Faith clicked on the browser history button. She pulled up another video. There was different music, but the same sort of intro. She read aloud, “Eat to live. Don’t live to eat.” The words faded into a photo of a girl who was so painfully thin that she was hard to look at. Faith opened another page, then another. “The only freedom left is the freedom to starve yourself.” she read. “Thin is beautiful. Fat is ugly.” She looked at the top of the screen, the video category. “Thinspo. I’ve never heard of it.”
“I don’t understand. These girls look like they’re starving, but they’ve got TVs in their rooms, they’re wearing nice clothes.”
Faith clicked on another link. “Thinspiration,” she said. “Good Lord, I can’t believe this. They’re emaciated.”
“Is there a newsgroup or something?”
Faith looked back at the history. She skimmed the list, finding more videos, but nothing that looked like a chat room. She scrolled to the next page and hit pay dirt. “Atlanta-Pro-Anna-dot-com,” she read. “It’s a pro-anorexia site.” Faith clicked on the link, but all that came up was another screen asking for a password. She tried “Felix” again, but it didn’t work. She read the fine print. “It’s asking for a six-digit password and Felix is only five letters.” She typed in variations on his name, saying them aloud for Will’s benefit. “Zero-Felix, one-Felix, Felix-zero …”
Will asked, “How many letters is ‘thinspiration’?”
“Too many,” she said. “ ‘Thinspo’ is seven.” She tried this, to no avail.
Will asked, “What’s her screen name?”
Faith read the name in the box above the password. “A-T-L thin.” She realized spelling wouldn’t help him. “It’s shorthand for ‘Atlanta thin.’ ” She entered in the screen name. “No dice. Oh.” Faith mentally kicked herself. “Felix’s birthday.” She opened up the calendar program and did a search for “birthday.” Only two hits came up, one for Pauline and one for her son. “One-two-eight-oh-three.” The screen stayed stagnant. “Nope, didn’t work.”
He nodded, absently scratching his arm. “Safes have six-digit combinations, right?”
“Couldn’t hurt to try it.” Faith waited, but Will did not move. “One-two-oh-eight-oh-three,” she repeated, knowing he was perfectly capable of processing numbers. Still he didn’t move, and finally she felt something in her brain click. “Oh. I’m sorry.”
“Don’t apologize. It’s my fault.”
“It’s mine.” She stood up and went to the safe, spinning the dial to the right, locking onto the twelve, then going left two turns and dialing in eight. It wasn’t the numbers Will couldn’t manage. It was the left and right.
Faith dialed in the last number, and was slightly disappointed it had been so easy when she heard the instant thunk of the last tumbler falling into place. She opened the safe and saw a spiral-bound notebook, the sort of thing every schoolkid had, and a single piece of laser paper. She skimmed the page. It was a printed-out email dealing with measuring an elevator so a couch could fit in it, something Faith had never considered had to be done, even though the first refrigerator she’d bought had been too big to fit through the kitchen door. “Work stuff,” she told Will, taking out the notebook.
She flipped open the cover to the first page. The hair on the back of her neck went up, and Faith suppressed a shudder as she realized what she was seeing. Neat cursive lined the page, over and over again, the same line. Faith flipped to the next page, then the next. The words had been traced so hard in places that the pen ripped the paper. She was not one to believe in the supernatural, but the anger she felt coming out of the notebook was palpable.
“It’s the same, right?” Will had probably recognized the spacing of the lines, the same short sentence repeatedly written, covering the notebook like a sadistic form of art.
I will not deny myself … I will not deny myself … I will not deny myself …
“The same,” Faith confirmed. “This connects Pauline to the cave, to Jackie Zabel and Anna.”
“It’s in pen,” Will said. “The pages in the cave were in pencil.”
“It’s the same sentence, though. I will not deny myself. Pauline wrote this on her own, not because she had to. No one made her do it. As far as we know, she was never in that cave.” Faith thumbed through the pages, making sure it was the same to the end of the notebook. “Jackie Zabel was thin. Not like the girls in the videos, but very thin.”
“Joelyn Zabel said her sister weighed the same weight when she died as she did in high school.”
“You think she had an eating disorder?”
“I think she had a lot of the same attributes that Pauline has—likes to be in control, likes to keep secrets.” He added, “Pete thought Jackie was malnourished, but maybe she was starving herself already.”
“What about Anna? Is she thin?”
“Same thing. You could see her …” He put his hand to his collarbone. “We thought it was part of the torture—starving them. But, those girls in the videos, they do that on purpose, right? These videos are like pornography for anorexics.”
Faith nodded, feeling a rush as she made the next connection. “Maybe they all met on the Internet.” She went back to the password box overlaying the Pro-Anna chat room and entered Felix’s birthday in every combination she could think of—leaving out the zeros, adding them back in, doing the full date, reversing the numbers. “It could be that Pauline was assigned a password she couldn’t change.”
“Or maybe what’s in that chat room is more valuable to her than what’s on the rest of the computer and in the safe.”
“This is a connection, Will. If all the women had eating disorders, then we finally have something that links them all.”
“And a chat room we can’t get into, and family that isn’t being exactly helpful.”
“What about Pauline McGhee’s brother? She told Felix that he was a bad man.” She turned away from the computer, giving Will her full attention. “Maybe we should go back to Felix and see if he remembers anything else.”
Will seemed dubious. “He’s only six years old, Faith. He’s bereft about losing his mom. I don’t think we can get anything else out of him.”
They both jumped when the phone on the desk rang. Faith reached for it without thinking, saying, “Pauline McGhee’s office.”
“Hello.” Morgan Hollister sounded none too pleased.
Faith asked, “Did you find Jacquelyn Zabel in your books?”
“ ’Fraid not, Detective, but—funny thing—I’ve got a call for you on line two.”
Faith shrugged at Will as she pressed the lighted button. “Faith Mitchell.”
Leo Donnelly went straight into a tirade. “Didn’t occur to you to check with me before barging in on my case?”
Faith’s mouth filled with apologies, but Leo didn’t give her time to get them out.
“I got a call from my boss who got a call from your butt-boy Hollister asking why the state was pawing through McGhee’s office when we’d already been through everything this morning.” He was breathing hard. “My boss, Faith. He’s wanting to know why I can’t do my job on this thing. You know how that makes me look?”
“It’s connected,” Faith said. “We found a connection between Pauline McGhee and our other victims.”
“I’m real fucking happy for you, Mitchell. Meanwhile, my balls are in a vise because you couldn’t take two seconds to stop and give me a heads-up.”
“Leo, I’m so sorry—”
“Save it,” he snapped. “I should hold this back from you, but I’m not that kind of guy.”
“Hold what back?”
“We’ve got another missing person.”
Faith felt her heart do a double beat. “Another missing woman?” she repeated, for Will’s benefit. “Does she match our profile?”
“Midthirties, dark hair, brown eyes. She works at some fancy bank in Buckhead where you gotta be filthy rich just to walk in the door. No friends. Everybody says she’s a ma
jor bitch.”
Faith nodded at Will. Another victim, another clock ticking down. “What’s her name? Where does she live?”
“Olivia Tanner.” He shot out the name and address so fast that she had to ask him to repeat it. “She’s in Virginia Highland.”
Faith scribbled the street address on the back of her hand.
He said, “You owe me for this.”
“Leo, I’m so sorry I—”
He didn’t let her finish. “If I were you, Mitchell, I’d watch myself. Except for the successful part, you’re looking a hell of a lot like that profile lately.”
She heard a soft click, which in some ways was worse than him slamming down the receiver in her ear.
Olivia Tanner lived in one of those deceptively small-looking Midtown bungalows that from the street appeared to be around a thousand square feet but ended up having six bedrooms and five and a half baths, with a price tag running slightly north of a million dollars. After being in Pauline McGhee’s office, seeing the missing woman’s psyche laid bare, Faith looked at Olivia Tanner’s house differently than she would have otherwise. The flower garden was beautiful, but all the plants were lined up in uniform rows. The outside of the house was crisply painted, the gutters in a graceful line along the eaves. Based on Faith’s knowledge of the neighborhood, the bungalow was probably thirty years older than her own lowly ranch house, but comparatively speaking, it looked brand-new.
“All right,” Will said into his cell phone. “Thank you for talking to me.” He ended the call, telling Faith, “Joelyn Zabel says that her sister struggled with anorexia and bulimia when she was in high school. She’s not sure what was going on recently, but it’s a pretty fair bet that Jackie hadn’t given it up.”
Faith let the information settle in her brain. “Okay,” she finally said.
“That’s it. That’s the connection.”
“Where does it get us?” she asked, turning off the ignition. “Tech can’t break into Jackie Zabel’s Mac. It might take weeks for them to find the password on Pauline McGhee’s computer, and we don’t even know if the anorexia chat room is where she met the other women or if it was just something she cruised during her lunch hour. Not that she ate lunch.” She looked back up at Olivia Tanner’s house. “What do you want to bet we don’t find a damn thing here, either?”
“You’re focusing on Felix when you need to be thinking about Pauline,” he said softly.
Faith wanted to tell him he was wrong, but it was true. All she could think about was Felix in some foster home, crying his eyes out. She needed to concentrate on the victims, the fact that Jacquelyn Zabel and Anna were precursors to Pauline McGhee and Olivia Tanner. How long could the two women endure the torture, the degradation? Every minute that passed was another minute they would suffer.
Every minute that passed was another minute Felix was without his mother.
Will told her, “The way we help Felix is to help Pauline.”
Faith breathed a heavy sigh. “It’s really starting to annoy me that you know me so well.”
“Please,” he muttered. “You are an enigma wrapped in a sticky bun.” He opened the car door and got out. She watched him walk toward the house with a determined stride.
Faith got out of the car and followed him, noting, “No garage, no BMW.” After her awful phone call with Leo, she had followed up with the desk sergeant who took the initial report on Olivia Tanner’s disappearance. The woman drove a blue BMW 325, hardly distinctive in this neighborhood. Tanner was single, worked as a vice president at a local bank, had no children, and her only living relative was her brother.
Will tried the front door. Locked. “What’s keeping the brother?”
Faith checked her watch. “His plane landed an hour ago. If traffic’s bad …” She let her voice trail off. Traffic was always bad in Atlanta, especially around the airport.
He leaned down, checking under the welcome mat for a key. When that didn’t work, he ran his hand along the top of the doorsill and checked the flowerpots, coming up empty. “You think we should just go in?”
Faith suppressed a comment about his eagerness to commit breaking and entering. She had worked with him long enough to know that frustration could act like adrenaline to Will, while it acted like Valium to Faith. “Let’s give him another few minutes.”
“We should go ahead and call a locksmith in case the brother doesn’t have a key.”
“Let’s just take this slow, all right?”
“You’re talking to me the way you talk to witnesses.”
“We don’t even know if Olivia Tanner is one of our victims. She could end up being bottle blonde and vibrant with tons of friends and a dog.”
“The bank said she hasn’t missed a day of work since she started there.”
“She could’ve fallen down the stairs. Decided to skip town. Run away with a stranger she met in a bar.”
Will didn’t answer. He cupped his hands and peered into the front windows, trying to see inside. The uniformed patrolman who had taken the missing persons report yesterday would have already done this, but Faith let him waste his time as they waited for Michael Tanner, Olivia’s brother, to show up.
Despite his anger, Leo had done them a solid by handing over the call. Procedure would have dictated a detective be assigned to the case. Depending on what the detective had on his books, it might have taken as long as twenty-four hours for Michael Tanner to talk to someone who could do more than fill out a report. From there, it might’ve taken another day before the GBI was alerted to a match on their profile. Leo had bought them two precious days on a case that desperately needed help. And they had kicked him in the teeth in the way of thanks.
Faith felt her BlackBerry start to vibrate. She checked the mail, saying a silent thank-you to Caroline, Amanda’s assistant. “I’ve got Jake Berman’s arrest report from the Mall of Georgia incident.”
“What’s it say?”
Faith watched the flashing file transfer icon. “It’ll take a few minutes to download.”
He walked around the house, checking each window. Faith followed him, keeping her BlackBerry in front of her like a divining rod. Finally, the first page of the report loaded, and she read from the narrative title. “ ‘Pursuant to complaints made by patrons of the Mall of Georgia …’ ” Faith scrolled down, looking for the relevant parts. “ ‘Suspect then made the typical hand gesture indicating he was interested in sexual intercourse. I responded by nodding my head twice, at which point he directed me back toward the stalls at the rear of the men’s room.’ ” She skimmed down some more. “ ‘Suspect’s wife and two sons, approximately age one and three, were waiting outside.’ ”
“Is the wife’s name listed?”
“No.”
Will walked up the steps of the deck that lined the back of Olivia Tanner’s house. Atlanta was in the piedmont of the Appalachians, which meant it was riddled with hills and valleys. Olivia Tanner’s bungalow was at the base of a steep slope, giving her backyard neighbors a clear view of her house.
“Maybe they saw something?” Will suggested.
Faith looked at the neighbor’s house. It was huge, the sort of McMansion you usually only saw in the suburbs. The top two stories had large decks and the basement had a terraced seating area with a brick fireplace. All the shutters and blinds on the back of the house were closed except for a pair of curtains that were pulled back on one of the basement doors.
“Looks empty,” she said.
“Probably a foreclosure.” Will tried Olivia Tanner’s back door. It was locked. “Olivia has been missing since at least yesterday. If she’s one of our victims, that means she was either taken right before or right after Pauline.” He checked the windows. “Are we thinking Jake Berman might be Pauline McGhee’s brother?”
“It’s possible,” Faith conceded. “Pauline warned Felix that her brother was dangerous. She didn’t want him around her kid.”
“She must have been scared of him for a reason.
Maybe he’s violent. Maybe the brother is the reason Pauline moved away and changed her name. She cut all ties at a very young age. She must have been terrified of him.”
Faith listed it out. “Jake Berman was at the scene of the crime. He’s disappeared. He wasn’t very cooperative as a witness. He hasn’t left a paper trail except for the one arrest for indecent exposure.”
“If Berman is an alias Pauline’s brother is using, then it’s pretty established. He was arrested and went through the system with the name intact.”
“If he changed it twenty years ago when Pauline ran away from home, that’s a lifetime as far as public records are concerned. They were still playing catch-up, trying to enter info and old cases into computers. A lot of those files never made the transition, especially in small towns. Look at how hard it’s been for Leo to track down Pauline’s parents, and they filed a missing persons report.”
“How old is Berman?”
Faith scrolled back to the front of the report. “Thirty-seven.”
Will stopped. “Pauline is thirty-seven. Could they be twins?”
Faith rifled around in her purse and found the black-and-white copy of Pauline McGhee’s driver’s license. She tried to recall Jake Berman’s face, but then remembered she was holding his file in her other hand. The BlackBerry was still loading. She held it up above her head, hoping the signal would get stronger.
“Let’s go back to the front of the house,” Will suggested. They went around the other side, Will checking the windows, making sure nothing looked suspicious. By the time they reached the front porch, the file had finally downloaded.
Jake Berman had a full beard in his arrest photo—the sort of unkempt kind that suburban dads sported when they were trying to look subversive. Faith showed Will the picture. “He was clean-shaven when I talked to him,” she said.
“Felix said the man who took his mother had a mustache.”
“He couldn’t have grown one that quickly.”
The Will Trent Series 5-Book Bundle Page 106
