She shifted a little in her seat and out of the corner of my eye I saw her full mouth pull into a hard line. “Again, I was upset, but only at myself. I knew there were cameras. I knew it was wrong, but I did it anyway because Jared insisted we needed the money. When you convince yourself that you’re in love, you can justify doing a lot of rash things.” I wanted to look at her to see if she was talking about the incident at the bar or something a little closer to home, but I wouldn’t give the observant man at the other end of the table that kind of leverage.
“So you are telling me you knew you would get caught?”
She nodded and we exchanged a look. “I did.”
He jotted down some more notes, and I could practically see the wheels in his head turning.
“Do you often do things that are illegal knowing you’ll get caught?”
“I’ve made some mistakes in the past. I’m sure you have most of them in that file in front of you. Everything I’ve done is public record.”
He was trying to rile her up, but she wasn’t giving in to the bait and I couldn’t be any prouder of her and how she was handling herself.
Larsen made a noise and moved forward in his chair. “The security cameras at the bar show that my client got physical with you before going inside the establishment. Was that an isolated incident?”
She lifted her fingers to her face and touched the smooth skin below her eye as she shook her head. “No. Jared got rough with me a couple times previously. Normally, when he was coming down off a high or freaking out about how he was going to get his next fix. He hit me once because I was supposed to bring beer to a party and I didn’t and my mom and some co-workers noticed the black eye. One of the guys that works at the bar told Jared if I ever showed up with anything other than a smile on my face, he would make sure that I was the last woman he ever raised his hand to. He left me alone after that.”
“So you knew Mr. Dalton had a substance abuse problem and a history of violence and yet you went with him that night. Why?”
I felt her balk a little and couldn’t resist the urge to look at her. Her eyes were wide in her face and she was very pale. It was obvious she was trying to think of a way to answer that question that explained her convoluted reasoning at the time without giving too much of her story away.
“Because I was scared and he told me he was taking me somewhere safe. I went with him because he was my boyfriend, and as I mentioned earlier, I was pretty sure I was in love with him.”
“Not so sure of those feelings anymore?” The snide question had me narrowing my eyes threateningly at the other end of the table, which made the man smirk at me knowingly.
“Spending a couple nights in jail really does wonders for clarity. I could never love a man that threatened someone I care about with a weapon. Jared was desperate and dangerous that night.”
“And why is that, Ms. Walker?”
She shrugged a little. “Because he stole drugs and money from bad people and they were looking for him.”
“How do you know this?”
“Because before they found him, they found me.” Her tone was cutting and it was obvious that Larsen was starting to get to her.
“Is that so? There are no police reports from you or from anyone else that indicates you had a run-in with these supposed bad people that were after my client.”
“I didn’t want to get Jared in trouble so I didn’t call the police, but you can contact Asa Cross. He came to see me the day after the attack and he can tell you what I looked like. You can also question the landlady from Jared’s apartment complex. She’s the one that scared off the guys that attacked me.”
Larsen leaned back in his chair and tapped his fingers on the file in front of him. “Well, you see, Ms. Walker, that’s where we run into some problems with your account of the events that led up to the robbery. The landlady doesn’t recall anyone being in the apartment besides you and my client, and Mr. Cross has an ax to grind considering he was the one at the bar the night of the robbery. The woman he is involved with is also the police officer that shot my client, so his interest in seeing my client incarcerated makes him biased in so many ways. The only person claiming there was an attack prior to the robbery is you, so isn’t it much more likely that you were mad about the bar being sold out from underneath you and coerced your drug-addicted boyfriend to rob it? Knowing he couldn’t say no to money for a fix or to the woman he loved?”
My skin crawled when he mentioned the landlady because I was pretty fucking sure her current memory loss only came about after fistfuls of cash exchanged hands. This guy wasn’t above bribing a witness to get his way and that let me know that this was going to be as ugly and as dirty as it could get.
A broken laugh wheezed out of her as she turned her head in my direction and then jerked it back towards Larsen. “You’ve got to be kidding me. Even if I was mad, which I told you I wasn’t, I would never risk the lives of the people that worked there. I was stupid enough to stay with Jared after the first time he hit me, but I would never inflict him on anyone else. I knew how dangerous he could be when he was high.”
“Is that so?”
She heaved a deep sigh and shook her head. “Yes, it’s so. I mess up and I get myself into bad situations, but I do my best not to let that bleed on to anyone that I care about.”
“So, what happened with Autumn Thompson a few years back?”
She and I both stiffened when he mentioned the girl’s name that had been so instrumental in leading Avett down the path full of self-inflicted wounds and purposeful pain. I heard her breath wheeze out of her in a tortured sound that had my heart cracking right down the middle.