“Motherfucker!” Paul swung wildly, and even though Will had been expecting it, he still lost his balance. Both of them fell back onto the floor. Paul had the superior position, but he was older and slower. Will deflected his strikes, relishing the feel of his fist in Paul’s soft gut. He punched him in the kidney, then gave him another jab to the stomach.
The door flew open, popping against the wall. “Will!” Hamish yelled. “Jesus Christ!”
Will literally felt himself come back to his senses. His hearing was first—Hamish’s panicked voice, a woman screaming. Pain came next, spreading across the bridge of his nose. He tasted blood in his mouth, smelled Paul’s sour breath as the man rolled off Will and onto the floor.
Both men lay on their backs, panting. Will tried to move, feeling something crunch in his back pocket.
No one seemed to notice the phone was ringing until Abigail Campano cried, “It’s Kayla! It’s Kayla’s cell phone calling!”
The woman was holding the telephone in her hand, eyes glued to the caller ID.
Both Will and Paul scrambled to stand. Hamish ran to his computer. He held up a finger, telling Abigail to wait while he pressed the keys. Will slipped on the extra set of headphones as Hamish donned his own pair. He nodded, and Abigail answered the phone, holding the receiver so that Paul could listen in.
“Hello?”
There was static, then a garbled voice that was electronically altered to a menacing monotone. “Is this the mother?”
Abigail’s mouth opened, but she wasn’t speaking. She stared at Hamish for a cue. He nodded, writing something on a dry erase board in front of him.
“Y-yes,” she stuttered. “This is Emma’s mother. Is Emma all right? Can I talk to Emma?”
Hamish must have coached her to use her daughter’s name as much as she could. It was harder to kill somebody who had a name.
The voice said, “I have your daughter.”
Hamish wrote something down, and Abigail nodded as she said, “What do you want? Tell me how to get Emma back.”
There was more static. The voice had no inflection, no accent. “I want one million dollars.”
“Okay,” she agreed. Hamish started furiously writing on the board. “When? Where?” She begged, “Just tell me what you want.”
“I will call you tomorrow at ten-thirty a.m. with details.”
“No—wait,” she cried. “How do I know she’s alive? How do I know Emma’s alive?”
Will pressed his fingers into the earphones, his ears straining to hear past the static. He heard clicking, but didn’t know if that was from Hamish pressing keys on his computer or something else. They all startled in unison as the sound jumped up several levels. “Daddy …” a girl’s voice said. Tired, terrified. “Daddy … please help me …”
“Baby!” Paul screamed. “Baby, it’s me!”
There was another click, then the line went dead.
“Emma?” Abigail yelled. “Hello?”
Hamish tapped the keys on his computer, working furiously to keep the line engaged. He shook his head at Will. Nothing.
“What do we do now?” Abigail begged, fear pitching her voice up almost as high as her daughter’s. “What do we do?”
“We pay the bastard.” Paul glared at Will. “I want you out of my house. Take him with you.”
Hamish looked startled, but Will shook his head, indicating that the man should stay put. He told Paul, “You can’t negotiate with the kidnapper on your own.”
“What the fuck do I need you for? You can’t even trace the fucking call.”
“Paul—” Abigail tried, but he cut her off.
“Get out of my fucking house. Now.” When Will did not move, Paul stepped forward, crowding the space. “Don’t think I won’t beat your ass again.”
“Why do you want me to leave?” Will asked. “So you can call your private security firm and they can tell you what to do?” You didn’t have to be able to read to see the answer in Paul’s eyes. “The more people you get involved in this, the more people who try to control it, the more likely it’s going to be that something bad happens to Emma.”
“You think I’m going to trust my daughter’s life to you?”
“I think you need to stop for just a minute and realize that I am the only person you’ve got who knows how to keep her safe right now.”
“Then I’m fucked, ain’t I?” Paul’s lips drew into a sneer. “You stupid piece of shit. Get the fuck out of my house.”
“Please,” Abigail murmured.
Paul persisted, “Get out of my God damn house.”
“It’s my house, too,” Abigail countered, her voice stronger. “I want them to stay.”
Paul told her, “You don’t know—”
“I know that they’re the police, Paul. They know what they’re doing. They deal with this kind of thing all the …” Her voice started to tremble again. She clutched her hands in front of her, nervously gripping the phone that had just brought her daughter’s voice back to her life. “He said he’ll call back tomorrow. We need their help. We need them to tell us what to do when he calls.”
Paul shook his head. “Stay out of this, Abby.”
“She’s my daughter, too!”
“Just let me take care of this,” he pleaded, though it was obvious his wife’s mind was already made up. “I can handle this.”
“The same way you handle everything else?”
The room went silent. Even the fan on Hamish’s computer stopped spinning.
Abigail did not seem concerned that she had an audience. “Where were you, Paul? How did you handle it when Emma started hanging around Kayla?”
“That’s not—”
“You said she was just acting out, that she was just being a teenager. To leave her alone. Look where leaving her alone got her. She sure as hell is alone now.”
Paul was wholly unconvincing when he mumbled, “She was just being a kid.”
“She was?” Abigail repeated. “You’re still spouting that same parental wisdom? ‘Just let her figure things out on her own,’ you said. ‘Just let her sow some wild oats.’ Just like you did at that age. Only, look at you now—you’re just a pathetic, needy bastard who can’t even keep his daughter safe.”
“I know you’re upset,” Paul said, sounding like the reasonable one. “Let’s just talk about this later.”
“That’s exactly what you told me,” she insisted. “Time and time again, you said we’d just talk about it later. Emma skipped school? We’ll talk about it later. Emma’s failing English? Talk about it later. Later, later, later. It’s later!” She threw the phone across the room, smashing it into pieces against the wall. “It’s later, Paul. Do you want to talk about it now? Do you want to tell me how I’m overreacting, how I’m the crazy one, I’m the overprotective one, how I just need to calm down and let kids be kids?” Her voice caught. “Are you calm, Paul? Are you calm while you’re thinking about what that man, that animal, is doing to our daughter?”
All of the color drained from Paul’s face. “Don’t say that.”
“You know what he’s doing to her,” she hissed. “You always said she was your beautiful girl. Do you think you’re the only man who thinks that? Do you think you’re the only man who can’t control himself around hot young blondes?”
Paul glanced at Will nervously, telling him, “Get out.”
“Don’t,” Abigail told Will. “I want you to hear this. I want you to know how my loving and devoted husband screws every twenty-year-old who crosses his path.” She indicated her face, her body. “It’s the car salesman in him. Every time one model gets out of date, he trades up to the newer one.”
“Abigail, this isn’t the time.”
“When is the time?” she demanded. “When is it time for you to fucking grow up and admit that you were wrong?” Her fury heightened with each word. “I trusted you! I trusted you to keep us safe. I looked the other way because I knew that at the end of the day, you would always come
back home to me.”
“I did. I do.” He was trying to soothe her, but Will could see it only made her angrier. “Abby—”
“Don’t say my name!” she screamed, throwing her fists into the air. “Don’t speak to me. Don’t look at me. Don’t say a God damn word to me until my daughter is home.”
She ran toward the front door, slamming it behind her. Will heard her footsteps as she ran down the steps. When he looked out the window, he could see her on her knees in the grass, bending over at the waist as she keened.
“Get out,” Paul said. His chest was heaving up and down as if the wind had been knocked out of him. “Please—just for now. Both of you. Just please get out.”
CHAPTER NINE
Faith stood outside the morgue, her finger pressed into one ear to block out the noise as she talked to Ruth Donner on her cell phone. Tracking down Kayla Alexander’s former nemesis had been somewhat easier than speaking in front of a group of terrified teenagers. In retrospect, Olivia McFaden’s relieving her of the podium had been somewhat reminiscent of Travis and Old Yeller in the woodshed.
Still, Faith had managed to persuade Olivia McFaden to put her in touch with Ruth Donner’s mother. The woman had given Faith an earful about Kayla Alexander, then volunteered her daughter’s cell phone number. Ruth was a student at Colorado State. She was studying early childhood education. She wanted to be a schoolteacher.
“I couldn’t believe it was Kayla,” Ruth said. “It’s been all over the news here.”
“Anything you could think of would help,” Faith said, raising her voice over the whir of a bone saw. She went up the stairs to the next landing, but she could still hear the motor. “Have you seen her since you left school?”
“No. Truthfully, I haven’t had much contact with anybody since I left.”
Faith tried, “Can you think of anyone who might want to hurt her?”
“Well, I mean …” Her voice trailed off. “Not to be cruel about it, but she wasn’t very well liked.”
Faith bit back the “no shit” that wanted to come, asking instead, “Did you know her friend Emma?”
“Not really. I saw her with Kayla, but she never said anything to me.” She remembered, “Well, sometimes she would stare at me, but you know how it is. If your best friend hates somebody, then you have to hate them, too.” She seemed to realize how childish that sounded. “God, it was all so desperate when I was in the middle of it, but now I look back and wonder why the heck any of it mattered, you know?”
“Yeah,” Faith agreed, feeling in her gut that this was a dead end. She had checked flight manifests going in and out of Atlanta for the last week. Ruth Donner’s name had not shown up on any airline manifests. “You have my number. Will you call me if you remember anything?”
“Of course,” Ruth agreed. “Will you let me know if you find her?”
“Yes,” Faith promised, though updating Ruth Donner wasn’t high on her list of priorities. “Thank you.”
Faith ended the call and tucked her phone into her pants pocket. She went back down the stairs, the scent of burned bone wafting up to meet her. Despite her earlier bravado with Will Trent, she hated being in the morgue. The dead bodies didn’t bother her so much as the atmosphere, the industrial processing of death. The cold marble tile that wrapped floor to ceiling to deflect stains. The drains on the floor every three feet so that blood and matter could be washed away. The stainless steel gurneys with their big rubber wheels and plastic mattresses.
Summer was the medical examiner’s peak period, a particularly brutal time of year. Often, you would find ten or twelve bodies stacked in the freezer. They lay there like pieces of meat waiting to be butchered for clues. The very thought brought an almost unbearable sadness.
Pete Hanson was holding up a pile of bloody, wet intestines when Faith walked in. He smiled brightly, giving her his usual greeting. “The prettiest detective in the building!”
She willed her stomach not to heave as he dropped the intestines onto a large scale. Despite being underground, the room was always disgustingly warm in the summer months, the compressor on the freezer pushing heat into the confined space faster than the air-conditioning could keep up with it.
“This one was full as a tick,” Pete mumbled, writing down the number from the scale.
Faith had never met a coroner who wasn’t eccentric in one way or another, but Pete Hanson was a special kind of freaky. She understood why he’d been divorced three times. The perplexing question was how he had found three women out there in the world who had agreed to marry him in the first place.
He motioned her over. “I take it there are no breaks if you’re gracing me with your presence?”
“Nothing yet,” she told him, glancing around the morgue. Snoopy, an elderly black man who had assisted Pete for as long as Faith had worked homicide, but whose real name she had still never learned, gave her a nod as he rolled Adam Humphrey’s face back along his skull, pressing the skin into the crevices. His bony fingers worked meticulously, and Faith was reminded of the time her mother had made her a Halloween costume, her firm hands smoothing pieces of material onto the Butterick pattern.
Faith made herself look away, thinking that between this and the heat, there was no way she was going to leave this room without tasting something awful in the back of her throat. “What about you?”
“Same bad luck, I’m afraid.” He took off his gloves and put on a fresh pair. “Snoopy’s covering it up, but I found a pretty bad smack to the right side of Humphrey’s head.”
“Fatal?”
“No, more of a glancing blow. The scalp remained intact, but it would’ve made him see stars.”
He walked over to a large soup pan with a ladle sticking out of it. She had arrived at the worst part of the autopsy. Stomach contents. The smell was vicious, the sort of scent that ate into the lining of your nose and back of your mouth, so that the next day you woke up thinking you had a sore throat.
“Now, this,” Pete said, using a long set of tweezers to hold up what looked like a large crystal of salt. “This is obviously gristle, common to most fast-food hamburgers.”
“Obviously,” Faith echoed, trying not to be sick.
“Think of that the next time you go to McDonald’s.”
Faith was fairly certain she was never going to eat again.
“I would guess the young man had some type of fast food at least thirty minutes prior to death. The girl had French fries but seems to have passed on the burger.”
She said, “We didn’t find any fast-food bags in the trashcans or the house.”
“Then perhaps they ate on the run. Worst possible thing for digestion, by the way. There’s a reason why there is an obesity epidemic in this country.”
Faith wondered if the man had looked in a mirror lately. His gut was so large and round that he looked pregnant under the billows of his surgical gown.
Pete asked, “How’s Will doing?”
“Trent?” she asked. “I didn’t realize you knew him.”
He took off his gloves, motioning for Faith to follow him. “Excellent detective. It must be a nice change working with someone who is, shall we say, more cerebral than your usual bunch.”
“Hm,” she said, unwilling to pay Will a compliment, even though Pete was right. There were only three women in Atlanta Homicide Division. There had been four when Faith first got there, but Claire Dunkel, a thirty-year veteran, had taken retirement the first week Faith had been on the squad. Her parting advice was, “Wear a skirt every once in a while or you’ll start to grow testicles.”
Maybe that’s why Faith was having such a hard time gelling with Will Trent. For all his faults, he actually seemed to respect her. He hadn’t once drawn a ludicrous connection between Faith’s hair color and her mental abilities, nor had he scratched himself repeatedly or spat on the floor—all things Leo Donnelly usually did before his second cup of coffee.
Pete untied his surgical gown, revealing a shirt that was
of the loud Hawaiian variety. Faith was glad to see that he was wearing shorts. Beneath the gown, the sight of his hairless legs, bare but for the black socks he’d pulled up to his knees, had been alarming.
“Horrible situation with your mother,” Pete said. Faith watched him punch the soap dispenser and lather up his hands. “It’s one of those cases where ‘just doing my job’ seems like a lame excuse, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” she agreed.
“Though I’ve been in this building for many years, and I’ve seen a lot of things happening that shouldn’t. I certainly wouldn’t volunteer any information, but if someone asked me directly, I would feel compelled to tell them the truth.” He smiled at her over his shoulder. “I suppose that would make me what you guys call a ‘rat.’ ”
She shrugged.
“Will is a good man who had to do a dirty job. I can relate to that.” He pulled a handful of paper towels off the stack and dried his hands as he walked to his office.
“Sit,” Pete said, indicating a chair by his desk.
Faith sat on the stack of papers in the chair, knowing Pete didn’t expect her to move them. “What do you have so far?”
“Nothing of consequence, I’m afraid.” He retrieved a paper bag from the small refrigerator in the corner. Faith concentrated on finding a clean page in her notebook as he took out a sandwich. “The girl was stabbed at least twenty-seven times. I would assume from angle and trajectory that the wounds match the kitchen knife you found at the crime scene. The killer was most likely on his knees, superior to the body, when he attacked her.”
Faith wrote furiously, knowing he would not pause to let her catch up.
“There was bruising around her thighs and some tearing in the vaginal canal. I found traces of cornstarch, which indicates a condom was used, but we can assume from the sperm that the condom tore, as often happens with rough sex. Also, I noted some faint bite marks around the breasts. I would say this was more consistent with consensual sex, though that’s really just speculation on my part.”
He unwrapped his sandwich and took a bite, chewing with his mouth open as he continued. “You can certainly leave those kinds of marks by raping a woman, but then again, if you were feeling a little eager and the woman was willing, you could make an argument that the marks were left not by rape, but during a particularly ardent session of lovemaking. I wouldn’t be surprised if, after a couple of bottles of tequila and some dancing, the current Mrs. Hanson happily exhibited the same sort of trauma.”
The Will Trent Series 5-Book Bundle Page 58
