“I know that’s how it looks,” he says, “but it really wasn’t the way I thought it would play out.”
“How did you think it would play out if he didn’t agree with you?”
Raphael shrugs. “I don’t know. Not that way, anyway.”
Melissa is nodding. It’s a great conversation. She wishes she was having it with Joe. They could talk about it and get naked. “Then what did you do?”
“I stuffed him into the trunk of his car, then I went and got my own car. I pulled up next to him and transferred him, then drove him out to . . . well, I buried the body.”
“Out where we went shooting today,” Melissa says. “That’s where, isn’t it?”
“Yeah.”
“Did it make you feel any better?”
“It didn’t bring Angela back, but I knew it wouldn’t. But yeah, it did. It made me feel a little better. Within days another lawyer was putting his hand up to take on the case. I didn’t bother going and seeing him because I knew the conversation would be the same. So I took care of him too. This time I left him for people to find. I thought it might make more of a message, you know, to other lawyers. And it did. Joe’s third lawyer was court appointed. The third lawyer seems like a man who really doesn’t want the job. So, you know, no reason to hurt him. At least not yet.
“And somebody else would have killed them anyway,” he adds. “Somebody was sending those guys death threats.”
“You killed two innocent people,” she says, not that she could care less, but she thinks that Raphael should see her caring more.
“They weren’t innocent,” he says.
“I’m sure they’d disagree.”
“So . . .” he says, “does this change things?”
She holds off on answering for a few seconds. Like she really has to think about it. Like weighing it up is a really tough decision. Only it’s not. It’s an easy decision. And it makes last night’s decision to approach Raphael look even better.
“I just . . . I don’t know, I’ve never known a killer before,” she says. “I should be happy because it just confirms you’ll take the shot on Monday, but, well, to be honest . . . it’s a little weird. You killed two people.”
“Two bad people,” he says.
“Two bad people,” she repeats. “Lawyers who were doing bad things.”
“Exactly,” he says. “So the question is the same—does this change things?”
“No,” she says.
“Good,” he says, and leans back into the chair.
“But we’re only after Joe,” she says. “Not any of the cops escorting him. No more lawyers. There’s been too much blood spilled already. Just Joe.”
“Of course,” he says. “The cops are the ones trying to lock him away. They’re on our side.”
“And the cop who came to your door?” she asks. “What did he want?”
“Schroder? Well, he’s not a policeman anymore,” he says, sounding a little cautious. “He just wanted to ask if anybody else had come to mind.”
“Come to mind about what?”
“About suspicious people at the group. I’m not sure who he’s after.”
“And what did you tell him?”
“I told him nobody came to mind.”
She heard their conversation from Angela’s room. She knows Schroder showed him a photograph of her. She knows they spoke about her, they even used her real name. It was probably a copy of the same photograph she found in the back of Schroder’s car, the photograph taken the day Cindy got bookended by two guys at the beach she’d never met before. In that photo Melissa has dark brown hair. That was her natural hair color—well, still is, technically—though these days she dies it black and keeps it short. And of course she wears the wigs. Even long wigs. And for Raphael, her hair is long and black.
“That was it?” she asks.
“Yeah. It was pretty routine,” he says, and she thinks back to last night when Raphael climbed into her car. In their time spent chatting before that, he’d been excellent at concealing the truth. He’d known then she wasn’t who she said she was, and she’s sure he knows it now. “So, how about we go over this plan a few more times? It’s why we’re here.”
She takes another sip of her water and puts it down. “Okay,” she says.
“It shouldn’t change anything,” he says. “At least you know I’ll do it. I’ll pull that trigger.”
Raphael is wrong. It does change everything. Not the fact he killed two lawyers, but the fact he’s lying about his conversation with Schroder. He knows who she is, and now it’s her job to hide that she knows that. It also means she’s going to have to adjust the plan because Raphael is going to adjust it too. It’s a matter of staying ahead—and that’s something she’s always been good at. Only person who’s beaten her since she stopped being Natalie and became Melissa is Joe.
Raphael is a killer, and that side of him is going to be on display on Monday morning, and not just with Joe, but with her too.
Bullet one will be going into Joe.
And bullet two, she is sure of it, will have her name on it.
Chapter Thirty-Four
I end up missing lunch because of my busy schedule with my psychiatrist, with Schroder and my lawyer, and then my psychiatrist again. So by early afternoon my stomach is twisting in knots. Which is when prison guard Adam comes and sees me. He has a sandwich. I’ve missed meals before because of other appointments, and I faced the same problem back then that I’m facing now—you just don’t know what’s in the food that prison guards bring to you, and it’s their job to make sure you get something.
“Bon appétit,” Adam says, which I figure is Latin for Fuck you.
I unwrap the sandwich and peel back the bread. There’s a bunch of pubic hairs between a slice of cheese and a slice of meat, enough of them to knit a jersey for a mouse—which is ironic because the last time Adam brought me a sandwich there actually was a dead mouse in it. I wrap it back up and hand it to Adam, who doesn’t take it.
“It’s either that, Middleton, or go hungry.”
“I’ll go hungry,” I say, just like I went hungry with the Mickey sandwich.
“We’ll see,” he says, and he wanders off, leaving me alone in my cell.
I go back to staring at the walls. I think about Melissa and I think about my auntie and I think about the psychiatrist and I think about the death penalty, and all that thinking makes me hungrier, and I realize I have more doubts than I thought about my future. The public has built up a profile of me without even getting to know me. A jury pool will be drawn from people who have been reading and watching a whole lot of negative shit about me over the last twelve months. How is it I can be judged by a panel of my peers? Are there twelve men and women out there who have taken lives, banged a few lonely housewives, had part of their genitalia removed, and tried shooting themselves? No. I’m going to be judged by dentists and shoe salesmen and musicians.
The communal area between the cells is open. The same people are there doing the same things—playing cards, talking, wishing they were all outside doing the kinds of things that got them locked inside. Other than an hour a day exercising in a small pen outside, most of us haven’t seen outside in a long time. Outside could be destroyed by aliens and it wouldn’t make a difference to any of us.
Another hour goes by. My stomach is rumbling even louder. Adam comes back to see me. “You have a phone call,” he says.
He leads me back through the cellblock. We head down a corridor and past a locked door to a phone that’s been bolted to the wall, the same size and shape of a payphone. It’s bolted pretty securely not because prison is full of thieves, but full of people who could beat somebody to death with a nice heavy object like that. The receiver is hanging from it, still swinging slightly from where it was dropped. Adam leans against the wall a few feet away and watches me.