“You think we’re a bunch of amateurs?”
Obviously, she did. “How is the search going?”
“We’re finding exactly what’s out here—nothing. Nada. Zero.” He glared at Will. “This how you state guys run things? Come in here and blow our whole fucking budget on a useless search in the middle of the goddamn night?”
Will was tired and he was frustrated, and it came out in his tone. “We usually pillage your supplies and rape your women first.”
“Ha-fucking-ha,” Fierro grumbled, slapping his neck again. He pulled away his hand and there was a smear of bloody insect on his palm. “You’re gonna be laughing your ass off when I take back my case.”
Amanda said, “Detective Fierro, Chief Peterson asked us to intervene. You don’t have the authority to take back this case.”
“Peterson, huh?” His lip curled. “Does that mean you’ve been greasing his pole again?”
Will sucked in so much air that his lips made a whistling sound. For her part, Amanda looked unfazed, though her eyes narrowed, and she gave Fierro a single nod, as if to say his time would come. Will wouldn’t be surprised if, at some future date, Fierro woke up to find a decapitated horse’s head in his bed.
“Hey!” someone screamed. “Over here!”
All three stood where they were in various stages of shock, anger and unadulterated rage.
“I found something!”
The words got Will moving. He jogged toward the searcher, a woman who was furiously waving her hands in the air. She was Rockdale uniformed patrol, wearing a knit hat on her head and surrounded by tall switchgrass.
“What is it?” he asked.
She pointed toward a dense pack of low-hanging trees. He saw that the leaves underneath were disturbed, bare spots of earth showing in places. “Something caught my light,” she said, turning on her Maglite and shining it into the shadowy area under the trees. Will didn’t see anything. By the time Amanda had joined them, he was wondering if the patrolwoman was a little too tired, a little too anxious to find something.
“What is it?” Amanda asked, just as the light reflected back from the darkness. It was a small flash that lasted no more than a second. Will blinked, thinking maybe his tired brain had conjured it, too, but the patrolwoman found it again—a quick flash like a tiny burst of powder, approximately twenty feet away.
Will slipped on a pair of latex gloves from his jacket. He took the flashlight, carefully pushing back branches as he made his way into the area. The prickly bushes and limbs made it hard going, and he stooped down low to make forward progress. He shone the light on the ground, scanning for the object. Maybe it was a broken mirror or a chewing gum wrapper. All the possibilities ran through his mind as he tried to locate it: a piece of jewelry, a shard of glass, minerals in a rock.
A Florida state driver’s license.
The license was about two feet from the base of the tree. Beside it was a small pocketknife, the thin blade so coated in blood that it blended in with the dark leaves around it. Close to the trunk, the branches thinned out. Will knelt down, picking up the leaves one at a time as he moved them off the license. The thick plastic had been folded in two. The colors and the distinctive outline of the state of Florida in the corner told him where the license had been issued. There was a hologram in the background to prevent forgeries. That must have been what the light had picked up on.
He leaned down, craning his neck so he could get a better look, not wanting to disturb the scene. One of the clearest fingerprints Will had ever seen was right in the middle of the license. Imprinted in blood, the ridges were practically jumping off the smooth plastic. The photograph showed a woman: dark hair, dark eyes.
“There’s a pocketknife and a license,” he told Amanda, his voice raised so that she could hear him. “There’s a bloody fingerprint on the license.”
“Can you read the name?” She put her hands on her hips, sounding furious.
Will felt his throat close up. He concentrated on the small print, making out a J, or maybe an I, before everything began to jumble around.
Her fury shot up exponentially. “Just bring the damn thing out.”
There was a cluster of cops around her now, all looking confused. Even twenty feet away, Will could hear them mumbling about procedure. The purity of the crime scene was sacrosanct. Defense lawyers chewed apart irregularities. Photographs and measurements had to be taken, sketches made. The chain of custody could not be broken, or the evidence would be thrown out.
“Will?”
He felt a drop of rain hit the back of his neck. It was hot, almost like a burn. More cops were coming up, trying to see what had been found. They would wonder why Will didn’t shout out the name from the license, why he didn’t immediately send off someone to do a computer check. Was this how it was going to end? Was Will going to have to pick his way out of this dense covering and announce to a group of strangers that, at his best, he could only read at a second-grade level? If that information got out, he might as well go home and stick his head in the oven, because there wouldn’t be a cop in the city who would work with him.
Amanda started making her way toward him, her skirt snagging on a prickly vine, various curses coming from her lips.
Will felt another drop of rain on his neck and wiped it away with his hand. He looked down at his glove. There was a fine smear of blood on his fingers. He thought maybe he had cut his neck on one of the limbs, but he felt another drop on the back of his neck. Hot, wet, viscous. He put his hand to the place. More blood.
Will looked up, into the eyes of a woman with dark brown hair and dark eyes. She was hanging upside down about fifteen feet above him. Her ankle was snagged in a patchwork of branches, the only thing keeping her from hitting the ground. She had fallen at an angle, face-first, snapping her neck. Her shoulders were twisted, her eyes open, staring at the ground. One arm hung straight down, reaching toward Will. There was an angry red circle around her wrist, the skin burned through. A piece of rope was knotted tightly around the other wrist. Her mouth was open. Her front tooth was broken, a third of it missing.
Another drop of blood dripped from her fingertips, this time hitting him on the cheek just below his eye. Will took off his latex glove and touched the blood. It was still warm.
She had died within the last hour.
CHAPTER FIVE
—
Pauline McGhee steered her Lexus LX right into the handicapped parking space in front of the City Foods Supermarket. It was five in the morning. All the handicapped people were probably still asleep. More importantly, it was too damn early to walk more than she had to.
“Come on, sleepy cat,” she told her son, gently pressing his shoulder. Felix stirred, not wanting to wake up. She caressed his cheek with her hand, thinking not for the first time that it was a miracle that something so perfect had come out of her imperfect body. “Come on, sweet pea,” she said, tickling his ribs until he curved up like a roly-poly worm.
She got out of the car, helping Felix climb out of the SUV behind her. His feet hadn’t hit the ground before she went over the routine. “See where we’re parked?” He nodded. “What do we do if we get lost?”
“Meet at the car.” He struggled not to yawn.
“Good boy.” She pulled him close as they walked toward the store. Growing up, Pauline had been told that she should find an adult if she ever got lost, but these days, you never knew who that adult might be. A security guard might be a pedophile. A little old lady might be a batty witch who spent her spare time hiding razor blades in apples. It was a sad state of affairs when the safest help for a lost six-year-old boy was an inanimate object.
The artificial lights of the store were a bit much for this time of morning, but it was Pauline’s own fault for not already buying the cupcakes for Felix’s class. She’d gotten the notice a week ago, but she hadn’t anticipated all hell breaking loose at work in between. One of the interior design agency’s biggest clients had ordered a custom-mad
e sixty-thousand-dollar Italian brown leather couch that wouldn’t fit in the damn elevator, and the only way to get it up to his penthouse was with a ten-thousand-dollar-an-hour crane.
The client was blaming Pauline’s agency for not catching the error, the agency was blaming Pauline for designing the couch too big, and Pauline was blaming the dipshit upholsterer whom she had specifically told to go to the building on Peachtree Street to measure the elevator before making the damn couch. Faced with a ten-thousand-dollar-an-hour crane bill or rebuilding a sixty-thousand-dollar couch, the upholsterer was, of course, conveniently forgetting this conversation, but Pauline was damned if she was going to let him get away with it.
There was a meeting of all concerned at seven o’clock sharp, and she was going to be the first one there to get in her side of the story. As her father always said, shit rolls downhill. Pauline McGhee wasn’t going to be the one smelling like a sewer when the day was over. She had evidence on her side—a copy of an email exchange with her boss asking him to remind the upholsterer about taking measurements. The critical part was Morgan’s response: I’ll take care of it. Her boss was pretending like the emails hadn’t happened, but Pauline wasn’t going to take the fall. Someone was going to lose their job today, and it sure as hell wasn’t going to be her.
“No, baby,” she said, pulling Felix’s hand away from a package of Gummi Bears dangling from the shelf. Pauline swore they put those things at kid level just so their parents would be bullied into buying them. She had seen more than one mother relent to a screaming kid just so he’d shut up. Pauline didn’t play that game, and Felix knew it. If he tried anything, she would snatch him up and leave the store, even if that meant abandoning a half-filled shopping cart.
She turned down the bakery aisle, nearly smacking into a grocery cart. The man behind the buggy laughed good-naturedly, and Pauline managed a smile.
“Have a good day,” he said.
“You, too,” she returned.
That, she thought, was the last time she was going to be nice to anybody this morning. She’d tossed and turned all night, then gotten up at three so she could run on the treadmill, put her face on, fix breakfast for Felix and get him ready for school. Long gone were her single days when she could spend all night partying, go home with whoever looked good, then roll out of bed the next morning twenty minutes before it was time to get to work.
Pauline ruffled Felix’s hair, thinking she didn’t miss it a bit. Though getting laid every now and then would’ve been a damn gift from heaven.
“Cupcakes,” she said, relieved to find several stacks lined up along the front of the bakery counter. Her relief quickly left when she saw that every single one was pastel with Easter bunnies and multicolored eggs on top. The note she’d gotten from the school had specified nondenominational cupcakes, but Pauline wasn’t sure what that meant, other than Felix’s extremely expensive private school was brimming with politically correct bullshit. They wouldn’t even call it an Easter Party—it was a Spring Party that just happened to fall a few days before Easter Sunday. What religion didn’t celebrate Easter? She knew the Jews didn’t get Christmas, but for the love of God, Easter was all about them. Even the pagans got the bunny.
“All right,” Pauline said, handing Felix her purse. He slung it over his shoulder the same way she did, and Pauline felt a pang of angst. She worked in interior design. Just about every man in her life was a flaming mo. She’d have to make an effort to meet some straight men soon for both their sakes.
There were six cupcakes in each box, so Pauline scooped up five boxes, thinking the teachers would want some. She couldn’t stand most of the faculty at the school, but they loved Felix, and Pauline loved her son, so what was an extra four seventy-five to feed the fat cows who took care of her baby?
She carried the boxes to the front of the store, the smell making her feel hungry and nauseated at the same time, like she could eat every one of them until it made her sick enough to spend the next hour in the toilet. It was too early to smell anything with frosting, that was for sure. She turned around and checked on Felix, who was dragging his feet behind her. He was exhausted, and it was her fault. She contemplated getting him the bag of Gummi Bears he’d wanted, but her cell phone started ringing as soon as she put the cupcakes on the checkout belt and all was forgotten when she recognized the number.
“Yeah?” she asked, watching the boxes slowly make their way down the belt toward the slope-shouldered cashier. The woman was so large that her hands barely met in the middle, like a T. Rex or a baby seal.
“Paulie.” Morgan, her boss, sounded frantic. “Can you believe this meeting?”
He was acting like he was on her side, but she knew he’d stab her in the back the minute she let her guard down. She’d enjoy watching him pack up his office after she produced the email at the meeting. “I know,” she commiserated. “It’s horrible.”
“Are you at the grocery store?”
He must have heard the beeps from the scanner. The T. Rex was ringing up each box individually, even though they were all the same. If Pauline hadn’t been on the phone, she would have jumped over the counter and scanned them herself. She moved to the end of the checkout and grabbed a couple of plastic bags to expedite the operation. Cradling her phone between her ear and shoulder, she asked, “What do you think’s gonna happen?”
“Well, it’s clearly not your fault,” he said, but she would’ve bet her right one that the bastard had told his boss that very thing.
“It’s not yours, either,” she countered, though Morgan had recommended the upholsterer in the first place, probably because the guy looked thirteen and waxed his gym-toned legs to shiny perfection. She knew the little tart was working the gay connection with Morgan, but he was dead wrong if he thought Pauline was going to be the odd girl out. It had taken her sixteen years to work her way up from secretary to assistant to designer. She’d spent endless nights at the Atlanta School of Art and Design getting her degree, dragging into work every morning so she could pay the rent, finally getting to a position where she could breathe a little, could afford to bring a kid into the world the right way—and then some. Felix had all the right clothes, all the good toys, and he went to one of the most expensive schools in the city. Pauline hadn’t stopped with her boy, either. She’d gotten her teeth fixed and laser-corrected her eyes. Every week she got a massage, every other week she got a facial, and there wasn’t a damn root in her hair that showed anything but sassy brown thanks to the girl she saw in Peachtree Hills every month and a half. There was no way in hell she was giving up any of that. Not by a long shot.
It would serve Morgan well to remember where Pauline had started. She’d worked the secretarial pool back before wire transfers and online banking, when they kept all the checks in a wall safe until they could be deposited at the end of the day. After the last office remodel, Pauline had taken a smaller office just so the safe would end up in her space. Just in case, she’d even had a locksmith come in after hours to reset the combination, and she was the only one who knew it. It drove Morgan crazy that he didn’t know the combination, and it was a damn good thing he didn’t, because the copy of the email covering her ass was locked behind that steel door. For days, she had conjured countless scenarios of herself opening the safe with a flourish, shoving the email in Morgan’s face, shaming him in front of their boss and the client.
“What a mess,” Morgan sighed, going for the dramatic. “I just can’t believe—”
Pauline took her purse from Felix and dug around for her wallet. He stared longingly at the candy bars as she slid her debit card through the reader and went through the motions. “Uh-huh,” she said as Morgan yapped in her ear about what a bastard the client was, how he wouldn’t stand by while Pauline’s good name was dragged through the mud. If anyone had been around to appreciate it, she would’ve feigned gagging herself.
“Come on, baby,” she said, gently pushing Felix toward the door. She cradled the phone to her ear as
she took the bags by the handles, then wondered why she had bothered to bag the boxes in the first place. Plastic boxes, plastic bags; the women at Felix’s school would be horrified on behalf of the environment. Pauline stacked the cupcakes back together, pressing against the top box with her chin. She dropped the empty bags in the trash, and used her free hand to dig into her purse for her car keys as she walked through the sliding doors.
“This is absolutely the worst thing that’s ever happened to me in my career,” Morgan groaned. Despite the crick in her neck, Pauline had forgotten she was still on the phone.
She pressed the button on the remote to open the trunk of the SUV. It slid up with a sigh, and she thought about how much she loved the sound of that tailgate lifting, what a luxury it was to make enough money so that you didn’t even have to open your own trunk. She wasn’t going to lose it all because of some pretty-boy butt waxer who couldn’t be bothered to measure a fucking elevator.
“It’s true,” she said into the phone, though she hadn’t really paid attention to what Morgan was stating as the God’s honest. She put the boxes in the back, then pressed the button on the bottom of the trunk to make it close. She was in her car before she realized that Felix wasn’t with her.
“Fuck,” she whispered, closing the phone. She was out of the car in a flash, scanning the parking lot, which had filled up considerably since she’d been inside the store.
“Felix?” She circled the car, thinking he must be hiding on the other side. He wasn’t there.
“Felix?” she called, running back toward the store. She nearly slammed into the sliding doors because they didn’t open quickly enough. She asked the cashier, “Did you see my son?” The woman looked confused, and Pauline tersely repeated, “My son. He was just with me. He’s got dark hair, he’s about this tall, he’s six years old?” She gave up, mumbling, “For fucksakes.” She ran back to the bakery, then up and down the aisles.
The Will Trent Series 5-Book Bundle Page 88
