Page 99 of The Best Lawyer
I went to the spare bedroom. Though Tom used it as a home office, Katy had taken over the closets. They were filled with all of her clothes. Designer dresses. Suits she would never wear. Jeanie had pulled some for Katy to wear in court. But many of the items in here still had tags on them. It was a point of contention between Katy and Tom, we learned. Katy ran up his credit cards each month. But Tom Loomis had the money to pay them off.
He’d paid for her recent plastic surgery, too. A boob job, facelift, tummy tuck. Little by little, she became a woman I didn’t know anymore. Had I been so wrong after all?
From what I could tell, Tom Loomis had tried to give her everything she asked for. The house in an affluent neighborhood. Social status. More clothing and jewelry than she would ever wear.
She would have been decimated by the divorce. They’d only been married two years, during which she’d cheated on him. I went back into the hall and stared into that awful bedroom. But to do this to him? It just didn’t make sense.
I heard the sliding door open off the living room. My skin broke out in goosebumps. For mid-July, the night was unseasonably cool.
I closed my eyes, trying to envision the horror of what happened here. The physical force it would have taken Katy to cut Tom’s neck open like that. I just could not believe she was strong enough to pull it off without Tom trying to stop her. Katy hated handling raw meat. Anytime she cooked with it, Joe would do that particular dirty work.
But could she have really slept through everything?
I stood at the foot of their king-sized bed. There would have been at least two feet between them. I reached out and pressed down on the mattress. I didn’t want to get too close to the dried blood so I stayed on Katy’s side.
I saw the button on Katy’s side of the bed. With their split king, she would have been able to raise and lower her mattress as she desired while Tom’s could have remained flat and vice versa. I grew bolder and pressed up and down on Katy’s mattress with more force. I could do it without getting Tom’s side to move much, if at all.
So maybe. If she were already asleep. Drug-induced, perhaps. She might not have been jostled very much if something quick and violent happened on the other side of the bed.
“Cass!” Eric called out with alarm in his voice.
I pounded on Katy’s mattress even more violently. My idea was to test it like they do on commercials. I headed for the kitchen to get a wine glass. I’d fill it with water and place it in the center of Tom’s mattress.
The sliding door opened as I got halfway through the living room.
“Cass.” Eric poked his head in. “I need you to come here. Right now.”
“I have an idea,” I said. “The way their mattresses are set up. I think …”
“Cass!” Eric came inside. He reached me in two strides and grabbed me by the elbow. “Not now.”
“But I …”
He practically dragged me outside. He’d hit the floodlight in the backyard. The patio was fairly well lit. Tom’s grill was in one corner. One of his patio chairs had blown over. Absently, I went to grab it.
“Look,” Eric barked.
He had a flashlight in his hand. He shone it on a patch of brick siding right behind Tom’s grill. I didn’t understand what I was supposed to be looking at.
Eric wiggled his beam of light back and forth. “The mortar pattern,” he said. “That’s what drew my eye. Don’t you see it?”
I looked closer. The mortar had symmetrical cracks in it on each side of one brick toward the bottom of the wall.
“Hold the flashlight,” Eric said, handing it to me. “You won’t believe this.” I did what he asked, shining it on that single brick. Eric reached for it. He managed to wedge his fingers between the cracks. He was wearing a pair of blue latex gloves. Slowly, he pulled the brick straight out. Smiling with triumph, he turned the brick around to show me the back.
It was hollow. At the bottom, I saw a black plastic square fastened to the base. The image of a key was painted on it in gold. The logo beneath it read “Hide-a-key.” Eric tapped on the brick itself. The noise it made was off. Not muffled or silent as if it were real brick. Eric was tapping plastic. Without even thinking, I reached for the fake brick.
“Don’t!” he warned me. “Not without gloves. Just hold the flashlight.”
Eric then grabbed the plastic square and popped a latch. My hands shaking, I managed to keep the flashlighttrained on the compartment. The hidden compartment was empty. If there had been a key inside, it was gone.
Chapter 34
“No,”Katy said.
It was just the two of us. I showed up at the jail just after midnight. In eight hours, her final day of trial would begin. By this time tomorrow, it was possible she’d know her fate.
We sat in the lawyer’s interview room. It felt like a dungeon with a single overhead light burning above us. Outside, two bleary-eyed deputies stood guard. Katy herself had to be woken out of a dead sleep to come down here.
