The Will Trent Series 5-Book Bundle

by Karin Slaughter

  Will said, “The lab is going to call us when Gordon Chew gets here. He’s the fingerprint expert.”

  “Why didn’t you use one of our guys?”

  “You only get a few chances to chemically process paper. If there’s a fingerprint on one of those notes, Gordon will find it.” Will tapped the keyboard on his computer to wake it up. He started reading something, probably his e-mail. “Did you do anything with that vial?”

  She was conscious that sound traveled both ways. “I put it in the right hands.”

  He kept his eyes on his computer, moving the mouse around, clicking. She didn’t know if he was pouting or scared to say the wrong thing again. As usual, his topic of choice was the last thing she would have predicted. “I had to have a root canal last year. You’re very lucky you’re with APD. The GBI’s dental plan sucks. I had to pay fifteen hundred bucks out of my own pocket.”

  Faith made a sympathetic noise, but she was about ready to snatch the keyboard out from under him. “Do you want me to leave you alone so you can play with your computer?”

  He had the grace to look guilty. Finally, he sat up in his chair, actually looking at Faith as he talked. “The ransom call from the cell phone came from a tower that services most of Atlanta. The ransom call analysis won’t be ready until noon. Charlie still doesn’t have anything tangible on the Prius. We’re waiting for Paul Campano’s DNA to come back to see if it matches Kayla Alexander. It’s been almost three full days since the girl was abducted and it looks like we’re going to waste another two hours waiting for people to answer our questions, which, by the way, is only going to lead to more questions.”

  “You make it sound so easy.”

  “Yeah, by the way, I’d call your union rep if I were you. The Alexanders are suing the city for mishandling the identification on their daughter.”

  “Fuck,” Faith groaned.

  Will tapped his fingers on his desk. “I’m sorry. We’re in this together, okay?”

  “You mean in the lawsuit?”

  He smiled. “Maybe that, too.”

  Faith couldn’t get bogged down in this crap and still do her job. “What’s our plan after the fingerprint guy?”

  “Amanda wants us to talk to the Copy Right employees to see if they noticed anything suspicious about the construction workers. Then we’re supposed to meet her at the Campano house. The kidnapper said he would call at ten-thirty this morning. Hopefully we’ll have some new information to go on then, a drop, a new proof of life.”

  “We’ve got a solid description of Adam’s Chevy Impala on the wire. Every cop in the city will be looking for it.”

  “Let’s just hope it’s still in the city.”

  He sat back in his chair, hands folded across his flat belly. Faith asked him, “Did Amanda tear you a new one?”

  “No,” he said. “I was surprised. She’s very hard to work for.”

  “I can imagine.”

  He held up his hand, thumb stretched out at an angle. “See this?” he asked, indicating a faint scar on the webbing. “She shot me with a nail gun four years ago.”

  “On purpose?”

  “That’s the question,” he said, folding his hands again.

  Since this seemed to be turning into a pile-it-on-Amanda party, she told him, “She dated my uncle Kenny when I was a kid.”

  Will nearly fell out of his chair. “What?”

  Faith explained, “My dad’s brother. He was a colonel in the Air Force. Amanda dated him for …” She thought about it. Amanda had left Ken right before Jeremy entered high school. “Almost fifteen years.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  “Amanda didn’t tell you when she put you onto my mother?”

  “No, but as far as I know, she never interfered. She just told me to be fair.” His voice sounded odd when he answered.

  Faith remembered something her mother had told her. At the time, she had found it strange, but now she understood. “My mother didn’t talk about you much during the investigation, but one time she told me that she trusted you to do the right thing.”

  “That’s nice,” Will said, though she gathered by his expression that he was feeling duped. Faith was beginning to see that this was classic Amanda. She never gave you the entire picture.

  She tried to change the subject, talking about his dank office. “The view doesn’t really improve in the sunlight.”

  Will rubbed his jaw again. “No.” He was silent for a moment, then said, “I’m sorry I left you out of the phone call. And the press conference. It won’t happen again.”

  She wasn’t quite ready to accept his apology, maybe because he kept leaving her out no matter how many times he said he was sorry. “What was Paul’s reaction to all this?”

  “He was his usual asshole self,” Will said. “Trying to control everything.”

  “What about him?” Faith asked. “Doth he protest too much?”

  “Paul’s an asshole, but I don’t see him doing this kind of thing. He’d have to have an accomplice, a motive.”

  “I guess we’ll know motive well enough when the DNA comes back.”

  “It’s not going to match.” He seemed so sure of himself that Faith didn’t bother to argue. The obvious culprit in any child abduction case was always the father. Actually, most domestic cases ended up pointing a big accusatory finger back at the father, no matter the circumstances. This was Will’s case, and if he was so damn sure the man wasn’t involved, then there was nothing Faith could do about it.

  “I know him,” Will said, as if he could sense Faith’s skepticism.

  “All right.”

  “I’m serious, Faith. Paul didn’t do this.” He kept pressing the matter. “I know you don’t trust my judgment on a lot of things—”

  “That’s not true.”

  “Then can I get a word in?”

  Faith didn’t trust herself to respond. She seemed to be making a habit of sparring with this man, and the end result usually had him feeling perplexed and her feeling like a heel.

  Will seemed to realize this, too. “All I am trying to say is that I know this guy. Please trust me. There is no way Paul Campano would be involved in anything that would hurt a kid—especially when it’s his own child.”

  “Okay,” Faith agreed. God knew she’d taken more on face value than this. She glanced around the room, feeling a desperate need to change the subject. “I don’t mean to pry, but do you mind my asking why you have two bags of home pregnancy kits by your window?”

  He actually blushed as he turned around to look at them.

  Faith rushed an apology. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said—”

  “I forgot they were over there.”

  Faith saw the boxes peeking up from the bags, their happy little logos. If only she’d had access to a kit when she was pregnant with Jeremy. Maybe Faith wouldn’t have waited until she was in her third trimester to tell her parents. She put her hand to her neck, wondering where that awful thought had come from. She must have been more exhausted than she realized.

  He said, “I think my girlfriend might be pregnant.”

  His words hung between them, and Faith tried to pin down when exactly their relationship had gone from coolly professional to personal. There was something so kind about him under his awkward manners and social ineptness. Despite her best intentions, Faith realized that she could not hate Will Trent.

  She glanced at the myriad kits. There had to be a dozen of them. “You can’t just dip those in the toilet. You have to have a fresh sample.”

  Will opened his desk drawer and reached his hand all the way to the back. “I’ve got this,” he said, pulling out a test stick. “I found it in the trash. Do you know what this signifies?”

  Faith stopped herself before touching the stick, remembering at the last minute that someone had actually urinated on it. She looked at the result panel. There was a single blue line. “I have no idea.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Anyway, I got all these so
I can figure out which brand it is and get the results.”

  The obvious question hung in the back of her throat—why don’t you just ask her?—but Faith figured the fact that Angie Polaski hadn’t mentioned the test to Will in the first place was proof enough that there was a serious breakdown in communications.

  She said, “Let’s go through them now.”

  He was obviously surprised by the suggestion. “No, I couldn’t ask you to do that.”

  “We can’t do anything until Bernard calls. Come on.”

  Will only made a show of resisting. He emptied the bags onto his desk. They started opening the boxes, breaking the plastic seals, finding the test sticks, comparing them to the one on Will’s desk calendar. They were nearly to the last one when Will said, “This looks like it.”

  Faith looked at the plastic-wrapped tester in his hand and compared it to the used one on his desk. “Yep,” she agreed.

  He unfolded the directions that came with the test, skimming them to find the right section. He glanced up at Faith nervously, then looked back at the directions.

  “Let me,” she finally said, putting him out of his misery. There was a drawing on the back side. “One line,” she said. “That means it’s negative.”

  He sat back in his chair, hands gripping the arms. She couldn’t tell if he was relieved or disappointed. “Thank you for helping me with that.”

  Faith nodded, sticking the directions back in the box.

  “Spell-check.”

  “What?”

  “Yesterday, Bernard said that computers make it easier for dyslexics to hide their problem.” He shrugged. “It would make sense that someone who was functionally illiterate would do the same thing.”

  Faith closed her eyes, remembering the threatening notes. “The way the words were jumbled together—they were spelled correctly, right? Is l-e-v a word?” She pointed to his computer. “Type it in.”

  Will didn’t move. “It’s a word.”

  “What does it mean?”

  His phone rang. He didn’t move to answer it.

  Faith had seen him acting strangely, but this took the cake. The phone rang again. “Do you want me to get that?”

  He reached over and pressed the speakerphone button. “Will Trent.”

  “It’s Beckey in the lab,” a woman with a pronounced Yankee accent said. “Gordon Chew is here.”

  Will pressed the off button on his computer monitor. He stood up, straightening his jacket. “Let’s go.”

  The forensics lab took up the entire second floor of City Hall East. Unlike the rest of the building, which was likely filled with mice and asbestos, the lab was clean and well lit. The air-conditioning actually worked. There were no cracked tiles on the floor or jagged pieces of metal sticking out from the desks. Everything was either white or stainless steel. Faith would’ve eaten her gun if she’d had to work here day in and day out. Even the windows were clean, missing the great swaths of grime that covered the rest of the building.

  At least two dozen people buzzed around the room, all of them wearing white coats, most of them in goggles and surgical gloves as they handled evidence or worked on their computers. There was music playing, something classical that Faith did not recognize. Other than this and the hum of electronics, there was no other noise. She supposed processing blood and combing through carpet fibers didn’t call for much conversation.

  “Over here,” a slim Asian man called across the room. He was sitting on a stool beside one of the lab tables. Several trays were laid out in front of him and a large black briefcase that she was used to seeing lawyers carry was on the floor at his feet. Faith wondered if he’d brought the white lab coat he was wearing or if someone had let him borrow it.

  “Gordon,” Will said, then introduced Faith.

  He offered her his hand. “Nice meeting you, ma’am.”

  “Likewise,” Faith said, thinking she hadn’t heard such a lovely, soft drawl since her grandmother had died. She wondered where Gordon had picked it up. He was probably a few years older than Faith, but he had the manners and bearing of a much older man.

  Will indicated the notes on the table. Gordon had taken them out of their plastic bags. “What do you think?”

  “I’m thinking it’s a good thing you called me. This paper is in terrible condition. I’m not going to even try iodine fuming.”

  “What about DFO?”

  “I already put them under the light. It’s a mess, man.”

  “Is there anything special about the brand or the watermark or—”

  “Generic as a pair of loafers.”

  Faith decided that hiding her ignorance was only punishing herself. “I’m not really familiar with chemical processing. Why can’t we just dust the paper for prints?”

  He smiled, obviously pleased at the question. “I bet you dusted a cigarette butt for prints at the academy, right?” He laughed at her expression. “They’ve been doing that for as long as I can remember.” He leaned back on the stool behind him. “Paper’s porous. The natural oil in your fingertips leaves a good, readable print on a hard surface, but when you’re dealing with fibers, the oil penetrates and migrates. Dusting it with powder is not going to bring out any latents. You use something like ninhydrin, which reacts with the amino acids in fingerprint residue, and hopefully, you get a pretty little print and we bring home your little girl.”

  The mood turned decidedly somber as they all considered how important these next few minutes would be.

  Will said, “Let’s get started.”

  Gordon took a pair of goggles out of his bag and a pair of green gloves. He told Will and Faith, “Y’all may want to step back. This is pretty toxic stuff.” They both did as he advised, but Gordon still handed them paper masks to cover their mouths and noses.

  He leaned down and took a small, unmarked metal container out of his bag. He unscrewed the cap and poured some of the contents into one of the pans, careful not to splash. Even through the mask, the fumes hit Faith like a flash of gunpowder. She had never smelled anything so blatantly chemical.

  Gordon explained, “Ninhydrin and heptane. I mixed it up last night before I headed down.” He capped the metal container. “We used to use Freon, but they outlawed that a few years back.” He told Will, “I used the last of my stash two months ago. Hated to see it go.”

  Gordon used a pair of tweezers to pick up the first sheet of paper. “The ink’s going to run a little bit,” he warned.

  “We already took pictures and made copies,” Will told him.

  Gordon dropped the paper into the chemical solution. Faith thought it was a lot like the old-fashioned way people used to develop photographs. She watched as he gently agitated the page in the solution. The type print shook, and Faith read the words over and over again as she waited for something to happen.

  SHE BE LONGS TOME!!!

  Whoever had written that note felt a closeness to Emma Campano. He had seen her, coveted her. Faith looked at the other note.

  LEV HER ALONG!!!

  Did the kidnapper feel like he needed to protect her from Adam?

  “Here we go,” Gordon said. She saw stray marks start to develop, forensic proof that the paper had been handled many times by different people. The creases of the folds came up first in a dark orange that quickly turned red. Other stray marks showed smeared thumbprints. A series of swirls came into relief, their color reminiscent of the purple from ditto machines that they used to use when Faith was in school. Thanks to the chemicals, she could see where the paper had been touched over and over again.

  Gordon murmured, “That’s kind of strange.”

  Will leaned over, keeping the mask on his face. “I’ve never seen it turn that dark before.”

  “Me, neither,” Gordon said. “Where’d you find this?”

  “A dorm room at Georgia Tech.”

  “Was it sitting near anything unusual?”

  “It was in the pocket of a student. All of them were.”

  “Wa
s he a chemistry major?”

  Faith shrugged. “He worked with adhesives.”

  Gordon leaned over the pan, staring at the dark print, the distinctive swirls. “This is a left thumbprint. I would say that whoever made it was exposed to some kind of chemical that is reacting to the acetate in my solution.”

  He reached into his bag and pulled out a magnifying glass. Faith held her breath as she watched him lean over the toxic-smelling pan. He studied all the different fingerprints the chemicals had brought out. “Based on the latents, we’ve got three different people touching this paper.” He looked at the black print again. “I’d say the thumbprint is the only time the third person touched this page.” He indicated the position. “It’s in the bottom left corner. He was being careful when he handled it.”

  Will said, “He might have put his thumb there because he was trying not to touch it as he slid it under the door.”

  “He might very well,” Gordon agreed. “I need to dry this, then I can look at the back. Why don’t y’all give me a few hours to see what I can come up with? Do you have comparisons of the two people you believe touched this?”

  Faith said, “Adam’s will be on file. We took Gabe Cohen’s to rule him out before we searched Adam’s room.”

  “What about Tommy Albertson’s?”

  She nodded. Albertson had been an ass about it, but she had managed to get prints off him.

  “Well,” Gordon began, “get me the comparisons. This is a pretty excellent print, coloring aside. I’ll run it through AFIS,” he said, referencing the automated fingerprint identification system. “The system’s been running slow lately. You know the best way to go about this. Give me the right suspect and I can give you a solid match.”

  “Will?” A tall woman with spiky blond hair and the requisite white lab coat walked over. “Amanda told me to find you. We got a hit on the sperm from the crime scene.”

  Will’s shock registered on his face. He shook his head, insisting, “No, it can’t be the father.”

  “The father? No, Will, I’m telling you we got a hit from the sex-offender database.” She held up a Post-it note.

  Faith read the name, hissing, “Jesus, he was right under our nose.”