“Are you—”
“It’s been a long day, Jeremy. I need to go to sleep.”
He was still reluctant. “All right.”
“Can you shut my door?” She wasn’t sure she could move even if she wanted to.
Jeremy gave her another worried look as he pulled the door closed. Faith heard the click of the latch, then the soft padding of his feet as he walked down the hall to the laundry room. It was only when she heard the third stair from the bottom squeak that Faith allowed herself to pull her hand out from under the pillow.
She opened her clenched fist. The sharp pain of fear receded and now all Faith could feel was blinding fury.
The message on Jeremy’s iPhone. His high school. His birth year.
Keep your mouth shut and your eyes open.
Her son had lain in this bed, his feet inches from what she had found.
I’m sure the bad guys will get fingered.
The words only made sense when Faith held her mother’s severed finger in her hand.
CHAPTER SIX
SARA LINTON WAS NO STRANGER TO SELF-LOATHING. SHE’D felt ashamed when her father saw her steal a candy bar from the honor box at church. She’d felt humiliated when she caught her husband cheating on her. She’d felt guilty when she lied to her sister about liking her brother-in-law. She’d felt embarrassed when her mother pointed out that she was too tall to wear capri pants. What she’d never felt like was trashy, and the knowledge that she was no better than a reality TV star cut her to the core of her being.
Even now, hours later, Sara’s face still burned at the thought of her confrontation with Angie Trent. There was only one other time in her life that she could recall a woman talking to her the way Angie had. Jeffrey’s mother was a mean drunk, and Sara had caught her on a very bad night. The only difference in this instance was that Angie had absolutely every right to label Sara a whore.
Jezebel, Sara’s mother would’ve said.
Not that Sara was going to tell her mother about any of this.
She muted the television, the sound grating on her nerves. She’d tried reading. She’d tried cleaning up her apartment. She’d clipped the dogs’ toenails. She’d washed dishes and folded clothes that were so wrinkled from being piled on her couch for so long that she’d had to iron them before they would fit in the drawers.
Twice, she’d headed toward the elevator to take Will’s car back to his house. Twice she’d turned back around. The problem was his keys. She couldn’t leave them in the car and she sure as hell wasn’t going to knock on the front door and hand them to Angie. Leaving them in his mailbox was not an option. Will’s neighborhood wasn’t bad, but he lived in the middle of a major metropolitan city. The car would be gone in the time it took Sara to walk back home.
So she just kept assigning herself busywork, all the while dreading Will’s arrival like a root canal. What would she say to him when he finally came to get his car? Words failed, though Sara had silently rehearsed plenty of speeches about honor and morality. The voice in her head had taken on the cadence of a Baptist preacher. This was all so sordid. It wasn’t right. Sara was not going to be some tawdry other woman. She wasn’t going to steal someone’s husband, even if he was ripe for the taking. Nor was she going to engage in a catfight with Angie Trent. Most of all, she wasn’t going to step into the middle of their incredibly dysfunctional relationship.
What kind of monster bragged about her husband trying to kill himself? It made Sara’s stomach turn. And then there was the larger issue: to what depths had Will sunk where slicing a razor up his arm seemed like the only solution? How obsessed was he with Angie that he would do such a terrible thing? And how sick was Angie that she’d held him while he did it?
These questions were best handled by a psychiatrist. Will’s childhood obviously had not been a walk in the park. That fact alone could cause some damage. His dyslexia was an issue, but it didn’t seem to stop his life. He had his quirks, but they were endearing, not off-putting. Had he worked through his suicidal tendencies or was he just good at hiding them? If he was past that point in his life, why was he still with that horrible woman?
And since Sara had decided nothing was going to happen between them, why was she still wasting her time thinking about these things?
He wasn’t even her type. Will was nothing like Jeffrey. There was none of her husband’s staggering self-confidence on display. Despite his height, Will wasn’t a physically intimidating man. Jeffrey had been a football player. He knew how to lead a team. Will was a loner, content to blend into the background and do his job under the shadow of Amanda’s thumb. He didn’t want glory or recognition. Not that Jeffrey had been an attention seeker, but he was incredibly secure in who he was and what he wanted. Women had swooned in his presence. He knew how to do just about everything the right way, which was one of the many reasons Sara had thrown logic to the wind and married him. Twice.
Maybe she wasn’t really interested in Will Trent at all. Maybe Angie Trent was partly right. Sara had liked being married to a cop, but not for the kinky reasons Angie had implied. The black-and-white nature of law enforcement appealed to Sara on a deep level. Her parents had raised her to help people, and you couldn’t get much more helpful than being a police officer. There was also a part of her brain that was drawn to the puzzle-solving aspects of a criminal investigation. She had loved talking to Jeffrey about his cases. Working in the morgue as the county coroner, finding clues, giving him information that she knew would help him with his job, had made her feel useful.
Sara groaned. As if being a doctor wasn’t a useful thing. Maybe Angie Trent was right about the perversion. Next, Sara would start trying to imagine Will in a uniform.
She shifted her two greyhounds off her lap so that she could stand. Billy yawned. Bob rolled onto his back to get more comfortable. She glanced around her apartment. An antsiness took over. She felt overwhelmed by the desire to change something—anything—so that she felt more in control of her life.
She started with the couches, siding them at an angle from the television while the dogs looked down at the floor passing underneath them. The coffee table was too big for the new arrangement, so she shifted everything again, only to find that that didn’t work, either. By the time she finished rolling up the rug and muscling everything back into its original place, she was sweating.
There was dust on the top of the picture frame over the console table. Sara got the furniture polish out and started dusting again. There was a lot of space to cover. The building she lived in was a converted milk-processing factory. Red brick walls supported twenty-foot ceilings. All the mechanical workings were exposed. The interior doors were distressed wood with barn door hardware. It was the sort of industrial loft you expected to find in New York City, though Sara had paid considerably less than the ten million dollars such a place would fetch in Manhattan.
No one thought the space suited her, which was what had drawn Sara to the apartment in the first place. When she’d first moved to Atlanta, she’d wanted something completely different from her homey bungalow back home. She was thinking lately that she’d gone overboard. The open plan felt almost cavernous. The kitchen, with its stainless steel everything and black granite tops, had been very expensive and very useless to someone like Sara, who had been known to burn soup. All the furniture was too modern. The dining room table, carved from a single piece of wood and large enough to seat twelve, was a ridiculous luxury considering she only used it to sort mail and hold the pizza box while she paid the delivery guy.
Sara put away the furniture polish. Dust wasn’t the problem. She should move. She should find a small house in one of the more settled Atlanta neighborhoods and get rid of the low-lying leather couches and glass coffee tables. She should have fluffy couches and wide chairs you could snuggle into for reading. She should have a kitchen with a farmhouse sink and a cheery view to the backyard through the wide-open windows.
She should live somewhere like Will’s
house.
The television caught her eye. The logo for the evening news scrolled onto the screen. A serious-looking reporter stood in front of the Georgia Diagnostic and Classification Prison. Most insiders referred to it as the D&C, fully mindful of the play on words for Georgia’s death row. Sara had seen the story of the two murdered men earlier and thought then what she thought now: here was yet another reason not to be involved with Will Trent.
He was working on Evelyn Mitchell’s case. He had probably been nowhere near that prison today, but the minute Sara saw the story about a murdered officer, her heart had jumped into her throat. Even after they’d given the man’s name as well as that of the dead inmate, her heart would not calm. Thanks to Jeffrey, Sara knew how it felt when the phone unexpectedly rang in the middle of the night. She remembered how every news story, every snippet of gossip, caused something inside of her to clench in fear that he would be going out on another case, putting his life in danger. It was a form of post-traumatic stress disorder. Sara hadn’t realized until her husband was gone that she’d been living in dread for all those years.
The intercom buzzed. Billy gave a halfhearted growl, but neither dog got off the couch. Sara pressed the speaker button. “Yes?”
Will said, “Hi, I’m sorry I—”
Sara buzzed him in. She grabbed his keys off the counter and propped open the front door. She wouldn’t invite him in. She wouldn’t let him apologize for what Angie had said, because Angie Trent had every right to speak her mind, and what’s more, she’d made some very good points. Sara would just tell Will that it was nice knowing him and good luck working things out with his wife.
If he ever got here. The elevator was taking its sweet time. She watched the digital readout show the car moving from the fourth floor down to the lobby. It took another forever for the numbers to start ascending. She whispered them aloud, “Three, four, five,” and then finally the bell dinged for six.
The doors slid back. Will peered out behind a pyramid of two cardboard file boxes, a white Styrofoam carton, and a Krispy Kreme doughnut bag. The greyhounds, who only seemed to notice Sara around suppertime, ran out into the hall to greet him.
Sara mumbled a curse.
“Sorry I’m so late.” He turned his body so that Bob wouldn’t knock him over.
Sara grabbed both dogs by their collars, holding the door open with her foot so that Will could come in. He slid the boxes onto her dining room table and immediately started petting the dogs. They licked him like a long-lost friend, their tails wagging, nails scratching against the wood floor. Sara’s resolve, which had been so strong only seconds before, started to crack.
Will looked up. “Were you in bed?”
She had dressed appropriately for her mood in an old pair of sweat pants and a Grant County Rebels football jersey. Her hair was pulled back so tightly that she could feel it tugging the skin on her neck. “Here are your keys.”
“Thanks.” Will brushed the dog hair off his chest. He was still wearing the same black T-shirt from that afternoon. “Whoa.” He pulled back Bob, who was making a play for the Krispy Kremes.
“Is that blood?” There was a dark, dried stain on the right-hand sleeve of his shirt. Instinctively, Sara reached for his arm.
Will took a step back. “It’s nothing.” He pulled down the cuff. “There was an incident at the prison today.”
Sara got that familiar, tight feeling in her chest. “You were there.”
“I couldn’t do anything to help him. Maybe you …” His words trailed off. “The staff doctor said it was a mortal wound. There was a lot of blood.” He clamped his hand around his wrist. “I should’ve changed shirts when I got home, but I’ve got a lot of work to do, and my house is kind of upside down right now.”
He had been home. Without reason, Sara had let herself think for just a moment that he hadn’t seen his wife. “We should talk about what happened.”
“Uh …” He seemed to purposefully miss her point. “Not much to say. He’s dead. He wasn’t a particularly good guy, but I’m sure it’ll be hard on his family.”
Sara stared at him. There was no guile on his face. Maybe Angie hadn’t told Will about the confrontation. Or maybe she had, and Will was doing his best to ignore it. Either way, he was hiding something. But suddenly, after spending the last few hours working herself into a frenzy, Sara didn’t care. She didn’t want to talk about it. She didn’t want to analyze it. The only thing she was certain of was that she did not want him to leave.
She asked, “What’s in the boxes?”
He seemed to note her shift in attitude, but chose not to acknowledge it. “Case files from an old investigation. It might have something to do with Evelyn’s disappearance.”
“Not kidnapping?”
His grin indicated he’d been caught. “I just have to know everything in these files by five tomorrow morning.”
“Do you need help?”
“Nope.” He turned to lift the boxes. “Thanks for getting Betty home for me.”
“Being dyslexic is not a character flaw.”
Will left the boxes on the table and turned around. He didn’t respond immediately. He just looked at her in a way that made Sara wish that she had bothered to bathe. Finally, he said, “I think I liked it better when you were mad at me.”
Sara didn’t respond.
“It’s Angie, right? That’s what you’re upset about?”
These shifting levels of subterfuge were new to her. “It seems like we were ignoring that.”
“Would you like to continue along that path?”
Sara shrugged. She didn’t know what she wanted. The right thing to do would be to tell him that their innocent flirtation was over. She should open the door and make him leave. She should call Dr. Dale tomorrow morning and ask him out on another date. She should forget about Will and let time erase him from her memory.
But it wasn’t her memory that was the problem. It was that tightness in her chest when she thought about him being in danger. It was that feeling of relief when he walked through the door. It was the happiness she felt just from being near him.
He said, “Angie and I haven’t been together—together—in over a year.” Will paused, as if to let that sink in. “Not since I met you.”
All Sara could say was, “Oh.”
“And then when her mother died a few months ago, I saw her for maybe two hours, and she was gone. She didn’t even go to the funeral.” He paused again; this was obviously difficult for him. “It’s hard to explain our relationship. Not without making myself look pitiful and stupid.”
“You don’t owe me an explanation.”
He put his hands in his pockets and leaned against the table. The overhead light caught the jagged scar above his mouth. The skin was pink, a fine line tracing the ridge between his upper lip and nose. Sara couldn’t begin to calculate the amount of time she’d wasted wondering how the scar would feel against her own mouth.
Too much time.
Will cleared his throat. He looked down at the floor, then back up at her. “You know where I grew up. How I grew up.”
She nodded. The Atlanta Children’s Home had closed many years ago, but the abandoned building was less than five miles from where they stood.
“Kids went away a lot. They were trying to get more of us into foster care. I guess it’s cheaper that way.” He shrugged, as if this was to be expected. “The older ones didn’t usually work out. They lasted maybe a few weeks, sometimes only a couple of days. They came back different. I guess you can imagine why.”
Sara shook her head. She didn’t want to.
“There wasn’t exactly a long line of people who wanted to foster an eight-year-old boy who couldn’t pass the third grade. But Angie’s a girl, and pretty, and smart, so she got sent out a lot.” Again, he shrugged. “I guess I got used to waiting for her to come back, and I guess I got used to not asking what happened while she was gone.” He pushed away from the table and picked up the boxes. “So,
that’s it. Pitiful and stupid.”
“No. Will—”
He stopped in front of the door, the boxes held in front of him like a suit of armor. “Amanda wanted me to ask you if you know anyone at the Fulton ME’s office.”
Sara’s brain took its time changing gears. “Probably. I did some of my training there when I started.”
He shifted his grip. “This is from Amanda, not me. She wants you to make some calls. You don’t have to, but—”
“What does she want to know?”
“Anything that comes up on the autopsies. They’re not going to share with us. They want to keep this case.”
He was turned toward the door, waiting. She looked at the back of his neck, the fine hairs at the nape. “All right.”
“You’ve got Amanda’s number. Just call her if anything comes up. Or call her if it doesn’t. She’s impatient.” He stood waiting for her to open the door.
Sara had spent most of the day wanting him out of her life, but now that he was leaving, she couldn’t take it. “Amanda was wrong.”
He turned back around to face her.
“What she said today. Amanda was wrong.”
He feigned shock. “I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone say those words out loud before.”
“Almeja. The dying man’s last words.” She explained, “The literal translation is right—‘clams’—but it’s not slang for ‘money.’ At least not the way I’ve heard it used.”
“What’s it slang for?”
She hated the word, but she said it anyway. “ ‘Cunt.’ ”
His brow furrowed. “How do you know that?”
“I work in a large public hospital. I don’t think a week’s gone by since I started without someone calling me some variation of that word.”
Will dropped the boxes back on the table. “Who called you that?”
She shook her head. He looked ready to take on her entire patient roster. “The point is, the guy was calling Faith that name. He wasn’t talking about money.”
Will crossed his arms. He was obviously riled. “Ricardo,” he supplied. “The guy in the backyard who shot at those little girls—his name was Ricardo.” Sara held his gaze. Will kept talking. “Hironobu Kwon was the dead guy in the laundry room. We don’t know anything about the older Asian, except that he had a fondness for Hawaiian shirts and spoke with a southside southern drawl. And then there’s someone else who got injured, probably in a knife fight with Evelyn. You’ll probably see the notice at the hospital when you go back to work. Blood type B-negative, possibly Hispanic, stab wound to the gut, possibly a wound on his hand.”
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