Triptych

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Will looked at his cell phone, the digital numbers telling him the time. He always took lateness as being rude. It said to the other person that their time was more valuable than yours. Amanda Wagner was totally aware of this. She had never been on time for an appointment in her life.

“Get you anything?” Caroline asked. Amanda’s secretary was a pretty young woman, ultraefficient and seemingly impervious to her boss’s sharp tongue. As far as Will knew, Caroline was the only woman who had ever worked with Amanda Wagner for more than an hour.

He said, “I’m fine, thank you, but-” Caroline waited as Will pulled the pink Post-it note from his pocket. “Could you run down this man’s record for me? Under the radar, if that’s okay.”

She understood instantly he meant for her to keep the trace from Amanda. Carolines eyes lit up at the prospect. “When do you need it?”

“Sooner rather than later.”

She saluted him, returning to her desk. Will looked at the empty doorway. He wanted to call back Caroline, tell her to forget about it. Angie was right about gut feelings, and even though Will had never met Jonathan Shelley in his life, just the sight of the man’s name sent up an alarm. Maybe Will was being jealous. Maybe he was just tired. Angie had been right again, this time about the perils of giving a dog too much cheese. Will had found out the hard way that it’s nearly impossible to go to sleep with a flatulent Chihuahua sharing your pillow.

Will sat in one of the two chairs across from Amanda’s desk. Like its usual occupant, the desk was uncluttered. Stacks of papers were neatly filed in the in- and out-boxes. Phone messages were stuck to the blotter in a straight line.

The office walls had framed news clippings of Amanda’s exploits: Atlanta’s mayor giving her a medal. Bill Clinton shaking her hand. Some south Georgia chief of police she had saved during a hostage situation. There were various plaques for faithful service as well as a shelf devoted to her shooting trophies.

After twenty years at the GBI working with tactical negotiations, Amanda Wagner had wanted a change. The brass had given her her choice of assignments. Typically, she had taken it into her head that she wanted to shake things up and in a year, she was heading up a new division of her own making, the criminal apprehension team. Special Criminal Apprehension Team. Never was an acronym more appropriate for the group she put together.

For the most part, the ten men Amanda had chosen to work under her were all like Will: young agents who had been on the job awhile and proven that they didn’t exactly get along with others. Their superiors had rated them as difficult, but there was never anything they did that merited a formal warning, let alone firing. They were good cops, though, the kinds of men who as adults tried to correct the wrongs they could not control as children. Amanda had an uncanny eye for broken people, the ones who had something in their past that made them fall easy prey to her pseudo-mothering. Will could imagine Amanda presenting her carefully culled list of potential recruits to Susan Richardson, her chief at headquarters. Susan must have looked at the list the way you look at a cat when it brings you a dead bird. “Yes, thank you, please excuse my dry heaves.”

Will shifted in his chair, looking at his phone again for the time. He wore a watch on his wrist, but only as a cheat to help him differentiate between left and right. Growing up, he had learned all kinds of tricks to hide his problem. Angie gave him constant grief about it, saying he shouldn’t be ashamed. Will wasn’t ashamed. He just didn’t want to have one more thing that made him different from everybody else. He sure as hell didn’t want to give Amanda Wagner more ammunition. She had been trying to get into his head as long as he had known her and this particular bit of information was tantamount to baring your neck to a hungry wolf.

He looked out the window, watching birds gliding along with the wind. Amanda had been working out of the Marietta building when Will had been thrown to the meth freaks up in the mountains. She had moved to City Hall East a little over a year ago, her corner office affording her a panoramic view of downtown Atlanta. She was right by the elevator, which let her keep a finger in every pie the building cooked up. Caroline was in the outer office, but Amanda never closed the door between them. He could hear the secretary typing on her computer now. If she had any self-respect, she was working on her resume.

“Hello, Will.” Amanda had sneaked up on him while he was staring out the window. She pressed her hand to his shoulder as she walked past him.

“Dr. Wagner.”

She sat behind her desk, saying, “Sorry I’m late,” the same automatic and meaningless way people say, “excuse me” when they bump into you.

He watched as she reviewed her phone messages, showing him the top of her carefully coiffed salt-and-pepper hair. Amanda was probably in her mid-fifties, a small woman, maybe five-three on a good day. Her attitude filled the room, and she walked with a swagger that rivaled a bullfighter’s. She wore a simple diamond ring on her wedding finger, though Will knew she wasn’t currently married. She had no children, or perhaps she had eaten them when they were young. Amanda was extremely private with her personal life-a luxury she didn’t afford others. Will thought of her time away from work the way he used to think of his schoolteachers crawling into their caves under the school building at night, lulling themselves to sleep with dreams of torturing their students the next day. Will imagined Amanda getting ready for work in the mornings; shaving her chest, tucking her tail, slipping her cloven hooves into her dainty size-six pumps.

“I suppose I should call you Dr. Trent now?” she said, not looking up from her messages.

Will had made himself busy during his mountain exile, knowing without a doubt that Amanda would eventually pull him from the Epworth office and put him back under her thumb. The correspondence school in Florida let him do the work online at his own pace, and the state recognized the criminology degree despite its dubious origins.

He told her the truth. “I was trying to make my pay grade too rich for your budget.”

“You don’t say,” she said, taking out a gold fountain pen and making a note on one of the messages.

Will glanced at the scar on his hand where Amanda had shot him with a nail gun. He told her, “Nice pen.”

She raised an eyebrow, sitting back in her chair. Almost a full minute passed before she asked, “Where is Two Egg, Florida, exactly?”

He fought a smile. He had chosen the school primarily for its ridiculous location. “I believe it’s near the picturesque Withlacoochee River, ma’am.”

She obviously didn’t believe a word he was saying. “Of course it is.”

Will was silent, a lobster being appraised in the tank.

She capped the gold fountain pen and placed it perpendicular to the blotter. “You’re not taping this, are you?”

“Not today, ma’am.” Will had a hard enough time reading typewritten documents, but his own handwriting was the kind of backward scrawl you’d find on the walls at the local kindergarten. Amanda was prone to giving out long lists of tasks. The only way Will could keep up with them was to record her so that he could take his time transcribing her words onto the computer. Two years ago, she had caught him red-handed in a meeting. Amanda hadn’t liked being taped without her permission and of course she had assumed Will was doing it for nefarious reasons. He would be damned if he told her about his reading problem, and even if he’d been inclined, Amanda had transferred him to the North Pole before he could get his snowshoes on.

“All right,” she said. “Tell me about your case.”

Will gave her a briefing on what little he had. He ran through the case files of the three girls he had found, said he believed two of them were connected. He told her he had read about Aleesha Monroe, the slain prostitute, on the GBIs daily report that highlighted crimes around the state. Following protocol, he had asked Lieutenant Ted Greer to be let in on the case and been assigned to Michael Ormewood, the lead detective. When he got to the part about Ormewood’s dead neighbor, Amanda stopped him.

“The tongue was bitten off?”

“I’m not certain how it was removed,” Will told her. “Perhaps if I had known you were going to be late this morning, I could have taken the time to discuss this with the coroner so that I would be better informed for this briefing.”

“Don’t whine, Dr. Trent. It doesn’t suit you.” Her tone was soft, conciliatory, but he could tell from her smile that he had been given a point in her scorebook. That he was even playing the game meant she had already won.

Amanda went back to the case. “The tongues weren’t taken from the scene in the previous crimes?”

“No, ma’am,” Will told her. “The first girl’s tongue wasn’t completely severed. The second was holding it in her hand when they found her, but it was too late to do anything about it. Monroe’s tongue was left on the stairs. Spit out, most likely. Cynthia Barrett’s tongue was not found at the scene.”

“Did you search the Barrett house?”

“The DeKalb PD did,” Will told her. “From what I gathered, they didn’t find anything unusual.”

“From what you gathered?” she echoed.

“I didn’t want to step on their toes.”

“Probably wise,” Amanda admitted. DeKalb County was still tightly controlled by a handful of men who didn’t like the state-or anyone, for that matter-messing in their business. Six years ago, DeKalb sheriff-elect Derwin Brown had been assassinated in his own driveway while he was carrying in some Christmas packages from his car. He was three days away from being sworn into office, and Sidney Dorsey, the outgoing sheriff, hadn’t taken the defeat well.

Amanda took a file out of the top drawer of her desk and opened it to the first page. “What do you think of this Michael Timothy Ormewood?”

“I haven’t yet formed an opinion,” Will answered, thinking that if she had pulled Ormewood’s personnel file, she already knew more than Will did.

She read aloud as she traced down the page with her finger. “Army man. Sixteen years Atlanta PD. Worked his way up from foot beat to his gold shield. Accused in ninety-eight of excessive use of force.” She made a jerking-off motion with her fist, dismissing the complaint. “He moved up pretty quickly. Narcotics-not for long, probably got bored-Vice, and now Homicide. No college education.” She glanced up at Will. “Do try not to lord your fancy Two Egg degree over him, Dr. Trent.” Yes, ma am.

She turned the page. “Commendation for saving a civilian. Even you have one of those. They hand them out like candy.” She closed the file. “Nothing to shout home about. Wears beige and keeps quiet.” This was a general phrase she used for cops who did their jobs and waited out their pensions. It was not a compliment.

“Anything else?” Will asked, knowing full well there was.

She smiled. “I put in a call to a friend in uniform.” Amanda always had friends. Considering her personality, Will wondered about the nature of these relationships, and if by friend she meant someone she gripped by the short hairs. “Ormewood worked in supply when he was over in Kuwait. Never made it past the rank of private.”

Will was mildly surprised. “Is that so?”

“He was honorably discharged, which is all the Atlanta PD would have known-or cared-about. My guy says he was wounded his second week overseas, and that they never did find out who shot him.”

“The wound was self-inflicted?”

She shrugged. “Wouldn’t you shoot yourself in the leg to get out of that hellhole?”

Will would have shot himself in the leg to get out of Amanda’s office.

“So.” Amanda pressed her palms together as she leaned back in the chair. “Plan of action?”

“I need to talk to Ormewood. It can’t be a fluke that this has happened in his own backyard.”

“Do you think he might have gotten too close to the doer in the Monroe case?”

“Cynthia Barrett’s body was fresh when we got there, probably no more than an hour old. I was with Ormewood the whole morning and I didn’t see that we made any great strides toward breaking the case, let alone pushed someone so hard that they jumped in their car, went to his house and mutilated his next-door neighbor.”

Amanda nodded for him to continue.

“We talked to Monroe’s pimp. He didn’t strike me as the type to cut off a good source of income, but obviously I’ll go back at him today.”

“And?”

“And as I said, I’ll talk to Ormewood about this, ask if he saw or did anything unusual the night of the Monroe murder.”

“Is he in today or did he take compassionate leave?”

“I have no idea,” Will answered. “Wherever he is, I’ll find him.”

She picked up one of her messages. “A Leo Donnelly was trying to get your personnel file.”

“I’m not surprised.”

“I sealed it,” she said. “No one needs to smell your dirty laundry.”

“No one but you,” Will corrected. He looked at his watch as he stood. “If that’s all, Dr. Wagner?”

She held her hands out in an open gesture. “By all means, Dr. Trent. Go forth and conquer.”