Faith let his words hang in the air, her brain trying to make sense of them. There was no way to make sense of it, though: What had been done to those women was not the product of a sound mind.
She asked, “Where’s Jacquelyn Zabel’s BMW?”
“Not in her driveway in Florida. And not at her mother’s house.”
“Did you put out an APB on the car?”
“In both Florida and Georgia.” He reached around to the back seat and pulled out a handful of folders. They were all color-coded, and he thumbed through until he found the orange one, which he handed to Faith. She opened it to find a printout from the Florida Department of Motor Vehicles. Jacquelyn Alexandra Zabel’s driver’s license stared back at her, the picture showing a very attractive woman with long dark hair and brown eyes. “She’s pretty,” Faith said.
“So’s Anna,” Will provided. “Brown hair, brown eyes.”
“Our guy has a type.” Faith turned to the next page and read aloud from the woman’s driving record, “Zabel’s car is a 2008 red BMW 540i. Speeding ticket six months ago for going eighty in a fifty-five. Running a stop sign in a school zone last month. Failure to stop at a roadblock two weeks ago, refused to take a Breathalyzer, court date pending.” She thumbed through the pages. “Her record was pretty clean until recently.”
Will absently scratched his forearm as he waited for another light to change. “Maybe something happened.”
“What about the notes Charlie found in the cave?”
“ ‘I will not deny myself,’ ” he recalled, taking out the blue folder. “The pages are being fingerprinted. They’re from a standard spiral notebook, written in pencil, probably by a woman.”
Faith looked at the copy, the same sentence written over and over again like she’d done many times herself as punishment back in junior high school. “And the rib?”
He was still scratching his arm. “No sign of the rib in the cave or the immediate area.”
“A souvenir?”
“Maybe,” he said. “Jacquelyn didn’t have any cuts on her body.” He corrected, “I mean, any deep cuts like what Anna had where the rib was removed. Both of them looked like they’d been through the same kind of stuff, though.”
“Torture.” Faith tried to put herself in the mind of their perpetrator. “He keeps one woman on the top of the bed and one woman underneath. Maybe he trades them out—does one horrible thing to Anna, then swaps her out for Jacquelyn and does the horrible thing to her.”
“Then trades them back,” Will said. “So, maybe Jacquelyn heard what happened to Anna with the rib, knew what was coming and chewed her way through the rope around her wrist.”
“She must have found the penknife, or had it with her under the bed.”
“Charlie examined the slats under the bed. He put them back together in sequence. The tip of a very sharp knife ran in the center of each slat where someone cut the rope from underneath the bed, head to foot.”
Faith suppressed a shudder as she stated the obvious. “Jacquelyn was under the bed while Anna was being mutilated.”
“And she was probably alive while we were searching the woods.”
Faith opened her mouth to say something along the lines of “It’s not your fault,” but she knew the words were useless. She felt guilt herself for not being out there during the search. She could not imagine how Will was feeling, considering he’d been blundering around in the woods while the woman was dying.
Instead, she asked, “What’s wrong with your arm?”
“What do you mean?”
“You keep scratching it.”
He stopped the car and squinted up at the street signs.
“Hamilton,” Faith read.
He checked his watch, a ploy he used for telling left from right. “Both victims were probably well-off,” he said, taking a right onto Hamilton. “Anna was malnourished, but her hair was nice—the color, I mean—and she’d had a manicure recently. The polish on her nails was chipped, but it looked professionally done.”
Faith didn’t press him on how he knew a professional manicure from an amateur one. “These women weren’t prostitutes. They had homes and probably jobs. It’s unusual for a killer to choose victims who will be missed.”
“Motive, means, opportunity,” he listed, stating the foundation for any investigation. “Motive is sex and torture and maybe taking the rib.”
“Means,” Faith said, trying to think of ways the killer might have abducted his victims. “Maybe he rigs their cars to break down? He could be a mechanic.”
“BMWs are equipped with driver assist. You just press a button and they’re on the phone with you and they send out a tow truck.”
“Nice,” Faith said. The Mini was a poor man’s BMW, which meant you had to use your own phone if you got stuck. “Jacquelyn’s moving her mother’s house. That means she probably contracted with a moving company or liquidation agent.”
“She’d need a termite letter to sell the house,” Will added. You couldn’t get a mortgage on a house in most of the South without first proving that termites weren’t feasting on the foundation. “So, our bad guy could be an exterminator, a contractor, a mover …”
Faith got out a pen and started a list on the back of the orange folder. “Her real estate license wouldn’t transfer up here, so she’d have to have an Atlanta agent to sell the house.”
“Unless she did a for-sale-by-owner, in which case she could have had open houses, could’ve had strangers in and out all the time.”
“Why didn’t anyone notice she was missing?” Faith asked. “Sara said Anna was taken at least four days ago.”
“Who’s Sara?”
“Sara Linton,” Faith said. He shrugged, and she studied him carefully. Will never forgot names. He never forgot anything. “The doctor from yesterday?”
“Is that her name?”
Faith resisted a “Come on.”
He asked, “How would she know how long Anna was kept?”
“She used to be a coroner in some county way down south.”
Will’s eyebrows went up. He slowed to look at another sign. “A coroner? That’s weird.”
He was one to talk. “She was a coroner and a pediatrician.”
Will mumbled as he tried to make out the sign. “I took her for a dancer.”
“Woodland,” Faith read. “A dancer? She’s twenty feet tall.”
“Dancers can be tall.”
Faith clenched her teeth together so that she would not laugh out loud.
“Anyway.” He didn’t add anything else, using the word to indicate an end to that part of the conversation.
She studied his profile as he turned the wheel, the way he stared so intently at the road ahead. Will was an attractive man, arguably handsome, but he was about as self-aware as a snail. His wife, Angie Polaski, seemed to see beyond his quirks—among them his painful inability to conduct small talk and the anachronistic three-piece suits he insisted on wearing. In return, Will seemed to overlook the fact that Angie had slept with half the Atlanta police force, including—if graffiti in the ladies’ toilet on the third floor was to be believed—a couple of women. They had met each other at the Atlanta Children’s Home, and Faith supposed this was the connection that bound them together. They were both orphans, both abandoned by, presumably, crappy parents. As with everything in his personal life, Will did not share the details. Faith hadn’t even known that he and Angie were officially married until Will showed up one morning wearing a wedding band.
And she had never known Will to even give a passing glance to another woman until now.
“This is it,” he said, taking a right down a narrow, tree-lined street. She saw the white crime-scene van parked in front of a very small house. Charlie Reed and two of his assistants were already going through the trash on the side of the road. Whoever had taken out the trash was the neatest person in the world. There were boxes stacked up on the curb, three rows of two, each labeled with the contents. Beside these were
a bunch of large black garbage bags lined up like a row of sentries. On the other side of the mailbox were a precisely aligned mattress and box spring, and a couple of pieces of furniture that the local trash trollers hadn’t spotted yet. Behind Charlie’s van were two empty Atlanta police cruisers, and Faith assumed the patrolmen Will had requested were already canvassing the neighborhood.
Faith said, “Her husband was a cop. Sounds like he was killed in the line of duty. I hope they fried the bastard.”
“Whose husband?”
He knew damn well who she was talking about. “Sara Linton’s. The dancing doctor.”
Will put the car in park and cut the engine. “I asked Charlie to hold off on processing the house.” He took two pairs of latex gloves out of his jacket pocket and handed one to Faith. “My guess is that it’s packed up for the move, but you never know.”
Faith got out of the car. Charlie would have to close off the house as a crime scene as soon as he started collecting evidence. Letting Will and Faith check it out first meant that they wouldn’t have to wait for everything to be processed before they started following up on clues.
“Hey there,” Charlie called, tossing them an almost cheery wave. “Got here just in time.” He indicated the bags. “Goodwill was about to cart it off when we pulled up.”
“What’ve you got?”
He showed them the tags on the bags where the contents had been neatly labeled. “Clothes, mostly. Kitchen items, old blenders, that sort of thing.” He flashed a smile. “Beats the hell out of that hole in the ground.”
Will asked, “When do you think we’ll have the analysis back from the cave?”
“Amanda put a rush on it. There was a lot of shit down there, literally and figuratively. We prioritized the pieces we thought might be more important. You know that DNA from the fluids will take forty-eight hours. Fingerprints are run through the computer as they’re developed. If there’s something earth-shattering down there, we’ll know by tomorrow morning at the latest.” He mimed holding a telephone receiver to his ear. “You’ll be the first call.”
Will indicated the garbage bags. “Find anything useful?”
Charlie handed him a packet of mail. Will snapped off the rubber band and looked at each envelope before handing it to Faith. “Postmark’s recent,” he noticed. He could easily read numbers, if not words, which was one of the many useful tools he used to conceal his problem. He was also good at recognizing company logos. “Gas bill, electric, cable …”
Faith read the name of the addressee: “Gwendolyn Zabel. That’s a lovely old name.”
“Like Faith,” Charlie said, and she was a little surprised to hear him utter something so personal. He hastily covered for it, saying, “And she lived in a lovely old house.”
Faith wouldn’t have called the small bungalow lovely, but it was certainly quaint with its gray shingles and red trim. Nothing had been done to update the place, or even simply keep it up. The gutters sagged from years of leaves and the roofline resembled a camel’s back. The grass was neatly trimmed, but there were no flower beds or carefully sculpted shrubs typical to Atlanta homes. All the other houses on the street but one had a second story added on or had simply been torn down to make way for a mansion. Gwendolyn Zabel must have been one of the last holdouts, the only two-bedroom, one-bath in the area. Faith wondered if the neighbors were glad to see the old woman go. Her daughter must have been happy to have the check from the sale. A house like this had probably cost around thirty thousand dollars when it was first built. Now the land alone would be worth around half a million.
Will asked Charlie, “Did you get the door unlocked?”
“It was unlocked when I got here,” he told them. “Me and the guys took a look around. Nothing jumped out, but you’ve got first dibs.” He indicated the trash pile in front of him. “This is just the tip of the iceberg. The place is a freakin’ mess.”
Will and Faith exchanged a look as they walked toward the house. Inman Park was far from Mayberry. You didn’t leave your door unlocked unless you were hoping for an insurance claim.
Faith pushed open the front door, walking back into the 1970s as she crossed the threshold. The green shag carpet on the floor was deep enough to cup her tennis shoes, and the mirrored wallpaper was kind enough to remind her that she’d put on fifteen pounds in the last month.
“Wow,” Will said, glancing around the front room. It was packed with untold amounts of crap: stacks of newspapers, paperback books, magazines.
“This can’t be safe to live in.”
“Imagine how it looked with all the stuff on the street back inside.” Faith picked up a rusted hand blender sitting on the top of a stack of Life magazines. “Sometimes old people start collecting things and they can’t stop.”
“This is crazy,” he said, wiping his hand along a stack of old forty-fives. Dust flew into the stale air.
“My grandmother’s house was worse than this,” Faith told him. “It took us a whole week just to be able to walk through to the kitchen.”
“Why would someone do this?”
“I don’t know,” she admitted. Her grandfather had died when Faith was a child, and her granny Mitchell had lived on her own for most of her life. She had started collecting things in her fifties, and by the time she was moved into a nursing home, the house had been filled to the rafters with useless things. Looking around another lonely old woman’s house, seeing a similar accumulation, made Faith wonder if someday Jeremy would be saying the same thing about Faith’s housekeeping.
At least he would have a little brother or sister to help him. Faith put her hand to her stomach, wondering for the first time about the child growing inside of her. Was it a girl or a boy? Would it have her blonde hair or its father’s dark Latino looks? Jeremy looked nothing like his father, thank God. Faith’s first love had been a gangly hillbilly with a build that was reminiscent of Spike from the Peanuts cartoon. As a baby, Jeremy had been almost delicate, like a thin piece of porcelain. He’d had the sweetest little feet. Those first few days, Faith had spent hours staring at his tiny toes, kissing the bottoms of his heels. She had thought that he was the most remarkable thing on the face of the earth. He had been her little doll.
“Faith?”
She dropped her hand, wondering what had come over her. She’d taken enough insulin this morning. Maybe she was just feeling the typical hormonal swings of pregnancy that had made being fourteen such a pleasure for Faith as well as everyone around her. How on Earth was she going to go through this again? And how was she going to do it alone?
“Faith?”
“You don’t have to keep saying my name, Will.” She indicated the back of the house. “Go check the kitchen. I’ll take the bedrooms.”
He gave her a careful look before heading into the kitchen.
Faith walked down the hallway toward the back rooms, picking her way through broken blenders and toasters and telephones. She wondered if the old woman had scavenged for these things or if she had accumulated them over a lifetime. The framed photographs on the walls looked ancient, some of them in sepia and black-and-white. Faith scanned them as she made her way back, wondering when people had started smiling for photographs, and why. She had some older photos of her mother’s grandparents that were particularly treasured. They had lived on a farm during the Depression, and a traveling photographer had taken a shot of their small family as well as a mule that was called Big Pete. Only the mule had been smiling.
There was no Big Pete on Gwendolyn Zabel’s wall, but some of the color photographs showed not one but two different young girls, both with dark brown hair hanging down past their pencil-thin waists. They were a few years apart in age, but definitely sisters. None of the more recent photographs showed the two posing together. Jacquelyn’s sister seemed to prefer desert settings for the shots she sent her mother, while Jacquelyn’s photos tended to show her posing on the beach, a bikini low across her boyishly thin hips. Faith could not help but think if she l
ooked that great at thirty-eight years old, she’d be taking picture of herself wearing a bikini, too. There were very few recent pictures of the sister, who appeared to have grown plumper with age. Faith hoped she had kept in touch with her mother. They could do a reverse trace on the telephone and find her that way.
The first bedroom did not have a door. Stacks of debris filled the room—more newspapers and magazines. There were some boxes, but for the most part, the small bedroom was filled with so much trash it was impossible to go more than a few feet in. A musty odor filled the air, and Faith remembered a story she’d seen on the news many years ago about a woman who’d gotten a paper cut from an old magazine and ended up dying from some strange disease. She backed out of the room and glanced into the bathroom. More junk, but someone had cleared a path to the toilet and scrubbed it clean. A toothbrush and some other toiletries were lined up on the sink. There were piles of garbage bags in the bathtub. The shower curtain was almost black with mold.
Faith had to turn sideways to get past the door to the master bedroom. She saw the reason as soon as she was inside. There was an old rocking chair near the door, so piled with clothes that it was ready to topple over except for the door propping it up. More clothes were scattered around the room, the sort of stuff that would be called vintage and sold for hundreds of dollars down the street in the funky clothing stores of Little Five Points.
The house was warm, which made it more difficult for Faith to get her sweaty hands into the latex gloves. She ignored the pinprick of dried blood on the tip of her finger, not wanting to think about anything else that would turn her into a sobbing mess.
She started on the chest of drawers first. All of the drawers were open, so it was just a matter of pushing around clothes, looking for stashed letters or an address book that might list family relations. The bed was neatly made, the only item in the house about which “neat” could be said to describe it. There was no telling if Jacquelyn Zabel had slept in her mother’s bedroom or if she had opted for a hotel downtown.
The Will Trent Series 7-Book Bundle Page 91
