Face of Betrayal (31 page)

“We’re here to do an intervention,” Nicole said.

“That’s ridiculous,” Cassidy said. Her eyes went to her glass.

“Not for drinking,” Allison said. “To make you see the truth about Rick.”

“What are you talking about? You guys are crazy.”

Nicole reached out for Cassidy’s wrist, catching it even when she tried to hide it behind her back, like a little kid.

“Crazy? Then why do you have these bruises?” She pushed up the sleeve so they could all see the clear ovals where a thumb and finger had left their mark. “Something about the way you’ve looked lately has been bugging me. And after we saw you at Tommy’s, I realized what it was—you’ve been putting makeup on your wrists.”

“We were just playing around, the way two consenting adults can.” Cassidy lifted her chin. “Maybe I like it a little rough.”

“Oh, Cassidy,” Allison breathed. She had to blink back tears.

At the sight of Allison’s emotion, something inside Cassidy broke. Her own eyes grew red. “But Rick loves me. He only acts the way he does sometimes because he loves me so much.”

“Ha! He can call it whatever he wants to, but it’s abuse,” Nicole said. “He’s trying to control you.”

“He just wants me to be happy.”

“No, he doesn’t. He just wants you to obey him,” Allison said. “That’s why we want you to go with us to Safe Harbor. Some of the women there have agreed to tell you their stories. Not as a reporter, but as a human being. They’ve been down the same road, Cass. They know exactly what could happen if you don’t get free of Rick.”

“This is ridiculous,” Cassidy said, but there was no force behind her words.

“Just come with us and listen. If you don’t believe them, you can walk away. But just promise you’ll listen for a little while.”

Cassidy sighed. “Okay. But I tell you, Rick’s not like those other guys. And I’m not like those women.”

T
he director met them in the lobby. “You’re Cassidy, yes?” she asked, shaking her hand. “We only use first names here.” She ushered Cassidy down the hall.

Allison figured the women at the shelter didn’t need anyone else there, eavesdropping on their own personal horrors, so she went out into the dayroom, with Nicole following. The TV was on, the sound turned down to a low murmur. Katie’s parents were being interviewed by Madeline McCormick. Was this the bigfooting thing Cassidy was always going on about?

Eliana, who worked the front desk, came in with an armful of dogeared donated magazines. She began to sort through them, putting most of them on a low table in the middle of the room, pausing every now and then to reject copies of
The Watchtower, Opera Today
, and
Golf Digest
. Then she glanced up at the screen.

“Huh!” she said in a tone of surprise.

“What?” Allison asked. “Do you know them?”

Eliana glanced sideways at Nicole and then looked back at Allison. “It’s confidential. You know I can’t talk about clients.”

Clients?
Allison and Nicole exchanged surprised looks. This changed everything. Wayne had abused his wife, maybe his children?

If so, Wayne Converse had just changed from a grieving father to the number one suspect.

“Eliana,” Allison said carefully, “this is Nicole Hedges. She’s an FBI agent. And you know that I’m a federal prosecutor. We are both working an active murder case that involves their daughter, Katie Converse. So if they were clients, we need to know.”

“It wasn’t under that name, but yeah, I recognize them.”

“So Valerie Converse came here for services?” Nicole asked.

“No,” Eliana said. “Not the mom. The
dad
. We see that every now and then. He came here a few times a couple of years ago because his wife was beating him. It was the wife who was the bad guy.”

CONVERSE RESIDENCE

January 19

A
llison gave Eliana a twenty-dollar bill to give to Cassidy for cab fare and asked her to apologize and say that something had come up. Then Allison and Nicole drove to the Converses’ house.

“Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” Allison asked. She threw a quick glance at her friend.

“We never looked at the mom,” Nicole answered. “Not for a second. But now I’m thinking we made a big mistake.”

“But why would she kill her own daughter?”

Nicole shook her head. “The autopsy showed it was a blow to the throat. Maybe it was an accident.”

“What about the necklace? Why leave it at the vigil?”

“Maybe she realized later that she had taken it with her,” Nicole said, “and then couldn’t think of how to get rid of it.”

They pulled up beside the house. The media crowds were gone now. So was Valerie’s car. Wayne answered the door.

“Hello, Wayne,” Nicole said.

Jalapeño pushed himself forward and began nosing the two women’s hands.

“Is your wife home?”

He straightened up. His cheeks were hollow, his eyes haunted. “Why? Do you have news? Has Fairview confessed?”

“Is Valerie here?” Allison repeated.

“No—she took Whitney to school, but she should be back pretty soon.”

Nicole said, “Maybe we can talk to you for a second, then.”

“Of course.” He stepped back. “Come in.”

Once they were in the living room, Allison said, “Wayne, we were just over at Safe Harbor shelter.”

“Oh?” His face was carefully bland.

“Have you ever been there?”

“No, I don’t believe so.”

No longer anxious to talk to them, Wayne busied himself lining up the fan of magazines on the coffee table.

“Is that the name of the animal shelter that had Jalapeño?” At the sound of his name, the dog pushed against Wayne’s thigh, and Wayne stroked the dog’s ears.

With a sigh, Nicole said, “Wayne, just—just stop. You know what kind of shelter it is. One of the women who works there recognized you on TV. She said you had come in for help a couple of times, but you used a fake name. So we need to ask you, Wayne—has Valerie ever hurt you?” A beat. “Or hurt your girls?”

He tried to look bewildered. “What are you talking about?”

Nicole said, “Wayne, please. Why didn’t you tell us about your wife? About Valerie?”

He looked down at his hands, which were still now. “Look, let me tell you something. When I was growing up, there were a couple of rules: you never hit anyone smaller than you, and you never, ever hit a woman.”

Allison felt more confused. Was Wayne saying
he
had been the one who had been abusive?

“So say your wife throws a telephone at you and it hits you in the head, then what do you do? Call the police?”

He looked back up at them with reddened eyes. “Valerie told me if I did that, she would tell them that I was the one who hit
her
. Was I supposed to throw a phone back at her? I couldn’t do that. Try to talk it out with her? Have you ever tried to talk anything out with Valerie? File for divorce? She would have killed me.”

“Wayne,” Nicole said. “Wayne, do you think Valerie is capable of murder?”

His face morphed with shock as he realized what Nicole was implying.

“What are you saying? Are you thinking she had something to do with what happened to Katie? That’s impossible. She would never hurt the girls. She loves them so much. She raised Katie like she was her own mother, and of course Whitney is the most important person on the planet to her.”

“Okay,” Allison said carefully. “So she wouldn’t hurt the girls. But she would hurt you? Why do you think she did that?”

“Because she’s always held it over me that it was my fault that we had to get married. I got her drunk after my first wife’s funeral, I couldn’t control myself, I got her pregnant, and I left her no choice. She’s still so angry about it. She moved out of her parents’ house and straight into mine. She never got to go to college. She never even dated. And some-times that comes out as rage.”

He wiped his nose with the back of his hand. Jalapeño regarded him anxiously, tail thumping lightly on the floor.

“And she’s right,” Wayne continued. “It
is
my fault. I stole Valerie’s childhood from her. And as she got older, she realized how much she had missed, and she got angrier and angrier. It started with little things. If she thought I didn’t like the dinner, she would tip the plates on the floor. Then she started throwing the plates at me. And then just whatever was handy.”

“If you went to the shelter, why didn’t you let them help you?” Nicole asked quietly.

“If we both got up in court and each said the other one was beating us—who do you think most judges would believe? And then I wouldn’t see my girls again. And Valerie’s not always like that. Sometimes she can go for months and everything’s great, and I think she’s finally healed. But then something will happen to set her off again.”

They heard the sound of the front door opening. Nicole got to her feet, with Allison following a beat later. But it wasn’t just Valerie who walked around the corner. She had one arm around Cassidy’s stiff shoulders. And Valerie’s other hand pressed a gun against Cassidy’s ribs.

“Valerie—what are you doing with my gun?” Wayne asked.

Valerie didn’t answer. Instead, she said in a bright voice, “Wayne—look who I found trying to listen at the window outside! Isn’t this a nice surprise? Cassidy, the reporter who helped us.” Her voice tightened. “Cassidy, the reporter who is building her career on our tragedy.”

Sensing the rising tension, Jalapeño began to whine.

Wayne said, “Look, Valerie, they know.”

“They know?”

Allison had expected her to grow even angrier, but instead her shoulders slumped as if in relief. But the gun didn’t budge.

“Then they have to understand it was an accident. I just snapped. She knew how to push my buttons, and she just kept pushing and pushing them.”

“Wait—are you talking about Katie?” Wayne’s voice rose and broke. “I meant they knew that you beat me. What are you saying? Are you saying you killed Katie?”

Valerie lifted her head. “You don’t understand. All I wanted was for her to be quiet. If she had only been quiet, nothing would have happened.”

“Tell us what happened, Valerie,” Nicole said soothingly. “We want to know. We want to hear your side of the story.”

Her words tumbled out. “I followed Katie that day. I thought she was meeting a boy. When she heard me coming down the path, she said”— Valerie made her voice high and mincing—“‘What took you so long, James?’ There’s only one James we know. Our senator. A man old enough to be
my
father, let alone her father. So I slapped her. I slapped her and called her a fool.”

Jalapeño growled as if he could understand her, but Valerie paid him no mind, lost in the details of what had happened the month before. She had taken her arm from around Cassidy’s shoulder. But now, Allison noted with horror, the gun was pointed squarely at her. At her belly.

“But Katie told me they were in
loove.”
The word was loaded with sarcasm. “Love! Like she would know what that word meant! She’s seventeen! She knows nothing! I told her she was going to ruin her life. That she would turn up pregnant and have to walk around with her belly showing and her shame for everyone to see.”

Valerie’s eyes narrowed. “And then she told me that she was smarter than me. Smart enough to have taken care of it. Unlike me. And then I thought I heard someone. She was still shouting about things no one else had any business knowing about, so I told her to be quiet. But she wouldn’t. So I tried to put my hand over her mouth. Just to shush her. But she pushed me away. And the side of my hand hit her throat. And then suddenly she was on the ground making this terrible whistling noise. And her eyes—her eyes were so big. And then the whistling stopped.”

The room was absolutely silent, all of them staring at Valerie.

“And I knew”—her voice was close to a whisper—“I knew that if I didn’t act fast, Whitney would not only lose her sister, but also her mother. So I put the leash around her neck. I tied it to a branch, but it broke. And then I heard someone coming, so I left.”

While she was listening, Allison had been slowly edging away from Valerie, so that the gun was now pointing somewhere between her and Nicole. At least she hoped it was.

Cassidy had watched her captor’s confession with darting eyes. Allison could tell her attention was torn between thinking what a great scoop this would make and wondering whether she would die before she ever got to serve it up to viewers.

In that moment, when they were all digesting the news, Nicole made her move. Her gun was in her hand so fast it seemed like a magic trick. And after that, everything happened so fast. Jalapeño jumping, Nicole’s gun firing, Valerie’s going off at the same time, Cassidy screaming, Wayne shouting, “No!”

And then Nicole was on the floor with bright red blood quickly drenching her white blouse. With the dog lying next to her, whining and biting its flank.

And Valerie still standing, unscathed. If she hesitated, it was only because she couldn’t decide which of them to shoot next.

The only time Allison had fired a gun was when Nicole had invited her to spend a few hours at the FBI range in rural Washington State. The weight of Nicole’s Glock had surprised her, as had the way it kicked up with every shot. She had flinched and blinked each time she pulled the trigger. And she hadn’t been very good.

But now without hesitation she grabbed Nicole’s gun from her slack hand. She remembered her friend’s advice.
You aim at the largest part of the body and pull the trigger until the subject goes down.

The shot threw Valerie back against the wall. Red bloomed on her chest. Her eyes widened in surprise. The gun fell from her hand to the floor. She raised her hands to the wound, her fingers dabbling the blood. Her body turned boneless and she slid down the wall, leaving a long smear of blood. Raising her shocked eyes to their faces, she said, “I had to think of Whitney.” She wheezed, gasped, tried to breathe, but blood bubbled from her lips. And then she slumped over sideways.

Cassidy grabbed a dishcloth from the kitchen and pressed it to Nic’s shoulder as she yanked her cell phone from her belt and dialed 911.

Allison fell to her knees. She moved her fingers around Valerie’s wrist, but even as she found it, the pulse eased and then vanished altogether. She had no clue how to get it back.