The Lies that Bind by Judith Van Gieson Read Free Book Online Page A

Cynthia.”
    â€œWhere do you keep them?”
    â€œIn my purse.”
    Her purse stuck to her arm as if it was made of industrial-strength Velcro. “Have you had any work done on the car recently?”
    â€œI had the oil changed at Mighty last week.”
    â€œWhich one?”
    â€œOn San Mateo.”
    I made a note of that, moved on to drugs, something else she hadn’t told me about. “Saia also told me you had taken Halcion that night. Do you take it often?”
    â€œOnly when I am under stress.”
    â€œAnd then how much do you take?”
    â€œA half.”
    â€œYou know there’s a forty-five-minute gap between the time you got home and the time Justine’s body was found, and an hour before the police got here.”
    â€œIt seemed longer to me.”
    â€œWhat did you do in that time?”
    â€œSlept.”
    Martha’s monosyllabic answers weren’t taking up much space, but I flipped to the next page on my legal pad anyway, just to break the rhythm. “Is there anything else you’d rather not talk about? Anything else you haven’t told me?” She might find denial comforting, but it wouldn’t help me defend her.
    â€œActually, I do have an idea about what happened to Justine,” she said. “Drugs.” She folded her hands in her lap as if she had just explained everything, but she hadn’t explained a thing to me. I don’t consider drugs the great catchall explanation for everything that goes wrong in America.
    â€œThe only drugs found in her system were antihistamines,” I said.
    â€œI didn’t say she had taken drugs. I believe she was selling them.”
    â€œAnd why do you think that?”
    â€œShe was very secretive about her past. I asked Michael why she came here from South America, but he never would give me an answer. Virga is obviously an assumed name. At Michael’s funeral I overheard her telling Mina Alarid that they were following her. She was driving very fast; I think she was being chased.”
    It wasn’t all that fast for New Mexico, but I didn’t say so. “By who?” I asked.
    â€œDrug dealers.”
    There are illegal drugs and legal drugs. Pick your poison. In Martha’s world the good people took the legal ones, the bad people took the others. “You think drug dealers set you up?”
    â€œPossibly.”
    â€œWhy would they do that?”
    â€œTo divert suspicion from them.”
    It had a certain kind of Halcion-and-vodka logic. “Just because someone happens to come here from Latin America, that doesn’t make her or him a drug dealer,” I said. “There are lots of other reasons to come to this country.”
    â€œJustine was carrying a revolver the night she was killed,” Martha said.
    The pen that was scrolling across my legal pad stopped in midstroke. “How do you know that?” I asked.
    â€œOne of the policemen, the one who was acting like the nice cop, was holding it inside one of their plastic bags, and he showed it to me. The gun had two empty chambers, he said, and he asked if Justine had fired it. Maybe he thought it had been an attempted robbery and was trying to get me to say I’d acted in self-defense. If I had killed her in self-defense, I asked him, would I have put her gun in the glove compartment?”
    â€œThat’s where they found it?”
    â€œYes. The keys were in her pocket. They went into the car looking for her identification.”
    â€œHow did they know which car was Justine’s?”
    â€œ It was the worst-looking car in the parking lot.”
    Martha had been pretty observant for someone who was under the influence. But being accused of killing someone and asked to look at a dead body in the middle of the night might be enough to sober somebody up. It sounded to me as if the police officers had been sloppy; they shouldn’t have entered Justine’s car. They should have