Fallen

by Karin Slaughter

  “I have no intention of doing something so stupid,” Amanda interrupted. “We still don’t know if Chuck Finn is involved in this or not.” Faith opened her mouth to protest, but Amanda held up her hand to stop her. “I know you think that Chuck was pushed into a life of crime while the others willingly jumped in, but guilty doesn’t come in shades. He took the money. He spent it. He confessed to his crimes and he’s out on the street somewhere with a very serious habit that costs a great deal of money. You also need to remember that Chuck still has friends on the Atlanta force, and where he doesn’t have friends, he might have the money to buy them. I know you don’t want to hear this, but there’s no getting around that he either gave Hironobu Kwon the tip-off or he’s pulling the strings on this new group of young guns.”

  Faith countered, “That doesn’t sound like Chuck.”

  “Skimming money off busts didn’t sound like Chuck, either, but here we are.” She told Will, “You mentioned the vantage point from Roz Levy’s house. There’s no way they could set up there. She’d shoot them the second they set foot in the driveway.”

  “It’s true,” Faith agreed. “Mrs. Levy watches the street like a hawk.”

  Will countered, “Unless someone’s getting shot or kidnapped next door.”

  Amanda ignored the observation. “The point, Will, is that we can exploit the position just as easily as the kidnappers can. Short of shipping you in the world’s largest box, we need to figure out how we’re going to get you and your rifle into Roz Levy’s carport without being seen.” She looked at Faith. “Are you sure you weren’t followed here?”

  Faith shook her head. “I was careful. I wasn’t followed.”

  “Good girl,” Amanda told her. She was back in her element, almost giddy with the task at hand. “I need to make some phone calls to find out what’s going on at Evelyn’s house. Our bad guys wouldn’t have suggested a meeting there if they thought the Atlanta Crime Scene Unit was going to be steady at work. We’ll see if Charlie can make some inquiries, too. Failing that, I think I’ve got a few more favors in my pocket with some old gals in Zone Six who would love nothing more than to show the kids how it’s done. Dr. Linton?”

  Sara was surprised to hear her name. “Yes?”

  “Thank you for your time. I trust you’ll keep this little party to yourself?”

  “Of course.”

  Faith stood behind Amanda. “Thank you,” she said. “Again.”

  Sara hugged her. “Be careful.”

  Will was next. He held out his hand. “Dr. Linton.”

  Sara looked down, wondering if she was having one of Faith’s hallucinations. He was actually shaking her hand goodbye.

  He said, “Thank you for your help. I’m sorry we imposed on you this morning.”

  Faith mumbled something Sara couldn’t hear.

  Amanda opened the closet. Sara guessed the smile on her face wasn’t there because she was happy to see her coat. “I know a lot of Evelyn’s neighbors. They’re mostly retired and I think that with the exception of that old battle-ax across the street, they’ll be okay with us using their places. I’ll need to get my hands on some cash. I think I can make that happen, but we’ll be tight for time.” She slipped on her coat. “Faith, you’ll need to go home and wait until you hear from us. I imagine at some point we’ll need you to run to a bank or two. Will, go home and change that shirt. The collar’s frayed and you’re missing a button. And while you’re at it, you’d better start building a Trojan horse or come up with a plan to romance Roz Levy. She was ready to have Faith arrested an hour ago. God knows what bee is up her wrinkled old butt this morning.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Sara opened the front door for them. Amanda started toward the elevator. Will, ever the gentleman, stepped aside so that Faith could leave first.

  Sara shut the door after Faith.

  “What—” Will began, but she put her finger to his lips.

  “Sweetheart, I know you’ve got work to do and I know it’s going to be dangerous, but whatever you get into today will not be nearly as life-threatening as what’ll happen if you ever do to me what you did to me last night and then think you can get off with a handshake the next morning. Okay?”

  He swallowed.

  “Call me later.” She kissed him goodbye, then opened the door so that he could leave.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  WILL SUBSCRIBED TO A LOT OF CAR MAGAZINES. MOSTLY, he bought them for the pictures, but sometimes he felt compelled to read the articles. That’s how he knew that Roz Levy’s avocado green 1960 Chevrolet Corvair 700 sedan was worth considerably more than Faith’s five-dollar appraisal.

  The car was a beauty, the sort of classic American carmakers used to be known for. The rear-mounted, air-cooled, horizontally opposed, aluminum flat-six engine had been engineered to directly take on the increasingly more popular compact-sized European models coming onto the market. The design was renowned for its innovative swing-axle rear suspension, which received its own chapter in Ralph Nader’s Unsafe at Any Speed. The spare tire was mounted in the forward luggage compartment, where the engine was normally located in other cars, nestled right next to a gasoline heater for the passenger area. Though winter was over, the tank was still filled with gas, which Will knew because his face had been pressed against the metal canister while Faith drove him to Mrs. Levy’s house. The sloshing of gasoline had been like ocean waves crashing against the shore. Or, a highly volatile accelerant churning less than a rusty millimeter from his face.

  The car had been built well before the 2001 National Highway Traffic Safety Administration deadline that required all manufacturers to install a glow-in-the-dark emergency release strap in case someone got trapped in the trunk of the car. Will wasn’t sure whether he would be able to reach a handle even if one existed. The trunk was deep but not wide, more like a pelican’s mouth. He was folded into a space meant to hold a spare tire and maybe a couple of suitcases—1960s suitcases, not the modern wheelie kinds that people nowadays used to pack their entire houses in for a weekend trip to the mountains.

  In short, there existed the very real possibility that he might die in here before Roz Levy remembered that she was supposed to let him out.

  There was a thin sliver of light coming through the cracked rubber seal around the hinge. Will lifted up his cell phone to check the time. He’d been in the trunk for almost two hours and had at least another half hour to go. His rifle was jammed between his legs in a way that was no longer pleasant. His paddle holster was turned so that his Glock dug into his side like an insistent finger. The bottle of water Faith had given him had long been recycled back into the plastic bottle. It was approximately six thousand degrees inside the metal tomb. He had lost feeling in his hands and feet. He was beginning to think that this was a very bad idea.

  It was the words “Trojan horse” that had gotten him thinking. One call to Roz Levy proved that she wasn’t going to make this easy for them. She was still pissed about Faith taking her car. She’d refused to let any of them inside of her house. Unusually, Will was the person who suggested the idiotic thing for him to do. Faith would return the Corvair to the carport. He would hide in the trunk until a few minutes before the appointed time. Mrs. Levy would take out her trash, releasing the trunk lid along the way. Will would then crawl out and give Faith cover.

  The fact that Roz Levy agreed to this alternate plan so easily made him suspect that she wasn’t going to play along, but by then another hour had passed and they didn’t really have a choice in the matter.

  There were other Trojan horses, too—most of them more clever than Will’s. The good thing about Amanda’s old gals was that they were old and they were women, which went against type in this particular situation. Whoever was watching the neighborhood would be expecting testosterone-pumped young guns with trigger fingers and short haircuts. Amanda had sent in six of her friends to various houses around the block. They’d had bakeware and cake stands in their hands, their pur
ses dangling from their arms. Some of them carried Bibles. They would look like visitors to anyone who was paying attention.

  The outside perimeter was covered by a cable truck, a mobile pet groomer’s van, and a bright yellow Prius that no self-respecting cop would ever drive. Between the three vehicles, they could monitor all traffic coming in and out of the two roads that led to the Mitchell section of the neighborhood.

  Even with all of this, Will still was not happy with the plan. It was the lesser of two evils, the greater evil being no police presence at all. He didn’t like the idea of Faith being so vulnerable, even though she was armed and had proven to anyone who was paying attention that she would not hesitate to shoot somebody. He felt in his gut that Amanda was wrong. This wasn’t about money. Maybe on the surface it was. Maybe even the kidnappers themselves thought it was about cold, hard cash. But at the end of the day, their behavior belied that motivation. This was personal. Someone was working out a grudge. Chuck Finn seemed like the most likely culprit. His underlings wanted the cash. Chuck wanted revenge. It was a win-win for everyone but Faith.

  And for the idiot trapped in a 1960 Corvair.

  Will winced as he tried to shift his position. His back ached. His nose itched. His ass felt like he had been pressing his full weight against a piece of hardened steel for two hours. In retrospect, shoving Will into a trunk sounded more like the kind of idea Amanda would have. Painful. Humiliating. Bound to end badly for Will. He must’ve had some sort of death wish. Or maybe he just wanted to spend a couple of hours simmering in the heat because it was the only way he’d have time to think about what he’d gotten himself into. And he didn’t mean the car.

  Will had never smoked a cigarette. He’d never done an illegal drug of any kind. He hated the taste of alcohol. As a kid, he’d seen how addictions could ruin lives, and as a cop, he saw how it could end them. He’d never been tempted to imbibe. He’d never understood how people could be so desperate for the next high that they were willing to trade away their lives and everything that mattered for another hit. They stole. They prostituted themselves. They abandoned or sold their children. They murdered people. They would do anything to avoid getting dopesick, that point at which the body craved the drug so badly that it turned on itself. Muscle cramps. Stabbing pains in the gut. Blinding headaches. Cotton mouth. Heart palpitations. Sweaty palms.

  Will’s physical discomfort wasn’t solely caused by the tight quarters in Mrs. Levy’s Corvair.

  He was dopesick for Sara.

  To his credit, he realized that his response to her was completely disproportionate to what a normal human being should be feeling right now. He was going to make a fool of himself. More so than he already had. He didn’t know how to be around her. At least not when they weren’t having sex. And they’d had a lot of sex, so it had taken Sara some time before she finally got the full-on view of Will’s astounding stupidity. And what a show he had put on for her. Shaking her hand like a realtor at an open house. He was surprised that she hadn’t slapped him. Even Amanda and Faith had been at a loss for words as they’d all waited for the elevator in the hall. His idiocy had actually rendered them speechless.

  Will was beginning to wonder if there was something physically wrong with him. Maybe he was diabetic like Faith. She was always yelling at him about his afternoon sticky bun, his second breakfast, his love of cheesy nachos from the downstairs vending machine. He went through his symptoms. He was sweating profusely. His thoughts were racing. He was confused. He was thirsty and he really, really needed to urinate.

  Sara hadn’t seemed mad at him when she’d told him goodbye. She had called him sweetheart, which he’d only been called once before, and that time was by her, too. She had kissed him. It wasn’t a passionate kiss—more like a peck. The sort of thing you saw on 1950s television shows right before the husband put on his hat and went off to work. She had told him to call her later. Did she really want him to call her or had she just been making a point? Will was used to the women in his life making points at his expense. But what defined later? Did that mean later tonight or later tomorrow? Or later in the week?

  Will groaned. He was a thirty-four-year-old man with a job and a dog to take care of. He had to get himself back under control. There was no way he was going to call Sara. Not later tonight or even later next week. He was too unsophisticated for her. Too socially awkward. Too desperate to be with her. Will had learned the hard way that the best thing to do when you really wanted something was to put it out of your mind, because you were never going to get it. He had to do that now with Sara. He had to do that before he got himself shot or he ended up getting Faith killed because he was acting like a lovesick schoolgirl.

  The worst part was that Angie had been right about everything.

  Well, maybe not everything.

  Sara didn’t color her hair.

  His phone vibrated. Will struggled not to castrate himself with his rifle while he pressed the Bluetooth piece into his ear. The trunk was well insulated, but he still kept his voice to a whisper. “Yeah?”

  “Will?” That’s all he needed—Amanda’s voice in his head. “What are you doing?”

  “Sweating,” he whispered back, wondering if she could’ve asked a more pointless question. He’d had this idea of springing out of the trunk like a superhero. After all this time, he realized he’d probably do well not to roll out onto the ground like a tongue.

  “We’re set up at Ida Johnson’s.” Evelyn’s backyard neighbor. Will wasn’t sure how Amanda had sweet-talked the woman into letting a bunch of cops sit in her house. Maybe she’d promised that Faith wouldn’t shoot any more drug dealers in her yard again. “I just heard a call on the scanner. There was a drive-by shooting in East Atlanta. Two dead. Ahbidi Mittal and his team just left Evelyn’s house so they can process the car. High profile. A woman and her kid. White, blonde, middle class, pretty.”

  So, now they knew how the kidnappers planned to get Evelyn’s house cleared out. Amanda had made some discreet calls earlier and found out that the CSU team had at least another three days on the house. They knew that Evelyn’s abductors had some drive-by experience. Obviously, these particular bad guys weren’t afraid of killing innocent bystanders, and they knew exactly the right victim profile to make sure every news station in Atlanta halted programming to cover the events live at the scene.

  The most troubling part to Will was that this proved they had no problem murdering a mother and her child.

  Amanda said, “Evelyn’s backyard is dug up.”

  Maybe it was the heat. Will had the image of a dog looking for a bone.

  “She must’ve told them the money was in the backyard. Holes are everywhere.”

  That had been one of Will’s early guesses. He saw how stupid it was now. People didn’t hide money like that anymore. Even Evelyn had a bank account. Everything was on a file in a computer these days.

  He kept his tone low. “Did Mrs. Levy see them digging?”

  Amanda was uncharacteristically silent.

  “Amanda?”

  “She’s not answering her phone right now, but I’m sure she’s just taking a nap.”

  He couldn’t swallow. It wasn’t funny anymore now that it might actually happen.

  “She’ll have her alarm set to wake her.”

  Will wondered how the old woman was going to hear her alarm if she couldn’t hear a phone. And then he stopped worrying, because he was going to pass out from heat stroke long before that happened.

  Amanda said, “I’ve got two friends with me and another old gal in the street. She’ll keep an eye on Faith while she’s on route to the house. Bev’s with the Secret Service. She requisitioned a mail truck.”

  Will wished that he were more surprised by this information. If Amanda told him that she called an old gal at the White House and borrowed the nuclear codes, he would just nod.

  “Everything’s lining up.” Amanda always got chatty right before a case was about to break, and now was no except
ion. “Faith is waiting at her house. She went to three different banks this morning to support her safe deposit box story. We had one of the managers hand her the cash at the last drop. All the bills are registered. There’s a tracker in the lining of the duffel.” She was silent for a moment. “I think she’ll be okay. Sara got her evened out for now. I’m worried that she’s not taking care of herself.”

  Will was worried about that, too. He’d always thought of Faith as indestructible. She seemed capable of handling any crisis. Maybe that had come from being thrust into motherhood before she was ready. Mrs. Levy’s words about the pregnancy scandal rocking the neighborhood kept coming back to him. Faith obviously still carried some shame. She had blushed when she explained her mother’s words to Sara, though Evelyn was obviously just using what might be her last words to her daughter to lift away some of that guilt. Faith’s entire life had been shattered by her pregnancy. Somehow, she had managed to pick up the pieces. Evelyn had been there to offer her support, but Faith had done all the heavy lifting. Getting her GED. Joining the Academy. Going back to college. Raising her kid. She was one of the strongest women Will had ever met. In some ways, she was even stronger than Amanda.

  And she deserved the truth.

  Will whispered, “Why did you lie to Faith about her father being a gambler?”

  Amanda didn’t answer.

  He started to ask her again. “Why did you—”

  “Because he was,” Amanda said. “I would think after this morning, you would recognize that there are other things a man can gamble with besides money.”

  Will swallowed the last bit of saliva in his mouth. He wasn’t up to Amanda’s riddles right now. “Evelyn was on the take.”

  “She made a big mistake a long time ago, and she’s been paying for it ever since.”

  He struggled to keep his voice quiet. “She took money—”

  “I’ll make you a promise, Will. If we get Evelyn out of this, then she’ll tell you the whole truth about everything. You can have a whole hour with her. She’ll answer any question you have.”