In Death 26 - Strangers in Death

twenty.”
    “Fifteen. Oh God. God. They’ll be grown.”
    “You’ll be eligible for parole in seven,” Baxter told her.
    “If you don’t cooperate, if this goes to trial, the charges bounce back. You’re looking at the probability of two life sentences, running consecutively. Off-planet.” Eve sat. “Your choice.”
    “My kids. I…I have a sister. Can my kids go to my sister?”
    “I’ll look into that. Personally.” Baxter nodded. “I’ll talk to your sister, to Child Services.”
    “They’ll be better off with her. I should’ve taken them and gone to my sister years ago.” She swiped at the tears with the tissues Baxter gave her. “Everything would be different if I’d done that. But I didn’t. I thought, Ned’s their father and they should be with their father. I thought, I’m his wife, and I’m supposed to make the home. If I did better, everything would work out. But I didn’t do better, and it just got worse and worse. And then…”
    “You met Ava Anders,” Eve prompted.
    “Yes.” Suzanne closed her eyes for a moment, took several breaths. “She was so good to us, to everyone. She made me feel like I could do better. Be better. Ned didn’t care about the program, but he didn’t mind. Got the kids out from underfoot, he said. But sometimes, just sometimes, he’d go to a practice or a game. And that was good. He’d even take us out for pizza after sometimes. It was better when he did. And the last time, after the last time he hit me, he promised he wouldn’t do it again. And he didn’t this time. He didn’t hit me for weeks, and he was around more. I thought, this is going to be all right. But then he started coming home late again, and smelling of sex.”
    “You talked to Ava about that?” Baxter asked.
    “What? No…Before, we talked before. Months ago. Just before the kids went back to school. When they were at camp and I went to the retreat, the end of August. God, Ned was so angry that I went, but it was good to be there. To have that time away. We’d talked before—Ava, I mean.”
    Taking the cup of water, she sipped, paused, sipped again. “She was so nice to me. She’d sit with me late at night and talk and talk. She understood how hard it was with Ned that way because her husband hurt her, too. She never told anyone but me. He hurt her, and he made her do things. And he did things with girls—girls who were too young to be hurt that way.
    “Everyone thinks he was so good.” Tears streamed out of Suzanne’s eyes, soaking the tissues as she mopped. “But he was a monster.”
    “That’s what she told you?”
    “She was afraid of him. I know what that’s like. We cried together. She couldn’t stand what he was doing to her, and more, to the children. She said he and Ned were alike. One day, Ned would hurt my babies. One day he could…with Maizie.”
    She closed her eyes, shuddered. “He’d never—he’d never touched Maizie like that, but he hit the kids sometimes. When they were bad, or when he’d had too much to drink. I thought, what would I do if he tried to do to Maizie what Mr. Anders did with young girls? I said, I think I said, I’d kill him if he touched her that way.”
    Her voice cracked, and began to waver and jump as she continued. “It would be too late then, Ava said, like she was afraid it was too late for her. She said she’d help me. We could help each other. We didn’t have to live like this anymore, or risk the children.”
    Suzanne reached for the water, then simply rubbed the cup over her forehead. “She said it was just like in the seminars and groups, where we talked about being proactive, about being strong. Taking action to make a difference. She’d stop Ned and I’d stop Mr. Anders. No one would ever know.”
    “Stop?” Eve qualified.
    Her shoulders hunched, Suzanne stared at the table. “Kill. We would kill them. No one would know—how could they—because each of us would be innocent of the crime that connected to us. She’d go first, to show good faith. We’d wait a few months and we’d be careful about contacting each other between. Then she’d stop Ned.”
    She heaved a breath, looked up at Eve again. “She said stop, not kill. I knew what she meant, I did, but it seemed right when she said it. She’d stop Ned before he hurt my children, stop him from hurting me. And then, we’d wait again, two or three months, and I’d stop Mr. Anders.”
    “Did she tell you how you’d stop him?”
    Suzanne