He looked up at her. There was suddenly such sadness in his eyes that she had to force herself not to look away. “I can’t do anything right.”
His life had been turned upside down over the last couple of days, but she knew he was talking about more than that. She told him, “I’m sure that’s not true.”
“Adam was my only friend, and he’s dead—probably because of me.”
“I promise you that’s not true.”
He looked away, staring at the bare mattress across from him. “I don’t fit in here. Everybody’s smarter than me. Everybody’s already picking fraternities and hanging out. Even Tommy.”
Faith was not stupid enough to offer Jeremy as his new best friend. She told Gabe, “It’s hard to adjust to a new school. You’ll figure it out eventually.”
“I really don’t think I will,” he said, sounding so sure of himself that Faith could almost hear an alarm going off in her head. She had been so concerned about the information Gabe had withheld that she had lost sight of the fact that he was just a teenager who had been thrown into a very bad situation.
“Gabe,” Faith began, “what’s going on with you?”
“I just need to get some rest.”
She knew then that he wasn’t talking about sleep. He had not called her to help Adam, he had called to help himself—and her response had been to push him around like a suspect she was interrogating. She made her voice softer. “What are you thinking about doing?”
“I don’t know,” he answered, but he still would not make eye contact with her. “Sometimes, I just think that the world would be a better place if I was just … gone. You know?”
“Have you tried anything before?” She glanced at his wrists. There were scratch marks that she hadn’t noticed before, thin red streaks where the skin had been broken but not punctured. “Maybe tried to hurt yourself?”
“I just want to get away from here. I want to go …”
“Home?” she suggested.
He shook his head. “There’s nothing there for me. My mom died of cancer six years ago. My dad and me …” He shook his head.
Faith told him, “I want to help you, Gabe, but you need to be honest with me.”
He picked at a tear in his jeans. She saw that his fingernails were chewed to the quick. The cuticles were ragged and torn.
“Did Adam buy a gun?”
He kept picking at his jeans. He shrugged his shoulders, and she still did not know whether to believe him.
She suggested, “Why don’t I call your father?”
His eyes widened. “No. Don’t do that. Please.”
“I can’t just leave you alone, Gabe.”
His eyes filled with tears again. His lips trembled. There was such desperation in his manner that she felt like he had reached into her chest and grabbed her heart with his fist. She could have kicked herself for letting it get to this point.
She repeated, “I’m not going to leave you alone.”
“I’ll be okay.”
Faith felt caught in an untenable position. Gabe was obviously a troubled young man, but he could not be her problem right now. She needed to get the threatening notes to the lab to see if there were any usable fingerprints on them. There was a student in Ireland who had sold his car to Adam—a car that had probably been used to transport Emma Campano from the Copy Right. There were two sets of parents who would identify their dead children tonight. There was a mother and a father on the other side of Atlanta waiting to find out whether or not their daughter was still alive.
Faith took out her cell phone and scrolled through her recent calls.
Gabe asked, “Are you going to arrest me?”
“No.” Faith pressed the send button on the phone. “I’m going to get you some help, and then I have to go do my job.” She didn’t add that she was going to search every item in his room, including the computer he’d let Adam borrow, before she left campus.
Gabe sat back against the bed, an air of resignation about him. He stared at the mattress opposite. Faith resisted the impulse to reach out and tuck a stray strand of hair behind his ear. Pimples dotted his chin. She could see stubble on his cheek where he had missed a spot shaving. He was still just a child—a child who was very lost and needed help.
Victor Martinez’s secretary answered on the second ring. “Student Services.”
“This is Detective Mitchell,” she told the woman. “I need to speak to the dean immediately.”
CHAPTER TEN
Will stood behind Gail and Simon Humphrey as they waited in front of the viewing window. The setup was the sort that was always shown on television and in movies: a simple curtain hung on the other side of the glass. Will would press a button, and the drape would be slowly drawn back, revealing the cleaned-up victim. The sheet would be tucked up to the chin in order to cover the baseball stitches holding together the Y-incision. Cue the mother slumping against her husband.
But the camera couldn’t capture everything. The pungent smell of the morgue. The distant whine of the giant freezers where they stored the bodies. The way the floor seemed to suck at the soles of your shoes as you walked toward that window. The heaviness of your arm as you reached out to push that button.
The curtain pulled back. Both parents stood, silent, probably numb. Simon was the first to move. He reached out and pressed his hand against the glass. Will wondered if he was remembering what it felt like to hold his son’s hand. Was that the sort of thing fathers did? At the park, out in public, fathers and sons were always playing ball or tossing Frisbees, the only contact between them a rustle of the hair or a punch on the arm. This seemed to be how dads taught their boys to be men, but there had to be a point, maybe early on, when they were able to hold their hands. One tiny one engulfed by one big one. Adam would have needed help crossing the street. In a crowd, you wouldn’t want him to wander off.
Yes, Will decided. Simon Humphrey had held his son’s hands.
Gail turned to Will. She wasn’t crying, but he sensed a familiar reserve, a kindred spirit. She would be at the hotel later tonight, maybe in the shower or sitting on the bed while her husband went for a walk, and then she would allow this moment to crash over her. She would be back in front of that window, looking at her dead son. She would collapse. She would feel her spirit leaving her body and know it might never return.
For now, she said, “Thank you, Agent Trent,” and shook his hand.
He led them down the hallway, asking them about the hotel where they would stay, giving them advice on where to have supper. He was aware of how foolish the small talk sounded, but Will also knew that the distraction would help them make it through the building, to give them the strength they needed to leave their child in this cold, dark place.
They had rented a car at the airport, and Will went with them as far as the garage. Through the glass panel in the door, he watched Gail Humphrey stumble. Her husband caught her arm and she shrugged him off. He tried again and she slapped at him, yelling, until he wrapped his arms around her to make her stop.
Will turned away, feeling like an intruder. He took the stairs up the six flights to his office. At half past eight, everyone but the skeleton crew had already gone home for the day. The lights were out, but he would have known his way even without the faint glow of the emergency exit signs. Will had a corner office, which would have been impressive if it hadn’t been this particular corner. Between the Home Depot across the street and the old Ford Factory next door that had been turned into apartment buildings, there wasn’t much to look at. Sometimes, he convinced himself that the abandoned railroad tracks with their weeds and discarded hypodermic needles offered something of a parklike view, but daydreaming only worked during the day.
Will turned on his desk lamp and sat down. He hated nighttime on days like this, where there was nothing he could do but catch up on paperwork while he waited for other people to bring him information. There was an expert in Tennessee who specialized in detecting fingerprints on pape
r. Paper was tricky and you only got a couple of tries developing prints before the process ruined the evidence. The man was driving down first thing in the morning to look at the notes. The recording of the ransom call was being hand-delivered to the University of Georgia’s audiology lab, but the professor had warned them it would take many hours to isolate the sounds. Charlie was working late at the lab trying to process all the evidence they had collected. Tips from the hotline were being followed up on, cops sifting through the pranksters and nutjobs, trying to find a viable lead.
Will had paperwork to do on all of this, but instead of turning to his computer, he sat back in his chair and stared at his blurred reflection in the dark window. They were coming up on thirty-six hours since Abigail Campano had come home to find her life turned upside down. Two people were still dead. One girl was still missing. And, still, not a single suspect was in sight.
He didn’t understand the ransom demand. Will was no rookie. He had worked kidnapping cases before. He had worked abduction cases. There were basic tenets to both. Kidnappers wanted money. Abductors wanted sex. He could not reconcile the brutal way in which Kayla Alexander had been killed with the phone call this morning demanding one million dollars. It just did not add up.
Then there was the fight between Abigail and Paul Campano. Angie had been right: Paul was cheating on his wife. Apparently, he liked young blondes, but did that include his own daughter, and possibly Kayla Alexander? Amanda had told Will to get the man’s DNA. Maybe she was right, too. Add in Faith, who had managed to get Gabriel Cohen to talk, and that just left Will as the odd man out—literally—because he was the only one who brought absolutely nothing to this case.
Will turned back to his desk, knowing that overthinking the problem would not bring him any closer to a solution. His cell phone was laid out on his desk in two pieces. During his fight with Paul, the clamshell had snapped off and the screen had cracked. Will held the lid in place and taped it back onto the phone with several pieces of Scotch tape. The phone still worked. When he’d left the Campano house, he had been able to hold it together in order to check his voice mail. Faith Mitchell’s messages had gotten progressively more important, her voice going up in excitement as she told him about the threatening notes Gabe Cohen had kept from them.
Will still wasn’t sure she had made the right decision about keeping the kid out of the system, but he had to trust her instincts.
At least they had more information on the car now. A computer search of graduate students working at the Georgia Tech Research Institute in Ireland had revealed the name Farokh Pansing. After a few phone calls, they had located a cell phone number and woken the man up from what sounded like a very deep sleep. The physics major had given Will a loving description of the blue 1981 Chevy Impala he had left behind. No air-conditioning. No seat belts. The driver’s door stuck when it rained. The engine leaked like a sieve. The undercarriage was so rusted out that, from the backseat, you could watch the road pass under your shoes. Because of its age, the state of Georgia considered the car a classic and it was therefore exempt from any emissions requirements. Farokh had sold the ancient car to Adam Humphrey for four hundred dollars. The state had no record of Adam ever applying for insurance or a tag.
They had issued a new alert on the Impala, but the warning only pertained to the state of Georgia. Emma Campano could easily be in Alabama or Tennessee or the Carolinas. Given the almost two days that had passed since her abduction, she could well be in Mexico or Canada.
Will’s computer gave a chug like a train, indicating that the system was running. Will had been out of the office for two days. He needed to check his e-mail and file his daily reports. He put on the headphones and adjusted the microphone, preparing to dictate the report. After opening up a blank Word document, he pressed the start key, but found himself at a loss for words. He stopped the recorder and sat back in his chair. When he reached up to rub his eyes, he gasped from the pain.
Paul hadn’t broken his nose, but he’d managed to whack it hard enough to move the cartilage. With the ransom recording to analyze and the threatening notes to rush to the lab, Will hadn’t had time to look at himself in the mirror until about ten minutes before the Humphreys had shown up to identify their son. Will’s nose had been broken several times in the past. It was already crooked enough. With the bruises, he looked like a bar brawler, which did not exactly engender trust in the Humphreys. The father had accepted his mumbled excuse about a rough football game the weekend before, but the mother had looked at him as if he had a giant “liar” sticker pinned to his head.
Will tapped the space bar on his computer and used the mouse to click on the e-mail icon. He slipped the headphones on and listened to his e-mails. The first three were spam, the second was from Pete Hanson, telling him the basic information Faith had already relayed about the autopsies of Adam Humphrey and Kayla Alexander.
The third e-mail was from Amanda Wagner. She had called a press conference for six-thirty the next morning. Will guessed she had been following the news as closely as he had. Absent anything else to cover, the reporters had started targeting the parents, picking apart their lives, slowly pointing the finger back at the victims. The press would be in for a disappointment if they thought they’d be able to talk to the Campanos tomorrow. Amanda was a master at controlling the press. She would parade out Paul and Abigail for the cameras, but she would do all the talking. Will couldn’t think how she would manage to put a muzzle on Paul, but he’d seen her pull too many rabbits out of her hat in the past to worry about logistics.
Amanda’s e-mail ended curtly. “You are to be in my office directly after the press conference,” the computer read. Will gathered she had heard about Paul Campano bashing his face in.
Will pressed play again, listening to Amanda’s terse message as if he could divine some nuance. The program allowed you to assign different voices to people. Pete sounded like Mickey Mouse. Amanda was Darth Vader. Sitting alone in his dark office, the sound gave Will an involuntary shudder.
Then it gave him an idea.
He opened up Pete’s e-mail again and selected a different voice to read the text. He went through each option, listening to the nuances. Will realized he was doing this the wrong way. He opened a new e-mail and clicked in the text area, then took out his digital recorder and selected the file that had the kidnapper’s voice on it.
He held the player up to the microphone and let it dictate the text:
“Is this the mother?”
Then Abigail, stuttering, “Y-yes … This is Emma’s mother. Is Emma all right? Can I talk to Emma?”
“I have your daughter.”
“What do you want? Tell me how to get Emma back.”
“I want one million dollars.”
“Okay … When? Where? Just tell me what you want.”
“I will call you tomorrow at ten-thirty a.m. with details.”
“No—wait! How do I—”
Will cut off the recording, excitement taking hold. Playing back each line, he isolated the kidnapper’s sentences and deleted Abigail’s. Next, he went through each voice option, searching for one that sounded similar to the kidnapper’s.
The last one in line was the one he used for Amanda Wagner. His finger hovered over the mouse. He clicked the button. The headphones sent out a foreboding, deep voice.
“Is this the mother?”
Will looked up, sensing he was not alone. Faith Mitchell stood in the doorway.
He jumped up, yanking off the headphones as if he had something to be guilty about. “I thought you were going home.”
She walked into his office and sat down. The desk lamp cast her in a harsh light. She looked older than her thirty-three years. “What are you doing?”
“The audiotape of the ransom demand,” he began, then figured he could just as easily show her. He picked up his digital recorder and pressed play. “This is the audio.” Will kept his thumb on the button, listening along with Faith to the kidnapper’
s phone call this morning, Abigail Campano’s terrified responses. He stopped it at the same place as before. “Now this is something I just did in my computer. It’s got one of those speaking options for lazy people where it reads stuff to you.” He moved the mouse over to the start button, saying, “I didn’t even remember I had it on here. I guess it’s some ADA thing.” He pulled out the headphone jack so the speakers would play. “Ready?”
She nodded.
He pressed play, and the kidnapper’s words came out of the computer speakers in the Darth Vader voice.
“Is this the mother?”
“Jesus Christ,” she murmured. “It’s almost exactly the same.”
“I think he must have written the sentences and prerecorded them coming out of the computer speakers.”
“That’s why the sentence construction’s so simple. There aren’t any contractions.”
Will looked at the computer screen as he repeated them back from memory. “I have your daughter. I want one million dollars. I will call you this time tomorrow with details.”
He picked up the phone and called Hamish Patel, who was driving the tape up to the University of Georgia in Athens.
Hamish sounded as excited as Will felt. He told Will, “If you manage to keep your job, you might actually break this case.”
Will made excuses. He didn’t want to think about what Amanda had in store for him tomorrow morning, but he imagined she was concocting a special kind of hell for the agent who had gotten into a fight with the father of a kidnapping victim. The GBI was planning another sex sting at the Atlanta airport. Will might be stuck in a bathroom stall on the B Concourse, waiting for a married father of three to tap his foot and ask for a blow job.
He rang off with Hamish and told Faith, “They’re going to check into it. These guys deal with computers and audio enhancement all of the time. I’m sure they would’ve figured it out in ten seconds.”
“Saves them ten seconds, then,” she pointed out. “I can’t help but think where we’d be if I’d been able to get Gabe to talk yesterday.”
The Will Trent Series 7-Book Bundle Page 60
