Will followed the dead man’s gaze up to the chandelier hovering overhead. The glass made a tinkling noise as it swayed in the artificial breeze from the air-conditioning. White spots of light danced around the foyer, reflecting the sunlight that came in through the palladium window over the doors.
Will asked, “Do you have an ID on him yet?”
“Looks like his wallet’s in his back pocket, but he’s not going anywhere. I don’t want to roll the body until Pete gets here.” He meant Pete Hanson, the city medical examiner. “Perp looks pretty young, you know?”
“Yeah,” Will agreed, thinking that the killer was probably not old enough to buy alcohol. Amanda had been excited by the prospect of a contract killing. Unless Hoyt Bentley’s enemies had a crack team of mercenary frat boys on the payroll, Will doubted there was a connection.
He asked, “Domestic?”
Leo shrugged again, a gesture that was more like a tic. “Looks like it, huh? Boyfriend snaps, kills the girl, panics when the mom comes home and goes after her. Problem is, Campano swears she’s never seen him before in her life.”
“Campano?” Will echoed, feeling his gut tighten at the name.
“Abigail Campano. That’s the mother.” Leo studied him. “You know her?”
“No.” Will looked down at the body, hoping his voice would not give him away. “I thought the last name was Bentley.”
“That’s the wife’s father. The husband’s Paul Campano. He owns a bunch of car dealerships. You heard the commercials, right? ‘We never say no at Campano.’ ”
“Where is he?”
Leo’s cell phone started to ring and he slid it off the clip on his belt. “Shouldn’t be too much longer. He was on the phone with her when it happened. He’s the one who called 9-1-1.”
Will cleared his throat so his voice would come back. “Might be interesting to know what he heard.”
“You think?” He studied Will closely as he opened his cell phone, answering, “Donnelly.”
Leo stepped outside and Will looked around the foyer, taking in the dead body, the broken glass. Obviously, there had been a massive struggle here. Blood streaked the floor, two different sets of tennis shoes leaving smeared waffle prints across the creamy white tile. A frail, antique-looking table had fallen on its side, a glass bowl shattered beside it. There was a busted cell phone that looked as if it had been stepped on. Mail was scattered around like confetti and a woman’s handbag was overturned, the contents adding to the mess.
Over by the wall, there was a lamp sitting upright on the floor as if someone had placed it there. The base was cracked and there was a tilt to the shade. Will wondered if someone had turned it right side up or if the lamp, defying all probabilities, had landed upright. He also wondered if anyone had noticed the bloody bare footprint beside the lamp.
His eyes followed the curving line of the polished wooden stairs, seeing two sets of bloody tennis-shoe prints heading down but no other bare footprints. There were scuffs and deep ruts in the walls where shoes and body parts had dug out the plaster, indicating at least one person had fallen. The trip must have been brutal. Abigail Campano had known she was fighting for her life. For his part, the dead kid at the bottom of the stairs was no lightweight. The definition of his muscles was evident under the red T-shirt. He must have been shocked to find himself overpowered even as he pulled his last breath.
In his head, Will sketched a diagram of the house, trying to get his bearings. A long hallway under the stairs led to the back of the house and what looked like the kitchen and family room. There were two rooms off the front entrance, probably originally intended to be parlors to give the men separate space from the women. Pocket doors closed off one room, but the second, which looked to be used as a library, was open. Dark paneling dominated the open parlor. Bookshelves lined the walls and a fireplace with a deep hearth already had wood laid for a fire. The furniture was heavy, probably oak. Two large leather chairs dominated the space. Will assumed the other parlor was the opposite, the walls painted in white or cream and the furnishings less masculine.
Upstairs, there would probably be the usual layout to these old houses: five or six bedrooms connected by a long, T-shaped hallway with what would have originally been servants’ stairs leading down to the kitchen in the back. If the other houses in the neighborhood were anything to go by, there would be a carriage house outside that had been converted to a garage with an apartment overhead. Measuring and mapping it all out for the reports would be a lot of work. Will was glad the task wouldn’t fall to him.
He was also glad he wouldn’t have to explain why the single bloody footprint on the foyer was heading up the stairs instead of running out the front doorway.
Leo came back into the house, obviously annoyed by the phone call. “Like I don’t got enough people sticking their heads up my ass with this prostate thing.” He indicated the scene. “You solve this one for me yet?”
Will asked, “Who does the green BMW on the street belong to?”
“The mother.”
“What about the girl—does she have a car?”
“A black Beemer, if you can believe it, 325 convertible. Parents took it away when her grades started to slide.” He pointed to the house across the street. “Nosey neighbor turned her in when she saw the car in the driveway during school hours.”
“Did the neighbor see anything today?”
“She’s even older than the dog, so don’t get your hopes up.” He gave a half shrug of his shoulder, allowing, “We’ve got somebody over there talking to her right now.”
“The mother’s sure she doesn’t recognize the killer?”
“Positive. I had her look at him again when she was more calmed down. Never seen him before in her life.”
Will looked back at the dead man. Everything was adding up but nothing made sense. “How’d he get here?”
“No idea. Could’ve taken the bus and walked from Peachtree Street.”
Peachtree, one of the busiest streets in Atlanta, was less than ten minutes away. Buses and trains went back and forth over-and underground bringing thousands of people to the office buildings and shops along the strip. Will had heard of criminals doing more stupid things than timing a brutal murder around a bus schedule, but the explanation didn’t feel right. This was Atlanta. Only the desperately poor or ecologically eccentric took public transportation. The man on the floor was a clean-cut white kid wearing what looked like a three-hundred-dollar pair of jeans and a two-hundred-dollar pair of Nikes. Either he had a car or he lived in the neighborhood.
Leo offered, “We’ve got patrol out looking for a car that don’t belong.”
“You were the first detective on the scene?”
Leo took his time answering, making sure Will knew that he was doing so as a courtesy. “I was the first cop, period,” he finally said. “Nine-one-one came in around twelve-thirty. I was finishing lunch at that sandwich place on Fourteenth. I got here maybe two seconds before the cruiser pulled up. We checked the house, made sure no one else was here, then I told everybody to get the hell out.”
Fourteenth Street was less than a five-minute drive from where they stood. It was luck that the first responding officer had been a detective who could secure the scene. “You were the first one to talk to the mother?”
“She was freaked the fuck out, let me tell you. Hands were shaking, couldn’t get her words out. Took about ten minutes for her to calm down enough to get the story out.”
“So, this looks clean to you? Some kind of domestic violence scene between two teenagers, then the mom comes in and puts a kink in it?”
“Is that what Hoyt Bentley sent you to check out?”
Will skirted the question. “This is a sensitive case, Leo. Bentley plays golf with the governor. He sits on the board of half the charities in town. Wouldn’t you be more surprised if we weren’t here?”
Leo half shrugged, half nodded. Maybe there was something bothering him about the scene, too, because h
e kept talking. “There’s defensive wounds on the mother. You can see signs of the struggle, what with all the broken shit and the walls being bashed in. Dead kid’s got more of the same, including some bite marks on his fingers where the mother tried to get his hands off her. The girl upstairs—he had some time with her. Panties down, bra pushed up. Blood everywhere.”
“Was there a struggle upstairs?”
“Some, but not like down here.” He paused before offering, “You wanna see her?”
Will appreciated the gesture, but Amanda had made it more than clear that she didn’t want him to get involved in this unless it had the markings of a professional hit. If Will saw something upstairs, no matter how innocuous, he might end up having to testify about it later in court.
Still she couldn’t fault him for being curious. “How was the girl killed?”
“Hard to tell.”
Will glanced behind him at the open front door. The air-conditioning in the house was on full blast, trying to keep up with the heat coming in. “Did you already get pictures of everything in here?”
“Upstairs and down,” Leo told him. “We’ll dust for prints and the usual shit once the bodies are taken away. By the way, that’s when I’ll shut the door, since you seem to have a stick up your ass about it. I’m trying to keep the tourists down to a minimum here.” He added, “Case like this, there are gonna be some heavy guns on it.”
Will thought that was an understatement. No one had reported a strange car in the neighborhood. Unless Leo’s public transportation theory held up, the kid was most likely a resident of Ansley Park. Knowing how these things worked, he probably came from a family of lawyers. Leo would need to do everything exactly by the book or he’d end up dangling by his short hairs the minute he took the stand.
Will rephrased his earlier question. “How did she die?”
“She’s a fucking mess—face like raw hamburger, blood everywhere. I’m surprised the mother even recognized her.” Leo paused, obviously seeing Will wanted a more concrete answer. “My guess? He beat her, then stabbed her to death.”
Again, Will looked at the dead man on the floor. His palms were covered with dried blood, not what you would expect from a closed fist beating someone repeatedly, or, for that matter, a hand holding a knife. The knees of his black jeans looked dark, too, as if he had knelt in something wet. His T-shirt was bunched up just below his ribs. A fresh bruise spread down into the waist of his pants.
Will asked, “Was the mother injured?”
“Scratches on the back of her arms and hands, like I said before. There’s a pretty deep cut on the palm from the glass on the floor.” Leo catalogued, “Lots of bruises, busted lip, some blood in her ear. Maybe a sprained ankle. I thought it was broke, but she moved it.” He rubbed his mouth, probably wishing there was a cigarette in it. “I called an ambulance, but she said she wasn’t leaving until her daughter’s removed.”
“She say it like that, ‘removed’?”
Leo mumbled a curse under his breath as he pulled a spiral-bound notebook out of his pocket. He flipped to the right page and showed it to Will.
Will frowned at the indecipherable scrawl. “Did you fingerprint a chicken?”
Leo turned the notebook back around and read aloud, “ ‘I will not leave my daughter here. I am not leaving this house until Emma leaves.’ ”
Will rolled the name around in his head, and the girl started to become a person to him rather than just another anonymous victim. She had been a baby once. Her parents had held her, protected her, given her a name. And now they had lost her.
He asked, “What’s the mother saying?”
Leo flipped the notebook closed. “Just the bare facts. I’d bet my left one she was a lawyer before she got knocked up and gave it all up for the good life.”
“Why is that?”
“She’s being real careful about what she says, how she says it. Lots of ‘I felt this’ and ‘I feared that.’ ”
Will nodded. A plea of self-defense relied solely on a person’s perception that he or she was in imminent danger of death at the time of the attack. Campano was obviously laying the groundwork, but Will didn’t know if that was because she was smart or because she was telling the truth. He looked down at the dead man again, the blood-caked palms, the soaked shirt. There was more here than met the eye.
Leo put his hand on Will’s shoulder. “Listen, I gotta warn you—”
He stopped as the pocket doors slid open. Amanda stood beside a young woman. Behind them, Will could see another woman sitting on a deep couch. She was wearing a white tennis outfit. What must have been her injured foot was propped up on the coffee table. Her tennis shoes were on the floor underneath.
“Special Agent Trent,” Amanda said, sliding the doors closed behind her. “This is Detective Faith Mitchell.” Amanda looked Leo up and down like a bad piece of fish, then turned back to the woman. “Special Agent Trent is at your disposal. The GBI is more than happy to offer you any and all help.” She raised an eyebrow at Will, letting him know that the opposite was true. Then, maybe because she thought he was stupid, she added, “I need you back in the office within the hour.”
The fact that Will had anticipated this very thing happening did not make him any more prepared. His car was parked back at city hall. Donnelly was going to be stuck on the scene until they cleared it and any one of the beat cops outside would love a chance to get Will Trent alone in the back of a squad car.
“Agent Trent?” Faith Mitchell seemed annoyed, which made Will think he’d missed something.
He asked, “I’m sorry?”
“Yeah, you are,” she mumbled, and Will could only blink, wondering what he had missed.
Leo didn’t seem to find anything unusual about the exchange. He asked the woman, “The mother say anything?”
“The daughter’s got a best friend.” Like Leo, Faith Mitchell carried a small spiral-bound notebook in her pocket. She paged through it to reference the name. “Kayla Alexander. The mother says we can probably find her at school. Westfield Academy.”
Will recognized the expensive private high school on the outskirts of Atlanta. “Why wasn’t Emma in school?”
Faith answered Leo, though Will had asked the question. “There’ve been some truancy issues in the past.”
Will was hardly an expert, but he couldn’t imagine a teenage girl skipping school without taking her best friend along with her. Unless she was meeting her boyfriend. He looked at the stairs again, wishing that he could go up and examine the scene. “Why wasn’t the mom here today?”
Faith said, “She’s got some weekly thing at her club. She usually doesn’t get back until three.”
“So, if someone was watching the house, they’d know that Emma was here alone.”
Faith told Leo, “I need some air.” She walked out the door and stood at the edge of the porch with her hands on her hips. She was young, probably in her early thirties, of average height, and pretty in the way that thin blond women were naturally thought to be pretty—but there was something that kept her from being attractive. Maybe it was the scowl that had been on her face or the flash of raw hatred in her eyes.
Leo mumbled an apology. “Sorry, man. I was trying to tell you—”
Across the foyer, the pocket doors slid open again. Abigail Campano stood at the entrance, leg bent at an angle so she wouldn’t put weight on her hurt ankle. Unlike Faith, there was something radiant about her blond hair and perfect, milky white skin. Even though her eyes were swollen from crying, her lip still bleeding where it had been busted open, the woman was beautiful.
“Ms. Campano,” Will began.
“Abigail,” she softly interrupted. “You’re the agent from the GBI?”
“Yes, ma’am. I’d like to offer my condolences.”
She stared at him in confusion, probably because she still hadn’t come to terms with her daughter’s death.
“Can you tell me a little bit about your daughter?”
&nb
sp; The blank stare did not go away.
Will tried, “You told Detective Donnelly that she had been skipping school lately?”
She nodded slowly. “Obviously, she managed to …” Her voice trailed off as she looked at the dead man on the floor. “Kayla got her into skipping last year. She’d never done anything like that before. She was always a good girl. Always trying to do the right thing.”
“There were other problems?”
“It all seems so inconsequential.” Her lips trembled as she held back her emotions. “She started talking back, doing her own thing. She was trying to be her own person, and we still wanted her to be our little girl.”
“Other than Kayla, did Emma have any friends? Boyfriends?”
Abigail shook her head, wrapping her arms around her waist. “She was so shy. She didn’t make new friends easily. I don’t know how this could have happened.”
“Does Kayla have a brother?”
“No, she’s an only child.” Her voice caught. “Like Emma.”
“Do you think you could make a list of the other kids she hung out with?”
“There were acquaintances, but Emma always picked one person to …” Again, her voice trailed off. “She had no one but Kayla, really.” There was something to her tone that was so final, so certain about her daughter’s aloneness in the world, that Will could not help but feel some of her sadness. He also hoped to God that Leo was making plans to talk to this Kayla. If she was as much an influence in Emma Campano’s life as her mother indicated, then she probably knew a lot more about what had happened here today than anyone else did.
Will asked Abigail, “Is there anyone who might have a grudge against you or your husband?”
She kept shaking her head, transfixed by the sight of the dead man lying in her foyer. “It all happened so fast. I keep trying to think what I did … what else I could have …”
“I know you’ve been asked this before, but are you sure you don’t recognize the man?”
Abigail’s eyes closed, but he imagined that she could still see her daughter’s murderer. “No,” she finally answered. “He’s a stranger to me.”
The Will Trent Series 7-Book Bundle Page 43
