Chapter 21
Allison
I throw on workout clothes, a thick running jacket, stocking cap and gloves, and prepare to brave the frigid late-February temperatures of our sleepy suburb.
From the bedroom window, the world outside looks muted and far away, the snowfall drifting past the glass in lazy spirals.
The rooftops blur under a growing white blanket.
Before I leave, I send a text message to Grayson, as I do every morning, ostensibly words of wisdom, but really just letting him know, without hovering, that I’m thinking of him. Today: Speak less than you know. Silence builds respect faster than words.
It’s not just nerves, either. It’s been exhausting, talking with Luke over this last week as if I don’t know what really happened. First, he wants to plead guilty and take the blame. Then he suspects Finley. If only he’d relax and trust me, I’ll get him through this.
I grab two nylon recyclable bags from the bunch in my mudroom.
They’re from Treasure Island, the grocery store we frequented when we lived in Chicago.
The Treasure Island stores are long shuttered, but my memories remain, back when Fin and I were newly married, when things between us were great, when I was giddy with love, when I was sure we’d be forever.
Now I know better. If I hadn’t learned that already with Anna Cortese, I did last month, when I crossed under Lake Shore Drive and saw it with my own eyes, when I watched my husband sneak into the rear of our condo building with his new mistress, Trinity Casto.
It was bad enough when Finley ran around on me with a woman from the country club whom I barely knew. But Trinity? Someone who’d been so close with Luke, who knew that Luke loved her, who’d been in our home?
These were my options. One, take the high road: confront Fin, divorce him, and move on. I preferred door number two: doing all that plus burning Trinity to the ground.
But I wasn’t going to put myself at personal risk. I didn’t want a repeat of Anna Cortese—guns, gas cans, lit matches. I would hurt Trinity from a distance.
A new idea began to form—as it turned out, from an old one.
I’d been sincerely wary of Max, a former drug dealer, and by extension Trinity—her weekday trips to see him, how easily a business owner could launder money, how commonly drugs move through gyms. I was never certain of my suspicions.
But after watching Trinity traipse into my condo building with Fin, I decided that it didn’t matter if my suspicions were true. I would make them true.
I prepared, of course. I always prepare. I could claim this was ingrained from years of trial work, but the truth? I’ve always been this way. It wasn’t trial work that made me good at disciplined preparation. It was disciplined preparation that made me good at trial work.
After I saw Trinity and Finley together, I put my plan into action. I went to Luke’s townhouse in Grace Park when I knew he wasn’t home. I had a key and knew the alarm code.
Wearing gloves, obviously, I started for the bathroom, hoping she might have used a hairbrush or something, but I saw something better resting on the glass table in Luke’s family room: a tube of Trinity’s lipstick.
It was hard to think of a better option than lipstick. Her fingerprints, for sure, would be on the outside tube. Her DNA, no doubt, would be on the lipstick itself.
Next, I needed the right bag, not as big as a grocery shopping bag, but not tiny, either.
One quick peek at Luke’s recycling bin gave me what I needed: a medium-sized bag from Trinity’s studio, made of some eco-friendly sustainable fabric, dark purple in color, bearing the word Trinity in its customary periwinkle.
She must have brought over some of those multivitamins he likes from her studio.
A nice gift for Luke. An even nicer one for me.
The oxycodone was the easy part; I never had to leave my house. Finley had never used the ninety-day supply—two pills a day, 180 total—prescribed to him after his knee injury.
Why did I fill and refill the prescription when he didn’t want them? I file that under the category of you-never-know. You never know, for example, how your husband might behave, especially with his history.
I had two choices of location—Trinity’s home or her studio—to plant the pills in her car.
When home, Trinity parked her car behind her residence, a small parking bay for three cars, matching the three condos in her building.
That would have been preferable, but my first stealth pass back there revealed a surveillance camera.
So that left me with the other place she parked her car—in the alley behind her fitness studio in Dearborn Park, narrow and cluttered with recycling bins and stacks of wooden pallets.
I scouted it carefully, walking the length of the alley twice from both ends, trying hard to look like just another woman on her way somewhere, scarf pulled up against the wind.
I looked up at the brick walls, noting the utility poles and fire escapes, the backs of the buildings, the dumpsters.
No cameras. Not one red-eyed lens staring down at me.
The only thing along the brick wall at all, near the back door to Trinity’s studio, was a rusty junction box that appeared to be in disrepair. That would work.
When the time came, nobody would see me.
The final step: accessing the trunk of her Corolla.
Enter Ralphie the scrap dealer, a guy in his late fifties whom I met fifteen years ago when I was a federal prosecutor and Harp was still with the Bureau.
Ralphie had been one of Harp’s snitches, a man with more information than Wikipedia, as she put it.
A mousy-looking character with wiry hair and narrow shoulders, Ralphie showed me a wide smile of uneven teeth when I entered his shack.
If I wanted to spend a few minutes in someone’s car, I asked him, how would an amateur like me go about that?
Ralphie, with those beady eyes and unattractive grin, said, There’s no such thing as an amateur anymore. I could buy something online these days, he explained, and for cheaper than what Ralphie would charge.
Suppose I don’t want any record of that particular transaction, I said.
Piece of cake, Ralphie said. He could help me out, as long as I could manage to spend a few minutes alone with the car’s key fob.
That was easy enough. I crashed a hangout Sunday morning at Luke’s, when Trinity was there. Her studio was closed over the weekend for some repairs or renovation—I didn’t really care why—and she was spending some time with her buddy Luke.
It was a simple matter of excusing myself, reaching into Trinity’s purse by the front door for the key fob, then taking it into Luke’s bathroom, where I pressed the RFID duplicator. Before I knew it, I had a matching key fob. I was ready to go.
At home, I found the three bottles of prescription Oxy I had stashed in my closet.
I counted out a hundred pills and put them into the shopping bag from Trinity’s studio.
Sure, I had 180 pills, but if I used them all, it would be too close for comfort to Finley’s exact scrips.
Cut it in half to ninety, and it still made sense for a three-month supply; some people only take one a day.
One hundred, on the other hand, felt like a nice round number for a drug dealer to sell.
And then, of course, I dropped the tube of Trinity’s lipstick into the bag with the pills.
Late one night, I snuck into the alley, beeped open Trinity’s trunk, and placed the shopping bag beneath the floorboard of her trunk. Then I talked Harp into tipping off law enforcement to be on the lookout for Trinity’s car on a Monday morning on I-57.
I will not apologize for what I did. Trinity had it coming. But what actually happened has tied my stomach in knots this week, beyond the worst-case scenario. I aimed for Trinity but hit my brother instead.
I will make this right. If the school tries to fire or suspend Luke, I’ll take them to court and get him reinstated.
And the prosecution is testing the bag that contained the Oxy pills and the tube of lipstick for DNA and fingerprints.
When those results come back, Trinity will be directly in the mix.
The already weak, circumstantial case against Luke will collapse.
Luke will have his life back within a matter of a week or two.
And Trinity will be out of our lives for good.