Karin Slaughter: Skin Privilege

Sara leaned back against the front counter, hugging her arms to her waist as she tried to read his expression. She had been a cop's wife far too long to think that there was any such thing as a simple phone call.

'Where is she now?' Jeffrey demanded. He nodded, his shoulders tensing as he listened to the caller. 'All right,' he said, looking at his watch. 'I can be there in three hours.'

He ended the call, squeezing the phone so hard in his hand that Sara thought it might break. ' Lena,' he said brusquely, just as Sara was about to ask him what was going on. Lena Adams was a detective on his squad, a woman who made a habit of getting herself into bad situations and dragging Jeffrey along with her. Just the sound of her name brought a sense of dread.

Sara said, 'I thought she was on vacation.'

'There was an explosion,' Jeffrey answered. 'She's in the hospital.'

'Is she okay?'

'No,' he told her, shaking his head as if he could not believe what he had heard. 'She's been arrested.'

Lena kept one hand on the steering wheel as she scrolled through radio stations with the other. She cringed at the vacuous girls screeching from the speakers; when had stupidity become a marketable talent? She gave up when she hit the country music channels. There was a six-disc changer in the trunk, but she was sick of each and every song on each and every disc. Desperate, she reached into the floor of the backseat, groping for a loose CD. She fished out three empty jewel cases in a row, cursing more loudly with each one. She was about to give up when the tips of her fingers brushed a cassette tape underneath her seat.

Her Celica was around eight years old and still had a tape player, but Lena had no idea what this particular cassette contained, or how it had even ended up in her car. Still, she popped it into the dash and waited. No music came, and she turned up the knob, wondering if the tape was blank or had been damaged by last summer's scorching heat. She turned it up further and nearly had a heart attack when the opening drumbeats of Joan Jett's 'Bad Reputation' filled the car.

Sibyl. Her twin sister had made this tape two weeks before she had died. Lena could remember listening to this exact song nearly six years ago as she sped down the highway, heading back to Grant County from a drop-off she'd made at the Georgia

Bureau of Investigation's lab in Macon. The drive had been much like the one she was making today: a straight shot down a kudzu-lined interstate, the \ few cars on the road whizzing by eighteen-wheelers and mobile homes that were being transported to waiting families. Meanwhile, her sister was back in Grant County, being tortured and murdered by a sadist while Lena sang with Joan Jett at the top of her lungs.

She popped out the tape and turned off the radio.

Six years. It didn't seem like so much time had passed, but then again, it felt like an eternity. Lena i was just now getting to the point where her dead! twin was not the first thing she thought about when j she woke up in the morning. It usually wasn't until later in the day when she saw something funny or heard a crazy story at work that she thought about Sibyl, made a mental note to tell her sister, then i realized a split second later that Sibyl was no longer j there to hear it.

Lena had always thought of Sibyl as her only j. family. Their mother had died thirteen days after giving birth. Their father, a cop, had been shot dead! by a man he'd pulled over on a speeding violation, i He'd never even known his young wife was pregnant. As there were no other relatives to speak j of, Hank Norton, their mother's brother, had j-raised the two girls. Lena had never thought of her l uncle as family. Hank had been a junkie during her j childhood and a sober, self-righteous asshole j during her teen years. Lena thought of him as more i like a warden, somebody who made the rules and | held all of the power. From the beginning, Lena had I only wanted to break out.

She pushed in the cassette tape again, twisted the knob to lower the sound to a low, angry growl.

I don't give a damn about my bad reputation …

The sisters had sung this as teenagers, their anthem against Reece, the backwater town they lived in until they were old enough to get the hell out. With their dark complexions and exotic looks that came courtesy of their Mexican-American grandmother, neither one of them had been particularly popular. Other kids were cruel, and Lena 's strategy was to take them on one by one while Sibyl kept to her studies, working hard to get the scholarships she needed to continue her education. After high school, Lena had spun her wheels for a while then entered the police academy, where Jeffrey Tolliver plucked her from a group of recruits and offered her a job. Sibyl had already taken a professorship at the Grant Institute of Technology, which made the decision to accept the job that much easier.

Lena found herself thinking about her first weeks in Grant County. After Reece, Heartsdale had seemed like a major metropolis. Even Avondale and Madison, the other cities that comprised Grant, were impressive to her small-town eyes. Most of the kids Lena had gone to school with had never traveled outside the state of Georgia. Their parents worked twelve-hour days at the tire plant or drew unemployment so they could sit around and drink. Vacations were for the wealthy – people who could afford to miss a couple of days of work and still pay the electric bill.

Hank owned a bar on the outskirts of Reece, and once he had stopped injecting the profits into his veins, Sibyl and Lena had lived a fairly comfortable life compared to their neighbors. Sure, the roof on their house was bowed and a 1963 Chevy truck had been on blocks in the backyard for as long as she could remember, but they always had food on the table and each year when school came around, Hank drove the girls into Augusta and bought them new clothes.

Lena should have been grateful, but she was not.

Sibyl had been eight when Hank, on a drunken bender, had slammed his car into her. Lena had been using an old tennis ball to play catch with her sister. She overthrew, and when Sibyl ran into the driveway and leaned down to pick up the ball, the bumper of Hank's reversing car had caught her in the temple. There hadn't even been much blood -just a thin cut following the line of her skull – but the damage was done. Sibyl hadn't been able to see anything after that, and no matter how many Alcoholics Anonymous meetings Hank attended or how supportive he tried to be, in the back of her mind, Lena always saw his car hitting her sister, the surprised look on Sibyl's face as she crumpled to the ground.

Yet, here Lena was, using up one of her valuable vacation days to go check on the old bastard. Hank hadn't telephoned in two weeks, which was strange. Even though she seldom returned his calls, he still left messages every other day. The last time she had seen her uncle was three months ago, when he'd driven to Grant County – uninvited – to help her move. She was renting Jeffrey's house after he'd found out his previous tenants, a couple of girls from the college, were using the place as their own personal bordello. Hank had said maybe a handful of words to her as he moved boxes, and Lena had been just as chatty. As he was leaving, guilt had forced her to suggest dinner at the new rib place up the street, but he was climbing into his beat-up old Mercedes, making his excuses, before she got the words out of her mouth.

She should have known then something was wrong. Hank never passed up an opportunity to spend time with her, no matter how painful that time was. That he had driven straight back to Reece should have been a clue. She was a detective, for chrissakes. She should notice when things were out of the ordinary.