Chương 13
I had arrived late because a client call ran long.
Leo met me in the lobby with a drink already in his hand.
He ordered me ginger ale because I was driving.
A woman with dark hair stood near the bar and looked at me too long.
I thought she recognized me from somewhere.
"What did he switch?"
Ruiz leaned forward.
"Celeste says Leo had two glasses on a high-top table."
My skin prickled.
"One alcoholic."
"Yes."
"And one ginger ale."
"She says he moved them after you entered the room."
"Why?"
"She didn't know."
I tried to reconstruct it.
Leo handing me a glass.
Me taking a sip.
A bitter edge beneath the ginger.
I had joked that the bartender hated designated drivers.
That night, on the way home, my hands tingled on the steering wheel.
"December," I whispered.
Ruiz nodded.
"December seventeenth."
"That's before January."
"Yes."
I stared at her.
"Then the prepaid card wasn't the first purchase."
"No."
My heartbeat accelerated.
"Where did he get it before that?"
"We don't know yet."
Ruiz took the screenshot from my hand and replaced it with another page.
"This is why I came."
I looked down.
The second screenshot was dated December eighteenth.
Celeste had written, Whatever was in that drink made her sick.
Leo replied, She gets like that.
Celeste wrote, I watched you put something in it.
Leo answered three minutes later.
Then you should have minded your own business.
Mara stood again, but this time nobody told her to sit.
I could not move.
The words on the page blurred.
Ruiz waited until I looked up.
"Judith, Celeste says she confronted him the next day."
My mouth barely worked.
"And?"
"He told her it was a sleep aid."
I gripped the sheet.
"Did she believe him?"
"At first."
"And later?"
Ruiz's expression changed.
"Later she started taking photographs."
Celeste had photographed the small amber bottle Leo carried in his coat pocket.
She had photographed the torn shipping envelope in the trunk of his car.
She had photographed a hotel receipt with a handwritten list on the back.
Ruiz placed the images on the tray one by one.
The handwriting was Leo's.
I knew the way he made his sevens with a bar through the middle.
I knew the cramped capital M that looked like three sharp hills.
Beside a series of dates were numbers.
Beside the numbers were brief notes.
Sleepy.
No reaction.
Hand tremor.
Blurred vision.
Increase?
The room disappeared for a second.
Mara grabbed the bed rail.
"He tracked it."
Ruiz nodded.
"He appears to have."
My eyes found the last note on the page.
Fell shower.
I looked away.
For months I had thought my body was betraying me.
It had been reporting a crime.
Ruiz let the silence hold.
"Celeste gave us the original images from a cloud backup," she said.
"Metadata places them on her phone before your hospitalization."
"Why didn't she come forward?"
"She says she was scared."
Mara's voice turned hard.
"Of him?"
"Of what she'd participated in."
I looked at her.
"What did she participate in?"
Ruiz hesitated.
"She helped him obtain the first bottle."
Mara swore.
I said nothing.
"Celeste says Leo told her it was a nonprescription sleep compound he couldn't order through his usual account because of workplace restrictions."
"She believed that?"
"At first."
Ruiz folded her hands.
"When she saw you become ill after the December party, she began questioning him."
"But she stayed with him."
"Yes."
"Why?"
"That's a better question for her."
I stared at Leo's handwriting.
Increase?
One word with a question mark.
As if he had been adjusting fertilizer.
"Is she being charged?"
"I don't know."
"You mean you won't tell me."
"I mean prosecutors haven't made that decision."
I looked at Mara.
She was watching the page like she wanted to burn through it.
"What about Freya?"
Ruiz's expression tightened.
"She admitted notarizing one signature she did not witness."
"One."
"Yes."
"Did she know he forged it?"
"She claims Leo told her you had signed earlier and forgotten because of your condition."
I laughed.
"He used the illness he was causing to explain the forgery."
"That's what the evidence may show."
"And she believed him."
"She says she did."
I looked at the silver tea tin on the counter, now sealed inside a clear evidence bag.
"Why did she take the tin?"
"She says Leo called her after the ambulance left and told her police might misunderstand things in the kitchen."
"What things?"
"He would not specify."
"So she removed evidence."
"Potentially."
"Ruiz."
"Yes."
"Stop protecting me from the words."
She held my gaze.
"She may have committed evidence tampering."
"Thank you."
It did not feel better.
Nothing did.
By the end of that week, the doctors transferred me to inpatient rehabilitation.
The room was smaller and had a window overlooking a parking garage.
Mara complained that the view was "architectural depression."
Denise was replaced by a therapist named Omar who believed every setback could be improved by changing the music.
He was wrong about the music and right about almost everything else.
The first time I walked six feet between parallel bars, my knees shook so violently I thought I would collapse.
Omar did not cheer.
I loved him for that.
He said, "Again."
So I did.
Six feet became ten.
Ten became twenty.
A walker replaced the bars.
Then a cane for short distances.
Some mornings my feet burned.
Some mornings they felt packed in ice.
Once I threw the cane across the therapy room because my left leg would not lift properly.
Omar retrieved it without comment.
"You're allowed to be mad," he said.
"I know."
"You're not allowed to make me fill out an incident report."
I laughed.
Then I cried.
Both happened more often than I liked.
Leo was arrested twelve days after the driveway collapse.
Ruiz called before the news reached me through anyone else.
The charges were preliminary.
Assault.
Poisoning-related offenses.
May you like
Fraud.
Forgery.
