Karin Slaughter - Pieces of Her

Andy tried to count her footsteps, pacing off two hundred yards, then three hundred, then finally veering left away from the ocean. All of the McMansions had security gates to keep strangers from wandering in off the beach. City code forbade any permanent fences in front of the sand dunes, so people had erected flimsy wooden slats hanging from barbed wire to serve as a deterrent. Only some of the gates were alarmed, but all of them were marked with warnings that a siren would go off if they were opened.

Andy stopped at the first gate she came to. She ran her hand along the sides. Her fingers brushed against a plastic box with a wire coming out of it.

Alarmed.

She ran to the next gate and went through the same check.

Alarmed.

Andy cursed, knowing the fastest way to the street would be to climb over the dunes. She gingerly pushed the wooden slats with her foot. The wire bowed. Some unseen anchor slipped from the sand so that the fence fell low enough to step over. She lifted her leg, careful not to snag her shorts on the barbed wire. Sea oats crushed under her feet as she traversed the steep slope. She cringed at the destruction she was causing. By the time she made it to a stone path, she was limping.

Andy leaned her hand against the wall, stopped to take a breath. Her throat was so dry that she went into a coughing attack. She covered her mouth, waiting it out. Her eyes watered. Her lungs ached. When the coughing had finally passed, she let her hand drop. She took a step that might as well have been on glass. The sand in her sneakers had the consistency of clumping cat litter. Andy took them off, tried to shake them out. The synthetic mesh had turned into a cheese grater. Still, she tried to cram her feet back into the sneakers. The pain was too much. She was already bleeding.

Andy walked barefoot up the path. She thought about all of the clues that Detective Palazzolo would find when she arrived at the bungalow: Laura’s face, especially her bloodshot eyes, still showing signs of suffocation. The plastic bag around her neck with the dead man’s fingerprints on it. The dead man lying in the office by the overturned coffee table. The side of his head caved in. Urine soaking his pants. Foam drying on his lips. His eyes pointing in two different directions. Blood from Laura’s leg streaked across the carpet. Andy’s fingerprints on the handle of the frying pan.

In the driveway: broken glass from the floodlights. The lock on the kitchen door probably jimmied. The puddles on the kitchen tiles showing the path Hoodie had taken. More water showing Andy’s route from the bedroom to the hall to the guest room to the living room and back again.

On the beach: Andy’s footprints carved into the wet sand. Her destructive path up the dunes. Her blood, her DNA, on the stone path where she now stood.

Andy clamped her teeth closed and groaned into the sky. Her neck strained from the effort. She leaned over, elbows on her knees, bowed over by the impact of her horrible actions. None of this was right. Nothing made sense.

What was she supposed to do?

What could she do?

She needed to talk to her father.

Andy started to walk toward the road. She would go to Gordon’s house. She would ask him what to do. He would help her do the right thing.

Andy stopped walking.

She knew what her father would do. Gordon would let Laura take the blame. He would not allow Andy to turn herself in. He would not risk the possibility that she could go to prison for the rest of her life.

But then Palazzolo would find Andy’s wet footprints inside Laura’s house, more footprints in the sand, her DNA between the McMansions, and she would charge Gordon with lying to a police officer and accomplice to murder after the fact.

Her father could go to prison. He could lose his license to practice.

Don’t make him lie for you.

Andy remembered the tears in her mother’s eyes, her insistence that everything she’d done was for Andy. At a basic level, Andy had to trust that Laura was telling her to do the right thing. She continued up the driveway. Laura had guessed that the man’s Ford would be in the Beachview Drive cul-de-sac. She had also said to run, so Andy started to run again, holding her sneakers in one hand and the make-up bag in the other.

She was rounding the corner when a bright light hit her face. Andy ducked back onto the stone path. Her first thought was that a police cruiser had hit her with the spotlight. Then she chanced a look up and realized she had triggered the motion detector on the floodlights.

Andy ran up the driveway. She kept to the middle of the street away from the motion detectors on the houses. She did not look back, but her peripheral vision had caught the distant rolling of the red and blue lights. It looked like every Belle Isle police cruiser had responded to the emergency text. Andy probably had minutes, possibly seconds, before someone in charge told them to fan out and search the area.

She got to the end of the one-way street. Beachview Drive dead-ended into Seaborne Avenue. There was a little dog-leg at the other end that served as beach access for emergency vehicles. Laura had guessed that the dead man’s car would be there.

There was no Ford in sight.

Shit.

A pair of headlights approached from Beachview. Andy panicked, running left, then right, then circling back and diving behind a palm tree as a black Suburban drove by. There was a giant, springy antenna on the bumper that told Andy the car belonged to law enforcement.

Andy looked back up Beachview Drive. There was an unpaved driveway halfway up, weeds and bushes overgrown at the entrance. One of the six remaining bungalows on Belle Isle was owned by the Hazeltons, a Pennsylvania couple who’d stopped coming down years ago.

Andy could hide there, try to figure out what to do next.

She checked Seaborne in case any cars were driving up the wrong way. She scanned Beachview for headlights. Then she jogged up the road, her bare feet slapping the asphalt, until she reached the Hazeltons’ long, sandy driveway.

There was something off.

The overgrown tangle of bushes had been tamped down.

Someone had recently driven up to the house.

Andy skirted the bushes, heading into the yard instead of down the driveway. Her feet were bleeding so badly that the sand created a second layer of sole. She kept moving forward, crouching down to make herself less visible. No lights were on inside the Hazelton house. Andy realized she could sort of see in the darkness. It was later—or earlier—than she’d thought. Not exactly sunrise, but Andy recalled there was a sciencey explanation about how the rays bounced against the ocean surface and brought the light to the beach before you could see the sun.

Whatever the phenomenon, it allowed her to make out the Ford truck parked in the driveway. The tires were bigger than normal. Black bumpers. Tinted windows. Florida license plate.

There was another truck parked beside it—smaller; a white Chevy, probably ten years old but otherwise nondescript. The license plate was from South Carolina, which wasn’t unusual this close to Charleston, but as far as Andy knew, the Hazeltons were still based in Pennsylvania.

Andy carefully approached the Chevy, crouching to look inside. The windows were rolled down. She saw the key was in the ignition. There was a giant lucky rabbit’s foot dangling from the keychain. Fuzzy dice hung from the mirror. Andy had no idea whether or not the truck belonged to the Hazeltons, but leaving the keys inside seemed like something the older couple would do. And the dice and giant rabbit’s foot keychain was right up their grandson’s alley.

Andy considered her options.

No GPS in the Chevy. No one to report it stolen. Should she take this instead? Should she leave the dead man’s truck behind?