Triptych

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

9:22 pm

Will sat in his office, trying not to twiddle his thumbs. He had paid a visit to Luther Morrison, Jasmine Allison’s… what? What did you call a thirty-year-old man who was having sex with a fourteen-year-old girl? Sick God damn bastard was what Will had decided on, and it had taken everything in him not to punch the animal in the face.

After that pleasant visit, Will had returned to City Hall East and caught up Amanda Wagner on the case. She hadn’t offered any staggering insight but neither had she taken him to task for not having a lot to say. Amanda could be demanding, but she knew a difficult case when she saw one.

The one thing she had told him was to not focus so much on the missing girl. Will’s case was the murder of Aleesha Monroe and how it connected to the other girls, not a runaway named Jasmine Allison. All he had was a ten-year-old boy’s story and a bad feeling, and while Amanda respected his gut instinct, she wasn’t about to waste time and resources based on either. She summed it up for him with her usual heartwarming pragmatism: the girl had a history of running away. She was dating a man who was twice her age. Her mother was in prison, her father was who knows where and most days, her grandmother couldn’t get out of a chair without assistance.

The only way this would be news is if she hadn’t run away. The DeKalb cops hadn’t moved an inch on Cynthia Barrett’s case and they weren’t keen to share their notes with Will. The DNA obtained from the vaginal swab Pete had taken was too contaminated to test. Toxicology had not yet come back, but Will wasn’t holding his breath for a miraculous revelation.

As for Aleesha Monroe, Forensics had reported nothing more earth-shattering about her apartment than what Will had seen for himself: the place was remarkably clean. He’d even sent back the techs to test the spot he’d found in Monroe’s doorway the night Jasmine was reported missing. There had not been enough of a sample to determine anything other than the spot was human blood.

All Will had to follow now was the stack of papers Leo Donnelly had left on his desk. Will had counted out the pages so that he would know what was ahead of him. About sixty rap sheets, two or three pages each, all detailing the lurid crimes of the metro area’s recently released sex offenders.

He wasn’t that desperate yet.

Will opened the fluorescent pink folder on his desk and found a recordable DVD in the back pocket. He slid this into the tray on his computer and clicked play.

The monitor showed two women and a man sitting at a table with a teenage girl. The man spoke first, identifying himself as Detective Dave Sanders of the Tucker police department, then giving the names of the two women before saying, “This is the statement of Julie Renee Cooper. Case number sixteen-forty-three-seven. Today is December ninth, two-thousand-five.”

Julie Cooper leaned toward the microphone. The camera angle was wide and Will could see the girl’s feet swinging back and forth over the floor.

“I went to the movies,” the girl began, her words difficult to understand. Will knew that when the recording had been made, her severed tongue had only recently been reattached. “There was a man in the alley.” Will had watched the teenager’s statement so many times that he could almost recite the story along with her. He knew when she paused to cry, her head down on the table, and the point where she got so upset that the recording had to be stopped.

Her abductor had dragged her into the alley. Julie had been too frightened to scream. He was wearing a black mask with holes for the mouth and eyes. She tasted blood when he put his mouth over hers, shoved his tongue past her lips. When she tried to turn her head away, he punched her in the face.

“Kiss me,” he kept saying. “Kiss me.”

Will jumped at the sound of his phone ringing. He picked up the receiver, said, “Will Trent.”

There was a pause on the other end, but no words.

“Hello?” Will asked, turning down the volume on the computer speakers.

“Hey, man,” Michael Ormewood said. “Didn’t think you’d be there this late.”

Will sat back in his chair, wondering why Michael had called if he’d thought Will wasn’t going to be there. “Why didn’t you try my cell?”

“Couldn’t find the number,” Michael explained, though how that was possible, Will did not know. He’d given all his numbers-even his home-on every message he’d left for Michael since Monday night. At first, Will had just wanted to talk to the man about Jasmine; now, he wanted to know why Michael had been avoiding his calls.

Will asked, “Everything okay?”

“Yeah. Thanks for asking.” Will heard the click of a lighter. Michael inhaled, then said, “Been making myself useful around here. Knocked out some of those chores Gina’s been ragging me about.”

“Good.” Will was quiet, knowing Michael would fill in the silence.

The detective said, “I talked to Barbara like you asked. My mother-in-law? She says she never saw Cynthia skipping school. Maybe the kid just wasn’t feeling good that day?”

“Makes sense,” Will allowed. He wasn’t used to talking to people like Michael unless he was interrogating them, and Will struggled not to let his hatred come through. That’s what it was-hatred. The man beat his wife. To Will’s thinking, he raped prostitutes. God only knew what he had done to Angie.

Will asked, “How’s your family?”

Michael hesitated. “What?”

“You said the other day you didn’t feel safe. I was just wondering if they were doing okay.”

“Yeah,” Michael answered. “I got them over at my mother-in-law’s, like I said.” He chuckled. “Tell you what, she spoils Tim. There’s gonna be a major adjustment when he gets back home.”

Will thought about Miriam Monroe, the huge difference between the loving way she talked about her children and the way Michael talked about Tim. Michael was just giving it lip service, saying the words he thought a good father should say. The man beat his wife. Did he hurt his mentally retarded son, too?

Michael said, “You still there, man?” Yes.

“I said, DeKalb PD is shutting me out.” He paused, probably to give Will room to respond. When he didn’t, Michael asked, “You hear anything from them?”

He was fishing about the restraining order. Will gave him a non-answer. “They don’t exactly have a reputation for flashing their cards around the table.”

“Right, right,” Michael agreed. He blew out a stream of smoke. “Phil’s real broken up about this. I tried to see if there was anything he knew, but the guy’s just shattered, you know?”

“I appreciate your trying.” Will decided to take a risk. “Detective Polaski told me she helped you go through some of your Vice files.”

Michael was silent for a beat too long. “Right, she did. Great chick. You hook up with her?”

“Did you find anything in the files?”

Michael paused, blew out some more smoke. “Nothing. I ran her in a few times, like Polaski said.”

“Aleesha?”

“Yeah. Couple of times, maybe three. I wrote down the dates. You want me to get them? She was part of the sweeps we did, just like I told you. Twenty, thirty girls at a time. I’m not surprised I didn’t remember her.”

“How about Baby G?”

“Nothing on him. He’s pretty new at the Homes. I could’a met him before, but there’s nothing in my files about it and I sure as shit don’t remember. Maybe we should go at him again? Bring him down to the station and see what he knows?”

Will wondered if he knew the pimp was dead.

“So,” Michael continued. “How’s it going? Anything on Aleesha?”

“Nothing big,” “Will answered. ”Tell me about Jasmine.“

“Is that one of the girls?”

“She’s the kid who took some skin off your face.”

“Oh, that one.” Michael’s laugh sounded strained. “Yeah. Little hell-fire.”

“Did she say anything to you before she ran up the stairs?”

“Nothing I want to repeat in front of my wife.”

“Your wife’s there with you?”

He gave that laugh again. “Where else would she be?”

There was a long stretch of silence. Michael had said less than a minute ago that his family was staying with his mother-in-law. Why was he lying?

“Anyway,” Michael said. “The girl-what’s her name? She didn’t say anything. You think she saw something the night Aleesha was killed?”

“I don’t know.” Was he embarrassed? Is that why he lied?

“I’d bring her into the station if you’re gonna question her, man. I’m not trying to tell you how to do your job or anything, but you don’t want some black brat bringing a charge against you. I was lucky I got away with a slap.”

“I’ll keep that in mind.” Will wondered if Michael had already found out that Jasmine was missing. If he’d lie about one thing, he’d certainly have no problem lying about another. “I’ve been thinking, Michael, how strange it is that Aleesha is so much older than the other victims.”

“How’s that?”

“She’s a grown woman. The other girls were teenagers. Then there’s the tongue. Your neighbor’s was cut out, the rest of the girls had theirs bitten.”

“Yeah,” Michael allowed, his tone measured. “Come to think of it, that is kind of strange.”

Will watched Julie Cooper giving her statement on his computer screen. She was about to ask the detectives to turn off the camera for a minute so she could collect herself. How did a young girl survive that kind of thing? How did she manage to go to school, do her homework like every other teenager, with the knowledge of what she had endured always lurking in her mind?

Michael suggested, “Maybe he’s been visiting the hookers to blow off some steam in between stalking these girls.” He paused. “I remember when I was in Vice how these girls used to talk themselves into trouble with the Johns. Sometimes they’d get in the middle of things and go up on the price. Sometimes they’d negotiate certain acts, positions, whatever, just to get the guy to go back to their place, then they’d change the rules, say they weren’t going to do it or they wanted more money.”

Will hadn’t considered that angle, but it was actually a good avenue to follow. That still didn’t explain Cynthia Barrett, though.

He asked, “Are you sure you didn’t piss somebody off, Michael? Maybe piss them off enough for them to do some kind of copycat thing with Cynthia, bring it to your back door?”

Michael laughed. “Are you being serious?”

“You tell me.”

“That’s fucking crazy, man.”

“How’s that?”

“They’d have to know a hell of a lot about the case,” Michael pointed out. “We didn’t release the detail about Monroe’s tongue to the press. The only people who knew about that were cops.” Michael muffled the phone, but Will heard him say, “Yeah, baby, I’ll be right there.” He said to Will, “Listen, Gina needs my help with Tim. Can I call you back in about ten minutes?”

“No,” Will told him. “I don’t need anything else.”

“Just call if you do.”

Will hung up the phone. He leaned back in his chair as he stared out the window. It had been dark out for some time, but the streetlights cast an unnatural spotlight on the abandoned rail yard next to the building. Will had gotten used to the depressing view.

The computer tooted like a steam train and Will closed the DVD program and opened his e-mail. The state computer wasn’t very sophisticated-the dictionary was extremely limited and the spell-check didn’t know half the words the average law enforcement officer used every day. Even if Will had asked, he knew they wouldn’t let him put any outside programs on the hard drive, so he was stuck with it. Still, like most computers, there was a reading option.

He scrolled through some spam before finding a new e-mail from Pete Hanson. He highlighted the text, clicked the menu bar, then selected “speak.” A stilted voice read him Pete’s message. The toxicology report had come back on Cynthia Barrett. Her last meal had been eggs and toast. There was a high level of nicotine in her system. There were also traces of alcohol and cocaine in her bloodstream.

Another dead end.

Will took out the copy he’d made of Aleesha Monroe’s letter to her mother, and he spread it out on the desk, pressing the folds open so it would lay flat. Her looping cursive was a nightmare but Will had already memorized the letter, so it was easier to read than if he’d come to it cold. Now, he went line-by-line, checking each sentence against his memory. Except for Monroe’s tendency to capitalize when it suited her, Will didn’t find anything new.

He folded up the letter and tucked it into his pocket. He glanced at the parole forms Leo had culled. A photograph was stapled to the corner of every profile, each inmate looking into the camera as he held up a black signboard that gave his vitals: name, crime, date of conviction, date of parole.

Reluctantly, Will slid open the top drawer to his desk. He found the staple remover and detached the photograph from the first offender profile. His office door was closed, the lights in the hall turned off. Still, he kept his voice to little above a whisper as he sounded out the first name.

After about an hour of this, he’d barely made a dent in the pile. His head was pounding and he dry-swallowed a handful of aspirin, thinking he would rather die of aspirin poisoning than from the headache hammering behind his eyes. Leo Donnelly had taken half the stack. He’d probably finished reading through his group in under an hour.

Will stood up and put on his jacket, thinking the task was probably a pointless one. If there was an offender in the database who had a habit of biting off tongues, Will would have pulled it when he first read about Monroe’s case and did a keyword search in the computer. Leo’s offender reports were from different districts and sometimes different states, so there was no uniformity in the description of the crimes. Some of the arresting officers had listed little more than the offense and age of the victim, others went into lurid detail, intimately describing the convict’s predatory actions. Unless one of the photos had a guy standing with a severed tongue in his hand, Will was pretty much looking for a needle in a haystack.

Still, he grabbed the files before he took the elevator down to the garage. The reports sat on the passenger seat as he drove home, and Will found himself glancing down at them every so often as if he could not quite understand why they were there. He parked in the driveway behind his motorcycle, Betty’s barks greeting him before he even made it up the porch. The little dog rushed out the door as soon as he opened it. Will snatched up the leash, prepared to track her down, but she did what she needed to do right on the front lawn and darted back inside before he could make it down the porch steps.

He turned around to find her enshrined on the couch pillows.

“Good evening to you, too,” he told her, shutting the door. He stopped it before it caught and went back out to the car to fetch the files. Will dropped them on his desk, glancing at the answering machine. The message light was solid, but he picked up the phone just to make sure it was working.

The dial tone buzzed in his ear.

Supper was the same as breakfast, a bowl of cereal he ate standing over the sink. All he really wanted to do was lie down on the couch and fall asleep watching television. The files were stopping him, though. A man who could read well would have finished those summaries hours ago. A cop who was doing his job would’ve scanned them over lunch, knowing he was probably wasting his time but also knowing that good police work meant exhausting every lead you had.

Will could not abandon the work halfway through.

He took off his jacket and draped it over the back of his swivel chair. This shouldn’t take too long, maybe three more hours at the most. Will wasn’t going to quit just because it was hard and he sure as hell was not going to show up at work tomorrow knowing that he had left something undone. He should have come home earlier and tackled the reports in earnest. There were certain things he could not do at work without giving himself away.

The staple remover was in his coat pocket and he put it beside the stack of reports on his desk. He took two rulers out of his desk drawer and adjusted the shade on the desk lamp so that the bulb faced the wall, casting little more than a sliver of light onto the work surface.

“All right, handsome,” Will mumbled, looking at the photograph stapled to the top of the next report. The guy had about three teeth and the kind of greasy, thin hair that you only ever found in your lesser trailer parks.

Will removed the photograph and set it aside. He put the two rulers on top of the page and isolated the first line of text. Using the tips of his index fingers, he blocked out individual words so that he could examine them one-by-one. His tendency was to read backward, and separating words with his fingers kept his eyes from darting where they shouldn’t go. Oddly, long words were easiest. Will was always seeing something simple, like “never” and turning it into “very” so that the sentence made absolutely no sense by the time he got to the end.

He picked out the three words at the top of the page, reading the name aloud so that he could better comprehend it. “Carter, Isaiah Henry.” It didn’t come out that easy, though. First, he said Cash, then Ford, probably because of the “car” part at the beginning of the last name. Isaiah was easy. Henry was another matter.

Christ, he was stupid.

Will looked up at the blank computer monitor in front of him, blinked to clear his vision. He turned on the computer just to buy some time while his mind played out the usual taunts, telling him he was probably retarded, that maybe he had something wrong with his brain that no one had ever bothered to figure out. God knew he had been beaten in the head enough times to knock something loose. At the end of the day, none of the possible reasons for his problem mattered and none of it changed the fact that there were kids in third grade who could read better than Will. And he was talking about the stupid ones who sat in the back.

The computer booted up, the fan whirring like the propeller on a model plane. Will clicked open his e-mail program and stared at the in-box for a couple of minutes before deleting an offer to extend the warranty on an appliance he did not even own. There was nothing else to distract him.

He returned to the stack of offenders, trying to make a game of it. The photograph was of a guy in his sixties. His white hair was combed in a neat part and his deep blue eyes made his ordinary face look more interesting. Put a hat on him and he could be a traveling salesman. Give him a Bible and he could be a deacon at the local church.

Slowly, Will slid the rulers down the page, reading line by line. A feed supply salesman by occupation, the man was a rapist who enjoyed torturing his victims. He had been sentenced for twelve years but gotten out in seven for good behavior. What exactly constituted good behavior for a man who pulled the fingernails off the hands of a twenty-two-year-old college student, Will was uncertain.

Another photo came off, another sheet of paper was put under the rulers. Will kept at it for hours, reading all the horrifying details of the sexual predators who had served their time and been paroled for good behavior. None of them did their full time, all but a handful looked like the sort of man you would smile at if you saw him walking down the street. Time crawled by, but Will did not look up until he was three rap sheets away from being finished.

Will stretched back, feeling his spine adjust against the hard edge of the chair. His knee bumped the desk, and the computer monitor flickered on.

It was past midnight. He might as well take a break and check his e-mail before he deciphered the details of the last three offenders.

There was a new mail from Amanda in his in-box, but he had no desire to read it. There were two requests from Caroline, Amanda’s secretary, asking about evidence in a case. Will opened his speech program and used the microphone to dictate a response, then did spell-check and had the computer read it back. When he was satisfied the words made sense, he highlighted the text and pasted it into the body of an e-mail, then did another spell-check before sending it off.

A hot stock tip had come in while he was doing this and Will clicked it into the trash. Next, he went into the trash folder and deleted all the crap he had sent there.

Will figured if there was an Olympic medal in wasting time, he was at least qualified enough to be an alternate. Surely there was more he could do, though. He opened up his spam folder, highlighted everything and slid the cursor over to delete. A message popped up and judging by the shape of it, Will assumed it was asking him if he was sure he wanted to do this. Will clicked the blue button that meant okay, then watched the junk e-mails drain off the list.

He scrolled back into his unread mail, thinking he might take a moment to check out what Amanda had to say. A new e-mail from Caroline had come in. She was probably just making a joke about both of them working so late, but at this point, Will would have opened an herbal Viagra offer to postpone reading reports for even a second.

There was a jpeg file attached to Caroline’s e-mail, and he clicked on download before highlighting the text of the e-mail so he could copy it into his speech program. Betty stirred on the couch, giving a muffled bark, and he turned around to make sure she was okay. The little dog was on her back with her skinny legs kicking in the air as she dreamed about… whatever it was little dogs dreamed about. Cheese?

Will turned back around, the grin on his face dropping when he saw what was on his monitor. The photo had finished downloading. The boy was probably sixteen, his hair long to his collar, his mouth in a half-smile that came automatically from having a camera stuck in your face at every holiday or family outing. He held a signboard in front of his narrow chest, the skin of his fingertips ragged where he’d bitten his nails down to the quick. Will did not try to read the sign; he knew it told a name, a date of conviction, a charge. The eyes were what gave the boy away. A lot could change from fifteen to thirty-five, but the eyes were constant: the almond shape of the opening, the variation of color in the iris, the long, long lashes that were almost like a girl’s.

The photo from the rap sheet Will had been about to read was still at his elbow. He held it up, thinking that there was no mistaking that the boy on the screen had grown up to be the felon in the photo.

Will pasted Caroline’s mail into the speech program. He turned up the sound to his speakers, then clicked the menu bar and scrolled down to speak. The words were slow and metallic, their content enough to make him feel like he had been punched in the gut.

The program finished. Will did not need to hear it a second time. He grabbed his car keys.

Angie’s lieutenant had told Will she was at a liquor store on Cheshire Bridge Road. Will found the store easily enough, but Angie was not among the prostitutes leaning against the building.

He said, “I’m looking for someone.”

“Me, too, handsome.”

“No,” Will said. He knew Angie didn’t go by her real name when she did this, but she had never told him her chosen alias. “She’s about five-eight. Brown hair, brown eyes. Olive skin.”

“Sounds like me, sweetheart.” This came from a short platinum blonde with a gap between her front teeth so pronounced that she whistled when she talked.

Another one said, “You looking for Robin, baby?”

“I don’t know,” he admitted, turning to the older woman. She had a black eye that was made worse by the makeup she had spackled over it.

“I’m Lola.” She pushed herself away from the wall. “You her brother?”

“Yes,” Will managed, not bothering to explain. “I need to talk to her.”

“Give it a minute, honey,” Lola soothed him. “She went back to the pokey with a date about ten minutes ago. She should be finishing up about now.”

“Thank you,” Will said. He tucked his hands into his pockets, realizing it was cold. He had been in such a hurry to leave the house that he hadn’t even brought his coat.

Behind him, a car door slammed. A woman got out and while Will was watching, she reached between her legs, wiped herself and shook out her hand. She saw Will, then glanced back at the other girls, a question in her eyes.

Lola provided, “He’s Robin’s brother.”

The woman walked her hooker’s stroll past Will, giving him the once-over. “I had a brother like that, I would’a never left home.”

Will glanced at his watch. He started to pace to try to work out the tension that was coiling every muscle he had into a tight ball, but each second that passed with Angie not showing her face only served to make it worse.

She always did this. She always put herself right in the middle of trouble and did not give a damn that Will suffered the consequences. As long as he had known her, Angie had pushed people as hard as she could, constantly testing their limits. It was a game that would get her killed one day, and then Will would be the one sitting on the couch, some other cop the unlucky bastard who had to hold his hand and tell him that she had been found strangled, beaten, raped, murdered.

The girls had been trash-talking, but Will noticed they’d turned quiet. He heard a rustling from the woods and Angie came out, flashlight in her hand.

She looked at Will, then the girls, then back at Will. Her mouth was set, her eyes lit with fury. She turned on her heel, heading back into the woods, and Will followed her.

“Stop,” he said, trying to keep up. “Would you just stop?” She wouldn’t listen. All he could do was follow the beam of her flashlight.

About twenty feet into the woods, she turned on him. “What the fuck are you doing here?” Her tone was sharp as a knife. “I’m just your brother paying you a call.”

Angie looked over his shoulder and Will followed suit. He could clearly see the girls standing in front of the liquor store. They made no attempt to hide their interest.

She whispered hoarsely, trying to keep her voice down. “This is the wrong fucking place for this, Will. Lola already thinks something’s up.” He shoved John Shelley’s rap sheet in her face. She did a double take when she saw the photograph, and he could have sworn her eyes softened.

“Read it,” he ordered. “Read it to me so that I know I’ve got it right.” Angie shined the flashlight on the first page. He saw her eyes moving, reading the words. She looked up, said, “Will,” like he was being unreasonable. “Read it.”

She held the flashlight under her arm, training the beam on the first page, then flipping to the second and third.

Finally, she looked up again. “So?”

He wanted to shake her. “Did you read what it says?”

Taking her time, she turned back to the first page and read aloud in a bored tone, “ ‘Jonathan Winston Shelley, six-one, one hundred ninety-five pounds, brown hair, brown eyes. Prior record: theft by taking. Received May 10, 1986, Coastal State Prison, maximum security, special offender’s wing, age sixteen. Paroled July 22, 2005, age thirty-five. Registered sexual offender, pedophile.” “ She looked back up, repeated, ”So?“

“Read the last page,” he said, meaning the part he’d printed out from Caroline’s e-mail. Shelley’s rap sheet had been brief, just listing the highlights of his crimes, but the records Caroline had found filled in all the blanks in horrid detail.

“Read it,” he demanded.

She didn’t want to. He could tell that from the steely way she glared at him.

He asked, “You want me to read it for you?”

“I only get an hour break for supper.”

He snatched the pages from her hand, tried to find the right section. He was so angry that the words kept reversing on the page, their shapes morphing one into the other. He tried, “Ca…” Will felt a knife-sharp pain in the front of his temple. God damnit, he knew at least two of the words. “Jonathan Shelley.” He tried to pick out another one. “Drain. No, he-dead. He killed-”

Angie put her hand over his. She tried to take the report but he wouldn’t let go. “Come on,” she coaxed, gently, pulling the pages from his grasp.

Will clenched his fists as he stared at the ground. Christ. No wonder she couldn’t stand to be with him.

She spoke softly. “I’m sorry.”

He wanted to sink into the ground, just magically to somewhere else.

“I’m sorry.

“I read it before.”

“I know you did,” she told him, taking his hand again. “Look at me, Will. I’m sorry.”

He could not look at her.

“You want me to read it out loud?”

“I don’t care what you do.”

“Will.”

He knew he was sounding petulant, but couldn’t stop. “I really don’t.”

The flashlight had fallen to the ground and she reached down to pick it up, still holding on to him. She shined the light on the pages and read, “ ‘On June 15, 1985, Shelley sexually assaulted Mary Alice Finney, a fifteen-year-old white female, then removed her tongue with a serrated kitchen knife, resulting in her death. In addition, Shelley made several deep bite marks in the victim’s flesh and urinated on the body. Shelley’s bloody fingerprints were found at the scene and on the body. The murder weapon was found in Shelley’s bedroom closet. Known drug addictions: heroin, cocaine.”’‘

“Angie,” was all he could say.

She was silent, letting a couple of cars pass before she said, “Remember I told you that Michael Ormewood came by here that one time?”

He was sick of hearing about Ormewood. If he never heard the man’s name again, Will would die a happy man.

Angie said, “He told us to look out for a recently released sex offender named John Shelley. He said he was really a bad guy and to stay away from him.” She looked down at the rap sheet. “Michael went to Decatur High School. He must have grown up in the area.”

“Did you manage to ask him about his childhood years while you were going down on him?”

“Do you want me to go down on you, too, Will? Is that what this is about?”

He slapped her hand away. “Stop it.”

She told him, “I read his personnel file.”

“You’re real interested in Michael for some reason. Why is he different? What makes him so special?”

“You’re not listening to what I’m saying.” She was talking to him like he was a child and he did not like it. “Michael went to Decatur High School, so he must have lived in the area. He was a few years older than John, but he would have heard about the crime. He would have known the details about the tongue. Why didn’t he mention it to you? Why didn’t he say, ”Hey, this reminds me of something that happened about twenty years ago right down the street from me.“ ”

Will was too upset to even consider the question.

She said, “John told me that someone was blackmailing him.”

Will laughed. “You think that Michael Ormewood knows there’s a guy out there raping and murdering women, taking out their tongues, but instead of arresting the doer, Michael’s blackmailing him? For what? What could John Shelley possibly have that Michael Ormewood would want?”

“How do you explain Michael telling me to look out for John Shelley? How do you explain his not mentioning this same thing happening to a girl in the same neighborhood where he grew up?”

Will tried to make her see reason. “How do you explain the other girls?”

“What other girls?”

“Last year, two girls were sexually assaulted by a man wearing a black ski mask. Both of them had their tongues bitten off.”

Her lips parted in surprise.

“John Shelley’s been out seven months,” Will told her. “Both girls lived thirty, forty minutes away from here.” She was silent, so he added, “Julie Cooper’s fifteen. The other girl was only fourteen. What do these crimes have in common? What’s the link here?”

Angie said, “You know perps have their way of doing things. Why would he deviate? Why would he cut off some and bite off the others? Why would he go from little girls to a grown woman?”

Will recalled Michael’s answer to this question, but he did not share it with Angie.

She asked, “Why didn’t you tell me about the other cases before?”

“When, Angie? Over dinner? Maybe when we were holding hands, taking a long stroll in the park?”

“You could have told me.”

“Why?” he asked. “Who knew you’d end up screwing around with a convicted pedophile?”

Her head jerked up. “I haven’t slept with him.”

“Yet.”

Angie gave a heavy sigh.

“Here’s an indisputable fact: Shelley raped and killed a fifteen-year-old girl. He cut out her tongue.”

“He’s not…” She looked back at Shelley’s photograph. “Whatever he did, he’s not that guy anymore.”

“Julie Cooper was fifteen,” Will told her. “He raped her in an alley behind a movie theater. He bit off her tongue.”

Angie shook her head.

“Anna Linder was fourteen. They found her in Stone Mountain Park the next day. She was holding her tongue in her hand like a security blanket. They had to pry it from her fingers.”

Angie still did not respond.

“Cynthia Barrett, Angie. Cynthia Barrett was fifteen.”

“Michael’s neighbor.”

Will shrugged. “So what?”

“Tell me this: How do they know each other? How did Michael know to warn me off him in the first place?” She indicated the liquor store with an angry wave of her hand. “You weren’t there when he did it. There’s something between them. Michael hates the guy.”

“What else am I missing here?” Will asked. “Because what it sounds like to me is that you’re so pissed at Michael Ormewood that you can’t see straight. Why is that, Angie? Why can’t you get this asshole out of your system?”

He could see the fury in her eyes, knew she was remembering the millions of times he had asked her this before.

Her voice was eerily calm when she said, “Did you ask Michael how old his wife was when he met her?” She didn’t let him respond. “She was fifteen, Will. He was twenty-five.”

“Did he rape her and bite out her tongue?” Will asked. “Because, unless he did, I don’t see why that makes a bit of difference.”

“I’m telling you, John didn’t do this.”

“I’ll ask him myself when I bring him in.”

“No.” She grabbed his arm as if she could physically stop him. “I’ll do it.”

Will could only stare at her. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

“The minute you put those cuffs on him, he’s shutting down.”

“You don’t know that.”

“He’s a con. Of course he’ll shut down. He won’t so much as fart until his lawyer shows up, and then the lawyer will tell you to go fuck yourself.”

“You’re not going to control this.”

“What’s the charge? Jaywalking?” She raised her eyebrows, as if she expected an answer. “You can bring him in for questioning, but what do you have? You can search his place, but what are you going to tell the judge when you ask for the warrant? ”He did it twenty years ago, Your Honor, so maybe, probably, possibly he could have done it again now?“ ” Angie crossed her arms. “Last time I checked, unless you’re the president of the United States, you need some kind of evidence to throw a guy in jail.”

Will did not answer because he knew that she was right.

“Do you have John’s fingerprints on anything? Any witnesses? Anybody who saw anything?”

Jasmine, Will thought. Maybe she saw something. If she did, she was probably at the bottom of a lake right now.

Angie summed it up: “No forensic evidence, no witnesses and no case. You’re right, Will. Let’s go out and arrest him right now, why don’t we:

“He could be stalking his next victim,” Will said, not adding that Angie could very well be the next woman he set his sights on.

“If you arrest him now, you’ll have to kick him in twenty-four hours, and if it is Shelley who’s doing this, then he’ll know you’re on to him and he’ll go so deep underground that you’ll never find him again.”

“What do you propose I do? Wait until another girl is raped? Maybe murdered?” Will pointed out, “He could already have his next victim right now, Angie. What if he’s got Jasmine? Am I supposed to sit around while she’s counting down the minutes left in her life?”

“He’ll talk to me. He doesn’t know I’m a cop.”

“What is it with this guy, Angie? Why won’t you see him for what he is?”

“Maybe it’s a good thing I don’t judge men based on what they’ve done in their past.”

“Is that supposed to hurt me?”

“Let me talk to him,” she pleaded. “You can watch his house until morning, make sure he doesn’t go out. If he’s got that little girl, then he won’t touch her without you knowing. I’ll go to the car wash tomorrow morning and sit him down and talk to him.”

“You think he’s going to confide in you?”

“If he’s innocent…” She nodded. “Yeah. I can make him talk.”

“And if he’s not?”

“Then you’ll be there.” She actually tried to tease him. “You’ll protect me, won’t you, Willy?”

“This isn’t anything to joke about.”

“I know.” She was looking over his shoulder again, watching the girls. “I need to get back to work.”

“I don’t like this,” he said. “I don’t like any of this and I don’t want to do it.”

“That’s nothing new for either of us, is it?” She put her hand to his cheek, brushed her lips against his. “Go away, Will.”

“I don’t want to leave you.”

“You don’t have a choice.”