Fractured

CHAPTER NINETEEN

FAITH WAS STRUCK by how normal she found Warren Grier. He was average looking, the sort of young man you wouldn't think twice about letting nto your house to fix your toilet or check for a gas leak. Considering what had happened to Kayla Alexander and Adam Humphrey, what had most likely been done to Emma Campano, Faith had expected a monster, or at the very least an arrogant sociopath like Evan Bernard.

Instead, she found Warren Grier almost pitiable. His body was thin and wiry. He couldn't make eye contact with her. Sitting in the chair across from her in the interrogation room, his shoulders hunched, his hands clasped low between his knees, he reminded her more of Jeremy that time he'd gotten caught stealing candy from the store than a cold-blooded killer.

She cleared her throat and he glanced up at her, shy, as if they were in high school and she was the cheerleader who was nice to him when her friends were not looking. He seemed almost grateful to be sitting across from her. Had she not seen him with her own eyes less than an hour ago pointing a gun in Will Trent's face, Faith would have laughed at the prospect of this introspective, awkward man being capable of such a thing.

Faith had only drawn her gun twice in her career. It was not a thing a police officer did lightly. You did not pull your weapon unless you were ready to use it, and there were a finite number of circumstances that justified that happening. Standing there in the woods, looking down at Warren Grier, watching his finger pull back on the trigger, she had been fully prepared to pull back her own finger.

But it would have been too late. Faith had been following procedure. She could have safely told any review panel that she was doing the job as she had been trained to do: you give a warning first, then you shoot. Faith knew now that she would never again give that warning. Warren had already pulled the trigger twice by the time she got there. The only thing that had kept him from pulling it a third time, sending the firing pin into the back of a bullet, the bullet through the back of Will's brain, was…what?

She felt a rush of heat just thinking about the close call. Faith had to remind herself that the irrational side of Warren Grier was the one that they needed to keep in mind at all times. Evan Bernard was the cool and collected one. Warren was the reactionary, the person who was capable of a frenzied murder. He had abducted Emma Campano. He had stabbed Adam Humphrey. He had beaten Kayla Alexander to death.

Faith realized that over the last twelve hours, she had allowed herself to think that Emma Campano was probably dead. Now she found herself coming to terms with the possibility that Emma was still alive, and that the only way to find her was through the killer sitting on the other side of the table.

She hoped to God that Will was up to the challenge.

Warren said, "The construction guys say that the water main should be fixed soon. That'll be nice to have the street clear, finally."

Faith turned slightly in her chair, facing away from him. There was a camera on a tripod at the head of the table, their every movement being recorded. She thought about Evan Bernard's little-girl room and wondered if Warren Grier had sat in front of the computer next door, watching him. They hadn't found a hard drive in the man's apartment. They hadn't found a laptop computer or anything remotely incriminating.

"They sure were busy this afternoon," he said. "It was very noisy."

She felt her pity seep away, her disgust take hold.

According to Lionel Petty, Warren spent a lot of time in his office with the door closed. Had he watched Emma and Adam in the parking lot on the security monitor? Is that when he'd first spotted Emma? How did Kayla fit into all of this? Where did Evan Bernard come in?

Faith had been processing Warren through the system, watching him get photographed and fingerprinted and searched. Will had told her about Warren's dingy apartment on Ashby Street downtown. It was a one-room affair with a toilet down the hall, the sort of place you moved into when you just got out of jail. Warren's landlady was shocked to hear that her quiet tenant of ten years had been arrested. He never went out except for work, she had told Will. He never had friends around.

So where was he keeping Emma Campano?

As if he could read her mind, Warren said, "You won't find her."

Faith did not respond, did not try to read any sense of hope in his words. Warren had tried several times to engage her in conversation. She had taken the bait the first few times, but quickly learned that he was playing her. He wanted to talk about the weather, the news story about the drought-anything to engage her in meaningless conversation. Faith had learned a long time ago that you never gave suspects what they wanted. It put the relationship on the wrong foot if they thought that they were the ones in control.

There was a knock at the door, then Will came into the room. He had several neon-colored file folders in his hand. He nodded at Faith as he checked the camera, making sure everything was working properly.

Warren said, "I'm sorry I tried to kill you."

Will smiled at him. "I'm glad you didn't succeed."

It showed remarkable restraint, and Faith was again struck by how very little Will Trent acted like a cop. He straightened his vest, making sure his tie was tightly tucked in, as he sat down beside Faith. The man looked more like an accountant who was about to start an audit than a cop.

Will told Warren, "Your fingerprint matches the note that was slipped under Adam Humphrey's door last week."

Warren nodded his head once. He stayed hunched over the table, his hands between his knees. His chest was pressed into the metal top the way babies do when they're trying to stand.

Will asked, "Did you try to warn Adam away?"

Warren gave a single nod again.

"May I tell you what I think happened?"

He seem to be waiting for just that.

"I think that you planned this out well ahead of time. Evan Bernard needed money to pursue his legal case against Georgia Tech. He lost his pension, his retirement benefits, everything," Will told Faith. "We found out that he sold his house last summer to pay his legal bills." He shook his head, indicating they had checked the house and found nothing.

Faith wondered what other information he had unearthed while she had been sitting on Warren. She glanced at the colored file folders, and Will gave her an uncharacteristic wink.

Warren asked, "Did you get adopted out?"

Faith didn't understand the question, but Will obviously did.

"No," he answered. "I left when I was eighteen."

Warren smiled, a kindred spirit. "Me, too."

"Did you meet Bernard when you got fostered out? Did he teach at your school?"

Warren's face was placid.

"I think that Evan Bernard introduced you to Kayla Alexander. He needed Kayla to open the front door for you, to make sure that Emma was at home. Maybe she was supposed to keep Adam calm while you took her away." Warren did not confirm anything. "Was Kayla the one who told Emma to start parking in the garage?"

Warren said, "Kayla told Emma to park there last year so her parents wouldn't find out they were skipping."

"Let's go back three days ago, the day of the crime. Did you use the path in the woods behind the Copy Right to walk to the Campanos?"

"Yes."

"Did you have the knife and the gloves with you?"

"Yes."

"So you went there intending to kill somebody."

He hesitated, then shrugged in answer.

Will thumbed through the files in his hand and opened the green one. "We found this in your desk at the copy center." He showed Faith the photograph before sliding it toward Warren. The picture showed Emma Campano walking with Adam Humphrey. The two teenagers had their arms around each other. Emma's head was tilted back as she laughed.

Will said, "You liked watching her."

Warren did not respond, but then Will hadn't really asked a question.

"Did you think that Adam wasn't good enough for her?"

He remained silent.

"You knew Emma was special. Who told you she had a reading problem like you?"

"I don't have a reading problem." His tone was defensive, a radical change from the conversational manner he had adopted before.

Will opened another folder, this one blue, and showed Faith an official-looking form. "This is an evaluation from a clinical psychologist who interviewed Warren when he was released from the state's care." Will put the sheet of paper down on the table, turning it toward Warren. Faith saw that there were colored dots on the page. Will put his finger on the blue one. " ‘Antisocial,' " he read, moving down to the red dot. " ‘Sociopathic tendencies.' " He moved his finger down to the next dot, then the next, calling out, " ‘Anger control issues.' ‘Poor aptitude.' ‘Poor reading skills.' Do you see this, Warren? Do you see what they said about you?" He paused, though obviously he didn't expect an answer. Will tucked the form back into the folder, and the tone of the interview suddenly changed when he said, "Well, I guess it doesn't matter if you can see it because it clearly says that you can't read it."

Pain flashed in the other man's eyes as if he had been betrayed.

Will kept chipping away, his tone soft, as if he could be both the good and the bad cop rolled into one. "Is that why you dropped out of school when you were sixteen?"

Warren shook his head.

"I guess school wasn't that fun since they stuck you with the stupid kids." For Faith's benefit, Will explained, "Warren was put into special education classes when he was fifteen, even though his IQ tested within the normal range."

Warren looked down at the table, his eyes still glistening.

Will said, "It's kind of sad when the short bus pulls up in front of the orphanage."

Warren cleared his throat, struggling to speak. "You're never going to find her."

"And you're never going to see her again."

"I have her up here," he insisted, pressing his finger to his temple. "I have her with me all the time."

"I know she's alive," Will said, sounding so certain of himself that Faith almost believed him. "You wouldn't kill her, Warren. She's special to you."

"She loves me."

"She's terrified of you."

He shook his head. "She understands why I had to do it. I had to save her."

"What does she understand?"

"That I'm protecting her."

"Protecting her from Bernard?"

He shook his head, biting his lip, refusing to give up the teacher.

Will opened a red file folder and took out yet another sheet of paper, which he slid Warren's way. " ‘It is my opinion that Warren Grier has an undiagnosed reading and written language disability. This, combined with his average IQ and antisocial behavior-' "

Warren whispered, "She's going to die, and it's all going to be on you."

"I'm not the one who took her from her family. I'm not the one who killed her best friend."

"Kayla wasn't her friend," Warren said. "She hated her. She couldn't stand her."

"Why?"

"Kayla made fun of her all the time," Warren said. "She said she was stupid because she had to have special help after school."

"Was Kayla mean to you, too?"

He shrugged, but the answer to that question was lying dead down in the morgue right now.

"Tell me what happened that day, Warren. Did Kayla let you into the house?"

"She was just supposed to let me into the house and shut up, but she wouldn't stop. She was pissed about Adam, that he was upstairs having sex with Emma. She kept going on and on about how stupid Emma is, and how she doesn't deserve to have a boyfriend. She said Emma is stupid like me."

"Did Kayla start yelling?"

"When I hit her." Warren amended, "Not hard, though. Only to get her to shut up."

"Then what happened?"

"She ran up the stairs. She kept screaming. I told her to stop, but she wouldn't. She was supposed to help with Adam. I was supposed to hold the knife to her neck so he wouldn't try anything, but she just went crazy. I had to hit her."

"Did you stab Kayla?"

"I don't know. I don't remember. I just felt someone grab my hand, and it was him, it was Adam. I didn't mean to hurt him. I just stood up, and the knife went into his chest. I didn't want to hurt him. I tried to help him. I tried to warn him to go away."

"Where was Emma when all of this was happening?"

"I heard her crying. She was in the closet in one of the rooms. She had…" His voice caught. "The room was so nice, you know? It had a big TV, and a fireplace, and all these clothes and shoes and everything. She had everything."

"Did you hit her?"

"I wouldn't hurt her."

"But she was unconscious when you carried her down the stairs."

"We went outside. I don't know what was wrong with her. I carried her. I put her in the trunk, then I went to the parking garage like I was supposed to."

"Like Bernard told you to?"

He looked back at the table again, and Faith wondered what kind of hold Evan Bernard had over the young man. For all appearances, Bernard preferred girls. Was there another side to his depravity that they had yet to find out about?

Will asked, "Where did you take her, Warren? Where did you take Emma?"

"Somewhere safe," he said. "Somewhere we could be together."

"You don't love her, Warren. You don't kidnap somebody if you love them. They come to you. They choose you. Not the other way around."

"It wasn't like that. She said she loved me."

"After you took her?"

"Yeah." He had a grin on his face, as if the news still surprised and astounded him. "She really fell in love with me."

"You really think that?" Will asked. "You really think you belong in her world?"

"She loves me. She told me."

Will leaned closer. "Guys like you and me, we don't know what it means to be in a family. We don't see how deep that bond is, we never feel how much parents love their children. You broke that bond, Warren. You took Emma away from her parents just like you were taken away from yours."

Warren still shook his head, but with sadness more than certainty.

"What was that like for you, being in her room, seeing the good kind of life she had when you had nothing?" His voice was low, confidential. "It all felt wrong, didn't it? I was there, man. I felt it, too. We don't belong around normal people like that. They can't take our nightmares. They don't understand why we hate Christmas and birthdays and summer vacations because every holiday reminds us of all the time we spent alone."

"No." Warren shook his head, vehement. "I'm not alone now. I have her."

"What do you picture for yourself, Warren? Some kind of domestic scene where you come home from work and Emma's cooking you dinner? She'll kiss you on the forehead and you'll drink some wine and talk about your day. Maybe after, she'll wash the plates and you'll dry?"

Warren shrugged, but Faith could tell that was exactly the sort of life the man envisioned.

"I saw your booking photos when they arrested you downstairs. I know what cigarette burns look like."

He whispered a quiet, "Fuck you."

"Did you show your burns to Emma? Did she get sick the same way you do every time you see them?"

"It's not like that."

"She had to feel the scars, Warren. I know you took your clothes off. I know you wanted to feel her skin against yours."

"No."

"I don't know which is worse, the pain or the smell. First, it's like little needles digging into you-a million at a time just burning and stinging. And then the smell hits you. It's like barbecue, isn't it? You smell it in the summer all over the city, that raw flesh burning in the flames."

"I told you, we love each other."

Will's tone was almost playful, as if he was giving the windup for a joke. "You ever feel your skin in the shower sometimes, Warren? You're soaping up and your hand goes to your ribs and you feel the little holes that were burned into your flesh?"

"That doesn't happen."

"They're like little suction cups when they're wet, right? You put your finger in them and you feel yourself get trapped all over again."

He shook his head.

"Did you beg for it to be over, screaming like a pussy because it hurt so bad? You told them you'd do anything, right? Anything to make the pain stop."

"Nobody hurt me like that."

Will's tone got harder, his words came faster. "You feel those scars and it makes you so angry. You want to take it out on some-one-maybe Emma with her perfect life and her rich daddy and her beautiful mother who has to have a doctor come knock her out because she can't bear the thought of being without her precious little girl."

"Stop it."

Will slammed his hand against the table. They all jumped. "She doesn't belong to you, Warren! Tell me where she is!"

Warren's jaw clenched as he glared at the table in front of him.

Spit flew from Will's mouth as he moved even closer. "I know you. I know how your mind works. You didn't take Emma because you love her, you took her because you wanted to make her scream."

Slowly, Warren looked up, facing Will. His anger was barely controlled, his lips trembling like a rabid dog's. "Yeah," he said, his voice a hoarse whisper. "She screamed." His face was as controlled as his tone. "She screamed until I shut her up."

Will sat back in his chair. There was a clock on the wall. Faith listened to it slowly ticking away the time. She looked at the cinder-block wall in front of her rather than give Warren the satisfaction of her curiosity or Will the intensity of her concern.

She had worked with cops who could stand in the pouring rain and swear on a stack of Bibles that the sun was shining. Many times, she had sat in this very interrogation room and listened to Leo Donnelly, a man with no children and four divorces, rhapsodize about his love of God and his precious twin baby girls in order to lure a suspect into a confession. Faith herself had at times fabricated an invisible husband, a doting grandmother, an absent father, in order to get suspects to talk. All cops knew how to spin a yarn.

Only, this time, she was certain that Will Trent was not lying.

Will put his hand on the stack of folders. "We found your adoption records."

Warren shook his head. "Those are sealed."

"They are unless you commit a felony," Will said, and Faith studied him, knowing that this was a lie, trying to figure out what cues he gave when he was not telling the truth. His face was just as impassive as before, and she ended up turning her attention back to Warren so that she did not drive herself mad.

Will said, "Your mother is still alive, Warren."

"You're lying."

"She's been looking for you."

For the first time since Will had entered the room, Warren glanced at Faith, as if he could engage her maternal instinct. "That's not fair."

Will said, "All this time, she's been looking for you."

He opened the last folder. There was a sheet of paper inside. He turned the page around and slid it toward Warren. From where Faith sat, she could see that he had copied a memo about appropriate attire for on-duty, undercover officers. The city's seal at the top had been duplicated so many times that the rising phoenix looked like a blob.

Will asked, "Don't you want to see your mother, Warren?"

His eyes filled with tears.

"There she is," Will said, tapping the paper. "She lives less than ten miles from where you work."

Warren started rocking back and forth, his tears wetting the page.

"What kind of son is she going to find in you?"

"A good one," the young man insisted.

"You think what you've done is good? You think she's going to want to be around the man who kept a young girl from her family?" Will pressed a little harder. "You're doing the same thing to Emma's parents that was done to your mom. You think she's going to be able to love you after finding out that you knew how to get Emma back to her family, but you wouldn't do it?"

"She's safe," he said. "I just wanted to keep her safe."

"Tell me where she is. Her mother misses her so much."

He shook his head. "No," he answered. "You're never going to find her. She's going to be with me forever. There's nothing that can come between us now."

"Stop the bullshit, Warren. You didn't want Emma. You wanted her life."

Warren looked at the file folders in front of Will as if he expected something even worse to be pulled out, some information even more damaging to be thrown into his face.

Will tried again. "Tell us where she is, and I'll tell you your mother's address."

Warren's eyes did not stray from the files, but he started whispering something so quietly that Faith could not make out what he was saying.

"I'll go get her myself. I'll drive her over to see you."

Warren kept whispering, his mouth moving in an unintelligible mantra.

Will said, "Speak up, Warren. Just tell us where she is so we can give her back to her parents who love her."

Faith finally understood his words. "Blue, red, purple, green. Blue, red, purple, green."

"Warren-"

His voice got louder. "Blue, red, purple, green." He stood up, screaming, "Blue, red, purple, green!" He started waving his hands, his tone rising to the top of his voice. "Blue! Red! Purple! Green!" He ran toward the door, trying the knob. Faith was closest to him so she tried to pull him away. Warren's elbow caught her in the mouth and she fell back against the table.

"Blue! Red! Purple! Green!" he screamed, running full on into the concrete wall. Will went after him, wrapping his arms around the man. Warren kicked, screaming, "No! Let me go! Let me go!"

"Warren!" Will let go of him, keeping his hands out wide in case he needed to grab him again.

Warren stood in the middle of the room. Blood dripped down his face where he had slammed his head into the wall. He lunged toward Will, swinging his fists wildly.

The door flew open and two cops rushed in to help. Warren tried to run out the door, but they wrestled him to the floor, where he wriggled frantically, jerking his hands away from them as they tried to cuff him, screaming all the while. His foot kicked up, catching one of the officers in the face.

The Taser came out. Thirty thousand volts screamed through his body. Almost immediately, Warren went limp on the floor.

Will sat back on his heels, his breath coming in pants. He leaned over Warren, hand on his chest. "Please," he begged. "Just tell me. Tell me where she is."

Warren's lips moved. Will leaned down to listen to him. Something passed between the two men. Will nodded once, very much like the curt affirmations Warren had given them earlier. He sat up slowly, hands in his lap, telling the cops, "Take him away."

The officers scooped up Warren like a bag of potatoes, dragging him toward the door. They would take him to his cell and let him sleep off the shock.

Faith looked at Will, trying to understand. "What did he say to you?"

He pointed to his file folders on the table, leaning over as if he was still too breathless to speak. Faith looked at the files. They were in the wrong order, but she could see it now: blue, red, purple, green.

Warren had been yelling out the colors of the folders.

THE HOMICIDE SQUAD room had not improved during Faith's three-day absence. Robertson's jockstrap still dangled from the top drawer of his desk. A blow-up doll marked as "evidence" during the last birthday party sat on top of the filing cabinet, her mouth still opened in a suggestive O even as the air slowly drained out of her once curvaceous body. Leo Donnelly's desk was cleared but for a famous old photograph of Farrah Fawcett that he had obviously cut out of a magazine. Over the years, the margins of the photo had been embellished with graffiti and artwork that was more suitable for a middle school boys' bathroom.

Adding to the overall masculine effect, the shift was changing, an event Faith always likened to a football locker room during half-time. The noise was deafening, the smells alarming. Someone had turned on the television that hung from the ceiling. Someone else was trying to find a station on the ancient radio. A burrito heated in the microwave, the odor of burned cheese wafting through the air. Baritone bellows filled the room as detectives tromped in and out, turning over cases, giving each other the business about whose dick was bigger, who would solve a case first, who was turning over a dog of an investigation that would never be solved. In short, the whole room was filling with testosterone the way a cloth diaper filled with shit.

Faith glanced at the television set as she recognized Amanda's voice saying, "…proud to announce that an arrest has been made in the Campano kidnapping."

Someone yelled, "Thanks to APD, you cunt."

There were more words tossed Amanda's way-bitch, snatch, whatever base and degrading terms other cops could conjure to denigrate a woman who would have them all pissing in their pants if she got them alone in a room for more than five minutes.

The handful of detectives closest to Faith's desk gave her curious glances-not because she was working the case, but because of the language. Faith shrugged, looking back at the television set, watching Amanda expertly handle the reporters. She could still feel their eyes on her, though.

This sort of testing took place almost on a daily basis. If Faith told them to shut up, she was a ballbuster who couldn't take a joke. If she ignored it, they took her silence for tacit approval. It didn't stop there. If she spurned their sexual advances, she was a lesbian. If she dated any of them, she would be labeled a whore. Faith couldn't win either way, and striking back in similar terms took up too much of her time. The pouting, the passive-aggressive whining-Faith had already raised one child, she wasn't ready to take on twenty more.

And yet, she had always loved working here, loved feeling like she was part of a brotherhood. This was why Will Trent did not act or talk like a cop. He didn't sit in a squad room. He didn't bullshit over beers with Charlie Reed and Hamish Patel. He was certainly part of a team, but working with him was like working in a bubble. There was never the hum of people in the background, the jostling of egos and assignments. His was a more focused way of doing the job, but it was so different from what Faith was used to that, now that she was back among her fellow detectives, she felt like she no longer belonged. She had to admit that for all Will's faults, at least he listened to what she had to say. It was nice to have a discussion with a colleague who didn't ask "What're you, on the rag?" every time she disagreed with him.

Faith looked back at the television. Amanda was nodding as a reporter asked about Westfield Academy, the arrest of Evan Bernard. She looked absolutely radiant, and Faith had to admit she was in her element on camera. The reporters were eating out of the palm of her hand. "Mr. Bernard is certainly a person of interest."

"You interested in this?" one of the detectives yelled. Faith did not have to glance over to know the man was probably cupping his genitals.

Amanda answered another question. "The suspect is a twenty-eight-year-old man with a storied past."

Off camera, a reporter asked, "Why aren't you releasing his name?"

"The arraignment in the morning will make it part of the public record," she said, sidestepping the obvious, which was that they were keeping Warren's name out of the press as long as they could in order to keep some helpful do-gooder from offering him legal advice. The fact that Lionel Petty had already submitted an I-Report to CNN.com of him and Warren Grier standing beside one of the copy machines at work would soon work against them.

Another reporter was obviously thinking the same thing as Faith. "What about the missing girl? Any leads on her whereabouts?"

"We believe it's only a matter of time before Emma Campano is found."

Faith noted that the woman did not say whether the girl would be found dead or alive. She felt a sudden pang of envy for Amanda and her position. Like Faith's mother, Amanda had worked her way to the top. If Faith had to put up with a little misogyny now and then, she could not imagine what it was like for her mother's generation.

Amanda had started in the secretarial pool, just like Evelyn Mitchell, back when the women officers had to wear below-the-knee wool skirts as they fetched coffee and typed up requisitions. Amanda had clawed her way to the top, only to have a bunch of idiots with primordial ooze dripping out of their noses heckle her as she broke one of the biggest cases the city had seen since Wayne Williams was spotted tossing a body into the Chattahoochee.

And where was Faith after all those years of progress and women's lib? She was still in the equivalent of the secretarial pool, she supposed. To be fair, she had volunteered for the task of cataloguing all the evidence Will had taken from Warren Grier's tiny abode. That was before she'd seen the piles of boxes they had taken from the boardinghouse and stacked around her desk. There were at least six of them, all filled to the top with papers. Warren was a pack rat, the kind of man who couldn't throw out a receipt or a movie ticket. He still had pay stubs from the copy center that went back almost ten years.

Faith touched her jaw, bruised and tender from where Warren's elbow had caught her. She had found an ancient Lean Cuisine in the back of the freezer in the break room. The bag was hard as a rock, but it felt good on her mouth. She hated getting hit. Not that anyone particularly enjoyed it, but Faith had learned a long time ago that puking was her natural response to pain. Holding a bag of frozen spaghetti and meatballs was not helping matters. A small price to pay considering what Emma Campano had probably gone through.

Will was escorting Warren Grier to the holding cells. There was only one question he had yet to get answered: Where was Emma? Even if the girl was still alive, time was running out. Faith thought about the conditions in which she might be kept: locked up in a room somewhere or, worse, shoved in the trunk of a car. Today, the temperature had hit one hundred before noon. The heat was unrelenting, even at night. Did Emma have water? Did she have food? How long before her supplies ran out? Death by dehydration took a week to ten days, but that was without a head wound and the broiling heat. Were they going to spend the next two weeks counting off the hours until Emma Campano could no longer draw breath?

"Hey, Mitchell. How's it working with that rat?" Robertson asked. He was sitting at his desk, leaning so far back in his chair that it looked like it might break.

"Fine," she told him, wondering why no one was giving Will credit for letting the Atlanta police duckwalk Evan Bernard out of Westfield Academy in front of the rolling cameras.

Robertson wagged his finger at her. "Be careful around that fucker. Never trust a Statey."

"Gotcha. Thanks."

"Fucking GBI. Taking our case, making it look like they did all the heavy lifting." There were noises of agreement from around the room.

What selective memory they all seemed to have. Faith would've probably been joining in if she hadn't been there that first day, watching Will connect the dots that had been in front of them all along.

Robertson seemed to be waiting for her to say something else, maybe take a jibe at Will or make a nasty comment about the GBI, but Faith was at a loss. A week ago, the words would have rushed out like beer from a tap. Now, the well had run dry.

Faith turned back to the work in front of her, trying to block out the noises of the squad room. She didn't have the strength at the moment to start going through the boxes from Warren's apartment, so she concentrated on her computer screen. Will had used a digital camera to take pictures of Warren Grier's living quarters, and she scrolled through the series of shots, which showed basically the same small room from six different angles.

Every mundane detail of Warren's existence had been captured, from his toiletries to his sock drawer. There were boxes and boxes of papers under his bed, overflowing with school report cards and official-looking forms from his time in the foster care system. There was a close-up of a manual for a Mac laptop computer, a phone number scribbled on the front. Faith tilted her head, wondering why Will had turned the camera upside down.

She picked up her cell phone and dialed the number, sticking her finger in her other ear to block out the noise. The phone rang once, twice, then a local theater picked up and started giving movie times for the next shows. No news flash there. The six billion ticket stubs sitting in a box at Faith's feet revealed his passion for the silver screen.

Faith went back to the pictures, trying to divine a clue that might lead to the missing girl. All she saw was the sad one-room apartment where Warren had lived all of his adult life. There were no photographs of family, no calendars with dates marked for dinners with friends. From all appearances, he had no friends, no one he could turn to.

That was no kind of excuse, though. By his own admission, Will had grown up under similar circumstances. He had lived in state care until he was eighteen. He'd become a cop-and a damn good one. His social skills left something to be desired, but there was something underneath all his awkwardness that was oddly endearing.

Or maybe it was something her mother had told her ages ago: the easiest way for a man to get into your heart was if you imagined what he was like as a child.

Faith clicked through the photos again, trying to see if anything stood out. She ran through the usual suspects: a garage, a storage facility, an old family cabin in the woods. None of these seemed to be likely hiding places that Warren could use. He had no car, no extra belongings to store, no family to speak of.

Something had to break. There had to be a path back to Emma Campano that was not yet illuminated. Evan Bernard was going to make bail in less than twelve hours. He would be back on the street, free to do what he wanted until his trial date for having sex with Kayla Alexander. Unless they found something to link him to the crimes at the Campano house, he was looking at nothing more than a slap on the wrist, probably three years in jail, then he would get his life back.

And then what would he do? There were too many other ways for a man with an interest in girls to find victims. Church. SAT tutoring. Youth groups. Evan Bernard would probably move out of state. Maybe he would fail to register as a sex offender in his new town. He might live near a swimming pool or a high school or even a day care center. Warren Grier was not going to flip. Whatever hold Bernard had on the young man was unbreakable. The only thing Faith and Will had done was make Bernard's life from here on out more difficult. They had found absolutely nothing to keep him locked up for the rest of his miserable existence, and nothing that brought them closer to finding Emma Campano.

And then there was the fact that Faith knew how these guys tended to work. Bernard had raped the girl in Savannah, but that couldn't have been his first time, and Kayla would not be his last. Was there another girl out there that he was grooming for his sick fantasies? Was there another teenager who was going to have her life turned upside down by the sick bastard?

Faith put down the frozen bag, working her jaw to make sure no permanent damage had been done. She put her hand to her face and, unbidden, the memory of Victor stroking her cheek came back to her. He had called three times on her cell phone, each message progressively more apologetic. In the end, he had resorted to blatant flattery, which, being honest, had done a good deal to help crack her resolve. Faith wondered if there was ever going to be a time when she understood any of the men in her life.

Will Trent was certainly an enigma. The way he had spoken to Warren in the interrogation room had been so intimate that Faith found herself unable to look him in the eye. Had all of that really happened to Will? Was he the damaged product of the state adoption program, just like Warren Grier?

What Will had said about the cigarette burns had felt so real. Under the jacket and the vest and the dress shirt, was he hiding similar scars? Faith had been in central booking when they took the photographs of Warren's damaged torso. As a police officer, she had seen many cigarette burns on many victims as well as suspects. They were unsurprising at this point, the kind of thing you expected alongside the tattoos and the track marks. People did not generally choose a life of crime for the adventure. They were junkies and criminals for a reason, and the reason usually could be found in their early home life.

Was Will just a really good liar? When he talked about what it felt like to touch the burn marks, was he speaking from experience, or making a calculated guess? Three days had passed since she'd first met the man and she knew as much about him now as she had on that very first day. And she still did not understand how he worked the job. Warren had tried to kill him, but instead of sticking the younger man in with pedophiles and rapists, Will had walked him down to the cells to make sure he got one to himself. And then there was Evan Bernard. Any cop worth his salt knew that the best way to sweat out someone like that arrogant prick was to stick him in with the nastiest motherfuckers on the cell block, yet Will had basically given him a pass, sticking him in with the shemales.

Faith figured it was too late in the day to guess his strategy- and besides, it wasn't as if he ever consulted her on anything. He kept all the details of the case locked up in his head and maybe, if Faith was lucky, he let some of it out when the mood struck him. He worked like no other cop she had ever met. There wasn't even a murder board in his office-a chronological listing of what happened when, who did what, the suspects and the victims pictured side by side so that clues could be tracked, leads could be followed. There was no way he could keep it all in his head. Maybe he kept it all on his precious tape recorder. Either way, if something happened to Will, there would be no logical point for the next lead investigator to pick up on. It was such a blatant disregard for procedure that Faith was shocked Amanda allowed it to happen.

Analyzing Amanda and Will's relationship was just wasting time. Faith went back to the computer, her hand resting on the mouse. The screen flickered up, showing a photograph of Warren Grier's bookshelf. Faith hadn't put it together before, but she found it pretty odd that a man who could not read would have books in his home.

She squinted her eyes at the titles, then thought better of it, giving her eyes a break and clicking the button to zoom in on the photo. There were several graphic novels, which made sense, and what looked like manuals for various pieces of office equipment. The spines were all sectioned together by color rather than title. The books on the bottom shelf were taller, the words blurred from being out of the camera lens's center frame. Faith guessed from their size that they were art books-the expensive type that you put on your coffee table for show.

Faith zoomed in closer on the bottom shelf, but still could not make out any of the titles. Something was familiar about the thick gray spines of three of the books. She put her chin in her hand, wincing at the pain from her bruised jaw. Why did the spines look so familiar?

She opened one of the boxes from Warren's apartment, looking to see if any of the books had been packed. They all seemed to contain papers and receipts from over the last ten years. Faith skimmed through the stacks, wondering why in the hell Will had taken all of this crap from the scene. Was it really necessary for them to know that Warren had paid a hundred ten dollars to Vision Quest for an eye exam six years ago?

More importantly, why would Will waste Faith's time asking her to go through stuff that was basically trash? She felt her irritation building as she skimmed page after page of useless documentation. Faith could understand why Warren would keep all of this-he would have no way of knowing whether or not it would be important one day, but why would Will want it catalogued into evidence? He didn't strike her as a needle-in-a-haystack kind of person, and with Bernard and Warren behind bars, there were certainly better uses to make of her time.

Slowly, Faith sat up in her chair, holding the dated bill in her hands but not really looking at it. Her mind flashed on different scenes from the last few days: Will reaching for the directory at the dorm even though the sign clearly said it was broken. The way she had found him at the school yesterday morning, his head bent over the newspaper as he touched his finger to each word on the page. Even at Evan Bernard's house today, he had thumbed through every page of the yearbooks rather than simply turning to the index and looking up the man's name, as Faith had done when she'd found the photograph of Mary Clark.

Two days ago, after Evan Bernard's insightful diagnosis that the abductor was functionally illiterate, Faith had had but one question: How can someone get through school without learning how to read and write?

"It happens," Will had told her. He had sounded so certain. Was that because it had happened to him?

Faith shook her head, though she was only arguing with herself. It didn't make sense. You had to have an advanced degree to get into the GBI. They didn't let just anybody in. Barring that, every government agency functioned on mounds and mounds of paperwork. There were reports to fill out, requisitions to be filed, casebooks to be submitted. Had Faith ever seen Will fill out anything? She thought about his computer setup, the fact that he had a microphone. Why would he need a microphone for his computer? Did he dictate his reports?

Faith rubbed her fingers into her eyes, wondering if lack of sleep was making her see things that weren't there. This simply was not possible. She had worked with the man almost every hour of the day since this whole thing started. Faith was not so stupid that she missed something that glaringly obvious. For his part, Will was too smart to be bad at anything so basic.

She looked back at her computer screen, concentrating on the books Warren had stacked along the bottom shelf. Questions about Will still pulled at her thoughts. Could he read the titles? Could he even read the threatening notes that had been slid under Adam Humphrey's door? What else had he missed?

Faith blinked, finally realizing why the three books on the bottom shelf looked so familiar. Here she had been questioning Will's abilities when an important piece of evidence practically glowed right in front of her.

She pulled out her spiral-bound notebook, looking for the phone number she had scribbled down at the school this morning. Tim Clark answered the phone on the third ring.

"Is Mary there?"

Again, he seemed reluctant to let his wife speak to the police. "She's taking a nap."

She was probably exactly where Faith had left her, staring into the backyard, wondering how she was going to cope with her memories. "I need to speak to her. It's very important."

He sighed, letting her know he wasn't happy. Minutes later, Mary came onto the line. Faith felt bad for thinking her husband was lying. The woman sounded as if she'd just been woken from a very deep sleep.

"I'm sorry for disturbing you."

"Doesn't matter," the woman said, her words slurring. Faith didn't feel so bad when she realized Mary Clark had obviously been drinking.

"I know you don't remember the name of the girl Evan was accused of raping back at Crim," Faith began. "But remember you said he had an alibi?"

"What?"

"Back at Crim," Faith repeated, wanting to reach through the phone and shake her. "Remember you said that Evan left the school because of a rape allegation?"

"They couldn't prove anything." Mary gave a harsh laugh. "He always gets away with it."

"Right," Faith coaxed, staring at her computer screen, the familiar gray spines of the Alonzo Crim High School yearbooks on Warren Grier's bookshelf. "But that time, you said he got away with it because there was a student who served as an alibi."

"Yeah," Mary conceded. "Warren Grier." She almost spit out the words. "He said they were together after school for some tutoring or something."

Faith had to be sure. "Mary, are you telling me that Warren Grier gave Evan Bernard an alibi for a crime thirteen years ago?"

"Yeah," she repeated. "Pathetic, right? That little retard was even farther up Evan's ass than I was."