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CHAPTER20
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Niall sat back and closed the book with tears in his eyes. He hadn’t been aware that he’d been reading out loud the whole time, and that all the other occupants in the room had heard, plus one more pair of ears that were hidden at the top of the stairs, well out of sight.
“I’m going to be sick.” Valerie jumped up from the table and ran down the hallway to the guest bathroom where she was violently ill. Detective Sparks gestured with her head to officer Bailey to keep an eye on her lest she pull a fast one.
“So, I am the one she was sneaking around with.”
“Yes sir, we ran some test on the cigarette butts and the blanket we found in the old barn we found on Miller’s Road and it all came back to you and your wife. The child was also yours sir.”
“Oh no, oh hell, why?” His eyes searched the room as if looking for answers and fell on Valerie who was escorted back into the room by officer Bailey. “You, why did you have to kill my wife? She was a good friend to you, always there when you needed her? How could you?”
He turned his attention back to the detective. “I want to hear it all; what did this bitch do to my wife and child?” Riley at this point had overcome his disbelief and just sat in stunned silence. He knew his wife had been jealous but he’d never suspected, never would’ve expected her to go this far.
“We finally got your wife’s phone unlocked, and the last text did indeed come from your phone, or so it appeared. But what Mrs. O’Rourke did was something called spoofing. In a nutshell what she did was buy a burner phone, that’s a phone that’s hard to trace and added an app that would allow her to call from one number while making it appear that she was calling from another.”
She smiled wanly at his confused look. “It’s a bit complicated but we don’t need to go into that right this minute. Suffice it to say, we traced the burner phone back to Mrs. O’Rourke, we haven’t found the actual phone as yet, but we’ve tracked down the purchase as well as the purchase for the acid and the dummy.”
“You said you wanted to know how it happened. As far as we can tell, sometime in the early morning on Thursday or even as early as late Wednesday night, Mrs. O’Rourke…”
“Don’t call her that, her name is Valerie.”
“Riley, you…”
“Shut up!” He looked like he could kill her with his bare hands.
“Carry on detective.” He flung his hand in Detective Sparks’ direction as he sat back in his seat. Outwardly he seemed cool and detached, but inside he was a teeming caldron of hate. He couldn’t shake the feeling that this was somehow his fault.
That had he not been as close to poor Sonya as he’d become none of this would’ve happened. Or maybe had he paid closer attention to his wife’s…Valerie’s psychosis he could’ve seen this coming and head it off. It was obvious that she wasn’t all there.
He could’ve forgiven her anything but this. No way was he going to stand by her like he had in the past; this was the final straw. He felt gutted, wide open and left for dead.
“As I was saying,” Detective Sparks continued, “we’re not quite sure when but what we do know is that Mrs. …Valerie used her friend’s fear of clowns, used your number, the one you use as Simon, to lure your wife into the woods where she’d laid a trap for her.”
“What kind of trap?” This was the hard part. Now she had to tell him that his pregnant wife was missing her face. She cleared her throat and forced herself to look at him. He was going to have to live with that horror for the rest of his life the least she could do was be professional about it.
“There was a dummy dressed up to look like a clown. Your wife’s fear made her careless and as she ran away in the opposite direction from which she came, which Valerie was counting on, there was a trip wire in her way.”
“She wouldn’t have been looking where she was going, scared as she was at the sight of the grotesque clown, so she fell over the wire and landed face first into a puddle of acid that Valerie had left there for just that purpose.”
“I didn’t mean to kill her you’ve got to believe me.” Valerie tried going to Riley after that statement. A statement she had no idea was being taped by Detective Sparks, but he rebuffed her, holding his hands out in front of him as if to ward her off.
“Don’t touch me, you make me sick. What about your godchildren, did you think about them you demented bitch?”
“Please Ri, I didn’t mean to kill her, I just wanted to scar her face. Like those honor things you know. I thought you two were having an affair. She’d gloated to me about the affair and when I asked her who with she refused to tell me.”
“We’ve been friends since Pre-K, we never kept anything from each other, so why now? What other conclusion could I draw other than the one I came to? And then she told me about the baby, about a month ago I think it was.”
“How could I live with another woman having your child when I couldn’t?” There was madness in her eyes now, a madness she’d kept well hidden from the world until now. A madness Sonya had sensed more than once but had overlooked because of her great love for her friend.
“It wasn’t mine you pathetic monster. I told you time and time again that I didn’t mind that we couldn’t have children. Did you think I didn’t know that the fault was with you?”
“You…you knew? But how?”
“I had myself tested so there could only be one other explanation. But I didn’t care. I even told you as long as we had our godchildren I was fine with us never having our own. How was I to know that you’d see that as me fathering them?”
His voice tapered off at the end and he slumped back in his chair looking defeated. “What a mess; what a bloody fucking mess.” He covered his face with his hand, trying in vain to shut the rest of the room out, wishing to be anywhere but here, now.
