The Kept Woman

ONE

Will Trent was worried about his dog. Betty was getting her teeth cleaned, which sounded like a ridiculous waste of money for a pet, but when the vet had explained to Will all the terrible things that poor dental hygiene could do to an animal, he had been ready to sell his house in order to buy the little thing a few more precious years.

Apparently, he wasn’t the only idiot in Atlanta who was ensuring his pet had better health care than many Americans. He glanced at the line of people waiting to enter the Dutch Valley Animal Clinic. A recalcitrant Great Dane was bottlenecking the front door, while several cat owners gave each other knowing looks. Will turned back to the street. He wiped the sweat off his neck, unsure whether he was perspiring from the intense late August heat or from the sheer panic of not knowing whether or not he had made the right decision. He’d never had a dog before. He’d never been solely responsible for an animal’s well-being. He put his hand to his chest. He could still feel the memory of Betty’s heart jangling like a tambourine as he handed her over to the vet tech.

Should he go back inside and rescue her?

The sharp beep of a car horn startled him out of his apprehension. He saw a flash of red as Faith Mitchell drove past in her Mini. She made a wide U-turn, then pulled up alongside Will. He was reaching for the handle when she leaned over and pushed open the door.

‘Hurry,’ she said, her voice raised over the whine of the air conditioning, which was set to polar. ‘Amanda already sent two texts asking where the hell we are.’

Will hesitated before getting into the tiny car. Faith’s government-issue Suburban was in the shop. There was a baby’s car seat strapped into the back seat, which left approximately thirty inches of space up front into which he could wedge his six-feet-four-inch frame.

Faith’s phone chirped with a new text. ‘Amanda.’ She said the name like a curse, which was how most people said it. Deputy Director Amanda Wagner was their boss at the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. She was not known for her patience.

Will tossed his suit jacket into the back seat then folded himself into the car like a burrito. He tilted his head into the extra few inches afforded by the closed sunroof. The glovebox pressed into his shins. His knees almost touched his face. If they were in an accident, the coroner would have to scrape his nose off the inside of his skull.

‘Murder,’ Faith said, letting her foot off the brake before he’d even closed the door. ‘Male, fifty-eight years old.’

‘Nice,’ Will said, relishing the death of a fellow human being as only a law enforcement officer can. In his defense, both he and Faith had spent the last seven months pushing boulders up some very steep hills. She had been loaned out to a special task force investigating the Atlanta Public Schools cheating scandal, and he had been stuck in the particular hell of a high-visibility rape investigation.

Faith said, ‘Atlanta nine-one-one got the call around five this AM.’ She had an air of giddiness about her as she relayed the details. ‘An unidentified male caller said there was a dead body near those abandoned warehouses off Chattahoochee. Lots of blood. No murder weapon.’ She slowed for a red light. ‘They’re not releasing cause of death on the radio, so it must be pretty bad.’

Something inside the car started to beep. Will reached blindly for his seat belt. ‘Why are we working this?’ The GBI couldn’t just walk on to a case. They had to be ordered in by the governor or asked in by the local cops. The Atlanta Police Department dealt with murder on a weekly basis. They didn’t generally ask for help. Especially from the state.

‘The victim is an Atlanta cop.’ Faith grabbed his seat belt and buckled him in like he was one of her kids. ‘Detective First Grade Dale Harding, retired. Ever heard of him?’

Will shook his head. ‘You?’

‘My mom knew him. Never worked with him. He was in white-collar crimes. Took early medical leave, then popped up doing private security. Mostly knuckle-dragging and knee-breaking.’ Faith had been with the APD for fifteen years before she’d partnered with Will. Her mother had retired as a captain. Between the two of them, they were familiar with practically everyone on the force. ‘Mom says that knowing Harding’s reputation, he probably pissed off the wrong pimp or missed the vig with his bookie and got a bat to the head.’

The car jerked as the light changed. Will felt a sharp jab in his ribs from his Glock. He tried to shift his weight. Despite the frigid air conditioning, sweat had already glued the back of his shirt to the seat. The skin peeled away like a Band-Aid. The clock on the dash read 7:38 AM. He couldn’t let himself think about how sweltering it would be by noon.

Faith’s phone chirped with a text. Then chirped again. And again. ‘Amanda,’ she groaned. ‘Why does she break up the lines? She sends three separate sentences in three separate texts. All caps. It’s not fair.’ Faith drove with one hand and texted back with the other, which was dangerous and illegal, but Faith was one of those cops who only saw infractions in other people. ‘We’re about five minutes out, right?’

‘Probably closer to ten with traffic.’ Will reached over to steady the steering wheel so they wouldn’t end up on the sidewalk. ‘What’s the address on the warehouse?’

She scrolled back through her texts. ‘It’s a construction site near the warehouses. Three-eighty Beacon.’

Will’s jaw clamped down so tight that he felt a lightning bolt of pain shoot into his neck. ‘That’s Marcus Rippy’s nightclub.’

Faith gave him a startled look. ‘Are you kidding me?’

Will shook his head. There was nothing about Marcus Rippy that he would kid about. The man was a pro basketball player who’d been accused of drugging and raping a college student. Will had spent the last seven months building a pretty solid case against the lying asshole, but Rippy had hundreds of millions of dollars to spend on lawyers and specialists and experts and publicists, who had all made sure that the case never went to trial.

Faith asked, ‘What’s a dead ex-cop doing inside Marcus Rippy’s club less than two weeks after Rippy walks on a rape charge?’

‘I’m sure his lawyers will have a plausible explanation by the time we get there.’

‘Jesus.’ Faith dropped her phone into the cup holder and put both hands back on the wheel. She was quiet for a moment, probably considering all the ways this had just turned bad for them. Dale Harding was a cop, but he’d been a bad cop. The hard truth about murder in the big city was that in general, the deceased rarely turned out to be a shining, upstanding citizen. Not to blame the victim, but they tended to be involved in activities-like pissing off pimps and not paying bookies-where it made sense that they would eventually end up murdered.

Marcus Rippy’s involvement changed everything.

Faith slowed the car as morning traffic thickened like paste. ‘I know you said you didn’t want to talk about your case crapping out, but now I need you to talk about it.’

Will still didn’t want to talk about it. Over a five-hour period, Rippy had repeatedly assaulted his victim, sometimes beating her, sometimes strangling her into unconsciousness. Standing beside her hospital bed three days later, Will could make out the dark lines where Rippy’s fingers had gripped her neck the same way he would palm a basketball. There were other bruises documented in the medical report. Cuts. Lacerations. Tearing. Blunt-force trauma. Bleeding. The woman could not speak above a whisper, but she still told her story, and she kept telling it to anyone who would listen until Rippy’s lawyers shut her up.

Faith asked, ‘Will?’

‘He raped a woman. He paid his way out of it. He’ll do it again. He probably did it before. And none of that matters because he knows how to handle a basketball.’

‘Wow, that’s a lot of information. Thank you.’

Will felt the pain in his jaw intensify. ‘The day after New Year’s Eve. Ten in the morning. The victim was found unconscious inside Marcus Rippy’s house by one of the maids. The maid called Rippy’s head of security, who called Rippy’s business manager, who called Rippy’s lawyers, who eventually called a private ambulance to take her to Piedmont Hospital. Two hours before the victim was reportedly found, around eight AM, Rippy’s private jet left for Miami with him and his entire family on board. He claims the vacation was on the books all along, but the flight plan was filed half an hour before take-off. Rippy said he had no idea the victim was in the house. Never saw her. Never talked to her. Didn’t know her name. They’d had a big New Year’s Eve party the night before. A couple of hundred people were in and out of the residence.’

Faith said, ‘There was a Facebook post of-’

‘Instagram,’ Will said, because he’d had the pleasure of trawling the internet for hours of party footage that people had filmed with their phones. ‘Someone at the party posted a GIF of the victim slurring her words before she threw up into an ice bucket. Rippy’s people had the hospital do a tox screen. She had pot, amphetamines and alcohol in her system.’

‘You said she was unconscious when they brought her into the hospital. Did she give permission for Rippy’s people to see her drug screen?’

Will shook his head, because it didn’t matter. Rippy’s team had paid off someone at the hospital lab and leaked the results of the blood test to the press.

‘You gotta admit, he’s got a great name for it. Rapey/Rippy.’ Faith twisted her lips to the side as she thought it out. ‘The house is huge, right?’

‘Sixteen thousand square feet.’ Will’s head called up the layout he’d studied for so many hours that it was still imprinted in his brain. ‘It’s shaped like a horseshoe, with a swimming pool in the middle. The family lives in the main section, the top of the horseshoe. The two wings off the back have a bunch of guest suites, and there’s a nail salon, an indoor basketball court, massage room, gym, movie theater, playroom for his two kids. You name it, they have it.’

‘So, logically, something bad could happen in one part of the house without someone in the other part knowing.’

‘Without two hundred people knowing. Without the maids and the butlers and the valets and the caterers and the cooks and the bartenders and the assistants and the whoever else knowing.’ Will had been given a two-hour tour of the Rippy estate by the family’s chief of security. Cameras were mounted at every possible angle around the exterior of the house. There were no blind spots. Motion sensors detected anything heavier than a leaf landing in the front yard. No one could go in or out of the estate without someone knowing about it.

Except for the night of the assault. There had been a bad storm. The power kept cutting in and out. The generators were state-of-the-art, but for some reason the external DVR that recorded footage from the security cameras was not jacked into the backup power grid.

Faith said, ‘Okay, I saw the news. Rippy’s people said she was a nutjob looking for a payday.’

‘They offered her money. She told them no.’

‘Could’ve been waiting for a higher number.’ Faith drummed her fingers on the steering wheel. ‘Is it possible her wounds were self-inflicted?’

That had been the contention of Rippy’s lawyers. They’d even found an expert who was willing to testify that the giant finger marks around her neck and back and thighs were made by her own hand.

‘She had this bruise here-’ Will indicated his own back. ‘Like a fist print between her shoulder blades. A big fist. You could see the finger marks, same as the bruises on her neck. She had a severe contusion on her liver. The doctors put her on bed rest for two weeks.’

‘There was a condom with Rippy’s semen-’

‘Found in a hall bathroom. The wife says they had sex that night.’

‘And he leaves the used condom in the hall bath, not the master?’ Faith frowned. ‘Was the wife’s DNA on the outside of the condom?’

‘The condom was on a tile floor that had been recently mopped with a cleaner that contained bleach. There was nothing we could use on the outside.’

‘Any DNA found on the victim?’

‘There were some unidentified strands, all female, probably picked up at her dorm.’

‘Did the victim say who invited her to the party?’

‘She came with a group of college friends. None of them can remember who got the initial invite. None of them knew Rippy personally. Or at least none of them claimed to. And all four of them immediately distanced themselves from the victim when I started knocking on doors.’

‘And the victim positively ID’d Rippy?’

‘She was standing in line for the bathroom. This was after she threw up in the ice bucket. She says she only had one drink, but it made her sick, like something wasn’t right. Rippy approached her. She recognized him immediately. He was nice, told her there was another bathroom down the hallway in the guest wing. She followed him. It was a long walk. She was feeling a little dizzy. He put his arm around her, kept her steady. He led her into the last guest suite at the end of the hall. She went to the toilet. She came out and he was sitting on the bed with his clothes off.’

‘And then what?’

‘And then she woke up in the hospital the next day. She had a bad concussion from being punched or hit in the head. She’d obviously been strangled repeatedly, lost consciousness a few times. The doctors think she won’t ever completely recover her memory of that night.’

‘Hm.’

Will felt the full weight of her skepticism in the sound.

Faith asked, ‘The hall bath where the condom was found?’

‘Six doors down from the guest suite, so they passed it on the way there, and he passed it on his way back to the party.’ Will added, ‘There’s video evidence from phones that show Rippy at the party off and on all night, so he went back and forth to work his alibi. Plus, half his team backed him up. Jameel Gordon, Andre Dupree, Reuben Figaroa. The day after the assault, they all showed up at the APD, lawyers in tow, each of them telling the exact same story. By the time the GBI caught the case, every single one of them declined to be interviewed again.’

‘Typical,’ Faith noted. ‘Rippy said that he never even saw the victim at the party?’

‘Correct.’

‘The wife was pretty vocal, right?’

‘She was a megaphone for his defense.’ LaDonna Rippy had gone on every talk show and news program that would have her. ‘She backed up everything that her husband said, including that she never saw the victim at the party.’

‘Hm.’ Faith sounded even more skeptical.

Will added, ‘And people who saw the victim that night said she was drunk and falling all over every basketball player she could get her hands on. Which, if you look at the GIF of her puking and combine that with the tox screen, makes sense. But then you look at the rape kit and you know that she was brutally raped, and the victim knows that Rippy was sitting on that bed, totally naked, when she came out of the bathroom.’

‘Devil’s advocate?’

Will nodded, though he knew what was coming.

‘I can see why it fell apart. It’s he said/she said and Rippy gets the benefit of the doubt because that’s how the Constitution works. Innocent until blah-blah-blah. And let’s not forget that Rippy is filthy rich. If he lived in a trailer park, his court-appointed lawyer would’ve pled him down to five years for false imprisonment to keep him off the sex-offender registry, end of story.’

Will didn’t respond, because there was nothing else to say.

Faith gripped the steering wheel. ‘I hate rape cases. You don’t throw a murder case to a jury and they ask, “Well, was the guy really murdered or is he lying because he wants the attention? And what was he doing in that part of town? And why was he drinking? And what about all those murderers he dated before?” ’

‘She wasn’t sympathetic.’ Will hated that this even mattered. ‘Her family’s a mess. Single mom with a drug habit. No idea who the dad is. She had some drug issues in high school, a history of self-cutting. She was coming off academic probation at her college. She dated around, spent a lot of time on Tinder and OkCupid, like everybody her age. Rippy’s people found out she had an abortion a few years ago. She basically wrote their trial strategy for them.’

‘There’s not much daylight between being a good girl and a bad one, but once you cross that line-’ Faith blew out a stream of air. ‘You can’t imagine the shit people said about me when I got pregnant with Jeremy. One day I was a junior high school honor student with her entire life ahead of her, and the next day I was a teenage Mata Hari.’

‘You were shot for being a spy?’

‘You know what I mean. I was a pariah. Jeremy’s dad was sent to live with family up north. My brother still hasn’t forgiven me. My dad got forced out of his Lodge. He lost a ton of customers. None of my friends would speak to me. I had to drop out of school.’

‘At least it was different when you had Emma.’

‘Oh, yeah, a single thirty-five-year-old woman with a twenty-year-old son and a one-year-old daughter is constantly praised for her excellent life choices.’ She changed the subject. ‘She had a boyfriend, right? The victim?’

‘He broke up with her a week before the assault.’

‘Oh, for godsakes.’ Faith had worked enough rape investigations to know that a defense lawyer’s dream was an accuser with an ex-boyfriend she was trying to make jealous.

‘He stepped up after the assault,’ Will said, though he wasn’t a fan of the ex-boyfriend. ‘Stayed by her side. Made her feel safe. Or at least tried to.’

‘Dale Harding’s name never came up during the investigation?’

He shook his head.

A news truck sped by, dipping into the oncoming traffic lane for twenty yards before taking an illegal turn.

Faith said, ‘Looks like news at noon has its lead story.’

‘They don’t want news. They want gossip.’ Up until Rippy’s case had been dismissed, Will couldn’t leave GBI headquarters without some well-coifed anchor trying to bait him into a career-ending sound bite. He got off light considering the death threats and online stalking Rippy’s fans lobbed at his accuser.

Faith said, ‘I guess this could be a coincidence. Harding being found dead at Rippy’s club?’

Will shot her a look. No cop believed in coincidence, especially a cop like Faith.

‘Okay,’ she relented, shuffling the steering wheel as she followed the news van’s illegal dip and dash. ‘At least we know why Amanda sent four texts.’ Her phone chirped. ‘Five.’ Faith grabbed the phone. Her thumb slid across the screen. She hooked a sharp turn. ‘Jeremy finally updated his Facebook page.’

Will took over the steering as she typed a message to her son, who was using the summer months away from college to drive across the country with three of his friends, seemingly for the sole purpose of worrying his mother.

Faith mumbled as she typed, bemoaning the stupidity of kids in particular and her son in specific. ‘Does this girl look eighteen to you?’

Will glanced at a photo of Jeremy standing very close to a scantily clad blonde. The grin on his face was heartbreakingly hopeful. Jeremy was a skinny, nerdy little kid studying physics at Georgia Tech. He was so out of the blonde’s league that he might as well have been a cantaloupe. ‘I would be more worried about the bong pipe on the floor.’

‘Oh, fer fucksake.’ Faith looked like she wanted to throw the phone out the window. ‘He’d better hope his grandmother doesn’t see this.’

Will watched as Faith forwarded the picture to her mother to make sure this very thing happened.

He pointed to the next intersection. ‘This is Chattahoochee.’

Faith was still cursing the photo as she took the turn. ‘As the mother of a son, I look at that picture and I think, “Don’t get her pregnant.” Then I look at it as the mother of a daughter and I think, “Don’t get stoned with a guy you just met, because his friends could gang-rape you and leave you dead in a hotel closet.” ’

Will shook his head. Jeremy was a good kid with good friends. ‘He’s twenty years old. You have to start trusting him sometime.’

‘No I don’t.’ She dropped her phone back into the cup holder. ‘Not if he still wants food, clothes, a roof over his head, health insurance, an iPhone, video games, pocket money, gas money-’

Will tuned out the long list of all the things Faith was going to take away from her poor son. His mind instantly went to Marcus Rippy. The basketball player’s smug face as he sat back in the chair with his arms crossed and his mouth shut. His wife’s hateful glares every time Will asked a question. His conceited business manager and his slick lawyers, who were all as interchangeable as Bond villains.

Keisha Miscavage, Marcus Rippy’s accuser.

She was a tough young woman, defiant, even from her hospital bed. Her hoarse whispers were peppered with fucks and shits and her eyes stayed constantly squinted as if she were interviewing Will instead of the other way around. ‘Don’t feel sorry for me,’ she’d warned him. ‘Just do your fucking job.’

Will had to admit, if only to himself, that he had a soft spot for hostile women. It killed him that he’d failed Keisha so miserably. He couldn’t even watch basketball anymore, let alone play it. Every time his hand touched a ball, he wanted to shove it down Marcus Rippy’s throat.

‘Holy crap.’ Faith coasted to a stop several yards behind a news van. ‘Half the police force is here.’

Will studied the parking lot outside the car window. Her estimate didn’t seem far off. The scene was vibrating with people. A semi truck hauling lights. The APD crime scene investigation bus. The GBI Department of Forensic Sciences mobile lab. APD cruisers and unmarked cop cars scattered around like Pick-Up Sticks. Yellow crime-scene tape roped off a smoldering burned-out car with a halo of water steaming off the scorching asphalt. Techs swarmed the area, laying down numbered yellow markers by anything that could be evidence.

Faith said, ‘I bet I know who called in the body.’

Will guessed, ‘Crack addict. Raver. Runaway.’ He took in the vault-like building in front of them. Marcus Rippy’s future nightclub. Construction had stopped six months ago when the rape charge had looked like it was going to stick. The poured concrete walls were rough and weathered, darkened along the bottom by several overlays of graffiti. Weeds had cracked up around the foundation. There were two giant windows, high up, tucked into opposite corners of the street side of the building. The glass was tinted almost black.

Will didn’t envy the job of the techs who had to inventory every condom, needle and crack pipe on-site. There was no telling how many fingerprints and shoeprints were inside. The broken glow necklaces and pacifiers indicated that ravers had made good use of the space.

Faith asked, ‘What’s the story on the club?’

‘The investors put construction on hold while they waited for Rippy’s problems to go away.’

‘Do you know if they’re back in?’

Will muttered an expletive under his breath-not because of the question, but because his boss was standing in front of the building with her hands on her hips. Amanda looked at her watch, then looked at them, then looked at her watch again.

Faith added her own expletive as she got out of the car. Will blindly reached for the round door handle, which was roughly the circumference of an M &M. The door popped back on its hinges. Hot air rushed in. Atlanta was at the tail end of the hottest, most humid summer on record. Going outside was like walking straight into the mouth of a yawning dog.

Will unfolded himself from the car, trying to ignore the audience of cops standing several feet away. Their voices didn’t carry, but he was pretty sure they were waging bets on how many more clowns would come out of the tiny vehicle.

Fortunately, Amanda’s attention had been pulled away by one of the crime scene analysts. Charlie Reed was easily recognizable by his handlebar mustache and Popeye build. Will scanned the area, looking for other familiar faces.

‘Mitchell, right?’

Will turned around to find himself looking at a remarkably handsome man. The guy had dark wavy hair and a cleft in his chin, and he looked at Faith with the eyes of an all-conquering frat boy.

‘Hi.’ Faith’s voice had a weird, high pitch. ‘Have we met?’

‘Never had the pleasure.’ The man ran his fingers through his boyish, floppy hair. ‘You look like your mom. I worked with her when I was in uniform. I’m Collier. This is my partner Ng.’

Ng gave an almost imperceptible tilt of his chin to convey his coolness. His hair was buzz-cut, military style. He was wearing dark wraparound glasses. Like his partner, he wore jeans and a black APD POLICE T-shirt-in contrast to Will, who looked like the maître d’ at an old Italian steakhouse.

‘I’m Trent,’ Will said, straightening his shoulders, because at least he had the height advantage. ‘What’ve we got here?’

‘A clusterfuck.’ Ng looked out at the building instead of looking up at Will. ‘I hear Rippy’s already on a plane to Miami.’

Faith asked, ‘Have you been inside?’

‘Not upstairs.’

Faith waited for more, then tried again. ‘Can we talk to the unis who found the body?’

Ng feigned a strain on his memory. He asked his partner, ‘You remember their names, bro?’

Collier shook his head. ‘Drawing a blank.’

Faith was no longer enamored. ‘Hey, 21 Jump Street, should we leave so you two can finish jerking each other off?’

Ng laughed, but he didn’t provide any more information.

‘For godsakes,’ Faith said. ‘You know my mom, Collier. Our boss is her old partner. What do you think she’s gonna say when we have to ask her to catch us up to speed?’

Collier gave a weary sigh. He rubbed the back of his neck as he looked off into the distance. The sun picked out slivers of gray in his hair. There were deep lines at the corners of his eyes. He was probably in his mid-forties, which made him a few years older than Will, which for some reason made Will feel better.

‘All right.’ Collier finally relented, but not before doing the fingers-through-the-hair thing again. ‘Switchboard gets an anonymous tip there’s a dead body, this location. Twenty minutes later, a two-man uni rolls up. They sweep the building. Find the DB, male, upstairs inside one of the rooms. Stabbed in the neck. A real bloodbath. One of ’em recognizes Harding from choir practice-drunk, gambler, poon hound, typical old-school five-o. I’m sure your mom’s got some stories.’

Ng said, ‘We were working a domestic when we got the call. That was some violent shit. Chick’s gonna be in surgery for days. Full moon always brings out the crazy.’

Faith ignored his war story. ‘How’d Harding or whoever gain access into the building?’

‘Looks like bolt cutters.’ Collier shrugged. ‘The padlock was cut clean, which probably took some muscle, so we’re thinking a man did it.’

‘You find the bolt cutters?’

‘Nope.’

‘What’s the story on the car?’

‘It was throwing off heat like Chernobyl when we got here. We called in AFD to hose it down. They say an accelerant was used. Gas tank exploded.’

‘No one called in a vehicle fire?’

‘Yeah, it’s shocking,’ Ng said. ‘You wouldn’t think all the junkies and whores squatting in these warehouses would pull a Kitty Genovese.’

Faith said, ‘Look who knows his urban legends.’

Will scanned the abandoned warehouses-one on either side of Rippy’s club. A construction sign advertised mixed-use housing coming soon, but the faded condition indicated that soon hadn’t come soon enough. The buildings were four stories each, at least a block deep. Red brick from the turn of the century before last. Gothic arches with stained glass that had been broken out long ago.

He turned around. There was a matching office building across the street, at least ten stories tall, maybe more if it had a basement. Yellow signs posted over the chained doors indicated that the building was scheduled for demolition. The three structures were massive relics of Atlanta’s industrial past. If Rippy’s investors had gone all in now that the rape case had disappeared, the project could net them all millions, maybe billions, of dollars.

Faith asked, ‘Were you able to pull the VIN off the car?’

Collier supplied, ‘White, 2016 Kia Sorento, registered to one Vernon Dale Harding. AFD says it was probably burning for four or five hours.’

‘So, someone killed Harding and torched his car, then someone else, or maybe the same guy, called it into nine-one-one five hours later.’

Will stared at the nightclub. ‘Why here?’

Faith shook her head. ‘Why us?’

Ng didn’t understand that the question was rhetorical. He threw his hand out toward the building. ‘This was supposed to be some kind of nightclub. Dance floor below, VIP rooms circled around the top, like an atrium in a mall. I thought there might be a gang involved, slinging up a dope club like this in the middle of Shitown, so I called my girl, she did a record check, Rippy’s name came up and I was like, “Oh shit.” So I kicked it up to my boss. He gives your ballbreaker a courtesy call and she’s out here ten minutes later flossing her teeth with our short hairs.’

They all looked at Amanda. Charlie Reed was gone, and a tall, willowy redhead had taken his place. She was pinning up her hair as she talked to Amanda.

Ng gave a low whistle. ‘Damn, son. Lookit that fine Girl Scout. Wonder if the paint matches the trim?’

Collier grinned. ‘I’ll let you know in the morning.’

Faith glanced down at Will’s clenched fists. ‘That’s enough, guys.’

Collier kept grinning. ‘We’re just having fun, Officer.’ He winked at her. ‘But you should know I got kicked out of Girl Scouts for eating some Brownies.’

Ng guffawed, and Faith rolled her eyes as she walked away.

‘Red,’ Will told the detectives. ‘Everybody calls her Red. She’s a crime scene tech, but she gets in the way a lot, so keep an eye on her.’

Collier asked, ‘She seeing anybody?’

Will shrugged. ‘Does it matter?’

‘Not a bit.’ Collier spoke with the extreme certainty of a man who had never been rejected by a woman. He gave Will a cocky salute. ‘Thanks for the four-one-one, bro.’

Will forced his fists to unclench as he walked toward Amanda. Faith was heading into the building, probably to get out of the heat. The red-haired woman was signing herself into the crime scene at the front gate. She saw Will and smiled, and he smiled back, because her name wasn’t Red, it was Sara Linton, and she wasn’t a crime scene tech, she was the medical examiner, and it was none of Collier’s and Ng’s God damm business what matched where because three hours ago she had been underneath Will in bed whispering so many filthy things into his ear that he had momentarily lost the ability to swallow.

Amanda didn’t look up from her BlackBerry when Will approached. He stood in front of her, waiting, because that’s what she usually made him do. He was intimately familiar with the top of her head, the spiral at the crown that spun her salt-and-pepper hair into a helmet.

Finally she said, ‘You’re late, Agent Trent.’

‘Yes, ma’am. It won’t happen again.’

She narrowed her eyes, dubious of the apology. ‘That odor in the air is the smell of shit hitting the fan. I’ve already been on the phone with the mayor, the governor and two district attorneys who refuse to come out here because they don’t want the news cameras capturing them anywhere near another case involving Marcus Rippy.’ She looked down at her phone again. The BlackBerry was her mobile command post, sending and receiving updates from her vast network of contacts, only some of them official.

She said, ‘There are three more satellite trucks on their way here, one of them national. I’ve got over thirty emails from reporters asking for statements. Rippy’s lawyers have already called to say they’ll be handling all questions and any indication that we’re unfairly targeting Rippy could lead to a harassment lawsuit. They won’t even meet with me until tomorrow morning. Too busy, they say.’

‘Same as before.’ Will had been granted exactly one sit-down with Marcus Rippy, during which time the man had remained almost completely silent. Faith was right. One of the more galling things about people with money was that they really knew their constitutional rights.

He asked Amanda, ‘Are we officially in charge or is APD?’

‘Do you think I would be standing here if I wasn’t officially in charge?’

Will glanced back at Collier and Ng. ‘Does Captain Chin Cleft know that?’

‘You think he’s cute?’

‘Well, I wouldn’t say-’

Amanda was already walking toward the building. Will had to trot to catch up with her. She had the quick gait of a Shetland pony.

They both signed in with the uniformed officer in charge of access to the crime scene. Instead of going inside, Amanda made Will stand just out of reach of the shade so that the sun would turn his skull into a kiln.

She said, ‘I knew Harding’s father when I was a rookie. Senior was a beat cop who spent his money on whores and the dog track. Died of an aneurysm back in eighty-five. Left his son his gambling habit. Dale took a medical retirement that ran out two years ago. He cashed out his pension earlier this year.’

‘Why was he on medical leave?’

‘HIPAA,’ she said, referring to the law that, among other things, barred cops from making doctors tell them intimate details about their patients. ‘I’m working some back channels to get the information, but this isn’t good, Will. Harding was a bad cop, but he’s a dead cop, and his body is lying inside a building owned by a man we very publicly could not put away for rape.’

‘Do we know if Harding has any connection to Rippy?’

‘If only I had a detective who could figure that out.’ She turned on her heel and walked into the building. The electricity was still off. The interior was dank and cavernous, the dark tinted windows giving the space a ghostly cast. They both slipped on shoe protectors. Suddenly the generators roared to life. Xenon lights popped on, illuminating every square inch of the building. Will felt his retinas flinch in protest.

There was a cacophony of clicks as Maglites were turned off and stored. Will’s eyes adjusted to find exactly what he expected to find: trash, condoms and needles, an empty shopping cart, lawn chairs, soiled mattresses-for some reason, there were always soiled mattresses-and too many spent beer cans and broken liquor bottles to count. The walls were covered with multi-colored graffiti that went up at least as high as a person’s arm could reach with a can of spray paint. Will recognized some gang tags-Suernos, Bloods, Crips-but for the most part there were bubbled names with hearts, peace flags and a couple of gigantic, well-endowed unicorns with rainbow eyes. Typical raver art. The great thing about ecstasy was that it made you really happy until it stopped your heart from beating.

Ng’s description of the layout was fairly accurate. The building had an upstairs atrium that opened to the bottom floor like in a shopping mall. A temporary wooden railing ringed the balcony, but there were gaps where a less careful person might get into trouble. The main floor was huge, multi-tiered, with concrete half-walls designating private seating areas and a large open space for dancing. What was probably meant to be the bar arced around the back of the building. Two grand, curved staircases reached to the second floor, which was at least forty feet up. The concrete stairs hugging the walls gave the impression of a cobra’s fangs about to bite down on the dance floor.

An older woman wearing a yellow hard hat approached Amanda. She had another hard hat in her hand, which she gave to Amanda, who in turn gave it to Will, who in turn set it on the floor.

The woman offered no preamble. ‘Found in the parking lot: an empty clear plastic bag with a paper label insert. Said bag contained at one time a tan canvas tarp, missing from the scene. The tarp is Handy brand, three-feet-seven by five-feet-seven, widely available.’ She paused her tired drone to take a breath. ‘Also found: a slightly used roll of black duct tape, outer plastic wrap not yet located. Weather report indicates a deluge, this vicinity, thirty-six hours previous. The paper label on the tarp bag and the edges of the tape do not show exposure to said weather event.’

Amanda said, ‘Well, I suppose we have a window at least, sometime over the weekend.’

‘Canvas tarp,’ Will repeated. ‘That’s what painters use.’

‘Correct,’ the woman said. ‘No paint or painter’s tools have been located inside or outside the building.’ She continued, ‘The stairs: both sets are part of the scene and still being processed. Found so far: items from a woman’s purse, what looks like tissue. The guts kind, not Kleenex.’ She pointed to a scissor lift. ‘You’ll need to use that to go up. We’ve put out a call for an operator. He’s twenty-five minutes out.’

‘Are you shitting me?’ Collier had sneaked up on them. ‘We can’t use the stairs?’ He was warily eyeing the scissor lift, which was a hydraulic machine that lifted a platform straight into the air, kind of like a very shaky open-air elevator with nothing but a thin safety rail between you and certain death.

Amanda asked Will, ‘Do you know how to operate that thing?’

‘I can figure it out.’ The machine was already plugged in. Will found the key hidden inside the auxiliary battery box. He used the tip of the key to press the tiny reset button on the bottom. The scissor lift stuttered a quick up-and-down and they were in business.

Will grabbed the safety rail and climbed up the two steps by the motor. Amanda reached for his hand so she could follow. Her movements looked effortless, mostly because Will did all the lifting. She was light, less than the weight of a boxing heavy bag.

They both turned around and waited for Collier. He glanced at the fang-like stairs.

Amanda tapped her watch. ‘You’ve got two seconds, Detective Collier.’

Collier took a deep breath. He grabbed the yellow hard hat off the floor. He clamped it down on his head and scampered up the platform like a frightened baby monkey.

Will turned the key to start the motor. In truth, he had worked construction jobs during his college years and he could operate just about any machine on a work site. Still, he stuttered the platform a bit just for the pleasure of watching Collier white-knuckle the safety rail.

The motor made a grinding noise as they started their ascent. Sara was on the stairs helping one of the techs collect evidence. She was wearing khakis and a fitted navy-blue GBI T-shirt that flattered her in more ways than two. Her hair was still pulled back, but some of the strands had come loose. She’d put on her glasses. He liked the way she looked in her glasses.

Will had known Sara Linton for eighteen months, which was roughly seventeen months and twenty-six days longer than any other period of sustained happiness in his life. He practically lived at her apartment. Their dogs got along. He liked her sister. He understood her mother. He was scared of her father. She had officially joined the GBI two weeks ago. This was their first case together. He was embarrassed by how excited he was to see her.

Which is why Will made himself look away, because mooning over your girlfriend at a grisly crime scene was probably how serial killers got their start.

Or maybe he would just be a regular murderer, because Collier had decided to take his mind off his vertigo by staring at Sara’s ass while she bent over to help the tech.

Will shifted his weight again. The platform shook. Collier made a noise halfway between a gag and a yelp.

Amanda gave Will one of her rare smiles. ‘My first rollout was for a guy who fell off the top of a scaffolding. This was back before Hazmat and all those silly safety regulations. There wasn’t much for the coroner. We hosed his brains off the sidewalk and into the gutter.’

Collier leaned over so he could use his arm to wipe the sweat from his face and still hold on to the railing.

The lift shook of its own accord as Will stopped the platform a few inches below the concrete balcony. The wooden railing had been pulled away. Across from the opening, half-inch slabs of moldy four-by-sixteen drywall were stacked chest-high. The thick layer of dust on the buckets of joint compound indicated they had been there since construction stopped six months ago. Graffiti dripped lazily across everything-the floor, the walls, the construction materials-with two more ubiquitous rainbow-eyed unicorns standing sentry at the top of each stairway.

Heavy wooden doors lined what Will assumed were the VIP rooms. The custom-carved mahogany had been stained a rich espresso, probably at the factory, but the graffiti artists had done their best to black out the finish. Yellow numbered crime scene markers dotted the entire span of the balcony, from one set of stairs to the other. Several Tyvek-clad techs were photographing and collecting evidence. Some of the VIP rooms were being sprayed down with luminol, a chemical that made body fluids glow an otherworldly blue when exposed to a black light.

Will didn’t want to think about all the body fluids they’d find.

Faith stood at the far end of the balcony, her head back as she drank from a bottle of water. She was wearing a white Tyvek suit. The zip was undone. The arms were tied around her waist. She had obviously passed herself off as a tech so she could get up to the crime scene without having to wait for the scissor lift. Sealed evidence bags were piled in front of her, alongside neatly stacked boxes of gloves, evidence bags and protective clothing. The murder room was a few feet away, the wooden door opened out. Light strobed as the position and state of the body were documented by the crime scene photographer. They wouldn’t be allowed inside until every inch was recorded.

Amanda pulled out her phone and read her new messages as she walked toward the kill room. ‘CNN is here. I’m going to have to update the governor and the mayor. Will, you’ll take point on this while I’m hand-holding. Collier, I need you to see if Harding has any family. My recollection is that there’s an aunt on the father’s side.’

‘Yes, ma’am.’ Collier’s shoulder rubbed the wall as he followed at a distance.

‘Take off that hard hat. You look like one of the Village People.’ She checked her phone again. Obviously a new piece of information had come in. ‘Harding has four ex-wives. Two are still on the force, both in records. Track them down and find out if there’s a bookie or pimp whose name kept coming up.’

Collier stumbled to keep up as he left the hat on the floor. ‘You think his exes were still talking to him?’

‘Am I really getting that question from you?’ Her words obviously hit their mark because Collier responded with a quick nod. She dropped her phone back into her pocket. ‘Faith, run it down for me.’

‘Doorknob to the neck.’ Faith pointed to the side of her own neck. ‘It matches the other doorknobs up here, so we can assume the killer didn’t bring it for the purpose of murder. They found a G43 by the car. The action is jammed, but at least one round was fired. Charlie is running the serial number through the system right now.’

‘That’s the new Glock,’ Collier said. ‘What’s it look like?’

‘Lightweight, slim profile. The grip is rough, but it’s pretty impressive for concealed carry.’

Collier asked another question about the gun, which was manufactured specifically for government use. Will tuned him out. The gun wasn’t going to solve this case.

He stepped around some marked bloody shoeprints and bent down to get a closer look at the lockset in the door. The backplate was rectangular, about three-by-six inches and screwed to the door. It was cast, plated in polished brass with a heavily detailed raised design featuring a cursive R at the center. Rippy’s logo. Will had seen it all over the man’s house. He squinted at the latchbolt, the long metal cylinder that kept the door closed or, when turned, allowed it to open. He saw scrapes around the hollow square where the doorknob spindle was supposed to go. And then he looked down at the floor and saw the long screwdriver with the numbered yellow card beside it.

Someone had been shut inside the room, and someone else had used the screwdriver to gain entry.

Will stood back up to look at the kill scene. The photographer stepped across the body, trying not to slip in the blood.

There was a lot of blood.

Sprayed on the ceiling, spattered and splattered on walls, glistening against the nearly black criss-cross of competing graffiti. The floor was flooded, like someone had opened the spigot on Harding’s carotid and let it run dry. Light danced off the dark, congealing liquid. Will could taste metal in his mouth as oxygen hit iron. Underneath it all he caught a whiff of piss that for some reason made him feel sorrier for the guy than the doorknob sticking Frankenstein-like out of the meaty hambone of his neck.

In policing, there wasn’t a lot of dignity in death.

Dale Harding’s body was in the center of the room, which was about fifteen feet square with a vaulted ceiling. He was flat on his back, a big, bald guy wearing a cheap, shiny suit that wouldn’t close around his ample gut, more like a cop of his father’s generation than his own. His shirt had come untucked on one side. His red and blue striped tie was split like the legs of a hurdler. The waistband of his pants was rolled over. His stainless-steel TAG Heuer had turned into a tourniquet on his wrist because his body was swelling with the various juices of decay. A gold diamond ring cut into his pinky finger. Black dress socks stretched around his waxy yellow ankles. His mouth was open. His eyes were closed. He obviously had some kind of eczema. The dry skin around his mouth and nose looked like it was speckled with sugar.

Weirdly, there was only a slash of blood on the front of his body, like a painter had flicked a brush at him. There were a few drops on his face, but nothing else, especially where you’d expect it, around the too-tight collar of his shirt.

‘These were found on the stairs.’

Will turned back around.

Faith was rolling the evidence bag in her hands so that she could read the labels on the contents. ‘BareMinerals. Mac. Light browns in the eyeshadows. Espresso-brown mascara. Chocolate eyeliner. The foundation and powder are a light medium.’

Amanda said, ‘So, probably a white woman.’

‘There’s also a tin of lip balm. La Mer.’

‘Rich white woman,’ Amanda amended. Will knew the brand, but only because Sara wore it. He’d accidentally seen the receipt and nearly had a heart attack. The balm cost more per ounce than a brick of heroin.

Amanda said, ‘So, we can assume a woman was here with Harding.’

‘And now she’s not,’ Faith said. ‘Doorknob to the neck sounds like something a woman would do.’

Amanda asked, ‘Where’s the purse?’

‘Inside the room. It looks torn, like it got caught on something.’

‘And only the make-up fell out?’

Faith picked up the other evidence bags and listed off the contents. ‘One car key, Chevy, model unknown, no keychain. A hairbrush with long brown hair in the bristles-they’ll get that to the lab ASAP. Tin of Altoids, spearmint. Various coins with purse fuzz. Pack of Puffs tissue. Plastic contact lens case. A tube of ChapStick, the poor woman’s La Mer.’

‘No wallet?’

Faith shook her head. ‘The photographer says he didn’t see one in the purse either, but we’ll look when he’s finished.’

‘So, we have a dead cop and a missing woman.’ Amanda read Will’s expression. ‘She hasn’t left the house. I talked to her an hour ago and checked in with the sheriff’s deputy who’s parked outside.’

Keisha Miscavage, Marcus Rippy’s accuser. Her name hadn’t been released to the press, but nobody stayed anonymous with the internet. Keisha had been forced into hiding three months ago, and she still had twenty-four-hour police protection because of credible death threats from several of Rippy’s fans.

Collier said, ‘What about all these gang tags? I’m counting two up here, at least four downstairs. We should get the gang taskforce on this, round up some bangers.’

Faith asked, ‘Should we round up all the unicorns, too?’

Amanda shook her head. ‘This is about the woman. Let’s assume that she was in this room. Let’s also assume she had something to do with the disposition of the victim, if we can call Harding the victim.’ She looked down at the contents from the purse. ‘This is a white, fairly wealthy woman meeting a dirty cop in a bad part of town in the middle of the night. Why? What was she doing here?’

Collier said, ‘Paying for it’s easier than marrying it. Maybe she was an escort, only he didn’t wanna or couldn’t pay and she got mad?’

Faith countered, ‘Strange place to meet up for a blow job.’

‘That’s a small tarp,’ Will said, because Amanda didn’t spend her weekends strolling the tarp section at her local hardware store. ‘Standard would be a five-by-seven, six-by-twelve, but the package outside was for a three-feet-seven by five-feet-seven, which is forty-three inches by sixty-seven. Harding’s at least a forty-inch waist, and around six feet tall.’

Amanda stared at him. ‘I need that in English.’

‘If the killer brought the tarp to the scene in order to dispose of a body, then the tarp he purchased was for a much smaller person.’

‘A woman-sized tarp,’ Faith said. ‘Great.’

Amanda was nodding. ‘Harding met the woman here to kill her, but she managed to get the upper hand.’

‘She’s injured.’ Sara came up the stairs. Her glasses were hooked on her shirt collar. She used the back of her arm to wipe the sweat off her forehead. ‘There are bloody bare footprints going up the left set of stairs. Likely a woman’s, probably size seven or eight, with a heavy strike that indicates she was running.’ She pointed back at the stairs. ‘Second tread down, there’s an impact point that indicates she fell and hit her head, likely at the crown. We found some long brown hair in the spatter, similar to what was found in the hairbrush.’ She pointed to the other set of stairs. ‘On the right, we’ve got more footprints, walking, and passive spatter leaving a trail toward the emergency side exit, then it disappears on the metal stairs. Passive spatter indicates a weeping wound.’

‘Ran up and walked down?’ Amanda guessed.

‘It’s possible.’ Sara shrugged. ‘There have been hundreds of people in and out of this building. Someone could have made the footprints last week and someone else could’ve left the drops of blood last night. We’ll need to sequence DNA on every sample before we can definitively say what belongs to whom.’

Amanda glowered. DNA could take weeks. She preferred her science more instantaneous.

‘Finished.’ The photographer started peeling off his Tyvek suit. His clothes were soaking wet. His hair looked painted onto his head. He told Amanda, ‘You can have the room. I’ll get the photos processed and uploaded as soon as I get back.’

She nodded. ‘Thank you.’

Sara pulled a fresh pair of gloves from her back pocket. ‘These shoeprints here-’ She pointed to the floor, which looked like it belonged in an Arthur Murray studio. ‘They’re from the first responders. Two sets. One went into the room, probably to see the face. The treads for both are nearly identical. HAIX Black Eagles. Police issue.’

Collier bristled. ‘They said in their statements that they didn’t enter the room.’

‘You might want to go back at them.’ Sara slipped on a fresh pair of shoe protectors as she explained, ‘There’s a lot of blood. They recognized the victim. He’s a fellow officer. That’s a lot to-’

‘Hold on, Red.’ Collier held up his hand like a traffic cop. ‘Don’t you think you should wait for the ME before you go traipsing in there?’

Sara gave him a look that had once presaged the two most miserable hours of Will’s life. ‘I’m the medical examiner, and I would prefer that you call me Sara or Dr Linton.’

Faith barked a laugh that echoed through the building.

Sara braced her hand against the wall as she walked into the room. Ripples spread through the pool of blood. She picked up the purse in the corner. The strap was broken. There was a long tear down the side. The bag was black textured leather with heavy brass zips and buckles and a padlock at the clasp, the kind of thing that could be very expensive or very cheap.

‘I don’t see a wallet.’ Sara held up a gold tube of lipstick. ‘Sisley, rose cashmere. I’ve got the same at home.’ Her eyebrows furrowed. ‘The gold is scratched off on the side, just like mine. Must be a manufacturing defect.’ Sara dropped the lipstick back into the purse. She tested the weight. ‘This doesn’t feel like Dolce and Gabbana.’

‘No.’ Amanda peered inside the bag. ‘It’s counterfeit. See the stitching?’

‘The ampersand is in the wrong font, too.’ Faith spread plastic on the ground so they could do a more careful inventory. ‘Why buy a fake D and G when you can afford Sisley and La Mer?’

Amanda said, ‘Twenty-five-hundred-dollar purse versus fifty-dollar lipstick?’

Faith said, ‘You can palm the lipstick, but not the purse.’

‘Maybe a tester. The scratch could be from peeling off the label.’

Will tried to give Collier a conspiratorial ‘us manly men have no idea what they’re talking about’ look, but Collier was already giving him an ‘I want to shoot you in the face’ look.

Sara went back into the room. This was her first opportunity to really examine the murder scene. Will had caught glimpses of this side of her before, but never in an official capacity. She took her time exploring the room, silently studying the blood patterns, the spray on the ceiling. The graffiti did not make her job easy. The walls were painted black in places from oversprayed logos and tags. She got close to everything, putting on her glasses so she could differentiate between the spray paint and the blood evidence. She walked around the perimeter of the room twice before beginning her examination of the body.

She couldn’t kneel in the blood, so she squatted down at Harding’s thick waist. She searched his front pants pockets, handing Faith a melted 3 Musketeers, an opened pack of Skittles, a wad of cash strapped by a green rubber band and some loose change. Next she checked Harding’s suit jacket. There was a folded sheet of paper inside the breast pocket. Sara unfolded the page. ‘Racing form. Online betting.’

‘Dogs?’ Amanda guessed.

‘Horses.’ Sara handed the form to Faith, who set it on the plastic alongside the other items.

‘No cell phones,’ Faith noted. ‘Not on Harding. Not in the purse. Not in the building.’

Sara patted down the body, checking to see if she’d missed anything obvious in his clothes. She pushed open Harding’s eyelids. She used both hands to force open his jaw so she could look inside the mouth. She unbuttoned his shirt and pants. She studied every inch of his bloated abdomen. She pulled back the unbuttoned cuffs of his shirtsleeves and looked at his forearms. She lifted his pant legs and pushed down his socks.

Finally she said, ‘Livor mortis indicates the body hasn’t been moved, so he died here, in this position, on his back. I’ll need to get ambient and liver temp, but he’s in full rigor, which means he’s been dead for more than four but less than eight hours.’

‘So we’re talking a timeline of Sunday night into Monday morning,’ Faith said. ‘The fire department estimates the car was set on fire four to five hours ago, which brings us to three AM. today. The nine-one-one came in at five AM.’

‘Sorry, but can I ask a question about that?’ Collier was obviously still licking his wounds, but he just as obviously wanted to prove his usefulness. ‘He’s got mold around his mouth and nose. Wouldn’t that take a lot longer than five hours to grow?’

‘It would, but it’s not mold.’ Sara asked, ‘Can you help me roll the body onto its side? I don’t want him falling forward.’

Collier pulled two shoe protectors out of the box. He gave Sara a lopsided grin as he slid the booties over the old protectors he’d put on when he entered the building. ‘I’m Holden, by the way. Like in the book. My parents were hoping for a disaffected loner.’

Sara smiled at the stupid joke, and Will wanted to kill himself.

Collier kept grinning, taking the gloves Sara offered, making a show of stretching out the fingers with his child-sized hands. ‘How do you want to do this?’

‘On my three.’ Sara counted down. Collier grunted as he lifted Harding’s shoulders and tried to roll him onto his side. The body was stiff and tilted like a hinge. The weight wouldn’t transfer without sending Harding face down into a pool of blood, so Collier had to brace his elbows against his knees to keep the body raised.

Sara peeled up Harding’s jacket and shirt so she could examine his back. Will gathered she was looking for punctures. She pressed her gloved fingers into the skin, testing for open wounds and finding nothing. The dark blood on the floor had made Harding look like he’d been dipped into a pan of motor oil.

She asked Collier, ‘You okay for another minute?’

‘Sure.’ The word got mangled in his throat. Will could see the veins in his neck popping out. Harding was at least two-fifty, maybe more. Collier’s arms were shaking from the effort of keeping him tilted up.

Sara changed into a fresh pair of gloves. She reached into Harding’s back pocket and pulled out a thick nylon wallet. The Velcro made a ripping sound when she opened it. She called out her findings. ‘Ticket stubs, receipts for fast-food places, betting slips, two different photographs of a naked blonde courtesy of BackDoorMan.com. Some business cards.’ She looked at Collier. ‘You can put him down, but be careful.’

Collier groaned as he settled the body back to the floor.

‘You’re going to want to see this.’ Sara passed one of the business cards to Faith. Will recognized the full-color logo. He had seen it countless times on documents turned over by Marcus Rippy’s sports management team.

‘Motherfuck,’ Faith muttered. ‘Kip Kilpatrick. He’s Rippy’s manager, right? I saw him on TV.’

Will looked at Amanda. She had her eyes closed like she wished she could wipe the man’s name from her mind. Will felt the same way. Kip Kilpatrick was Marcus Rippy’s manager, head lawyer, best friend and all-around fixer. There was no legal proof, but Will was certain Kilpatrick had used his thugs to pay off two witnesses from the New Year’s Eve party and intimidated a third into silence.

Sara said, ‘I hate to make things worse, but the doorknob missed Harding’s jugulars and carotids. And his esophagus. And pretty much anything else that matters. There’s no blood in his mouth or nose. There was very little bleeding from the spindle, just a trickle that’s dried down the side of his neck. He doesn’t have any other significant injuries. This blood, or at least this volume of blood, isn’t from him.’

‘What?’ Amanda sounded more exasperated than shocked. ‘Are you certain?’

‘Positive. The back of his clothes wicked up blood from the floor, and the swipe of blood on his shirt is clearly from someone else. His major arteries are intact. There are no significant wounds in his head, torso, arms, or legs. The blood you see in this room is not from Dale Harding.’

Will felt surprised, and then he felt stupid for being surprised. Sara had read the scene better than he had.

‘So whose blood is it?’ Faith asked. ‘Ms. La Mer?’

‘It seems likely.’ Sara stood up carefully so she wouldn’t lose her balance.

Amanda tried to make sense of the information. ‘Our missing woman hit her head on the stairs, then she left her bloody footprints as she ran across the balcony, and then what?’

‘There was a violent struggle between two people in this room. There are signs of high-velocity spatter on the ceiling, which suggests that an artery was punctured, and as I said, it wasn’t Harding’s.’ Sara walked over to the far corner. ‘We’re going to need some alternate light sources because the graffiti is so dark, but can you see this swipe along the wall? That’s from someone’s hand, and the hand was covered in blood. The shape and span are small, more like a woman’s.’

Will had noticed the smeared line of blood before, but not that it ended with a visible set of fingers. They reminded him of the finger-shaped bruises on Keisha Miscavage’s neck.

Amanda told Sara, ‘There were no unsolved shootings last night. Are we talking stabbing, then?’

Sara shrugged. ‘Maybe.’

‘Maybe,’ Amanda repeated. ‘Wonderful. I’ll tell the hospitals to maybe look out for an unexplained stabbing with a serious head injury.’

‘I can do that.’ Collier started typing into his phone. ‘I got a buddy works the precinct at Grady Hospital. He can check with the ER pronto.’

‘We’ll need Atlanta Medical and Piedmont, too.’

Collier nodded as he typed.

Faith said, ‘Sara, back up a minute for me. The doorknob didn’t kill Harding, but he’s obviously dead. So what happened?’

‘His bad choices happened. He’s morbidly obese. He’s unusually bloated. His eyes show signs of conjunctival erythema. I’m guessing he has an enlarged heart, hypertension. There are needle marks on his abdomen and thighs that indicate he’s an insulin-dependent diabetic. His diet was fast food and Skittles. He wasn’t managing his condition.’

Collier looked skeptical. ‘So Harding conveniently slipped into a diabetic coma during the middle of a death match?’

‘It’s more complicated than that.’ Sara indicated the area around her own mouth. ‘Harding’s face. You thought it was mold, but mold usually grows in a colony or clump. Think about bread when it goes bad. My first guess was seborrheic dermatitis, but now I’m fairly certain it’s uremic frost.’

Will said, ‘I thought I smelled urine.’

‘Good catch.’ Sara handed Collier a bag for his gloves and shoe protectors. ‘Urea is one of the toxins that’s supposed to be filtered out through the kidneys. If the kidneys don’t work for some reason-diabetes and hypertension are good reasons-then the body tries to excrete the urea through sweat. The sweat evaporates, the urea crystalizes, and that leads to uremic frost.’

Collier nodded like he understood. ‘How long does that take?’

‘Not long. He’s been living with chronic end-stage renal disease. He was getting treatment at some point. He has a graft for vascular access in his arm. Uremic frost is very rare, but it tells us that for whatever reason, he stopped getting dialysis, probably within the last week to ten days.’

‘Jesus,’ Faith said. ‘So is this a murder or not?’

Amanda said, ‘It seems they both tried to kill each other and both likely succeeded.’ She told Sara, ‘Let’s focus on the missing woman. You said there was a violent struggle in this room that Harding obviously lost, but not before he managed to do quite a bit of damage to his opponent, as evidenced by the blood. Given her wounds, could the woman walk out of here and drive herself away?’ She amended, ‘No maybes or possiblies. You’re not speaking to the court, Dr Linton.’

Sara still hedged. ‘Let’s start with the impact on the stairs. If it’s from the missing woman’s head, then she took a pretty hard blow. Her skull was probably fractured. At the very least, she’s concussed.’ Sara looked back over the kill room. ‘The volume of blood loss is the real danger. I’d estimate this is just over two liters, maybe a thirty to thirty-five percent loss. That’s a borderline Class III hemorrhage. In addition to stopping the bleed, she’d need fluids, probably a transfusion.’

‘She could use the tarp,’ Will said. ‘To stop the bleeding. The tarp is missing. There was a roll of duct tape found in the parking lot.’

‘Possible,’ Sara agreed. ‘But let’s talk about the nature of the injury. If the blood came from the chest or neck, she would be dead. It can’t be from the belly because the blood would stay in the belly. So that leaves the limbs. A good gash in the groin could do this. She would likely be able to walk, but not without difficulty. Same with the medial malleolus, the inside of the ankle. She could still drag or crawl her way out. There’s also this-’ Sara held up her arms as if to protect her face, palms out. ‘A horizontal cut to the radial or ulnar arteries, then the arms flail and blood sprays around the room like a garden hose, which is basically what the artery would be at that point.’ She looked back at Harding. ‘I’d expect him to have more blood on him if that was the case.’

Amanda said, ‘Thank you, Doctor, for that litany of multiple choices. How much time do we have to find this woman?’

Sara took the dig in stride. ‘None of those injuries are the type that can go untreated, even if she manages to stop the bleeding. Given the four-to-five-hour window on time of death and the volume of blood loss, I’d say that without medical intervention she might have two to three more hours before her organs start shutting down.’

‘You work the dead, we’ll find the living.’ Amanda turned to Will and Faith. ‘We’ve got a clock ticking. Our number one goal is to locate this woman, get her medical help, then find out what the hell she was doing here in the first place.’

Collier asked, ‘What about BackDoorMan.com? Does that bring in Rippy?’

‘That’ll be Harding’s kink,’ Will said. ‘Rippy has a definite type.’

Faith supplied, ‘Dark hair, smart mouth, killer body.’

Collier said, ‘His wife is a blonde.’

Faith rolled her eyes. ‘I’m a blonde. She’s a bottle.’

‘You can discuss hair color after we find the woman.’ Amanda told Collier, ‘Get that partner of yours to run missing persons reports submitted within the last forty-eight hours. Women, young, Rippy’s type.’ Collier nodded, but she wasn’t finished. ‘I need at least ten uniforms to check both warehouses and the office building. Call in a structural engineer on the building; it looks iffy. I want feet, not just eyeballs, on every single floor, every nook and cranny, no stone unturned. Our victim-slash-murderer could be bleeding out or hiding right under our noses. None of us wants to read that headline in the paper tomorrow morning.’

She turned to Faith. ‘Go to Harding’s place of residence. I’ll have the warrant signed by the time you get there. Harding called himself a private investigator. It makes sense that he was investigating a woman, possibly for Rippy. She could be another victim or she could’ve been blackmailing him for money, or both. Harding will have a file, photographs, notes, hopefully a home address for the girl.’

She pointed to Will. ‘Go with her. Harding can’t be living in luxury. There will be liquor stores, check-cashers, strip joints in his neighborhood. They’ll probably sell burner phones. Cross the IMEIs with any security footage to see if we can pin a phone number to Harding, then cross-reference the numbers against any that are linked to Kip Kilpatrick or Marcus Rippy.’

There was a chorus of ‘Yes, ma’am’s,’ all around.

Will heard metal scraping concrete. The scissor lift had brought Charlie Reed to the second floor. He had a grim look on his face as he approached them.

Amanda said, ‘Spit it out, Charlie. We’re already against the clock.’

Charlie fidgeted with his cell phone. ‘I got back the info on the Glock 43.’

‘And?’

Charlie kept his gaze glued to Amanda. ‘Maybe we should-’

‘I said spit it out.’

He took a deep breath. ‘It’s registered to Angie Polaski.’

Will felt a sudden tightness in his chest. He tasted acid on his tongue.

Dark hair. Smart mouth. Killer body.

There was a burning sensation on the side of his face. People staring at him. Waiting for his reaction. A bead of sweat rolled into his eye. He looked up at the ceiling because he didn’t trust himself to look at anything else.

It was Collier who finally broke the silence with a question. ‘What am I missing here?’ No one answered, so he asked, ‘Who’s Angie Polaski?’

Sara had to clear her throat before she could speak. ‘Angie Polaski is Will’s wife.’

TWO

Sara watched Will brace his hand against the wall to steady himself. She should do something-comfort him, tell him it was going to be all right-but she just stood there struggling against the usual spark of rage that accompanied any mention of his erratic, hateful wife.

Angie Polaski had been flitting in and out of Will’s life like a mosquito since he was eleven years old. They had grown up together at the Atlanta Children’s Home, both surviving abuse, neglect, abandonment, torture. Not all of this had come at the hands of the system. Of all the pains visited down upon Will during his adolescence, nothing compared to the torments Angie had put him through. Still kept putting him through, because it made a cruel kind of sense that they were all assembled here in this building with a pool of blood congealing around her latest victim.

Dale Harding was collateral damage. Will was always Angie’s primary target, the one she kept hitting again and again.

Was this finally the end of her?

‘It can’t-’ Will stopped. His eyes scanned the murder room. ‘She can’t be-’

Sara tried to push down her anger. This wasn’t just another one of Angie’s peevish grabs for attention. She could see Will making the same connections: the violent struggle, the life-threatening injury, the veritable lake of blood.

Wounded. Dangerous. Desperate.

Angie.

‘She-’ Will stopped again. ‘Maybe she’s-’ He slumped against the wall. His breathing was erratic. ‘Oh God. Oh Jesus.’ He put his hand to his mouth. ‘She can’t be-’ His voice cracked. ‘It’s her.’

‘We don’t know that.’ Sara tried to make her voice reassuring. She reminded herself that this wasn’t about Angie. This was about Will. Seeing him in so much pain was like a knife twisting in her chest. ‘Her gun could’ve been stolen, or-’

‘It’s her.’ He turned his back to them and walked a few feet away, but not before Sara saw the anguished expression on his face. She felt overwhelmed by her own uselessness. Angie was someone they both desperately wanted to be rid of, but not like this. At least not that Sara would ever say aloud. She had to admit that she had always known that Angie would never gracefully bow out. Even in death-or near-death-she had found a way to drag Will down with her.

Amanda asked, ‘Charlie, what’s the address on the registration?’

‘The same as on her driver’s license.’ Charlie looked at the screen on his phone. ‘Ninety-eight-’

‘Baker,’ Will interrupted, still not turning around. ‘That’s her old address. What about the phone number?’

Charlie read off a number, and Will shook his head. ‘Disconnected.’

Amanda asked Will, ‘Do you know where she is?’

He shook his head again.

‘When did you last see her?’

Will paused a moment before answering, ‘Saturday.’

Sara felt the knife in her chest make a final, violent twist. ‘Saturday?’

They had slept over at his house. They had made love. Twice. Then Will had told Sara he was going for a run and secretly met with his wife.

Sara’s mouth could barely form words. ‘You saw her two days ago?’

Will said nothing.

Amanda gave a quick, agitated sigh. ‘Do you have a phone number? A place of employment? Any means to get in touch with her?’

He shook his head to every question.

Sara stared at his back, his broad shoulders that she had wrapped her arms around. His neck that she had kissed. His thick dirty-blond hair that she’d run her fingers through. Tears welled into her eyes. Had he been seeing Angie all this time? All of those late nights at work. All of those early meetings. All of those two-hour runs and pick-up games of basketball.

‘All right.’ Amanda clapped her hands for attention. Her voice was raised to fill the building. ‘Crime scene people, take a fifteen-minute break. Get hydrated. Sit in the air conditioning.’

There was a groan of appreciation as the white-suited techs made their way toward the exits. They would probably start gossiping as soon as they were outside.

Sara wiped her eyes before her tears could fall. She was at work. She had to focus on what was in front of her, what she could control. She told Amanda, ‘We can do blood typing in the mobile lab. Results are almost instantaneous.’ She tried in vain to swallow the lump in her throat. ‘It’s not DNA, but we can use ABO typing as a rule-out against Angie. Or as a rule-in, depending what her blood type is.’ She had to stop to swallow again. She couldn’t tell if she was making any sense. ‘We can establish a loose narrative. Does the blood type from the spatter on the stairs match the type of the bloody footprints that go toward the room? Do those samples match the blood type inside the room? Is it the same type as the arterial spray? The hand swipe?’ Sara pressed together her lips. How many times was she going to say the word type? Someone could turn it into a drinking game. ‘I’ll need Angie’s blood type. And we’ll need to backstop all of this with DNA. But the blood typing could at least tell us something.’

Amanda gave a curt nod. ‘Do it. Angie was a cop for ten years. I’ll pull the blood info from her file.’ She sounded uncharacteristically flustered. ‘Faith, hit the phones. We need a current address, phone, employer, anything you can find. Collier, yours and Ng’s orders haven’t changed. I want you to get teams to search the ware-’

‘I’ll do it.’ Will started toward the lift, but Amanda clamped her hand down on his arm, stopping him cold.

‘Stay here.’ He tried to pull away, but her fingernails dug into his shirtsleeve. ‘That’s an order.’

‘She could be-’

‘I know what she could be, but you’re going to stay here and answer my questions. Is that understood?’

Collier coughed into his hand, like the teacher was scolding a student. Faith slapped his arm to shut him up.

Amanda said, ‘Charlie, take Collier and Faith downstairs, then come back up for me.’

Faith squeezed Sara’s hand as she walked by. They had a rule that they never discussed Will except in general terms. Sara had never wanted to break that rule more badly than she did right now.

‘Amanda.’ Will didn’t wait for the audience to leave. ‘I can’t just-’

Amanda held up a finger to silence him. At least someone was worried about Sara being humiliated. Again.

Saturday.

Two days ago.

She’d had no idea Will was keeping something from her. What else had she missed? Sara tried to scan back over the last few weeks. Will hadn’t been acting strange. If anything, he had been more attentive, even romantic, which could’ve been the biggest sign of all.

‘Amanda,’ Will tried again, his voice lowered as he struggled to sound reasonable. ‘You heard what Sara said. Angie could be bleeding to death. She might have a few hours before…’ His words trailed off. They all knew what would happen if Angie didn’t get help. ‘I have to look for her. I’m the only one who knows the kinds of places she’d hide.’

Amanda gave Will one of her steely glares. ‘I swear on my life, Wilbur, if you take one step off this balcony, I’ll have you in handcuffs before you see sunshine.’

His eyes burned with hatred. ‘I’ll never forgive you for this.’

Amanda made a show of pulling out her phone. ‘Add it to the list.’

Will turned his back to her. His gaze skipped over Sara. Instead of speaking to her, or even acknowledging what was happening, he walked back toward the stairs. Sara expected him to go down anyway, but he turned back around, pacing the length of the balcony like a caged leopard. His teeth were so tightly gritted that Sara could see his jawbone working. His fists were clenched. He stopped again at the top of the stairs, shook his head, mumbled something under his breath.

Sara could read the word on his lips. Not an apology. Not an explanation.

Angie.

He didn’t love Angie. At least not as a husband. At least not according to what he had told Sara. For almost a full year, Will had been searching for his wife in order to file divorce papers. Their marriage was a scam anyway, something they had literally done on a dare. Will had promised Sara that he was doing everything possible to end it. She had never once questioned how a special agent with the Georgia Bureau of Investigation was unable to find a woman who was apparently right in front of his face as recently as two days ago.

Had he met her at a restaurant? A hotel? Sara felt her tears threatening to return. Had he been with Angie this entire time? Had he played Sara for a fool?

‘All right.’ Amanda had waited until the lift settled on the ground floor. ‘Saturday. Where did you see Angie?’

Slowly Will turned around. He crossed his arms. He looked somewhere over Amanda’s head. ‘Outside my house. Parked on the street.’ He paused, and Sara hoped he was remembering what she had done to him before he left, because it was never going to happen again. ‘I was heading out for a run, and I saw her car. It’s a Chevy Monte Carlo SS, eighty-eight, black with-’

‘Red stripes. I’ve already put out a five-state APB.’ Amanda asked Will the question that was burning in Sara’s mind. ‘Why was she at your house?’

He shook his head. ‘I don’t know. She saw me and she got back into her car and-’

‘She didn’t speak to you?’

‘No.’

‘She didn’t go inside?’

‘No.’ He caught himself. ‘Not that I know of. But she lets herself in sometimes.’

Sara looked down at the evidence bags Faith had left on the ground.

The lipstick.

Sisley rose cashmere with a scratch down the side of the case. There was no manufacturing defect. This was Sara’s lipstick. She had left it at Will’s last month. In his bathroom. On the sink basin. They had gone out to dinner, and when she had looked for it later, it was nowhere to be found.

In Angie’s purse. In her hand. Between her fingers. On her mouth.

Sara felt nauseated.

Amanda asked Will, ‘Do you know why she was parked outside your house?’

He shook his head. ‘No.’

Sara struggled to find her voice. ‘Did she leave a note on my car?’

‘No,’ Will said, but how could Sara trust him? They had gone to breakfast after his run. They had spent the day on the couch together and ordered pizza and fooled around and he’d had a million opportunities to tell her that the woman he had spent a year trying to locate had been parked outside his house that very morning. It’s not like Sara would have been angry. Irritated, maybe, but not at Will. She never blamed him for Angie’s bullshit. He knew that because Angie had caused problems for both of them countless times before.

Which meant that the only reason for Will to hide the visit was because there was more to the story. Like that Angie had been inside his house. Like that she had stolen Sara’s lipstick. What else was Sara missing? Some hair combs. A bottle of perfume. Sara had blamed herself for misplacing things between her apartment and Will’s house, never once considering that Angie was stealing from her.

And that Will knew.

Amanda said, ‘Walk me through it. You come out your front door. You see Angie inside her parked car.’

‘Standing beside it.’ Will spoke carefully, as if he needed to think before he answered. ‘She saw me, knew that I’d seen her, but she got into her car and-’ He glanced down at the evidence bags. The Chevy ignition key. The old kind that might fit an ’88 Monte Carlo.

He said, ‘I ran after the car, but she drove off.’

Sara tried to block out the image of Will chasing Angie down the street.

Amanda turned to Sara. ‘What note were you asking about?’

She shrugged, like it was nothing, but it was everything. ‘Sometimes she leaves notes on my car. They say what you’d expect.’

‘Recently?’

‘The last one was three weeks ago.’ Sara was working her last shift as a pediatrician at Grady Hospital. A four-year-old had mistaken a bag of crystal meth for candy. The boy was in full cardiac arrest when the paramedics brought him in. She had tried for hours to save him. Nothing had worked. And then she had gone out to her car and found the words FUCKING WHORE written in dark eyeliner on her windshield.

There was no question the missive was from Will’s wife. Angie had a disjointed cursive with Fs that looked like Js and Es that resembled backward 3s. The two letters appeared in just about every note she’d ever left, starting a year ago, the morning after the first night Will had spent at Sara’s apartment.

Amanda asked Will, ‘Angie never left notes for you?’

Will rubbed the side of his jaw. ‘She wouldn’t do that.’

Sara looked down at the ground. He knew her so well.

‘All right.’ Amanda sounded even more flustered than before. ‘I’ll give the two of you five minutes to talk, then you’re back to work.’

‘No.’ Will almost shouted the word. ‘I need to look for Angie. You’ve got to let me look for her.’

‘And what happens if you find her dead body, Will? Your ex-wife you’ve been trying to divorce so you can be with your new girlfriend? And the medical examiner in charge of the crime scene just happens to be said new girlfriend? And your partner and your boss are working the case, too? How’s that going to read in the paper? Or do you need me to read it for you?’

Sara could tell from Will’s expression that he hadn’t considered any of this.

Amanda continued, ‘Your wife murdered-or didn’t murder, according to your girlfriend-a cop who was on Kip Kilpatrick’s payroll, in the service of Marcus Rippy, who you’ve just harassed with a false rape charge for the last seven months, and oh, by the way, this same wife was stalking your girlfriend.’ She had her hands on her hips. ‘Does that sound about right to you?’

‘I just want to find her.’

‘I know you do, but you’re going to have to let me handle this.’ Amanda told Sara, ‘Five minutes.’ Her low heels made a snapping sound as she walked toward the lift. Sara hadn’t even heard Charlie bring the platform back up.

Will opened his mouth to speak, but Sara stopped him.

‘This way,’ she said, indicating that they should move away from the murder room. No matter how Dale Harding had lived, he deserved some respect in death.

Will’s Tyveked feet shuffled across the floor. His shoulders were slumped, giving him the air of a kid being taken to the woodshed. He stopped behind the stack of Sheetrock. He rubbed his face with both hands, wiping off any expression.

Sara stood in front of him. She waited for him to say something-anything. That he was sorry he had lied or that he was sad or angry or that he loved her and they would get through this or that he never wanted to see her again.

He said nothing.

He stared over her shoulder at the space where the lift would return. His fists were still clenched. His body was coiled, ready to leap the second the platform was in sight.

‘I’m not keeping you here.’ Sara felt the words catch in her throat. Her tone tended to go soft when she was angry. She could barely raise her voice above a whisper. ‘You can go over there and wait. I’ve got plenty of work to do.’

Will didn’t move. They both knew Charlie wouldn’t return until their five minutes was up. ‘What do you want me to say?’

Her heart was pounding. Her mouth had gone dry. He sounded angry. He had no right to be angry. ‘Why didn’t you tell me that you saw her?’

‘I didn’t want to upset you.’

‘Usually when people say that, what they really mean is they didn’t have the guts to be honest.’

He gave a laugh that flipped a switch inside of her.

Sara had never wanted to slap him so badly in her life.

‘Look at me.’

His reluctance was palpable, but he finally looked at her.

‘You know she took my lipstick. That she went through my things.’ Sara felt her tears return, this time from anger. Everything started to unwind from the lipstick, because Angie wasn’t the type of person who stopped at just one violation. Sara thought about all of the private things she had left at Will’s house. Picturing Angie finding them, touching them, made her sick with rage. ‘Do you think she broke into my apartment?’

‘I don’t know.’ He held out his hands in an open shrug, like none of this was his problem. ‘What do you want me to-’

‘Shut up.’ Sara’s throat strained around the words. ‘She went through my things. Our things.’

Will rubbed his jaw with his fingers. He glanced back at the balcony.

‘You changed the locks on your doors last year.’ At least Sara knew this was the truth. He’d given her a new key. She had seen the new deadbolts. ‘Did you give her a key, too?’

He shook his head.

‘How long have you known that she’s been breaking into your house?’

He shrugged.

‘Are you going to answer me?’

‘You told me to shut up.’

Sara tasted bile in her mouth. She had left her laptop at Will’s. Her entire life was on that thing-patient files, emails, her address book, her calendar, photographs. Had Angie guessed her password? Had she gone through Sara’s overnight bag? Had she worn Sara’s clothes? What else had she stolen?

‘Look,’ Will said. ‘I’m not even sure she was in the house. It’s just that sometimes stuff was moved. Or maybe you moved it. Or I did. Or-’

‘Really? That’s what you thought?’ Will was congenitally tidy. He always put everything back in its place, and Sara was careful to do the same when she was in his house. ‘Why didn’t you change the locks again?’

‘For what? Do you think it’s that easy to stop her? That I can actually control her?’ He sounded baffled by the question, and maybe he was, because as stubborn as Will could be, as strong as he was, Angie was always the one who dictated the terms of their relationship. She was like an older sister who wanted to protect him. Like a twisted lover who used sex to control him. Like a hateful wife who didn’t want to be married, but didn’t want to let him go. Angie loved him. She hated him. She needed him. She disappeared, sometimes for days, sometimes for weeks, months, more than once for a full year. That she always came back had been the only constant in Will’s life for almost three decades.

Sara asked, ‘Have you really been looking for her?’

‘I showed you the divorce papers.’

‘Is that a yes?’

There was a flicker of anger in his eyes. ‘Yes.’

‘Have you seen her before without telling me?’ A bitter panic filled her mouth. ‘Have you been with her?’

The anger glowed white-hot, as if she had no right to ask the question. ‘No, Sara. I haven’t been fucking her behind your back.’

Was he telling the truth? Could she trust what he was saying? Sara had upended her life for this man. She had silenced her gut instinct. She had compromised her morals. She had taken this job. She had made a complete fool of herself in front of everyone she worked with. Not to mention what her family would think, because there was no way to hide this awfulness from them without turning herself into a bigger liar than Will.

He asked, ‘Do you think she’s still alive?’

‘I don’t know.’ The truth had the benefit of a cruel uncertainty.

Will looked at his watch. He was actually timing this, waiting for the second the lift came back up so he could jump on his white horse and save Angie yet again.

They had looked at open houses yesterday, the day after he’d seen his wife. They were out for a walk, and they had joked that lookie-looing air-conditioned houses was a good excuse to get out of the heat. Unbidden, Sara had found herself thinking about coming down that particular set of stairs to kiss Will hello or planting flowers in that yard while Will cut the grass or standing in that kitchen eating late-night ice cream with Will when what she should’ve really been thinking about was what kind of lock she should put on her fucking bedside drawer.

‘Christ.’ Sara covered her face with both hands. She wanted to wash herself with lye.

‘She wouldn’t give up.’ Will picked at his eyebrow, a nervous tic Sara had noticed the first time they’d met. ‘Angie. She wouldn’t give up. Even if she was hurt.’

Sara didn’t respond, but he was right. Angie was a cockroach. She left disease wherever she went and nothing could destroy her.

Will said, ‘Her car isn’t here. But her key is. But she could have another one. A key.’ He dropped his hand. ‘She was a cop. She was the toughest girl at the home. Tougher than the boys. Tougher than me, sometimes. She knows how to handle herself. She has people, a network, who would help her if she was in trouble. If she was hurt.’

Every word he said was like a dagger.

‘Right?’ Will said. ‘If anyone could survive this, it’s Angie?’

Sara shook her head. She couldn’t have this conversation. ‘What am I supposed to do here, Will? Reassure you? Comfort you? Tell you it’s okay that you deceived me? That you knew she was violating my privacy-our privacy-but you let it happen anyway?’ Sara put her hand over her mouth, because sounding shrill would not get them through this. ‘I know that part of you will always have feelings for her. She’s been an important part of your life for almost thirty years. I accept that. I understand that you are connected to her because of what you survived, but you and I are together. At least I thought we were. I need you to be honest with me.’

Will shook his head as if this was a simple misunderstanding. ‘I am being honest. She was parked on the street. We didn’t talk. I guess I should’ve told you.’

Sara bit down hard on the guess.

Again he glanced back at the opening where the lift would come. ‘It’s been longer than five minutes.’

‘Will.’ What little remained of her pride drained away. ‘Please. Just tell me what you want me to do. Please.’ Sara grabbed his hand before she could stop herself. She couldn’t stand the feeling that he was slipping away. ‘Should I give you some time? If that’s what you need, just tell me.’

He looked down at their hands.

‘Talk to me. Please.’

His thumb stroked the back of her fingers. Was he trying to think of a way to leave her? Was there more that he hadn’t confessed?

She felt her heart start to shake in her chest. ‘If you need to work through this alone, then tell me. I can take it. Just tell me what you want me to do.’

He kept stroking her hand. Sara remembered the first time Will had touched her like this. They were in the basement of the hospital. The feel of his skin against hers had set off an explosion inside of her body. Her heart had fluttered in her chest the same way it was fluttering now. Except that time, she was filled with hope. Now, she was flooded with dread.

‘Will?’

He cleared his throat. He tightened his grip on her hand. She held her breath as she waited for his words, wondering if this was the end of their relationship or just another giant mountain they had to scale.

He said, ‘Can you pick up Betty?’

Sara’s brain couldn’t process the request. ‘What?’

‘She’s at the vet and…’ He took a stuttered breath. He held on tight to her hand. ‘I don’t know how late I’ll be. Can you pick her up?’

Sara felt her mouth open, then close, then open again.

‘They told me she would…’ He paused. She saw his Adam’s apple work as he swallowed. ‘They said to come at five, but maybe you can call to see if you can pick her up earlier, because they said she’d be finished by noon, but the anesthesia-’

‘Yes.’ Sara didn’t know what else to do but relent. ‘I’ll take care of her.’

He let out a long, slow breath, as if figuring out what to do with Betty was the most difficult part of this conversation. ‘Thank you.’

Charlie Reed came up the stairs, his footsteps unnaturally heavy to announce his arrival. He carried two heavy-looking duffel bags, one in each hand.

He told them, ‘Stairs are cleared, so no more deathtrap elevator.’ His mouth went into a tight smile under his handlebar mustache. ‘Will, Amanda’s waiting in the car.’

Will’s hand slipped from Sara’s. He took the stairs two at a time, sidestepping Charlie as he made a quick descent.

Sara stared after him, not sure what had just happened or how she was supposed to feel about it. She pressed her hand to her chest to make sure that her heart was still beating. The quick taps were the same as if she’d just run a marathon.

‘Goodness.’ Charlie had reached the top of the stairs. He dropped both the duffels. He clasped his hands together as he walked toward Sara. ‘I’m trying to think about how to make this more uncomfortable. Should I take off my pants? Burst into song?’

Sara tried to laugh, but it came out sounding more like a cry. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘Don’t apologize to me.’ Charlie’s smile was genuinely kind. He pulled a bottle of water out of one of the many pockets in his cargo pants. ‘You need to drink all of this. It’s officially eleventy billion degrees in here.’

Sara made herself smile because he was trying.

‘Option one,’ Charlie began. ‘Daytime drinking. It has its pros and cons.’

Sara could only think of the pros. She hadn’t had an alcoholic beverage in over a year. Will hated the taste. ‘Option two?’

He indicated the building, which was still an active crime scene.

‘The drinking is tempting,’ Sara told him, feeling every single word to her core. ‘But let’s talk about what we need to do. Harding’s body can be removed. We’ll need at least four people.’

‘I asked for six because of the stairs. ETA is forty minutes out.’

Sara looked at her watch. Her eyes blurred. She could only guess at the time. ‘They’ll need a few hours to do the prep. I’ll start the autopsy after lunch.’ Betty’s vet would not release her before five, especially to Sara. The man had a chip on his shoulder about not being a people doctor. ‘I guess the ABO testing is at the top of my list. Do we have Angie’s blood type yet?’

‘Amanda said she’d text it to you as soon as she finds out. Meanwhile, I’ve asked one of the techs to collect samples from the blood. He’ll probably take about half an hour. As you can see, the walls are practically black with graffiti, so I told him to just collect what’s visible and triple-check his labels. He’s slow, but thorough.’ Charlie paused for a breath. ‘Until then, you can help me set up the black lights and photograph the luminol reactions, or you can sit in the coolness of the crime scene van and wait for the samples so you can work your magic.’

Sara longed to be alone in the van, but she said, ‘I’ll help you.’ She took a mouthful of water. Her stomach roiled at the cold liquid. It was the lipstick. She couldn’t get her mind off Angie standing at the mirror in Will’s bathroom, testing Sara’s make-up, taking what she wanted. That’s what Angie Polaski did. She took things that belonged to other people.

Charlie asked, ‘You okay?’

‘Absolutely.’ Sara carefully screwed the cap back on the water bottle. She asked Charlie, ‘What else?’

‘We’re still cataloging evidence. That should take three, maybe four days. Harding’s car has cooled down enough to process, though I doubt we’ll find much. The thing is toast.’ He turned around as a tech made his way up the stairs. The young man was dressed in a hoodless Tyvek suit. He wore a hairnet, his ponytail sticking out like an arrow at the back of his head. There was an ornate red and blue cross tattooed on the side of his neck. His chin showed a smattering of a goatee and his eyebrow was pierced.

Charlie provided, ‘Gary Quintana. He came straight to us from tech school. Super smart, really wants to learn. Don’t let his crazy look fool you. He does foster care for rescue cats. And he’s a vegan.’

Sara smiled and nodded as if she was actually following what Charlie was saying. She could feel her heart pulsing inside her throat. Her stomach had turned sour. She prayed she would not get sick.

Charlie clasped his hands together. ‘So I’ve got all my fancy camera equipment and lights and-’

‘I’m sorry,’ Sara interrupted. She put her hand to her chest again, certain that Charlie could see her heart pounding underneath. ‘Do you mind if I have a minute?’

‘Absolutely. I’ll start setting up in the first room. Just pop in when you’re ready.’

Sara could barely choke out a thank-you. She walked across the balcony toward the far set of stairs. She passed the room where Dale Harding had died, feeling like she’d committed the worst kind of sin for letting her life melt down when the man was lying dead. She stopped in front of the rainbow-eyed unicorn at the top of the stairs. Her stomach pitched like a tiny ship in the middle of an ocean. Sara closed her eyes. She waited out the nausea. Then she took out her iPhone because it offered the only socially acceptable excuse to stand silently with her head bent down.

There was a text from her sister. Tessa was a missionary in South Africa. She’d sent a photo of her daughter building a mud castle with help from some of the local kids.

Sara pulled up the keyboard. She typed, ANGIE IS BACK, but didn’t send the text. She stared at the words. She deleted the last two and wrote: ANGIE MIGHT BE DEAD. Her thumb hovered over ‘send’, but she couldn’t press it.

Sara had testified at several murder trials where phone data came into play. She envisioned herself on the witness stand explaining to a jury why her little sister had sent back a smiley face at the news that Will’s wife might be dead. She deleted the unsent text and stared at the photo of her niece until her stomach settled and she didn’t feel like flinging herself down the stairs anymore.

Sara had never fully understood Will and Angie’s screwed-up relationship. It was something she’d come to accept as one of those things you tolerated when you were in love with someone, like the fact that he refused to eat vegetables or that he was completely blind to the toilet paper roll being empty. Angie was an addiction. She was a disease.

Everybody had a past.

Sara had been married before. She had been deeply, irrevocably in love with a man with whom she would’ve happily spent the rest of her life. But he had died, and she had forced herself to move on. Eventually. Slowly. She had left the small town where she grew up. Left her family. Left everything she had ever known to move to Atlanta and start over. And then Will had come along.

Had it been love at first sight? Meeting Will was more like an awakening. At the time, Sara had been a widow for three years. She was working double shifts at Grady Hospital, going home, then going back to work, and that was her life. And then Will had walked into the emergency room. Sara had felt something stir deep inside of her, like a winter flower poking its head out of the snow. He was handsome. He was smart. He was funny. He was also very, very complicated. Will would be the first to admit that he had enough baggage to fill every airplane in the sky. And Angie was only part of it.

For most of her professional life, Sara had worked as either a pediatrician or a medical examiner. Between the two jobs, she had seen the countless reprehensible ways that people took out their rage on children. Not until Will did she truly understand what happened when these abused kids grew up. Will’s scars were both emotional and physical. He didn’t trust people-at least not enough. Getting him to talk about his feelings was like pulling teeth. Actually, getting him to talk about anything of true importance was like pulling the Titanic through quicksand. With a shoestring.

They had been together for three months before he would even acknowledge the scars on his body. Almost a year passed before he told Sara some of the causes, but not the details, and certainly not the emotions behind them. She had learned to take his cue and not ask questions. She ran her hands along his back and pretended the perfect square imprint from a belt buckle was not there. She kissed his mouth and ignored the scar where his lip had been busted into two pieces. She only bought him long-sleeved shirts because she knew that he didn’t want anyone to see where he’d taken a razor to his forearm.

For Angie.

He had tried to kill himself for Angie. Not because she rejected him, but because as kids, they were both placed in a foster home with a man who would not keep his hands off Angie. She had cried wolf before. She wasn’t the kind of girl the police listened to. At fourteen, she already had a record. So Will had taken a razor blade and cut open his forearm in a six-inch line up from his wrist because he knew that an emergency room visit was the one thing they couldn’t ignore.

This wasn’t the first or last time he had risked his life for Angie Polaski. It had taken Will years to break the hold she had over him. But was that hold really broken? Was he just understandably upset that someone he’d known for almost the entirety of his life was probably dead?

Sara could not stop going back to the lipstick. That’s all she could focus on, because the additional violations the lipstick signified were too much to handle. Will knew that Angie was breaking into his house. He could lay down his life for her, but he couldn’t be bothered to protect Sara’s privacy.

She shook her head. At least she knew where she fell on his list of priorities: right behind Betty.

Sara put her phone back in her pocket. She unhooked her glasses from her collar. The lenses were smeared. The building was insufferably hot. Everything was covered in sweat. She found a tissue in her pocket and rubbed the lenses with purpose.

She supposed one good thing about picking up Betty was that Will would eventually have to come by and get her. Which was ludicrous. Why had Sara given him so much power? She was a grown woman. She shouldn’t feel like she was waiting for some boy to check yes or no on a note that she had slipped inside his locker.

Sara checked the lenses. She squinted at a smudge, about to curse herself for ruining another pair of glasses when she realized the smudge was not on the lens. It was on the unicorn behind it.

She slid on her glasses. She took a closer look. The unicorn was life-sized, if you could assume a unicorn was the same size as a horse. His head was tilted slightly as he gazed down the stairs. The creature’s rainbow eye was about her shoulder height. Centered on the green and blue stripe in his iris was a hole that was around the size of a dime. Specks of gray concrete were chipped out, which is what she had taken for a smudge on her lens. Sara looked down at the ground. Concrete dust covered cigarette butts and crack pipes. The dust had fallen recently.

‘Charlie?’ she called.

He poked his head out of one of the rooms. ‘Yes?’

‘Can you come over here with your camera and some tweezers?’

‘That’s the most interesting proposition I’ve had all week.’ He went back into the room and came out with his camera in one hand and a CSU kit in the other.

Sara pointed to the unicorn’s eye. ‘Here.’

Charlie shuddered. ‘Two things that have always freaked me out: unicorns and eyeballs.’ He took a magnifying glass from the kit and leaned in for a better look. ‘Oh, I see. Excellent catch.’

Sara stood by while Charlie photographed the pierced eye, using a small metal ruler to capture scale. He did the same with the dust below the unicorn, then changed lenses to get a wider view. When he’d finally documented the creature, he handed Sara a pair of needle-nose tweezers. ‘You do the honors.’

Sara was mindful that she could do a lot more harm than good if she didn’t take her time. She was also mindful that she had never lost a game of Operation. She rested the heel of her hand just below the unicorn’s eye. She opened the tweezers just wide enough to still clear the sides of the hole in the iris. Slowly she inserted the blades until she felt something solid. Instead of opening the tweezers, she narrowed them, fairly certain that there would be something to grip. She was right. The tip of the blades caught the flattened rim of what turned out to be a hollow-point bullet.

Charlie said, ‘They shoot unicorns, don’t they?’

Sara smiled. ‘Thirty-eight special?’

‘Looks like it.’ Charlie told her, ‘The G43 was unfired. The clip and chamber had nine-mill American Eagle, full metal jackets.’ Charlie’s mustache twisted to the side in thought. ‘This could be from a revolver.’

‘Could be,’ Sara agreed. A cop of Dale Harding’s age might prefer a revolver to a nine-millimeter. ‘You haven’t found another gun?’

‘Maybe it melted in his car. I’ll let the techs know to look for it.’

Sara sniffed the spent cartridge, picking up the lingering odors of sawdust, graphite and nitroglycerine. ‘Smells recent.’

Charlie took a sniff. ‘I think so. No blood, though.’

‘The bullet would’ve been hot enough to cauterize any bleeding as it went through the body, but there could be microscopic traces.’

‘Kastle-Meyer?’

Sara shook her head. The field blood test was known for false positives. ‘We should let the lab do a wash. I’d hate to be told we used the only viable sample and they can’t test for DNA.’

‘Excellent point.’ Charlie looked down at the floor. ‘I’m no doctor, but if the bullet hit anything big, like an artery, we’d be able to see blood somewhere in this area.’

‘Agreed.’ Sara found a small plastic evidence bag in the CSU kit. Charlie took over the labeling because his handwriting was better.

He said, ‘Just so you know, Amanda authorized rushes on everything, including the DNA.’

‘Twenty-four hours is better than two months.’ Sara studied the bullet hole in the unicorn’s eye. ‘Does this hole look more oval to you?’

‘I saw that when I was taking pictures. We’ll call in the computer geeks to do a rendering, calculate the trajectory, velocity, angles. I’ll let them know about the rush. We should have something back in a few days.’

Sara took a Sharpie pen out of the CSU kit and slid it into the hole. The clipped cap pointed back toward the balcony at a slight angle. ‘Do you have two levels and some string?’

Charlie laughed. ‘You’re a regular MacGyver.’

Sara waited for Charlie to retrieve a ball of string from one of the duffel bags. He tied it to the end of the Sharpie. He took his phone out of his pocket and pulled up a spirit level app.

‘Oh, good thinking.’ Sara pulled out her iPhone. She thumbed through her apps until she found the level. ‘The other side of the balcony is how many yards?’

‘Twenty-eight.’

Sara said, ‘An airborne projectile is subject to the forces of air resistance, wind and gravity.’

‘No wind inside of here. Resistance would be negligible at this distance.’

‘Which leaves gravity.’ Sara placed her phone on top of the Sharpie. The app showed an old-fashioned Stanley level with a digital number below the bubble. ‘I’ve got seven-point-six degrees.’ She placed the phone against the side of the pen for the second reading. The number kept jumping up and down. ‘Let’s call it thirty-two.’

‘Fantastic.’ Charlie started walking backward, rolling out the string, keeping the line tight. Occasionally he stopped and checked the level on his phone against the top and side of the string to make sure he was still on target. As long as he kept the angles consistent, the string would roughly indicate the point at which the bullet had left the muzzle of the gun.

Charlie glanced behind him as he walked, stepping around yellow plastic markers. His hand was too high to reasonably assume an average person had held a gun and fired it from that level. He passed the murder room, the stacked drywall. His hand started to move lower. He didn’t stop until he was at the top of the stairs.

‘Wait.’ Sara looked at the level on her phone. ‘You’re pulling way left.’

‘I have a theory.’ Charlie went down one stair, then another. He looked back at Sara. The hand holding the ball of string went lower, then lower still. Sara kept the pen steady. The string had moved away from the balcony, tensing in the open air like a tightrope, until Charlie’s hand was at his ankle. He used the level to make an adjustment. His hand slid back until it was pressed against the wall. He checked the angles one last time. ‘This is the end of the line, as it were.’

Sara studied the path of the string. Charlie’s theory was as good as any. Whoever had fired the gun would’ve been standing somewhere on the stairs. Or not standing. Charlie’s hand was low, about three inches away from the tread. Two stairs down was the impact point where the woman-likely Angie-had hit the back of her head.

Sara said, ‘They struggled for the gun there.’

‘Angie and Harding.’ Charlie picked up her train of thought. ‘Angie has a gun. She’s running up the stairs. Harding grabs her, bangs the back of her head against the tread. She sees tweety birds. He reaches for the gun. Maybe he bangs the back of her hand into the concrete and she squeezes off a shot.’

‘Angie is right-handed.’ Sara hated that she knew this. ‘If she was on her back, for your theory to work, the gun would have to be in her left hand, which means the bullet would be on that side of the stairs, not here.’

‘She could’ve twisted to her side?’

Sara shrugged, because there weren’t a lot of absolutes considering they were using a ball of string and a free app.

‘Let’s think about this.’ Charlie started rolling up the string. ‘Angie is running away from Harding, revolver in her hand because her Glock somehow got jammed out in the parking lot. She’s almost at the top of the stairs. Harding catches her. The gun goes off. Angie gets away. She goes to the room. Shuts the door. To be continued.’ He held up his finger. ‘Problem is, how would the gun go off? A cop wouldn’t have her finger on the trigger while she ran up the stairs. They’re trained out the wazoo that you rest your finger on the guard until you’re ready to shoot. You don’t unlearn that when you take off your badge.’

‘The footprints bother me,’ Sara said. ‘Why would her feet be bloody by the time she gets up the stairs?’

‘No shoes?’ Charlie guessed. ‘There’s a ton of broken glass down there, some of it covered with blood. Which reminds me, we found a small amount of dried blood on the floor downstairs. Looks like a bad nosebleed.’

‘That could fit with the drug paraphernalia, but we should take a sample anyway.’

‘Excuse me, sir.’ Gary, the cat-rescuing tech, walked up behind Charlie. ‘I couldn’t help but overhearing, and I was wondering about the struggle for the gun. Like, if she was twisted on her side when they struggled on the stairs, wouldn’t the muzzle of the gun be pointing up, more toward the ceiling?’ He tried to approximate the pose, hands in the air like Farrah Fawcett in a TV show that had been off the air for years before he was born.

‘More like this,’ Charlie said, striking his own pose. ‘And then the gun could turn this way…’ He tilted his hand. ‘I look like a Heisman Trophy, don’t I?’

Sara’s laugh was more genuine this time, because they both looked ridiculous. ‘Maybe we should get the computer geeks in here.’

Gary picked up a tray of vials. ‘I took samples from everywhere I saw blood. I also swabbed the trickle of blood on Harding’s neck. Dr Linton, do you mind if I watch you type the blood? I’ve never seen it done before.’

Sara suddenly felt ancient. Forget Farrah Fawcett. Gary had likely been in diapers when O.J. Simpson’s lawyers had educated America about DNA. ‘I’d be happy to.’

Gary practically skipped down the stairs. Sara followed at a more careful pace. She tried not to think about earlier when she’d glanced over at Will working the scissor lift. The funny way he’d seethed at Collier for checking her out, as if Sara would ever give another man the time of day.

She asked Gary, ‘What do you know about blood types?’

‘There are four main groups,’ he answered. ‘A, B, AB and O.’

‘Correct. For the most part, all humans belong to one of those groups, which are based on genetically determined antigens that attach to red blood cells. The ABO test determines whether or not the antigen is present by using a reagent that agglutinates when it comes into contact with the blood.’

‘Yes, ma’am.’ Gary looked lost. ‘Thank you.’

She tried again. ‘You basically drop blood on a pre-prepared card, mix it around, and it tells you what the type is.’

‘Oh.’ He took the clipboard from the cop standing inside the doorway and signed out. ‘That’s cool.’

He opened the door. Sara was blinded by a blast of sunlight, so she couldn’t tell if Gary was really interested or just being polite. She scribbled her signature below his. Her eyes took their time adjusting as they walked across the parking lot. Gary took off his hairnet and tightened the band around his ponytail. He had already unzipped his Tyvek suit. His navy-blue GBI T-shirt had the sleeves tightly rolled up to his shoulders. More tattoos covered his arms. He wore a thick gold necklace with a medallion that caught the sunlight like a mirror.

She glanced around the parking lot and adjacent buildings, telling herself that she wasn’t looking for Will or even Amanda, but still feeling disappointed when she didn’t find either. Sara looked down at her phone to see if Amanda had sent her Angie’s blood type. She hadn’t yet, which was strange. Amanda was usually quick. Sara touched her finger to the phone icon. This would be a legitimate reason to call. She could ask Amanda about Angie’s records and then casually question whether there was anything else going on, like had Will found Angie and carried her in his arms all the way to the hospital.

Sara returned her phone to her pocket.

She looked up, then quickly back down again. The sun was shining straight into her eyes. She guessed it was around ten o’clock, if she was remembering her Girl Scout training. The sunlight was so unrelenting that it brought tears into her eyes. She had to keep her gaze down as she made her way past Harding’s burned-out Kia. The car was being thoroughly examined by two techs who were on their knees with magnifying glasses. The blackened frame had only slightly cooled down. Sara could still feel the heat radiating off the metal as she walked by.

The GBI’s Department of Forensic Sciences mobile lab had been created inside a limousine bus that had been confiscated from a guy running a Medicare fraud. The seating had been torn out to accommodate a long desk with banks of computers and storage for various collection kits and evidence bags. Most importantly, the air conditioning had been left intact. Sara almost fell to her knees in relief when the cool air touched her skin.

Gary put the tray of samples down on the desk. He pulled out a chair for Sara, then took his own. She tried not to stare at his necklace. The medallion read SLAM.

He asked, ‘Can you tell sex or race with the kit?’

She used a paper towel to wipe the sweat off her neck and face. ‘With sex, you’d need a DNA test for the presence or absence of a Y chromosome.’ She started searching the cubbies and drawers for the familiar EldonCard typing kits that she had ordered off Amazon because they were cheaper than the local supplier. ‘For race, you can fall back on statistics, but it’s not at all definitive. Caucasians have a relatively high number of As. Hispanics have a high number of Os. Asians and African Americans have a high number of Bs.’

‘What about people who are mixed race?’

She wondered if he was asking the question because of Angie. She had Mediterranean features-olive skin and luxuriant brown hair and a curvaceous figure. The only time Sara had stood beside Angie, she’d felt like the proverbial gawky, redheaded stepchild.

She told Gary, ‘Mixed race is a bit more complicated. Parents don’t always match their children’s blood type, but their alleles dictate the blood type. Two parents, type AB and type O, can have a child type A or B, but not O or AB. Two Os can only have an O, but nothing else.’

‘Wow.’ Gary scratched his goatee. ‘Most of the stuff they taught us about blood in school had to do with DNA. Collecting, processing. This is blowing my mind.’

Sara wasn’t sure whether or not he was being genuine. Nerds had it so much easier now. At Gary’s age, she’d stuck out like a sore distal phalange.

She offered, ‘I’ll do the first typing. You’ll do the second. I’ll make sure you have the hang of it and then you can do the others.’

‘Cool.’ He flashed a smile. ‘Thank you, Dr Linton.’

‘Sara.’ She sliced open the metal foil around the EldonCard. ‘This is the test card.’ She showed him the white index card with black print. At the top were four empty circles, or wells, each with a dot of reagent at their center. Beneath the circles were labels: ANTI-A, ANTI-B, ANTI-D, and a control.

‘Anti-D?’ Gary asked.

‘D tests for the Rh factor.’ Sara spared him another long lecture. ‘The absence or presence of rhesus gives you the positive or the negative after the blood type. So, if you see blood clotting in the A circle and blood clotting in the D, that means your blood type is A-positive. If there’s no clotting in the D, then it’s A-negative.’

‘Rhesus?’

She snapped on a pair of gloves. ‘It’s named after rhesus monkeys, because they were initially used to create the anti-serum for typing blood samples.’

‘Oh,’ Gary said. ‘Poor monkeys.’

Sara laid out some clean paper towels and emptied the kit onto the counter. She set aside the alcohol swab and lancet because they weren’t testing a live subject. She separated the four Eldon sticks-basically plastic Q-tips-and the tiny bottle of water that came with the kit. She told Gary, ‘Write on the card where the first sample came from.’

Gary took a pen from his pocket and wrote LEFT STAIR TWO IMPACT, then the address for the building, date and time. His gold medallion tapped against the desk. Sara assumed he hadn’t met Amanda yet. She had once slapped a ruler to the back of Will’s neck to make sure that his hair was the regulation one inch off his collar.

Sara put on her glasses. She laid the card flat on the paper towels. She squeezed a pin drop of water onto the four separate reagents in each circle. Gary opened one of the test vials, which contained a glob of tissue, probably scalp. Sara used a glass pipette to collect some blood. She dabbed the blood at the bottom of the control well. She used the Eldon stick to mix the blood and reagent inside the margins of the printed circle.

Gary said, ‘Would it be clotting already?’

‘Not the control. It should always look smooth.’ Sara dropped more blood onto the first circle, marked ANTI-A, and swirled it around with a fresh stick. Then she did the same for anti-B and -D. She told Gary, ‘Next, you turn the card on its side, hold for ten seconds, then upside down for ten seconds, and so on until you make a full revolution to mix the blood with the reagent.’

Gary said, ‘It looks like the B is clotting.’

He was right. There were patch-like red clumps inside the B circle.

‘There’s no clotting in the D circle,’ Gary said. ‘That means it’s B-negative, right?’

‘Correct,’ Sara told him. ‘Well done.’

‘Do we know the blood type for Mrs Trent?’

Sara felt the name like a punch to her throat. ‘She goes by Polaski.’

‘Oh, sorry. My bad.’

‘I haven’t received her blood type yet.’ Sara checked her phone to make sure a text hadn’t come in from Amanda. She wondered again if something had happened. Will had a habit of agreeing with Amanda, then doing whatever he wanted. Sara used to find that attractive.

Gary asked, ‘Is Mrs Polaski’s DNA on file from when she was a cop?’

Instead of telling him they could probably find an intact sample on Sara’s lipstick, she answered, ‘It’s unlikely unless she was a rule-out at a crime scene. She worked vice, so there probably wasn’t a need.’ Sara forced her thoughts to stay on the task at hand. ‘DNA is the gold standard, but the typing is a significant finding. B-negative is found in only two percent of Caucasians, one percent of African Americans and well under a half a percent in the remaining ethnic groups.’

‘Wow. Thank you. That there is some mad science, Dr Linton.’ Gary took out his pen and filled in the next card without being asked. His letters were neat capitals that easily fit in the square provided. LEFT STAIR BLOODY FOOTPRINT A.

He said, ‘So, the water first, right?’

‘Just a pin drop.’ She kept silent while Gary processed the next kit. He really was a fast learner. When he mixed the blood, his margins inside the circles were better than hers. He started to turn the card, holding it in place for ten seconds before turning it again, then again. As before, the blood clotted on B-negative.

She told him, ‘Type the sample from Harding’s neck.’

Gary had taken a swab because there wasn’t a lot of blood. He had to use a blade to cut the cotton tip into sections, then use water to free the blood. He went through the same steps with the card. This time, only the circle for D clotted. He asked, ‘Did I do something wrong?’

‘He’s O-positive, the most common blood type for Caucasians, but the important part is this makes Harding a definite rule-out for the footprint and the spatter on the stairs.’ She handed him another kit. ‘Let’s try the sample of blood from the room where Harding died.’

There was a loud knock on the door. Both Sara and Gary jumped at the noise.

‘Good Lord God.’ Charlie held up his camera as he climbed into the van and slid down to the floor. ‘I thought I was going to burst into flames inside that room.’ He closed his eyes and breathed the cold air for a few seconds.

Gary started the next kit. Sara handed Charlie a paper towel to wipe his face. He was soaked through with sweat. They would need to get some fans in the building before they continued. It was August. Even tonight when the sun set, the temperature would only dip a few degrees.

‘Okay.’ Charlie tossed the paper towel into the trashcan. ‘I’ve been activating the luminol inside the other rooms.’

Sara nodded. Luminol was activated by a black light that made the enzymes in blood glow an ethereal blue. The reaction lasted for a few seconds, and only happened once, which was why it was important to have a camera to record the process.

She asked Charlie, ‘Anything good?’

‘Oh yeah. I’ve got it right here.’ Charlie switched on the LED on the back of the camera and started toggling through the pictures. ‘By the way, I found some blood spray on the unicorn, which could mean the bullet went through somebody.’

‘A lot of spray or a little spray?’

‘More like a sneeze.’

‘That’s not enough to test with the EldonCard. We’ll have to go with DNA.’ For Gary’s sake, she added, ‘There’s no time stamp on blood. Could be some raver sneezed out some blood three months ago.’

Charlie said, ‘Nobody knows the trouble that unicorn has seen.’ His thumb worked the scroll on the camera. Rorschachs of bright blue spatters and splatters flashed across the LED.

‘Dr Linton?’ Gary held up the card he’d just processed. ‘More B-negative.’

Charlie asked him, ‘By any chance, did you take a sample from the second room from the left stair?’

‘Yes, sir.’ Gary checked the vials. ‘I found some blood on the floor, back right corner. And I triple-checked the label before I went to the next one, just like you said.’

‘Good boy.’ Charlie said, ‘Type it for me, please.’

Gary waited for Sara to give him the nod to proceed.

She asked Charlie, ‘What’s going on? Did you find something?’

‘Oh, I found something.’

Sara wasn’t one for cliffhangers, but she let Charlie have his fun. For the most part, forensic work was the least glamorous part of policing. It wasn’t like on television, where impeccably dressed, beautiful crime scene techs plucked clues from thin air, waved around guns, interrogated the bad guys, then carted them off to jail. Fifty percent of Charlie’s job was paperwork and the remaining fifty percent had his eye to either a camera or a microscope. He had probably found an unusual pattern of spatter on a ceiling, or the forensic Holy Grail: a viable fingerprint left in fresh blood.

‘There it is.’ Charlie sounded triumphant. He held out the camera so that Sara could see for herself.

The display showed the familiar chemiluminescence-bright glowing blue against the dark graffitied background, almost like an X-ray. Instead of an unusual blood pattern or a clear fingerprint, there were two words written in blood: HELP ME.

‘Dr Linton?’ Gary had finished the test card. ‘It says B-negative, just like the other two.’

Charlie verified, ‘Gary, you’re sure that blood was taken from the second room, which is where I found this note?’

‘Yes, sir. Positive. Triple positive.’

‘Sara?’ Charlie waited. ‘Did you get Angie’s blood type from Amanda yet?’

She couldn’t find it in herself to answer. Her eyes would not leave the glowing image on the camera. She stared at the two words, absorbing the familiar disjointed cursive like radiation into her brain.

Both of the Es were written like backward 3s.

Amanda opened the back door. She held out her hand for Charlie to help her into the van. Gary stood to offer his chair. Amanda took in his tattoos and gold chain and scowled. ‘Young man, wait for me outside.’

Gary quickly followed orders, gently clicking the door shut behind him.

Amanda sat in the vacated chair. She told Sara, ‘Will is searching the office building across the street.’ Her tone was accusatory, as if Sara could have stopped him. ‘The structural engineer said the whole damn thing is about to fall down, but Will wouldn’t listen. I can’t send anyone in after him without risking a lawsuit if the building collapses.’

Sara handed Amanda the camera.

‘What’s this?’ Amanda looked down at the screen. She stared at the words for a good long while. ‘You recognize the handwriting?’

Sara nodded. She had gotten so many nasty notes over the last year that she knew Angie’s handwriting almost better than her own.

Amanda said, ‘For now, let’s make sure this message goes no further than the three of us. Will doesn’t need anything else to set him off.’

Charlie said, ‘Yes, ma’am.’

Sara found she couldn’t answer.

Amanda said, ‘Records finally sent me Angie’s file.’ She let the camera rest in her lap. Her shoulders slumped. She seemed suddenly tired, older than her sixty-four years. ‘Please tell me that none of the blood you found is B-negative.’

THREE

The front doors to the office building had been chained shut, but the junkies had pulled the boards off a window. The door to the basement and the doors to the elevator shafts were a different beast. The metal had been welded to the jamb. This hadn’t put a damper on the party. The lobby was riddled with broken glass and pieces of steel from fractured desks and chairs. The building was old enough to be built from wood and not concrete. It was a wonder the thing hadn’t burned down. Fires had been started on the asbestos tile floors and the smoke had blackened the asbestos tile ceilings. Urine stained the walls. Everything of any value had been broken or carted off long ago. Even the copper wires had been stripped out of the walls.

The structure was ten stories, almost perfectly square. Will gathered that each of the floors was divided into twenty offices, ten on each side, with a long open cubicle area down the center and two bathrooms at the back. The layout was less like a maze and more like an Escher drawing. Some of the rooms had makeshift stairs built from stacked crates and desks that led to rotted holes in the ceilings. These wobbly stairs led to locked doors or smaller rooms on different floors that needed to be searched after he finished the one below. Will felt like a pinball banging from one side of the building to the other, up some creaky stacked crates, down some shifting stacked desks, prying open cabinets and lifting downed bookcases and kicking over piles of paperwork that had been left to rot for decades.

Angie.

He had to find Angie.

Amanda had wasted almost an hour of Will’s life, making him wait outside the governor’s office while she briefed the man on what little they had so far in the Dale Harding murder investigation. Will had spent the time convincing himself that she was right. He couldn’t look for Angie. He couldn’t be the one to find her. The press would latch onto the story and Will wouldn’t just see the end of his career, he would probably see the inside of a prison cell. He could ruin Amanda’s life in the process. Faith’s. Sara’s. The damage would be irreparable.

Unless he found Angie alive. Unless she was able to tell the story of what had really happened inside Rippy’s club.

That was when Will had walked outside the state capitol and hailed a cab.

Forty minutes had passed since then. If Sara was right, if Angie only had a few more hours, then he might be too late.

But he couldn’t stop looking.

Will pushed open the last door to the last office on the third floor. There were no boards on the windows. Sunlight drenched the small room. Will pushed a desk away from the wall. A rat darted out. Will jumped back. His foot went through a rotted floorboard. He felt the skin along the back of his calf rip open like a zipper. He quickly wrenched his leg out of the hole, praying a stray needle or piece of broken glass hadn’t infected him. His pants were torn. Blood streamed into his shoe. Nothing he could do about either right now.

A set of stairs was at the end of the hall. The concrete treads ran up the structure like a spine, broken windows on every other landing shooting blinding light into his eyes. Will grabbed the handrail and swung himself up to the next flight. His knee almost buckled on the landing. His leg might be hurt worse than he’d originally thought. He could feel blood pooling into the heel of his shoe. His sock made a squishing noise as he climbed to the next floor.

‘Hey.’ Collier was waiting for him. The yellow hard hat was back on his head. He was leaning against the door jamb. His arms were crossed over his chest. ‘End of the line, buddy. You gotta get outta here.’

Will said, ‘Move.’

‘Your boss lady shit a brick when I told her you were here. I literally watched it pinch out between her legs.’ Collier grinned. ‘Guess she’ll pinch out another one when she finds out I’m in here too.’

Collier didn’t move, so Will shoved him aside.

‘Come on, bro. This place ain’t safe.’ Collier had to jog to keep up with Will’s longer stride. ‘I’m in charge of the search teams. If you fall through the floor and break your neck, that’s on my record.’

‘I already fell through the floor.’ Will strode up the hallway. He entered the first office. Dingy carpet. Broken chairs. Rusted metal desk.

Collier followed him, standing in the doorway, watching Will search the room. ‘What’s your deal, bro?’

Will saw the edge of a mattress. Newspapers covered the surface. He could make out a shape underneath. He used his foot to kick away the papers, breath caught in his chest until he saw that the shape was a blanket, not Angie.

Collier said, ‘This is some crazy shit, man.’

Will turned around. Collier was still blocking the doorway.

Will asked, ‘Where’s your partner?’

‘Ng’s ball-deep in missing persons reports, plus he’s waiting for our domestic from last night to get out of surgery. He won’t see sunshine for days.’

‘Why don’t you go help him?’

‘’Cause I’m helping you.’

‘No you’re not.’ Will towered over him. ‘Move, or I’ll move you.’

‘Is this about before with your girlfriend? Mistress? Whatever?’ Collier smirked. ‘Lookit, dude, you should’a told me you were seeing her. Handle it like a man.’

‘You’re right.’ Will reared back his fist and punched him in the side of the head-not just for Sara, but for being an asshole and being in the way.

Collier’s hands went up a second too late. The blow was harder than Will intended, or maybe Collier was just one of those guys who couldn’t take a punch. His eyes rolled back in his head. His mouth fished open. He dropped like a sack of shit thrown from wherever it is you throw sacks of shit from, knocked out cold before he hit the floor.

Will experienced five seconds of sheer bliss before he came back to his senses. He looked down at his hand, startled by his own sudden act of violence. He flexed his fingers. The skin had broken over two of his knuckles. Trickles of blood slid down his wrist. For a moment he found himself wondering if the hand had acted of its own accord, some kind of possession he couldn’t control. This wasn’t him. He didn’t just haul off and punch people, even people like Collier, who deserved it.

This was Angie’s real power over Will: she brought out the very worst in him.

Will untucked his shirt. He wiped the blood off his hand. He tucked the shirt back in. He leaned down. He grabbed Collier by the shoulders and propped him up in the doorway. Then he walked across the hall and continued searching for Angie.

Another office. Another desk. Another overturned bookshelf. A shopping cart with an old IBM Selectric. He turned around. There was a metal cabinet by the door. Every other office seemed to have one. Six feet tall. Three feet wide. Eighteen inches deep. Unlike the others, the doors were closed.

Will wiped the sweat off his palms. He wrapped his fingers around the handle. He tried to turn the latch. Rust kept it from moving. He put his shoulder into it, practically lifting the cabinet off the floor. There was a loud pop. The door squealed open.

Empty.

She might hide in a cabinet. Angie liked dark places. Places where she could see you but you couldn’t see her. The basement at the children’s home was her favorite retreat. Someone had dragged a futon downstairs and laid it on the cold brick floor. Kids would smoke down there. Do other things. Mrs Flannigan, the lady who ran the home, couldn’t handle the stairs. Her knees were old. She carried a lot of weight. She had no idea what was going on down there. Or maybe she did. Maybe she understood that physical comforts were all they had to offer each other.

Will took out his handkerchief. He wiped the back of his neck.

He would never forget being down in the basement with Angie. His first time. He wasn’t shaking so much as vibrating with excitement and fear and dread that he would do it wrong or too soon or backward and she would laugh at him and he would have to kill himself.

Angie was three years older than Will. She’d done a lot of things with a lot of boys, some other things with a lot of men, not always her choice, but the fact was that she knew what she was doing and he did not.

Just the touch of her hands made him shiver. He was clumsy. He forgot things, like how to unbutton his own pants. At that point in his life, the only people who had ever touched Will were either hurting him or stitching him up. He couldn’t help himself. He started crying. Really crying. Not like the hot tears streaming down his face when his nose was broken or when he cut open his own arm with a straight razor.

Big, gulping, humiliating sobs.

Angie hadn’t laughed at him. She had held him. Her arms around his back. Her legs wrapped with his. Will hadn’t known what to do with his hands. He had never been held before. He had never been physically close to another human being. They had stayed in the basement for hours, Angie holding him, kissing him, showing him what to do. She had promised to never let Will go, but the truth was that things between them were never the same. She could never look at him again without seeing him as broken.

The next time Will had felt that close to a woman was almost thirty years later.

‘Trent!’ Collier was at the end of the hall, bobbing like a Weeble Wobble. He winced as his fingers touched his ear. Blood streaked down the side of his face and neck.

Will returned his handkerchief to his pocket. He pushed open another door, searched another room.

Angie, he kept thinking. Where are you hiding?

There was no use calling for her, because he knew that she would not want to be found. Angie was a wild animal. She did not show weakness. She slinked away to lick her wounds in private. Will had always known that when her time came, she would go off somewhere and die on her own. The same as the woman who’d raised her.

Or at least tried to raise her.

Angie was not even ten years old when Deidre Polaski injected her final not-fatal-enough overdose of heroin. The woman had spent the next thirty-four years in a vegetative coma inside a state-run hospice facility. Angie had once told Will that she wasn’t sure which was worse: living with Deidre’s pimp or living at the children’s home.

‘Trent!’ Collier braced his hands against the wall. Spit drooled out of his mouth. ‘Jesus Christ. What the fuck did you hit me with, a sledgehammer?’

Will struggled against his guilt, forcing himself not to apologize. He pushed open the next door. He felt his stomach clench as his eyes scanned what was left of the bathroom. The floor had rotted through. Broken toilets, sinks and pipes had crashed to the level below.

There was another metal storage cabinet on the other side of the hole. Doors closed. Could Angie be inside? Would she cling to the wall, edging her way to the other side of the room so she could close herself off and wait to die?

Collier said, ‘You’re not going in there.’ He stood behind Will, his hand covering his bloody ear. ‘No kidding, man. You’ll fall to your death.’

Will took out his handkerchief and handed it to him.

Collier hissed a curse as he put the cloth to his ear. ‘That cabinet’s a foot wide, dude. How thin is this chick?’

‘She could fit in there.’

‘Sitting down?’

Will imagined Angie sitting in the cabinet. Eyes closed. Listening.

Collier said, ‘Okay, this chick is hurt, all right? Real bad. She has all these other rooms to choose from, but this is the one she goes into, the one with the giant hole in it. How’s she even gonna get over there?’

He had a point. Angie wasn’t athletic. She hated sweat.

Will turned around. He went into the bathroom across the hall.

Again Collier watched him from the doorway, arms folded, leaning against the jamb. ‘They told me you were a stubborn prick.’

Will kicked open a stall door.

‘I guess you got your ass handed to you by the good doctor?’

‘Shut up.’ Will heard the echo of Sara saying the same two words a few hours ago. He’d never seen her that mad before.

Collier said, ‘What’s your secret, man? I mean, no offense, but Brad Pitt you ain’t.’

Will grabbed Collier’s shirt and moved him out of the way.

Angie wasn’t on this floor. Six more to go. Will headed toward the stairs and started the climb to the next level. Was he doing this the wrong way? Should he have started at the top floor instead of the bottom? Was there an attic in this place? A top-floor C-suite with a panoramic view?

Tactically, higher ground was always better. The office building was right across the street from Rippy’s club. Angie could’ve been watching the whole time. She would’ve seen the patrol car roll up, the fire department, the crime scene vans, the detectives, all of them spinning their wheels trying to figure out what the hell was happening while Angie was up on the tenth floor the entire time laughing her ass off.

Or bleeding to death.

Will passed the fifth floor, the sixth. He was winded by the time he saw a large 8 painted at the top of the next landing. He stopped, hands on his knees so he could lean over to catch his breath. The heat was getting to him. Sweat dripped onto the floor. His lungs were screaming. His hamstrings were aching. Blood dribbled down the side of his shoe. The cuts on his knuckles had opened up again.

Was this a mistake?

Angie wouldn’t climb these stairs on a good day, let alone with a life-threatening injury. She hated exercise.

Will sat down on the stairs. He rubbed his face and shook the excess sweat off his hands. Was he sure that Angie was even in the building? Where was her car? Shouldn’t Will be trying to find out where she was living instead of risking his life searching a condemned building?

And what about Sara?

‘Holy Mother of Christ.’ Collier had stopped a few flights down. He was panting like a locomotive. ‘I think I need stitches in my ear.’

Will leaned his head back against the wall. Had he lost Sara? Had Angie, with this final, violent act, managed to do what she couldn’t do for the last year?

Betty was his only saving grace. Early on in their relationship, Sara had kept volunteering to watch Betty while Will was working late. At first he thought it was because she wanted to know about his cases, but then he had slowly realized that she was using his dog to lure him over to her apartment. It had taken Will a long time to accept that a woman like Sara would want to be with him.

She wouldn’t have agreed to pick up Betty if she wanted to end things now.

Would she?

‘Trent.’ Collier was like a broken record. His feet scuffed the stairs as he made it to the landing below Will. ‘What’s the point of this, dude? You think she’s hiding under a typewriter?’

Will looked down at him. ‘Why are you here?’

‘It seemed like a good idea when I was outside. What’s your excuse?’ Collier seemed genuinely interested. ‘Dude, you know she’s not in here.’

Will looked up at the ceiling. Graffiti stared back.

Why was he here?

Maybe the better question was: where else would he be? There were no clues to follow. No leads to run down. He had no idea where Angie was living. Where she was working. Why she was in Rippy’s building. How she had gotten herself tangled up in a rape case Will couldn’t make against a man he despised.

Well, maybe he knew the answer to the last one. Angie always inserted herself into Will’s business. She was stealth, like a cat tracking its prey then leaving the poor dead creature as a trophy on Will’s doorstep so that he had to figure out what to do with the body.

There were so many unmarked graves in Will’s past that he had lost count.

Collier said, ‘I called around about your wife.’ He leaned his shoulder against the wall. He crossed his arms again. The good news was the blood around his ear was drying. The bad news was that it had glued Will’s handkerchief to his skin.

‘And?’ Will said, though he could guess what Collier had found out. Angie slept around. Frequently and indiscriminately. She was the worst kind of cop. You couldn’t trust her to have your back. She was a loner. She had a death wish.

Collier was uncharacteristically diplomatic. ‘She sounds like she’s a real piece of work.’

Will couldn’t disagree with him.

‘I’ve known gals like that. They’re a lot of fun.’ Collier was still keeping his distance. He didn’t want to get hit again. ‘The thing is, they’ve always got people they can fall back on.’

Will had said the same thing to Sara, but it sounded shitty coming out of Collier’s mouth.

‘You really think she’d run across the street to this dump?’ Collier slid down the wall so he could sit. He was still out of breath. ‘Lookit, I never met the broad, but I’ve known plenty of broads like her.’ He glanced up at Will, probably to make sure he wasn’t coming down the stairs. ‘No offense, bro, but they’ve always gotta backup plan. You know what I mean?’

Will knew what he meant. Angie always had a guy she could run to. That guy hadn’t always been Will. She had different men she used at different times in her life. When it wasn’t Will’s turn, he went to work, he retiled his bathroom, he restored his car, and he convinced himself the whole time that he wasn’t waiting for her to come back into his life. Dreading. Anticipating. Aching.

Collier said, ‘My take is, the shit went down last night, she’s injured, so she pulled out her phone-which we can’t find-and she called up a guy and he came rushing over to help.’

‘What if Harding was the guy?’

‘You think she only had one guy?’

Will took a deep breath. He held on to it for as long as he could.

Collier asked, ‘We leaving now?’

Will pushed himself up. Heat exhaustion put stars in his eyes. He steadied himself for a moment. He blinked away sweat. He turned around and resumed his climb up the stairs.

‘Jesus Christ,’ Collier muttered. The soles of his shoes hit the treads like sandpaper. ‘You ask me, you oughta be running back down these stairs and telling ol’ Red you’re fucking sorry.’

Collier was right. Will owed Sara an apology. He owed her more than that. But he had to keep moving forward, because taking a step back, letting himself think about what he was doing and why, was a thread he couldn’t let unravel.

Collier said, ‘That’s a good-lookin’ woman you got there.’

‘Shut up.’

‘I’m just sayin’, dude. Simple observation.’

Up ahead, Will saw a painted 9 marking the next landing. He kept climbing. The heat intensified with every step. He braced his hand against the wall. He went through the list again: he didn’t know where Angie lived. He didn’t know where she worked. He didn’t know who her friends were. If she had friends. If she wanted friends. She had been the center of his existence for well over half of his life and he didn’t know a damn thing about her.

‘You got prime rib at home,’ Collier said. ‘You don’t run out to McDonald’s for a Happy Meal.’ He laughed. ‘I mean, not so prime rib ever finds out. ’Cause, shit, man, we all like a greasy cheeseburger every now and then, am I right?’

Will turned the corner at the 9. He looked up to the next landing.

His heart stopped.

A woman’s foot.

Bare. Dirty.

Bloody cuts criss-crossed the soles.

‘Angie?’ He whispered the word, afraid to say it louder because she might disappear.

Collier asked, ‘What’d you say?’

Will stumbled up the stairs. He could barely carry his own weight. He was on his knees by the time he reached the landing.

Angie was lying face down on the floor. Long brown hair wild. Legs splayed. One arm underneath her, the other over her head. She was wearing a white dress he’d seen before. Cotton, see-through, which is why she wore the black bra underneath. The dress rode up her legs, showing matching black bikini underwear.

Blood radiated from beneath her still body, cresting in a halo over her head.

Will put his hand on her ankle. The skin was cold. He felt no pulse.

His head dropped down. He squeezed his eyes shut against the tears that came.

Collier was behind him. ‘I’ll call it in.’

‘Don’t.’ Will needed a minute. He couldn’t hear the call on the radio. He couldn’t take his hand from Angie’s leg. She was thinner than the last time he’d seen her-not Saturday, that was just a glimpse, but about sixteen months ago. It was the last time they were together. Deidre had finally died, all alone in the nursing home because Angie didn’t see her anymore. Will was on a case when it happened. He had driven back to Atlanta to be with Angie. Sara was in the picture by then, like a blur at the edge of the frame that might be something or nothing at all, depending on how things developed.

Will had told himself that he owed Angie one last chance, but she had known the minute she looked into his eyes that all that weight between them-that Pandora’s box of shared horrors that they both carried on their backs-had finally been lifted.

Will cleared his throat. ‘I want to see her face.’

Collier’s mouth opened, but he didn’t say what he was supposed to say-that they should leave the body in situ, that they needed to call in forensics and Amanda and everybody else who would pick over Angie Polaski’s lifeless body like carrion.

Instead, Collier climbed the stairs and went to the head of Angie’s body. He didn’t bother to glove up before he slipped his hands under her thin shoulders. He said, ‘On three?’

Will forced himself to move. To get up on his knees. To wrap his hands around Angie’s ankles. Her skin was smooth. She shaved her legs every day. She hated having her feet touched. She liked fresh milk in her coffee. She loved the perfume samples that came in magazines. She loved dancing. She loved conflict and chaos and all the things he could not stand. But she looked out for Will. She loved him like a brother. A lover. A sworn enemy. She hated him for leaving her. She didn’t want him anymore. She couldn’t let him go.

She would never, ever hold him like she held him in that basement ever again.

Collier counted down. ‘Three.’

Wordlessly they lifted the body and turned her onto her back. She wasn’t stiff. The arm over her head flailed, crossing itself over her eyes as if she couldn’t face the fact that she was gone.

Her swollen lips were chapped. Dark blood smeared down her chin. White powder speckled her hair and face.

Will’s hand shook as he reached out to move the arm. There was blood-not just from her mouth and nose, but from needle tracks. On her neck. Between her grimy fingers. On her arms.

Will felt his heart start to jackhammer. He was light-headed. His fingers touched her cool skin. Her face. He had to see her face.

The arm moved.

Collier asked, ‘Did you do that?’

Unaided, the woman’s arm slid off her face, flopped onto the ground.

Her mouth slit open, then her rheumy eyes.

She looked at Will.

He looked back.

It wasn’t Angie.

FOUR

Faith sat in her car outside Dale Harding’s duplex, taking a break from the unrelenting heat. She was sweating her balls off, to quote a post from her son’s Facebook page that future potential employers would eventually find.

Maybe he could live with his grandmother. Faith had gotten a sunglassed smiley face back when she texted Evelyn the photo of Jeremy with the bong. This was certainly a radical departure from her mother’s previous parenting techniques, which had come straight from the pages of Fascist Monthly. Then again, Jeremy wouldn’t be here if fashioning yourself into your child’s own private Mussolini was a strategy for success.

She took a long drink of water and stared at Dale Harding’s duplex side of a well-maintained single-story bungalow nestled inside a sprawling gated complex.

Something wasn’t adding up.

Faith hated when things didn’t add up.

After hitting a series of brick walls trying to locate any contact information for Angie Polaski, Faith had burned through the remainder of the morning and part of the afternoon trying to track down Dale Harding’s place of residence. Two dead ends had sent her to east Atlanta’s shadier neighborhoods, where she was told by various neighbors and slumlords that Dale Harding was an asshole who owed them money. No one seemed surprised or sad to learn of his untimely death. Several expressed regret that they hadn’t been there to witness it.

As Amanda had predicted, there were liquor stores, strip clubs, payday loan stores and all sorts of seedy dives where you’d expect to run into a slimeball like Dale Harding, and in fact many of the workers at these businesses recognized the dead man’s photograph, though none could recall seeing Dale in the last six months. That was the story everywhere Faith went: Dale was bellied up to the bar every day until six months ago. He was shoving ones into G-strings every day until six months ago. He was buying loose cigarettes and three-dollar liters of whiskey every day until six months ago.

No one could tell her what had happened six months ago.

She was about to give up when she ran into a stripper who said Harding had promised her kid a hundred bucks if he helped move some boxes. Faith would’ve never found the quiet little duplex in north Atlanta if Harding hadn’t stiffed the kid.

All of that made sense, from the slumlords to the strippers to cheating a fifteen-year-old boy out of a promised payday. What didn’t make sense was the place that Harding had finally called home.

He hadn’t lived in elegance so much as limbo. According to its website, the Mesa Arms was an active retirement community for the fifty-five-and-older set. Faith had drooled over the modern floorplans posted on the site. Everything was in italics with an exclamation point, like it wasn’t exciting enough to live in a community that did not allow children under the age of eighteen to visit more than three days in a row.

Spa-style bathrooms!

Main floor masters!

Hardwoods throughout!

Central vacuum!

The place was a baby boomer’s dream, if you could dream in half-a-million-dollar increments. Green lawns. Gently sloping sidewalks. Cute craftsman-style bungalows spread out like fans on tree-lined cul-de-sacs. There was a club lounge, gym, pool, and a tennis court that was currently occupied by two sporty seniors, even though the temperature had passed the one hundred mark.

Faith used the sleeve of Will’s suit jacket to wipe the back of her neck. At this point, the thermometer might as well read HELL.

She finished the water and tossed the empty into the back seat. She wondered if Harding had found a sugar mama, then figured that was unlikely unless she had very, very low standards. It was possible. Cotton-candy-pink drapes were hanging in the front windows. There were three gnomes and a ceramic bunny in the front yard, all dressed in ill-sized pink jackets, which seemed incongruous with Harding’s betting sheet and nudie pics from Backdoorman.com.

Considering Harding had cashed in his chips both literally and figuratively, Faith found it odd that he’d chosen the Mesa to live out his dying days. Further, it was odd that the Mesa was allowing him to do so. The posted $1,200-a-month homeowners’ association fee seemed well out of reach for a man who had bought out his pension for pennies on the dollar.

Then again, Harding had known he wasn’t going to live long enough to take the full benefit, so maybe he was smarter than she was giving him credit for. Better to die in the Mesa Arms than some government-owned toilet of a nursing home.

Was it irony or just shitty luck that he’d ended up croaking in an abandoned nightclub with a doorknob stuck in his neck?

Not just any nightclub. Marcus Rippy’s club.

She wasn’t ignoring the timing of Harding’s good luck so much as mulling it around inside her head. Marcus Rippy had been accused of rape seven months ago. Harding had hit paydirt approximately one month later. Then there was Angie Polaski caught in the middle. Had she been sent to the club to take out Harding, or had Harding been sent there to take her out?

Faith couldn’t yet add it up, but she knew the math was there.

She fished around in the back seat for the bottle of water her mother had insisted she take with her this morning. It had been baking in the car since 6:30. The warm liquid slid down her throat like cooking oil, but the city was under a code black smog alert and she couldn’t afford to get dehydrated.

Her time hadn’t just been wasted in strip clubs and liquor stores. She had spent a good hour walking up and down the Mesa Arms knocking on doors that were never answered, peering through windows that showed well-appointed, otherwise empty homes. The sign outside the property manager’s office said that they would be back at two, which had already come and gone. The heat-resistant tennis players had shown up ten minutes ago. Faith was headed toward the courts when a wave of dizziness had sent her back to the car. She had tested her blood sugar under the roar of the Mini’s air conditioning because Sara’s lecture about badly managed diabetes had hit home.

Poor Sara.

‘Okay,’ Faith mumbled, psyching herself up for a return to the heat. She cut the engine. Before she could open the door, her phone chirped. She turned the engine back on so she could sit in the air conditioning. ‘Mitchell.’

Amanda said, ‘Will found a Jane Doe in the office building across the street. Junkie. Homeless. OD’d on a giant bag full of blow. Looks like it was on purpose. Her nose and throat collapsed. She’s at Grady. Surgery should be two hours. Do what you can at Harding’s, then go sit on her. I’d bet my eyeteeth she saw something.’

Faith silently repeated everything back in her head so that she could make sense of all the information. ‘Do we know why she wanted to kill herself?’

‘She’s a junkie,’ Amanda said, as if that was as good an explanation as any. ‘I got your text with Harding’s address. The search warrant is being faxed to the property manager.’

‘No one’s there. I called the emergency number, I knocked on doors. Not a lot of people seem to be home, which is weird, because it’s some kind of retirement community. It’s actually really nice. Nicer than Harding could afford, I would guess.’

‘It’s owned by a shell company. We’re trying to trace it back, but we know Kilpatrick owns a lot of expensive real estate that he lets out well below market value.’

‘Smart.’ Faith had to hand it to Marcus Rippy’s fixer. The guy knew how to squirm his way out of a legally binding financial entanglement. She told Amanda, ‘Not a bad way to hide some money. Harding lives in old people Shangri-La for a nominal sum, Kilpatrick keeps him off the official payroll.’

‘Incidentally, Harding bought the car brand new six months ago. Paid cash.’

‘Harding did a lot of new things with money six months ago.’

‘Tell me you have a lead.’

‘Not yet.’ Faith hedged her words so they didn’t give false hope. ‘I mean, I don’t know what I have other than a feeling that something isn’t adding up.’

Amanda sighed, but to her credit she never faulted them for listening to their instincts. ‘Collier heard back from the hospitals. All the stabbing victims are accounted for. Two domestics. One bar fight. Another was self-inflicted, said the knife slipped into her side while she was cooking.’

Faith couldn’t muster any surprise over the number of unrelated stabbings. She had worked this job too long. ‘I should have Harding’s bank accounts and phone records within the hour. I’ll start going through everything as soon as it hits my email. Meanwhile, I guess I can interrupt the tennis players. So far, they’re the only people I’ve seen.’

‘Angie’s blood is all over the crime scene.’

Faith bit her lip. This just kept getting worse. ‘How did Will take the news?’

‘He didn’t hear it. And he won’t. Hold on.’ The phone clicked as Amanda took another call.

Faith picked at the stitching on the steering wheel. She thought about Will, the devastated look on his face when Charlie said the gun was registered to Angie. The only thing worse than his expression was Sara’s. Amanda had sent them all away to give Will and Sara some privacy, but there had been a long line to sign out of the crime scene at the front door and Faith had managed to catch the gist of their discussion.

Sara was a better woman than Faith. If Faith had found out that her lover’s ex was rifling through her things-not just rifling, but stealing-Faith would’ve burned down his fucking house.

‘Faith?’ Amanda had clicked back onto the line. ‘Have you heard from Will?’

‘Yeah, we had a long conversation about his feelings while he braided my hair.’

‘I’m not in the mood for your humor.’ Amanda had let an uncharacteristic edge of concern enter her tone. Will’s weird, Flowers-in-the-Attic-y relationship with Angie paled in comparison to the dysfunctional freak show he had with Amanda. She was the closest thing he’d ever had to a mother, if you were constantly afraid that your mother would smother you in your sleep.

Amanda said, ‘Will left after he found the Jane Doe. Just disappeared. I have no idea where he is. He’s not at home. He’s not answering his phones.’

Faith knew he didn’t have a car at the scene. ‘Did he get a ride from Sara?’

‘She was already gone when the Jane Doe was found.’

‘I suppose that’s one small blessing.’

‘Yes, well, I’m sure he’s working on a new way to screw that up.’

Unfortunately, Faith was equally certain. ‘Do you think Angie’s dead?’

‘We can only hope.’ Amanda sounded like she meant it. ‘I sent Collier to help you search Harding’s place.’

‘I don’t need his help.’

‘I don’t care. Hold on again.’ Amanda’s voice was muffled as she barked an order to an unseen underling. She told Faith, ‘I’ve managed to force a meeting with Kip Kilpatrick’s team at four o’clock. Get Collier started at Harding’s, then head over to the hospital. I don’t want you spending too much time with him.’

Faith felt her hackles rise. ‘What does that mean?’

‘It means he’s your type.’

Faith was too stunned to laugh. ‘Does he drive a sixty-thousand-dollar truck and live in his mother’s trailer?’

Amanda chuckled. The phone clicked again. She had hung up.

Faith stared at the phone. There was not much to recommend having your godmother as your boss. Actually, there was a lot that advised against it.

She set the alarm on her phone to go off in an hour. In her experience, the surgeons at Grady were always faster than they predicted, and Faith wanted to be standing by Jane Doe’s bed when she finally came round. You only got one chance to surprise a witness, and considering how close this case cut to home, Faith wasn’t going to blow it.

She put her hand on the car key but didn’t turn off the engine. The air conditioning was too precious to cut a second too short. She looked at the tennis court, which, un-mesa-like, was over a hill and up several steps. She looked at Harding’s front door, which was considerably closer. There was a fake-looking rock in the low-maintenance yard that likely contained a spare key. The search warrant was probably sitting in the fax machine inside the manager’s office. She could go ahead and get started.

Faith was getting out of her car when Collier pulled up in a black Dodge Charger. Aerosmith leaked out of the closed windows. There was a figurine of a grass-skirted, half-naked Hawaiian girl stuck to the dashboard. His wheels skidded across the asphalt as he braked, threw the gear into reverse, and backed into the space beside Faith’s Mini.

He gave her the once-over as he got out of the Charger, the same as he had this morning. He seemed appreciative, even though she was wearing her GBI regs-dark blue shirt, khakis and a thigh holster because the uniform was unflattering enough without adding two inches of Glock on her hip.

‘What’s that?’ She pointed to the two round Band-Aids wrapped around the top of his right ear. Blood had dried into the crevices.

‘Cut myself shaving.’

‘With a machete?’

‘My Epilady broke.’ He glanced into the back of Faith’s car, taking in the baby seat and scattered Cheerios.

She laid it all out in the open. ‘I have a one-year-old and a twenty-year-old.’

‘Uh, yeah. You were APD for fifteen years before you jumped ship. Never married. Graduated from Tech. Your mom was on the job. Your dad was an insurance agent, rest in peace. You live two streets over from your mom in a house your grandmother left you, which is how you can live in a nice neighborhood on a state salary.’ He pushed up his sunglasses. ‘Come on, Mitchell. You know cops gossip like bitchy little girls. I already know everything about you.’

Faith started up the sidewalk.

‘I’m the second oldest of nine myself.’

‘Jesus,’ Faith muttered, thinking of his poor mother.

‘Dad’s a retired cop. Two brothers are with APD, another two are with Fulton County, another is in McDonough. I’ve got a sister who’s a fireman but we don’t talk about her.’

Faith picked up the fake rock, only to find that it was a real rock.

‘Come on, Mitchell.’ Collier was like a puppy nipping at her heels. ‘I know you checked me out. What’d your mom say?’

Faith made an educated guess. ‘That you’re cocky and prone to mistakes.’

He grinned. ‘I knew she’d remember me.’

Faith thought of something. ‘Where did you take Will?’

He stopped grinning. ‘What’s that?’

‘Will disappeared after he found the Jane Doe in the office building. Where did you take him?’

‘That’s some class-A detective work there, partner. But he didn’t find her. Well, he did, but I was there too. So you could say we both found her.’

‘I’m not your partner.’ Faith knelt down and studied the rocks. All of them looked fake. ‘Are you going to answer me?’

‘I took him to his house.’ Collier shoved his hands into his pockets. ‘Don’t ask me why, ’cause I can’t tell you. My sister says I should’a been the fireman ’cause I’m the dumbass who runs into the burning building instead of running away from it.’

‘Do you know why the Jane Doe tried to kill herself?’

He shrugged. ‘She’s a junkie.’

Faith picked up a suspiciously dull rock. This one was a real fake. She slid back the plastic cover, expecting to find the house key.

Empty.

Collier asked, ‘Did your mom tell you I had a wrestling accident in high school?’ He was leaning against the door jamb, his arms crossed. ‘Testicular torsion.’

Faith tossed the empty rock back into the yard.

‘Tragedy, really.’ He ran his fingers through his hair as he squinted into the distance. ‘I’ll never be able to have kids.’ He winked at her, because that was obviously in the script. ‘Hasn’t stopped me from trying.’

‘Hello?’ A hippy-looking woman in flip-flops and a belted yellow shirt dress was walking up the sidewalk. Her long gray hair was loose around her shoulders. She held a stack of papers in one hand and wore a loaded springy keychain on her wrist. ‘Are you the police lady who called?’

‘Yes, ma’am.’ Faith pulled her ID out of her pocket. ‘I’m Special Agent Faith Mitchell. This is-’

‘Oh, I don’t need to see that, hon. You’ve both got POLICE written on the back of your shirts.’

Faith put away her ID, skipping the lecture about how you could put POLICE on the back of anything these days.

The woman said, ‘Can’t say I’m surprised something bad happened to ol’ Dale. He wasn’t one for making friends.’ Her shoes flip-flopped across the front walk. She banged her fist on Harding’s door. The keys on the springy ring clattered around her wrist. ‘Hello?’ She banged again. ‘Hello?’

Faith asked, ‘Was he living with someone?’

‘No. Sorry, force of habit. I do a lot of wellness checks, and I never enter a house without knocking.’ She extended her hand. ‘I’m Violet Nelson, by the way. The property manager. Sorry I was out so long. I got hung up at the library.’

‘Were you involved in leasing this place to Harding?’

‘That would be the responsibility of the owners, and the documents list them as a corporation based in Delaware, I’m assuming for the tax breaks.’ She searched her keyring, checking the neat color-coded labels. ‘Ugh, I need my glasses. Do either of you…?’

Faith looked at Collier, because he was a hell of a lot closer to needing reading glasses than she was.

He gave one of his squinty smiles. ‘I’m younger than I look.’

‘It’ll hit you soon enough. Both of you.’ Violet laughed, but it wasn’t funny. She kept going through the keys. There were at least fifty of them. Faith didn’t offer to help, because Violet struck her as prone to idle chatter. ‘I’ll unlock this door and y’all can take as long as you want. Just slip the keys back through the slot in my office door when you leave.’

Faith exchanged another look with Collier, because this wasn’t the usual attitude of a property manager. Then again, most of the property managers they dealt with worked behind cages or bulletproof glass.

Faith said, ‘I knocked on some of the neighbors’ doors. Doesn’t seem like anybody is home today.’

‘It’s busier on the weekends.’ Violet tried to push a key into the lock. ‘No one really retires anymore. They’ve all got part-time jobs. Some of the luckier ones volunteer. Come four o’clock, you’ll find most of us down at the club house for cocktail hour.’

Faith would pass out if she had a drink at four in the afternoon. She asked the woman, ‘Did you know Dale Harding?’

‘I knew him well enough.’ Violet didn’t seem happy about it. ‘He was a pain in my posterior, let me tell you.’

Faith rolled her hand, letting the woman know she should do just that.

‘Let’s just say that he wasn’t the cleanest-living person.’

Collier guessed, ‘Women? Booze?’

‘Trash,’ she said, then caught herself. ‘Not like white trash. Like real trash-things that should be thrown away but aren’t. I wouldn’t call him a hoarder. It’s more like he was just too lazy to walk to the trashcan. There were complaints about odors from Barbara. That’s the gal next door. Spoiled food, she said, the stink of it just wafting through the walls to her side of the house. I smelled it myself. Disgusting. I’ve written about ten letters to the company in Delaware, with no luck. We’ve been talking to the HOA lawyers for months about what to do.’

‘That’s horrible,’ Faith said, thinking that it never occurred to normal people that the smell of spoiled food was remarkably similar to the odor from a decaying body. ‘What else?’

‘They were constantly bickering.’ Violet tried another key. ‘Barb and Dale. Well, Dale and everybody, but especially Barb. They just rubbed each other the wrong way.’ She jammed in another key, with no success. ‘I had to step in a few times to help turn down the heat. I hate to speak ill of the dead, but Dale was…’ She struggled for the word.

‘An asshole?’ Faith suggested, because that seemed to be the word of consensus.

‘Yes, an asshole,’ Violet agreed. ‘So if this was like Midsomer Murders and you were asking if Dale had any enemies, the answer is that he went out of his way to make enemies.’ She pointed to the windows. ‘Those hideous curtains are a perfect example. The bylaws clearly state everyone should have white window coverings. When I sent him a letter about the pink curtains, he sent back a note on fake stationery from a fake law firm saying that I was discriminating against him because he’s a homosexual.’ She rolled her eyes. ‘As if a gay man of that age would buy polyester curtains.’

Faith watched her try another key. She was going through the entire ring. ‘What about Barb, the next-door neighbor? You said it got heated?’

‘He taunted her. For no reason. Just picked and picked and picked.’

‘For instance?’

Violet waved toward the front yard. ‘These were her gnomes, and her grandson gave her that rabbit. We all knew that. She dressed them all in matching seasonal jackets. Red on Valentine’s Day. Plaid for Armistice Day.’ She shrugged. ‘To each her own. But one day Barb comes to me and says the strangest thing has happened. All the gnomes and the rabbit are gone from her yard. We chalked it up to kids. Some of the grandchildren around here are a bunch of juvenile delinquents. Blood will out, as they say. But then two days later, Dale puts out the gnomes and the rabbit in his front yard and they’re wearing pink jackets. And not even jackets that fit.’ She tried another key. ‘Actually, there were four gnomes, but he’d painted one of them in blackface, which is expressly forbidden in the homeowners’ bylaws.’ She lowered her voice, explaining, ‘If we didn’t have the rule, this whole place would be lit up with lawn jockeys.’

So much for Shangri-La. ‘Did Harding have any regular visitors?’

‘Nary a one that I ever saw.’

Collier asked, ‘Did he keep a schedule?’

‘He was home more often than not, which was extremely annoying, let me tell you. Gave him time to mess with people. As lazy as he was, he’d walk two streets over to yell at a grandkid having too much fun in the pool.’

‘When did he move in?’

Violet tried another key. ‘Six months ago, maybe? I’ve got the paperwork somewhere. Give me your email and I’ll scan it to you. He’s past due on his HOA fees.’ She finally found the correct key. ‘That’s homeowners’-’

Collier stopped her hand on the doorknob.

Faith had her Glock in her hands before she completely processed what was happening.

There was a noise inside the house.

Rustling, like someone was trying to be quiet.

Faith looked at the fake rock. There was no key. Why have a fake rock when you didn’t have a key?

Unless someone had already used the key to get inside.

Collier put his finger to his lips before Violet could ask for an explanation. He indicated for her to move back, then back some more, until she was standing on the other side of his car.

The noise came again. Louder this time.

Collier took out his phone and whispered a call-in for backup, then he motioned for Faith to take the lead.

Which meant that fifty years of feminism would probably end up getting Faith gut-shot.

She tapped her finger on the side of her Glock, just above the trigger, which is where they were trained to keep their finger until they had made the decision to shoot. She thought about her bulletproof vest in the car. The baby seat for her precious daughter. The bottle of water her thoughtful mother had given her this morning. The photo of her beautiful son on her phone.

Then she raised her foot and kicked in the door.

‘Police!’ Faith yelled, letting the word explode from her mouth.

She swiveled around, scanning the room. Kitchen. Table. Couch. Chairs. Clutter. Chaos. All of her senses had turned off but one. Her vision tunneled onto doorways and windows, searching for hands holding weapons. Collier checked the coat closet. Empty. He pressed his back against hers. He tapped her leg. They moved forward in unison, both crouched low, both swiveling their heads like gun turrets.

She remembered the Mesa Arms website. Harding lived in the Tahoe. Open concept. Two bedroom. One bathroom.

Doorway.

A separate powder room for your guests!

Doorway.

A well-appointed laundry room with optional storage cabinets!

Corner.

Faith put herself at an angle, letting the corner serve as a visual block to anyone standing in the hallway with a shotgun. If she couldn’t see them, they couldn’t see her. She had her weapon out in front of her, feet wide apart. Without any conscious thought, her finger slipped from the side of the gun and went to the trigger. She forced herself to put her finger back along the barrel, to buy herself that extra second of hesitation in case it was a kid or an elderly deaf person standing at the end of the hall.

Now or never.

Slowly, a centimeter at a time, she rolled the upper part of her body to the side and peered around the corner.

Empty.

Faith took the lead down the hallway.

Doorway.

A central bathroom with walk-in shower and comfort seat toilet!

Closed doors.

Light-filled main-level bedrooms for you and your guests!

The bedrooms were on opposite sides of the hall, each taking up one side of the rear portion of the house.

Faith let Collier take the room on the right. Again she stood at an angle, covering him and the other closed door so his back would be protected when he breached the room. With an almost painful slowness, he reached down and turned the knob. The door opened. He slammed it back in case anyone was standing behind it. Pink curtains on a bay window to the backyard. A blow-up mattress on the floor. An open curtain where the closet door should’ve been.

Clear.

In the hall, Collier took position opposite the left bedroom and gave her the nod.

Faith kicked open the door so hard that the knob stuck into the drywall. More windows. More pink curtains. Another mattress on the floor, this one with a boxspring, dirty sheets. Cardboard box for a bedside table. Dangling cords. A lamp. The closet had a door and the door had a keyed deadbolt.

Faith made herself breathe, because she had been holding her breath so long that she was going to pass out. Her lungs would only half fill. Her heart was a stopwatch. Sweat dripped from her hands as she forced her grip on the Glock to loosen so the recoil wouldn’t break her wrist if she had to shoot.

Collier stood with his back to the wall, covering the closet. She made herself move forward, blocking out the movie that kept replaying in her head: the closet door opens, a shotgun comes out, her chest is shredded to pieces.

With extreme deliberateness, Faith peeled her left hand away from her Glock. The bones inside her fingers felt like they were rattling together. Her shoulder pinched as she lowered her arm. She reached toward the egg-shaped doorknob. Her skin registered the cold metal. The joints in her wrist started the slow grind of rotating her hand.

Locked.

Faith opened her mouth. She inhaled.

Spacious walk-in master closet!

The hinges were on the outside. The door couldn’t be kicked in.

She glanced back at Collier. He was still tensed, but he was facing away from her, toward the hallway. His chest heaved with each shallow breath. His Glock was pointed up at the ceiling.

The attic.

Optional storage for your precious keepsakes!

In the hall, a string dangled down from a set of folding attic stairs.

Faith started shaking her head. There was no way she was going up into that attic with just one person covering her.

A noise.

The scraping sound, this time heavier, like someone was inching across the attic.

Collier entered the hallway, knees still bent in a low crouch. Faith did the same, stopping in the doorway. He looked at her. She nodded, though every inch of her body was telling her that this was going to end badly. Collier reached up. He grabbed the string hanging from the stairs. The springs squealed so loudly that Faith’s heart nearly detonated. Collier unfolded the steps with one hand, his Glock still pointing up with the other.

Both of them stood completely still, waiting for the other to move.

This wasn’t about being scared. They were both terrified in equal measure. This was about trusting someone to have your back while you prairie-dogged your head into an open firing range.

Faith muttered a silent curse and took out her phone. Better to have her hand shot off than her face. She swiped through to the video camera and turned on the flash so that forensics would have a clear recording that explained the two dead cops in the hallway.

She forced her brain to unfreeze the muscles in her leg so that she could climb the stairs. Her foot was an inch off the ground when Collier snatched the phone out of her hand. He shot her a look like she was the crazy one. He planted his black sneaker on the first rung of the stairs. The springs groaned under his weight. He stepped up to the second rung.

Faith saw the movie in her head again, this time with Collier: a shotgun comes out, his chest is shredded to pieces.

Collier stopped on the second rung. Both of his hands were at chest level, one with his Glock, the other with her phone. He was listening for the sound, trying to gauge which direction it had come from, because he would only have one chance shining the phone’s light into the dark attic space. Faith couldn’t help him locate the direction. All she heard was blood rushing through her ears. She opened her mouth for more air. Her tongue felt like cotton. She could taste her own fear, sour, like rotted meat and sweat and acid.

Collier looked back for her go-ahead. She nodded. They both stared into the black expanse of the attic. His shoulders slumped. His head turtled down his neck. He raised his hand, using the phone as a digital periscope. They both looked at the screen. An image flashed up.

Faith felt her stomach punch into her chest.

Collier sighed out a low ‘Fu-u-uck.’

A rat the size of a house cat stared back from the phone, its beady eyes glowing red in the light. It was sitting on its haunches. Its jaw was working as it chewed. Something was in its hands, which was even more horrific, because Faith didn’t want to think about a rat having hands that could grab something.

Collier turned the phone in a three-sixty around the attic before holstering his Glock. He used his free hand to zoom in on the rat, then past it. There were two file boxes up against the shared wall of the duplex. They were resting precariously on separate joists because the attic floor didn’t extend that far. An opened package of rotting ground beef was closer to the stairs. White maggots moved across the surface like waves breaking in the ocean. Flies buzzed. While they were watching, the rat’s hands reached out and pulled the tray a few inches away from the stairs. The sliding sound felt like it was happening inside of Faith’s skull.

The rat eyed them carefully as it pried away a chunk of meat with its thin, angular fingers. It drew the rotted meat back to its chest, took a couple of hops away, then bent down its head and stared at them as it chewed.

‘Okay.’ Collier stepped back down the stairs. He handed Faith the phone. ‘I’m going to go throw up now.’

She thought he was kidding, because he seemed fine, but then two seconds later he was in the bathroom horking out the lining of his stomach.

Faith called out, ‘Be sure to cancel backup.’

Collier retched in the affirmative.

She ran her hand along the dusty top of the closet door jamb. No key. She took a pen out of a pocket in her cargo pants and poked around the box Harding had used as a bedside table. She checked above the windowsills and the hall door. No key.

Collier sounded like he was finished in the bathroom, but then he gagged so loudly that her ears ached. Faith shivered, not because of the sound but because the attic stairs were still open. She could picture the rat lumbering its way down, tiny thumbless hands holding on to the thin handrail. She put her back to the wall as she slid past the open stairs. She waited until she was safely in the living room to play back the video on her phone.

The rat was a grayish blue with round ears and a thick, dirty white tail the color of the string on a tampon. The creature stared at her through the screen, mouth working. There was no sound, but she swore she heard lips smacking. A streak of blood trailed behind the tray where the rat had been pulling the meat away from the stairs and toward something. Probably a giant nest.

Her whole body shuddered at the thought.

Faith hit ‘play’ again. She remembered a pop-up book someone had given her daughter at Christmas. Emma was clearly terrified of the zillion-eyed housefly that popped out of the centerfold, but she couldn’t stop herself from opening the book and screaming. Faith felt the same way when she watched the video again. She was disgusted, but she couldn’t look away.

The toilet flushed. Collier wiped his mouth with the back of his hand as he joined her in the living room. ‘So,’ he said, brushing a smattering of vomit off his shirt. ‘Rat burglar alarm?’

Faith made herself look away from her phone. The only words that came to mind were the ones she had been hearing about Dale Harding all day. ‘What an asshole.’

‘Could you tell if those file boxes were labeled?’

Faith held out the phone so he could check for himself.

‘Uh-uh.’ He held up his finger, like he needed a moment to decide. ‘Okay, it passed.’

‘You sure?’ His face was the color of an envelope.

‘No.’ He walked over to the kitchen sink and turned on the faucet. He had to move a stack of dishes so he could stick his head under the tap. He gurgled, then spat into the sink, which was disgusting but Faith had a feeling that Harding had done worse things in that sink.

‘Officers?’

Faith had forgotten about Violet.

‘Good Lord, it smells like ammonia and trash in here.’ The woman stood just outside the doorway. She pinched her nose closed. ‘Is everything all right?’

‘There’s a rat up there,’ Collier said. ‘Big one. Maybe pregnant.’

‘Is he gray with white ears?’

Faith showed her the paused video on her phone.

‘I’ll be damned.’ Violet shook her head. ‘Barb’s grandson brought his rat over last weekend. He swore up and down that he put the top back on the cage. They looked everywhere for that stupid thing.’

‘I’m pretty sure this isn’t a pet.’ Collier waved away a fly. ‘I mean, it’s huge. Like, unnatural.’

Violet offered, ‘I can show you the MISSING poster Barb posted on the message board.’

Collier clamped his mouth shut and shook his head.

Faith thought about the package of ground beef near the attic stairs. ‘Was the rat inside Barb’s house when it went missing?’

‘No. The kid put the cage on Barb’s screened porch for about half an hour. Apparently they like fresh air. He came back and the top was pushed up and the rat was gone.’ Violet frowned as she took in the room. ‘I’m sure Mr Nimh was more comfortable in this squalor.’

Faith asked, ‘Is Barb home much?’

‘Now that you say that, she normally is. She’ll be devastated she missed all this action. Bit of a busybody.’

Faith loved busybodies. She handed Violet her business card. ‘Could you have Barb call me? I’d just like a general idea of Harding.’

‘I’m not sure she can tell you much beyond what a bully he was.’

‘You’d be surprised what people can remember.’

Violet tucked the card into her bra strap. ‘As I said before, just slip the key back through the mail slot in my office door when you’re finished.’

Faith listened to her flip-flop her way down the sidewalk.

‘A pet.’ Collier waved away another fly.

‘That explains why it wasn’t scared of us.’

‘I still want it to die. Like, immediately. With fire.’

‘Look for a key,’ she told him. ‘We need to get into that closet.’

‘We need to call animal control,’ he countered. ‘Dude kept a rat in his attic. No telling what’s in that closet.’

Faith wasn’t going to wait for animal control. She took in the filthy living room and kitchen, wondering where somebody like Harding would hide a key. Nothing jumped out except an overwhelming sense of disgust. Squalor was a word that seemed custom-made for the way Harding lived. There were Styrofoam plates and cups all over the open-concept living/dining/kitchen area. The moist-looking brown velvet couch and scarred coffee table were overflowing with abandoned KFC takeout bowls. Gnawed chicken bones with green mold, cups of Coke with thick skins on the surface, browned sporks where he hadn’t gotten off all the mashed potatoes.

Then there was the smell, which suddenly hit her like a hammer to the bridge of her nose. Not just ammonia, but rot, likely from Dale Harding’s bad habits, if Sara’s assessment of his final days proved to be correct. Faith hadn’t noticed the stench when they broke down the front door. Adrenaline had a way of focusing your priorities, and her main priority had been not to get killed. Now that her terror had abated, her other senses had returned, and they were immediately assaulted by the stink.

And flies, because there were at least two dozen of them taking advantage of all the trash.

Faith said, ‘In this heat, maggots can hatch in eight to twenty hours. It takes about three to five days for them to pupate.’

Collier guffawed. ‘Sorry, pupate is a funny word.’

‘I’m saying that it tracks that the meat was put in the attic this weekend, probably to feed the rat. Or keep him up there.’ Faith forced open one of the windows to help dissipate the smell. Then she pushed out the screen to take care of the flies.

Collier belched loudly, then asked, ‘You got any breath mints?’

‘Nope.’

Faith turned away from Collier. She thought about the breath mints in her car, and how nice it would be to go outside and take a five-minute break from Harding’s greasy, disgusting house. Her sense of smell had definitely returned. The rancid odor was biting into the back of her mouth and nose. She would’ve bet her life savings that the rotting meat in the attic was nothing compared to what was underneath the piles of wet-looking newspapers and magazines Harding had scattered around the floor. Violet was right. The trash was born of sheer laziness. If Harding had finished eating a bowl of macaroni and cheese when he came through the front door, he just dropped the bowl where he was standing and moved on.

‘It’s weird, right?’ Collier was watching her. ‘The way freaking out takes away your sense of smell?’

‘How can you not smell this?’ Faith opened another window. She wasn’t going to bond with this jackass. ‘Where’s the TV?’

Collier ran his finger along a low console table, separating the dust like the Red Sea. ‘There was a TV here, but it’s gone. Looks like it was big.’

‘No computer.’ Faith opened a drawer in the table beside the couch. She used her pen to poke around the takeout menus. ‘No iPad. No laptop.’ She opened another drawer. More crap. No key to open the closet.

Collier said, ‘Harding strikes me as a paperwork kind of guy.’

Faith coughed as a new smell infiltrated her nostrils. She pushed open another window. ‘There were charging cables beside the bed in the master.’

‘I’m detecting that was for his phones.’ Collier had his arms crossed again. He stood with his feet wide apart, probably because he was used to carrying fifty pounds of equipment around his hips during his patrol days. He said, ‘So, this thing you’ve got going on with Trent. Are you his work wife, or do you got something else on the side?’

Faith watched an Atlanta police cruiser pull up behind her Mini. They had probably been en route when Collier canceled the call for backup and decided to come check it out anyway. The two men looked young and eager. Their necks craned as they stared at the house. The driver rolled down his window.

Faith waved them off, calling out the window, ‘We’re fine.’

The driver put the gear in park anyway.

‘Lemons into lemonade,’ Collier said. ‘We’ll send one of the unis into the attic for the boxes, don’t mention the rat, and see what happens.’

‘Two weeks of rabies shots is what happens.’ Which she knew was exactly what Dale Harding was hoping for when he shoved the boxes up into the attic with the packet of ground beef and some weird kid’s stolen rat. Just one more way for the guy to wipe his ass on the toilet paper of his life. Harding knew that he was weeks away from death, whether by someone else’s hand or his own shitty life choices. He also knew that someone would have to empty his house, and that they would likely get a face full of rat in the process.

Faith walked out the front door. The sun cut open her eyeballs. She wasn’t sure whether she had tears or blood streaming down her face. She didn’t care. Harding had been a cop. He knew what you risked when you pulled your gun and busted into a house. And he had set them up anyway.

She held up her hand to block the sun. The unis were standing by their cruiser, heads down, staring at their phones.

She told the driver, ‘Give me your tire iron.’

He said, ‘My tire iron?’

Faith leaned into the car and popped the trunk. The tire iron was snapped into a kit mounted inside the rear quarter panel. She hefted the weight of the long, heavy metal bar in her hand. It was the single-handle type, L-shaped with a socket on the end to loosen the wheel lugs.

Perfect.

Collier was watching from the window when she went back into the house. Faith grabbed a chair from the cheap dining set and dragged it down the hallway. Collier followed, asking, ‘What are you doing?’

‘I’m beating this asshole.’ She stood on the chair and swung the tire iron into the ceiling. The socket end lodged into the Sheetrock. She shoved the bar in farther, turned it at an angle and pulled down. A chunk of ceiling dropped to the floor. She took another swing with the tire iron. She thought about the Mesa Arms’ website, how it promoted its energy-efficient upgrades, like the spray foam in the attic that made it possible to break open the ceiling without getting a face full of pink insulation.

Faith dropped the tire iron, pleased that her guesstimate had worked out. The two file boxes were within arm’s reach. All she had to do was fight the flies to get to them.

‘Hey, lady,’ one of the unis called from the hall. ‘You know there’s some stairs right here.’

‘There’s a rat,’ Collier told him. ‘Like, Godzilla’s brother.’

‘You mean Rodan?’

‘Chibi, man. Rodan was a surrogate. Chibi was blood.’

‘Goro,’ Faith said, because she had spent three years of Saturdays watching Godzilla movies when Jeremy went through a phase. ‘Collier, help me with these boxes.’

‘She’s right,’ Collier said. ‘It definitely looked like Gorosaurus.’ He bared his teeth and made his hands into claws. ‘Like it was out for blood.’

Faith let the first box drop on his head.

Annoyingly, Collier still managed to catch it. He put the box on the floor and waited for her to pass down the second one.

The uni said, ‘You need us for anything else, man?’

Collier shook his head. ‘I’m good, bro.’

‘The closet,’ Faith reminded him.

‘Oh, right.’ Collier motioned for them to follow him into the other room. Faith took a precarious step down with the heavy second box in her hands. She put it on the floor beside the first. From the other room she heard a discussion about the best way to pull pins from the hinges, like they had never seen a hammer and a flat-head screwdriver before.

Faith clapped dust from her arms and ran her fingers through her hair to get rid of the grit. The rotting meat smell was so pungent that she had to open the bedroom windows. And push out the screens because the flies were starting to swarm. Ripping down the ceiling probably hadn’t been her best idea, but logic tended to go out the window when she was pissed off, and she was really pissed off at Dale Harding.

At the GBI, Faith had investigated her share of bad cops, and the one trait that they all had in common was that they thought they were still good guys. Theft, rape, murder, extortion, racketeering, pimping-it didn’t matter. They still thought the crimes they had committed were for the greater good. They were taking care of their families. They were protecting their brothers in blue. They had made a mistake. They would never do it again. It was annoying how they were all the same in their insistence that they were still basically good human beings.

Harding hadn’t just embraced his badness. He had forced it on others.

And now she had to go through even more of his crap.

Faith dragged the chair over to the window. She kicked the boxes in the same direction, then she sat down. She tried not to think about why the lid on the first box felt damp, but her mind still conjured up the useful fact that rats leave a trail of urine wherever they go.

She shuddered before digging into the stack of neatly labeled files.

Dale Harding had been a private eye, and the first box contained the sort of glamorous work done by PIs the world over: photos of cheating spouses in cheap motels, photos of cheating spouses in parked cars, photos of cheating spouses in alleyways and roadside gas stations and inside a kids’ play house in the backyard.

Harding’s record-keeping was meticulous. Receipts for gas and meals and developing photos were stapled to expense reports. Daily logs followed the movements of his targets. He wrote in tiny block lettering and his spelling was exactly what you’d expect from a guy who probably went from high school to the police academy. Not that Faith hadn’t done the same, but at least she knew the difference between you’re and your.

Collier stood in the doorway. ‘Closet’s clear.’

‘You probably should’ve had the bomb squad check it.’

Finally he registered something other than cocky self-assuredness as they both realized that considering Harding, it wasn’t exactly a joke.

He said, ‘Something was in the closet at some point. There’s an impression in the carpet. Round, like a five-gallon bucket.’

Faith stood up so that she could see for herself. The two unis were back on their phones, heads down, thumbs working. She could probably murder Collier with the tire iron right in front of them and they wouldn’t notice.

The closet door had been propped up against the wall. Faith used the flashlight app on her phone to examine the inside of the four-by-eight walk-in closet. It was just as Collier had said. In the back corner, a circle impression was imprinted into the brown carpet. She scanned the rest of the closet. The rods had been removed. Wires dangled down where the light fixture should have been. The white walls were scuffed at the bottom. The enclosed space had a lingering odor of raw sewage.

Collier said, ‘We see this a lot. Drug mules come up from Mexico with pellets or powder heroin in their stomachs. They shit them out in a bucket, take their money, then head back to Mexico to fill up again.’

‘You think a place like this, where they have to specifically ban lawn jockeys in the yards, wouldn’t be lighting up nine-one-one if they saw a bunch of Mexicans going in and out of Harding’s house?’ She told the unis, ‘Turn the door around.’

‘We gotta boot. Dispatch called.’ Neither looked up from their phones as they walked out of the room.

Collier seemed impressed. ‘Good guys, right?’

Faith wrapped her hands around the edges of the door. Of course it was solid wood. She tilted it onto its corner and swiveled the door around. She lost her grip at the last minute. The top edge of the door slammed into the wall, leaving a gash. Faith stepped back to look. There were scratch marks low on the wood. She double-checked the hinges, making sure she was looking at the side that faced into the closet.

‘The rat?’ Collier guessed.

Faith took a photo of the scratches. ‘We need to get forensics in here.’

‘My guys or your guys?’

‘Mine.’ Faith sent the photo to Charlie Reed, who would likely be open to a change of scenery after processing Marcus Rippy’s nightclub for the last seven hours. She texted him the address and told him to process the closet first thing. She wasn’t a scientist, but a five-gallon bucket and a locked closet door with scratches on the back probably meant that someone had been kept inside.

Or it could be more of Harding’s bullshit waste of their time.

Collier said, ‘The closet door was locked when we got here. Why lock the door when there’s nothing in there?’

‘Why did Harding do anything?’ Faith went back into the other bedroom. She sat down in the chair and started putting the cheating spouse files back into the first box. Collier stood in the doorway again. She told him, ‘There’s nothing here, at least not the kind of thing you’d hide behind a rat.’

‘I don’t care what Violet said. That thing looked pregnant.’ Collier sat down on the mattress. It made a farting sound. He gave Faith the exact look that she expected him to give. He pushed the lid off the second box. There were no file folders, just a stack of pages with lots of nude photos on top.

Collier took the pictures. He handed Faith the papers.

She thumbed through them quickly. Hospital admittance records. Arrest warrants. Rehab. Rap sheet. They were all for one person. Delilah Jean Palmer, twenty-two years old, current address the Cheshire Motor Inn, which was a known hangout for prostitutes. There was no family listed. From birth, Palmer had been a ward of the state.

She was also a current model for BackDoorMan.com. Palmer’s most recent booking photo showed the same woman from the racy pictures Sara had found inside Dale Harding’s wallet. Her hair was different in each photo, sometimes platinum blonde, sometimes her natural brown, sometimes purple or pink.

‘It’s her.’ Collier leaned over, his shoulder pressed against Faith’s arm. He showed her a larger image of the wallet-sized photos: Delilah Palmer leaning over a kitchen counter, her head turned back toward the camera, mouth open, approximating sexual excitement. He said, ‘I’m gonna guess she’s not a real blonde. See, I’m a fast learner, Mitchell. You should keep me around.’

Faith knew that the GBI’s computer division was already looking into BackDoorMan.com, but she told Collier, ‘Why don’t you check the website?’

‘Good idea.’ He took out his phone. With any luck, he would waste the next hour looking at porn so that she could get some work done.

So, basically like every romantic relationship Faith had ever had in her life.

She returned to the documents for a more careful reading. She realized she was holding Delilah Palmer’s juvenile records, which was strange, because juvenile records were usually sealed. Palmer’s first arrest was at the age of ten for selling OxyContin at John Wesley Dobbs Elementary in east Atlanta. Faith had spent quite some time at Dobbs while helping the state build a RICO case against the Atlanta Public Schools system for widespread cheating on standardized tests. Some of the faculty had hosted a fish and grits sit-down dinner where they erased and changed the answers on students’ Scantrons. Meanwhile, 99.5 percent of their struggling student body qualified for free or assisted lunch.

Faith studied Palmer’s first booking photo from twelve years ago. The girl’s hands were so small that she couldn’t hold the reader board straight for the camera. The top of her head didn’t reach the first line in the ruler painted on the wall behind her. There were scabs on her face. Her short brown hair was unwashed. She had dark circles under her eyes, either from lack of sleep, lack of food, or lack of belonging.

Delilah would’ve been an oddity at Dobbs, and not just because she had entered the drug trafficking trade at such an early age. Last month, when Faith was preparing documents for the RICO trial, she had to explain to the district attorney that she hadn’t made a mistake in her charts. In 2012, Dobbs did not have a 5 percent white student body. They had a total of five white students. Had the demographics been reversed, there was no way the city would’ve allowed that level of corruption to go unchecked for so long.

Faith flipped to Delilah’s next arrest. More Oxy sales at age twelve and then again at fifteen. By sixteen, Delilah had dropped out of school and was slinging heroin, which was what happened when you couldn’t afford Oxy anymore. A single 80 milligram, pill could run sixty to one hundred dollars, depending on the market. The same money for a bag of heroin could keep you high for days.

She flipped ahead to the charging sheets. Parole. Diversion treatment. More parole. Rehab.

Despite her criminal history, Delilah Palmer had never spent more than a night in jail.

Her first prostitution arrest came at the end of her sixteenth year. There were four more arrests for solicitation, two more for selling pot and heroin respectively, all accompanied by a free one-night accommodation in the Fulton County jail.

Faith scanned the names of the arresting officers. Some of them were familiar. Most of them were from zone six, which made sense because criminals were like everybody else. They tended to stay in their own neighborhoods.

Dale Harding had also worked in zone six. He had obviously kept an eye on Delilah Palmer for most of her life. Reading between the lines, Faith guessed that he’d called in every favor he had to keep the girl from doing serious time.

Collier said, ‘You gonna share or do I have to guess?’

‘You smell like vomit.’

‘I just threw up. Didn’t you hear me in the bathroom? It, like, echoed.’

She handed him Delilah Palmer’s rap sheet. ‘Two bedrooms, two beds. Someone was staying here with Harding.’

‘You think it was this Palmer chick?’ He frowned. ‘She ain’t much, but she could do better than Harding.’

Faith thought about the locked closet, the bucket, the sewage smell. Harding could’ve been doing his own rehab. Cold turkey in a closet was a hell of a lot cheaper than fifteen grand for in-patient treatment. Again. That might better explain the squalor. This place certainly looked like a junkie was living here.

‘Didja see over there?’ Collier nodded toward a retainer on the floor. ‘My sisters all wore those after they got their braces off. Like, not the same retainer, different ones, but they were all small, just like that one. Meaning it’s sized like what a girl would wear in her mouth.’

Faith couldn’t understand why he used so many words to say just one thing. ‘What about the website?’

‘Nothing popped out.’ He laughed. ‘Pun intended. I’m more of a front-door man myself. Especially the knockers.’

Faith felt the strain of her eyes rolling.

‘You know what, Mitchell? When I first met you, I figured we’d end up in a bedroom looking at porn.’

Faith started to stand.

‘Hold on.’ He grabbed a stack of photographs from the box. ‘Lookit these. Delilah’s been modeling for a while. The BackDoorMan.com ones, I’d say they started when she was around sixteen. The earlier ones don’t have a website or identifying marks, but I’d put her closer to twelve, maybe thirteen.’

Faith put the photos side by side with the mugshots from Delilah’s various arrests. Collier’s estimate was off by a few years. Faith could pin down the age back to the girl’s first arrest at ten years old. The illicit image was heartbreaking. Delilah was dressed in lace panties and a bra that must have been clipped in the back so it wouldn’t slide down to her feet. She didn’t have a waist yet, or curves, or anything but baby fat that the heroin would eventually wear away. Faith looked at her dull, lifeless eyes. Everything about the girl reeked of abandon.

Why was Harding, who by all accounts didn’t give a shit about anyone or anything, so interested in this abandoned girl? What did she mean to him?

Collier asked, ‘What’s next, Kemosabe?’

‘I’ll be right back.’ Faith stood up. She went back into the kitchen. Again Collier followed her. He was like a kid, always underfoot. She longed for Will’s quiet self-containment. ‘We can be apart for longer than two seconds.’

‘Then how will I know what you’re up to?’

She opened the freezer door. Ice cream and alcohol filled the shelves, but there was also a quart-sized Ziploc bag with a stack of papers shoved into the back. Freezer burn had melded it to a box of fish fingers. Faith had to hit the box on the side of the fridge to break away the bag.

People with chronic or end-stage diseases were told to leave valuable documents like medical directives in their freezer so that paramedics could easily find them. As horrible a man as Harding was, he had managed to follow the guideline. Except his directive explicitly stated that all possible measures should be taken to preserve his life.

‘Je-sus,’ Collier said, because of course he was reading over Faith’s shoulder. ‘The guy’s got a death warrant, but he wants the paramedics to keep him alive for as long as possible?’

‘This was filled out two years ago. Maybe he forgot about it.’ Faith found the contact information on the second page.

Next of kin: Delilah Jean Palmer.

Relationship: daughter.

‘She was his kid,’ Collier said, because he had forgotten that Faith had eyes in her head. ‘Her juvie rap sheet listed her as an orphan.’

There were three phone numbers beside Delilah’s name, two of which had lines drawn through them. All of them were in different shades of ink. Faith used Harding’s landline and dialed the most recent number. It went straight into a pre-recorded message from the phone company informing Faith that the number had been disconnected.

She tried the other two numbers just to be sure.

Disconnected.

Collier took out his cell phone. ‘My turn to work some magic?’

‘Help yourself.’

Collier started to follow her back to the bedroom, but she put her hand out to stop him. ‘We don’t have to do everything together.’

‘What if the rat comes back? With its babies?’

‘Scream really loud.’

She headed down the hallway again, glancing up the attic stairs because the rat was still up there, possibly giving birth to triplets, because that was the kind of day she was having. Thank God Faith had made more holes in the ceiling in case the thing decided it wanted to expand its territory.

She sat down in the chair and made herself look at the photos of Delilah again.

Putting aside how disgusting it was that a father kept pictures of his naked daughter, age twelve, bending over a stick riding horse, there was something off about the girl. Faith couldn’t articulate what made the photos different from the hundreds of similar photos she had seen throughout her law enforcement career, but it was there.

Exploitation had a common theme: misery. Delilah’s eyes were glassy, likely from the heroin that had either been given or withheld so that she would pose for the camera. Her thighs were red where someone had been rough with her. A thin powdering of make-up barely concealed the bruising around her neck. There was lipstick on her teeth. None of this was new or particularly surprising.

It was that same feeling Faith had been having all day: something wasn’t adding up.

Faith hated when things didn’t add up.

‘It’s weird that they’re pictures, right?’ Collier was hovering in the doorway again.

Faith said, ‘You mean like some fathers keep school pictures of their kids, only Harding kept naked photos?’

‘No, I mean why doesn’t he have videos? Porn is the sole reason for the internet. It ruined the nudie pic industry. Even Playboy gave up the ghost.’

‘You’re asking why Harding was looking at naked pictures of his daughter instead of naked videos?’

‘Basically. Shit.’ He clapped his hand to his throat. He coughed. ‘I think I swallowed a fly.’

‘Try keeping your mouth shut.’

‘Ha-ha.’ He sat down on the mattress again. It made the sound again. He gave her the look. Again. ‘I asked my girl in records to run a priority background on little Delilah. We’ll see what she’s been up to lately. With Harding dead, she’ll wind up in jail soon, and there won’t be anybody to get her out.’

‘She could know something,’ Faith said. ‘We have to figure out what Harding was up to over the last week or so of his life. That’s going to tell us why he ended up in Rippy’s nightclub.’ She tried to talk through what was bothering her. ‘Was he a pedophile or a bad father?’

‘My vote goes for both.’

‘He must’a broken his piggy bank over this chick.’ A cop’s currency was knowing who to call, and also knowing that when that person called you back, you did what they wanted, no questions asked. ‘This isn’t asking a uni to lose a speeding ticket. These are high-level favors, lieutenants and parole officers and judges, even. No way he could pay all of that back. He worked white collar. He didn’t have the juice. There was probably nobody left on the force who would answer his calls.’

‘You know the story about the dad who stopped going to work. He couldn’t leave his little girl’s behind.’

Faith shook her head, wishing Collier would shut the hell up. Will’s sense of humor could be irreverent, but he would never, ever joke about a man molesting his own child.

Miraculously, Collier finally picked up on her mood. ‘Harding doesn’t have a computer or a printer.’

Faith checked the paper stock on the photos. ‘These weren’t printed at a lab. Somebody did them privately.’

‘You think someone printed them out for him?’

‘For what? Blackmail?’ She thought about Harding’s windfall six months ago. He moved into the Mesa Arms. He bought a new car. ‘It would be the other way around. Harding’s the one who came into some scratch. I have a good mind to call the lottery board and run his name.’

Collier’s phone buzzed. His finger slid across the screen. ‘Attachment.’ He waited for the download. ‘Oh man. This keeps getting better and better.’ He held up the phone. The screen showed a scan of an official marriage license.

Faith squinted at the words. She had to read them twice before their meaning came through.

Five and a half months ago, Vernon Dale Harding had married Delilah Jean Palmer. It was his fifth marriage and her first.

Faith put her hand to her mouth, then thought better of it.

‘Damn,’ Collier said. ‘Dude married his own daughter.’

‘That can’t be right.’

‘You can see it right here. Processed and everything.’

‘He listed her as his daughter two years ago. You saw it on the forms.’

Collier didn’t seem as confused as she felt. ‘The DNR forms aren’t official, at least not unless somebody finds them and takes them to the hospital.’

Faith felt her head shaking in confusion. She wanted to go back and look at the papers again, but she knew she hadn’t read them wrong. ‘How did that even happen? You can’t marry somebody you’re related to. You have to fill out a license. They run the-’

‘She was always an orphan in the system. Harding probably never had parental rights. They could do all the background checks they wanted and the relationship wouldn’t show up.’

Faith had let the pornographic photos fall out of her hands. She looked down at the scattered images and tried not to think about why Dale Harding had kept them over the years. ‘Good God, this poor girl never had a chance.’

‘He wasn’t sleeping with her.’ Collier stopped Faith’s protest. ‘Not recently, at least. There’s no Viagra in the bathroom, and considering what that guy had going on, there was no farmer left in the dale.’ He laughed. ‘Like, the tractor wasn’t up to plowing the fields.’

‘We need to find this girl.’ Faith started typing a text to Amanda to put out an APB. ‘She’s Harding’s legal wife. Harding was found dead or murdered in a room full of blood. If I’m his killer, then I’m looking for anyone Harding might have confided in. Whether she’s his wife or daughter, she has to know something. Just by virtue of the fact that she was living with him.’

‘Did you notice she’s not here?’ Collier’s mood had shifted. He was getting it now. ‘The TV’s gone. There’s no computer. Maybe she heard that he was dead, knew that there was a target on her back, so she sold his shit and got out of Dodge.’

‘Violet, the property manager, never met Delilah. There’s the weird closet thing. Why would you keep a girl hidden away from everybody in the neighborhood unless there was a reason to keep her hidden?’

Collier said, ‘She’s a whore, so she knows the streets. She was probably working Harding the same as he was working her. Maybe she’s the one who got him killed. I can see that happening-girl crosses the wrong guy, Harding swoops in to protect her and gets a doorknob for his troubles.’

‘Either way, she’s in danger.’ Faith asked, ‘Did records give you her last known address?’

Collier went back to his phone. ‘Renaissance Suites off I-20. My girl already called the manager, texted him a photo from Delilah’s last booking. He says he don’t know nothin’ about nothin’.’

Faith heard her phone chirp. She read the text. ‘Amanda’s put out the APB on Delilah. You need to work your back channels in the APD for information on the girl. Knock on every door to every building or house she’s ever lived in. Check into her juvie record, go by her school, whatever it takes to find out who her friends were.’

Collier had a weird look on his face. ‘Anything else, boss lady?’

‘Yeah, she was busted for soliciting, so she’ll have a pimp. Find him. Talk to him. Run him in if you have to.’ The alarm went off on Faith’s phone. She started shoving the files and photographs back into the boxes. ‘We need to find Delilah before someone else does.’

Collier asked, ‘What are you going to be doing while I pound out this awesome amount of shoe leather?’

‘I’ve got to go to the hospital and talk to the Jane Doe that Will found. She might have seen something last night.’

‘Uh, technically we found her, as in Will and me.’

‘Will and I.’ She muscled up the boxes. They were heavier than she’d anticipated. ‘I should have Harding’s banking and phone information by the time I get to Grady. I’ll go through these files and cross-check them against-’

‘Wait.’ Collier was trailing her down the hall. Again. ‘Your Jane Doe-she knows me. She’d be more likely to talk to a friendly face.’

Faith stopped. Collier bumped into her from behind. She told him, ‘Charlie Reed, our crime scene guy, will be here any minute. Wait for him, then go look for Delilah. If she’s out there, we need to talk to her. If Angie and Harding were killed for a reason, she might know the reason, and that reason could get her killed too.’

‘You really think she’s in danger?’

‘Don’t you?’

‘You’re not much of a feminist, are you?’ Collier grinned at what must have been the shocked look on her face. ‘Could be Delilah’s the one that went after both of them. Angie and Harding. Ever think of that? Women are capable of murder too, partner.’

‘If you call me partner again, you’ll find out exactly what women are capable of.’

For once, Collier took her seriously. ‘I’ll get Ng started, join him as soon as your guy gets here. Should I call you later?’

‘If you find Delilah or have valuable information, yes.’

‘What if I want to look at some more porn with you?’

Faith shouldered open the front door. She kept her head down so her retinas wouldn’t ignite. At her car, she balanced the boxes on one knee and fumbled with the door handle until she nearly dropped everything. She finally managed to yank back the handle with the tip of her pinky finger. She used the toe of her shoe to pry open the door. She threw the boxes into the passenger seat. She got behind the wheel. All the while, Collier stood in the open front doorway, not bothering to offer any help whatsoever. He was up her ass when she didn’t need him and she couldn’t get him to move a muscle when she did.

‘God dammit,’ Faith muttered.

Amanda was right.

He was exactly her type.

FIVE

Will stood in the lobby of the gleaming Tower Place 100 office building. The twenty-nine-story skyscraper was part of the Tower Place complex, which anchored the corner of Piedmont and Peachtree Road and was only partially responsible for the dense line of Jaguars and Maseratis that clogged Buckhead morning, noon and night.

He hadn’t planned on being here so much as followed the breadcrumbs Angie had left. First he’d gone home to change and get some documents from his safe, then he’d gone to Angie’s bank, which led to the store where she kept her post office box, which led him to this office building, where he stuck out like a country rube because he’d forgone his usual suit and tie for something more comfortable. He couldn’t even pass for a tech billionaire. His jeans were Lucky, not Armani. Sara had bought his long-sleeved polo from a store he had never heard of. His old running sneakers were splotched with the French-blue paint from his bathroom.

He had painted the walls a lighter color because he had realized one morning that the chocolates and dark browns he had chosen for his house were too masculine for Sara.

Sara.

Will felt his chest rise and fall with a deep, calming breath. Just the thought of her name had drained away some of his anxiety. He allowed himself a moment to remember how good it felt to wake up in the middle of the night and find Sara’s body draped across his. She fit him like the last piece of a complicated puzzle. He had never met anyone like her before. She woke him up sometimes just to be with him. Her hands on him. Wanting him. Angie had never wanted him like that.

So why was he here?

Will looked down at the thick gray envelope in his hands. The multi-colored logo for Kip Kilpatrick’s management company was in the corner. Angie’s name was typed above a PO box number. The box was located in a midtown UPS store. There were actually two envelopes inside the box, but the one with the colored logo was the one Will saw first, and his heart had stopped like a train smashing into a brick wall.

He had stood motionless in the UPS store, staring at the envelope, not touching it, trying to get over his shock. Here was a concrete link between Angie and Kip Kilpatrick and, by extension, Marcus Rippy. He should’ve called Amanda immediately, got in a forensic team for fingerprints and to run the security footage. But Will hadn’t done any of this, because among other things, Amanda would want to know how he had tracked down the post office box number in the first place.

Angie’s bank had given Will copies of her statements showing her mailing address. He’d offered the manager his marriage certificate to prove that he was still legally married to Angie. The woman hadn’t needed to see it. All she’d needed was his driver’s license. Will’s name was still on Angie’s checking account, the same as it had been for the last twenty years.

He had not told Sara about the account.

Angie’s recent bank statement had shown an unusually large balance. She had always lived paycheck to paycheck. Will was the saver, the one who was terrified of running out of money and living on the streets again. Angie spent money as soon as it was in her pocket. She had told Will that she was going to die young so she might as well have fun.

Had she died young? Was forty-three middle-aged anymore?

The two-to-three-hour window to find Angie alive had closed hours ago. Sara was a good doctor. She knew how to read a crime scene and she knew how much blood was supposed to be inside of a body. Still, Will could not accept that Angie was dead. He wasn’t one for cosmic signs, but he knew that if something really bad happened to her, he would feel it in his gut.

Will folded the envelope in half, then shoved it into his back pocket as he headed toward the bank of elevators. He passed on two cars before realizing there was no way he would find one that wasn’t already packed with people from the parking deck. He looked at his watch. At 3:30 in the afternoon, the office workers should be pushing the clock to go home, not returning from late lunches. The elevator he finally jammed himself into was filled with the lingering odor of alcohol and cigarettes. Buttons were pressed. Will looked at the panel. They were going to stop on almost every floor.

He had been to Kip Kilpatrick’s office only once, during the brief and uneventful interview with Marcus Rippy. Will could still recall the opulent details inside the offices, because it was the sort of place specifically designed to stick in your head.

110 Sports Management took up the top two floors of the building, seemingly so that they could build a fancy floating glass staircase connecting the two levels. There were life-sized Fathead stickers all over the walls showing players dunking basketballs, rushing the net and throwing game-winning touchdowns. Framed jerseys with familiar numbers were in a straight line outside the conference room like photos of past CEOs, which was appropriate because sport was a billion-dollar business. God-like athleticism wasn’t enough to pay the bills. You had to have lifestyle brands and sneaker endorsements and your own clothing line to prove that you’d really made it.

Behind all of those billion-dollar deals, you also had to have a team of lawyers and managers and agents and brokers who all got their cut. Which was great, but it also created problems. Coca-Cola was a billion-dollar industry too, but there were lots of cans of Coke and bottlers who could make more of it. If a can of Coke exploded, you could get another one out of the fridge. If an athlete got pulled over going 100 miles an hour down I-75 while snorting cocaine with a hooker in his lap, then your entire business was dead the second TMZ posted the mugshot.

There was only one Serena Williams. There was only one Peyton Manning. There was only one Marcus Rippy.

Will forced out the image that came to mind when he thought of Marcus Rippy. Not the many photos of the athlete standing by his three-hundred-thousand-dollar car or on board his private Gulfstream or with his hand resting on the massive head of his pure-bred Alaskan Husky. The one of him at home with his family, acting like a happy father and caring husband while Keisha Miscavage, the woman Rippy had brutally raped, had around-the-clock protection because of the death threats from his fans.

One word from the ballplayer could stop those guys. One line in an interview or post to his Twitter account would make it possible for Keisha Miscavage to go home and start putting her life back together.

Then again, Rippy probably got a kick out of knowing she was still imprisoned.

A bell dinged. Fifth floor. The elevator doors opened. A handful of people got off. Will stood with his back pressed against the wall. He put his hand to his neck, remembering a second too late that he wasn’t wearing a tie.

After Collier had dropped him at the house, Will had assumed he was on some sort of leave, if not outright fired. He remembered thinking that men who were unemployed did not have to wear a suit and tie. It was kind of the point of being unemployed. Now, he regretted his clothing choices, but when he set off from his house a few hours ago, he’d assumed he was going to be chasing down leads on Angie, not confronting Kip Kilpatrick.

The elevator stopped at the twelfth floor. Half of the people got off. No one else got on. Will kept his back to the wall. The car stopped two more floors up. One person got on and took the ride to the next floor. By the time the car left the fifteenth floor, Will was finally alone. He watched the display flash as the elevator took an ear-popping ascent toward the top floor.

Each time the number changed, he thought, Angie. Angie. Angie.

Was he deluding himself? Was she really dead?

Will had made his share of death notifications, steeling himself before knocking on a door, offering a shoulder to lean on or a face to scream at when he told a mother, father, husband, wife, child that their loved one would never come home again.

What was it like to be on the other side? Would Will get a call in an hour or a day or a week? Would he be told that a patrol car had rolled up on Angie’s Monte Carlo and found her lifeless body slumped over the wheel?

Will would have to identify her. He would need to see her face before he believed that she was gone. In the unrelenting summer heat, what would she look like after all that time? Bloated, unrecognizable. He had seen bodies like that before. They would have to run DNA, but even then, Will’s brain would always battle over whether or not that swollen, discolored face belonged to his wife or if Angie had managed to cheat death the way she always cheated everything else.

She was a survivor. She could still be out there. Collier was right. Angie always had a guy. Maybe one of those guys was a doctor. Maybe she was recovering right now, too frail to pick up the phone and let Will know that she was alive.

Not that she would ever call him so long as Sara was around.

Will pressed his fingers into his eyes.

The elevator stopped on the twenty-ninth floor. The doors slid open. White marble gleamed from every surface. A gorgeous, model-thin blonde looked up from her computer at the reception counter. Will recognized her from before, but he was certain she would not remember him.

He was wrong.

‘Agent Trent.’ Her smile dropped into a straight line. ‘Take a seat. Mr Kilpatrick is still in his meeting. He’ll be five or ten minutes.’

Kip Kilpatrick was smart, but he wasn’t clairvoyant. Last Will had heard, Amanda was meeting with Marcus Rippy’s agent/lawyer first thing tomorrow morning. Up until half an hour ago, even Will didn’t know he was going to be here. Or maybe Kilpatrick wasn’t expecting Will to show up so much as waiting for him to. It made sense. Marcus Rippy was Kilpatrick’s biggest client, his only can of Coke. The slimy agent had already scuttled a rape charge. Explaining away a dead body was a comparative cakewalk.

‘There.’ The woman pointed to a seating area.

Will followed her order, walking across the lobby, which was the same square footage of his entire house. There was a frosted-glass door that led to the offices and one that led to a bathroom, but other than that, the lobby was completely closed off from the rest of the business.

From the sparse decor, you’d never know that you were standing right outside one of the top sports agencies in the country. Will supposed that was by design. No prospective client wanted to sit in the lobby staring at the smiling face of his on-court rival. Conversely, if your star was fading, you didn’t want to see that some hot Young Turk’s picture had taken your place on the wall.

Will sank into one of the comfortable chairs beside an expanse of floor-to-ceiling windows. Everything in the lobby was chrome and dark blue leather. The view outside stretched all the way to downtown. The light gray walls had 110% printed over and over again in a glossy clear varnish like wallpaper. There was a sign that hadn’t been here the last time: giant gold-leafed letters mounted on what looked like a nickel-plated quarter-inch sheet of metal that was taller than Will.

Will studied the letters. There were three lines of text, each at least eighteen inches tall. He watched the letters float around like sea anemones. An M crossed with an A. An E morphed into a Y.

Will had always had trouble reading. He wasn’t illiterate. He could read, but it took some time, and it helped if the words were printed or neatly written. The problem had plagued him since childhood. He’d barely graduated high school. Most of his teachers assumed he was just lazy or stupid or both. Will was in college when a professor mentioned dyslexia. It was a diagnosis he did not share with anyone else, because people assumed that slow reading meant you had a slow mind.

Sara was the first person Will had ever met who didn’t treat his disability like a handicap.

Man.

Age.

Ment.

Will silently read the three words from the sign a second, then a third time.

He heard the sound of a toilet flushing, then a faucet running, then an air hand dryer. The bathroom door opened. An older, well-dressed African American woman came out. She leaned heavily on a cane as she walked toward the seating area.

The receptionist turned on a smile. ‘Laslo will come for you in another minute, Mrs Lindsay.’

Will stood up, because he had been raised by a woman old enough to be his grandmother, and Mrs Flannigan had taught them manners more suited to the Greatest Generation.

Mrs Lindsay seemed to appreciate the gesture. She smiled sweetly as she sat down on the couch opposite Will.

She asked, ‘Is it still hot as the dickens outside?’

He took his seat. ‘Yes, ma’am.’

‘Lord help us.’ She smiled at him again, then picked up a magazine. Sports Illustrated. Marcus Rippy was on the cover palming a basketball. Will looked out the window because seeing the man’s face made him want to throw his chair across the room.

Mrs Lindsay tore out a subscription card and started to fan herself.

Will crossed his leg over his knee. He sat back in the deep chair. His calf was throbbing. There was a dot of blood on the leg of his jeans. He felt like a lifetime had passed since his foot had broken through the rotted floor of the condemned office building. At home, he’d wrapped his bleeding calf in gauze, but apparently that hadn’t solved the problem.

He looked at his watch. He ignored the dried blood on the back of his hand. He checked his phone, which was packed with threats from Amanda. The only sound in the room was Mrs Lindsay turning an occasional page in her magazine and the sporadic clattering of the receptionist’s long fingernails hitting her keyboard. Tap. Tap. Tap. She was far from proficient. Will couldn’t stop himself from duplicating the mantra from the elevator.

Angie. Angie. Angie.

She disappeared all the time. Months would go by, sometimes an entire year, and then one day Will would be eating dinner over the kitchen sink or lying on the couch watching TV and Angie would let herself into the house and act like only a few minutes had passed since the last time she’d seen him.

She would always say, ‘It’s me, baby. Did you miss me?’

That’s what she was doing now. She had disappeared, and she would be back, because she always came back eventually.

Will uncrossed his legs. He leaned forward, hands clasped between his knees. He twisted the cheap wedding ring around his finger. He’d bought the gold band for twenty-five bucks at a pawnshop. He had wanted to look legitimately married for the bank manager. Will could’ve saved the cash. The manager had barely glanced at his ID before giving him access to Angie’s entire financial life.

He picked at the ring. The gold was chipping off. It was nicer than the one Angie had given him.

Will dropped his hands. He wanted to stand up and pace, but he felt instinctively that the receptionist would not like that. Neither, he imagined, would Mrs Lindsay. Nothing was worse than watching someone else pace back and forth, plus it was a giant tip-off that you were nervous about something, and he didn’t want Kip Kilpatrick to know that he was nervous.

Should he be nervous? Will had the upper hand. At least he thought he did, but Kilpatrick had blindsided him before.

Will picked up a magazine. He recognized the Robb Report logo. There was a Bentley Bentayga SUV on the cover. Will paged to the article. Numbers had never been a problem for him. He found the car’s specs and traced his finger under the text. The words were easier to make out because they were familiar from other specs in other magazines, because he loved cars. Twin turbo 6.0 liter W12. 600 h.p. and 664 lb-ft of torque. Top speed of 187 m.p.h. The interior photographs showed hand-embroidered leather seats and delicate reeding around the chrome gauges.

Will drove a thirty-seven-year-old Porsche 911, but the car was no classic. His first mode of transportation had been a Kawasaki dirtbike, a sweet ride if you could show up for work covered in sweat or soaked in rain. One day Will had spotted a burned-out chassis abandoned in a field near his house. He’d paid some homeless guys to help him carry what was left of the Porsche back to his garage. The car was drivable after six months, but lack of money and a daunting technical schematic meant that it took Will almost ten years to fully restore it.

Sara had taken him to test-drive a brand-new 911 at Christmas. The trip to the dealership had been a surprise. Will had felt like an imposter standing in the showroom, but Sara had been right at home. She was used to being around money. Her apartment was a penthouse loft that cost north of a million bucks. Her BMW X5 had every bell and whistle. Sara had that confidence that came from knowing she could afford to buy what she wanted. Like the way she had stood in those open houses yesterday, looking around the large open spaces, silently thinking about the things she would change to make it more suited for her tastes, completely missing the fact that Will’s hands were shaking as he held the flier and counted the number of zeroes in front of the decimal.

Will’s Social Security number had been stolen by a foster parent when he was six years old. He didn’t find this out until he was twenty and tried to open his first bank account. His credit was in the toilet. He’d had to pay cash for everything until he was twenty-eight, and then the only credit card he could use was the one attached to his ATM. Even his house had been paid for with cash. He’d bought it at a tax foreclosure auction on the courthouse steps. For the first three years, he’d slept with a shotgun beside his bed because crack addicts kept showing up expecting to score some rocks from the gang that used to squat there.

Will still couldn’t get a credit card. Because of his cash-only policy, he had gone from bad credit to no credit. He literally did not show up with any of the ratings agencies. If Sara thought they were going to be able to buy a house together, she’d better be prepared to exchange her million-dollar penthouse loft for a shoebox. After ignoring Amanda all day, Will probably didn’t have a job anymore.

‘Are you a ball player?’

Will looked up from the magazine. Mrs Lindsay was talking to him.

‘No, ma’am,’ he told her, and then because as far as he knew, it was still technically true, he said, ‘I’m a special agent with the Georgia Bureau of Investigation.’

‘Isn’t that interesting?’ She played with the pearls around her neck. ‘Now, the GBI is the state police?’

‘No, ma’am. We’re a statewide agency that provides assistance with criminal investigations, forensic laboratory services and computerized criminal justice information.’

‘Sort of like the FBI, but to the state?’

She had picked it up quicker than most. ‘Yes, ma’am, exactly.’

‘All kinds of cases?’

‘Yes, ma’am. Every kind.’

‘How interesting.’ She started to rummage inside her purse. ‘Are you here for your job? I hope no one is in trouble?’

Will shook his head. ‘No, ma’am. Just some routine questions.’

‘What’s your full name?’

‘Will Trent.’

‘Will Trent. A man with two first names.’ She took out a small notebook with a church glass pattern on the vinyl cover. She picked at the pen inside the spiral.

Will leaned up so he could get his wallet. He fished out one of his business cards. ‘This is me.’

She studied the card. ‘Will Trent, Special Agent, Georgia Bureau of Investigation.’ She smiled at him as she tucked the card into her notebook and returned it to her purse. ‘I like to remember people I meet. How long have you been married?’

Will glanced down at the pawnshop ring on his finger. Was he a widower? What did you call yourself if your wife died when you no longer wanted to be married to her?

‘I’m sorry,’ Mrs Lindsay apologized. ‘I’m being nosey. My daughter is always telling me I’m too curious for my own good.’

‘No, ma’am. That’s all right. I’m kind of nosey, too.’

‘I should hope so, considering your job.’ She laughed, so Will laughed too. She told him, ‘I was married for fifty-one years to a wonderful man.’

‘You were a child bride?’

She laughed again. ‘You’re very kind, Special Agent Trent, but no. My husband passed away three years ago.’

Will felt a lump come into his throat. ‘And you have a daughter?’

‘Yes.’ That was all she said. She clutched her purse in her lap. She kept smiling at him. He smiled back.

And then he saw her bottom lip start to quiver.

Her eyes were moist.

Will glanced at the receptionist, who was still typing on her computer.

He lowered his voice, ‘Is everything all right?’

‘Oh yes.’ Her teeth showed in a wide smile, but the lip would not stop its tremble. ‘Everything is wonderful.’

Will noticed that the receptionist had stopped typing. She had the phone to her ear. Mrs Lindsay’s lip had not stopped quivering. She was obviously upset about something.

He tried to sound conversational. ‘Do you live around here?’

‘Just up the street.’

‘Buckhead,’ Will said. ‘My boss lives down the road in those town homes near Peachtree Battle.’

‘That’s a nice area. I’m in the older building at the curve across from the churches.’

‘Jesus Junction,’ Will supplied.

‘The Lord is everywhere.’

Will wasn’t religious, but he said, ‘It’s good to have somebody looking out for you.’

‘You’re so right. I am truly blessed.’

Will felt like he was trapped inside a plasma globe with little sparks of electricity arcing back and forth between him and Mrs Lindsay. They kept staring at each other for at least another ten seconds before the door behind the receptionist’s desk opened.

‘Miss Lindsay?’ A bullet-headed thug wearing a tight-fitting black shirt and even tighter black pants stood in the open doorway. His Boston accent was as thick as his neck. ‘Let’s bring you back, sweetheart.’

Mrs Lindsay gripped her cane and stood, so Will stood too. ‘It was nice meeting you.’

‘You too.’ She offered her hand. He shook it. Her skin was clammy. She bit her lip to stop the tremble. She leaned on her cane to get herself started, then walked through the open door without turning back around.

The thug eyeballed Will a fuck-you before shutting the door behind him. Will took a wild shot in the dark and guessed this was Laslo, and that Laslo worked for Kip Kilpatrick. Behind every fixer was a sleazeball eager to get his hands dirty. Laslo struck Will as the type who came pre-dirtied.

The receptionist said, ‘Mr Kilpatrick should be about five or ten minutes.’

‘More.’ She looked confused, so Will explained, ‘Because you said five to ten minutes before, so now it’s-’

She started pecking on her computer again.

Will stuck his hands into his pockets. He looked at the couch, feeling like Mrs Lindsay might have left something for him. A breadcrumb, maybe.

Nothing.

He walked toward the bathroom door, turned around, and walked back toward the drink sign. He’d been right about the pacing. The receptionist kept giving him annoyed looks as she picked away at her computer keyboard. He wondered if she was updating her Facebook page. What exactly was required of a receptionist if she wasn’t in charge of answering phones? Will considered this as he paced, because the other things he had to consider were too much to bear. He was on his sixth revolution when a loud ding pierced the air.

The elevator doors slid open. Amanda stepped out.

Her expression quickly changed from surprise to fury to her usual mask of indifference. ‘You’re early,’ she said, as if the fact that he was standing in the lobby hadn’t shocked the hell out of her. She turned to the receptionist, ‘Can you find out how much longer Mr Kilpatrick will be?’

The girl picked up the phone. Her fingernails spiked the keypad.

‘Thank you.’ Amanda’s tone was polite, but her shoes gave her away. The heels stabbed into the marble floor like knives. She sat in the chair Will had abandoned. Her feet didn’t reach the ground. She teetered a bit as she tried to keep her balance. Will had never seen Amanda sit all the way back in a chair, but the problem was that this particular chair had been built for someone with a basketball player’s long legs. No wonder Will had been so comfortable.

He told her, ‘Sorry I was early.’

She picked up the Robb Report. ‘I think I prefer you without testicles.’

The receptionist hung up the phone with a clatter. ‘Mr Kilpatrick said he’ll be five or ten minutes.’ For Will’s sake, she added, ‘More.’

‘Thank you.’ Amanda stared at the magazine with a sudden interest in luxury watches.

Will figured he couldn’t piss off Amanda any more than he already had. He resumed his pacing back and forth between the bathroom and the sign. He thought about the second envelope he had found in Angie’s post office box. White, nondescript, more shocking than the first. There was no stamp. Angie had left it for him, and Will had left it locked inside his car. The Kilpatrick envelope was evidence. The second was nobody’s business.

He asked Amanda, ‘Did you find anything?’ She stared at him blankly. ‘At the crime scene?’

Amanda turned to the receptionist. ‘Excuse me?’ She waited for the girl to look up. ‘The last time I was here, I was served a lovely mint tea. Do you mind making some for me again? With honey?’

The receptionist forced a smile. She slammed her hands on the desk and rolled back her chair so she could stand. She opened the door to the offices and closed it hard behind her.

Amanda told Will, ‘Sit down.’

He sat on the couch.

She said, ‘You’ve got until the girl comes back to explain to me why I shouldn’t fire you on the spot.’

Will couldn’t think of a good reason, so he settled on coming clean. He pulled the 110 envelope out of his back pocket. He tossed it onto the glass coffee table.

Amanda didn’t touch it. She read the return address, which was for the office they were sitting in. Like the wallpaper in the lobby, the 110% was repeated in clear ink across the front and back. Instead of asking what was inside the envelope, she said, ‘How did you get Angie’s PO box number?’

‘I went to the bank. I’m on her checking account. The PO box is inside a UPS store off-’

‘Spring Street.’ She gave him a withering look. ‘Your phone belongs to the GBI, Will. I could track you to the bathroom if I wanted to.’ She motioned for him to continue. ‘So, you went to the store and?’

Will let the information about the tracking sink in. ‘I showed the manager the bank statement with our names on it and my driver’s license and he gave me access to the post office box.’ He left out the hundred dollars cash that had exchanged hands, and the veiled threats he had made to the store owner about the GBI’s fraud investigation division, but something about the look Amanda gave him said that she knew.

She studied the envelope again, still not touching it. ‘Who did you hit?’

He looked at the broken skin on the back of his hand. ‘Somebody who probably didn’t deserve it.’

‘Are they going to be a problem?’

Will didn’t think Collier was the type. ‘No.’

‘You need to take off that wedding ring before you see Sara. And I wouldn’t tell her you’re still listed on Angie’s bank account, because she might wonder how you can find that post office box in two hours when you haven’t been able to find one single viable lead off Angie in the last year and a half.’

Will didn’t hear a question, so he didn’t give an answer.

‘Why are you still on her account?’

‘Because she needs money sometimes.’ He looked out the window. The truth was, he didn’t know why he hadn’t tried to track down Angie through the bank statement before. ‘She’ll text me sometimes that she needs help.’

‘Which means you have her phone number?’

‘The last time she texted me was thirteen months ago for a couple hundred dollars.’ It was actually five hundred, but Will didn’t want to overshare. ‘The phone number that Charlie found is the same number she texted from. It’s been disconnected.’ He added, ‘And it’s the same number on her bank account.’

Amanda finally picked up the envelope. She pulled out the five-thousand-dollar check written from Kip Kilpatrick’s personal account. Proof that Angie had been working for Kilpatrick. Amanda let her hand fall to her lap. ‘This is why she didn’t need to borrow money. If you can call it borrowing. I’m assuming she never paid you back.’

Again, he did not answer the question that was not asked. ‘For the last three months, Angie has shown a five-thousand-dollar deposit every two weeks, the same amount that’s on that check. She was working for Kip Kilpatrick.’

‘For what reason do you think Kilpatrick was paying her ten thousand dollars a month out of his private account?’

Will shrugged, but he could think of a lot of illicit things Angie would do. She’d had a pill problem on and off from childhood. She didn’t mind doing bad things or looking the other way when people did bad things for her. She had also dipped into legal enterprises, so Will went with the least of her sins. ‘She was registered with the state as a private investigator. Maybe Kilpatrick had her investigating people, doing background checks on potential clients. She worked security part-time when she was a cop. Maybe she did that for him too.’ He asked her again, ‘What did you find at the crime scene?’

Amanda ignored the question a second time. ‘Tell me the reason you didn’t call me half an hour ago when you found this check.’

Will looked down at his hands. He was twisting the wedding ring again. He didn’t know why he had developed an attachment to it. The ring meant about as much as the one that Angie had put on his finger at the court house.

Amanda said, ‘The blood in the room is type B-negative, which is a very rare blood type. Angie is type B-negative. That’s all I have for you.’

‘All the blood was B-negative?’

‘The majority of the blood, yes. The volume.’

Will heard Sara’s words echo in his head.

The volume of blood loss is the real danger.

Amanda said, ‘Jane Doe is still in surgery. We have a lead on a gal named Delilah Palmer. Ever heard of her?’

Will shook his head.

‘White female, twenty-two years old. Her sheet has prostitution and drugs times eight. Harding was her guardian angel. She’s been on the game for a while.’

‘Angie worked vice when she was a cop.’

‘Did she really?’ Amanda put on a bad show of sounding surprised. ‘We’ve put out a high alert. This Delilah Palmer likely knows why Dale and Angie were killed, which either makes her our top suspect or our next victim.’

Will twisted the ring on his finger. He forced himself not to look at his watch, to do the math for how much time had passed since Sara had said that Angie didn’t have much time.

She would come back. Angie always came back. That’s how he would get through this. He would treat this time like every other time she disappeared, and a year would go by, two years, and Will would find a way to accept that he had watched Amanda pretend to read a magazine while Angie had died alone. Just like she always said she would do. Just like Will had wished she would do because he wanted things to be easier with Sara.

He looked out the window. He tried to swallow. He felt that familiar tightness in his chest. The last thing he had said to Angie was that he didn’t love her anymore.

Then he had gone back to Sara.

Amanda put down her magazine. She stood up. She walked around the coffee table and sat on the edge of the couch. She smoothed out her skirt. She stared at the wall in front of her. Her shoulder touched his, and it took everything Will had inside of him not to lean against her.

She said, ‘You know my mother hanged herself in our backyard when I was a child.’

Will looked up. She had spoken matter-of-factly, but the truth was that he hadn’t known.

She said, ‘Every time I washed dishes, I would look out the window at that tree and think, “You are the last person who is ever going to make me feel this way ever again.” ’

Will didn’t ask which way she meant.

‘And then Kenny came along. I’m sure Faith has told you about her uncle.’

Will nodded. Kenny Mitchell was a retired pilot who’d flown test engines for NASA.

‘Kenny was a stone-cold fox, as we used to say.’ She smiled her secret smile. ‘I couldn’t understand why he chose me. I was such a plain, silly girl. Very naive. Desperate to please my father. Wouldn’t say boo to a ghost.’

Will couldn’t picture Amanda being any of those things.

‘Kenny was like a drug. At first in the exciting way, then in the bad way. The way that led your Jane Doe to vacuuming up two ounces of coke.’ Amanda’s tone said she wasn’t exaggerating. ‘I lowered myself for him. I did things that I never thought I would ever, ever do.’

Will glanced back toward the closed office door. How long did water take to boil for tea?

Amanda said, ‘The hardest part was that deep down inside, I knew it. I knew he would never marry me. I knew he would never give me children.’ She paused. ‘I could spot a lying perp from fifty yards, but I chose to believe everything that came out of Kenny’s mouth. I’d invested so many years of my life in him that I couldn’t admit that I was wrong. I was terrified of looking like a fool.’

Will sat back on the couch. If she thought that was how he was with Angie, then she was wrong. Will knew from the beginning that Angie was the wrong person for him. As for looking like a fool, everybody knew that she cheated on him.

Used to cheat on him.

Amanda continued, ‘Kenny and I had been together for nearly eight years when I met Roger.’ Her voice softened when she said the name. ‘I’ll spare you the details, but let’s just say he caught my eye. He wanted to give me everything I didn’t have with Kenny, but I said no, because I didn’t know how to be with a man who wanted to be with me.’ The softness had drained away. ‘I was addicted to Kenny’s uncertainty, that niggling little doubt in my gut that made me wonder if I could survive without him. I thought I could fix the pain inside of him. It took me a long time to realize that the pain was inside of me.’

Will rubbed his jaw. That hit a little closer to home.

Amanda turned toward him, her hand resting on the back of the couch. ‘We had this kitten when I was a little girl. Buttons. She kept clawing the couch, so my father bought me a water pistol and told me to shoot her every time she got near it. And I remember that first time I squirted her, she panicked and ran to me for comfort. She clung to me, and I petted her until she calmed down. That’s how I was with Kenny. That’s how you were with Angie.’ Amanda said this with conviction. ‘It’s the curse of the motherless child. We seek comfort from the very people who do us harm.’

Her words splayed him open like a razor.

She said, ‘I think you never checked Angie’s bank statement because you were afraid that she’d closed the account. That she’d cut off that final tie with you.’

Will looked down at his hands, the broken skin from punching Collier, the fake ring that signified his fake marriage.

‘Am I right?’

He shrugged, but he knew that she was right.

Angie had left him a letter. That was what was inside the second envelope inside her post office box. This one had Will’s name written on the outside in capital letters, clear so that he could easily read it. The letter inside was a different matter. Angie had deliberately written him a note in her cursive chicken scratch because she knew that Will would not be able to read it. He would have to find someone else to read it for him.

Sara?

He cleared his throat. ‘What made you finally leave Kenny?’

‘You think I’d ever give up?’ She laughed deep from her belly. ‘Oh no. Kenny left me. For a man.’

Will felt himself startle.

‘I knew he was gay. I wasn’t that naive.’ She shrugged. ‘It was the seventies. Everybody thought gay people could change.’

Will tried to get over his shock. ‘Was it too late with Roger?’

‘About half a century too late. He wanted a stay-at-home wife and I wanted a career.’ She looked at her watch, then at the closed door. ‘At least he showed me what an orgasm was.’

Will put his head in his hands and prayed for self-immolation.

‘Oh stop it.’ Amanda stood up, indicating that sharing time was over. ‘Wilbur, I have known you for more years than I care to admit, and you have always been a raving idiot in your personal life. Don’t screw things up with Sara. She is too good for you, and you’d better find a way to keep her before she figures that out.’

She grabbed his hand and slid the ring off his finger.

He watched her stomp over to the desk and toss the ring into the trashcan. The metal made a dinging sound, like the hammer hitting the bell at the end of round one. ‘And don’t tell any of this to Faith. She has no idea her uncle is gay.’

The door opened. The receptionist said, ‘Mr Kilpatrick will see you now.’

‘Thank you.’ Amanda waited for Will to stand up and follow her.

Will put his hands on his knees and pushed himself up from the couch. His head was spinning through the slide show of everything Amanda had just told him, but he forced himself to stop the carousel and put it on a shelf. None of what she’d said mattered. Angie wasn’t dead. She was off somewhere, the same place she always went to, and eventually one day his front door would open and he would hear those familiar words.

It’s me, baby. Did you miss me?

A loud rebel yell shocked Will’s attention back to the present. Two young guys in sharp suits high-fived each other as they celebrated something agent-y. The quiet of the lobby was gone. Phones were ringing. Secretaries were murmuring into their headsets. The floating glass stairs were filled with people who looked like they had stepped out of a magazine spread. Overhead, a giant LED sign counted up the number of millions the company had made for their players so far this year.

Except for the staggeringly high number, not much had changed in the four months since Will had been here. The life-sized stickers were still on the walls. Every office door still had a beautiful young woman stationed at a desk outside. There were still photos of agents looking like Tattoo next to Mr O’Rourke as they stood by their star players signing multi-million-dollar contracts.

The surly receptionist handed them over to another blonde, this one a few years older, probably with an MBA from Harvard, because hot blondes who worked in offices like this weren’t just for show anymore.

The new blonde told Amanda, ‘I put your mint tea in the conference room, but Kip wanted to talk to you first.’

Will realized he should’ve asked Amanda what she hoped to accomplish here. It was normal procedure to talk to a building’s owner when a dead body was found on their premises, but this wasn’t Kip Kilpatrick’s first rodeo. There was no way he’d let them interview Marcus Rippy, even off the record.

It was too late to ask Amanda now. The blonde knocked on the office door, then let them in.

Kip Kilpatrick was sitting at a massive glass table in the center of his light-filled corner office. The ceiling soared twenty feet overhead. The dull marble slabs on the floor were broken up with heavy wool rugs shot through with strings of silk. The deep couches and chairs in the seating area had been designed for giants. Kilpatrick was not a giant. His small feet rested on the edge of the table, scuffing the backs of his bespoke leather loafers. He was leaning back in the chair, tossing a basketball into the air with both hands, talking into the Bluetooth earpiece stuck in his ear because he wouldn’t look douchey enough speaking into a regular phone.

Kilpatrick had other clients-a top-seeded tennis player, a soccer player who had helped the US take home the World Cup, but it was clear from his office who the real superstar was. It wasn’t just the regulation NBA Marcus Rippy backboard mounted high on the wall. They might as well have been standing in a Marcus Rippy museum. Kilpatrick had framed jerseys going back to Rippy’s youth league days. Signed basketballs lined the window ledge. Two Rippy bobbleheads sat on opposite corners of his desk. Championship trophies were on a specially designed floating shelf that had a pin light wrapping every inch of gold. There was even a pair of bronzed size-fourteen basketball shoes that Rippy had worn when he helped his college team win the Final Four.

Will had always assumed that Kilpatrick was a failed player. He was not too short, but not tall enough, the kind of guy who puppydogged the team, trying to be friends with the players while they walked all over him. The only difference now was that he at least got paid for it.

‘Heads up,’ Kilpatrick said. He passed the basketball to Will.

Will let the ball hit him in the chest and bounce across the room. The sound echoed in the cold office. They all watched the ball dribble into the corner.

Kilpatrick said, ‘Guess you’re not a player?’

Will said nothing.

‘Have I met you before?’

Will had spent seven months hounding Kilpatrick and his people over the Rippy investigation. There was probably a dartboard in the break room with his face on it. Still, if Kilpatrick was going to pretend they had never met, that was fine with Will.

He said, ‘Drawing a blank.’

‘Me too.’ Kilpatrick bumped the glass table as he stood. The bobbleheads nodded. ‘Ms Wagner. Can’t say that I’m happy to see you again.’

Amanda didn’t tell him that the feeling was mutual. ‘Thank you for moving up our meeting. I’m sure we’d all like to get this straightened out as soon as possible.’

‘Absolutely.’ Kilpatrick opened a small refrigerator packed with bottles of BankShot, an energy drink that tasted like cough syrup. He twisted off the cap. He took a mouthful and swigged it around before swallowing. ‘Tell me, what’s “this” again?’

‘ “This” is a murder investigation that is currently taking place at Marcus Rippy’s nightclub.’ When he didn’t respond, Amanda said, ‘As I told you on the phone, I need information about the development.’

Kilpatrick chugged the drink. Will glanced at Amanda. She was being unusually patient.

‘Ahh.’ Kilpatrick tossed the empty bottle into the trashcan. ‘What I can tell you right now is that I’ve never heard of this Harding guy.’

‘So the name Triangle-O Holdings Limited means nothing to you?’

‘Nope.’ Kilpatrick grabbed the basketball off the floor. ‘Never heard of it.’

Will had no idea where Amanda was going with her question, but for her benefit, he explained to Kilpatrick, ‘The triangle offense was made famous by Michael Jordan’s Chicago Bulls under coach Phil Jackson.’

‘Jordan, huh?’ Kilpatrick smiled as he palmed the basketball. ‘I think I heard of that guy. Like a really old Marcus Rippy.’

Amanda said, ‘Dale Harding was living in a very nice home owned by Triangle-O Holdings.’

Kilpatrick threw the basketball toward the hoop. It hit the backboard and he took the rebound for another shot. ‘Nothin’ but net,’ he said, like he couldn’t simply walk up and touch the bottom of the net with the tips of his fingers.

Amanda said, ‘Triangle-O Holdings is registered in Delaware to a company that is registered in St Martin, then St Lucia, all the way through to a corporation held in Copenhagen.’

Will felt a tickle in his brain. The construction signs outside Rippy’s nightclub had a Danish flag in the logo.

Amanda had obviously noticed the same detail, but earlier and when it could better serve her purpose. ‘I’ve got the state department making an official inquiry into the names of the corporation’s board and shareholders. You could make this a lot easier if you would just tell me.’

‘No idea.’ Kilpatrick tried to spin the basketball on the tip of his finger. ‘Wish I could help you.’

‘You could let us talk to Marcus Rippy.’

He coughed a laugh. ‘Not a chance, lady.’

Will sneaked a glance at Amanda again, wondering what she was up to. She had to know they had lost their one shot at Marcus Rippy.

She asked, ‘What about the name Angie Polaski?’

Kilpatrick finally got the ball to spin. ‘What about it?’

‘Have you ever heard of her?’

‘Sure.’ He slapped the basketball to make it spin faster.

‘In what capacity?’

‘Uh, let’s just say she provided a service.’

‘Background checks? Security?’

‘Snatch.’ Kilpatrick got a look on his face that made Will want to punch him straight out the window. ‘She provided girls for some of my parties. Nothing was expected of them. I just asked that they be experienced.’ He paused, and added, ‘Conversationalists. Experienced conversationalists. Like I said, nothing sexual was expected of them. They were all adults. They were paid for their conversation. Anything else was their choice.’

‘Choice,’ Will repeated, because he knew for a fact that Marcus Rippy preferred women who didn’t have a choice.

Amanda summed it up. ‘So you’re saying that Angie Polaski provided escorts for your parties?’

Kilpatrick nodded, his eyes on the spinning ball.

Will had to admit there might be something to what he was saying. Angie had loved working vice. She was always more comfortable walking the line between cop and criminal. She also knew her share of prostitutes, and she never had any problems with women making money any way they knew how.

Kilpatrick said, ‘My clients are high-profile celebrities. Sometimes they want a little discreet company. It’s hard for them to meet women.’

Amanda asked, ‘You mean other than their wives?’

Will thought about the working girls that Angie knew. They were low-level streetwalkers, drug addicts, some of them toothless, all of them desperate, none of them more than a few years away from a prison cell or a grave. Will might be able to imagine a world in which Angie pimped out some girls and told herself that she was doing them a favor, but the girls she knew were not the kind of ladies that Kilpatrick’s clients would want to meet.

Kilpatrick said, ‘So, that’s what you wanted to know? What Polaski was doing for me?’

‘Do you have her current address?’

‘Post office box.’ He picked up the phone, punched in some numbers, and said, ‘My office.’ He hung up the phone. ‘My guy Laslo can give you the details.’ Laslo again. Will was right to assume the bullet-headed Boston thug was an extra pair of dirty hands.

Amanda asked, ‘How did you meet Ms Polaski?’

Kilpatrick shrugged his shoulders. ‘The way you meet these kinds of people is, they’re just there. They know what you’re looking for and they offer to take care of it for a price. Easy.’

Will said, ‘Like bribing witnesses in a rape trial.’

Kilpatrick looked at him. Something like a snort came out of his nose. ‘Yeah, now I remember who you are.’

Amanda asked, ‘What about a phone number?’

‘Laslo will have it. I don’t deal with tradespeople.’

‘Right,’ Will said. ‘You just mail them the checks from your personal bank account.’

Amanda shot Will a daggered look. She told Kilpatrick, ‘We found a check written to Angie Polaski, drawn from your bank account.’

‘The agency only pays for drinks and dinners. Anything else is on us.’ Kilpatrick explained, ‘ “Business development” is what we call it on our taxes.’

Amanda said, ‘Let’s talk about another development. The one where we found a dead body this morning.’

He started to spin the ball again. ‘I’ll let you get that from the horse’s mouth.’

Amanda said, ‘Does that mean that everything you’ve told us thus far has been from the horse’s other end?’

Kilpatrick took a beat to get her meaning.

There was a knock at the door. Laslo said, ‘Boss, they’re ready.’

Kilpatrick dribbled the basketball as he walked across the office. ‘Get these people Polaski’s deets. They’re cops. They’re looking for her.’

‘Big surprise.’ Laslo grabbed the ball and shot it toward the hoop on the wall.

Kilpatrick started to go for the rebound.

Amanda snaked the ball and put it down on the closest chair. ‘We’re ready when you are, Mr Kilpatrick.’

He eyed the basketball, but thought better of it. ‘This way.’ He started down the hallway. ‘The development is scheduled to break ground next week. We’re calling it the All-Star Complex.’

She asked, ‘We?’

‘Yeah, that’s thanks to you guys.’ Kilpatrick led them past a bunch of closed office doors. ‘Funny thing about that jacked-up rape charge you laid on Marcus. The other investors were looking for someone else to step in, and we realized we were missing a larger opportunity.’

‘Meaning?’

‘We pitched the investment to some of our higher-end clients. We realized we could expand the complex into a live/work community.’

Amanda said, ‘So like Atlantic Station, but in an area that is historically more crime-ridden.’

Will smiled. She had a point. Atlantic Station had been pitched to the city as a dream development that would turn an area of blight into a thriving tax base. As with most dreams, reality had come crashing down in the form of a spike in sexual assaults, muggings, carjackings and vandalism. At one point, a couple of more enterprising bank robbers had strapped a chain around an ATM machine and pulled it out of the wall with their truck.

Kilpatrick had obviously handled the Atlantic Station question before. ‘Those were growing pains. It happens. The whole thing’s been turned around, as I’m sure you know. And also, the developers didn’t have the benefit of eight of the most talented, tremendous athletes the world has ever known, ready to promote the project to make sure it succeeds.’ He threw his hands out like a carnival barker. ‘Think about it. Marcus Rippy alone has over ten million Facebook fans. His Tweets and Instagram reach twice as many as that. He puts up one post about a dope club or a hip shop he’s excited about and within the hour the place is flooded. He’s a taste-maker.’

Kilpatrick turned the corner and they were facing a vast glass-walled conference room with a table that could accommodate fifty people. Will forced himself not to flinch in disgust when he noticed the four lawyers already in the room. Kilpatrick must have called in the big guns the minute Amanda had requested a meeting.

Will recognized them all from the Rippy rape investigation. The interchangeable Bond villains: two old white men, each with a gorgeous thirty-ish woman dressed to kill sitting beside him. Kilpatrick ran through the introductions, but Will had already designated their Bond status from before. Auric Goldfinger was at the head of the table, his patches of Chia-like gold hair and thick German accent earning him the name. Obviously his blonde underling was Pussy Galore. Then there was Dr Julius No, a man who for some reason always kept his hands under the table. His sidekick was Rosa Klebb, named not for her looks, which were fantastic, but because her pointy high-heeled shoes seemed like the type that would have poison-tipped knives inside of them.

Goldfinger said, ‘Deputy Director, Agent Trent, thank you both for coming. Please sit.’ He indicated a chair with a cup of tea in front of it, two seats away from Rosa Klebb.

Will pulled out two chairs from the opposite end of the table, about half a mile away from the Bond quartet, because he knew that’s how Amanda would want to play it. She glanced up at Will as they sat down, her eyes going to his bare neck, and he got the feeling that she was really annoyed that he wasn’t wearing a suit and tie.

Will was annoyed too. He could’ve at least worn his gun on his hip. He needed some armor against these people. They didn’t roll out of bed for less than three thousand bucks an hour. Each. The combined receipt for this meeting was probably more than Will’s take-home pay.

He looked at Kilpatrick, but Kilpatrick was obviously no longer in charge. He had slumped into a chair, rolling an unopened bottle of red BankShot between his hands.

‘So.’ Amanda chose to forgo subtlety. ‘I’m trying to understand why it takes four lawyers to answer one simple question.’

Goldfinger smiled. ‘It’s not a simple question, Deputy Director. You asked for details on the property in which the victim was found. We are simply here to give you the larger picture of the situation.’

Amanda said, ‘In my experience, there’s always a larger picture where murder is concerned, but again, it’s never taken so many lawyers to draw it for me.’

Will watched them carefully. No one spoke. No one moved. Despite her question, Amanda didn’t seem displeased to find herself talking to the lawyers. If someone had asked Will for his opinion, he would’ve guessed that she’d somehow contrived to put them all in this room.

The only question was why. Amanda set aside the tea bag and drank some tea.

Finally Goldfinger looked at Dr No, who in turn nodded to Rosa Klebb.

Klebb stood up. She stacked together some folders. She walked around the conference table, which was about the width of a sequoia. Will could hear her pantyhose scratching against her tight skirt. He looked down at her extremely high-heeled shoes. The soles were red because they could stop a man’s heart. Sara had a pair from the same designer. He preferred them on Sara.

‘This is a packet on the development,’ Goldfinger told them. ‘It’s the same presentation we shared with the mayor and governor last month.’

Amanda would’ve already heard about the project. She had talked to the mayor this morning and was briefing the governor at the capitol when Will had given her the slip. She didn’t volunteer this information. Instead she glanced at the folder, which had a massive star logo in the center. She handed her packet to Will. He put it on top of his packet and placed both at his elbow.

Dr No leaned over, his hands still tucked under the table. ‘We’ll have to ask you to keep this information to yourselves. There’s a press embargo until the official announcement. You can read the details about the development in the packet.’

Amanda waited.

Goldfinger explained, ‘The All-Star Complex will have a sixteen-screen movie theater, a thirty-story hotel, a twenty-story condominium complex, a farmers’ market, an outdoor shopping mall with high-end boutique and chain stores, exclusive town homes, a members-only nightclub and of course a full-sized basketball court adjacent to what we’re calling the All-Star Experience, an interactive museum showcasing all that is wonderful about NCAA basketball.’

Amanda asked, ‘How will this be financed?’

‘We have several private investors whose names I’m currently not at liberty to release.’

‘And foreign investors?’ Amanda prodded.

Goldfinger smiled. ‘A project of this scope requires many, many investors, some of whom wish to remain behind the scenes.’

‘Including yourselves?’

He smiled back a non-answer.

She said, ‘The construction company is LK Totalbyg A/S, based in Denmark.’

‘That is correct. As you know, Atlanta is an international city. We reached out to international investors. It’s a win-win for everyone involved.’

Will thought about the people who actually lived in Atlanta who would be investing whether they wanted to or not. The perks that the government handed out for these kinds of projects were phenomenal. City-funded bond initiatives, decades-long state and local tax deferments, new roadways, new infrastructure, new traffic lights and cops to keep the area safe-basically all the cold, hard cash that always made these developments possible for the rich guys who touted the glories of private enterprise and talked about pulling themselves up by their bootstraps.

The American Dream.

‘Deputy Director.’ Dr No leaned toward Amanda as if they weren’t separated by an ocean of hardwood. ‘As both the mayor and governor have repeatedly expressed, both the city and state are very excited about the development. The proximity to the Georgia Dome, Georgia Tech, Centennial Village and SunTrust Park means the complex will be a mecca for tourists.’

Will thought that Chattahoochee Avenue was a bit far out to be a mecca for anything, but he had to assume these guys had seen a map.

Goldfinger said, ‘We’re hoping that the All-Star Experience will rival downtown’s College Football Hall of Fame. I don’t have to tell you what it would do for the city’s economic opportunities if we could secure more vital slots in the March Madness rotation.’

‘Sounds impressive.’ Amanda didn’t have to know about sports to understand that this was big business. She looked down the table, expectant. ‘And?’

Dr No took over. ‘And we would hope that you would understand that this is a delicate undertaking.’

Pussy Galore chimed in. ‘It’s not just the nuts and bolts of building such an impressive complex. We’ve put a lot of time and effort into making the announcement about the project’s existence. You only get one opportunity to make that first big splash. We’ve got all of our all-star investors lined up to attend. We’re flying in reporters from New York, Chicago and LA. We’ve booked suites and restaurants. We have a massive two-day party planned, culminating in a ground-breaking at the site. We’ve worked the press into a frenzy. It’s very important that none of this is tainted by lingering doubt about any of the investors.’

Goldfinger added, ‘Or about the site.’

Amanda said, ‘If that means you’re worried we’re going to charge your client with rape again, I can put your minds at ease.’ She smiled. ‘This is a murder case, so if we make any charges, it will be for murder.’

The room lost all of its air.

Goldfinger smiled, and then the smile turned into a laugh.

Dr No joined in, his hands still below the table so that he looked like a lemming caught in a blender.

Amanda asked, ‘When is this party planned?’

‘This weekend.’

‘Ah,’ she said, as if she finally understood, but Will would’ve bet his life that she knew about the launch before she walked through the door. The mayor and the governor would’ve both been pressuring her harder than the lawyers to wrap up the investigation so the project could get under way. The city needed the jobs. The state needed the money.

Amanda told them, ‘The fact remains that a dead man was found inside the nightclub. We’ve got a large crime scene to process. Even with overtime, it will take at least until Saturday to catalog and photograph all of the evidence.’

Not for the first time, Will admired Amanda’s lying skills, because there was no way that crime scene would take that long to clear. She was playing the long game here. He just couldn’t see the end point.

Goldfinger said, ‘This is the problem at which we have arrived. Saturday is a bit of a difficulty for us.’

‘Not just a bit.’ Galore supplied, ‘We promised an early peek of the club to the LA Times. They’re scheduled for first thing Friday morning. They want to do a before-and-after kind of thing with Marcus, take some photos of him behind the bar, maybe standing on the balcony, then the later photos will show the same shots after the club is finished.’

‘Can’t you postpone that?’ Amanda asked.

Galore wrinkled her nose. ‘The word postpone is catnip to reporters. We’d be looking at a lot of bad press.’

Amanda told them, ‘I was inside that club this morning. It looked more like a crack den than the anchor to a two-point-eight-billion-dollar project.’

None of them seemed to notice that she had the price tag at her fingertips.

Galore supplied, ‘We had cleaners scheduled to go in this morning to start making the club more presentable. Obviously that was well after your crime scene people arrived.’ She added, ‘But still, we’d need at least two days, balls to the walls, to get that place spiffed up.’

‘You realize the press has already gotten wind of the murder?’ Amanda said. ‘They know that a body was found inside the club.’

‘Yes, they know that a body was found,’ Galore said. ‘They don’t know that the man was anything other than a vagrant.’

‘Both the GBI and the Atlanta police were on scene. The media is going to assume that we wouldn’t put that much effort into solving the murder of a vagrant.’ She smiled at them. ‘Not that any death isn’t a tragedy, but the local police normally don’t ask the state for help in such circumstances.’

‘So it’s a drug deal gone bad, or two homeless men fighting over a forty,’ Galore suggested. ‘That would only serve to highlight another positive aspect of the All-Star development, taking an area that is prone to crime and turning it into a safe, clean, family-friendly neighborhood.’

‘But he wasn’t a vagrant. He was a retired Atlanta police detective.’

No one had an answer for that.

Amanda said, ‘I’m sorry, folks, I understand the dilemma, but I can’t rush a murder investigation for your grand opening. I have to think of the victim’s family. The detective had a wife. She’s only twenty-two years old.’

Will worked to keep the surprise off his face. Because of the age, he had to assume that the wife was Delilah Palmer. He had no idea why Amanda hadn’t shared this detail with him. There was a big difference between Harding being Delilah’s guardian angel and being her husband. Wives knew things. They had access to information. If Harding was targeted for knowing too much, then Delilah would be the next person on the list.

Amanda continued, ‘Harding and the girl were married for only a few months. I already had to tell her that she’s a widow. Am I supposed to go back now and tell her that her husband’s death takes a back seat to a press event?’ Amanda shook her head as if the very thought made her sad. ‘And speaking of the press, Mrs Harding is incredibly photogenic. Blonde hair, blue eyes, very pretty. The press will be all over her.’

‘No, no,’ Dr No said. ‘We wouldn’t want any of that, Deputy Director. We’re not trying to impede your investigation.’ He shot Goldfinger a look, because of course they were trying to impede the investigation.

And Amanda would’ve known this already, so again Will had to wonder what she was angling for.

‘Deputy Director,’ Goldfinger began. ‘We would just ask that you do all you can to speed things along.’ He held up his finger. ‘Not speed, of course, because that would imply rushing. I would just say that you could please handle this expeditiously.’

She nodded. ‘Of course. I’ll do what I can. But I can’t have my people cleared out by Saturday. There are simply not enough hours in the day.’

Dr No asked, ‘Is there anything we can do to help expedite the process?’

Will felt an invisible zap come off Amanda. Dr No’s question was exactly what she had been waiting for.

‘I wonder if-’ She stopped herself. ‘No, never mind. We’ll do all we can.’ She started to stand. ‘Thank you for your time.’

‘Please.’ Goldfinger motioned for her to sit. ‘What can we do?’

She sat back down. She gave a heavy sigh. ‘I’m afraid it all comes back to Marcus Rippy.’

‘Fuck no!’ Kilpatrick had jumped to attention. ‘You’re not talking to Marcus. No fucking way, no fucking how.’

Amanda spoke to Goldfinger. ‘Look at this from my perspective. I have a highly decorated, much respected ex-police detective found murdered inside a building that is under construction. In the course of a normal investigation, the first thing I would do is talk to the building owner to eliminate him or her as a suspect and to generate a list of people who would have access to the building.’

‘I can give you a fucking list,’ Kilpatrick sputtered. ‘You don’t need to talk to Marcus.’

‘I’m afraid I do.’ She held out her hands in a helpless shrug. ‘I just need a few moments of his time, and a promise that he’ll have an open and honest conversation with us. It would go a long way toward repairing his reputation if he was shown to be helping a police investigation. On the record.’

‘Are you fucking kidding me? On the record?’ Kilpatrick had jumped to his feet. He told Goldfinger, ‘You can get five to ten years in this state for lying to a cop.’

Amanda asked, ‘What is your client planning to lie about?’

Kilpatrick ignored her, telling Goldfinger, ‘This fucking spider is trying to trap Marcus into saying something that-’

‘Kip,’ Dr No said, and Kilpatrick’s mouth shut like a trout.

Goldfinger told Amanda, ‘Deputy Director, perhaps you and I could speak in private?’

The three other lawyers stood in unison.

Amanda touched Will’s arm, releasing him. He headed toward the door.

Kilpatrick threw his hands into the air. ‘This is bullshit, man. Bullshit!’ The trio of lawyers had already dispersed. Will watched Kilpatrick from the hallway. He said ‘bullshit’ two more times before leaving the room. He tried to slam the glass door behind him, but it was on a pneumatic closer.

Like magic, Laslo appeared at Will’s elbow. Kilpatrick jabbed his finger at both of them, red-faced, furious. ‘Walk this peckerhead to the lobby, then come back to my office. Pronto.’ Kilpatrick punched the wall. The Sheetrock flexed but didn’t puncture. He kicked it to the same effect before stalking away.

‘Hey, peckerhead.’ Laslo indicated the long walk back to the lobby. ‘This way.’

‘Laslo.’ Will looked over the guy’s head, taking advantage of the half-foot difference. He wasn’t going to leave without Amanda, and something about the thug had rubbed him the wrong way. ‘You gotta last name?’

‘Yeah, it’s Go Fuck Yourself. Now start moving.’

‘Laslo Go Fuck Yourself.’ Will didn’t move. ‘You gotta card?’

‘I got my size ten up your ass if you don’t get movin’, buddy.’

Will forced a chuckle. He put his hands in his pockets like he had all day.

‘What the fuck are you laughin’ at?’

Will couldn’t tame the thing inside of him that wanted to piss this guy off. He thought about the old lady from the lobby, the way her bottom lip had trembled. Was that because of Laslo? Kip Kilpatrick? Will felt instinctively that something was there.

He told Laslo, ‘Mrs Lindsay warned me you’re a pistol.’

Laslo’s expression darkened, which meant Will had hit a nerve. Will wondered what the guy’s rap sheet looked like back in Boston. He imagined there was some weight to it. He had prison ink on the side of his neck and the look of a man who could take a beating and still win the fight.

Laslo warned, ‘You stay away from the old lady or I will fuck you up.’

‘You’d better bring a ladder.’

‘Don’t think ’cause you’re a cop I won’t take you down.’ Laslo put his hands on his hips, which Will thought was only appropriate for a man if he was standing on the sidelines at a game. Laslo’s tight shirt gaped open. The material was stretched so thin that he could’ve saved his dry-cleaning bill and painted it on. He glared at Will, asking, ‘What’re you lookin’ at, faggot?’

‘That’s a nice shirt. Does it come in adult sizes?’

The conference room door opened.

‘Thank you so much,’ Amanda called to Goldfinger. She smiled at Will, triumph putting a twinkle in her eyes. Marcus Rippy was important, but not as important as a two-point-eight-billion-dollar deal that everyone wanted a piece of.

Amanda asked Will, ‘Ready?’

Laslo jabbed his thumb down the hall. ‘This way.’

‘Thank you, Mr Zivcovik.’ Amanda took the lead toward the lobby. She asked Laslo, ‘Did you manage to find the phone number for Ms Polaski?’

He didn’t look away from Will as he passed her a piece of folded notepaper.

Amanda glanced at the number, then handed it to Will.

It was for the same disconnected line that was on everything.

Laslo yanked open the lobby door. ‘Anything else I can do for y’alls?’ He put on a hick accent that, layered on top of his Boston accent, made him sound like he was recovering from a stroke.

Amanda said, ‘Young man, surely you’ve lived down here long enough to know that y’all is a second-person-plural pronoun.’

The comment was meant to be the last, but Will had a question for Laslo. ‘Did you know Angie?’

‘Polaski?’ A toothy grin spread across his round face. ‘Sure, I knew her.’ He gave Will a knowing wink. ‘She had a cunt like a boa constrictor.’

‘Had?’ Amanda asked.

He slammed the door in their faces.

SIX

Faith sat in an uncomfortable plastic chair across from the nurses’ station inside the Grady Hospital ICU. There were armed guards at either end of the hall. The ward was full. Grady was Atlanta’s only public hospital, a level one trauma center that saw most of the bad cases the city had to offer. At any given time, at least a quarter of the patients were handcuffed to their beds.

She glanced up at the whiteboard behind the desk. Olivia, the head nurse, was updating the status of one of the patients. Grady admitted a lot of Jane Does, but Faith only cared about her potential witness, Jane Doe 2. She was still marked critical. The junkie’s surgery had taken four hours longer than planned. They’d had to rebuild her nose and throat. So much blood had been replaced that they’d basically put her into rapid detox from the coke. And now she was pumped full of morphine. She would be out of it for at least another hour, minimum.

At least Faith hadn’t let her time go to waste. She had tackled Dale Harding’s financial documents and phone records. Not that the task got her anywhere closer to a solution, let alone a clue to follow. Harding’s phone calls were all for pizza or Chinese delivery, so he must have used a burner phone for business. As for his bank records, it didn’t take a forensic accountant to understand the figures. Harding kept less than one hundred dollars in his checking account, a number that hadn’t fluctuated much over the last six months, because he had used a gold MasterCard to charge everything, from his gorditas at Taco Bell to the support hose that kept the circulation going in his legs. The cumulative balance on the card for the last six months was forty-six thousand and change. Harding had stopped making payments on the bill. Faith assumed this was by design. He’d stopped dialysis, basically signing his own death warrant. He’d obviously planned to screw as many people as he could on his way out.

The question was, had one of those people been Delilah Palmer? Faith couldn’t stop thinking about the porn photos, the dead look in the girl’s eyes. Even back to ten years old, Delilah seemed to show the resignation that it was her fate to be used by every man who crossed her path. Not just any man, but Dale Harding. A cop. A father. The one person she should have been able to trust, and he kept nasty photos of her in his attic and married her because-why?

Delilah had to be the key to both Harding’s and Angie’s murders. Faith didn’t buy Collier’s feminist theory that the girl was behind their deaths. Harding had always taken care of Delilah. She would have known that he didn’t have much time left. Why kill the guy when she could just wait a few days and dance on his grave?

Faith could think of a lot of people who would want Angie Polaski dead, so she kept the focus on Dale Harding. He was a gambler. He took risks. He had likely taken a final risk before his death, something with a big payout, which meant that Delilah, his legal wife, would be the beneficiary. Unless there was something illegal about the payout. That made more sense. And it also explained why Delilah’s life would be in jeopardy.

And Faith had put that imbecile Collier in charge of finding her.

She scrolled through the sixteen different texts Collier had sent her since she’d left him at the Mesa Arms. If he was overtalkative in person, he was a freaking bible in the printed word. He peppered his texts with so much useless information about the weather, the songs on the radio and his dietary habits that Faith felt the need to distill the information into bullet points before her head exploded.

She reached into her cargo pants pocket and found her spiral notebook and pen. She flipped to a fresh page. At the top, she wrote four headers: PALMER, HARDING, POLASKI, RIPPY.

She tapped her pen on the blank columns underneath the names. Connections. That’s what she needed to see. Delilah was married to Dale Harding, possibly his daughter. Harding worked for Rippy. According to the briefing Faith had gotten from Amanda, Angie worked for Kip Kilpatrick, which meant she really worked for Rippy.

Faith tapped the pen again. Angie probably knew Harding from way back. Bad cops stuck together. They told themselves they were outsiders because they were the only ones who could get the job done, but the truth was that good cops wanted nothing to do with them.

Faith turned to the next page and wrote QUESTIONS at the top.

Why did Angie and Harding meet at Rippy’s club?

What does Delilah know?

Who would want to kill Harding?

Who would want to kill Angie?

If Harding and Angie knew each other from before, it made sense that one would tap the other for a job with Kip Kilpatrick. Harding had moved into the Mesa Arms six months ago, so Faith could reasonably assume that’s when he’d started working for Kilpatrick. Angie’s bank account had big checks coming in four months ago, so that meant she had worked for Kilpatrick at least four months.

Faith flipped back to the first page.

All of the arrows pointed to Marcus Rippy.

Her phone buzzed. Another lengthy text came in from Collier. Faith skimmed the lines for meaning, skipping over a report about the indigestion he’d gotten from a gas station hot dog. On Saturday, the day before the murder, Delilah Palmer had rented a black Ford Fusion from a Hertz location on Howell Mill Road. No security footage existed of the transaction. She had used her Visa card. Collier had put out a BOLO on the rental car. He’d also reiterated his heroin-mule theory, pointing out that dealers rented cars because they knew that their own rides would be seized by the cops if they were caught dealing out of them.

Again Faith tapped her pen against the notebook. She didn’t buy Collier’s drug angle. He was a hammer looking for a nail.

Delilah had rented the car Saturday, not Sunday or Monday, which implied that she had lined it up before Harding was murdered. Which could also imply that she knew ahead of time that Harding was in jeopardy and that she might need an escape. But she had used her own license and credit card to book the car. Delilah had been on the streets for years. She was too savvy to use her own name for a getaway.

Faith’s phone vibrated again. Another text, blissfully short.

GIRLZ SAY SOUZA OD’D 6 MOS AGO. DEAD END. DEAD, GET IT?

Faith had to scroll back through her texts to remind herself who Souza was. She found the pertinent missive time-stamped two hours ago. According to some of Collier’s sources in zone six, Virginia Souza was another whore for whom Harding had called in a handful of favors. She worked Delilah’s street corner. She was fairly violent, considering she had been twice charged with assault against a minor. Faith wondered if that minor had been Delilah Palmer.

She looked at the text again. Collier’s sign-off was to say that he was going to talk to the younger whores, who might know something or someone who could point him toward Delilah Palmer’s whereabouts. Or he was talking to young whores because he was Collier. He had signed off with a series of eggplant emojis that, going by Jeremy’s Facebook page, were a stand-in for a bunch of penises.

Faith returned to her notebook. Lots of arrows connecting back to Rippy. Lots of questions. No answers. She should’ve let Collier rot here at the hospital while she tracked down Delilah Palmer. That was the problem with murder cases. You never knew which lead would take you to the solution and which one would sink you into a black hole. Faith was getting the feeling that she had given Collier the good lead. She was going to throw herself off the roof of this building if he ended up lucking into their bad guy.

Her phone vibrated again. She didn’t want to read another dissertation from Collier’s awesome gumshoe file, but ignorance was a luxury she did not have. She looked at the screen. CALL FROM WANTANABE, B.

Faith stood up and walked down the hall for privacy. ‘Mitchell.’

‘Is this Special Agent Faith Mitchell?’ a woman asked.

‘Yes.’

‘I’m Barbara Wantanabe. Violet told me you wanted to talk?’

Faith had almost forgotten about Harding’s next-door neighbor. ‘Thanks for getting back to me. I was wondering if you could tell me about Dale Harding.’

‘Oh, I could give you an earful,’ she said, and then she proceeded to do just that, complaining about the smell from his house, the way he sometimes parked his car with the wheels on the grass, his foul language, the loud volume on his television and radio.

Faith followed along as best she could. Barb was even more verbose than Collier. She had a way of saying something, then contradicting herself, then restating the first thing she had said, then equivocating, and by the fifth time she’d wound herself into a rhetorical knot, Faith started to understand why Harding had hated her so much.

‘And don’t even get me started on the music.’

Faith listened as she started on Harding’s music. The same rap album, morning noon and night. Her grandson said it was Jay Z, something called The Black Album. Faith was familiar with the record, which her own son had played loudly behind the closed door of his room because it was the perfect backdrop to his white male privilege and early acceptance to one of the most prestigious universities in the country.

Faith tuned back into Barb, looking for a chance to jump in. Finally the woman had to stop to take a breath. ‘Did he have visitors?’

‘No,’ Barb said, then, ‘yes. I mean, I think so, yes. He might have had a visitor.’

Faith covered her eyes with her hand. ‘I sense some uncertainty.’

‘Well, yes. That’s true. I am uncertain.’

She had to float Collier’s drug-mule theory. ‘Did you see people coming in and out? Like a lot of people who looked like they didn’t fit in with the neighborhood?’

‘No, nothing like that. I would’ve called the police. It’s just that I thought there might be someone else, another person, over there at some point.’

‘At which point?’

‘Recently. Well, no, that’s not right. Last month.’

‘You thought someone was visiting at Dale’s house last month?’

‘Yes. Well, maybe staying there? Visiting might not be the right word.’

Faith gritted her teeth.

‘I mean to say that there could’ve been someone living over there. I think. When Dale was gone. Now, he was usually not there during the day when he first moved in, but later, he was always there. Which was when the problem started. When he was there. Which sounds mean, but there you go.’

Faith tried to wrap her brain around all the information. ‘So, when Dale first moved in six months ago, he was never home, but then you noticed that changed last month?’

‘Exactly.’

‘And around the time that changed, you heard sounds from next door that indicated someone other than Dale might be living there?’

‘Yes.’

Faith waited for the contradictory no, but it never came.

‘I heard sounds, you see.’ Barb paused before the next hedge. ‘Not sounds, per se. I mean, they could’ve been from the television. But who watches television and plays a rap album at the same time?’ She immediately went back on herself. ‘Then again, some people might do that.’

‘They might,’ Faith said. Especially if they wanted to cover up a noise, like a junkie beating on the closet door demanding to be let out. She asked, ‘Did you ever hear any banging?’

‘Banging?’

‘Someone banging on a wall or banging on a door?’

‘Well…’ She took her time considering the question.

Faith called up a mental image of the Tahoe floorplan at the Mesa Arms. The guest room was against the shared wall of the duplex. The master was to the outside, which gave the room more windows, but it also afforded more privacy.

Large master closet ideal for keeping women!

Barb said, ‘I guess you could say the noise sounded like a hammer.’

‘Like a hammer pounding something?’

‘Yes, but repeatedly. Maybe he was hanging pictures.’ She paused. ‘No, that would’ve been a lot of pictures. Not that it was constant-the noise-but it was long enough. I suppose he could’ve been assembling some furniture. My son does that for me. But only when he can find the time. My daughter-in-law, you see. But really, with Dale, the excrement was the real problem.’

Faith felt her mind boggle. ‘Say what, now?’

‘Excrement. You know…’ she lowered her voice, ‘doo-doo.’

‘Waste?’

‘Human.’

Faith had to repeat the two words together. ‘Human waste?’

‘Yes. In the backyard.’ She sighed. ‘You see, Dale would rinse out this bucket every evening, and at first I thought that he was painting inside, which made sense, because you would listen to music while you paint, yes?’

Faith threw out her hand. ‘Sure.’

‘And so I assumed that he was painting his walls, and not a very nice color, but then my grandson went into the backyard one day looking for twigs for Mr Nimh to chew on. Their teeth grow constantly, you see. Oh!’ She sounded excited. ‘Thank you, by the way, for finding him. I was persona non grata with my daughter-in-law for that particular crime. Believe me, she keeps a list. Now, I wasn’t a big fan of my own mother-in-law, but you do what you have to do, yes? It’s called respect.’

Faith tried to get Barb back on track. ‘Let’s go back to the excrement.’ There were six words she never thought she’d say. ‘You saw Dale cleaning out the bucket every night?’

‘Yes.’

‘Starting when?’

‘Two weeks ago? No.’ She doubled back. ‘Ten days. I would say ten days ago.’

‘A large bucket, not the kind you’d use to mop your floor?’

‘Right. Yes. For paint. Or I suppose solvents, but that size. Big.’

‘And one day your grandson went into the backyard and he found something? Smelled something?’

‘Yes. No. Both. He smelled something, and then he walked over. It was a slime, sort of? Whatever it was, it got all over the bottom of his shoe.’

The rat must have been thrilled.

Barb said, ‘I had to wash the sole with the hose. It was disgusting. And his mother was furious at me. Now, she’s my daughter-in-law, and I know that I have to play by her rules, but honestly-’

‘Did you ask Dale about the excrement?’

‘Oh no. I couldn’t talk to Dale about anything. That would be pointless. He would just curse at me and walk away.’

Faith understood why. ‘Did you ever see a different car at Dale’s house other than his white Kia?’

‘Not that I recall.’ She showed an unusual certainty. ‘No, I’m sure I never did.’

‘Are you home much?’ Faith tried to tread carefully, because a lot of times even well-meaning people stretched the truth. ‘I’m asking because you weren’t home this afternoon.’

‘I’ve been volunteering more at the YMCA. I fold towels, help keep things straightened up. I’m very clean, you see, which is why I had some issues with Dale. I don’t like things messed up. There’s no reason not to pick something up and put it right back where you found it, yes?’

‘Yes.’ Faith covered her eyes with her hand again. The woman never met a tangent she didn’t travel. ‘So you stepped up your volunteering to get away from Dale?’

‘Correct. At first volunteering was just a way to get out of the house for a few hours. And to help people. Of course to help people. But then it became my only respite away from the noise. And the odor. You smelled the odor, yes? I couldn’t live with it all day, you see. It was unbearable.’

Faith wondered if Barb’s absence had been the very thing Harding was pushing for all along. If he was keeping Delilah locked in the closet to dry her out, he would want to make sure no one would hear her screaming and call the police.

Faith asked, ‘When did you start spending more time away?’

‘Last week.’

‘So, seven days ago?’

‘Yes.’

Which meant that Dale had managed to drive her out after three days of relentless torture.

Barb said, ‘I just gave up. It was getting worse and worse. The smell. The noises. I couldn’t take it anymore, and I’m not the type to complain. Violet can verify that.’

Faith had the feeling Violet would do no such thing. ‘Well, I’m very sorry that you had to go through that, Ms Wantanabe. I appreciate your talking to me. If you think of anything else-’

‘It’s sad,’ she interrupted. ‘When he first moved in, I thought he was just a lonely old bachelor. He was obviously having health issues. He didn’t seem very happy. And I thought to myself, This is a good place for him. We’re a community here. We all have our differences. As Violet would say, some of us are to the right of Genghis Khan and the rest are to the left of Pluto, but we look out for each other, you know?’

Faith felt her phone vibrate. ‘Yes, ma’am. It seemed like a nice place. I need to-’

‘You get to a certain age, you learn to look past people’s quirks and idiosyncrasies.’ She gave a long sigh. ‘But I’ll tell you what, honey. There’s no looking past human poop in your backyard.’

‘Well, okay.’ Faith’s phone vibrated again. There was a text from Will. ‘Thank you, ma’am. Call me if you think of anything else.’

Faith ended the call before Barb could toss out another bon mot. She opened Will’s text. He’d sent her a photo of the front of Grady, which was Will’s way of saying he was at the hospital looking for her. Faith texted back an emoji of a dinner plate and a smiling pile of shit, meaning she would meet him in the food court.

She checked the patient board as she walked past the nurses’ station. Jane Doe 2 was still critical. Faith didn’t bother to ask the nurses for an update. They had her card. They had promised to text the minute the patient was coherent enough to talk.

Faith started down the stairs. She tapped the pockets of her cargo pants, making sure her blood testing kit was still there. She had two insulin pens left. She had used a third half an hour ago, so she needed to eat. The problem was that Grady only offered fast-food restaurants. This was great for their new cardiac wing, but it was awful if you were trying to control your diabetes. Not that she felt like controlling anything right now. Faith longed for the days when she could eat herself into a stupor that drowned out her stress.

Will had beaten her to the food court. He was sitting at a quiet table in the back. She didn’t recognize him at first because he was in jeans and a beautiful long-sleeved polo that Sara had obviously sneaked into his wardrobe. He was a nice-looking guy, but he had a habit of blending in, which made him unlike every other cop she had ever met.

Will asked, ‘Is this okay?’

He meant the salad he’d ordered for her. Faith stared at the wilted lettuce and white chicken strips that looked like fingers on a dead man. Will’s tray had two cheeseburgers, large fries, a large Frosty and a Coke.

‘Looks good.’ Faith sat down, fighting the urge to unhinge her jaw and swallow everything on his tray. ‘Thanks.’

He said, ‘Amanda scheduled an on-the-record interview with Rippy tomorrow.’

‘I know. She caught me up on everything.’

‘Everything?’

‘I know about the bank account you shared with Angie. And I agree that you shouldn’t tell Sara about it.’

Will didn’t answer. He had never been one for unsolicited advice. ‘I got Laslo Zivcovik’s sheet out of Boston. He’s got some misdemeanors-open bottle, speeding, an assault against a woman and a felony manslaughter for a bar fight. He stabbed a guy twenty-eight times and left him to bleed to death. Laslo pulled a dime in big-boy prison.’

‘Felony manslaughter?’ Faith said. ‘He must’ve had a good lawyer.’

‘I’m assuming he was mobbed up, or was working for the Boston version of Kip Kilpatrick.’

‘Does it bother you what he said about Angie?’

‘I’m more worried that he knows what a snake’s vagina feels like.’

Faith stared at him.

He shrugged. ‘It’s like living with an alcoholic. You’re not surprised when somebody tells you they’re at a bar.’

Faith had dated an alcoholic for years. Worrying about your partner choking on his own vomit or killing someone in a DUI was not the same as knowing he was out there fucking everything that moved.

Which, in retrospect, should have also been one of the things she worried about.

Will said, ‘I met this woman outside Kilpatrick’s office. Mrs Lindsay. African American, really put together. She had pearls around her neck. Probably in her seventies. She gave me a lot of information about herself. I got the feeling she was in a bad place.’

‘Could be she’s the mother of one of the players, worried her son’s going off the deep end.’

‘She talked about a daughter, but tangentially. Not the way you’d talk about your kid if she was good enough to play at that level.’

Will’s gut instinct put Faith’s to shame. She asked, ‘What’s bothering you about her?’

‘Her lip quivered.’ He touched his own lip. ‘She seemed nervous. Upset.’

‘She knew you were a cop?’

‘Yes.’

‘Did you get a first name?’

‘No, but she told me that she lives in that apartment complex at Jesus Junction.’

‘That’s pretty detailed.’

‘Not detailed enough. I called the building. There’s no Mrs Lindsay there.’

Faith found it interesting that he’d bothered to call. ‘A woman that age will have a church. You should try the AME on Arden.’

He nodded.

‘Who was she there to see?’

‘Kilpatrick, I’m assuming. Laslo fetched her. Called her Miss Lindsay.’

That threw up a flag. Calling a woman of that age Miss was just plain disrespectful. Unless it wasn’t. ‘Lindsay could be her first name. An older Southern woman like that might go by Miss as a form of respect, like Driving Miss Daisy.’

‘I hadn’t thought of that.’ Will shrugged. ‘It’s probably nothing.’

‘It’s more than I’ve got to go on. You should make some calls in the morning.’ She was aware that the errand sounded like busywork to keep him off Angie’s case, so she tried to put a better spin on the task. ‘Harding shows up dead at Rippy’s club. Angie is working for Kilpatrick. Laslo is Kilpatrick’s bulldog. Miss Lindsay shows up a few hours after the murder. Laslo takes her back into the offices, probably to Kilpatrick. You know where I’m going with this. There’s no such thing as a coincidence.’

‘She wasn’t in his office,’ Will said. ‘Miss Lindsay. I didn’t see her anywhere, actually. She might have been downstairs. She could’ve been seeing somebody else.’

‘Or they could’ve been hiding her from you.’

‘Yeah, maybe.’ He started back in on the Frosty. ‘Catch me up on your day.’

‘It was like Whac-a-Mole without the hammer.’ Faith picked at her salad as she ran down what she’d found out about Harding’s life-the battles with Barb Wantanabe, the rat, the smell, the excrement, the naked photos of Delilah Palmer and the marriage certificate.

The last part caught Will’s attention. ‘He lists her as his daughter, but two years later she’s his wife?’

‘Yep.’

‘And it’s the same young woman from the nudie pic in his wallet?’

‘He’s got nudie pics going back to her elementary school days.’

He put down the Frosty. ‘Harding was a pedophile.’

‘Yes. Maybe.’ She sounded like Barb Wantanabe. ‘Here’s what’s bothering me: for the most part, pedophiles have age groups. If you like preteens, that’s your thing. If you like them in between or after puberty, that’s your thing. I know it happens, but it’s very rare for them to stick with one victim as she ages.’

‘It’s rare to stick with just one victim, period. A guy Harding’s age would have hundreds of victims. You didn’t find any other photos?’

Faith shook her head as she forced down a piece of rubbery chicken. ‘There was a second girl Harding called in favors for. Virginia Souza. Harding didn’t have any pictures of her, nothing was in his files. She’s dead. OD’d six months ago.’

‘The magic six months,’ Will said. ‘You’re thinking Harding was keeping Delilah at his house to dry her out?’

‘Locked in his closet with nothing but a pot to piss in, as it were.’ She thought of something. ‘Maybe he had Angie locked in there?’

‘No way. She would’ve clawed through the Sheetrock and killed him.’

Faith knew that he was not speaking metaphorically. ‘Collier thinks Harding was running drug mules.’

Will gave her a skeptical look. ‘Mexican cartels don’t use doorknobs to send a message.’

She laughed, mostly because he’d made Collier look like an idiot. ‘Okay, so we’ll assume Delilah was the only woman Harding kept in his closet. Why did he lock her up?’

‘Because he cared about her.’ Will held up his hands to stop her protests. ‘Harding chose to go off dialysis. He knew he was going to die, and soon. This is literally how he planned to spend the rest of his life-drying her out.’

‘Maybe he felt responsible for fucking her up.’ She remembered the dental device by the bed in the guest room. ‘Somebody also sprang for an orthodontist. She was sleeping with a retainer.’

‘We could get Collier’s partner on that. Call all of the orthodontists in the area to see if she’s a patient.’

Faith picked up her phone and started typing. ‘I’ll pass that through Amanda,’ she said, but she suggested that Collier and Ng did the shitwork together.

Will waited until she had sent the text. ‘You said Palmer’s first big arrest was for slinging Oxy. Where was she getting the pills, do you think?’

Faith considered the question. ‘She was living in the ’hood, attending elementary school. Adderall, Concerta, Ritalin-that’s what you’d expect to find floating around. ADD/ADHD drugs. Valium and Percocet come along in middle school. Oxy is more high school, more of a suburban white people problem.’

‘So who was supplying Delilah with Oxy to sell when she was ten years old?’

‘Harding was white collar. He wouldn’t have access.’ Faith thought it through. Her mother had run the drug squad out of zone six. The evidence lockup would’ve looked like a pharmacy. ‘Harding might know somebody who had access. Maybe he located a cop with a pill problem and Harding pressured him into sharing the take.’

‘Zone six?’

She nodded.

Will’s demeanor changed.

‘Do you know somebody who worked zone six and had a pill problem who might’ve been connected to Harding?’

‘Yeah,’ he said, and he didn’t have to tell her that it was Angie. ‘She takes care of kids like that. At least she used to.’

‘Kids like Delilah?’ Faith felt her stomach turn. It was one thing for Angie to pimp out other women for high-end parties, but exploiting orphaned little girls was beyond the pale.

Will said, ‘Angie worked vice. The young ones-she kind of took them under her wing.’

‘And gave them pills to sell?’

Will rubbed his jaw. ‘Angie knows what it’s like to be stuck in that kind of situation with no one looking out for you.’

‘You’ve lost me,’ Faith said. ‘I don’t see the compassionate side of turning a ten-year-old into a drug mule.’

‘Which is worse: selling Oxy or selling sex?’

‘Those are the only two choices?’

‘For kids like that, stuck in the system, changing schools and foster homes five times a year, never knowing where they’re gonna sleep from one night to the next?’ He sounded emphatic. ‘Yeah, those are the choices.’

The mother side of Faith wanted to argue him down. The cynical side, the one who’d been a cop for fifteen years, could see the logic. Kids like that didn’t live the lives they wanted. They survived the lives they had.

Will asked, ‘How many strings did Harding have to pull to keep Delilah out of trouble?’

‘More than a harp player.’

‘Who did the favors?’

‘That’s not how favors work. You don’t talk about them. That’s kind of the point.’ Faith heard her voice echo in the food court. She sounded pissed off, and maybe she was. Sure, kids like Delilah Palmer had it bad, but teaching them how to successfully enter the criminal underworld was not the solution. ‘Jesus, Will. Do you really think Angie was giving little girls pills to sell?’

Will drummed his fingers on the table. He stared over her shoulder, which was probably one of his most annoying recurrent tactics.

Faith speared a piece of chicken. The tension over Angie’s possible bad good deeds sat on the table between them. Faith forgot sometimes how rough Will’s life had been. This was entirely his own fault. From the outside, he seemed like a normal guy. And then you noticed the scars on his face. Or the fact that he never rolled up his sleeves, even in ten-thousand-degree heat. He never talked about any of it. Actually, he never talked about anything. Like that the open cuts on his fist meant that he’d recently punched somebody. Like that his wife was probably dead. Or that his girlfriend’s heart was broken.

‘Faith?’ Will waited for her to look up. He tried to smile. ‘I feel like I need to see the rat.’

She let out a long breath that she didn’t realize she’d been holding. She pulled the video up on her phone and slid it across the table. ‘Collier threw up. Epically. The godfather of vomiting.’

Will laughed appreciatively. He played the video. Twice. Faith could hear Collier’s panicked breathing through the speaker. It got better each time. Will finally put down the phone. ‘That’s a Russian Blue.’

‘The rat?’

‘I raided a pet store once. The guy was selling exotic animals out of the back, but the front was filled with rats. Amanda made me catalog all of them.’ He slid the phone back her way. ‘Dale could’ve gone after Angie to protect Delilah. Clean up the mess before he clocked out.’

She shrugged, but the theory made sense.

He said, ‘If there’s a drug angle, that opens this up.’

‘You mean we’ll have to tell Amanda.’

Will nodded.

‘God dammit,’ Faith muttered. ‘Collier wanted to track down those gang tags in the club. I’m going to kill myself if he was right.’

‘Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,’ Will said. ‘It’s a theory, right? We don’t know for sure what Angie was up to.’

‘Except getting paid ten grand a month by Kilpatrick.’

‘Maybe she was hooking him up with drugs.’

‘I’d buy that if they were growth hormones or steroids.’

‘He wouldn’t need Angie for that. He’d have doctors writing legal scripts.’ Will sat back in his chair. ‘Let’s say we find Delilah and she’s never heard of Angie. Then what?’

‘Then she tells us what the hell is going on.’ Faith didn’t give Will time to laugh in her face, because they both knew that was very unlikely. Girls like Delilah didn’t talk to cops. They waited out their time, then they disappeared.

Faith took out her notebook. He couldn’t read her scrawl, but she pointed to the headers. ‘Palmer was married to and possibly related to Harding. Harding lived in a house owned by a company that probably traces back to Kip Kilpatrick. Angie was working for Kip Kilpatrick. Harding hit the jackpot six months ago. Angie started getting her payday four months ago.’ She pointed to the last name. ‘They all tie to Rippy.’

Will took the notebook. He studied the names. Faith saw his eyes move, but she didn’t know how quickly he could take it in. She knew that he was better with words he had seen before, but there were new names on the paper.

Will put the notebook down. He asked, ‘What if we were building a case right now? Palmer is in the wind for whatever reason. Rippy is Teflon. The only two people we know for sure about are Harding and Angie. They were both at the same location, the club. One of them died there. The other died because of something that happened there. Probably died.’

Faith let the ‘probably’ slide by.

He said, ‘These arrows to Rippy look good on paper, but we don’t really have a direct connection, because all of them go through here-’ He tapped his finger on Kilpatrick’s name. ‘He’s the intermediary, the thing standing between Rippy and everybody else. Let’s say by some miracle we have a solid murder charge with evidence and all that other good stuff and the judge gives us an arrest warrant. It won’t be Rippy we charge. It’ll be Kilpatrick. That’s what Rippy pays him for. And if you’re thinking we can build a conspiracy charge, you’re dreaming. Harding’s dead. Angie’s probably dead. Rippy walks away just like he always does.’

She couldn’t accept that he was right, even though every single word made absolute sense. ‘Jane Doe could’ve seen something. She was in the office building across the street. She would’ve had a bird’s-eye view.’ Faith looked at the time on her phone. ‘She should be coming out of her morphine stupor soon. We can talk to her.’

Will didn’t look hopeful.

Faith closed her notebook. She couldn’t look at it anymore. ‘Why do you think she tried to kill herself?’

‘Maybe she was lonely?’ He laid his arm across the back of the empty chair beside him. ‘It’s hard being homeless. You don’t know who to trust. You never really sleep. There’s nobody to talk to.’

Faith realized that Will was the first person who had actually tried to answer the question. ‘How much coke did she have?’

‘I’d guess about two ounces.’

‘Jesus Christ. That’s almost three grand’s worth of coke. Where the hell did she get it?’

‘We can ask her when she wakes up.’ He put his hand to his chest. He winced in pain. ‘I feel like I’m having a heart attack.’

Panic shook her into action. She started to stand, but he stopped her.

‘Not for real. Just this tightness.’ He rubbed his chest with his fingers. ‘Like a shaking, almost. Do you ever get that, where your heart shakes in your chest?’

Faith got it all of the time. ‘That sounds like stress.’

Will kept rubbing his chest. ‘Sara sent me a picture of Betty. She was in her bed at Sara’s place. That’s good, right?’

Faith nodded, but she had no idea. Will had his own way of communicating with people.

He said, ‘I checked online. That lipstick costs sixty bucks.’

Faith nearly choked on a piece of lettuce. The most expensive thing she had ever put on her face was a New York strip after a perp had punched her in the eye.

Will said, ‘All the colors looked the same to me. Can you pull the product number from the evidence log?’

‘Will.’ Faith put down her fork. ‘Sara doesn’t care about the lipstick.’

He shook his head, like she had no idea. ‘She was really, really pissed off.’

‘Will, listen to me. It’s not about the money. It’s about Angie stealing it.’

‘That’s just how Angie is.’ The excuse seemed to make sense to him. ‘When we were growing up, none of us had anything. If you saw something you wanted, you took it. Otherwise you never had anything. Especially anything nice.’

Faith struggled for a way to explain it to him. ‘What if one of Sara’s ex-boyfriends broke into her apartment and stole the shirt that you sleep in?’

‘Wouldn’t it make more sense for him to steal Sara’s shirt?’

Faith groaned. Men had it so easy. When they got mad at each other, they fought it out. Women cut themselves and gave each other eating disorders.

She said, ‘Remember that suicide last year at the women’s detention center?’

‘Alexis Rodriguez. She cut her wrists.’

‘Right. And when we asked the other inmates why she did it, they said that girls had been stealing her stuff. Not just her commissary. She’d put down a pen and the next thing she knows, it’s missing. She’d take off her socks and they’d disappear. They even stole her trash. Why do you think they did that?’

He shrugged. ‘To be mean.’

‘To make her understand that nothing belonged to her. That no matter how important or inconsequential, they could take away anything at any time, and she couldn’t do anything about it.’

He looked dubious.

‘Why else would Angie leave those notes on Sara’s car?’

‘She was mad.’

‘Sure, she was mad, but she was fucking with Sara.’

Will shifted in his seat. He still wasn’t seeing it.

‘Angie was a bully, Will. And she wanted Sara to know that she could take you back anytime she wanted. That’s why she stole the lipstick. That’s why she left the notes. She was marking her territory.’ Faith had to say the next part. ‘And you let her get away with it.’

Will sat back in his chair. He did not stand up and leave. He did not tell her to mind her own business. He rubbed the side of his jaw. He stared at the trashcan by the door.

Faith waited. And waited. She tried to finish her salad. She checked to make sure that there were no new messages on her phone.

‘She left me a note,’ Will said. ‘Angie.’

Faith kept waiting.

‘Amanda doesn’t know. At least I don’t think she does. It was in the post office box.’ He stared at his hands. ‘She printed my name on the outside, but the letter is in cursive.’

Faith knew that Will had trouble reading cursive. Angie would know this too, which to Faith’s thinking made her an even bigger bitch than before.

He said, ‘I can’t let Sara read it. The letter.’

‘No, you can’t.’

‘It’s what she wanted. For Sara to have to read it. Out loud. To me.’

‘It is.’

‘So…?’

Faith felt her throat work. He had never asked her to read anything for him. It had always been a point of pride. He took his turn writing up their reports. He was the only man she had ever worked with who didn’t try to turn her into his private secretary.

Faith said, ‘All right.’

He reached into his front pocket and pulled out a piece of folded notebook paper. The edge was tattered from being ripped away from the spiral. He unfolded the letter and smoothed it out on the table. Angry words filled the page, crossing the margins, spilling onto the back. Things were underlined. The pen had actually torn through the paper.

Faith’s eyes picked up the word Sara, and she cringed inside. ‘Are you sure?’

Will didn’t say anything. He just waited.

Faith didn’t know what to do but turn the letter around and start to read. ‘ “Hey, baby. If someone is reading this to you, then I am dead.” ’

Will put his head in his hands.

‘ “I hope it’s Sara, because I want that cu-” ’ Faith cursed Angie under her breath. ‘ “I want that cunt to know that you will never, ever love her the way that you love me.” ’ She glanced up at Will. He still had his head in his hands.

Faith returned to the letter.

‘ “Remember the basement? I want you to tell your precious Sara about the basement because that will explain everything. She will understand that you have only been fucking her because she is a poor substitute for me. You have been lying to her about everything.” ’ Faith squinted at the scrawl, trying to decipher the next few words. ‘ “You like her because she’s safe, and because she’ll-” ’ Faith stopped. Her eyes had skipped ahead. She told Will, ‘I don’t think-’

‘Please.’ His voice was muffled by his hands. ‘If you don’t read it, I’ll never know.’

Faith cleared her throat. Her face burned with embarrassment. For herself. For Sara. ‘ “You like her because she’s safe and because she’ll go down on you and you never see her spit because that is part of her scam. She is your lapdog for a reason.” ’ Faith silently scanned ahead, praying it wouldn’t get worse.

It did.

‘ “Needy bitches like Sara want the white picket fence and the kids in the yard. How would that be, having a bunch of little monsters with your fucked-up genes inside of them? Loser retards like you who can’t read their own fucking names.” ’

Faith had to stop again, this time to tamp down her own fury.

She continued. ‘ “Ask yourself this: would you ever risk your life for her? Sara Linton is a boring bitch. That’s why you can’t let me go. That’s why you found this fucking letter. She will never excite you like I do. You will never want her like you want me. She will never understand who you really are. The only person on earth who ever got you was me, and now I am dead, and you didn’t do a God damm thing to stop that from happening.” ’ Faith felt a palpable relief as she read the last line. ‘ “Love, Angie.” ’

Will kept his head in his hands.

Faith folded the note back into a square. This was evidence. Angie had suspected that she was going to die, which meant her murder was premeditated. Faith let that play out in her head. If and when they caught the killer, there would be a court case. The letter to Will would become part of the public record. This was Angie’s final swipe at Sara. The blow would be a knockout.

Faith said, ‘You need to destroy this.’

Will looked up. His eyes glistened in the overhead lights.

Faith tore the letter in two. Then she tore it again, then another time, until Angie’s hateful words were ripped into a million pieces.

Will said, ‘Do you think she’s dead?’

‘Yes. You saw the blood. You heard what Angie wrote, that she knew she would be dead soon.’ Faith culled the tiny shreds of paper into a pile. ‘Don’t tell Sara about the letter. It will destroy everything. Exactly what Angie wanted.’

He started rubbing his chest again. His face was pale.

She tried to remember the signs of a heart attack. ‘Does your arm hurt?’

‘I feel numb,’ he said, and he seemed as surprised as Faith that he had admitted as much. ‘How do people get through this?’

‘I don’t know.’ Faith dragged her finger through the torn pieces of paper, then piled them back up again. ‘When my dad died, my world turned upside down.’ She felt tears well into her eyes, because fifteen years was still not enough time to get over the loss. ‘The day of the funeral, I didn’t think I could do it. Jeremy was a wreck. My dad worked at home. They were extremely close.’ Faith took a breath. ‘So, we get to the funeral and Jeremy just loses it. Sobbing like I hadn’t seen since he was a baby. He wouldn’t let go of me. I had to hold him the entire time.’

She looked up at Will. ‘I remember standing on the stairs to the chapel, and I felt this click, like, “Okay, you’re the mom. Be strong for your kid and deal with this when you’re alone and you can handle it.” ’ Faith smiled, but the truth was that she was never alone. If she was lucky, she had thirty minutes in the morning before Emma woke up, and then the phone started ringing and she had to get ready for work and the world started crashing in. ‘How people do it is they don’t have a choice. You get out of bed. You dress yourself. You go to work, and you just do it.’

‘Denial,’ Will said. ‘I’ve heard of that.’

‘It has made me the woman I am today.’

He drummed his fingers on the table. He studied her the way he did when he was trying to figure out what was wrong. ‘Delilah Palmer. You’re worried because you gave Collier the good lead.’

Hearing him guess what was wrong made her realize what was wrong. ‘It’s not because I want the collar. I mean, hell, yeah, of course I want the collar, but there’s something about Collier that-’

‘I don’t trust him either.’

Her phone chirped. The nurse had finally texted her. ‘Oh for fucksakes.’ Faith had to read the message twice before she believed it. ‘Jane Doe was taken back into surgery. If she makes it, we won’t be able to talk to her until tomorrow morning.’

Will laughed, but not because it was funny. ‘Now what?’

‘I’m going home.’ Faith swept Angie’s shredded note into her open palm. She handed the pieces to Will. ‘Flush this down the toilet, then go talk to Sara.’

SEVEN

Sara lay on the couch with Betty on the pillow beside her. The little dog had managed to wrap her entire body around Sara’s head. Her two greyhounds, Bob and Billy, were draped across her legs.

She had started out the evening at her dining-room table researching uremic frost while she drank a cup of herbal tea. Then she’d moved onto a glass of wine at the kitchen counter while she edited a paper for a journal. Then she had looked around the apartment and decided that it needed to be cleaned. Sara always cleaned when she was upset, but this was one of those rare occasions when she was actually too upset to clean. Which is how she’d ended up lying on the couch, drinking a Scotch and covered in dogs.

She sipped her drink as she watched the laptop propped up on a pillow on her stomach. As with the rest of the evening, her lesser demons had won out. She’d started out with a documentary about Peggy Guggenheim and ended up watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Or trying to. The plot wasn’t that complicated-obviously, Buffy was going to slay a vampire-but between the alcohol and her other problems, Sara couldn’t focus.

Will hadn’t called. He hadn’t texted, even when she’d sent him a picture of Betty. He had spent all day looking for Angie, and even now, when Angie was almost certainly dead, Will still hadn’t made the effort to get in touch with her.

If Sara had been the type to force a choice, she would’ve taken Will’s lack of communication as an answer.

She paused the computer. She took off her glasses. She closed her eyes.

Sara let her mind drift back to Saturday morning, ignoring the part where Will had seen Angie. Friday night, they had decided to stay at Will’s house because he had a fenced-in backyard and a dog door in the kitchen, which meant that the animals would be able to take care of themselves while the humans slept in.

Sara had awakened at 4:30. The curse of the on-call doctor. Her brain wouldn’t shut down long enough for her to go back to sleep. She thought about doing some work, or calling her sister, but she had found herself watching Will sleep, which was the silly kind of thing you only saw in movies.

He was on his back, head turned. A sliver of light from underneath the window shade played across his face. She had stroked his cheek. The roughness of his skin had kindled an interest in further exploration. She let her fingers travel along his chest. Instead of continuing down, she placed her palm over his heart and felt the steady beats.

This is what she remembered from that morning: the overwhelming joy of ownership. His heart belonged to her. His mind. His body. His soul. They had been together for only a year, but every day that passed, she loved him more. Her relationship with Will was one of the most meaningful connections she’d had in her life.

Not that Sara had been in that many relationships. Her first boyfriend, Steve Mann, had elicited all of the excitement possible for a third trombone in the high school band. Mason James, whom she’d met during medical school, had been more in love with himself than any woman could ever hope to be. The first time Sara had introduced him to her family, her mother had quipped, ‘That man needs to build a bridge to get over himself.’

Then there was Jeffrey Tolliver, her husband.

Sara opened her eyes.

She took another sip of her drink, which was more water than Scotch at this point. She checked the time. Too late to call her sister. Sara wanted to talk to someone, to work through the grand explosion that had shattered her life, and Tessa was the only safe haven. Faith had to be on Will’s side because she was his partner and their unquestioned loyalty was what kept them both safe. Calling her mother was not an option. The first thing out of Cathy Linton’s mouth would be a giant ‘I told you so.’

And God knows her mother had told her so. Many times. Countless times. Don’t date a married man. Don’t fall in love with a married man. Don’t ever think that you can trust a married man. Sara had thought there was more nuance to their story than her mother was picking up on, but now she was having second thoughts. The only words worse than ‘I told you so’ were ‘Yes, Mother, you were right.’

Sara looked at the time again. Not even a minute had ticked by. She weighed the consequences of waking up her sister. Tessa was in South Africa. It was two in the morning on her side of the world. She would panic if the phone rang so early. Besides, Sara knew exactly how the conversation would go. The first thing out of Tessa’s mouth would be ‘Show him how you feel.’

What she meant was that Sara should break down in front of Will, let him see that she was a basket case and couldn’t live without him. Which was a lie, because Sara could live without Will. She would be miserable, she would be devastated, but she could manage it. Losing her husband had taught her at least that.

But Tessa wouldn’t let Sara hide behind Jeffrey’s death. She would likely say something about riding a high horse into the lonely sunset. Sara would remind her that one of the things Will liked about her was her strength. Tessa would say that she was confusing strength with stubbornness, and then she would do what she always did: allude to what her family called the Bambi incident. The first time they had watched the film, Tessa had wept uncontrollably. Sara had mumbled an excuse about needing to study for a spelling test because she hadn’t wanted anyone to see her crying.

Tessa’s final point would be delivered in a tone reminiscent of their mother: ‘Only a fool thinks she can fool other people.’

On the contrary, Sara had made a career out of fooling people. If you were a parent with a sick kid, the last thing you needed was a doctor who couldn’t stop bawling. If you were a terrified patient, you didn’t want to see your doctor break down at your bedside. The skills transferred. There was nothing to be gained by turning into a mess in front of Will. It was a cheap way to win an argument. He would comfort her, and she would feel horrible for manipulating him, and in the morning nothing would’ve changed.

He would still be in love with his wife.

Sara took a mouthful of Scotch and held it before she swallowed.

Was that the truth? Did Will really love Angie the way a husband loved his wife? He had lied to Sara about seeing her on Saturday. He was probably lying about other things. Death had a way of focusing your emotions. Maybe losing Angie had made Will realize that he didn’t want Sara after all.

There was no need for him to call or text if there was nothing left to say.

The dogs shifted. Bob jumped down from the couch. Billy followed. Sara heard a soft knock at the door. She looked at the door as if it could explain how someone had gotten into the building without using the intercom system. Sara was on the penthouse floor. She had only one neighbor, Abel Conford, who was on vacation for the month.

There was another soft knock. The dogs ambled over to the door. Betty stayed on the pillow. She yawned.

Sara put her laptop on the coffee table. She forced herself to stand up. And to not get angry, because the only reason the dogs weren’t barking was because they recognized the man knocking on the door.

She had given Will a key last year. It was cute that he’d still knocked on the door the first week after. Now, it was annoying.

Sara opened the door. Will had his hands in his pockets. He was wearing jeans and the gray Ermenegildo Zegna polo she had slipped in with his Gap T-shirts.

He saw the laptop. ‘You’re watching Buffy without me?’

Sara left the door open and went back to retrieve her drink. The loft was open-concept, the living room, dining-room and kitchen taking up one large space. Sara was glad to be able to put some distance between them. She sat down on the couch. Betty stood from the pillow. She stretched and yawned again, but didn’t go to Will.

He didn’t go to the dog either. Or Sara. He stood with his back against the kitchen counter. He asked, ‘She did okay? At the vet?’

‘Yes.’

His hands were gripped together the way he used to do when he twisted his wedding ring around his finger. The skin over the knuckles of his index and middle fingers was broken open.

Sara didn’t ask about the injury. She took another drink from her glass.

‘There’s a girl,’ he said. ‘She might know what Harding knew. What got him killed. That could get her killed.’

Sara feigned interest. ‘This is the Jane Doe you found in the office building?’

‘No, another girl. Harding’s wife. Daughter. Maybe. We don’t know.’

Sara drank her Scotch.

‘I cut myself.’ Instead of holding up his hand, he turned and showed her the back of his right leg. There was a dark patch of blood. ‘I slipped through some floorboards.’ He waited. ‘There’s a couple of splinters.’

‘If it’s been longer than six hours, it’s too late for sutures.’

Will waited.

Sara waited too. She wasn’t going to make this easy for him. If he was going to break up with her, then he had to be a man about it.

He said, ‘Have you had much?’ He paused. ‘To drink?’

‘Not nearly enough.’ Sara got up from the couch. She passed Will on her way into the kitchen. Her stomach wouldn’t like a second drink on top of the earlier glass of wine, but she poured herself one anyway.

Will stood on the other side of the counter. He watched her top off the glass. He had a physical aversion to alcohol. His shoulders squared. His chin lifted. She wasn’t even sure if he noticed. She had to assume it was muscle memory from all the drunks who had abused him when he was a child. As with most things, Will did not talk about it.

She asked, ‘Do you want one?’

He nodded. ‘Okay.’

Sara had seen him drink alcohol once, but that was under duress. She had forced a trickle of Scotch down his throat because he couldn’t stop coughing.

He asked, ‘Do you have gin?’

She leaned down to search the cabinet, which, until tonight, she hadn’t opened for months. Dust covered the foiled corks in the wine. There was a full bottle of gin in the back, but something told her that gin was Angie’s drink, and Sara was not going to toast her boyfriend’s dead wife in her kitchen.

She stood up. ‘No gin. There’s wine in the fridge, or do you want Scotch?’

‘That’s what I had before?’

She took down a glass and poured him a double. When he didn’t move to take it, Sara slid the glass across the counter. He still didn’t take it.

She said, ‘Amanda told me not to tell you, but there was a note from Angie.’

The color drained from his face. ‘How did she…?’

‘You already knew?’

He opened his mouth again, but nothing came out.

Sara said, ‘I’m glad it’s out in the open. I wasn’t going to lie, or pretend that I didn’t know. That would make me the worst kind of hypocrite.’

‘How…’ He hesitated. ‘How does Amanda know?’

‘She’s in charge of the investigation, Will. It’s her job to know everything.’

He spread his hands palms down on the counter. He wouldn’t look at her.

Sara thought back to the crime scene bus, Charlie’s glee when he’d shown her the glowing HELP ME on the wall. Angie’s injuries had been severe, life-threatening, but she had stopped to write the words in her own blood, knowing that Will would see them. That Sara would see them. That everyone would know that Angie would always have her claws in him. She might as well have written FUCK YOU, SARA LINTON.

Will asked, ‘Did you read it? The note?’

‘Yes. I’m the one who recognized her handwriting.’

Will kept staring at his hands. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘For what? You said it before: you can’t control her.’

‘What she said…’ His voice trailed off again. He sounded distraught. ‘It doesn’t matter. Not to me.’

Sara didn’t believe him. The fact of Angie’s death hadn’t yet sunk in. ‘It mattered to her. It’s probably the last thing she wrote before she died.’

He lifted the glass of Scotch. He threw back the drink, and then he almost coughed it all back up.

Sara pulled a paper towel off the roll and handed it to him.

His eyes were watering. He wiped the mess off the counter. He was sweating. He looked shaken. And he should be. Angie was dead. She had begged him for help. He hadn’t been able to save her, not this time when it really mattered. Thirty years of his life was gone. He was probably in shock. Alcohol was the last thing he needed.

Sara took the glass away from him and put it in the sink. ‘Wait for me in your bathroom.’ She didn’t give him time to respond. She found her glasses on the couch and walked down the hall to her office. She pulled down her medical bag from the closet shelf. She turned around.

She did not want to leave the room.

She stood by her desk, holding the bag, willing herself to calm down.

There was no way to fix this. She couldn’t stitch together their relationship like she could stitch together his leg. Talking around the problem was only delaying the inevitable. And yet she didn’t have it in her to confront him. She was frozen in place, terrified of what might come if they really talked about what had happened, what was coming next. Sara couldn’t guess the future. There was just a blank expanse of unknown. All she could do was stand in the darkened office listening to the blood rushing through her ears. She counted to fifty, then one hundred, and then she made herself move.

The hallway seemed longer than it ever had before. More like an arduous journey than a stroll. Will’s bathroom was in the spare bedroom. Sara had designated a separate area for Will for the benefit of their relationship. When she finally rounded the corner, he was waiting for her in the doorway.

She said, ‘Take off your pants.’

Will stared at her.

‘It’s easier than trying to roll up your jeans.’ She emptied her medical bag into the sink. She laid out the tools she would need. ‘Take off your pants. Take off your socks. Stand in the tub. I need to clean the wound.’

Will obeyed the orders, giving a slight wince when he peeled the jeans away from his leg. He had bled through the bandage, which was little more than an oversized Band-Aid. He stood in the tub.

‘Take off the bandage.’ Sara looked for a pair of gloves, then thought better of it. If Angie had given Will a disease, Sara already had it. She put on her glasses. ‘Turn sideways.’

Will turned. The leg was worse than she’d expected. This was more than a few splinters. He had a deep two-and-a-half-inch laceration down the side of his calf. Debris had crusted into the blood. It was too late for sutures. She would be sewing in an infection.

She asked, ‘Did you wash it?’

‘I tried in the shower, but it hurt.’

‘This is going to hurt more.’ Sara unwrapped the bottle of Betadine. She closed the toilet lid so she could sit down. She didn’t give him any warning before she blasted a steady stream of cold antiseptic directly into the wound.

Will grabbed the curtain rod, almost ripping it from the wall. He hissed air between his teeth.

‘Okay?’ she asked.

‘Yep.’

Sara jetted out a chunk of debris. He’d done a poor job of cleaning the site. Caked blood dropped onto the white porcelain tub. Will lifted up onto his toes. He had braced his hands on the curtain rod and shower head. His teeth were clenched. So much for the Hippocratic Oath. Sara had gone from being a caring doctor to a passive-aggressive bitch. She put down the bottle. Will’s leg was shaking. ‘Do you want me to numb you?’

He shook his head. His shirt had ridden up. He was holding his breath. She could see every single clenched muscle in his abdomen.

Sara felt the full weight of her transgression. ‘I’m sorry. I don’t want to hurt you. I mean, obviously, I did, but I-’

‘It’s okay.’

‘No, it’s not okay, Will. It’s not okay.’

Her words echoed in the bathroom. She sounded angry. She was angry. Both of them knew that Sara wasn’t talking about his leg.

He said, ‘I know why Angie took your lipstick.’

Sara waited.

‘She was trying to bully you. I should’ve stopped her.’

‘How?’ Sara genuinely wanted to know. ‘It’s like the note she left for you on the wall at the club. She knew that Charlie or somebody would luminol the area. That I would see it. That it would be a public thing. She does what she wants to do.’

‘The wall.’ Will nodded, as if that explained everything. ‘Yeah.’

‘Yeah,’ Sara agreed, which brought them right back to where they had started.

She wet some gauze under the tub faucet and used it to wipe off the Betadine. Will eventually lowered his heel. She scooped warm water onto his leg and foot, rubbing away the iodine stain. She’d made a mess of everything. Even the hand towel she used to pat him dry showed streaks of yellow-brown from the antiseptic.

Sara told him, ‘The hard part’s over. I can still numb you. Some of the splinters are deep.’

‘I’m fine.’

Sara took a flashlight out of the drawer. She found the tweezers from her bag. There were several tiny black splinters just below the surface of his skin. She counted three that were deeper, more like shards of wood. They would’ve been jabbing him every time he took a step.

She folded the hand towel and knelt on the tile floor so she could get at the splinters.

Will flinched before she touched him.

‘Try to relax the muscle.’

‘I’m trying.’

She made the offer again. ‘I have some lidocaine right here. It’s a tiny needle.’

‘I’m fine.’ His death grip on the curtain rod said otherwise.

This time, Sara tried to be gentle. As a pediatric intern, she’d spent hours sewing sutures onto peaches in order to train a softer touch into her hands. Still, there was no way to get around some types of hurt. Will remained stoic, even as she worked a piece of wood the size of a toothpick out of the open gash.

‘I’m sorry,’ she repeated, because she hated the thought of hurting him. At least she hated it now. ‘This one is really deep.’

‘It’s okay.’ He allowed a breath, but only so he could speak. ‘Just hurry.’

Sara tried to hurry, but it didn’t help that Will’s calf was a concrete block. She remembered the first time she’d seen him in running shorts. She’d felt a rush of heat at the sight of his lean, muscular legs. He ran five miles a day, five days a week. Most of the time he took a detour to the local high school, where he sprinted up and down the stadium steps. There were sculptures in Florence with less definition.

‘Sara?’

She looked up at him.

‘I could’ve gotten stronger locks for the doors. A Flip Guard. An alarm. I’m sorry I didn’t do that. It was disrespectful to you.’

Sara carefully worked out the last splinter. Now that he was talking about it, Sara didn’t want to have the conversation. She sat back on her heels. She put down the tweezers. She hooked her glasses on her collar. Will was standing in front of her in his boxers. His arms were still raised over his head. The alcohol inside of her suggested that there was an easy way to get them through the night.

Will said, ‘Everyone’s been telling me what it’s like to lose somebody.’

Sara reached into the sink for the bandage roll and some fresh gauze.

‘Faith told me about her dad dying. Amanda told me about her mother. Did you know she hanged herself?’

Sara shook her head as she tied the bandage around Will’s leg.

‘I’m just going to tell myself that Angie’s where she always goes when she leaves me. Wherever that is.’

Sara stood up. She washed her hands.

Will pulled on his jeans. ‘I think I’ll be okay if I can do that. Just tell myself that she’s not really gone. That way, when she doesn’t come back, it won’t matter. It’ll just be like all the times before.’

Sara turned off the water. There was a tremble in her hand, more like a vibration that was working through her body, as if a tuning fork had been touched to her nerves.

She asked, ‘Do you want to know what it was like when my husband died?’

He looked up from buttoning his jeans. Sara had told him the story, but not the details.

She said, ‘It felt like someone had reached inside of my chest and ripped out my heart.’

Will zipped his pants. His expression was blank. He really had no idea what Angie’s death was going to do to him.

She said, ‘I felt hollow. Like there was nothing inside of me. I wanted to kill myself. I did try to kill myself. Did you know that?’

Will looked stunned. She had told him about the pills, but not her intentions. ‘You said it was an accident.’

‘I’m a doctor, Will. I knew what to do. Ambien. Hydrocodone. Tylenol.’ Tears started to fall. Now that the words were coming out, she couldn’t stop them. ‘My mother found me. She called an ambulance and they took me to the hospital, and people I worked with, people I’ve known since I was a child, had to pump my stomach so that I wouldn’t die.’ Her fists were clenched. She wanted to grab him and shake him and make him understand that death wasn’t the kind of thing you could just pretend away. ‘I begged them to let me go. I wanted to die. I loved him. He was my life. He was the center of my universe, and when he was gone, that was it. There was nothing left for me.’

Will slipped on his sneakers. He was listening, but he wasn’t hearing.

‘Angie’s dead. Brutally murdered.’ He didn’t flinch from her words. Four years ago, if someone had said the same thing about Jeffrey, Sara would’ve been on the floor. ‘She was the most important person in your life for thirty years. You can’t just tell yourself that she’s on a vacation, that she’s going to come back from the beach with a tan. That’s not how it works when you lose somebody. You see them on street corners. You hear their voice in the other room. You want to sleep all the time so you can dream about them. You don’t want to wash your clothes or your sheets so you can still smell them. I did this for three years, Will. Every single day for three years. I wasn’t living. I was going through the motions. I wanted to be just as dead as he was until-’

Sara caught herself at the last second.

‘Until what?’

Her hand went to her throat. She felt like she was dangling over a cliff.

He repeated, ‘Until what?’

‘Until enough time had passed.’ Her pulse jumped under her fingers. She was angry. She was terrified. She was breathless from the rawness of her words and she was a coward for not telling him exactly what had turned her life around.

She just couldn’t do it.

She said, ‘You’re going to need time to grieve.’ What she really meant was, You’re going to need time away from me, and I don’t think my heart can take it.

Will carefully lined up his socks. He folded them in two. ‘I know you can never love me the way that you loved him.’

Sara felt blindsided. ‘That’s not fair.’

‘Maybe.’ He tucked his socks into his back pocket. ‘I think I should go.’

‘I think you should too.’ The words came unfiltered from her mouth. Sara recognized her voice. She just didn’t know why she had said it.

Will waited for her to step aside so he could pass.

She followed him into the living room. Her equilibrium was gone. Everything had shifted, but she couldn’t figure out how.

‘I don’t know if I have a job anymore.’ He was talking to her as if nothing had changed. ‘Even if I do, Amanda won’t let me near the case. Faith’s following up on the Palmer angle with Collier.’ He scooped up Betty. ‘I’ll probably be stuck at my desk processing paperwork.’

Sara struggled for composure. ‘I won’t have the tox screen back on Harding for another week.’

‘Probably doesn’t matter.’ He took Betty’s leash off the hook and snapped it onto her collar. ‘Okay. I’ll see you later.’

He shut the door behind him.

Sara leaned against the wall for support. Her heart was battering her ribs. She felt light-headed.

What the hell had just happened?

Why had he left?

Why had she let him?

Sara put her back to the wall. She slid down to the floor. She looked at her watch. It was still too late to call Tessa. Sara didn’t even know what she would say. Everything had escalated so quickly. Was Will having some sort of mental breakdown?

Was Sara?

She had said too much about Jeffrey. Sara had always walked a fine line with memories of her husband. She didn’t want to deny their time together, but she didn’t want to rub Will’s face in it either. Did Will really think she was telling him that she couldn’t get over losing her husband? Four years ago, Sara would have believed that was true.

Until she’d met Will.

That was what she’d stopped herself from saying in the bathroom: that Will had changed everything. That he had made her want to live again. That he was her life and the thought of losing him terrified her. The shame of her cowardice was equal to her regret. She had been scared because there was no point in telling him that she loved him if he was just going to leave.

Sara leaned her head back against the wall. She stared at the dark sky out the windows. She’d seen death too many times to believe that there was such a thing as angels, but if there were demons in the afterlife, Angie Polaski was out there cackling like a witch.

This was the revelation that finally moved Sara; not love or need or even desperation, but the absolute conviction that she was not going to let Angie win.

Sara stood up. She found her purse. The dogs stirred, hoping for a walk, but she brushed them aside as she left the apartment. She didn’t bother with the lock. She pressed the elevator button. She pressed it again. She looked up at the lighted panel. The car was stuck on the lobby level. She turned toward the stairs.

Will was standing by her door.

Betty was beside him.

He asked, ‘What’s wrong?’

Of all the idiotic questions. ‘I thought you left.’

‘I thought you wanted me to.’

‘I only said that because you said it.’ She shook her head. ‘I know that sounds stupid. It is stupid. Was stupid.’ She wanted to reach for him. To hold him. To make the last ten minutes go away. ‘Why are you still here?’

‘It’s a free country.’

‘Will, please.’

He shrugged. He looked down at his dog. ‘I don’t have a lot of quit in me, Sara. You should know that by now.’

‘You were just going to wait out here all night?’

‘I knew you would have to take out the dogs before you went to bed.’

A bell dinged. The elevator doors opened.

Sara was fixed in place. She felt the tingling in her nerves again. She was back on the cliff, her toes dangling over. She took a deep breath. ‘I don’t love you less than him, Will. I love you differently. I love you…’ She couldn’t describe it. There were no words. ‘I love you.’

He nodded, but she couldn’t tell if he understood.

She said, ‘We have to talk about this.’

‘No, we don’t.’ He reached out to her. He cupped his hand to her face. His touch was like a balm. He smoothed her brow. He wiped her tears. He stroked her cheek. Her breath caught when his thumb brushed across her lips.

He asked, ‘Do you want me to stop?’

‘I want you to do that with your mouth.’

He gently pressed his lips to hers. Sara kissed him back. There was no passion, just the overwhelming need for reconnection. Will pulled her close. Sara buried her face in the crook of his neck. She wrapped her arms around his waist. She felt him relax into her. They clung to each other, standing outside the open door to her apartment, until her cell phone chimed.

Then chimed again.

And again.

Will broke away first.

Reluctantly Sara picked up her purse from the floor.

They both knew that Amanda sent rapid-fire texts, just as they both knew there was only one reason she would be reaching out to Sara after eight o’clock at night.

She found her phone. She swiped her finger across the screen.

AMANDA: NEED YOU NOW ANGIE’S CAR FOUND 1885 SOMMERSET.

AMANDA: CADAVER DOG FOUND SCENT IN TRUNK.

AMANDA: DON’T TELL WILL.

Sara told him.

EIGHT

Will sat beside Sara in her BMW. She was being strong for him. Silent, but strong. They hadn’t talked about more than logistics since she’d read Amanda’s texts.

Do you know where this is? Do you want me to drive?

Sara turned onto Spring Street. Night had fallen. The instrument panel cast her face in white tones. Will gripped her hand as tightly as he could without breaking something. He still felt numb, except for the places where he didn’t. There was an elephant standing on his chest. The pain was physical, suffocating. His arm hurt. Or maybe it only hurt because Faith had asked him before if his arm was hurting. Or maybe he was unraveling because that was what everyone kept saying he was going to do.

Cadaver dogs were trained to find the scent of decomposition. They had alerted on Angie’s trunk. That meant that everyone was thinking that Angie was dead.

Was it true? Was Angie dead?

The most important person in his life for thirty years.

Angie had been the only person in his life for thirty years.

That was the only incontrovertible fact.

Will tried to summon that moment in the basement, all those years ago, when Angie had held him, comforted him. Nothing. He tried to remember the one time they went on a vacation together. They had argued about directions. They had argued about where to eat. They had argued about who was being more argumentative.

You dumbass was the last thing she’d said to him that night, and the next morning she was gone.

Angie was awful to live with. She was constantly breaking things, borrowing things, never putting his stuff back where it belonged. Will’s mind strained for one single good memory but all he saw was static, the fuzzy white and black patches that used to show on TV when the station went off the air.

Sara squeezed his hand. He looked down at their intertwined fingers. One of the first things he’d noticed about Sara was how long and graceful her fingers were. He didn’t know if that came with being a surgeon or if it was simply because everything about her was beautiful.

He studied her face. Her sharp chin. Her button nose. Her long auburn hair that was pinned up into a swirl at the back of her head.

She usually took her hair down after work. Will knew this was for his sake, that it drove her crazy when her hair fell into her eyes. She was constantly pushing it back and he never told her to pin it up because he was selfish.

Every relationship, romantic or otherwise, had a certain level of selfishness. It went back and forth depending on who was stronger or who needed it most. Amanda sucked up selfishness like a sponge. Faith gave it away too easily. Angie reached down your throat and grabbed it and then kicked you in the balls for thinking you could have it in the first place.

Will had always thought that he and Sara shared an emotional equivalence, but was Will taking all the selfishness for himself? He had lied to her about what had happened with Angie last Saturday. He had lied to her about the letter Angie had left for him in the post office box. He had lied about his and Angie’s joint bank account. He had lied about not doing everything he could do to find her.

Angie. Angie. Angie.

She was dead now. Maybe. Most likely. He would have a clean slate. For the first time in thirty years, Will’s confidante, his torturer, his source of support and source of pain was gone.

He shivered.

Sara turned down the air conditioner. ‘Are you okay?’

‘Yes.’ He looked out the window so she could not see his face. The elephant shifted its weight. Will could almost feel his ribs flex from the pressure. His vision strobed. He opened his mouth and tried to fill his lungs.

They were in midtown. The bright lights outside the window hurt his eyes. His ears buzzed with the fan blowing out cold air from the dash. Underneath the sound, there was music. Soft women’s voices harmonizing over a steel guitar. Sara never turned off the radio, she only turned the volume down low.

She released his hand so that she could put on the blinker. They were at 1885 Sommerset. Instead of a building, there was a house, a sprawling English Tudor that took up half a city block. The lawn sloped toward the street, neatly trimmed grass and well-manicured flowers led up to stone steps.

Angie’s car had been found at a funeral home.

Sara pulled into the parking lot. An old pickup truck with a yellow Lab in the passenger’s seat was leaving the scene. A patrol car was parked on the grass. The officer was sitting behind the wheel typing into the laptop mounted onto the dash. Will recognized Amanda’s Suburban and Faith’s red Mini. Charlie Reed was there in his white crime scene van, but for some reason he was sitting behind the wheel instead of processing Angie’s car. The black Dodge Charger belonged to Collier and Ng. The GBI was still in charge, but Angie’s car had been found in the Atlanta city limits and there was still an active murder investigation.

The two detectives were sitting on the hood the same as they’d been this morning. Ng still had on his wraparound sunglasses. He did the chin nod thing when Will got out of the car. Collier waved, but Amanda must have put them under strict orders to keep their distance, because neither of them approached.

Angie’s Monte Carlo SS was parked in a handicapped space in front of the building. She would park in a handicapped space because that’s what she did. Yellow crime scene tape roped off the area. The trunk was open. The driver’s door was open. Even from twenty yards, Will could smell the sickly sweet odor of death. Or maybe it was like his arm hurting. He only smelled death because someone had planted the idea in his mind.

Amanda came out of a side door. Unusually, her BlackBerry wasn’t in her hand. She had a lot of things she could yell at Will about right now, but she didn’t. ‘Uniformed patrol spotted Angie’s car an hour ago. The funeral home closed at six, but there’s an intern who sleeps here for overnight calls.’

‘An intern?’ Will tried to ask the question that a cop would.

‘From the local mortuary school.’ Amanda crossed her arms. ‘He was picking up a body at a nursing home when the uni found Angie’s car. Faith is talking to him in the chapel.’

Will studied the house. He guessed the large two-story structure at the end was the chapel.

Amanda said, ‘The uni smelled an odor. He popped the trunk using the latch inside the car. He called in the cadaver dog. It hit on the scent immediately.’

Will looked at the car again. Parked at an angle. Hastily abandoned. The windows were down. His vision flashed up an image: Angie slumped over the wheel. He blinked and it was gone.

‘Will?’ Sara said.

He looked at her.

‘Why are you rubbing your chest?’

Will hadn’t realized he was rubbing his chest. He stopped. He told Amanda, ‘There are license plate scanners on Spring and Peachtree.’

She nodded. Scanners all over the city tracked the movement of traffic and searched for the license plates of stolen or suspect vehicles. ‘The data is being sent to the computer division for analysis.’

Will looked out at the street. Sommerset and Spring was a busy corner. Midtown was heavily monitored. Every major intersection had a camera.

Amanda said, ‘We’ve requested footage from GDOT and APD. We’ll comb through it as soon as it’s in hand. Search teams are on the way.’

Will said what she already knew. ‘Someone left the car here. They would need to drive away or-’

‘I’ve got everybody in the state looking for Delilah Palmer.’

Will had forgotten about Dale Harding’s wife or daughter or both. Palmer was a young prostitute with a drug problem. She had grown up in the system. The only parent she’d ever known had exploited her. She could’ve been Angie twenty years ago, except that Angie had managed to pull herself out. Or at least make it seem that way. Will wasn’t so sure she had managed to escape anything.

Sara’s hand pressed against the small of his back. ‘You okay?’

Will walked toward the car. The smell grew more pungent as he got closer. You didn’t need a bloodhound to know that something bad had happened here. He stopped at the crime scene tape. The trunk of Angie’s car was lined with a scratchy charcoal-colored carpet that he’d gotten from a roll at Pep Boys. He had leaned over the trunk for hours lining up the seams, gluing it in place.

Amanda shined a police-issue Maglite into the trunk. There was a dark stain in the carpet, just a little off from the center. The only thing in the trunk was a red plastic bottle of transmission fluid.

Will knelt down. He examined the pavement under the car. The transmission was leaking. The car was probably his now. He would have to fix it before he sold it.

‘Will?’ Sara put her hand on his shoulder. She knelt beside him. ‘Look at me.’

He looked at her.

‘I think we should go. There’s nothing here.’

Will stood up, but he didn’t go. He went to the driver’s side of the car. The door was wide open. A half-empty bottle of tequila was in the footwell. A joint was in the ashtray. Candy wrappers. Gum. Angie had a sweet tooth.

He asked Amanda, ‘It was like this when the uni rolled up?’

She nodded.

The open door would act like a flag to whoever drove by, which meant the car was left to be found sooner rather than later. Will took the flashlight from Amanda. He shined the light into the car. The interior was light gray. The shift for the manual transmission jutted out from the floor between the seats. He saw blood on the steering wheel. Blood on the driver’s seat. Blood on the white circle on top of the black shifter knob. It was an 8-ball. Angie had picked it out of a magazine. This was before the internet. Will had gone to three different stores to find an adapter so it would screw onto the stick.

He turned the flashlight, examining the back seat. More blood, almost black from baking in the sun all day. There was a smear near the door handle. Too small for a handprint. Maybe a closed fist punching out. Maybe a desperate last move to get away. Someone had lain bleeding in the back seat. Someone had lain bleeding in the trunk. Someone had been bleeding or covered in blood when they drove the car away.

He asked Amanda, ‘Two bodies and the driver?’

Amanda had obviously considered this. ‘She could’ve been moved from the back seat to the trunk.’

‘Still bleeding?’ he asked, meaning still alive.

‘Gravity,’ Sara said. ‘If there was a chest wound, and she was on her side, depending on how she was positioned, you might expect that amount of blood to seep out post mortem.’

‘She,’ Will said. ‘What about Delilah Palmer?’

‘I had someone at Grady run down her blood type. She had an admit for an OD last year. She’s O-positive. Angie was B-negative.’ Amanda’s hand was on his arm. She had tried to let him work this out on his own, leaving Charlie in his van, calling off Collier and Ng, but now she was going to give him the truth. ‘Wilbur, I know this is hard to hear, but everything points toward Angie.’ She laid it out for him. ‘Angie’s blood type was all over the crime scene. We found her purse, her gun. This is her car. Charlie already typed the blood for me. The back seat, the trunk and the front seat are all B-negative. We’ve got the DNA on rush, but given the rarity of the blood type, the likelihood that it’s not Angie is slim to none. And it’s a hell of a lot of blood, Will. Too much blood for her to walk away.’

Will mulled over her words. The stain in the trunk was in the area you would expect from a chest wound. Arterial spray was found on the walls of the room where Dale Harding died. Arteries were in the heart. The heart was in the chest.

Will tried to play out a likely scenario. Angie in the back seat, bleeding to death. The driver some guy she’d called because she always had a guy she could call. He would be desperately trying to get her help, and then he would realize that it was too late. And then he would put her in the trunk because he couldn’t drive around the city with a dead woman in the back seat of the car. And then he would wait until sundown and drive the car here.

‘The manager is on the way.’ Faith came walking down a lighted path. An open spiral notebook was in her hand. She looked at Will, then looked at him again.

Amanda said, ‘And?’

Faith referenced her notes. ‘Inside, we’ve got Ray Belcamino, twenty-year-old male Caucasian, no record. Mortuary student at Gupton-Jones. He clocked into work at approximately five fifteen for a five-thirty shift. His call-in sheet has him three times off the premises, once to Piedmont Hospital at six forty-three, another to the Sunrise Nursing home at seven oh two, and a third, a false alarm, at eight twenty-two.’ She looked up. ‘Apparently it’s a thing for interns to call in fake deaths to prank each other.’

‘Of course it is,’ Amanda said.

‘All three times, Belcamino used the commercial entrance near the chapel, behind the fence. There’s a service elevator that goes down to the basement. He can’t see the parking lot over the fence. He drove in from the west each time, so he didn’t pass the parking lot and he didn’t see the car.’

Amanda asked, ‘Closed-circuit cameras?’

‘Six, but they’re all trained on the doors and windows, not the parking lot.’

Will asked, ‘Did you check the Dumpster?’

‘First thing. Nothing.’

He asked, ‘Were any of the doors tampered with?’

‘No, and there’s an alarm system. Every door and window is wired.’

‘How is the elevator accessed?’

‘There’s a keypad.’

Will asked, ‘Can the keypad be seen from behind the fence?’

‘Yeah. And it turns off the alarm, too.’

Amanda asked, ‘Where are you going with this?’

‘Why bring a car that has a dead body in a trunk to a funeral home?’

They all looked back at the building.

Faith said, ‘I’ll go. Wait here.’

Will didn’t wait. He didn’t run, either, but his stride was twice as long as Faith’s. He reached the chapel before she did. He opened the door before she did. He passed the pews and walked onto the stage and found the door that led to the back half of the funeral home before she did.

Behind the scenes was scuffed and utilitarian. Drop ceiling, peeling linoleum. There was a long hallway running the entire back of the building. Two massive elevator doors stood sentry at one end. Will knew that there was likely an identical set of elevator doors to the outside and that this was where the bodies were transported down to the basement. He headed toward the elevator, assuming there would be stairs. Faith was right behind him. She was jogging to catch up, so Will started jogging so that she couldn’t.

The metal stairs were old and jangly. His footsteps jarred the railing. At the bottom, there was a landing with a swinging door. Will pushed through to a small office, more like a vestibule. There was another set of double doors behind a wooden desk, and at the desk sat a young man who could only be Ray Belcamino.

The kid jumped up. His iPad clattered to the floor.

Will tried the double doors. Locked. No windows. ‘How many bodies do you have in here?’

Belcamino’s eyes darted to Faith as she came through the swinging door

She was out of breath. ‘I need your logs. We have to match each body to a name.’

The kid looked panicked. ‘Is one missing?’

Will wanted to grab him by the collar. ‘We need a body count.’

‘Seven,’ he said. ‘No, eight. Eight.’ He picked up the iPad. He started tapping the screen. ‘The two tonight, three more from this week, one being processed, two awaiting cremation.’

Faith grabbed the iPad. She glanced through the list. She told Will, ‘I don’t recognize any of the names.’

‘What names?’ Belcamino had started to sweat. He either knew something or suspected something. ‘What’s wrong?’

Will pushed him back against the wall. ‘Who are you working with?’

‘Nobody!’ Panic cracked his voice. ‘Here! I work here!’

The swinging door banged open. Amanda, then Sara, then Charlie, crammed into the small vestibule.

Amanda asked Belcamino, ‘Where do you store the bodies?’

‘There’s a buzzer.’ His eyes darted toward the desk. Will let him go. The kid reached underneath the desk and found the button. The rear set of doors arced open.

Light green tiled walls. Dark green linoleum floor. Chemical smells. Bright lights. Low ceiling. About the size of a school classroom. There was a body at the front of the room. Elderly man. Wrinkled skin. White tufts of hair. A cloth covered his genitals. Tubes went out of his neck and connected him to a machine with a canister.

The walk-in freezer was in the back. Large stainless-steel door. Reinforced glass window. Amanda was already there. Her hand hovered over a green lighted button to open the door.

Will traversed the room. This was the second time today he’d walked toward an unknown, thinking that he was going to find Angie’s body. His vision sharpened. His ears picked up every sound.

The freezer door made a heavy clicking sound. Cold air seeped out from around the edges. An automatic arm opened the door at a glacial pace. Will had worked in a grocery store once. The walk-in where they kept the frozen foods was not dissimilar. Shelves on each side. Six tiers evenly spaced floor-to-ceiling. About fifteen feet deep, maybe ten feet high. Instead of bags of peas on the shelves, there were black body bags.

Four on one side. Four on the other.

‘Fuck me.’ Belcamino ripped a clipboard off the wall. He ran into the freezer. He checked the labels on the bags against the list. He was on the last body when he stopped. ‘There’s no tag.’

Will started to go inside. Sara caught him by the wrist. ‘You know you can’t be the one to find her.’

He had found her. He had figured out why the car was at the funeral home. He had led them into the basement. He couldn’t stop now. The bag was less than ten feet away. The shelves were tight. Angie’s nose would be less than half a foot from the corpse above her. She was claustrophobic. She was terrified of tight spaces.

‘Will.’ Sara’s hand moved to his arm. ‘You need to let them take care of her, okay? Let Charlie do his job. He has to take photographs. The bag needs to be preserved for fingerprints. There could be trace evidence on the floor. We have to do this the right way, or we’ll never be able to find out why she was left here.’

He knew all of this was true, but he couldn’t move.

‘Come on.’ She pulled at his arm.

He stepped back, then back again.

Charlie opened his duffel. He slipped on a pair of shoe protectors, then gloves. He put a fresh card in his camera. He checked the batteries, confirmed the date and time.

He started outside the freezer, slowly working his way in. He photographed the bag from every angle, kneeling down, leaning over the other bodies. He used his ruler for scale. He left marked cards on items of interest. It felt like an hour had passed before he finally told Ray Belcamino, ‘Get a gurney. The space is too tight. We’ll need to move her so we can open the bag.’

Belcamino disappeared into another room. He returned with a gurney. A white sheet was folded on the center. He kicked the wheels straight and forced the gurney up the small ramp that led to the freezer.

Charlie handed him a pair of gloves.

Obviously moving bodies was a job that Belcamino had done on his own before. He muscled the black bag onto the gurney like he was moving a rolled carpet. Will had to look away, because he was going to hit the kid if he had to watch him a second longer.

He heard the gurney being rolled out, the freezer door shutting with a thunk.

Amanda said, ‘Thank you, Mr Belcamino. You can wait upstairs.’

Belcamino offered no protest as he left the room.

Charlie took more photographs. He dragged over a step stool that was against the wall. He stood over the bag and took more photos. He used the ruler again to document scale.

Will stared at the contours of the black bag. He couldn’t make sense of what was underneath. And then he realized that the body was on its side, that whoever had taken it from the trunk had left it in the same position in which it had died.

Angie always slept on her side, close to him but not touching him. Sometimes at night her breath would tickle his ear and he would have to turn over so that he could go to sleep.

‘Faith?’ Charlie held out an extra pair of gloves. The fingers dangled in the air for a second before Faith finally took them.

Her hands were obviously sweating. She struggled to pull on the gloves. Her jaw was clamped tight. She hated dead bodies. She hated being in the morgue. She hated autopsies.

She grabbed the zipper and started to pull.

The sound was like a rip. Something tearing apart. Something breaking. The body was turned away from them. Will saw dark hair. Brown, the same color as Angie’s. The woman’s bare shoulder was revealed. The curve of her spine. The arc of her hip. Her legs were bent. Her hands were between her knees. Her toes were curled, the feet sickled.

Faith gagged. The smell was noxious, putrid. The body had been in the trunk for hours in the broiling sun. Heat had accelerated the decomposition. The skin was desiccated. The human body was made up of the same fiber and tissue as any other mammal. Both had the same reaction to heat, which was to release fluids.

Charlie spread open the bag. A trickle of blood turned pink by cholesterol splattered onto the floor.

Faith gagged again. She put the back of her hand under her nose. She squeezed her eyes closed. She was standing on the opposite side of the gurney. She had seen the face. She shook her head. ‘I can’t tell if it’s her. She’s just-’

‘Beaten,’ Charlie said.

Will looked at her back, blackened with patches that looked like soot. The same pattern was on her legs. On the soles of her feet.

‘Bleach,’ Sara said. The odor steamed off the bag.

‘She wasn’t scrubbed clean, though. It looks like the bleach was poured. Almost sloshed.’

‘Her clothes are gone,’ Amanda noted. ‘Someone was worried about trace evidence.’

Faith said, ‘She was somewhere other than the car.’

‘Her face looks like someone took a bat to her.’ Charlie did a cursory examination. ‘Contusions and lacerations on the face and neck. Fingernail scrapes. It looks like bones were broken.’ He knelt down with the camera, zooming in on the head, neck, chest, torso. ‘Multiple stab wounds.’ He asked Will, ‘Does she have any identifying marks? Tattoos?’

Will shook his head.

Then he remembered.

Time moved in double frame, as if someone had pressed the fast-forward on his life. Will was pulling away from Sara. He was walking around the gurney. He was pushing Charlie aside. He was looking at the body, the deep black bruises, the cuts, the mottled skin, and there it was: a single mole on her breast. Was it in the same place? Why couldn’t he remember where the mole was supposed to be?

He found himself on his knees. He looked at her face.

Bloated. Unrecognizable.

Her head was swollen to twice its size, black and red marks criss-crossing her face. Her lips were leaking fluid. Her nose was twisted to the side. More like a Halloween mask than a face.

Was it Angie?

Did it feel like Angie?

The numbness inside of Will had never really gone away. He felt nothing looking at this woman. He noticed the things he would notice on any case. Domestic homicide. Battery. Assault. Mouth open. Teeth broken. Lips chapped and swollen like too-ripe fruit. Her eyelids were thick, the consistency of wet bread. Blue veins and red arteries shot through almost translucent skin. Her cheek had been sliced with a very sharp knife or a razor. The skin flapped back, hanging open like a page in a book. He saw tissue, sinew, stark white of bone.

He looked at her hands. They were balled together between her bent knees. The heat had curled her fingers. Decomposition had cracked open the skin. Clear liquid seeped out from the joints of her knuckles. The ring around her finger had broken apart.

Angie’s wedding ring.

Green plastic with a bright yellow sunflower. Will had wasted three quarters on a bubble gum machine before the ring had come out. The dare had been that Angie would marry him if it took less than four quarters. She never backed down from a dare. She had married him. She had lasted ten days before he came home from work and found that all of her clothes were gone.

Will opened his mouth. He breathed in and out.

Amanda asked, ‘Will?’

Will shook his head. This wasn’t right. Someone had planted the ring. He would know instinctively if this was Angie. He stood up. He said, ‘It’s not her.’

Faith asked, ‘What about the ring?’

Will kept shaking his head. More looks were being exchanged. They clearly thought he was in denial, but they were wrong. Maybe when he was outside looking at the bloodied car, hearing Amanda run down the evidence, he had let himself think it might be Angie, but now that he was in the same room with this body, this stranger, he was certain that she was still alive.

It was what Sara said. He did not feel the hollowness. He did not feel an absence of the heart.

Charlie said, ‘I have a mobile fingerprint scanner.’

‘Her finger pads are cracked open. It’ll be hard to get a print.’

‘We can still try, but we’ll have to go upstairs to get a signal.’

‘She’s in full rigor.’

Will looked at the woman’s face again. It was like trying to read a book. He could see pieces but not the whole. The eyelashes were clumped together. The lip was torn apart. The jaw was set, roped like a cable on a suspension bridge. Rigor mortis. The coagulation of muscle proteins. It started in the eyelids, neck, jaw. All the muscles of the body stiffened, fixing the corpse in place.

Faith asked, ‘That means she’s been dead for three to four hours?’

‘Longer,’ Sara said, but she didn’t say how much longer.

Amanda asked, ‘How do we get fingerprints when her hands are curled?’

‘You’ll have to break the fingers.’

‘Would it be easier if she were on her back?’

‘I’ll need help turning her.’

Will walked away from them to the other side of the room. The elderly man was still lying on the gurney. Will tried to figure out the machines. Yellow fluid lurched around inside the canister. An orange tube came out of the bottom. There was some kind of pump working. He heard the motor turning, the shhh of a bellow moving air. One liquid being pushed out. Another liquid being pushed in. He followed the tube to the man’s carotid. The liquid passed through a heavy-gauge needle. There was another tube dropped over the side of the table, resting on the rusted edge of a floor drain.

Snap.

Like a twig being broken.

Snap.

Will kept his back to them. He didn’t want to know who broke open the fingers.

Snap.

‘Okay,’ Charlie said. ‘I think that’s good.’

‘Her fingers are a mess,’ Sara said. ‘I don’t think the scanner will be able to pick up the ridges.’

‘Try,’ Amanda told them.

There was a rustling sound, a click, three rapid beeps. The mobile fingerprint scanner. Biometrics. There was an injection-molded dock with a 30-pin iPhone connector. The dock had a silver pad. The pad scanned the fingerprint. An app on the phone processed the scan into a 256-bit grayscale, 508 dpi image, then transmitted the data to the GBI’s Live Scan servers, where the print was compared against the hundreds of thousands of prints stored in the system.

The only thing required was the dock and a phone with a signal.

Charlie was holding both in his hands as he walked toward the vestibule. He told Will, ‘It’s iffy because of the damage, but we might be able to get a hit.’

Will didn’t know why this information was directed specifically to him. He looked at his watch. Violent crimes tended to peak around ten p.m. The servers would be processing thousands of requests. Even on a slow day, the results could take anywhere from five minutes to twenty-four hours, and then the GBI required that the prints had to be peer-reviewed by a group of human beings who could reach a consensus on whether or not the computer match met the threshold for a legal level of certainty.

Faith said, ‘Sara?’

Something about her tone of voice made Will turn around.

Faith was standing at the foot of the gurney. She was looking down. The dead woman’s feet were raised off the table, frozen by rigor mortis. Her hands between her knees had opened her legs and her open legs gave a clear view of what was between them.

Rape, Will thought. The woman who could not be Angie had not just been strangled and beaten and stabbed. Sara was going to tell him that she had been raped.

‘Will?’ Sara waited for him to look at her. ‘Did Angie ever have a child?’

He couldn’t understand the question.

Sara said, ‘She has an episiotomy scar.’

Will had never heard the word before. ‘From an assault?’

‘From having a baby.’

He shook his head. Angie had been pregnant before, but not by Will. ‘She had an abortion eight years ago.’

Faith said, ‘That’s not how you get the scar.’

Sara said, ‘It’s a surgical incision made in the perineum during a vaginal birth.’

Faith translated, ‘They cut you open down there so the baby can come out.’

Will still didn’t understand. It was like looking at the dead woman’s face. He recognized the words, but not the sense.

Sara asked, ‘Does your chest feel tight?’

Will looked down. He was rubbing his chest again.

Faith said, ‘He wasn’t feeling well before.’

‘You’re wrong,’ Will said. ‘I don’t think it’s her.’

Sara was pushing him backward. The double doors opened. They stuttered closed. They were in the vestibule. Will was sitting at the metal desk. All three of them were hovering over him like in his worst kind of nightmare.

Sara said, ‘Take some deep breaths for me.’

Amanda said, ‘I have some Xanax.’ There was an enamel pill case in her hand. Pink base, roses on the lid. It was the sort of thing an old lady would use for her sniffing salts.

Sara said, ‘Put this under your tongue.’

Will complied without even thinking. The pill tasted bitter. He could feel it melting under his tongue. Saliva filled his mouth. He had to swallow.

‘It’ll take a few minutes.’ Sara started rubbing his back like he was a kid at the hospital. Will didn’t like it. He hated being fussed over.

He leaned over, putting his head between his knees, pretending like he was dizzy. Sara rubbed his back some more. He palmed the pill.

‘Just breathe.’ Sara’s fingers went to his wrist. She was taking his pulse. ‘You’re okay.’

Will sat up.

Sara was watching his every move. Amanda still held the open pill case in her hand. Faith had disappeared.

Sara asked, ‘Okay?’

‘I don’t think it’s her,’ Will repeated, but if anything, saying the words a second time made him question whether or not they were true. ‘She never had a baby.’

‘She did,’ Amanda said. Will watched her mouth move. Her lipstick was smudged. ‘Twenty-seven years ago, Angie disappeared from her foster placement. Three months later, she showed up at the hospital. She was in labor. She delivered a girl. She left before social services could arrive.’

The news should’ve hit him like a lightning strike, but nothing about Angie could surprise him anymore.

Sara asked, ‘How old was she?’

‘Sixteen.’

1989.

Will was stuck at the children’s home. No one wanted a teenage boy around, especially one who was taller than all of his teachers. Angie was living with a couple who took in kids for a living. They had anywhere from eight to fifteen kids at a time, stacked into bunk beds four to a room.

Will asked Amanda, ‘How did you find out about this?’

‘The same way I find out about everything.’ Amanda’s voice was hard. They never talked about the fact that she had followed Will from infancy, that throughout his life she had been the invisible hand that had redirected him whenever he got off course. Had she corrected Angie, too, steering her away from Will?

He asked, ‘What did you do?’

‘I didn’t do anything.’ Amanda dropped the pill case back into her pocket. ‘Angie disappeared. She abandoned her child. None of this should surprise you.’

Sara asked, ‘Did the baby survive?’

‘Yes. I never found out what happened to her. She was lost in the system.’

Their marriage application.

Angie had filled out the form. They were sitting outside the probate office. The sunflower ring was already on her finger. Angie had read the questions aloud. Over the age of sixteen? Sure. Ever been married before? Not that you know of. Father’s name? Who the fuck knows. Mother’s name? Doesn’t matter. Related to the intended spouse-uh-oh. Her pen scratched the paper as she scribbled in the answers. Children? Not me, baby. She had laughed her deep, husky laugh. Not that I know of, anyway…

Amanda said, ‘The daughter was born in January. She would be twenty-seven now. Delilah Palmer is twenty-two.’

Sara cleared her throat. ‘Do you know who the father is?’

Amanda said, ‘It’s not Will.’

Will wondered if that was true. That time in the basement. They hadn’t used a condom. Angie wasn’t on the pill. Then again, Will wasn’t the only boy she took into the basement.

Sara’s fingers were on his wrist again. ‘Your pulse is still thready.’

Will pulled away his hand. He stood up. He looked at the closed double doors. He did not need to see the body again to know the truth.

The sunflower ring. The car. The blood.

Her ring. Her car. Her blood.

Her baby.

Angie would abandon a baby. For some inexplicable reason, Will accepted this as proof above everything else. Angie did not have the capacity or the desire to care for something every single day for the rest of her life. Self-survival, not empathy, had always been her guiding principle. Will had seen it last Saturday and he could easily see it happening twenty-seven years ago. Angie went to the hospital. She’d had the baby. She’d left as soon as possible.

And now she was dead.

Will asked Sara, ‘Can we go home?’

‘Yes.’ She put her keys in his hand. ‘Go wait for me in the car. I’ll be right there.’

Amanda worked her BlackBerry. ‘I’ll tell Faith to wait with him.’

Will understood that a conversation was going to take place between Sara and Amanda, and that he would be the subject, but he didn’t have the wherewithal to fight it. His chest was still caught in a vise. There was a rock inside his stomach.

He climbed the stairs. He shoved his hand in his pocket to wipe it clean. What was left of the pill had melted into chalk. Some of the Xanax had gotten into his system. He was dizzy by the time he reached the end of the hall. His mouth tasted gritty. He tried three doors before he found the chapel. The lights were off, but between the large windows and the downtown glow, the rows of pews were easy to see.

He looked up at the arched ceiling. Huge chandeliers hung down like jewelry. Gray carpet lined the aisle between the pews. The stage was flat, a lectern to the side. He guessed it was as non-denominational as a chapel could be. Will had been to church twice with Sara, once at Easter and once on Christmas Eve. She wasn’t religious, but she loved the pageantry. Will could still recall his surprise when she sang along with the congregation. She knew all the words by heart.

Angie despised religion. She was one of those arrogant assholes who thought all believers were mentally deranged. She had been driven here in the trunk of her car. She had been carried down to the freezer. Her wedding ring was still on her finger. Had she been alive when the ring was put on? Had she asked the person with her to make sure that she wore it even in death?

Will felt a burning sensation in his chest. He was rubbing his skin raw. What were the symptoms of a panic attack? He didn’t want to ask Sara because she would probably shove another pill in his mouth.

Why had she done that? She knew he hated anything stronger than aspirin. He hated it even more that she had seen him upset. He’d acted like a pathetic kid. She would probably never want to have sex with him again.

Will sat down on the steps to the stage. He fished his phone out of his back pocket. Instead of Googling ‘panic attacks’, he lay back on the carpet. He looked up at the crystals sparkling in the chandelier. The weight started to lift off his chest. His lungs filled with air. He was floating. This was the Xanax. Will didn’t like it. Nothing good ever came out of losing control.

Delilah Palmer. She could’ve been at Rippy’s club when Harding died. She could’ve tried to save Angie. She could’ve driven Angie’s body here. She could’ve called in the false alarm to get Belcamino to leave, then watched him work the security panel at the elevator. One trip down to the basement. Another trip back up. She leaves Angie’s car here. She walks to her rental car and never looks back.

Will’s eyes would not stay open. He realized his head was where the casket would go during a funeral service. He would have to plan Angie’s funeral. It would be easier to have it here. She would want to be cremated. Belcamino could take care of that-put it on his form, process her for the crematorium.

Who would come to the funeral? Amanda and Faith, because they would feel obligated. Sara? He couldn’t ask her, but she would probably volunteer. What about her mother and father? They were good country people. Cathy would probably bake a casserole. Or would she? Will knew that Sara’s mother didn’t trust him. She wasn’t wrong. He hadn’t told Sara about Saturday. He hadn’t told her about a lot of things.

Cops would come to the funeral. That’s what you did when another cop died, no matter whether or not that cop was a good cop or a bad cop or retired. Lovers would attend-plenty of those. Old friends-not so much. Enemies, maybe. The father of her child. Maybe her child. Twenty-seven years old. Angry. Abandoned. Wanting answers that Will could not give.

He felt his eyelids relax. His face. His shoulders. An eerie silence settled in.

He was in a quiet chapel. It was the middle of the night. Angie was dead. This is when he should feel it: the overwhelming loss, the hollowness that Sara had described. She had been so angry at him for not being more devastated. Maybe something had broken inside of him. Maybe that was Angie’s last piece of vengeance: she had turned off the thing inside of Will that was capable of feeling.

His phone buzzed in his hand. Faith was probably looking for him. He answered, ‘I’m in the chapel.’

‘Really?’ Not Faith. Another woman, her voice low and cool.

Will looked at the screen. The caller ID was blocked. ‘Who is this?’

‘It’s me, baby.’ Angie gave her deep, husky laugh. ‘Did you miss me?’