He turned around. There was a matching office building across the street, at least ten stories tall, maybe more if it had a basement. Yellow signs posted over the chained doors indicated that the building was scheduled for demolition. The three structures were massive relics of Atlanta’s industrial past. If Rippy’s investors had gone all in now that the rape case had disappeared, the project could net them all millions, maybe billions, of dollars.
Faith asked, ‘Were you able to pull the VIN off the car?’
Collier supplied, ‘White, 2016 Kia Sorento, registered to one Vernon Dale Harding. AFD says it was probably burning for four or five hours.’
‘So, someone killed Harding and torched his car, then someone else, or maybe the same guy, called it into nine-one-one five hours later.’
Will stared at the nightclub. ‘Why here?’
Faith shook her head. ‘Why us?’
Ng didn’t understand that the question was rhetorical. He threw his hand out toward the building. ‘This was supposed to be some kind of nightclub. Dance floor below, VIP rooms circled around the top, like an atrium in a mall. I thought there might be a gang involved, slinging up a dope club like this in the middle of Shitown, so I called my girl, she did a record check, Rippy’s name came up and I was like, “Oh shit.” So I kicked it up to my boss. He gives your ballbreaker a courtesy call and she’s out here ten minutes later flossing her teeth with our short hairs.’
They all looked at Amanda. Charlie Reed was gone, and a tall, willowy redhead had taken his place. She was pinning up her hair as she talked to Amanda.
Ng gave a low whistle. ‘Damn, son. Lookit that fine Girl Scout. Wonder if the paint matches the trim?’
Collier grinned. ‘I’ll let you know in the morning.’
Faith glanced down at Will’s clenched fists. ‘That’s enough, guys.’
Collier kept grinning. ‘We’re just having fun, Officer.’ He winked at her. ‘But you should know I got kicked out of Girl Scouts for eating some Brownies.’
Ng guffawed, and Faith rolled her eyes as she walked away.
‘Red,’ Will told the detectives. ‘Everybody calls her Red. She’s a crime scene tech, but she gets in the way a lot, so keep an eye on her.’
Collier asked, ‘She seeing anybody?’
Will shrugged. ‘Does it matter?’
‘Not a bit.’ Collier spoke with the extreme certainty of a man who had never been rejected by a woman. He gave Will a cocky salute. ‘Thanks for the four-one-one, bro.’
Will forced his fists to unclench as he walked toward Amanda. Faith was heading into the building, probably to get out of the heat. The red-haired woman was signing herself into the crime scene at the front gate. She saw Will and smiled, and he smiled back, because her name wasn’t Red, it was Sara Linton, and she wasn’t a crime scene tech, she was the medical examiner, and it was none of Collier’s and Ng’s God damm business what matched where because three hours ago she had been underneath Will in bed whispering so many filthy things into his ear that he had momentarily lost the ability to swallow.
Amanda didn’t look up from her BlackBerry when Will approached. He stood in front of her, waiting, because that’s what she usually made him do. He was intimately familiar with the top of her head, the spiral at the crown that spun her salt-and-pepper hair into a helmet.
Finally she said, ‘You’re late, Agent Trent.’
‘Yes, ma’am. It won’t happen again.’
She narrowed her eyes, dubious of the apology. ‘That odor in the air is the smell of shit hitting the fan. I’ve already been on the phone with the mayor, the governor and two district attorneys who refuse to come out here because they don’t want the news cameras capturing them anywhere near another case involving Marcus Rippy.’ She looked down at her phone again. The BlackBerry was her mobile command post, sending and receiving updates from her vast network of contacts, only some of them official.
She said, ‘There are three more satellite trucks on their way here, one of them national. I’ve got over thirty emails from reporters asking for statements. Rippy’s lawyers have already called to say they’ll be handling all questions and any indication that we’re unfairly targeting Rippy could lead to a harassment lawsuit. They won’t even meet with me until tomorrow morning. Too busy, they say.’
‘Same as before.’ Will had been granted exactly one sit-down with Marcus Rippy, during which time the man had remained almost completely silent. Faith was right. One of the more galling things about people with money was that they really knew their constitutional rights.
He asked Amanda, ‘Are we officially in charge or is APD?’
‘Do you think I would be standing here if I wasn’t officially in charge?’
Will glanced back at Collier and Ng. ‘Does Captain Chin Cleft know that?’
‘You think he’s cute?’
‘Well, I wouldn’t say—’
Amanda was already walking toward the building. Will had to trot to catch up with her. She had the quick gait of a Shetland pony.
They both signed in with the uniformed officer in charge of access to the crime scene. Instead of going inside, Amanda made Will stand just out of reach of the shade so that the sun would turn his skull into a kiln.
She said, ‘I knew Harding’s father when I was a rookie. Senior was a beat cop who spent his money on whores and the dog track. Died of an aneurysm back in eighty-five. Left his son his gambling habit. Dale took a medical retirement that ran out two years ago. He cashed out his pension earlier this year.’
‘Why was he on medical leave?’
‘HIPAA,’ she said, referring to the law that, among other things, barred cops from making doctors tell them intimate details about their patients. ‘I’m working some back channels to get the information, but this isn’t good, Will. Harding was a bad cop, but he’s a dead cop, and his body is lying inside a building owned by a man we very publicly could not put away for rape.’
‘Do we know if Harding has any connection to Rippy?’
‘If only I had a detective who could figure that out.’ She turned on her heel and walked into the building. The electricity was still off. The interior was dank and cavernous, the dark tinted windows giving the space a ghostly cast. They both slipped on shoe protectors. Suddenly the generators roared to life. Xenon lights popped on, illuminating every square inch of the building. Will felt his retinas flinch in protest.
There was a cacophony of clicks as Maglites were turned off and stored. Will’s eyes adjusted to find exactly what he expected to find: trash, condoms and needles, an empty shopping cart, lawn chairs, soiled mattresses—for some reason, there were always soiled mattresses—and too many spent beer cans and broken liquor bottles to count. The walls were covered with multi-colored graffiti that went up at least as high as a person’s arm could reach with a can of spray paint. Will recognized some gang tags—Suernos, Bloods, Crips—but for the most part there were bubbled names with hearts, peace flags and a couple of gigantic, well-endowed unicorns with rainbow eyes. Typical raver art. The great thing about ecstasy was that it made you really happy until it stopped your heart from beating.
Ng’s description of the layout was fairly accurate. The building had an upstairs atrium that opened to the bottom floor like in a shopping mall. A temporary wooden railing ringed the balcony, but there were gaps where a less careful person might get into trouble. The main floor was huge, multi-tiered, with concrete half-walls designating private seating areas and a large open space for dancing. What was probably meant to be the bar arced around the back of the building. Two grand, curved staircases reached to the second floor, which was at least forty feet up. The concrete stairs hugging the walls gave the impression of a cobra’s fangs about to bite down on the dance floor.
An older woman wearing a yellow hard hat approached Amanda. She had another hard hat in her hand, which she gave to Amanda, who in turn gave it to Will, who in turn set it on the floor.
The woman offered no preamble. �
�Found in the parking lot: an empty clear plastic bag with a paper label insert. Said bag contained at one time a tan canvas tarp, missing from the scene. The tarp is Handy brand, three-feet-seven by five-feet-seven, widely available.’ She paused her tired drone to take a breath. ‘Also found: a slightly used roll of black duct tape, outer plastic wrap not yet located. Weather report indicates a deluge, this vicinity, thirty-six hours previous. The paper label on the tarp bag and the edges of the tape do not show exposure to said weather event.’
Amanda said, ‘Well, I suppose we have a window at least, sometime over the weekend.’
‘Canvas tarp,’ Will repeated. ‘That’s what painters use.’
‘Correct,’ the woman said. ‘No paint or painter’s tools have been located inside or outside the building.’ She continued, ‘The stairs: both sets are part of the scene and still being processed. Found so far: items from a woman’s purse, what looks like tissue. The guts kind, not Kleenex.’ She pointed to a scissor lift. ‘You’ll need to use that to go up. We’ve put out a call for an operator. He’s twenty-five minutes out.’
‘Are you shitting me?’ Collier had sneaked up on them. ‘We can’t use the stairs?’ He was warily eyeing the scissor lift, which was a hydraulic machine that lifted a platform straight into the air, kind of like a very shaky open-air elevator with nothing but a thin safety rail between you and certain death.
Amanda asked Will, ‘Do you know how to operate that thing?’
‘I can figure it out.’ The machine was already plugged in. Will found the key hidden inside the auxiliary battery box. He used the tip of the key to press the tiny reset button on the bottom. The scissor lift stuttered a quick up-and-down and they were in business.
Will grabbed the safety rail and climbed up the two steps by the motor. Amanda reached for his hand so she could follow. Her movements looked effortless, mostly because Will did all the lifting. She was light, less than the weight of a boxing heavy bag.
They both turned around and waited for Collier. He glanced at the fang-like stairs.
Amanda tapped her watch. ‘You’ve got two seconds, Detective Collier.’
Collier took a deep breath. He grabbed the yellow hard hat off the floor. He clamped it down on his head and scampered up the platform like a frightened baby monkey.
Will turned the key to start the motor. In truth, he had worked construction jobs during his college years and he could operate just about any machine on a work site. Still, he stuttered the platform a bit just for the pleasure of watching Collier white-knuckle the safety rail.
The motor made a grinding noise as they started their ascent. Sara was on the stairs helping one of the techs collect evidence. She was wearing khakis and a fitted navy-blue GBI T-shirt that flattered her in more ways than two. Her hair was still pulled back, but some of the strands had come loose. She’d put on her glasses. He liked the way she looked in her glasses.
Will had known Sara Linton for eighteen months, which was roughly seventeen months and twenty-six days longer than any other period of sustained happiness in his life. He practically lived at her apartment. Their dogs got along. He liked her sister. He understood her mother. He was scared of her father. She had officially joined the GBI two weeks ago. This was their first case together. He was embarrassed by how excited he was to see her.
Which is why Will made himself look away, because mooning over your girlfriend at a grisly crime scene was probably how serial killers got their start.
Or maybe he would just be a regular murderer, because Collier had decided to take his mind off his vertigo by staring at Sara’s ass while she bent over to help the tech.
Will shifted his weight again. The platform shook. Collier made a noise halfway between a gag and a yelp.
Amanda gave Will one of her rare smiles. ‘My first rollout was for a guy who fell off the top of a scaffolding. This was back before Hazmat and all those silly safety regulations. There wasn’t much for the coroner. We hosed his brains off the sidewalk and into the gutter.’
Collier leaned over so he could use his arm to wipe the sweat from his face and still hold on to the railing.
The lift shook of its own accord as Will stopped the platform a few inches below the concrete balcony. The wooden railing had been pulled away. Across from the opening, half-inch slabs of moldy four-by-sixteen drywall were stacked chest-high. The thick layer of dust on the buckets of joint compound indicated they had been there since construction stopped six months ago. Graffiti dripped lazily across everything—the floor, the walls, the construction materials—with two more ubiquitous rainbow-eyed unicorns standing sentry at the top of each stairway.
Heavy wooden doors lined what Will assumed were the VIP rooms. The custom-carved mahogany had been stained a rich espresso, probably at the factory, but the graffiti artists had done their best to black out the finish. Yellow numbered crime scene markers dotted the entire span of the balcony, from one set of stairs to the other. Several Tyvek-clad techs were photographing and collecting evidence. Some of the VIP rooms were being sprayed down with luminol, a chemical that made body fluids glow an otherworldly blue when exposed to a black light.
Will didn’t want to think about all the body fluids they’d find.
Faith stood at the far end of the balcony, her head back as she drank from a bottle of water. She was wearing a white Tyvek suit. The zip was undone. The arms were tied around her waist. She had obviously passed herself off as a tech so she could get up to the crime scene without having to wait for the scissor lift. Sealed evidence bags were piled in front of her, alongside neatly stacked boxes of gloves, evidence bags and protective clothing. The murder room was a few feet away, the wooden door opened out. Light strobed as the position and state of the body were documented by the crime scene photographer. They wouldn’t be allowed inside until every inch was recorded.
Amanda pulled out her phone and read her new messages as she walked toward the kill room. ‘CNN is here. I’m going to have to update the governor and the mayor. Will, you’ll take point on this while I’m hand-holding. Collier, I need you to see if Harding has any family. My recollection is that there’s an aunt on the father’s side.’
‘Yes, ma’am.’ Collier’s shoulder rubbed the wall as he followed at a distance.
‘Take off that hard hat. You look like one of the Village People.’ She checked her phone again. Obviously a new piece of information had come in. ‘Harding has four ex-wives. Two are still on the force, both in records. Track them down and find out if there’s a bookie or pimp whose name kept coming up.’
Collier stumbled to keep up as he left the hat on the floor. ‘You think his exes were still talking to him?’
‘Am I really getting that question from you?’ Her words obviously hit their mark because Collier responded with a quick nod. She dropped her phone back into her pocket. ‘Faith, run it down for me.’
‘Doorknob to the neck.’ Faith pointed to the side of her own neck. ‘It matches the other doorknobs up here, so we can assume the killer didn’t bring it for the purpose of murder. They found a G43 by the car. The action is jammed, but at least one round was fired. Charlie is running the serial number through the system right now.’
‘That’s the new Glock,’ Collier said. ‘What’s it look like?’
‘Lightweight, slim profile. The grip is rough, but it’s pretty impressive for concealed carry.’
Collier asked another question about the gun, which was manufactured specifically for government use. Will tuned him out. The gun wasn’t going to solve this case.
He stepped around some marked bloody shoeprints and bent down to get a closer look at the lockset in the door. The backplate was rectangular, about three-by-six inches and screwed to the door. It was cast, plated in polished brass with a heavily detailed raised design featuring a cursive R at the center. Rippy’s logo. Will had seen it all over the man’s house. He squinted at the latchbolt, the long metal cylinder that kept the door closed or, when turned, allowed it
to open. He saw scrapes around the hollow square where the doorknob spindle was supposed to go. And then he looked down at the floor and saw the long screwdriver with the numbered yellow card beside it.
Someone had been shut inside the room, and someone else had used the screwdriver to gain entry.
Will stood back up to look at the kill scene. The photographer stepped across the body, trying not to slip in the blood.
There was a lot of blood.
Sprayed on the ceiling, spattered and splattered on walls, glistening against the nearly black criss-cross of competing graffiti. The floor was flooded, like someone had opened the spigot on Harding’s carotid and let it run dry. Light danced off the dark, congealing liquid. Will could taste metal in his mouth as oxygen hit iron. Underneath it all he caught a whiff of piss that for some reason made him feel sorrier for the guy than the doorknob sticking Frankenstein-like out of the meaty hambone of his neck.
In policing, there wasn’t a lot of dignity in death.
Dale Harding’s body was in the center of the room, which was about fifteen feet square with a vaulted ceiling. He was flat on his back, a big, bald guy wearing a cheap, shiny suit that wouldn’t close around his ample gut, more like a cop of his father’s generation than his own. His shirt had come untucked on one side. His red and blue striped tie was split like the legs of a hurdler. The waistband of his pants was rolled over. His stainless-steel TAG Heuer had turned into a tourniquet on his wrist because his body was swelling with the various juices of decay. A gold diamond ring cut into his pinky finger. Black dress socks stretched around his waxy yellow ankles. His mouth was open. His eyes were closed. He obviously had some kind of eczema. The dry skin around his mouth and nose looked like it was speckled with sugar.
Weirdly, there was only a slash of blood on the front of his body, like a painter had flicked a brush at him. There were a few drops on his face, but nothing else, especially where you’d expect it, around the too-tight collar of his shirt.
The Kept Woman (Will Trent 8) Page 3
