Third Degree

“What are you doing?” he asked, still looking out over the front lawn.

“Getting her some water. She’s tired out. No, actually she’s not. She’s traumatized by what you did upstairs. Probably scarred permanently. What is wrong with you?”

“Give her a teaspoon of Benadryl.”

“Is that your professional advice? Drug our daughter to sleep?”

Warren rolled his eyes. “This will be a lot less traumatic for her if she sleeps through it.”

Laurel’s stomach tightened. “What will?”

“Don’t worry about it. She can sleep in the safe room.”

Laurel felt as though she were having a conversation with a robot. “Warren, you just killed your business partner. Your office almost burned to the ground. Your employee tried to kill a federal agent. Don’t you realize the police will be here any minute?”

“That’s why she needs to be in the safe room.”

Laurel whispered, “You’re not putting our daughter into that room alone. She’d be terrified.”

“She’d also be safe. Bullets can’t penetrate an inch of steel plate.”

A bolt of alarm shot through Laurel, despite her fatigue. “Do you seriously intend to hold us hostage inside a ring of armed men?”

At last Warren’s face betrayed some emotion. “This is our house, Laurel. My house. My land. I expect the police to respect our rights and leave us alone to deal with our own family problems.”

She closed her eyes, trying to blot out his face long enough to think, but it was impossible. The enormity of what had happened finally sank into her soul, and the floodgates opened. As she cried, she experienced an epiphany that revealed the road to freedom. The password to that road was a lie. But unlike the lies of omission she had been telling for the past year, she was going to have to sell this story. At least Kyle won’t have died for nothing, she thought. In death, he was going to do her a service he could never have done in life.

She carried Beth to the built-in banquette in the corner of the kitchen. Beth tried to cling to her, but Laurel set her firmly on the seat and rubbed her forehead for half a minute. “Warren,” she said, straightening up and putting her hands on her hips, “I can’t let you put Beth at risk like this. I’m going to tell you what you want to know. But first I’ve got to know that you’ll bring this insanity to an end. I don’t care what you do to me, but you’ve got to let Beth leave the house.”

Hearing resolve in her voice, he looked away from the window and focused on her. “Do you really think Beth is in danger from me? You’re the one who put our children at risk. If you tell me the truth, the real truth, you might be surprised by how things turn out.”

Laurel tried to read his meaning, but it was impossible. “Send Beth outside first. As a sign of good faith. Then I’ll tell you.”

He smiled sadly. “I can’t do that. You haven’t proved yourself worthy of trust. She’s in no danger.” He took a step toward Laurel. “Tell me.”

She realized then that he wasn’t holding the gun. Was it still in one of his pockets?

“I’m waiting,” he said.

She pictured the awful scene upstairs, when he had told the kids she was having an affair. That was sufficient to bring more tears to her eyes. “It was Kyle, okay?” she said softly. “I saw him for almost a year.”

Warren’s eyes narrowed, and he moved closer. Close enough to hit her. “Kyle. You were having an affair with Kyle?”

She nodded. “I didn’t love him. But I wanted to hurt you. I knew that would hurt you more than anything else. If I cheapened myself like that.”

Warren moved closer, close enough to kiss. “You made love with him?”

“No. I fucked him.”

Warren flinched. She expected a blow any second.

“And you knew about the other women? About Vida? The nurses?”

Laurel nodded. “That was part of it, I think.”

“Did Kyle love you?”

She was about to say no, but then she thought of Danny’s letter. “He thought he did. Kyle was crazy. He’d never had anyone like me before. He said he would give up all the others if I would run away with him. But I didn’t want that. I just wanted to make you realize what you were doing to me. How you were ignoring me.”

Warren tilted his head to the right, like a scientist studying an animal in the midst of some curious act. “You’re lying,” he said at length.

“You don’t know the truth when you hear it.”

“If Kyle was the one who wrote that letter, you would have let him shoot me. But you didn’t. You warned me.”

“Of course I did! I didn’t love Kyle! I love you. Besides, you’re the father of my children.”

Warren shook his head. “You’re lying now. Kyle could have smashed your laptop while I ran to answer the kitchen phone, but he didn’t. He didn’t care about that Hotmail account at all.”

“I could have done the same thing.”

“No, I was watching you. And you did try, once. Kyle never did. He even screamed at you to tell me the password. He didn’t care about your computer, because he knew it was no threat to him.”

She searched her mind for some rational argument, but there was none.

“You’re still trying to protect someone,” Warren said, his voice low and dangerous. “Who is it?” He grabbed her by the shoulders and shook her violently. “Tell me who he is!”

“Daddy, stop it!” Beth screeched. “You’re hurting Mama!”

“Mom’s fine,” Warren said, stopping his assault but not taking his eyes from Laurel’s face. “If you were really having an affair with Kyle, you can answer one simple question for me.”

Her stomach rolled over.

“Kyle had a unique feature below the waist. What was it?”

She lowered her voice. “I’m not going to discuss another man’s genitals with you in front of our daughter.”

“Let’s go to the great room, then.”

Laurel closed her eyes as though disgusted, but she was thinking desperately.

“You don’t know,” Warren whispered. “Because you’ve never seen Kyle’s…package.”

But she had seen it, once. A couple of years ago, at a Halloween party that lasted into the wee hours. A few drunken guests had peeled off their costumes and leaped into their hosts’ heated pool. Naturally one of them was Kyle. He’d been standing behind a plastic cubicle that served as a changing room, out of Warren’s line of sight but well within Laurel’s. After stripping off his pants, he’d turned toward her long enough for her to take in his full nudity; then he’d burst into the open and dived into the steaming water. Laurel had a clear memory of the event, but no matter how hard she focused, she saw nothing but a normal, middle-aged penis of average size.

“Time’s up,” Warren said. “You lose.”

“There’s nothing different about him.”

Warren’s smile was triumphant. “Kyle had hypospadias. Do you know what that is?”

Laurel had heard the word, but she couldn’t recall what condition it described.

“His urethra opens on the underside of his penis, rather than at the tip. It’s fairly common. One in three hundred live births. And if you’d been sleeping with him, you would definitely know about it.”

She looked away.

“You can go check his corpse, if you’re curious. No? Then I repeat: tell me who you’re trying to protect. If you don’t-”

The kitchen phone rang loudly. Warren let go of her, glanced at the caller ID, then walked to the kitchen window. “And awaaay we go. It’s started now.”

Laurel stood on tiptoe. Over the hedges in front of the window, she saw a Sheriff’s Department cruiser parked at the end of their driveway. One man inside.

Warren pressed the speakerphone button, then came back to the window. “This is Dr. Shields. Who’s this?”