The Kept Woman (Will Trent 8)

by Karin Slaughter

  Unless it was Thursday or Friday, the days she went to the grocery store and the dry cleaner, respectively. Angie had pictured a lot of things for her daughter, but never that she would turn into a hermit.

  Angie’s car was pointed in the wrong direction to follow Jo. Another trip through the grassy divide landed her two cars behind the Range Rover, which was stopped at a red light. Jo’s blinker wasn’t on, which could mean that she was heading straight into the Peachtree Battle shopping center. Angie scanned the shops down the hill. This wasn’t Jo’s grocery day, and even if it was, she used the Kroger on Peachtree. Her dry cleaner was on Carriage Drive. The only business in the strip mall that was open this early was Starbucks.

  The light changed. Jo drove across the intersection and turned into the Starbucks parking lot.

  Angie followed at a distance, keeping another car between them. The lot was packed. Angie expected Jo to pull into the line at the drive-thru, but she circled a few times and found a spot.

  ‘Come on.’ Angie had to wait out a shuffling woman with her nose in her phone before she could exit the parking lot and find a space in front of the bank across the alley.

  She got out of her car and darted toward the Starbucks. She didn’t realize what was about to happen until she saw Jo opening the glass door. She was going into a coffee shop. She would place her order at the counter. She would thank the woman behind the register. There would have to be some kind of conversation. Angie would finally hear Jo’s voice. This was why she had wanted the job at Kip’s in the first place—this moment, this space in time. She would hear her daughter speak. She would divine through some long-snuffed maternal instinct whether or not Jo was okay, and then Angie could get back to her regular life and never think about her lost daughter ever again.

  Angie opened the door.

  She was too late.

  Jo had already placed her order. She was standing with the herd of coffee-buyers, waiting for the woman behind the counter to call her name.

  Angie mumbled a curse as she got in line for the register. The guy ahead of her had apparently never been to a Starbucks before. He was asking questions about sizes. Angie pulled a bottle of overpriced apple juice from the fridge. She glanced at Jo, then let herself stare openly.

  She wasn’t the only person appraising her daughter. Every man in the room had noticed her. Jo was beautiful. She had a way of drawing your eye. What was troubling was that she either didn’t notice or didn’t care. At twenty-seven, Angie had used her looks like a battering ram. There wasn’t a door she couldn’t break open.

  ‘Josephine?’ the barista called. ‘Tall soy latte.’

  Josephine, not Jo.

  She picked up the cup. She didn’t speak. Her smile was stressed, obviously forced. She took the latte to the back of the store. She sat down at the long bar overlooking the parking lot. There was an empty stool one seat down. Angie checked to make sure the cashier wasn’t looking. She ducked out of line and took the empty seat before anyone else could.

  The bar was narrow, maybe a foot wide. Outside the window, cars snaked toward the drive-thru window. The guy between Angie and her daughter was typing on his computer. She glanced down at the screen and assumed he was writing the great American novel. At a Starbucks. Just like Hemingway.

  Angie opened her juice. She had done private eye work off and on for years. There was a go-bag in her trunk with the tools of the trade. Duct tape, a small tarp in case it rained, a good camera, a directional microphone, four tiny cameras that could be hidden inside potted plants and air vents. None of which could help her at this late date. She spotted a newspaper a few seats down. She bumped the woman on the other side of her, nodded at the paper, and it was silently passed her way.

  Hemingway, meet Sam Spade.

  Angie skimmed the headline on the front page. She chanced another look at her daughter. The cup caught her attention. JOSEPHINE was written in black marker. Angie knew there was a lot in a name. Her mother’s pimp had called her Angela. Even now, if anyone said the name, bile would shoot into her mouth.

  Angie took a deep breath. She let her eyes travel up.

  Jo was staring out the window. Angie followed her sight line to the white stucco wall of the strip mall. The girl was waiting for something. Thinking about something. Upset about something. Her eyes did not move from the wall. She was sitting on her hands. Steam rose from her untouched coffee. Her phone was face up on the bar in front of her. She was tense. Angie felt like she could reach across Hemingway and actually touch the woman’s anxiety.

  But that wasn’t what she was here for.

  Angie opened the newspaper. She pretended to be interested in world events. And then she actually got interested in world events, because nothing else was happening. The woman next to her got up and left. The line at the counter thinned, then disappeared. The parking lot began to empty. Finally Hemingway moved to an oversized chair a few tables away.

  Angie turned the page in her newspaper. FINANCE.

  She glanced at Jo.

  Her daughter had not moved. She was still sitting on her hands. Still staring at the blank wall. Still almost shaking with anxiety.

  They were the only two people left at the bar. Angie got up and moved a few stools away because that’s what a normal person would do. She spread out the newspaper. She wasn’t Meryl Streep. She couldn’t pretend to be interested in finance. She turned to the LIFE section. She reached for her juice, but so much time had passed that the bottle was warm.

  Angie’s eyes started to blur from reading the tiny words. She looked out the window and blinked. She watched a car pull into the street. She listened to Hemingway banging away at his laptop.

  Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Jo jump. The move was almost imperceptible. A half-second later, Angie heard Jo’s phone ring. Not a ring exactly, more like a noise you’d hear from a 1950s sci-fi movie.

  FaceTime.

  Jo’s hands were shaking when she accepted the video call. She held the phone low in front of her face. Angie couldn’t see the image of the caller, nor could she hear that person’s voice. Jo had slipped in earbuds. She held the tiny mic up to her mouth and said, ‘I’m here.’

  Angie pulled her own phone out of her purse. She tapped some buttons. She pretended to toss the phone back into her purse, but the move was practiced. The phone landed at an angle, camera facing toward Jo. Angie couldn’t look at what was happening live, but she could watch the video later.

  ‘Yes,’ Jo said. ‘Do you see?’

  Angie’s vision tunneled on the newsprint. She felt a pain in her ear. She was straining to hear Jo’s voice, but it was little more than a whisper.

  Jo said, ‘Yes. I understand.’

  Angie flipped the paper over. She ran her finger down a line of text that she could not read. Jo’s voice was still low, but she sounded panicked, afraid.

  ‘I understand.’

  Who could make Jo sound scared? Marcus Rippy came to mind. He liked being in charge. Jo was his type. So was Angie, but even at twenty-seven, Angie could handle guys like that. She didn’t think little Josephine from Thomaston could handle anything.

  ‘I will,’ Jo said. ‘Thank you.’

  There was a change in the air. Stress draining away. The call had ended. Jo put down the phone. Her elbows went to the bar. Her head dropped into her hands. Relief radiated off her thin body.

  Her voice. Angie had been too wrapped up in the whispery hush to analyze the sound.

  Jo started to cry. Angie had never been good with emotion. Her options were always to either wait it out or go away. She racked her brain to think how a normal person would behave in a Starbucks with a woman crying a few chairs away. Angie could reasonably ask the girl if she was all right. That seemed like an appropriate response. Jo’s shoulders were shaking. She was clearly upset. Angie could just say the words: Are you okay? It was a simple question. People asked variations of it all the time to complete strangers. In elevators. In bathrooms. In line for coffee
.

  How are you doing?

  Angie opened her mouth, but it was too late.

  Jo stood up. She unhooked her purse from the back of her chair. Or at least she tried to. The strap got caught. The chair toppled. The sound was like an explosion in the small space. Hemingway rushed over to help her.

  ‘I’ve got it,’ Jo said.

  ‘I can—’

  ‘I know how to pick up a fucking chair!’

  She snatched the chair from his hands. She slammed it back in place. The sound echoed like a gunshot. Heads swiveled to see what the problem was. The barista started to walk around the counter.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Hemingway apologized. ‘I was just trying to help.’

  ‘Help.’ Jo snorted. ‘Mind your own fucking business. That’s how you can help.’

  Jo yanked open the glass door. She stalked across the parking lot. She threw her purse into her car. Her tires burned against asphalt as she streaked out of the parking lot.

  ‘Jeesh,’ Hemingway said. ‘What was that?’

  Angie smiled.

  That was her daughter.

  WEDNESDAY, 10:27 AM

  Angie drove down Chattahoochee Avenue at an old lady’s pace. Her transmission was slipping. She didn’t have time to top off the fluid. She didn’t have time to change her coffee-stained jeans. She was late meeting Dale and his electronics guy. There were a lot of things Angie didn’t mind being late for, but everything had changed half an hour ago inside the Starbucks.

  ‘Dammit!’ Angie struggled to push the gear into fourth. There was a grinding sound that sent a rattle into the clutch.

  Maybe she could talk Dale’s guy into topping off her transmission fluid. Or maybe she would torch the car and leave it burning in front of Sara Linton’s apartment building. She was the reason Angie had to buy transmission fluid by the case. Normally Angie would spend a few weeks with Will, let him fix the car, then head on her way, but that wasn’t an option since Red Riding Hood was sleeping in her bed.

  His name is my favorite word, Sara had written to her sister.

  ‘Shit.’ Angie hissed out one of her favorite words between her teeth. She couldn’t dredge up her usual anger for Sara Linton. She was too worried about Jo.

  She had to watch the Starbucks video again. Her phone battery was almost gone from playing it so much. Angie kept her palms on the steering wheel and balanced her phone between her fingers. She tapped the arrow for play. ‘Do you see?’ Jo whispered, holding up her iPhone, proving to the caller that she was inside the Starbucks. ‘I understand . . . I will . . . thank you . . .’

  Before Angie made detective, she had worked as a beat cop. She took nights, because they paid more. Every shift was basically ten seconds of adrenaline sandwiched by eight hours of social work. The old-timers called them chicken bones, because you’d get a call to somebody’s shitty apartment and find two rednecks fighting over something stupid, like a chicken bone. Not that the call was ever a cakewalk. You never knew when two neighbors arguing about a barbecue grill could turn into a stand-off with a drunk pointing a loaded shotgun at your chest.

  Domestic violence calls were the same, but different. You always went in assuming something really bad was going to happen. Even Angie, who was drawn to confrontation, hated rolling out on a battery call. The men always tried to push her around. The women always lied. The kids always cried, and in the end, all Angie could do was arrest the guy, write up the report, and wait until she got another call to go to the same house over and over and over again.

  Jo didn’t have any obvious bruises or scars. Her face was perfect. She walked with an even stride, not in the bent-over posture of a woman who’d gotten the hell beaten out of her.

  But still, Angie could tell that her daughter was being abused.

  The way she never looked at her husband. The way she stayed glued to his side, never talking to anybody, never daring to raise her eyes above the floor. The way she never left home except to go to the elementary school, the grocery store or the dry cleaner. The obedient air she assumed around her husband, as if she was not a person but an appendage.

  Two nights ago, when Kip was convening a meeting about Jo being a problem, Reuben Figaroa was being flown by private jet to an undisclosed location, where the best orthopedist in the world would perform micro-surgery on his knee. That was all the information Angie could get out of Laslo. An injured player was the kind of news that could tilt the shape of the upcoming basketball season. Jo had stayed at home because things had to look normal. She had to take the kid to school. She had to make people believe that nothing was wrong with her husband.

  Angie didn’t give a shit about Reuben’s surgery. What she cared about was what his absence was doing to her daughter.

  Jo was terrified. That was clear. Angie held the evidence in her own two hands.

  When Jo said, ‘Do you see?’ what she meant was, ‘Do you see where I am? Exactly where you told me to be.’

  When she said, ‘I understand,’ what she meant was, ‘I understand you are in charge and that I can’t do anything about it.’

  When she said, ‘I will,’ she meant ‘I will do exactly what you just told me to do, exactly how you want me to do it.’

  The worst part was at the end of the video. Tears slid down Jo’s jaw, her neck. Her fingers trembled around the mic. Still she said, ‘Thank you.’

  Reuben Figaroa. Angie could clearly see him on Jo’s iPhone when she turned the camera to show him the almost empty coffee shop.

  Kip had said that Jo was getting too close to Marcus. Maybe that was by design. Jo had known Marcus in junior high. Obviously they were still friends. He was rich. She was desperate. If Marcus was Jo’s parachute, then the plan wasn’t a bad one. The most life-threatening time for a battered woman was when she tried to leave her abuser. The only thing that shifted the odds was having another man around to protect her. If Jo was getting close to Marcus, it was only because she was pulling away from Reuben. This was what Angie had abandoned her daughter to: a lifetime of being nothing more than a kept woman.

  Angie tossed her phone back into her purse. She wiped her eyes. The juice from Starbucks must have gone bad. Her hands were sweating. Her stomach cramped.

  Back in her early twenties, Angie had been with a guy who slapped her around. And then punched her around. And then did other things that she thought meant he was desperately in love with her. The violence worked like a magnet. That, and seeing a big, giant man cry like a baby because he was so fucking sorry that he’d hurt you and he was never, ever going to do it again.

  Until he did it again.

  ‘Jesus,’ Angie whispered. What was the point of staying out of Jo’s life? First the pill problem, and now this. Jo had inherited all of Angie’s bad choices. ‘Fuck!’ She banged her hand against the steering wheel, but not because of Jo. She had missed the turn into the parking lot.

  Angie struggled with the shifter, trying to force the gear into reverse. The clutch tensed. She heard the gears grinding. Her stomach was still cramping.

  ‘Fuck!’ she screamed again. ‘Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!’ She banged her fists on the steering wheel until the pain shot into her back and shoulders.

  She stopped. This was crazy. She had lost it over a stupid missed turn.

  Finger by finger, she wrapped her hands around the wheel. She took a deep breath and held it for as long as she could.

  Carefully Angie forced the gear into first. She drove to the end of the street, then did a wide U-turn. She had the gear in third by the time she coasted into an abandoned parking lot. She flipped into reverse just to prove that she could and backed into one of the lined parking spaces.

  Angie flexed her hand. Banging the steering wheel hadn’t been her smartest move. The side of her fist already felt bruised.

  Nothing she could do about that now.

  Angie looked up at the massive concrete block that was Marcus Rippy’s nightclub. The building resembled a mummified robot’s head. A cleaning crew was su
pposed to spiff it up next week, but Angie wasn’t sure how they were going to manage it. Weeds shot up from the broken asphalt. Graffiti was everywhere. She had no idea why Dale always wanted to meet here. He must have been a terrible cop. All he wanted was routine. Maybe that’s what happened when you got older. Or maybe it was because it didn’t matter if Dale kept showing up in the same place over and over again. He’d stopped dialysis a week ago. If what Angie had read on the internet was true, he had a week, maybe two at the most, which meant he’d be dead before anyone figured out the pattern.

  Could be he was already dead. Angie looked at the time on her phone. Dale was fifteen minutes late. Sam Vera, his electronics guy, wasn’t here either. Why was it that she was the only person who ran on time anymore?

  She flipped down her visor and checked her make-up in the mirror. Her eyeliner was melting. Her lips could use a touch-up. She found Sara’s lipstick in her purse. Angie twisted the gold case. There was a scratch down the side. You’d think for sixty bucks the thing would be plated in real gold.

  Angie looked at the flattened lipstick. She had cut off the tip. She might be a dangerous stalker, but she wasn’t unhygienic.

  Was she really dangerous?

  A few notes left on a car window never hurt anybody. Going through Sara’s shit was weird, but that hadn’t been on purpose. Or not by design, anyway. Angie had gone to Will’s house because she wanted to see him. Not talk to him, but just see him. As usual, he was at Sara’s. This had happened many times before. She had used the key Will left on the ledge over the back door. The first thing Angie had seen was his stupid little dog. Betty wouldn’t stop yapping. Angie had used her foot to slide her into the spare bedroom and shut the door. She was passing the bathroom when she saw Sara’s make-up strewn across the sink.

  Angie’s first thought was: Will’s not going to like that.

  Her second thought was: What the hell is Sara Linton doing leaving her shit here?

  Here.

  Will’s bathroom. Will’s bedroom. Will’s house.

  Angie’s husband.