Warren mumbled, “I know, I know.”
On the tape, Bernard was obviously agitated. “No, you don’t know. You need to listen to what I’m saying. If you do this right, none of us will get caught.”
A girl’s voice they had verified was Kayla Alexander’s, said, “You want me to write it down for you, Warren? You want me to make a list?”
Will clicked off the recorder. “You can hear the rest in court.”
“I’m going free in an hour,” Bernard said. “My lawyer told me—”
“Your lawyer doesn’t know about the DVDs.” Charlie Reed had been wrong about the cables in back of Bernard’s home computer. They had been attached to a recordable DVD drive.
Will told the man, “We have at least a dozen videos showing you in your special room, Evan. My partner is at Westfield Academy with Olivia McFaden right now. We made stills from the videos—pictures that show the girls’ faces right alongside yours. So far, they’ve identified six students from the school.” Will asked, “How many more do you think we’ll find? How many women do you think are going to come forward?”
“I want my lawyer. Now.”
“Oh, he’s coming. He seemed really eager to talk to you when I told him about the new charges.” Will put his hand on the sheet, pushing it into the cell. “Here you go, Evan. I don’t want you to ever think that I didn’t leave you enough rope to hang yourself with.”
Betty was on the couch when Will came home, which meant that Angie wasn’t there. He took off his jacket and loosened his tie as he adjusted the thermostat. He had been in the house less than a minute and he was already annoyed. Angie knew he liked to keep the air on for Betty. She tended to get nasty heat rashes in the summer.
The answering machine was flashing. There was one message.
Will pressed the button and heard Paul Campano’s voice come out of the speaker.
“Hey, Will,” he said, and that was enough. Will stopped the tape, not wanting to know what the rest of the message said. He didn’t want to hear Paul humbled or grateful. The man had said his name instead of calling him Trash. That was all that Will had ever wanted to hear.
He scooped the dog off the couch and took her to the kitchen, where he was surprised to find her water bowl was filled. He examined Betty’s bug-eyed face, as if he could tell whether or not she had stopped drinking just by looking at her. He was fairly certain Angie hadn’t bothered to fill up the bowl during the day. Betty licked Will’s face and he gave her a pet before putting her down on the floor. He scooped some kibble in her food bowl, then tossed her a piece of her favorite cheese, before going into the bedroom.
It was like an oven in the back of the house. He stripped out of his vest, shirt and pants as he walked to the bed, tossing them all on a chair. Will wasn’t sure what time it was, but he was so tired that it didn’t make a difference. The fact that Angie never made the bed actually seemed like a good thing as he slid between the sheets.
Unbidden, a long, heavy sigh came out of his chest as he closed his eyes. He put his hands on his chest, then he put them down at his sides. He rolled over. He kicked the sheets off. Finally, he ended up on his back again, staring up at the ceiling.
The phone rang, piercing the solitude. Will debated whether or not to answer. He checked the clock. It was ten in the morning. There was no one in the world right now that he wanted to talk to. Amanda wasn’t about to pat him on the back, the press would not know how to get his phone number and Angie was off doing her own thing—whatever that was.
He picked it up before the machine clicked on.
“Hi,” Faith said. “Are you busy?”
“Just lying around in my underwear.” There was no response. “Hello?”
“Yes.” She said the word like a statement, and he realized that yet again he’d blurted out the wrong thing. He was about to apologize when she said, “I told Amanda I’m taking the job.”
Several responses came to mind, but Will weighed them out, not trusting himself not to say something stupid. “Good,” he managed, more like a croak.
“It’s because we caught him.” Bernard, she meant. “If we hadn’t, I probably would’ve been fine going back to my little desk in the murder squad and biding my time until retirement.”
“You’ve never struck me as the type of cop who works on a time clock.”
“It was a really easy habit to fall into when I was partnered with Leo,” she admitted. “Maybe it’ll be different with you.”
He laughed. “I can honestly say that I’ve never had a woman look at being stuck with me as a positive thing.”
She laughed, too. “At least I can help you with your reports.”
Will felt his smile drop. They had not discussed Faith’s obvious realization that there were second-graders in her neighborhood who could read better than Will. He said, “I don’t need help, Faith. Really.” To cut some of the tension, he added, “But, thank you.”
“All right,” she agreed, but the strain was still there.
He tried to think of something else to say—a joke, a bad pun about his illiteracy. Nothing came except the glaring reminder that there was a reason he did not tell people about his problem. Will did not need help with anything. He could pull his own weight, and had for years.
He asked, “When do you start?”
“It’s complicated,” she said. “I’ve got a provisional certificate until I finish my degree, but, basically, I’ll be in your office first thing a week from Monday.”
“My office?” Will asked, getting a sinking sensation. He knew how Amanda worked. She had come down to his office a year ago and noted that, if Will kept his knees up around his ears, another desk could easily be wedged into the space. “That’ll be great,” he said, trying to keep things upbeat.
“I’ve been thinking a lot about Kayla.”
He could tell as much from her tone of voice. “You mean the lawsuit?”
“No. Her motivation.” Faith was silent again, but this time she seemed to be gathering her thoughts. “Nobody liked Kayla except Emma. Her parents were shitty. The whole school hated her.”
“From all reports, she was reviled for a reason.”
“But Bernard’s such a manipulative bastard, it’s hard to tell whether or not she was in it for the thrill or because he told her to do it.”
Will did not want to accept that it was possible for a seventeen-year-old girl to be so sadistic. The only thing he knew for certain was that with Warren dead and Bernard pointing his finger at everyone but himself, they would never really know the truth. “I doubt even Kayla knew the difference.”
“Mary Clark still doesn’t know.”
He considered the poor woman, the damage that had been done to her psyche. On the surface, Mary was living a good life: well educated, married with children, teaching at an upscale school. And yet, all of that meant nothing because of something tragic that had happened to her over a decade ago. It was the same way he had thought of Emma early on in this case: everything she survived would make her want to die every day for the rest of her life. If the GBI and the Atlanta police and every other police force in America really cared about stopping crime, they would take all the money they poured into prisons and the courts and homeland security and spend every nickel on protecting children from the bastards who preyed on them. Will could pretty much guarantee the investment would pay off in saved lives.
“I should go,” Faith told him. “I’m having lunch with Victor Martinez in two hours and I’m still wearing the same clothes he saw me in last time.”
“The guy from Tech?”
“We’ll see how long it takes for me to screw it up.”
“I can give you some pointers.”
“I think I manage that sort of thing well enough on my own.”
She made noises about going, and he stopped her. “Faith?”
“Yes?”
Will struggled to make a grand statement, to welcome her into his life, to find a way to make it clear th
at he was going to do whatever it took to keep things running smoothly. “I’ll see you in a week.”
“All right.”
Will hung up the phone, and a million better things to say came to mind, starting with telling her that he was glad she had made the decision and ending with him begging her to forgive any and all future monkey business. He lay in bed, eyes on the ceiling, and ran through their phone conversation. Will realized that he knew exactly when she had decided to take the job. They were at the copy center, listening to Evan Bernard, Kayla Alexander and Warren Grier planning the abduction of Emma Campano. Both of them were punch-drunk with exhaustion, and their foolish grins must have alarmed Charlie Reed, though the man had held his tongue.
She was right about one thing: as bad as the last few days had been, catching Evan Bernard made it all worthwhile. They had brought Emma Campano home. Warren Grier had meted out his own punishment, but there had been value in what he’d left behind. Kayla Alexander had gotten justice, too, no matter what her involvement had been in the crime. There was a certain satisfaction in those resolutions, a certain reassurance that what you did out on the streets actually mattered.
Yet, Will wondered if Faith knew that her father had an out-of-state bank account with over twenty thousand dollars in it. Will was two weeks into the Evelyn Mitchell case before he thought to check for accounts under her dead husband’s name. The savings account was at least twenty years old and the balance had fluctuated over the years but never dropped below five thousand dollars. The last withdrawal had been three years earlier, so it was hard to track where exactly the money had been spent. Evelyn Mitchell was a cop. She would know better than to keep receipts. As a matter of fact, if Will hadn’t found the account, he would have assumed from the way she lived her life that she was clean. She had a small mortgage, modest savings and a six-year-old Mercedes she had bought used.
It must have been expensive raising your child’s child. Doctor appointments, field trips, schoolbooks. Jeremy wouldn’t have had insurance. Will doubted fifteen-year-old Faith’s policy covered childbirth. Maybe that’s where the money had gone. Maybe she had figured there was nothing wrong with using drug dealers’ money to take care of her family.
There were tax issues, of course, but Will did not work for the IRS. He worked for the GBI, and it was his job to present the evidence to the lawyers and let them decide what case they were going to bring. Will had been mildly surprised when he heard that Evelyn Mitchell was being forcibly retired instead of prosecuted. He had been on the job long enough to know that the higher up you were, the less likely you were to swing, but the bank account was the proverbial slam dunk. Now he knew why the woman had escaped with her pension. Amanda must have pulled some pretty long strings to keep her almost-sister-in-law out of prison.
The front door slammed. “Willy?”
He was silent for just a moment, feeling the painful sting of his solitude being interrupted. “In here.”
Angie narrowed her eyes when she found him lying in bed. “You’re not watching porn, are you?”
Considering Evan Bernard’s sex tapes, it would be many hours before he could think about porn again. “Where were you?”
“I went to see Leo Donnelly in the hospital.”
“You hate him.”
“He’s a cop. Cops go to see cops when they’re in the hospital.”
Will would never understand that code, the secret language that came with wearing a uniform.
Angie said, “I heard you got your guy.”
“Did you hear my prisoner killed himself while he was in my custody?”
“It wasn’t your fault.” Automatic, the cop’s gesundheit of absolution.
“He was one of us,” Will told her, not wanting to say Warren Grier’s name aloud, to make him a living person again. “He was in and out of foster homes all his life. He finally left at eighteen. He was all alone.”
Angie’s eyes softened for just a moment. “Were you with him when he died?”
Will nodded. He had to believe that he had been there for Warren, even as the man took his last breath.
She said, “Then he wasn’t alone, was he?”
Will rolled over on his side so that he could look at her. She was wearing shorts and a white blouse that was so thin it showed the black bra she was wearing underneath. Leo Donnelly must have loved that. He was probably telling half the squad room about it right now.
Will said, “I know you know you’re not pregnant.”
“I know you know.”
There was nothing much more that he could say on the topic.
She asked, “Do you want a sandwich?”
“You let the mayonnaise go bad.”
She gave a sly smile. “I bought a new jar at the store.”
Will felt himself smiling back. It was, he thought, the nicest thing she had done for him in a really long while.
She started to leave, then stopped. “I’m glad you solved your case, Will. No one else would’ve gotten that girl back alive.”
“I’m not so sure about that,” he admitted. “You know a lot of this stuff is just chance.”
“Be sure to tell that to your asshole teacher.”
Evan Bernard. Was the reading teacher’s impending prosecution the product of chance, or was that all down to Will’s insight? Eventually, whoever was leading the investigation would have checked all of the CDs in Warren’s office. Evan Bernard might have been in the wind by then, but they would have found the evidence.
She said, “Maybe if you’re good, we can buff the coffee table again.”
“Maybe the chair. My knees are hurting.”
“I’m not going to marry an old man.”
He didn’t say the obvious, which was that she wasn’t going to marry anybody. Angie hadn’t put her house on the market, she wore her engagement ring only when it suited her and as long as Will had known her, the only commitment she had ever stuck to was one to never stick to commitments. The only promise she had ever kept was that she kept popping back up in his life no matter how many times she told him she was not going to.
She had bought him mayonnaise, though. There was some kind of love in the gesture.
Angie leaned over the bed and gave him an uncharacteristic kiss on the forehead. “I’ll let you know when your sandwich is ready.” Will fell onto his back and stared up at the ceiling. He tried to remember what it felt like to be alone. As far back as he could remember, there had never been that sense of complete isolation you got when there was no one else out there in the world who even knew your name. Angie had always been a phone call away. Even when she was seeing other men, she would drop everything to come to Will’s side. Not that he had ever asked her to, but he knew that she would, just as he knew that he would do the same for her.
Did having Angie in his life mean that Will would never be as alone as Warren Grier? He thought about the scene he had described to the younger man during the interrogation, the picture Will had painted of domestic bliss: Warren would come home to find Emma cooking dinner for him. They would share a bottle of wine and talk about their day. Emma would wash the dishes. Warren would dry. Describing the scenario had been so easy for Will because he knew in his heart that Warren’s dreams would closely parallel his own.
Until recently, Will’s house had looked like Warren’s tiny room on Ashby Street—everything neat, everything in its place. Now Angie’s stuff was strewn about, the imprint of her daily existence firmly melding into Will’s. Was that a bad thing? Was the inconvenience, the disruption, the price that human beings paid for companionship? Will had told Warren that guys like them didn’t know how to be in normal relationships. Maybe Will had landed himself right in the middle of one without having the capacity to recognize the signs.
Clicking announced Betty’s entrance in the bedroom as her toenails struck the wood floor. It was as if the dog had been waiting for Angie to leave. She jumped onto the bed and looked at him expectantly. Will covered himself with the sheet,
thinking it was mildly inappropriate to be undressed in front of the dog. Betty seemed to have her own issues. He saw what looked like potting soil on her snout.
Will closed his eyes, listening to the creaks and groans of the old house, the compressor kicking in as the air conditioner whirred to life. Betty crawled onto his chest and took three turns before settling down. She had a little wheeze when she breathed. Maybe her hay fever was back. Will would have to take her to the doctor for some antihistamine tomorrow.
He heard Angie cursing in the kitchen. There was the sound of a knife hitting the floor, probably covered in mayonnaise. He could picture her wiping it up with her foot, tracking it across the tile. Betty would probably find the spots and lick the greasy residue. Will wondered if dogs could get food poisoning and decided the risk was too great.
Carefully, he scooped Betty off his chest, then put on his pants and went to help Angie in the kitchen.
EPILOGUE
The Ansley Park house sat vacant. The furniture had been auctioned. The walls and floors had been stripped. Special cleaning crews had erased the blood, the scenes of crime. Yet everything was still exactly the same in Abigail Campano’s head. Sometimes she would be in the kitchen of their new house or walking up the staircase and remember Adam Humphrey’s face, the dark red of his eyes as she squeezed the life out of him.
Despite—or maybe because of—the objection of their lawyers, Abby had written his parents a letter. She had told them what Emma had said about their boy, how he was kind and good and gentle. She had apologized. She had freely admitted her guilt. She offered them everything she had and was fully prepared to give it. Abigail had herself been a lawyer and she knew full well what she was doing. Two weeks later, a note had arrived in the mailbox among the various detritus strangers send strangers in times of catastrophe. There was no return address, but the postmark showed a rural town in Oregon. Two short sentences were on the card inside: Thank you for your letter. We pray that we all find the strength to carry on.
The Will Trent Series 7-Book Bundle Page 79
