No. Sometimes she wanted to grab Emma by the shoulders and shake her, to tell her not to be so reliant on her father, that she needed to learn how to fend for herself. Abigail didn’t want her daughter to grow up thinking that the only way to get anything was through a man. Emma was smart and funny and beautiful and she could have everything she wanted so long as she worked for it. Unfortunately, Paul jumping every time Emma snapped her fingers was too alluring. He had built a world for her where everything was perfect and nothing could go wrong.
Until now.
There was a knock on the door. Abigail realized she was still lying in bed, that she had only imagined that she’d managed to sit up. She moved her arms and legs to see if she could feel them.
“Abby?” Paul looked exhausted. He hadn’t shaved. His lips were chapped. His eyes were sunken in his head. She had slapped him last night—her hand stinging against his cheek. Until yesterday, Abigail had never raised her hand to another human being in her life. Now, in the course of twenty-four hours, she had killed a teenage boy and slapped her own husband.
Paul had told her that if they hadn’t taken away Emma’s car, she might be safe now. Maybe men were not so easy, after all.
He said, “No news yet.”
She knew this just from looking at him.
“Your mom’s flight is gonna be in around three. Okay?”
She swallowed, her throat dry. She had cried so much that she didn’t have any tears left. The words came out of her mouth before she knew what she was saying. “Where’s my father?”
Paul seemed disappointed that she asked for someone else. “He went out to get some coffee.”
She didn’t believe him. Her father didn’t go out to get coffee. He had people who did those kinds of things for him.
“Babe,” Paul said, but there was nothing else. She could feel the need in him, but Abigail was numb. Still, he came into the room, sat by her on the bed. “We’ll get through this.”
“What if we don’t?” she asked, her voice sounding dead in her own ears. “What if we can’t get through this, Paul?”
Tears came into his eyes. He had always been an easy crier. Emma had worked him so easily with the car. When they’d told her they were taking it away from her, she had screamed, thrown a tantrum. “I hate you!” she had yelled, first at Abigail, then at Paul. “I hate your guts!” He had stood there with his mouth open long after his little angel had flounced out of the room.
Now, Abigail asked the question that had been on her mind all night. “Paul, tell me. Did you do something … did you make somebody …” Abigail tried to get her thoughts together. Everything was rushing in on her. “Paul, did you piss somebody off? Is that why she was taken?”
He looked as if she had spat on him. “Of course not,” he whispered, his voice raspy. “Do you think I would keep that from you? Do you think I’d be sitting on my hands like this if I knew who had taken our baby?”
She felt awful, but deep down she also felt some kind of vindication that she had hurt him so easily.
“That woman I was with … I shouldn’t have done it, Abby. I don’t know why I did. She didn’t mean anything, babe. I just … needed.”
He didn’t say what he needed. They both knew the answer to that: he needed everything.
She asked, “Tell me the truth. Where’s Dad?”
“He’s talking to some people.”
“We’ve got half the police department in the house and the rest of them a phone call away. Who’s he talking to?”
“Private security. They’ve handled things for him before.”
“Does he know who did this? Is there someone who’s trying to get back at him for something?”
Paul shook his head. “I don’t know, babe. Your dad doesn’t exactly confide in me. I think he’s right not to leave this to the GBI.”
“That one cop seemed like he knew what he was doing.”
“Yeah, well, I wouldn’t trust that freak cocksucker as far as I could throw him.”
His words were so sharp that she didn’t know how to respond.
“I should’ve never said that to you about the car,” he whispered. “It had nothing to do with the car. She just … She didn’t listen. You were right. I should’ve been tougher on her. I should have been her father instead of her friend.”
How long had she waited for him to see this? And now, it meant nothing. “It doesn’t matter.”
“I want her back so bad, Abby. I want another chance to do everything right.” His shoulders shook as he cried. “You and Emma are my world. I’ve built my whole life around both of you. I don’t think I could live with myself if something … if something happened.”
Abigail sat up, cupping her hands around his face. He leaned into her and she kissed his neck, his cheek, his lips. When he gently pushed her back onto the bed, she didn’t protest. There was no passion, no desire except for release. This was simply the only way they had left to console each other.
CHAPTER SIX
At six forty-five in the morning, Will parked his car in the teachers’ parking lot of Westfield Academy. Rent-a-cops stood sentry in front of the buildings, their short-sleeved uniforms and matching shorts pressed into sharp creases. Well-marked security cars rolled through the campus. Will was glad to find the school on high alert. He knew that Amanda had requested the DeKalb County police send cruisers out to the area every two hours, but he also knew that DeKalb was overburdened and understaffed. The private security team would take up the gap. At the very least, they might help quell some of the sense of panic that was building—which was sure to get worse, judging by the news vans and cameramen setting up across the street.
Will had turned off the television this morning because he couldn’t take the hype. The press had even less to go on than the police, but the talking heads were analyzing every scrap of rumor and innuendo they could find. There were “secret sources” and conspiracy theories galore. Girls from the school had been on the national morning shows, their teary-eyed pleas for their dear friend’s return somewhat undercut by their perfectly coiffed hair and expertly applied makeup. It took the focus off Emma Campano and put it squarely on the melodrama.
This time yesterday morning, Kayla and Emma had probably been getting ready for school. Maybe Adam Humphrey had slept in because he had a later class. Abigail Campano had been getting ready for her day of tennis and spa treatments. Paul had been on his way to work. None of them had known how little time they had left before their lives were forever changed or—worse—stolen.
Will could still remember the first case he had worked that involved a child. The girl was ten. She had been taken from her home in the middle of the night in a fake abduction staged by her father. The man had used his daughter to his satisfaction, snapped her neck and tossed her down a ravine in the woods behind the family’s church. It takes only a few minutes for flies to find a corpse. They start laying their eggs immediately. Twenty-four hours later, the larvae hatch and begin to devour the organs and tissue. The body bloats. The skin turns waxen, almost incandescently blue. The smell is like rotten eggs and battery acid.
This was the state in which Will had found her.
He prayed to God this was not how he would find Emma Campano.
There was laughter from a few teachers as they made their way up the stairs to the main school building. He watched them go through the doors, smiles still on their faces. Will hated schools the way some people hated prison. That was really how Will had thought of school when he was a child: some kind of prison where the wardens could do whatever they liked. Other kids who had parents at least had some kind of buffer, but Will only had the state to look after him, and it wasn’t exactly in the state’s interest to go after a city’s school system.
Will would be the one questioning the teachers today, and he broke out into a cold sweat every time he thought about it. These were educated people—and not educated at the crap correspondence schools where Will had gotten his dubious degree
s. They would probably see right through him. For the first time since this all started, he was glad that Faith Mitchell was going to be with him. At least she would be able to deflect some of the attention, and the fact was that Westfield Academy had one dead student and one missing. Maybe the teachers would be too focused on the tragedy to scrutinize Will. At any rate, there were still a lot of questions that needed to be answered.
Because Westfield only offered high school level courses, all of the students were between the ages of fourteen and eighteen. Leo Donnelly had spent most of yesterday talking to most of the student body and come up with the sort of information you would expect from teenagers who’ve just found out that one classmate was brutally murdered and one was missing: both Kayla and Emma were well-loved, good girls.
If you could go back a week, however, the story might be different. Will wanted to talk to the teachers and find out what their take was on the two girls. He still wasn’t getting a clear image of Emma Campano. You didn’t turn into a school-skipper overnight. There were generally smaller transgressions that led to bigger ones. No one liked to speak ill of the dead, but in Will’s experience, teachers didn’t walk on eggshells when there was something that needed to be said.
Will glanced out the window, looking at the buildings. The private school was impressive, the sort of local school with a national reputation that Atlanta was known for. Before the Civil War, only the wealthiest Atlantans could afford to educate their offspring, and most of them sent their children to Europe for the luxury of a well-rounded education. After the war, the money dried up but the desire to educate was still there. Recently impoverished debutantes realized that they actually had marketable skills and started opening up private schools along Ponce de Leon Avenue. People may have bartered tuition with family silver and priceless heirlooms, but pretty soon the classrooms were full. Even after the Atlanta Public School System was established in 1872, wealthy Atlantans preferred to keep their children away from the riffraff.
The Westfield Academy was one of those private schools. It was currently housed in a series of old buildings that dated back to the early 1900s. The original schoolhouse was a clapboard-style structure that resembled a barn more than anything else. Most of the later buildings were red brick and looming. The centerpiece was a marble-sided gothic cathedral that looked as out of place as Will’s 1979 Porsche 911 did among the late-model Toyotas and Hondas in the teachers’ parking lot.
Will was used to the car standing out. Nine years ago, he had spotted the burned-out shell of the 911 in an abandoned lot on his street. This was back when most of the houses in his neighborhood were of the crack variety and Will had slept with his gun under his pillow in case people knocked on the wrong door. No one had protested when he’d put wheels on the car and rolled it into his garage. He’d even found a homeless man who helped him push it up the hill for ten bucks and a drink from the hose.
By the time the crack houses were torn down and families had started to move in, Will had completely rebuilt the car. On weekends and holidays, he scoured junkyards and body shops looking for the right parts. He taught himself about pistons and cylinders, exhaust manifolds and brake calipers. He learned how to weld and bondo and paint. Without the benefit of anyone’s expertise, Will managed to return the car to its original glory. He knew that this was an accomplishment to be proud of, but somewhere in the back of his head, Will couldn’t help but think if he’d been able to understand a clutch schematic or an engine diagram, he could have fixed the car in six months instead of six years.
It was the same with the Campano case. Was there something out there—something important—Will couldn’t see because he was too stubborn to admit to his own weakness?
Will spread the morning newspaper over the steering wheel, taking another go at the Emma Campano story. Adam Humphrey’s and Kayla Alexander’s pictures were just below Emma’s, all under the headline “ANSLEY PARK TRAGEDY.” There was a special pull-out section on the families and the neighborhood along with interviews from people claiming to be close friends. Actual news was sparse, and carefully hidden among the hyperbole. Will had started reading the paper at home, but his head, already aching from lack of sleep, nearly exploded from trying to decipher the tiny print.
Now, Will didn’t have a choice in the matter. He had to know what was being said about the case, what details were in the public domain. Routinely, the police held back certain pieces of information that only the killer would know. Because so many Atlanta cops had been on the crime scene, there had been the inevitable leaks. Emma’s hiding in the closet. The rope and duct tape in the car. The broken cell phone, crushed under Kayla Alexander’s back. Of course, the big story was that the Atlanta Police Department had screwed it all up. The press, an organization known for routinely getting facts wrong, was not so forgiving where the police were concerned.
As Will held his finger under each word, trying to isolate it so he could understand the meaning, he was keenly aware that whoever had taken Emma Campano was probably reading the same story right now. Maybe the killer was getting a charge out of having his crimes on the front page of the Atlanta Journal. Maybe he was sweating over each word as much as Will, trying to see if there were any clues he had left behind.
Or maybe the man was so arrogant that he knew there was no way to link him to the crimes. Maybe he was out right now, trolling for his next victim even as Emma Campano’s body rotted in a shallow grave.
There was a tap on the glass. Faith Mitchell was standing on the passenger’s side of the car. She had his jacket in one hand and a cup of coffee in the other. Will reached over and unlocked the door for her.
“Can you believe that?” She angrily indicated the newspaper.
“What?” he asked, folding up the paper. “I just started reading it.”
She shut the car door to keep in the air-conditioning. “A ‘highly placed Atlanta police officer’ is quoted as saying that we botched the investigation and the GBI had to be called in.” She seemed to realize who she was talking to and said, “I know we fucked up, but you don’t talk about that sort of thing to the press. It doesn’t exactly engender respect from the taxpayers.”
“No,” he agreed, though he thought it was curious she believed the source was from the APD. Will had actually made it that far into the story and assumed that the source was in the GBI and went by the name of Amanda Wagner.
“It would have been nice if they’d left out how wealthy the parents are, but I suppose you could figure that out from the name. Those car commercials are the most annoying thing on TV right now.” She stared at him as if she was waiting for him to say something.
He said, “Yeah, they’re pretty annoying. The commercials.”
“Whatever.” She held up his jacket. “You left this on my car.”
He found his digital recorder, relieved to have it back. “These are great,” he told Faith, knowing she had probably found it curious. “You wouldn’t believe how bad my handwriting is.”
She just stared at him again, and he felt the hair on the back of his neck stand up as he tucked the recorder into his pocket. Had she figured it out? If she listened to the recorder, all she would hear was Will’s voice cataloguing information about the case so he could later dictate it into his computer and generate a report. Angie had said to watch out for Faith Mitchell. Had he already given himself away?
Faith’s lips pressed together in a tight line. “I need to ask you something. You don’t have to answer it, but I wish you would.”
Will stared straight ahead. He could see teachers going into the main building with large thermoses of coffee and stacks of papers in their hands. “Sure.”
“Do you think she’s dead?”
His mouth opened, but more from relief than anything else. “Honestly, I don’t know.” He took his time putting his jacket on the backseat with the newspaper, trying to get some of his composure back. “I take it you didn’t find anything earth-shattering last night in the dorm?” He
had told her to call him if there were any leads.
She hesitated, as if she had to switch gears, then answered, “Not really. Nothing of interest in Adam’s things except the pot, which I think we can agree is not very interesting?” Will nodded, and she continued, “We talked to every student in both halls. No one really knew Adam except for Gabe Cohen and Tommy Albertson, and considering the positive impression I made on both of them, they were reluctant to give any more information. I sent Ivan Sambor to talk to them—you know who he is?” Will shook his head. “Big Polish guy, doesn’t take shit from anybody. Frankly, he scares the bejeezus out of me. He got the same story I got: they barely knew Adam, Gabe was crashing at his place because Tommy is an asshole. Even Tommy agreed with this, by the way.”
She took out her spiral-bound notebook and flipped through the pages. “Most of the freshmen in Adam’s dorm are in the same classes, but we can always go to each class and look for new faces. I reached all of his teachers but one, and all of them said the same thing: first week of class/nobody knows anybody/sorry he’s dead/I don’t even remember what he looks like. The one I couldn’t get in touch with—Jerry Favre—is supposed to call me back today.”
She flipped to another page. “Nuts and bolts: The security camera shows Adam leaving the dorm around seven forty-five yesterday morning. He’s got an eight-o’clock class; the teacher verified he was there. Adam gave some kind of report the whole period, so there was no sneaking out. The card reader, which doesn’t mean jack, by the way—you’re not the only genius who figured out the handicap door trick—has him returning to the dorm at ten-eighteen a.m., which jibes with his class ending at ten. We have what’s probably the back of his head on the camera. He changed clothes, then left again at exactly ten thirty-two. That’s the last we have of him, unless you’re holding something back.”
The Will Trent Series 7-Book Bundle Page 53
