The Kept Woman

by Karin Slaughter

  Tactically, higher ground was always better. The office building was right across the street from Rippy’s club. Angie could’ve been watching the whole time. She would’ve seen the patrol car roll up, the fire department, the crime scene vans, the detectives, all of them spinning their wheels trying to figure out what the hell was happening while Angie was up on the tenth floor the entire time laughing her ass off.

  Or bleeding to death.

  Will passed the fifth floor, the sixth. He was winded by the time he saw a large 8 painted at the top of the next landing. He stopped, hands on his knees so he could lean over to catch his breath. The heat was getting to him. Sweat dripped onto the floor. His lungs were screaming. His hamstrings were aching. Blood dribbled down the side of his shoe. The cuts on his knuckles had opened up again.

  Was this a mistake?

  Angie wouldn’t climb these stairs on a good day, let alone with a life-threatening injury. She hated exercise.

  Will sat down on the stairs. He rubbed his face and shook the excess sweat off his hands. Was he sure that Angie was even in the building? Where was her car? Shouldn’t Will be trying to find out where she was living instead of risking his life searching a condemned building?

  And what about Sara?

  “Holy Mother of Christ.” Collier had stopped a few flights down. He was panting like a locomotive. “I think I need stitches in my ear.”

  Will leaned his head back against the wall. Had he lost Sara? Had Angie, with this final, violent act managed to do what she couldn’t do for the last year?

  Betty was his only saving grace. Early on in their relationship, Sara had kept volunteering to watch Betty while Will was working late. At first, he thought it was because she wanted to know about his cases, but then he had slowly realized that she was using his dog to lure him over to her apartment. It had taken Will a long time to accept that a woman like Sara would want to be with him.

  She wouldn’t have agreed to pick up Betty if she wanted to end things now.

  Would she?

  “Trent.” Collier was like a broken record. His feet scuffed the stairs as he made it to the landing below Will. “What’s the point of this, dude? You think she’s hiding under a typewriter?”

  Will looked down at him. “Why are you here?”

  “It seemed like a good idea when I was outside. What’s your excuse?” Collier seemed genuinely interested. “Dude, you know she’s not in here.”

  Will looked up at the ceiling. Graffiti stared back.

  Why was he here?

  Maybe the better question was: where else would he be? There were no clues to follow. No leads to run down. He had no idea where Angie was living. Where she was working. Why she was in Rippy’s building. How she had gotten herself tangled up in a rape case Will couldn’t make against a man he despised.

  Well, maybe he knew the answer to the last one. Angie always inserted herself into Will’s business. She was stealth, like a cat tracking its prey, then leaving the poor, dead creature as a trophy on Will’s doorstep so that he had to figure out what to do with the body.

  There were so many unmarked graves in Will’s past that he had lost count.

  Collier said, “I called around about your wife.” He leaned his shoulder against the wall. He crossed his arms again. The good news was the blood around his ear was drying. The bad news was that it had glued Will’s handkerchief to his skin.

  “And?” Will said, though he could guess what Collier had found out. Angie slept around. Frequently and indiscriminately. She was the worst kind of cop. You couldn’t trust her to have your back. She was a loner. She had a death wish.

  Collier was uncharacteristically diplomatic. “She sounds like she’s a real piece of work.”

  Will couldn’t disagree with him.

  “I’ve known gals like that. They’re a lot of fun.” Collier was still keeping his distance. He didn’t want to get hit again. “The thing is, they’ve always got people they can fall back on.”

  Will had said the same thing to Sara, but it sounded shitty coming out of Collier’s mouth.

  “You really think she’d run across the street to this dump?” Collier slid down the wall so he could sit. He was still out of breath. “Lookit, I never met the broad, but I’ve known plenty of broads like her.” He glanced up at Will, probably to make sure he wasn’t coming down the stairs. “No offense, bro, but they’ve always gotta backup plan. You know what I mean?”

  Will knew what he meant. Angie always had a guy she could run to. That guy hadn’t always been Will. She had different men she used at different times in her life. When it wasn’t Will’s turn, he went to work, he retiled his bathroom, he restored his car, and he convinced himself the whole time that he wasn’t waiting for her to come back into his life. Dreading. Anticipating. Aching.

  Collier said, “My take is, the shit went down last night, she’s injured, so she pulled out her phone—which we can’t find—and she called up a guy and he came rushing over to help.”

  “What if Harding was the guy?”

  “You think she only had one guy?”

  Will took a deep breath. He held on to it for as long as he could.

  Collier asked, “We leaving now?”

  Will pushed himself up. Heat exhaustion put stars in his eyes. He steadied himself for a moment. He blinked away sweat. He turned around and resumed his climb up the stairs.

  “Jesus Christ,” Collier muttered. The soles of his shoes hit the treads like sandpaper. “You ask me, you oughta be running back down these stairs and telling ol’ Red you’re fucking sorry.”

  Collier was right. Will owed Sara an apology. He owed her more than that. But he had to keep moving forward because taking a step back, letting himself think about what he was doing and why, was a thread he couldn’t let unravel.

  Collier said, “That’s a good lookin’ woman you got there.”

  “Shut up.”

  “I’m just sayin’, dude. Simple observation.”

  Up ahead, Will saw a painted 9 marking the next landing. He kept climbing. The heat intensified with every step. He braced his hand against the wall. He went through the list again: he didn’t know where Angie lived. He didn’t know where she worked. He didn’t know who her friends were. If she had friends. If she wanted friends. She had been the center of his existence for well over half of his life and he didn’t know a damn thing about her.

  “You got prime rib at home,” Collier said. “You don’t run out to McDonald’s for a Happy Meal.” He laughed. “I mean, not so Prime Rib ever finds out. ’Cause, shit, man, we all like a greasy cheeseburger every now and then, am I right?”

  Will turned the corner at the 9. He looked up to the next landing.

  His heart stopped.

  A woman’s foot.

  Bare. Dirty.

  Bloody cuts crisscrossed the soles.

  “Angie?” He whispered the word, afraid to say it louder because she might disappear.

  Collier asked, “What’d you say?”

  Will stumbled up the stairs. He could barely carry his own weight. He was on his knees by the time he reached the landing.

  Angie was lying facedown on the floor. Long brown hair wild. Legs splayed. One arm underneath her, the other over her head. She was wearing a white dress he’d seen before. Cotton, see-through, which is why she wore the black bra underneath. The dress rode up her legs, showing matching black bikini underwear.

  Blood radiated from beneath her still body, cresting in a halo over her head.

  Will put his hand on her ankle. The skin was cold. He felt no pulse.

  His head dropped down. He squeezed his eyes shut against the tears that came.

  Collier was behind him. “I’ll call it in.”

  “Don’t.” Will needed a minute. He couldn’t hear the call on the radio. He couldn’t take his hand from Angie’s leg. She was thinner than the last time he’d seen her—not Saturday, that was just a glimpse, but about sixteen months ago. It was the last tim
e they were together. Deidre had finally died, all alone in the nursing home because Angie didn’t see her anymore. Will was on a case when it happened. He had driven back to Atlanta to be with Angie. Sara was in the picture by then, like a blur at the edge of the frame that might be something or nothing at all, depending on how things developed.

  Will had told himself that he owed Angie one last chance, but she had known the minute she looked into his eyes that all that weight between them—that Pandora’s box of shared horrors that they both carried on their backs—had finally been lifted.

  Will cleared his throat. “I want to see her face.”

  Collier’s mouth opened, but he didn’t say what he was supposed to say—that they should leave the body in situ, that they needed to call in forensics and Amanda and everybody else who would pick over Angie Polaski’s lifeless body like carrion.

  Instead, Collier climbed the stairs and went to the head of Angie’s body. He didn’t bother to glove up before he slipped his hands under her thin shoulders. He said, “On three?”

  Will forced himself to move. To get up on his knees. To wrap his hands around Angie’s ankles. Her skin was smooth. She shaved her legs every day. She hated having her feet touched. She liked fresh milk in her coffee. She loved the perfume samples that came in magazines. She loved dancing. She loved conflict and chaos and all the things he could not stand. But she looked out for Will. She loved him like a brother. A lover. A sworn enemy. She hated him for leaving her. She didn’t want him anymore. She couldn’t let him go.

  She would never, ever hold him like she held him in that basement ever again.

  Collier counted down. “Three.”

  Wordlessly, they lifted the body and turned her onto her back. She wasn’t stiff. The arm over her head flailed, crossing itself over her eyes, as if she couldn’t face the fact that she was gone.

  Her swollen lips were chapped. Dark blood smeared down her chin. White powder speckled her hair and face.

  Will’s hand shook as he reached out to move the arm. There was blood—not just from her mouth and nose, but from needle tracks. On her neck. Between her grimy fingers. On her arms.

  Will felt his heart start to jackhammer. He was light-headed. His fingers touched her cool skin. Her face. He had to see her face.

  The arm moved.

  Collier asked, “Did you do that?”

  Unaided, the woman’s arm slid off her face, flopped onto the ground.

  Her mouth slit open, then her rheumy eyes.

  She looked at Will.

  He looked back.

  It wasn’t Angie.

  Chapter Four

  Faith sat in her car outside Dale Harding’s duplex, taking a break from the unrelenting heat. She was sweating her balls off, to quote a post from her son’s Facebook page that future potential employers would eventually find.

  Maybe he could live with his grandmother. Faith had gotten a sunglassed smiley face back when she texted Evelyn the photo of Jeremy with the bong. This was certainly a radical departure from her mother’s previous parenting techniques, which had come straight from the pages of Fascist Monthly. Then again, Jeremy wouldn’t be here if fashioning yourself into your child’s own private Mussolini was a strategy for success.

  She took a long drink of water and stared at Dale Harding’s duplex side of a well-maintained, single-story bungalow nestled inside a sprawling, gated complex.

  Something wasn’t adding up.

  Faith hated when things didn’t add up.

  After hitting a series of brick walls trying to locate any contact information for Angie Polaski, Faith had burned through the remainder of the morning and part of the afternoon trying to track down Dale Harding’s place of residence. Two dead ends had sent her to east Atlanta’s shadier neighborhoods, where she was told by various neighbors and slumlords that Dale Harding was an asshole who owed them money. No one seemed surprised or sad to learn of his untimely death. Several expressed regret that they hadn’t been there to witness it.

  As Amanda had predicted, there were liquor stores, strip clubs, payday loan stores, and all sorts of seedy dives where you’d expect to run into a slimeball like Dale Harding, and in fact, many of the workers at these businesses recognized the dead man’s photograph, though none could recall seeing Dale in the last six months. That was the story everywhere Faith went: Dale was bellied up to the bar every day until six months ago. He was shoving ones into G-strings every day until six months ago. He was buying loose cigarettes and three-dollar liters of whiskey every day until six months ago.

  No one could tell her what had happened six months ago.

  She was about to give up when she ran into a stripper who said Harding had promised her kid a hundred bucks if he helped move some boxes. Faith would’ve never found the quiet little duplex in North Atlanta if Harding hadn’t stiffed the kid.

  All of that made sense, from the slumlords to the strippers to cheating a fifteen-year-old boy out of a promised payday. What didn’t make sense was the place that Harding had finally called home.

  He hadn’t lived in elegance so much as limbo. According to its website, the Mesa Arms was an active retirement community for the fifty-five-and-older set. Faith had drooled over the modern floor plans posted on the site. Everything was in italics with an exclamation point, like it wasn’t exciting enough to live in a community that did not allow children under the age of eighteen to visit more than three days in a row.

  Spa-style bathrooms!

  Main-floor masters!

  Hardwoods throughout!

  Central vacuum!

  The place was a baby boomer’s dream, if you could dream in half-a-million-dollar increments. Green lawns. Gently sloping sidewalks. Cute, craftsman-style bungalows spread out like fans on tree-lined cul-de-sacs. There was a club lounge, gym, pool, and a tennis court that was currently occupied by two sporty seniors, even though the temperature had passed the one hundred mark.

  Faith used the sleeve of Will’s suit jacket to wipe the back of her neck. At this point, the thermometer might as well read hell.

  She finished the water and tossed the empty into the backseat. She wondered if Harding had found a sugar mama, then figured that was unlikely unless she had very, very low standards. It was possible. Cotton-candy-pink drapes were hanging in the front windows. There were three gnomes and a ceramic bunny in the front yard, all dressed in ill-sized pink jackets, which seemed incongruous with Harding’s betting sheet and nudie pics from BackDoorMan.com.

  Considering Harding had cashed in his chips both literally and figuratively, Faith found it odd that he’d chosen the Mesa to live out his dying days. Further, it was odd that the Mesa was allowing him to do so. The posted $1,200 a month homeowner’s association fee seemed well out of reach for a man who had bought out his pension for pennies on the dollar.

  Then again, Harding had known he wasn’t going to live long enough to take the full benefit, so maybe he was smarter than she was giving him credit for. Better to die in the Mesa Arms than some government-owned toilet of a nursing home.

  Was it irony or just shitty luck that he’d ended up croaking in an abandoned nightclub with a doorknob stuck in his neck?

  Not just any nightclub. Marcus Rippy’s club.

  She wasn’t ignoring the timing of Harding’s good luck so much as mulling it around inside her head. Marcus Rippy had been accused of rape seven months ago. Harding had hit paydirt approximately one month later. Then there was Angie Polaski caught in the middle. Had she been sent to the club to take out Harding, or had Harding been sent there to take her out?

  Faith couldn’t yet add it up, but she knew the math was there.

  She fished around in the backseat for the bottle of water her mother had insisted she take with her this morning. It had been baking in the car since six-thirty. The warm liquid slid down her throat like cooking oil, but the city was under a code black smog alert and she couldn’t afford to get dehydrated.

  Her time hadn’t just been wast
ed in strip clubs and liquor stores. She had spent a good hour walking up and down the Mesa Arms knocking on doors that were never answered, peering through windows that showed well-appointed, otherwise empty homes. The sign outside the property manager’s office said that they would be back at 2:00, which had already come and gone. The heat-resistant tennis players had shown up ten minutes ago. Faith was headed toward the courts when a wave of dizziness had sent her back to the car. She had tested her blood sugar under the roar of the Mini’s air-conditioning because Sara’s lecture about badly managed diabetes had hit home.

  Poor Sara.

  “Okay,” Faith mumbled, psyching herself up for a return to the heat. She cut the engine. Before she could open the door, her phone chirped. She turned the engine back on so she could sit in the air-conditioning. “Mitchell.”

  Amanda said, “Will found a Jane Doe in the office building across the street. Junkie. Homeless. OD’d on a giant bag full of blow. Looks like it was on purpose. Her nose and throat collapsed. She’s at Grady. Surgery should be two hours. Do what you can at Harding’s, then go sit on her. I’d bet my eyeteeth she saw something.”

  Faith silently repeated everything back in her head so that she could make sense of all the information. “Do we know why she wanted to kill herself?”

  “She’s a junkie,” Amanda said, as if that was as good an explanation as any. “I got your text with Harding’s address. The search warrant is being faxed to the property manager.”

  “No one’s there. I called the emergency number, I knocked on doors. Not a lot of people seem to be home, which is weird, because it’s some kind of retirement community. It’s actually really nice. Nicer than Harding could afford, I would guess.”

  “His place is owned by a shell company. We’re trying to trace it back, but we know Kilpatrick owns a lot of expensive real estate that he lets out well below market value.”

  “Smart.” Faith had to hand it to Marcus Rippy’s fixer. The guy knew how to squirm his way out of a legally binding financial entanglement. She told Amanda, “Not a bad way to hide some money. Harding lives in old-people Shangri-la for a nominal sum, Kilpatrick keeps him off the official payroll.”