Sara ended the call. “They’re on their way. Just stay there until—”
“Amanda?” Will glanced around the hallway, trying to put together a plan. Finally, he turned around and got down on his belly.
Sara pleaded, “Will, don’t.”
He elbowed back until his feet hung down into the basement.
“You’re going to fall.”
He edged back farther, expecting any moment for his feet to hit solid ground.
“There are broken pieces of wood down there. You could shatter your ankle. You could land on Amanda.”
Will gripped the edge of the doorjambs with his fingers, praying that his arms wouldn’t give. Which they eventually did. He dropped straight down like the blade on a guillotine.
“Will?” Sara was in the open doorway. She got down on her knees. “Are you all right?”
Pieces of wood poked into his back like sharp fingers. Sawdust filled the air. Will’s nose had banged into his knee so hard that pinpoints of light exploded in front of his eyes. He touched the side of his ankle. A nail had scraped across the bone. His teeth ached at the memory.
“Will?” Sara’s tone rose in alarm. “Will?”
“I’m all right.” He felt his ankle squick as he moved. Blood pooled into the heel of his shoe. He tried to make light of the situation. “Looks like I was right about needing that tetanus shot.”
She mumbled a shocking expletive.
Will tried to stand, but his feet couldn’t find purchase. He blindly reached out, thinking Amanda was close by. He got on his knees, leaning out farther, and finally was rewarded with a foot. Her shoe was missing. Her pantyhose were torn.
“Amanda?” Carefully, Will picked his way across the shards of wood and broken nails. He put his hand on her shin, then her thigh. He gently felt along until he found her arm folded over her stomach.
Amanda moaned.
Will’s stomach roiled as his fingers followed the unnatural angle of her wrist. “Amanda?” he repeated.
She moaned again. Will knew she’d have a Maglite in the Suburban. He dug his fingers into the front pockets of her jeans, trying to find her keys. He could send Sara out to the car. She would have to search for the flashlight. He would tell her it was in the glove compartment or one of the locked drawers. She would spend several minutes looking for the light, which was exactly what Will needed.
“Amanda?” He checked her back pockets. The tips of his fingers brushed along the broken plastic case on her BlackBerry.
Suddenly, Amanda’s good hand clamped around his wrist. She asked, “Where’s My-kel?”
Will stopped searching for the keys. “Amanda? It’s Will. Will Trent.”
Her tone was terse. “I know who you are, Wilbur.”
Will felt his body go rigid. Only Angie called him Wilbur. It was the name on his birth certificate.
Sara asked, “Is she okay?”
Will had to swallow before he could speak. “I think her wrist is broken.”
“How’s her respiration?”
He listened for the cadence of her breath, but all he could hear was his own blood pounding in his ears. Why was Amanda here? She should be out looking for the missing girl. She should be leading the team. She shouldn’t be here. In this basement. With a hammer.
“Will?” Sara’s tone was softer now. She was worried about him.
He asked, “How long before the ambulance gets here?”
“Not much longer. Are you sure you’re all right?”
“I’m fine.” Will put his hand on Amanda’s foot again. He could feel a steady pulse near her ankle. He’d worked for this woman most of his career but still knew very little about her. She lived in a condo in the heart of Buckhead. She had been on the job longer than he had been alive, which put her age in the mid-sixties. She kept her salt-and-pepper hair coiffed in the shape of a football helmet and wore pantyhose with starched blue jeans. She had a sharp tongue, more degrees than a college professor, and she knew that his name was Wilbur even though he’d had it legally changed when he entered college and every piece of paper the GBI had on file listed his legal name as William Trent.
He cleared his throat again so that he could ask Sara, “Is there anything I should be doing?”
“No, just stay where you are.” Sara used a raised, clear tone Will thought of as her doctor’s voice. “Amanda. This is Dr. Linton. Can you tell me today’s date?”
She groaned out a pained breath. “I told Edna to shore up those steps a million times.”
Will sat back on his heels. Something sharp pressed against his knee. He felt blood sliding across his ankle, dripping through his sock. His heart was pounding so hard that he was sure Sara could hear it.
“Will,” Amanda mumbled. “What time is it?”
Will couldn’t answer her. His mouth felt wired shut.
Sara took over, saying, “It’s five-thirty.”
“In the evening,” Amanda said, not a question. “We’re at the children’s home. I fell down the basement stairs.” She lay there taking deep breaths of the pungent air. “Dr. Linton, am I going to live?”
“I’d be very surprised if you didn’t.”
“Well, I suppose that’s as much as I can ask for right now. Did I lose consciousness?”
“Yes,” Sara answered. “For about two minutes.”
Amanda spoke more to herself. “I don’t know what that means. Are you touching my foot?”
Will pulled away his hand.
“I can move my toes.” Amanda sounded relieved. “My head feels like it’s been cracked open.” He heard movement, the rustling of clothes. “No, nothing sticking out. No blood. No soft spots. God, my shoulder hurts.”
Will tasted blood. His nose was bleeding. He used the back of his hand to wipe his mouth.
Amanda let out another heavy sigh. “I’ll tell you what, Will. You get past a certain age and a broken bone or a cracked head is no laughing matter. It’s with you for the rest of your life. What’s left of the rest of your life.”
She was quiet for a few seconds. From the sound of it, she was trying to keep her breathing steady. Despite the fact that he was obviously not going to answer, she told Will, “When I joined the Atlanta Police Department, there was a whole division assigned to checking our appearance. The Inspection Division. Six full-duty officers. I’m not making that up.”
Will glanced up at Sara. She shrugged.
“They would show up during roll call, and if you didn’t fix what they told you to fix, you were suspended without pay.”
He put his hand to his watch, wishing he could feel the second hand ticking by. Grady Hospital was only a few blocks away. There was no reason for the ambulance to be taking so long. They knew Amanda was a cop. They knew she needed help.
Amanda said, “I remember the first time I rolled up on a signal forty-five. Some jackass had a CB radio stolen out of his car. We were always getting forty-fives on CB radios. They had those big antennas pointing like arrows off their back bumpers.”
Again, Will glanced up at Sara. She made a circling motion, indicating he should keep Amanda talking.
Will’s throat was too tight. He couldn’t force out the words, couldn’t pretend that they were all just a bunch of friends who’d had a bad day.
Amanda didn’t seem to need encouragement. She chuckled under her breath. “They laughed at me. They laughed at me when I got there. They laughed at me when I took the report. They laughed at me when I left. No one thought women should be in uniform. The station would get calls every week—someone reporting that a woman had stolen a squad car. They couldn’t believe we were on the job.”
Sara said, “I think they’re here,” just as Will heard the distant wail of a siren. “I’ll go wave them down.”
Will waited until Sara’s footsteps were on the front porch. It took everything in him not to grab Amanda by the shoulders and shake her. “Why are you here?”
“Is Sara gone?”
“Why are you here?�
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Amanda’s tone turned uncharacteristically gentle. “I have to tell you something.”
“I don’t care,” he shot back. “How did you know—”
“Shut up and listen,” she hissed. “Are you listening?”
Will felt the dread come flooding back. The siren was louder. The ambulance braked hard in front of the house.
“Are you listening?”
Will found himself speechless again.
“It’s about your father.”
She said more, but Will’s ears felt muffled, as if he was listening to her voice underwater. As a kid, Will had ruined the earpiece to his transistor radio that way, putting the bud in his ear, dunking his head in the bathtub, thinking that would be a cool new way to hear music. It had been in this very house. Two floors up in the boys’ bathroom. He was lucky he hadn’t electrocuted himself.
There was a loud thunk overhead as paramedics shoved open the front door. Heavy footsteps banged across the floor. The bright beam of a Maglite suddenly filled the basement. Will blinked in the glare. He felt dizzy. His lungs ached for breath.
Amanda’s words came rushing back to him the same way sound had come back to his ears when he’d grabbed the sides of the tub and thrust his head above water.
“Listen to me,” she’d ordered.
But he didn’t want to. He didn’t want to know what she had to say.
The parole board had met. They had let Will’s father out of prison.
three
October 15, 1974
LUCY BENNETT
Lucy had lost track of time once the symptoms had subsided. She knew it took heroin three days to fully leave your bloodstream. She knew that the sweats and sickness lasted a week or more, depending on how far gone you were. The stomach cramps. The throbbing pain in your legs. The alternating constipation and diarrhea. The bright red blood from your lungs giving up the Drano or baby formula or whatever was used to cut down the Boy.
People had died trying to leave H on their own. The drug was vengeful. It owned you. It clawed into your skin and wouldn’t let go. Lucy had seen its castoffs laid out in back rooms and vacant parking lots. Their flesh desiccated. Fingers and toes curled. Their nails and hair kept growing. They looked like mummified witches.
Weeks? Months? Years?
The stifling August heat had been broken by what could only be fall temperatures. Cool mornings. Cold nights. Was winter coming? Was it still 1974, or had she missed Thanksgiving, Christmas, her birthday?
Sands through the hourglass.
Did it really matter anymore?
Every day, Lucy wished that she was dead. The heroin was gone, but not a second went by when she wasn’t thinking about that high. The transcendence. The obliteration. The numbing of her mind. The ecstasy of the needle hitting vein. The rush of fire burning through her senses. Those first few days, Lucy could still taste the H in her vomit. She’d tried to eat it, but the man had forced her to stop.
The man.
The monster.
Who would do something like this? It defied logic. There was no pattern in Lucy’s life to explain why this was happening. As bad as some of her johns were, they always let her go. Once they got what they wanted, they tossed her back into the street. They didn’t want to see her again. They hated the sight of her. They kicked her if she didn’t move fast enough. They shoved her out of their cars and sped away.
But not him. Not this man. Not this devil.
Lucy wanted him to fuck her. She wanted him to beat her. She wanted him to do anything but the loathsome routine she had to endure every day. The way he brushed her hair and teeth. The way he bathed her. The chaste way he used the rag to wash between her legs. The gentle pats of the towel as he dried her. The look of pity every time her eyes opened and closed. And the praying. The constant praying.
“Wash away your sins. Wash away your sins.” It was his mantra. He said nothing directly to her. He only spoke to God, as if He would listen to an animal like this man. Lucy asked why—why her? Why this? She screamed at him. She begged him. She offered him anything, and all he said was, “Wash away your sins.”
Lucy had grown up with prayer. Over the years, she had often found solace in religion. The smell of a burning candle or the taste of wine could send her back to the church pew, where she happily sat between her mother and father. Her brother, Henry, would scribble crude drawings on the bulletin, bored nearly to death, but Lucy loved listening to the preacher extol the vast rewards of a godly life. On the streets, it gave her comfort to think about those sermons from long ago. Even as a sinner, she was not completely without salvation. The crucifixion meant nothing if not to redeem Lucy Bennett’s soul.
But not like this. Never like this. Not the soap and water. Not the blood and wine. Not the needle and thread.
There was penance, and then there was torture.
four
July 7, 1975
MONDAY
Amanda Wagner let out a long sigh of relief as she drove out of her father’s Ansley Park neighborhood. Duke had been in rare form this morning. He’d begun a litany of complaints the moment Amanda walked through his kitchen door and not stopped until she was waving goodbye from behind the wheel of her car. Feckless veterans looking for handouts. Gas prices through the roof. New York City expecting the rest of the country to bail them out. There was not one story in the morning paper about which Duke did not share his opinion. By the time he’d started listing the seemingly endless faults of the newly organized Atlanta Police Department, Amanda was only half listening, nodding occasionally to keep his temper from turning in the wrong direction.
She cooked his breakfast. She kept his coffee mug filled. She emptied his ashtrays. She laid out a shirt and tie on his bed. She wrote down directions for thawing the roast so she could fix his supper after work. Meanwhile, the only thing that made it all bearable was thinking about her tiny studio apartment on Peachtree Street.
The place was less than five minutes away from her father’s house, but it might as well be on the moon. Stuck between the library and the hippie compound along Fourteenth Street, the apartment was one of six units in an old Victorian mansion. Duke had taken one look at the space and snorted that he’d had better accommodations on Midway during the war. None of the windows would properly close. The freezer wasn’t cold enough to make ice. The kitchen table had to be moved before the oven door could be opened. The toilet lid scraped the side of the bathtub.
It was love at first sight.
Amanda was twenty-five years old. She was going to college. She had a good job. After years of begging, she’d finally managed by some miracle to persuade her father to let her move out. She wasn’t exactly Mary Richards, but at least she wouldn’t pass for Edith Bunker anymore.
She slowed her car and took a right turn onto Highland Avenue, then another right into the strip mall behind the pharmacy. The summer heat was almost suffocating, though it was only quarter till eight in the morning. Steam misted from the asphalt as she pulled into a parking space at the far end of the lot. Her hands were sweating so badly that she could barely grip the steering wheel. Her pantyhose were cutting into her waist. The back of her shirt stuck to the seat. There was a throbbing ache in her neck that was working its way up to her temples.
Still, Amanda rolled down her shirtsleeves and buttoned the tight cuffs at her wrists. She dragged her purse off the passenger’s seat, thinking the bag got heavier every time she lifted it. She reminded herself that it was better than what she was wearing on patrol this time last year. Undergarments. Pantyhose. Black socks. Navy-colored, polyester-blend pants. A man’s cotton shirt that was so big the breast pockets tucked below her waist. Underbelt. Metal hooks. Outer belt. Holster. Gun. Radio. Shoulder mic. Kel-Lite. Handcuffs. Nightstick. Key holder.
It was no wonder the patrolwomen of the Atlanta police force had bladders the size of watermelons. It took ten minutes to remove all the equipment from your waist before you could go to the bathroom—and th
at was assuming you could sit down without your back going into spasms. The Kel-Lite alone, with its four D-cell batteries and eighteen-inch-long shaft, weighed in at just under eight pounds.
Amanda felt every ounce of the weight as she hefted her purse onto her shoulder and got out of the car. Same equipment, but now that she was a plainclothes officer it was in a leather bag instead of on her hips. It had to be called progress.
Her father had been in charge of Zone 1 when Amanda joined the force. For nearly twenty years, Captain Duke Wagner had run the unit with an iron fist, right up until Reginald Eaves, Atlanta’s first black public safety commissioner, fired most of the senior white officers and replaced them with blacks. The collective outrage had nearly toppled the force. That previous chief John Inman had done basically the same thing in reverse seemed to be a fact lost in everyone’s collective memory. The good ol’ boy network was fine so long as you were one of the lucky few who were dialed in.
Consequently, Duke and his ilk were suing the city for their old jobs back. Maynard Jackson, the city’s first black mayor, was backing his man. No one knew how it would end, though to hear Duke talk, it was just a matter of time before the city capitulated. No matter their color, politicians needed votes, and voters wanted to feel safe. Which explained why the police force gripped the city like a devouring octopus, its tentacles spreading in every direction.
Six patrol zones stretched from the impoverished Southside to the more affluent northern neighborhoods. Spotted within these zones were so-called “Model Cities,” precincts that served the more violent sections of the downtown corridor. There were small pockets of wealth inside Ansley Park, Piedmont Heights, and Buckhead, but a good many of the city’s inhabitants lived in slums, from Grady Homes to Techwood to the city’s most notorious housing project, Perry Homes. This Westside ghetto was so dangerous it warranted its own police force. It was the sort of job returning vets clamored for, more like a war zone than a neighborhood.
The plainclothes and detective units were posted across the zones. There were twelve divisions in all, from vice control to special investigations. Sex crimes was one of the few divisions that allowed women in any numbers. Amanda doubted very seriously her father would’ve let her apply for the unit had he still been on the force when she submitted her application. She cringed to think what would happen if Duke won his lawsuit and got reinstated. He’d likely have her back in uniform performing crossing-guard duties in front of Morningside Elementary.
The Will Trent Series 7-Book Bundle Page 210
