Third Degree (16 page)

Laurel pictured a pretty, dark-haired Louisiana girl, the younger sister of the bleached-blond receptionist people said Auster was sleeping with. What would Diane Rivers do when Nell Roberts showed up at school to pick up the children Diane had been asked to drop off? She’d call Laurel’s cell phone, which was now tucked into Warren’s back pocket, and he’d give some smooth explanation to allay any suspicion. End of story.

“How long till they get out of school?” Laurel asked casually.

Warren shrugged. “They’ll get here when they get here. But Nell’s not bringing them. I didn’t e-mail her. You’re such a perfect mother that I realized you would already have arranged to get them here. Right?”

His sarcasm angered Laurel, but at least she had learned that the possibility to intervene with Diane remained.

“Warren, I’m begging you to let me go to the bathroom. Don’t you have enough simple human decency left to allow that?”

At last he looked over at her. “Tell me the password to your Hotmail account. Then you can go.”

Okay,
Laurel thought angrily.
You asked for it.
She closed her eyes and relaxed her urinary sphincter. Within seconds her crotch was soaked, then her inner thighs and bottom. The smell would hit Warren in a minute, and he was unlikely to maintain a stoic front. The sofa beneath Laurel’s behind was a leather Roche-Bobois imported from France, $17,000 and change through a boutique store in West Palm Beach. She was still peeing when Warren sat up straight n the ottoman.

“Fuck!” he cried. “You didn’t pee on that couch?”

“I told you I had to go.”

“Get off the damn sofa!”

“Screw you. Cut this tape off me and I’ll get up.”

He glared as though he wanted to hit her, but Laurel sat as calmly as a Buddha, almost blissful in the relief of her empty bladder.

“You’re disgusting,” Warren said.

“You asked for it, you got it.”

He went into the kitchen and came back with a razor-sharp steak knife. Then he knelt and began cutting the duct tape away from her lower legs. They burned as blood began flowing back into her skin. She held out her hands for him to cut the tape from her wrists, but he shook his head.

“Forget it. Take off your pants and throw them in the wash. Then we’ll get you some new ones.”

Stripping off her pants presented a problem, since her pants were the only thing concealing her clone phone. Carefully, she slid them down her legs and bunched them around the pocket that held the Razr, then headed for the laundry room. The pungent odor of urine reminded her of the days when Grant and Beth still wore diapers, a memory that broke loose a calcified layer of fierce maternal instinct. As she passed through the kitchen, she glanced at the wall clock: 2:11 p.m. Fifty minutes, max, until the kids burst through the front door. Fifty minutes to break out of the house or to hurt Warren so badly that she could do anything she liked without fear of retribution.

He seemed to sense her hardening resolve. He followed no closer than ten feet behind her as she walked to the laundry room, and his gun stayed in his hand. That distance allowed her to palm the Razr as she tossed the dirty slacks into the washer. But this presented another problem. If she tried to sneak the phone to the bedroom while naked from the waist down, Warren was bound to see it. She considered trying to slip it up under her arm, but she could feel him watching her from the bifold doors.

“Get moving,” he said. “Come on.”

“Just a sec.” She wanted to check the phone for text messages, but she didn’t dare. As she reached for the big jug of Purex on the shelf above the machine, she slid the Razr onto the shelf and left it there. Just before the phone slid out of sight, she saw 2 new messages on its tiny exterior LCD screen. Her heart leaped, for the messages could only be from Danny, but she didn’t even consider trying to open the phone and read them. That would have to wait. After she got the wash going, she left the Purex on top of the dryer and walked half-naked back to the master suite, trusting that Warren would prefer to watch her receding derriere rather than double-check the laundry room.

She got into the shower and cleaned herself as well as she could, considering the duct tape on her wrists. Rather than loosening under the spray, the tape became even stickier, a gooey gray mess. To her surprise, Warren hung a towel on the shower door while she scrubbed. She dried herself with it, pulled a fresh pair of panties from her drawer, and selected a pair of stretchy, black yoga pants from the closet—just the thing for sprinting, if she got the chance.

As she sat on the bed to pull them on, she caught Warren staring at her pubic triangle. He’d always liked her to keep it shaved, and she usually obliged him. But Danny had liked her natural, and she’d been more than happy to please him. Warren hadn’t complained about the difference, though he had mentioned it a few months back. But now he was staring at her mons like a detective who’d stumbled onto a clue that could solve the case of his life.

“What?” she asked. “Comments from the gallery?”

“Kyle likes them shaved,” Warren said almost to himself. “I’ve heard him say it a hundred times.”

“He would.”

Warren’s eyes narrowed. “What does that mean?”

Laurel sighed, debating whether to be honest. “I just think it’s juvenile the way men want women shaved down there. I mean, what’s the deal? Do you really want a prepubescent girl, and a shaved woman is the closest thing you can get?”

Warren had gone red. “Your new friend is above all that, right? More mature than the rest of us?”

You’d better believe it.
“I’m not going to dignify that.” She pulled on her panties and then the yoga pants. “What now, General Pinochet?”

“Don’t act like this is my fault. You put yourself in this position.”

“Ah. So torture is the new legal remedy for infidelity?”

“It ought to be. Even if it were, the betrayed person would still suffer more.”

She dismissed his words with a flick of her hand and walked back toward the kitchen.

“Back to the couch,” he told her. “If there’s room beside your wet spot.”

“No more duct tape. My children will
not
see me like that. And you’re going to cut this tape off my wrists before they come in.”

Warren wasn’t looking at her anymore. He was staring at the computer on the coffee table as though seeing it for the first time. She felt a sudden compulsion to distract him but saw no way to do so. She knew that look. Warren could be maddeningly stupid when it came to human relations, but when it came to quantitative matters, he could be as smart as a treeful of owls, as her grandfather used to say. She could almost smell the rush of his neurotransmitters kicking into overdrive.

He started to laugh, sending a chill through her.

“What is it? What’s funny?”

He perched on the Eames ottoman and reached for the trackpad. “All this time I’ve been searching for
data.
I’ve ignored the actual programs.”

A worm of fear squirmed in Laurel’s belly. Warren was already clicking away, this time with his sights set squarely on her true vulnerability. It took him less than five minutes to nail her. She knew the exact moment, because he smiled like the Cheshire cat, then looked up and spoke with almost obscene satisfaction.

“Hello, misselizabeth2006. How are we today?”

Adrenaline blasted through Laurel’s system like a hit of pure cocaine, but she looked back at him like a deaf woman who couldn’t read lips.

“Don’t even try,” Warren said. “You’re not Meryl Streep, okay? You’re not even Tori Spelling. I want your password.”

“I don’t have the password for that account.”

“Jesus! Would you stop it already? What’s the point of denying anything now?”

“I got that account when I first got my computer. It was free. I used it once or twice, then never again.”

“Uh-huh. So it’s just a coincidence that I found that love letter in your copy of
Pride and Prejudice,
and that your Hotmail alias is Miss Elizabeth, as in Elizabeth
Bennet
?”

That Warren would know even a single character from an Austen novel stunned Laurel.

“You can thank Keira Knightley for that one,” he said.

When Laurel didn’t respond, he squeezed his fists into his eye sockets in some sort of brutal massage, then began stabbing the Sony’s keyboard again. “Let’s just check out your little story, shall we?”

An almost irresistible compulsion to flee gripped Laurel. Only the memory of Warren firing the pistol at her head kept her on the sofa. The revolver now lay inches from her laptop—and from Warren’s right hand.

“O-kay,” he said, like a desk clerk locating a hotel reservation. “Here’s the Microsoft file where old e-mail is stored for Hotmail accounts. Your file totals exactly 226 megabytes of data.” He looked up again, his eyes glowing with triumph. “That sounds like about five hundred e-mails to me. With a few candid snapshots thrown in, maybe. Are we going to see some of your
personal
porn this time?”

Not without my password,
Laurel thought, but her confidence was wavering. Warren was driving her ever deeper into a corner—

“This file was last accessed two days ago,” Warren said. “At eleven forty a.m. So, you read your love notes while in your classroom at Country Day? Is that why I donated money to get Wi-Fi out there? What were your poor students doing then,
Miss Elizabeth
? That sounds like negligence to me.”

Laurel stared determinedly at the floor. The entire dynamic between them had changed, but she could not acknowledge this.

“I guess I’ll have to figure out your password on my own,” Warren said cheerily.

The keyboard started clicking again.

Laurel hugged herself and tried to think of a way to stop him, but nothing came to her. With the screen facing away from her, she couldn’t be sure what he was doing. But he would almost certainly begin with her birthday, then the kids’ birthdays, then her Social Security number. Then he’d move on to various inversions of those numerals. Warren had always excelled at puzzles, so this kind of thing was very much to his taste. Yet after several abortive attempts to log into her account, he got up, hurried over to his study, and quickly returned holding her copy of
Pride and Prejudice.

“I should have started with this,” he said. “I guess we’ll try
Darcy
first? Any thoughts?”

Retrieving this book had been a brilliant intuitive leap, but it didn’t worry Laurel as much as Warren probably thought it did. Even with a copy of
Pride and Prejudice
to work from, it would take hundreds of hours to ever hit on
FitzztiF,
the password to her account. She’d created it by playing with the first half of Mr. Darcy’s Christian name: Fitzwilliam. It was an almost childish choice, but the odds against Warren trying that particular sequence of letters were astronomical.

“I wish I had a PET scanner that could read the folds of your traitorous little brain,” he said with sudden bitterness.

She pretended to ignore him, but she was rejoicing inside. Trying to guess someone’s password was about as much fun—and as difficult—as trying to open a safe by random turns of the dial.

“I know why you’re doing this,” he said over the screen. “Stonewalling, I mean. It’s because he doesn’t want you. The letter was definite about that. He used you and then he dumped you.”

She gave Warren nothing.

“If he’d wanted to run away with you, you’d be gone, wouldn’t you? You’re just afraid to jump ship without a lifeboat waiting to catch you. You’re gutless. That’s the ugly bottom of all this. I don’t know what the hell I ever saw in you.”

She knew she shouldn’t take the bait, but she couldn’t let this pass. “If that’s how you feel, why would you care if I’m seeing someone?”

“Because I’m stuck with you,” he said, still not looking up from the screen. “I take my marriage vows seriously. And I take our children’s well-being seriously. I happen to have the fortitude to stick it out and try, even with a slut who hasn’t got the nerve to bail out without a golden parachute.”

“Me?” she whispered. “
I’m
a coward? I’m gutless? What about
you
?”

The righteous indignation in her voice got his attention. He peered over the top of the screen. “What are you talking about?”

“You know. That night on Highway 24. On the way home from the Criterium race in McComb.”

Warren had gone still. His face was pale but for the dark circles around his eyes. He remembered, all right. They stared at each other over her computer, each recalling the night that had opened a chasm between them, one that had not been bridged since. Almost a year ago now, after one of the few bike races Laurel had traveled to watch. Warren had taken third place, which most riders would have been happy to win, but because it was only a regional race, he had dumped the diminutive trophy in a garbage can and demanded that they leave for home immediately.

They’d covered about half of the sixty-mile drive when it happened. Flames exploded out of the darkness far ahead, as though from an impacting meteor. As they drew closer, Laurel made out the silhouette of a burning pickup truck on the right shoulder, its nose wedged tight against a massive oak tree. More chilling, she saw a prone form on the asphalt, and it seemed to be moving. She kept waiting for Warren to hit the brakes, but he never did, and before she knew it, they were hurtling past the flaming wreck, the acrid stench of burning gasoline flooding through the AC vents like a ghostly accusation.

“Stop!” she’d cried, grabbing his arm, but he’d continued on, his jaw set tight. The argument that followed had altered her view of her husband forever. While she pleaded for him to turn back and use his medical skills to save the victim she had seen on the road (much less those who might be trapped inside the truck), Warren had calmly described the risks of such an act for him. Wasn’t there a Good Samaritan law on the books in Mississippi? Laurel shouted. Wouldn’t make a bit of difference, Warren told her, not once the personal-injury lawyers got into it. She’d been sobbing by then.