The Kept Woman (Will Trent 8)

by Karin Slaughter

  Was Sara?

  She had said too much about Jeffrey. Sara had always walked a fine line with memories of her husband. She didn’t want to deny their time together, but she didn’t want to rub Will’s face in it either. Did Will really think she was telling him that she couldn’t get over losing her husband? Four years ago, Sara would have believed that was true.

  Until she’d met Will.

  That was what she’d stopped herself from saying in the bathroom: that Will had changed everything. That he had made her want to live again. That he was her life and the thought of losing him terrified her. The shame of her cowardice was equal to her regret. She had been scared because there was no point in telling him that she loved him if he was just going to leave.

  Sara leaned her head back against the wall. She stared at the dark sky out the windows. She’d seen death too many times to believe that there was such a thing as angels, but if there were demons in the afterlife, Angie Polaski was out there cackling like a witch.

  This was the revelation that finally moved Sara; not love or need or even desperation, but the absolute conviction that she was not going to let Angie win.

  Sara stood up. She found her purse. The dogs stirred, hoping for a walk, but she brushed them aside as she left the apartment. She didn’t bother with the lock. She pressed the elevator button. She pressed it again. She looked up at the lighted panel. The car was stuck on the lobby level. She turned toward the stairs.

  Will was standing by her door.

  Betty was beside him.

  He asked, ‘What’s wrong?’

  Of all the idiotic questions. ‘I thought you left.’

  ‘I thought you wanted me to.’

  ‘I only said that because you said it.’ She shook her head. ‘I know that sounds stupid. It is stupid. Was stupid.’ She wanted to reach for him. To hold him. To make the last ten minutes go away. ‘Why are you still here?’

  ‘It’s a free country.’

  ‘Will, please.’

  He shrugged. He looked down at his dog. ‘I don’t have a lot of quit in me, Sara. You should know that by now.’

  ‘You were just going to wait out here all night?’

  ‘I knew you would have to take out the dogs before you went to bed.’

  A bell dinged. The elevator doors opened.

  Sara was fixed in place. She felt the tingling in her nerves again. She was back on the cliff, her toes dangling over. She took a deep breath. ‘I don’t love you less than him, Will. I love you differently. I love you . . .’ She couldn’t describe it. There were no words. ‘I love you.’

  He nodded, but she couldn’t tell if he understood.

  She said, ‘We have to talk about this.’

  ‘No, we don’t.’ He reached out to her. He cupped his hand to her face. His touch was like a balm. He smoothed her brow. He wiped her tears. He stroked her cheek. Her breath caught when his thumb brushed across her lips.

  He asked, ‘Do you want me to stop?’

  ‘I want you to do that with your mouth.’

  He gently pressed his lips to hers. Sara kissed him back. There was no passion, just the overwhelming need for reconnection. Will pulled her close. Sara buried her face in the crook of his neck. She wrapped her arms around his waist. She felt him relax into her. They clung to each other, standing outside the open door to her apartment, until her cell phone chimed.

  Then chimed again.

  And again.

  Will broke away first.

  Reluctantly Sara picked up her purse from the floor.

  They both knew that Amanda sent rapid-fire texts, just as they both knew there was only one reason she would be reaching out to Sara after eight o’clock at night.

  She found her phone. She swiped her finger across the screen.

  AMANDA: NEED YOU NOW ANGIE’S CAR FOUND 1885 SOMMERSET.

  AMANDA: CADAVER DOG FOUND SCENT IN TRUNK.

  AMANDA: DON’T TELL WILL.

  Sara told him.

  EIGHT

  Will sat beside Sara in her BMW. She was being strong for him. Silent, but strong. They hadn’t talked about more than logistics since she’d read Amanda’s texts.

  Do you know where this is? Do you want me to drive?

  Sara turned onto Spring Street. Night had fallen. The instrument panel cast her face in white tones. Will gripped her hand as tightly as he could without breaking something. He still felt numb, except for the places where he didn’t. There was an elephant standing on his chest. The pain was physical, suffocating. His arm hurt. Or maybe it only hurt because Faith had asked him before if his arm was hurting. Or maybe he was unraveling because that was what everyone kept saying he was going to do.

  Cadaver dogs were trained to find the scent of decomposition. They had alerted on Angie’s trunk. That meant that everyone was thinking that Angie was dead.

  Was it true? Was Angie dead?

  The most important person in his life for thirty years.

  Angie had been the only person in his life for thirty years.

  That was the only incontrovertible fact.

  Will tried to summon that moment in the basement, all those years ago, when Angie had held him, comforted him. Nothing. He tried to remember the one time they went on a vacation together. They had argued about directions. They had argued about where to eat. They had argued about who was being more argumentative.

  You dumbass was the last thing she’d said to him that night, and the next morning she was gone.

  Angie was awful to live with. She was constantly breaking things, borrowing things, never putting his stuff back where it belonged. Will’s mind strained for one single good memory but all he saw was static, the fuzzy white and black patches that used to show on TV when the station went off the air.

  Sara squeezed his hand. He looked down at their intertwined fingers. One of the first things he’d noticed about Sara was how long and graceful her fingers were. He didn’t know if that came with being a surgeon or if it was simply because everything about her was beautiful.

  He studied her face. Her sharp chin. Her button nose. Her long auburn hair that was pinned up into a swirl at the back of her head.

  She usually took her hair down after work. Will knew this was for his sake, that it drove her crazy when her hair fell into her eyes. She was constantly pushing it back and he never told her to pin it up because he was selfish.

  Every relationship, romantic or otherwise, had a certain level of selfishness. It went back and forth depending on who was stronger or who needed it most. Amanda sucked up selfishness like a sponge. Faith gave it away too easily. Angie reached down your throat and grabbed it and then kicked you in the balls for thinking you could have it in the first place.

  Will had always thought that he and Sara shared an emotional equivalence, but was Will taking all the selfishness for himself? He had lied to her about what had happened with Angie last Saturday. He had lied to her about the letter Angie had left for him in the post office box. He had lied about his and Angie’s joint bank account. He had lied about not doing everything he could do to find her.

  Angie. Angie. Angie.

  She was dead now. Maybe. Most likely. He would have a clean slate. For the first time in thirty years, Will’s confidante, his torturer, his source of support and source of pain was gone.

  He shivered.

  Sara turned down the air conditioner. ‘Are you okay?’

  ‘Yes.’ He looked out the window so she could not see his face. The elephant shifted its weight. Will could almost feel his ribs flex from the pressure. His vision strobed. He opened his mouth and tried to fill his lungs.

  They were in midtown. The bright lights outside the window hurt his eyes. His ears buzzed with the fan blowing out cold air from the dash. Underneath the sound, there was music. Soft women’s voices harmonizing over a steel guitar. Sara never turned off the radio, she only turned the volume down low.

  She released his hand so that she could put on the blinker. They were at 1885
Sommerset. Instead of a building, there was a house, a sprawling English Tudor that took up half a city block. The lawn sloped toward the street, neatly trimmed grass and well-manicured flowers led up to stone steps.

  Angie’s car had been found at a funeral home.

  Sara pulled into the parking lot. An old pickup truck with a yellow Lab in the passenger’s seat was leaving the scene. A patrol car was parked on the grass. The officer was sitting behind the wheel typing into the laptop mounted onto the dash. Will recognized Amanda’s Suburban and Faith’s red Mini. Charlie Reed was there in his white crime scene van, but for some reason he was sitting behind the wheel instead of processing Angie’s car. The black Dodge Charger belonged to Collier and Ng. The GBI was still in charge, but Angie’s car had been found in the Atlanta city limits and there was still an active murder investigation.

  The two detectives were sitting on the hood the same as they’d been this morning. Ng still had on his wraparound sunglasses. He did the chin nod thing when Will got out of the car. Collier waved, but Amanda must have put them under strict orders to keep their distance, because neither of them approached.

  Angie’s Monte Carlo SS was parked in a handicapped space in front of the building. She would park in a handicapped space because that’s what she did. Yellow crime scene tape roped off the area. The trunk was open. The driver’s door was open. Even from twenty yards, Will could smell the sickly sweet odor of death. Or maybe it was like his arm hurting. He only smelled death because someone had planted the idea in his mind.

  Amanda came out of a side door. Unusually, her BlackBerry wasn’t in her hand. She had a lot of things she could yell at Will about right now, but she didn’t. ‘Uniformed patrol spotted Angie’s car an hour ago. The funeral home closed at six, but there’s an intern who sleeps here for overnight calls.’

  ‘An intern?’ Will tried to ask the question that a cop would.

  ‘From the local mortuary school.’ Amanda crossed her arms. ‘He was picking up a body at a nursing home when the uni found Angie’s car. Faith is talking to him in the chapel.’

  Will studied the house. He guessed the large two-story structure at the end was the chapel.

  Amanda said, ‘The uni smelled an odor. He popped the trunk using the latch inside the car. He called in the cadaver dog. It hit on the scent immediately.’

  Will looked at the car again. Parked at an angle. Hastily abandoned. The windows were down. His vision flashed up an image: Angie slumped over the wheel. He blinked and it was gone.

  ‘Will?’ Sara said.

  He looked at her.

  ‘Why are you rubbing your chest?’

  Will hadn’t realized he was rubbing his chest. He stopped. He told Amanda, ‘There are license plate scanners on Spring and Peachtree.’

  She nodded. Scanners all over the city tracked the movement of traffic and searched for the license plates of stolen or suspect vehicles. ‘The data is being sent to the computer division for analysis.’

  Will looked out at the street. Sommerset and Spring was a busy corner. Midtown was heavily monitored. Every major intersection had a camera.

  Amanda said, ‘We’ve requested footage from GDOT and APD. We’ll comb through it as soon as it’s in hand. Search teams are on the way.’

  Will said what she already knew. ‘Someone left the car here. They would need to drive away or—’

  ‘I’ve got everybody in the state looking for Delilah Palmer.’

  Will had forgotten about Dale Harding’s wife or daughter or both. Palmer was a young prostitute with a drug problem. She had grown up in the system. The only parent she’d ever known had exploited her. She could’ve been Angie twenty years ago, except that Angie had managed to pull herself out. Or at least make it seem that way. Will wasn’t so sure she had managed to escape anything.

  Sara’s hand pressed against the small of his back. ‘You okay?’

  Will walked toward the car. The smell grew more pungent as he got closer. You didn’t need a bloodhound to know that something bad had happened here. He stopped at the crime scene tape. The trunk of Angie’s car was lined with a scratchy charcoal-colored carpet that he’d gotten from a roll at Pep Boys. He had leaned over the trunk for hours lining up the seams, gluing it in place.

  Amanda shined a police-issue Maglite into the trunk. There was a dark stain in the carpet, just a little off from the center. The only thing in the trunk was a red plastic bottle of transmission fluid.

  Will knelt down. He examined the pavement under the car. The transmission was leaking. The car was probably his now. He would have to fix it before he sold it.

  ‘Will?’ Sara put her hand on his shoulder. She knelt beside him. ‘Look at me.’

  He looked at her.

  ‘I think we should go. There’s nothing here.’

  Will stood up, but he didn’t go. He went to the driver’s side of the car. The door was wide open. A half-empty bottle of tequila was in the footwell. A joint was in the ashtray. Candy wrappers. Gum. Angie had a sweet tooth.

  He asked Amanda, ‘It was like this when the uni rolled up?’

  She nodded.

  The open door would act like a flag to whoever drove by, which meant the car was left to be found sooner rather than later. Will took the flashlight from Amanda. He shined the light into the car. The interior was light gray. The shift for the manual transmission jutted out from the floor between the seats. He saw blood on the steering wheel. Blood on the driver’s seat. Blood on the white circle on top of the black shifter knob. It was an 8-ball. Angie had picked it out of a magazine. This was before the internet. Will had gone to three different stores to find an adapter so it would screw onto the stick.

  He turned the flashlight, examining the back seat. More blood, almost black from baking in the sun all day. There was a smear near the door handle. Too small for a handprint. Maybe a closed fist punching out. Maybe a desperate last move to get away. Someone had lain bleeding in the back seat. Someone had lain bleeding in the trunk. Someone had been bleeding or covered in blood when they drove the car away.

  He asked Amanda, ‘Two bodies and the driver?’

  Amanda had obviously considered this. ‘She could’ve been moved from the back seat to the trunk.’

  ‘Still bleeding?’ he asked, meaning still alive.

  ‘Gravity,’ Sara said. ‘If there was a chest wound, and she was on her side, depending on how she was positioned, you might expect that amount of blood to seep out post mortem.’

  ‘She,’ Will said. ‘What about Delilah Palmer?’

  ‘I had someone at Grady run down her blood type. She had an admit for an OD last year. She’s O-positive. Angie was B-negative.’ Amanda’s hand was on his arm. She had tried to let him work this out on his own, leaving Charlie in his van, calling off Collier and Ng, but now she was going to give him the truth. ‘Wilbur, I know this is hard to hear, but everything points toward Angie.’ She laid it out for him. ‘Angie’s blood type was all over the crime scene. We found her purse, her gun. This is her car. Charlie already typed the blood for me. The back seat, the trunk and the front seat are all B-negative. We’ve got the DNA on rush, but given the rarity of the blood type, the likelihood that it’s not Angie is slim to none. And it’s a hell of a lot of blood, Will. Too much blood for her to walk away.’

  Will mulled over her words. The stain in the trunk was in the area you would expect from a chest wound. Arterial spray was found on the walls of the room where Dale Harding died. Arteries were in the heart. The heart was in the chest.

  Will tried to play out a likely scenario. Angie in the back seat, bleeding to death. The driver some guy she’d called because she always had a guy she could call. He would be desperately trying to get her help, and then he would realize that it was too late. And then he would put her in the trunk because he couldn’t drive around the city with a dead woman in the back seat of the car. And then he would wait until sundown and drive the car here.

  ‘The manager is on the way.’ Fa
ith came walking down a lighted path. An open spiral notebook was in her hand. She looked at Will, then looked at him again.

  Amanda said, ‘And?’

  Faith referenced her notes. ‘Inside, we’ve got Ray Belcamino, twenty-year-old male Caucasian, no record. Mortuary student at Gupton-Jones. He clocked into work at approximately five fifteen for a five-thirty shift. His call-in sheet has him three times off the premises, once to Piedmont Hospital at six forty-three, another to the Sunrise Nursing home at seven oh two, and a third, a false alarm, at eight twenty-two.’ She looked up. ‘Apparently it’s a thing for interns to call in fake deaths to prank each other.’

  ‘Of course it is,’ Amanda said.

  ‘All three times, Belcamino used the commercial entrance near the chapel, behind the fence. There’s a service elevator that goes down to the basement. He can’t see the parking lot over the fence. He drove in from the west each time, so he didn’t pass the parking lot and he didn’t see the car.’

  Amanda asked, ‘Closed-circuit cameras?’

  ‘Six, but they’re all trained on the doors and windows, not the parking lot.’

  Will asked, ‘Did you check the Dumpster?’

  ‘First thing. Nothing.’

  He asked, ‘Were any of the doors tampered with?’

  ‘No, and there’s an alarm system. Every door and window is wired.’

  ‘How is the elevator accessed?’

  ‘There’s a keypad.’

  Will asked, ‘Can the keypad be seen from behind the fence?’

  ‘Yeah. And it turns off the alarm, too.’

  Amanda asked, ‘Where are you going with this?’

  ‘Why bring a car that has a dead body in a trunk to a funeral home?’

  They all looked back at the building.

  Faith said, ‘I’ll go. Wait here.’

  Will didn’t wait. He didn’t run, either, but his stride was twice as long as Faith’s. He reached the chapel before she did. He opened the door before she did. He passed the pews and walked onto the stage and found the door that led to the back half of the funeral home before she did.