Fallen

CHAPTER SIX

SARA LINTON WAS NO STRANGER TO SELF-LOATHING. SHE’D felt ashamed when her father saw her steal a candy bar from the honor box at church. She’d felt humiliated when she caught her husband cheating on her. She’d felt guilty when she lied to her sister about liking her brother-in-law. She’d felt embarrassed when her mother pointed out that she was too tall to wear capri pants. What she’d never felt like was trashy, and the knowledge that she was no better than a reality TV star cut her to the core of her being.

Even now, hours later, Sara’s face still burned at the thought of her confrontation with Angie Trent. There was only one other time in her life that she could recall a woman talking to her the way Angie had. Jeffrey’s mother was a mean drunk, and Sara had caught her on a very bad night. The only difference in this instance was that Angie had absolutely every right to label Sara a whore.

Jezebel, Sara’s mother would’ve said.

Not that Sara was going to tell her mother about any of this.

She muted the television, the sound grating on her nerves. She’d tried reading. She’d tried cleaning up her apartment. She’d clipped the dogs’ toenails. She’d washed dishes and folded clothes that were so wrinkled from being piled on her couch for so long that she’d had to iron them before they would fit in the drawers.

Twice, she’d headed toward the elevator to take Will’s car back to his house. Twice she’d turned back around. The problem was his keys. She couldn’t leave them in the car and she sure as hell wasn’t going to knock on the front door and hand them to Angie. Leaving them in his mailbox was not an option. Will’s neighborhood wasn’t bad, but he lived in the middle of a major metropolitan city. The car would be gone in the time it took Sara to walk back home.

So she just kept assigning herself busywork, all the while dreading Will’s arrival like a root canal. What would she say to him when he finally came to get his car? Words failed, though Sara had silently rehearsed plenty of speeches about honor and morality. The voice in her head had taken on the cadence of a Baptist preacher. This was all so sordid. It wasn’t right. Sara was not going to be some tawdry other woman. She wasn’t going to steal someone’s husband, even if he was ripe for the taking. Nor was she going to engage in a catfight with Angie Trent. Most of all, she wasn’t going to step into the middle of their incredibly dysfunctional relationship.

What kind of monster bragged about her husband trying to kill himself? It made Sara’s stomach turn. And then there was the larger issue: to what depths had Will sunk where slicing a razor up his arm seemed like the only solution? How obsessed was he with Angie that he would do such a terrible thing? And how sick was Angie that she’d held him while he did it?

These questions were best handled by a psychiatrist. Will’s childhood obviously had not been a walk in the park. That fact alone could cause some damage. His dyslexia was an issue, but it didn’t seem to stop his life. He had his quirks, but they were endearing, not off-putting. Had he worked through his suicidal tendencies or was he just good at hiding them? If he was past that point in his life, why was he still with that horrible woman?

And since Sara had decided nothing was going to happen between them, why was she still wasting her time thinking about these things?

He wasn’t even her type. Will was nothing like Jeffrey. There was none of her husband’s staggering self-confidence on display. Despite his height, Will wasn’t a physically intimidating man. Jeffrey had been a football player. He knew how to lead a team. Will was a loner, content to blend into the background and do his job under the shadow of Amanda’s thumb. He didn’t want glory or recognition. Not that Jeffrey had been an attention seeker, but he was incredibly secure in who he was and what he wanted. Women had swooned in his presence. He knew how to do just about everything the right way, which was one of the many reasons Sara had thrown logic to the wind and married him. Twice.

Maybe she wasn’t really interested in Will Trent at all. Maybe Angie Trent was partly right. Sara had liked being married to a cop, but not for the kinky reasons Angie had implied. The black-and-white nature of law enforcement appealed to Sara on a deep level. Her parents had raised her to help people, and you couldn’t get much more helpful than being a police officer. There was also a part of her brain that was drawn to the puzzle-solving aspects of a criminal investigation. She had loved talking to Jeffrey about his cases. Working in the morgue as the county coroner, finding clues, giving him information that she knew would help him with his job, had made her feel useful.

Sara groaned. As if being a doctor wasn’t a useful thing. Maybe Angie Trent was right about the perversion. Next, Sara would start trying to imagine Will in a uniform.

She shifted her two greyhounds off her lap so that she could stand. Billy yawned. Bob rolled onto his back to get more comfortable. She glanced around her apartment. An antsiness took over. She felt overwhelmed by the desire to change something—anything—so that she felt more in control of her life.

She started with the couches, siding them at an angle from the television while the dogs looked down at the floor passing underneath them. The coffee table was too big for the new arrangement, so she shifted everything again, only to find that that didn’t work, either. By the time she finished rolling up the rug and muscling everything back into its original place, she was sweating.

There was dust on the top of the picture frame over the console table. Sara got the furniture polish out and started dusting again. There was a lot of space to cover. The building she lived in was a converted milk-processing factory. Red brick walls supported twenty-foot ceilings. All the mechanical workings were exposed. The interior doors were distressed wood with barn door hardware. It was the sort of industrial loft you expected to find in New York City, though Sara had paid considerably less than the ten million dollars such a place would fetch in Manhattan.

No one thought the space suited her, which was what had drawn Sara to the apartment in the first place. When she’d first moved to Atlanta, she’d wanted something completely different from her homey bungalow back home. She was thinking lately that she’d gone overboard. The open plan felt almost cavernous. The kitchen, with its stainless steel everything and black granite tops, had been very expensive and very useless to someone like Sara, who had been known to burn soup. All the furniture was too modern. The dining room table, carved from a single piece of wood and large enough to seat twelve, was a ridiculous luxury considering she only used it to sort mail and hold the pizza box while she paid the delivery guy.

Sara put away the furniture polish. Dust wasn’t the problem. She should move. She should find a small house in one of the more settled Atlanta neighborhoods and get rid of the low-lying leather couches and glass coffee tables. She should have fluffy couches and wide chairs you could snuggle into for reading. She should have a kitchen with a farmhouse sink and a cheery view to the backyard through the wide-open windows.

She should live somewhere like Will’s house.

The television caught her eye. The logo for the evening news scrolled onto the screen. A serious-looking reporter stood in front of the Georgia Diagnostic and Classification Prison. Most insiders referred to it as the D&C, fully mindful of the play on words for Georgia’s death row. Sara had seen the story of the two murdered men earlier and thought then what she thought now: here was yet another reason not to be involved with Will Trent.

He was working on Evelyn Mitchell’s case. He had probably been nowhere near that prison today, but the minute Sara saw the story about a murdered officer, her heart had jumped into her throat. Even after they’d given the man’s name as well as that of the dead inmate, her heart would not calm. Thanks to Jeffrey, Sara knew how it felt when the phone unexpectedly rang in the middle of the night. She remembered how every news story, every snippet of gossip, caused something inside of her to clench in fear that he would be going out on another case, putting his life in danger. It was a form of post-traumatic stress disorder. Sara hadn’t realized until her husband was gone that she’d been living in dread for all those years.

The intercom buzzed. Billy gave a halfhearted growl, but neither dog got off the couch. Sara pressed the speaker button. “Yes?”

Will said, “Hi, I’m sorry I—”

Sara buzzed him in. She grabbed his keys off the counter and propped open the front door. She wouldn’t invite him in. She wouldn’t let him apologize for what Angie had said, because Angie Trent had every right to speak her mind, and what’s more, she’d made some very good points. Sara would just tell Will that it was nice knowing him and good luck working things out with his wife.

If he ever got here. The elevator was taking its sweet time. She watched the digital readout show the car moving from the fourth floor down to the lobby. It took another forever for the numbers to start ascending. She whispered them aloud, “Three, four, five,” and then finally the bell dinged for six.

The doors slid back. Will peered out behind a pyramid of two cardboard file boxes, a white Styrofoam carton, and a Krispy Kreme doughnut bag. The greyhounds, who only seemed to notice Sara around suppertime, ran out into the hall to greet him.

Sara mumbled a curse.

“Sorry I’m so late.” He turned his body so that Bob wouldn’t knock him over.

Sara grabbed both dogs by their collars, holding the door open with her foot so that Will could come in. He slid the boxes onto her dining room table and immediately started petting the dogs. They licked him like a long-lost friend, their tails wagging, nails scratching against the wood floor. Sara’s resolve, which had been so strong only seconds before, started to crack.

Will looked up. “Were you in bed?”

She had dressed appropriately for her mood in an old pair of sweat pants and a Grant County Rebels football jersey. Her hair was pulled back so tightly that she could feel it tugging the skin on her neck. “Here are your keys.”

“Thanks.” Will brushed the dog hair off his chest. He was still wearing the same black T-shirt from that afternoon. “Whoa.” He pulled back Bob, who was making a play for the Krispy Kremes.

“Is that blood?” There was a dark, dried stain on the right-hand sleeve of his shirt. Instinctively, Sara reached for his arm.

Will took a step back. “It’s nothing.” He pulled down the cuff. “There was an incident at the prison today.”

Sara got that familiar, tight feeling in her chest. “You were there.”

“I couldn’t do anything to help him. Maybe you …” His words trailed off. “The staff doctor said it was a mortal wound. There was a lot of blood.” He clamped his hand around his wrist. “I should’ve changed shirts when I got home, but I’ve got a lot of work to do, and my house is kind of upside down right now.”

He had been home. Without reason, Sara had let herself think for just a moment that he hadn’t seen his wife. “We should talk about what happened.”

“Uh …” He seemed to purposefully miss her point. “Not much to say. He’s dead. He wasn’t a particularly good guy, but I’m sure it’ll be hard on his family.”

Sara stared at him. There was no guile on his face. Maybe Angie hadn’t told Will about the confrontation. Or maybe she had, and Will was doing his best to ignore it. Either way, he was hiding something. But suddenly, after spending the last few hours working herself into a frenzy, Sara didn’t care. She didn’t want to talk about it. She didn’t want to analyze it. The only thing she was certain of was that she did not want him to leave.

She asked, “What’s in the boxes?”

He seemed to note her shift in attitude, but chose not to acknowledge it. “Case files from an old investigation. It might have something to do with Evelyn’s disappearance.”

“Not kidnapping?”

His grin indicated he’d been caught. “I just have to know everything in these files by five tomorrow morning.”

“Do you need help?”

“Nope.” He turned to lift the boxes. “Thanks for getting Betty home for me.”

“Being dyslexic is not a character flaw.”

Will left the boxes on the table and turned around. He didn’t respond immediately. He just looked at her in a way that made Sara wish that she had bothered to bathe. Finally, he said, “I think I liked it better when you were mad at me.”

Sara didn’t respond.

“It’s Angie, right? That’s what you’re upset about?”

These shifting levels of subterfuge were new to her. “It seems like we were ignoring that.”

“Would you like to continue along that path?”

Sara shrugged. She didn’t know what she wanted. The right thing to do would be to tell him that their innocent flirtation was over. She should open the door and make him leave. She should call Dr. Dale tomorrow morning and ask him out on another date. She should forget about Will and let time erase him from her memory.

But it wasn’t her memory that was the problem. It was that tightness in her chest when she thought about him being in danger. It was that feeling of relief when he walked through the door. It was the happiness she felt just from being near him.

He said, “Angie and I haven’t been together—together—in over a year.” Will paused, as if to let that sink in. “Not since I met you.”

All Sara could say was, “Oh.”

“And then when her mother died a few months ago, I saw her for maybe two hours, and she was gone. She didn’t even go to the funeral.” He paused again; this was obviously difficult for him. “It’s hard to explain our relationship. Not without making myself look pitiful and stupid.”

“You don’t owe me an explanation.”

He put his hands in his pockets and leaned against the table. The overhead light caught the jagged scar above his mouth. The skin was pink, a fine line tracing the ridge between his upper lip and nose. Sara couldn’t begin to calculate the amount of time she’d wasted wondering how the scar would feel against her own mouth.

Too much time.

Will cleared his throat. He looked down at the floor, then back up at her. “You know where I grew up. How I grew up.”

She nodded. The Atlanta Children’s Home had closed many years ago, but the abandoned building was less than five miles from where they stood.

“Kids went away a lot. They were trying to get more of us into foster care. I guess it’s cheaper that way.” He shrugged, as if this was to be expected. “The older ones didn’t usually work out. They lasted maybe a few weeks, sometimes only a couple of days. They came back different. I guess you can imagine why.”

Sara shook her head. She didn’t want to.

“There wasn’t exactly a long line of people who wanted to foster an eight-year-old boy who couldn’t pass the third grade. But Angie’s a girl, and pretty, and smart, so she got sent out a lot.” Again, he shrugged. “I guess I got used to waiting for her to come back, and I guess I got used to not asking what happened while she was gone.” He pushed away from the table and picked up the boxes. “So, that’s it. Pitiful and stupid.”

“No. Will—”

He stopped in front of the door, the boxes held in front of him like a suit of armor. “Amanda wanted me to ask you if you know anyone at the Fulton ME’s office.”

Sara’s brain took its time changing gears. “Probably. I did some of my training there when I started.”

He shifted his grip. “This is from Amanda, not me. She wants you to make some calls. You don’t have to, but—”

“What does she want to know?”

“Anything that comes up on the autopsies. They’re not going to share with us. They want to keep this case.”

He was turned toward the door, waiting. She looked at the back of his neck, the fine hairs at the nape. “All right.”

“You’ve got Amanda’s number. Just call her if anything comes up. Or call her if it doesn’t. She’s impatient.” He stood waiting for her to open the door.

Sara had spent most of the day wanting him out of her life, but now that he was leaving, she couldn’t take it. “Amanda was wrong.”

He turned back around to face her.

“What she said today. Amanda was wrong.”

He feigned shock. “I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone say those words out loud before.”

“Almeja. The dying man’s last words.” She explained, “The literal translation is right—‘clams’—but it’s not slang for ‘money.’ At least not the way I’ve heard it used.”

“What’s it slang for?”

She hated the word, but she said it anyway. “ ‘Cunt.’ ”

His brow furrowed. “How do you know that?”

“I work in a large public hospital. I don’t think a week’s gone by since I started without someone calling me some variation of that word.”

Will dropped the boxes back on the table. “Who called you that?”

She shook her head. He looked ready to take on her entire patient roster. “The point is, the guy was calling Faith that name. He wasn’t talking about money.”

Will crossed his arms. He was obviously riled. “Ricardo,” he supplied. “The guy in the backyard who shot at those little girls—his name was Ricardo.” Sara held his gaze. Will kept talking. “Hironobu Kwon was the dead guy in the laundry room. We don’t know anything about the older Asian, except that he had a fondness for Hawaiian shirts and spoke with a southside southern drawl. And then there’s someone else who got injured, probably in a knife fight with Evelyn. You’ll probably see the notice at the hospital when you go back to work. Blood type B-negative, possibly Hispanic, stab wound to the gut, possibly a wound on his hand.”

“That’s quite a cast of characters.”

“Trust me, it’s not easy keeping up with them, and I’m not even sure any of them are the real reason all of this is happening.”

“What do you mean?”

“This feels personal, like there’s something else at play. You don’t wait around four years to rob somebody. It’s got to be about something more than money.”

“They say it’s the root of all evil for a reason.” Sara’s husband had always loved money motivations. In her experience, he tended to be right. “This injured guy—the one with the gut wound—is he in a gang?” Will nodded.

“They generally have their own doctors. They’re not bad—I’ve seen some of their handiwork at the ER. But a belly wound is pretty sophisticated to treat. They might need blood, and B-negative is hard to come by. They’d also need a sterile operating environment, medicines that you can’t just grab at your local drugstore. They’d only be at a hospital pharmacy.”

“Can you give me a list? I can have it added to the alert.”

“Of course.” She went to the kitchen to find a pad and paper.

He stayed by the dining room table. “How long could someone live with a stab wound in their belly? It bled a lot at the scene.”

“It depends. Hours, maybe days. Triage can buy some time, but anything close to a week would be a miracle.”

“You mind if I eat my dinner while you do that?” He opened the Styrofoam box. She saw two foot-long hot dogs soaked in chili. He sniffed, then frowned. “I guess the guy at the gas station was going to throw them out for a reason.” Still, he picked up one of the hot dogs.

“Don’t you dare.”

“It’s probably fine.”

“Sit down.” She took out a frying pan from the cabinet and found a carton of eggs in the refrigerator. Will sat at the bar across from the stainless steel cooktop. The Styrofoam box was on the counter beside him. Bob poked it with his nose, then backed away.

She asked, “Was that really your dinner—two hot dogs and a Krispy Kreme doughnut?”

“Four doughnuts.”

“What does your cholesterol look like?”

“I guess it’s white like what they show in the commercials.”

“Very funny.” She wrapped the Styrofoam container in aluminum foil and threw it into the trash. “Why do you think Faith’s mother wasn’t kidnapped?”

“I didn’t actually say that. I just think a lot of things aren’t adding up.” He watched Sara break eggs into a bowl. “I don’t think she left willingly. She wouldn’t do that to her family. But I think she might know her kidnappers. Like, they had a previous working relationship.”

“How?”

He stood and walked to the dining room table, where he took out a handful of yellow folders from one of the boxes. He grabbed the bag of doughnuts before sitting back down at the kitchen bar. “Boyd Spivey,” he said, opening the top file and showing her a mugshot.

Sara recognized the face and name from the news. “That’s the man who was killed at the prison today.”

Will nodded, opening the next file. “Ben Humphrey.”

“Another cop?”

“Yep.” He opened another file. There was a yellow star stickered on the inside. “This is Adam Hopkins. He was Humphrey’s partner.” Another file, this one with a purple star. “This is Chuck Finn, Spivey’s partner, and this guy—” He fumbled open the last file. Green star. “Is Demarcus Alexander.” He’d forgotten one. Will went back to the table and found another yellow folder. This one had a black star, which seemed prophetic when he said, “Lloyd Crittenden. Died from a drug overdose three years ago.”

“All cops?”

Will nodded as he shoved half a doughnut into his mouth.

Sara poured the eggs into the pan. “What am I missing?”

“Their boss was Evelyn Mitchell.”

Sara almost spilled the eggs. “Faith’s mother?” She went back to the photographs, studying the men’s faces. They all had that same arrogant tilt to their chins, as if their present trouble was just a blip on the radar. She skimmed Spivey’s arrest report, trying to decipher the typos. “Theft during the commission of a felony.” She flipped back the page and read the details. “Spivey issued a standing order to his team that they should remove ten percent off the top of every drug bust involving cash money exceeding two thousand dollars.”

“It added up.”

“To how much?”

“From what accounting could estimate, over the course of twelve years, they stole around six million dollars.”

She gave a low whistle.

“That’s a little less than a million each, tax free. Or at least it was. I’m sure Uncle Sam caught up with them their first day in prison.”

Even stolen money was taxable income. Most inmates got their notice from the IRS within the first week of their prison sentence.

Sara checked the front page of the arrest report, stopping on a familiar name. “You were the investigating officer.”

“It’s not my favorite part of the job.” He shoved the rest of the doughnut into his mouth.

Sara looked down at the file, pretending to read on. The typos hadn’t been much of a red flag. Every police report she’d ever read was riddled with grammar and spelling mistakes. Like most dyslexics, Will treated spell check as sacrosanct. He’d substituted words that made no contextual sense, then signed his name at the bottom. Sara studied his signature. It was little more than a squiggle running at an angle from the black line.

Will was watching her closely. She realized she needed to ask a question. “Who instigated the investigation?”

“An anonymous tip came into the GBI.”

“Why wasn’t Evelyn charged?”

“The prosecutor refused to bring a case. She was allowed to retire with her full pension. They called it early retirement, but she was way past her thirty years. She wasn’t working for the money. At least not the money she was getting from the city.”

Sara used a spatula to stir the eggs. Will ate another doughnut in two bites. The powdered sugar sprinkled onto the black granite countertop.

She said, “Can I ask you something?”

“Sure.”

“How does Faith work with you after you investigated her mother?”

“She thinks I’m wrong.” Bob was back. He propped his nose on the counter and Will started petting his head. “I know that she cleared it with her mother, but we’ve never really talked about it beyond that.”

Sara would not have believed anyone else telling her the same thing, but she could easily imagine how this worked. Faith wasn’t one to sit around talking about her feelings, and Will was just so damn decent that it was hard to assign him vengeful ulterior motives. “What’s Evelyn like?”

“She’s old school.”

“Like Amanda?”

“Not exactly.” He took another doughnut out of the bag. “I mean, she’s tough, but she’s not as intense.”

Sara understood what he meant. That generation didn’t have a lot of avenues for proving themselves to their male counterparts. Amanda had taken the ball-breaking route with obvious relish.

“They came up together,” Will told her. “They went to the academy together, then worked joint task forces through APD and the GBI. They’re still good friends. I think Amanda dated Evelyn’s brother, or her brother-in-law.”

Sara couldn’t think of a more obvious conflict of interest. “And Amanda was your senior officer when you were investigating Evelyn?”

“Yep.” He inhaled another doughnut.

“Did you know this at the time?”

He shook his head, keeping the doughnut in his cheek like a squirrel with a nut so that he could ask, “You know the stove isn’t on, right?”

“Crap.” That explained why the eggs were still liquid. She clicked the dial until the flame whooshed up.

He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “I like to let them sit for a while, too. Gives them a woodsy character.”

“That’s E. coli.” She checked the toaster, wondering why it hadn’t popped up. Probably because there was nothing in there. Will smiled as she got a loaf of bread out of the cabinet. She said, “I’m not much of a cook.”

“Do you want me to take over?”

“I want you to tell me about Evelyn.”

He leaned back in the chair. “I liked her when I met her. I know that seems strange under the circumstances. I guess I was supposed to hate her, but you can’t look at it that way. This is government work. Sometimes investigations get started for the wrong reason, and you find yourself sitting opposite somebody who’s been jammed up for saying the wrong thing or ticking off the wrong politician.” He brushed the powdered sugar into a pile as he talked. “Evelyn was very polite. Respectful. Her record was spotless until then. She treated me like I was just doing my job, not like I was a pedophile, which is what you normally get.”

“Maybe she knew she’d never be prosecuted.”

“I think she was worried about it, but her primary concern was her daughter. She worked really hard to keep Faith out of it. I never even met her until Amanda paired us up.”

“She’s a good mother at least.”

“She’s a classy lady. But she’s also smart, strong, tough. I wouldn’t bet against her on this.”

Sara had forgotten the eggs. She used the spatula to scrape them off the bottom of the pan.

Will told her, “Evelyn was duct-taped to a chair while they searched her house. I found an arrowhead drawn underneath the seat. She used her own blood to do it.”

“Where was it pointing?”

“Into the room. At the couch. Into the backyard.” He shrugged. “Who knows? We didn’t find anything.”

Sara thought about it. “Just the head of an arrow? That’s all?”

He fanned out the powdered sugar again and drew the shape.

Sara studied the symbol, silently debating how to proceed. She finally decided the truth was her only option. “It looks like a V to me. The letter V.”

He was quiet in a way that changed the air in the room. She thought he was going to change the subject, or make a joke, but he told her, “It wasn’t perfect. It was smudged at the top.”

“Like this?” She drew another line. “Like the letter A?”

He stared at the figure. “I guess Amanda wasn’t pretending when she said she didn’t know what I was talking about.”

“She saw it, too?”

He brushed the powdered sugar into his hand and dropped it into the bag with the last doughnut. “Yep.”

She put the plate of eggs in front of him. The toaster popped up. The bread was almost black. “Oh, no,” she mumbled. “I’m so sorry. You don’t have to eat this. Do you want me to get the hot dogs out of the trash?”

He took the burned toast from her and dropped it on the plate. It made a sound like a brick scraping concrete. “Some butter would be nice.”

She had fake butter. Will dipped a knifeful out of the tub and coated the bread until it was soggy enough to fold in his hand. The eggs were closer to taupe than yellow, but he started in on them anyway.

Sara told him, “The name ‘Amanda’ starts with an A. Almeja starts with an A. And now Evelyn might’ve drawn an A on the bottom of her chair.”

He put down the fork. His plate was clean.

She continued, “Almeja sort of sounds like ‘Amanda.’ The same number of syllables. The same first and last letter.” He would’ve missed the alliterative. Most dyslexics couldn’t rhyme two words if you put a gun to their heads.

He edged his plate away. “Amanda isn’t telling me everything. She’s not even admitting that the corruption case has anything to do with Evelyn’s situation.”

“But she told you to go over all your case files.”

“Either she needs the information or she’s trying to keep me busy. She knows this will take me all night.”

“Not if I help you.”

He picked up his plate and walked over to the sink. “Do you want me to wash this before I go?”

“I want you to tell me about the crime scene.”

He rinsed his plate, then started to wash his hands.

“That’s the cold,” Sara said, and then because it was pointless to tell him that because she was left-handed, she’d switched the hot water valve to the right-hand side, she leaned in and adjusted the temperature for him.

Will opened his hand so that she could squirt some soap onto his palm. “Why do you smell like lemon furniture polish?”

“Why did you let me believe Betty belongs to your wife?”

He lathered the soap in his hands. “There are some mysteries that will never be solved.”

She smiled. “Tell me about the crime scene.”

Will told her what they had found: the upturned chairs and broken baby toys. He segued into Mrs. Levy and Evelyn’s gentleman caller, Mittal’s theory about the blood trail, and Will’s own divergent theory about the same. By the time he got to the part where they had found the gentleman in the trunk, Sara had managed to get him to sit down at the dining room table.

She asked, “Do you think Boyd Spivey was killed because he talked to Amanda?”

“It’s possible, but not likely.” He explained, “Think about the timing. Amanda called the warden two hours before we got to the prison. The prison doc said a serrated knife was used. That’s not something you can make out of your toothbrush. The camera was disabled the day before, which indicates this was planned at least twenty-four hours in advance.”

“So, it was coordinated. Evelyn is taken. Boyd is killed a few hours later. Are the other men from her team safe?”

“That’s a very good question.” He pulled his cell phone out of his pocket. “Do you mind if I make some calls?”

“Of course not.” She got up from the table to give him some privacy. The frying pan was still warm, so she ran cold water over it. The eggs were seared to the metal. She picked at the slime with her thumbnail before giving up and sticking it on the top rack of the dishwasher.

Sara opened Boyd Spivey’s file again. Will had used a pink star to identify him, perhaps as a joke. The man looked the part of a corrupt cop. His moon-shaped face indicated steroid use. His pupils were barely discernible in his beady eyes. His height and weight were closer to a linebacker’s.

She skimmed the details of Spivey’s arrest while listening with half an ear as Will talked with someone at Valdosta State Prison. They discussed whether or not to move Ben Humphrey and Adam Hopkins into solitary confinement, and agreed that it would be best just to step up their monitoring.

Will’s next call was more complicated. Sara assumed he was talking to someone at GBI headquarters about locating the remaining two men through their parole officers.

She opened Spivey’s file and found his personnel record behind the arrest report. Sara read through the details of the man’s professional life. Spivey had joined the academy fresh out of high school. He’d gone to night school at Georgia State in order to earn a BA in criminal science. He had three children and a wife who worked as a secretary at the Dutch consulate on the outskirts of the city.

Spivey’s promotion onto Evelyn’s team was a coup. The drug squad was one of the most elite in the country. They had all the best weapons and facilities, and enough high-profile bad guys in the Atlanta area to win them plenty of commendations and press time, which Spivey in particular seemed to enjoy. Will had collected newspaper clippings on the team’s most noteworthy busts. Spivey was front and center of every news story, even though Evelyn was the leader of the team. One photo showed a clean-shaven Spivey with enough ribbons on his chest to decorate a girl’s bicycle.

And it still had not been enough.

“Hey.”

Sara looked up from her reading. Will had finished his phone calls.

“Sorry about that. I wanted to make sure they were safe.”

“It’s fine.” Sara wasn’t going to pretend she hadn’t been listening. “You didn’t call Amanda.”

“No, I didn’t.”

“Give me some more files to read.”

“You really don’t have to do this.”

“I want to.” Sara was no longer being kind or trying to spend more time in his company. She wanted to know what had made a man like Boyd Spivey turn into such a lowlife.

Will stared at her long enough to make her think he was going to say no. Then he opened one of the boxes. There was an ancient Walkman nestled in a pile of audio cassette tapes. None of them had labels, unless you counted the colored, star-shaped stickers. Will explained, “These are recordings of all the interviews I had with each suspect. None of them said much in the beginning, but they all ended up making deals to cut time off their sentences.”

“They ratted each other out?”

“Not a chance. They had some information on a couple of local councilmen to trade. It gave them some leverage with the prosecutor.”

Sara couldn’t pretend to be shocked over politicians with drug problems. “How much leverage?”

“Enough to get them talking, not enough to make them give up the big fish.” He opened the next box and started pulling out files. As with everything else, they were color-coded. He handed her the green ones first. “Witness testimony for the prosecution.” He stacked the red ones, which were fewer in number. “Witnesses for the defense.” He took out the blue ones. “High-dollar busts—anything where more than two thousand dollars was seized.”

Sara went right to work, carefully reading the next personnel file. Ben Humphrey had been the same kind of cop as Boyd Spivey: solidly built, good at his job, driven to get press, and, in the end, absolutely corrupt. The same proved to be true of Adam Hopkins and Demarcus Alexander, both of whom were praised for their bravery under fire during a bank robbery, both of whom paid cash for their vacation homes in Florida. Lloyd Crittenden had earned his shield after flipping his cruiser six times during the pursuit of a man who’d shot up a seedy bar with a sawed-off shotgun. He also had a mouth on him. There were two write-ups for insubordination, but Evelyn’s yearly reviews had been nothing if not glowing.

The only outlier was Chuck Finn, who seemed more cerebral than his colleagues. Finn had been in the process of earning his PhD in Italian renaissance art when he was busted. His lifestyle wasn’t as lavish as the others’. He’d used his ill-gotten gains to educate himself and travel the world. He must’ve complemented the team in more subtle ways. Evelyn Mitchell had obviously handpicked each man for a reason. Some were leaders. Some, like Chuck Finn, were obviously followers. They all fit the same general profile: overachievers with a reputation in the department for doing whatever had to be done. Three were white. Two were black. One was part Cherokee Indian. All of them had given up everything for cold, hard cash.

Will flipped over the tape in the Walkman. He sat with his eyes closed, headphones tucked into his ears. She could hear the squeak of the wheels working in the tape player.

The next stack of folders detailed all of the high-dollar busts the team had made, and presumably skimmed from, over the years. Sara had thought these files would be the hardest to get through, but they all turned out to be fairly mundane. Such was the nature of the illegal drug trade that most of the men the team had arrested were either dead or incarcerated when Evelyn’s squad was busted. Only a few were still on the street, but they were obviously active. Sara recognized some of the names from the nightly news. Two looked promising for their own reasons. She set their files aside for Will.

Sara checked the time. It was well past midnight and she had an early shift in the morning. As if on cue, her mouth opened in such a wide yawn that her jaw popped. She glanced at Will to make sure he hadn’t seen. There was still a large stack of folders in front of her. She was only halfway through, but she couldn’t make herself stop if she wanted to. It was like trying to put together all the clues in a mystery novel. The good guys were just as corrupt as the villains. The villains seemed to take the graft as a cost of doing business. Both probably had a long list of justifications for their illegal actions.

She tackled the next pile of folders. The six men on Evelyn’s team had never gone to trial, but they must have been close to starting when the deals were made. The prosecution’s list of potential witnesses had been highly screened, but no more so than those representing the defendants. The names would be familiar to Will, but still, Sara carefully read through each file. After a solid hour of comparing statements, she let herself move on to the last file, which she’d held back as a reward for not giving up.

Evelyn Mitchell’s booking photo showed a trim woman with an unreadable expression on her face. She must have felt humiliated to be booked and processed after spending so much time on the other side of the table. Nothing about her expression gave that away. Her mouth was set in a tight line. Her eyes stared blankly ahead. Her hair was blonde, like Faith’s, with gray streaking through at the temples. Blue eyes, 138 pounds, five-nine—a little taller than her daughter.

Her career was the sort that garnered pioneer awards from the local Women’s Club, which Captain Mitchell had twice received. Her promotion to detective was preceded by a hostage negotiation that had resulted in the freeing of two children and the death of a serial child molester. Her lieutenant rank came almost ten years after passing the test with the highest grade yet recorded. Her captainship was the result of a gender-bias lawsuit filed with the EEOC.

Evelyn had worked her way up the hard way, paying her dues on the street. She had two degrees, one from Georgia Tech, both with honors. She was a mother, a grandmother, a widow. Her children were in what Sara thought of as service—one to her community, the other to his country. Her husband had worked a solidly respectable job as an insurance salesman. In many ways, she reminded Sara of her own mother. Cathy Linton wasn’t the sort of woman to carry a gun, but she was driven to do what she believed was right for herself and her family.

But she would’ve never taken a bribe. Cathy was painfully honest, the sort of person who would turn around and drive fifty miles back to a tourist trap in Florida because they had given her too much change. Maybe this explained why Faith could work with Will. If someone had told Sara that her mother had stolen almost a million dollars, she would’ve laughed in their face. It was the stuff of fairy tales. Faith didn’t just think he was wrong about her mother. She thought he was deluded.

Will changed out another tape.

Sara motioned for him to take off his headphones. “It doesn’t add up.”

“What doesn’t?”

“You said each team member netted just shy of a million dollars. You’ve accounted for sixty thousand, at best, in the out-of-state account that was opened in Bill Mitchell’s name. Evelyn doesn’t drive a Porsche. She doesn’t have a mistress. Faith and her brother weren’t in private schools, and the only vacations she took were to Jekyll Island with her grandson.”

“It adds up after today,” he reminded her. “Whoever took Evelyn wants that money.”

“I don’t buy it.”

Most cops defended their cases like they would defend their children. Will just asked, “Why?”

“Gut feeling. Instinct. I just don’t buy it.”

“Faith doesn’t know about the bank account.”

“I won’t tell her.”

He sat up, clasping his hands together. “I’ve been listening to my early interviews with Evelyn. She talks about her husband, mostly.”

“Bill, right? He was an insurance agent.”

“He died a few years before the case was brought against Evelyn.”

Sara braced herself for a widow question, but Will went in another direction.

“The year before Bill died, he was sued by the family of a policyholder for a claim denial. They said Bill filled out some paperwork incorrectly. A father of three had a rare kind of heart defect. The company denied treatment.”

This wasn’t a new story to Sara. “They said it was a pre-existing condition.”

“Only it wasn’t—at least not diagnosed. The family got a lawyer, but it was too late. The guy ended up dying because the wrong box was checked on a form. Three days later, his widow gets a letter in the mail from the insurance company saying that Bill Mitchell, the originating agent, made a mistake on the forms and her husband’s treatment was approved.”

“That’s awful.”

“Bill took it hard. He was a very careful man. His reputation was important to him, important to his work. He got an ulcer worrying about it.”

That wasn’t technically how ulcers worked, but she told him, “Go on.”

“He was eventually cleared. They found the original forms. The insurance company had screwed up, not Bill. Some data entry person had clicked the wrong box. No malfeasance, just incompetence.” Will waved this away. “Anyway, what Evelyn said was that Bill never got past it. It made her crazy because he wouldn’t let it go. They argued about it. She thought he was just feeling sorry for himself. She accused him of being paranoid. He said people at work treated him differently. A lot of people thought the company took the bullet and it was really Bill’s mistake.”

Sara was dubious. “An insurance company took the bullet?”

“People get crazy ideas,” Will said. “Anyway, Bill felt like it wiped out all the good he’d done over the years. Evelyn said that when the cancer came—Bill died of pancreatic cancer three months after his diagnosis—she thought part of the reason he couldn’t fight it was that he had this guilt hanging over his head. And that she had never forgiven him for that, for not fighting the cancer. He just kind of accepted it and then waited to die.”

Pancreatic cancer was not easily vanquished. The chances for long-term survival were less than five percent. “Stress like that can certainly impair your immune system.”

“Evelyn was worried that the same thing was going to happen to her.”

“That she’d get cancer?”

“No. That the investigation would ruin her life, even if she was cleared. That it would hang over her head forever. She said that in all the years since her husband had died, she had never wanted him back more than she did that day so that she could tell him that she finally understood.”

Sara considered the weight of the statement. “That sounds like something an innocent person would say.”

“It does.”

“Does that mean you’re leaning away from your original conclusion?”

“It’s very kind of you to phrase your question so diplomatically.” He grinned. “I don’t know. My case was shut down before I could wrap it up to my satisfaction. Evelyn signed her papers and took her retirement. Amanda didn’t even tell me it was over. I heard it on the news one morning—decorated officer retiring from the force to spend more time with her family.”

“You think she got away with it.”

“I keep coming back to one thing: she was in charge of a team that stole a whole lot of money. Either she turned a blind eye or she’s not as good as she reads on paper.” Will picked at the plastic seam on one of the audiotapes. “And there’s still the bank account. It might not seem like much compared to millions, but sixty thousand is a chunk of change. And it’s in her husband’s name, not hers. Why not change it over now that he’s dead? Why still keep it a secret?”

“All good points.”

He was quiet for a moment, the only sound in the room his thumbnail picking at the plastic seam. “Faith didn’t call me when it happened. I didn’t have my cell, so it would’ve been pointless, but she didn’t call me.” He paused. “I thought maybe she didn’t trust me because it was her mother involved.”

“I doubt she was even thinking about that. You know how your brain just blanks out when something like that happens. Did you ask her about it?”

“She’s got a lot more on her mind right now than holding my hand.” He gave a self-deprecating chuckle. “Maybe I should write about it in my diary.” He started packing up the boxes. “Anyway, I’ll let you get to bed. Did you find anything I should know about?”

Sara pulled out the two files she’d set aside. “These guys might deserve a closer look. They were in the high-dollar busts. One of them was also on Spivey’s defense witness list. I flagged him because he has a history of kidnapping for leverage over rival gangs.”

Will opened the top file.

Sara supplied the name. “Ignatio Ortiz.”

Will groaned. “He’s in Phillips State Prison on a manslaughter attempt.”

“So, it won’t be hard to find him.”

“He runs Los Texicanos.”

Sara was familiar with the gang. She had treated her share of kids who were involved in the organization. Not many of them walked out of the ER in one piece.

Will said, “If Ortiz is wrapped up in this, he’ll never talk to us. If he’s not, then he’ll never talk to us. Whichever it is, driving to the prison would be three or four hours out of our day for nothing.”

“He was going to be called as a witness for Spivey’s defense.”

“Boyd had a surprising number of thugs willing to testify that he hadn’t touched their money. There was a whole roster of criminals willing to stand up for Evelyn’s team.”

“Did you get anything from Boyd at the prison?”

Will frowned. “Amanda interviewed him. They talked in some kind of code. One thing I picked up on was that Boyd said the Asians were trying to cut the Mexicans out of the supply side.”

“Los Texicanos,” Sara provided.

“Amanda told me their preferred method is slitting throats.”

Sara put her hand to her neck, trying not to shudder. “You think that Evelyn was still doing business with these drug dealers?”

He closed Ortiz’s file. “I can’t see how. She doesn’t have any juice without her badge. And I can’t picture her as a kingpin unless she’s some kind of sociopath. Granny-Nanny by day, drug lord by night.”

“You said Ortiz is in prison for attempted manslaughter. Who’d he try to kill?”

“His brother. He found him in bed with his wife.”

“Maybe this is the brother.” Sara opened the next file. “Hector Ortiz,” she told him. “He’s not a bad guy on paper, but he made the defense witness list. I pulled him because he has the same last name as Ignatio.”

Will unclipped the mugshot from the file to get a closer look. “Is your gut still telling you that Evelyn is innocent?”

Sara looked at her watch. She had to be at work in five hours. “My gut has turned in for the night. What is it?”

He held up Hector Ortiz’s photograph. The man was bald with a salt-and-pepper goatee. His shirt was rumpled. He held up his arm to show a tattoo to the camera: a green and red Texas star with a rattlesnake wrapped around it.

Will said, “Meet Evelyn’s gentleman friend.”