The Will Trent Series 7-Book Bundle

by Karin Slaughter

  Suddenly there was a man screaming from the front of the house. “Get the fuck out of my way!”

  Will heard scuffling outside, cops yelling for someone to stop, then Paul Campano barreled up the front steps like a man on fire. He rammed Faith Mitchell out of his way as he burst into the house. A uniformed patrolman caught her as she stumbled back, perilously close to the edge of the porch. Neither of them looked happy, but Leo waved his hand, telling them to let it go.

  Paul stood in the foyer, fists clenched. Will wondered if this was something genetic—that you were either the type of person who clenched your fists all the time or you weren’t.

  “Paul …” Abigail whispered, rushing to him.

  Even holding his wife, Paul kept his hands fisted.

  Faith was obviously still bristling. Her tone was clipped. “Mr. Campano, I’m Detective Mitchell with the Atlanta Police Department. This is Detective Donnelly.”

  Paul wasn’t interested in introductions. He was staring at the dead man over his wife’s shoulder. “Is that the fucker who did this?” His voice turned to a growl. “Who is he? What’s he doing in my house?”

  Faith and Leo exchanged a look that Will would’ve missed if he hadn’t been watching them for his own cues. They were partners; they obviously had a shorthand, and it looked like this time Faith was taking the short straw.

  She suggested, “Mr. Campano, let’s go out on the porch and talk about this.”

  “Who the fuck are you?” Paul glared at Will, his beady eyes almost swallowed by the extra weight on his face.

  Will shouldn’t have been surprised by the question, or even the way it was phrased. The last time Paul Campano had talked to him this way, Will was ten years old and they were both living in the Atlanta Children’s Home. A lot had changed since then. Will had gotten taller and his hair had gotten darker. The only thing that changed about Paul was he seemed to have gotten heavier and meaner.

  Leo supplied, “Mr. Campano, this is Agent Trent with the GBI.”

  Will tried to talk Paul down a little, to make him feel like he could help. “Do you know if your daughter had any enemies, Mr. Campano?”

  “Emma?” he asked, glaring at Will. “Of course not. She was only seventeen years old.”

  “How about you?”

  “No,” he snapped. “No one who would do …” He shook his head, unable to complete the sentence. He looked back at the dead killer. “Who is this bastard? What did Emma ever do to him?”

  “Anything you can give us will help. Maybe you and your wife could—”

  “She’s up there, isn’t she?” Paul interrupted, looking up. “My baby’s upstairs.”

  No one answered him, but Leo took a couple of steps toward the stairs to block the way.

  Paul said, “I want to see her.”

  “No,” Abigail warned, her voice shaking. “You don’t want to see her like that, Paul. You don’t want to know.”

  “I need to see her.”

  “Listen to your wife, sir,” Faith coaxed. “You’ll get to see her soon. You just need to let us take care of her right now.”

  Paul barked at Leo, “Get the fuck out of my way.”

  “Sir, I don’t think—”

  Leo took the brunt of his anger. Paul slammed him into the wall as he bolted up the stairs. Will ran up after the man, almost knocking into him as Paul stopped cold at the top of the landing.

  He stood frozen, staring at his daughter’s lifeless form at the end of the hallway. The girl was at least fifteen feet away, but her presence filled the space as if she were right there beside them. All the fight seemed to drain out of Paul. Like most bullies, he could never sustain any one emotion.

  “Your wife was right,” Will told him. “You don’t want to see her like this.”

  Paul went quiet, his labored breathing the only audible noise. His hand was to his chest, palm flat as if he was saying the pledge of allegiance. Tears brimmed in his eyes.

  He swallowed hard. “There was this glass bowl on the table.” His voice had gone flat, lifeless. “We got it in Paris.”

  “That’s nice,” Will said, thinking that never in a million years could he imagine Paul in Paris.

  “It’s a mess up here.”

  “There are people who can clean it up for you.”

  He went silent again, and Will followed his gaze, taking in the scene. Leo was right about downstairs being worse than up, but there was something even more sinister and unsettling in the air up here. The same bloody shoe prints were here, crisscrossing the white carpeting up and down the long hall. Streaks of blood slashed across the white walls where either the knife or a fist had arced over the body, repeatedly punching or plunging into the flesh. For some reason, the most troubling part to Will was the single red handprint on the wall directly over the victim’s head where her attacker had obviously rested his weight as he raped her.

  “Trashcan, right?”

  Paul Campano wasn’t looking for the garbage. He had called Will “Trashcan” when they were children. The memory put a lump in Will’s throat. He had to swallow before he could answer. “Yeah.”

  “Tell me what happened to my daughter.”

  Will debated, but only for a moment. He had to turn sideways to get past Paul and go into the hallway. Careful not to disturb anything, he stepped into the crime scene. Emma’s body was parallel to the walls, her head facing away from the stairs. As he walked toward her, Will’s eyes kept going back to the handprint, the perfect formation of the palm and fingers. His gut roiled as he thought about what the guy had been doing when he left the impression.

  Will stopped a few feet from the girl. “She was probably killed here,” he told Paul, knowing from the pool of blood soaking into the carpet that the girl had not been moved. He crouched down by the body, resting his hands on his knees so that he wouldn’t accidentally touch anything. Emma’s shorts were bunched around one ankle, her feet bare. Her underwear and shirt had been yanked out of the way by her attacker. Teeth marks showed dark red against the white of her breasts. Scrapes and bruises trailed up the insides of her thighs, swollen welts showing the damage that had been done. She was thin, with shoulder-length blond hair like her mother and broad shoulders like her dad. There was no telling what she had looked like in life. Her face was beaten so severely that the skull had collapsed on itself, obscuring the eyes, the nose. The only point of reference was the mouth, which gaped open in a toothless, bloody hole.

  Will checked on Paul. The man still stood frozen at the top of the stairs. His big, meaty hands were clasped in front of his chest like a nervous old woman waiting for bad news. Will didn’t know what exactly he could see, if the distance softened some of the violence or made it worse.

  Will told him, “She was beaten. I can see what looks like two knife wounds. One’s just below her breast. The other is above her belly button.”

  “She got it pierced last year.” Paul gave a strained laugh. Will looked back at him and Paul took this as a sign to continue. “She and her best friend went to Florida and came back with …” He shook his head. “You think shit like that’s funny when you’re a kid, but when you’re a parent and your daughter comes home with a ring in her belly …” His face crumpled as he fought emotions.

  Will turned his attention back to the girl. There was a silver ring looped through the skin of her belly button.

  Paul asked, “Was she raped?”

  “Probably.” He’d said the word too fast. The sound hung in the stagnant air.

  “Before or after?” Paul’s voice shook. He was more than familiar with the dark deeds men were capable of.

  The blood on her abdomen and chest was smeared, indicating someone had lain on top of her after the worst of the beating was over. Still, Will told him, “The coroner will have to answer that. I can’t tell.”

  “Are you lying to me?”

  “No,” Will answered, trying not to look at the handprint, to let the guilt eat him up inside so that he ended up being
the one to tell this man the horrible truth about his daughter’s violent, degrading death.

  Suddenly he felt Paul behind him.

  Will stood, blocking him. “This is a crime scene. You need to—”

  Paul’s mouth dropped open. He slumped against Will like all the air had left his body. “It’s not …” His mouth worked, tears welling into his eyes. “It’s not her.”

  Will tried to turn the man away from the sight of his daughter. “Let’s go downstairs. You don’t need to see any more of this.”

  “No,” Paul countered, his fingers digging into Will’s arm. “I mean it. It’s not her.” He shook his head back and forth, vehement. “It’s not Emma.”

  “I know this is hard for you.”

  “Fuck you, with what you know!” Paul pushed himself away from Will. “Has anybody ever told you that your daughter is dead?” He kept shaking his head, staring at the girl. “That’s not her.”

  Will tried to reason with him. “Her navel is pierced like you said.”

  He shook his head, his words choking in his throat. “It’s not—”

  “Come on,” Will coaxed, pushing him back a few steps, trying to keep him from contaminating the scene any more than he already had.

  Paul’s words came out in an almost giddy rush. “Her hair, Trash. Emma’s got longer hair than that. It goes down to her back almost. And she’s got a birthmark on her right arm—Emma does. Look, there’s nothing there. There’s no birthmark.”

  Will checked the arm. Except for the blood, the skin was a perfect white.

  “Right arm,” Paul insisted, annoyed. He pointed to the other arm. “She’s got a birthmark.” When Will did not respond, he took out his wallet. Receipts and papers fell onto the floor as he dug around inside. “It’s weird, shaped like a handprint. The skin’s darker there.” He found what he was looking for and handed Will a photograph. Emma was much younger in the picture. She was wearing a cheerleading outfit. One arm was cocked to her hip, holding a pom-pom. Paul was right; the birthmark looked as if someone had wrapped his hand around her arm and left a print.

  Still, Will said, “Paul, let’s not—”

  “Abby! It’s not her. It’s not Emma!” Paul was laughing, elated. “Look at her arm, Trash. There’s nothing there. This isn’t Emma. It’s gotta be Kayla. They look alike. They trade clothes all the time. It’s got to be her!”

  Abigail ran upstairs, Faith fast behind her.

  “Stay back.” Will blocked their way, holding out his arms like a crossing guard, physically pushing Paul back. The man was still smiling a fool’s grin. All he was thinking was that his daughter wasn’t dead. His mind hadn’t made the next leap.

  “Keep them here,” Will told Faith. She nodded, stepping in front of the parents. Carefully, Will walked back toward the dead girl. He crouched down again, studying the shoe prints, the spray on the wall. Crossing the dead girl’s body was a fine arc of blood that caught his attention. It went just under her breasts like a finely drawn line. Will hadn’t noticed it the first time, but right now, he would have bet his pension that the blood had come from the kid downstairs.

  “It’s not her,” Paul insisted. “It’s not Emma.”

  Faith began, “It’s hard sometimes when you lose someone you love. Denial is understandable.”

  Paul exploded. “Would you listen to me, you stupid bitch? I’m not going through the twelve steps of grief. I know what my fucking daughter looks like!”

  Leo called, “Everything okay up there?”

  “It’s under control,” Faith said, sounding like the exact opposite was true.

  Will looked at the dead girl’s bare feet. The soles were clean, seemingly the only part of her body that didn’t have some pattern of blood on it.

  He stood up, asking Abigail, “Tell me what happened.”

  She was shaking her head, unable to let herself hope. “Is it Emma? Is that her?”

  Will took in the faint streaks of dark red on the skirt of Abigail’s white tennis dress, the transfer patterns across her chest. He kept his voice firm, even though his heart was thumping hard enough to press against his ribs. “Tell me exactly what happened from the moment you got here.”

  “I was in my car—”

  “From the stairs,” Will interrupted. “You came up the stairs. Did you go to the body? Did you come into this area?”

  “I stood here,” she said, indicating the floor in front of her.

  “What did you see?”

  Tears streamed down her cheeks. Her mouth moved, trying to get out words as her eyes scanned the dead body. Finally, she said, “I saw him standing over her. He had a knife in his hand. I felt threatened.”

  “I know you felt like your life was in danger,” Will assured her. “Just tell me what happened next.”

  Her throat worked. “I panicked. I stepped back and fell down the stairs.”

  “What did he do?”

  “He came after me—came down the stairs.”

  “Did he have the knife in his hand?” She nodded. “Was it raised?”

  She nodded again, then shook her head. “I don’t know. No. It was at his side.” She tightened her hand to her side to show him. “He was running down the stairs. It was at his side.”

  “Did he raise the knife when he got to the bottom of the stairs?”

  “I kicked him before he got to the bottom. To throw him off balance.”

  “What happened to the knife?”

  “He dropped it when he fell. I—He hit me in the head. I thought he was going to kill me.”

  Will turned around, looked at the shoe prints again. They were scattered, chaotic. Two people had stepped in the blood, walked back and forth, struggled. “Are you sure you didn’t come into the hallway up here at all?”

  She nodded her head.

  “Listen to me very carefully. You didn’t walk around up here? You didn’t go to your daughter? You didn’t step in any blood?”

  “No. I was here. Right here. I stopped at the top of the stairs and he came toward me. I thought he was going to kill me. I thought …” She put her hand to her mouth, unable to continue. Her voice cracked as she asked her husband, “It’s not Em?”

  Will told Faith, “Keep them both right here,” as he headed down the stairs.

  Leo was standing in the front doorway, talking to one of the uniformed patrolmen. He asked Will, “What’s going on?”

  “Don’t wait for Pete,” he ordered, stepping over the body. “I need an ID on this guy right now.” He found Abigail Campano’s shoes in the parlor under the coffee table. The tread was a court zigzag, not a waffle pattern. Except for a couple of scuff marks on the toes, there wasn’t a trace of blood on them.

  In the foyer, Leo was taking a pair of latex gloves from his pocket. “The nosey neighbor across the street says she saw a car parked in the driveway a couple of hours ago. Could be yellow, could be white. Could be four doors, could be two.”

  Will checked the dead man’s sneakers. Waffle pattern, dried blood caked in the tread. He said, “Give me those.” Leo handed him the gloves and Will put them on. “You got your pictures, right?”

  “Yeah. What’s going on?”

  Carefully, Will peeled up the dead man’s T-shirt. The material was still soaking wet where it had bunched up at the waist, and it left an odd, pinkish hue on the exposed skin.

  Leo asked, “You wanna tell me what you’re doing?”

  There was so much blood that it was hard to see anything. Will gently pressed the abdomen, and a narrow slit opened up in the flesh, black liquid oozing out.

  “Shit,” Leo hissed. “Did the mother stab him?”

  “No.” Will saw how it must have happened. The young man kneeling beside the body upstairs, a knife plunged into his chest. He would have pulled out the knife, arterial blood spraying over the dead girl’s body. The man would’ve tried to stand, staggering to get help even as his lung collapsed. That’s when Abigail Campano had appeared at the top of the stairs. She saw th
e man who had killed her daughter. He saw the woman who could possibly save them all.

  Leo looked up the stairs, then back at the dead kid, finally understanding. “Shit.”

  Will snapped off the gloves, trying not to think about all the lost time. He went to the bloody bare footprint, saw that the weight had been on the ball of the foot when it was made. There was a small cluster of blood droplets on the bottom stair—six of them.

  Will talked it out for Leo’s benefit as much as his own. “Emma was unconscious. The killer carried her over his shoulder.” Will narrowed his eyes, putting the pieces together. “He stopped here at the bottom of the stairs to catch his breath. Her head and arms were hanging down his back. The blood drops on the bottom tread are almost perfectly round, which means they fell straight down.” Will pointed to the footprint. “He shifted her weight forward. Her foot touched the floor—that’s why it’s facing up the stairs instead of toward the door. After carrying her down the stairs, he had to readjust the body so that he could carry her out the front door.”

  Leo tried to cover himself. “The mother’s story held up. There was no way I could—”

  “It doesn’t matter.” Will glanced up. Abigail and Paul Campano were staring over the railing, watching, disbelieving. “Does Kayla have a car?”

  Abigail spoke hesitantly. “She drives a white Prius.”

  Will took out his phone and hit the speed dial. He told Leo, “Try to nail down the old lady on the car—show her a photo array if you have to. Check all 9-1-1 calls coming out of the area in the last five hours. Get your guys to recanvass the neighborhood. There were a lot of joggers out earlier who are probably back home by now. I’ll notify highway patrol; there’s an on-ramp to the interstate less than a mile from here.” Will put the phone to his ear just as Amanda picked up. He didn’t waste time with pleasantries. “I need a team here. It looks like we’ve got a kidnapping.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  Emma Campano’s bedroom was almost as big as Will’s entire house. He hadn’t had his own room as a kid. He hadn’t really had his own anything until he turned eighteen and the Atlanta Children’s Home gave him a pat on the back and a check from the state. His first apartment was a box, but it was his box. Will could still remember what it felt like to leave his toothbrush and shampoo in the bathroom without having to worry someone else would swipe them—or worse. Even to this day, there was a certain joy he felt from opening the refrigerator and knowing that he could eat anything he wanted.