The Last Widow: The latest new 2019 crime thriller from the No. 1 Sunday Times bestselling author

by Karin Slaughter

  They all stepped aside so two orderlies could run past.

  Amanda said, “My people can get a warrant faster. Let us do the paperwork.”

  “Good,” Maggie propelled herself down the next flight. “I’ll reach out to Murphy. I can’t make any promises.”

  “Neither can I.” Amanda sounded furious again. Her breathing was audible. Her high heels stabbed into the stairs.

  Faith checked her watch.

  2:17 p.m.

  The bombings would be on the news by now. Evelyn would assume that Faith was responding with Amanda. Then, she would call Jeremy and tell him that she’d talked to Faith and everything was okay. Then, she would break the iPad rule with Emma and pretend like it was a treat rather than a distraction. She had been a cop for thirty years. She knew how to lie to her family.

  Faith rounded the landing. She took the last few steps two at a time. They had reached the second floor. An Atlanta police sergeant was holding open the door. He told Maggie, “The doctor couldn’t wait. He said to find him when you’re here.”

  “Find him.” Maggie rolled her hand. “Walk and talk.”

  The sergeant skipped to catch up, saying, “They left the bullet in Hurley’s leg. Safer that way. His jaw needs to be wired shut, but there are a lot of criticals ahead of him. The sixth floor was cleared. We’ve got him covered. Nobody’s taking a piss. Excuse me, ma’am.”

  “We all piss, Sergeant.” Maggie asked, “Is Hurley awake?”

  “In and out, ma’am. He refused pain meds once they moved him up from the ER.”

  “He doesn’t want to slip up and say something.” Amanda turned to the officer, “See that his jaw stays a low priority. I need him to talk. Keep him alone in the room. Make sure he can see out the window.” She added, “Don’t give him any water.”

  The sergeant looked at Maggie. She nodded her okay, then turned back to Amanda.

  “Take this.” Amanda ripped a page out of her notebook. “Tell the press it’s the official statement from the GBI. I need you to read it out exactly as written.”

  “Understood.” Maggie traded the paper for her satellite phone. “Find one of my people if you need me. Good luck.”

  Amanda headed down the hallway, calling to Faith, “We need to go up a flight. I want to talk to the nurse.”

  Lydia Ortiz. Faith knew about the woman from the debrief they’d gotten in the helicopter. Ortiz had recognized Michelle Spivey in the surgical recovery area. She’d called security but before they could arrive, all hell had broken loose.

  “This way.” Amanda passed the elevator. There was a closer set of stairs, but crime scene investigators were scouring it for clues.

  Robert Jacob Hurley had dragged Michelle Spivey out of the recovery area on the third floor. He had met his two accomplices outside the second-floor landing. As they were going down to the ground floor, two cops were coming up. The officers were responding to Lydia Ortiz’s SOS. Both were shot in the head. Another officer, a sheriff’s deputy, was waiting for them when they exited the building. She was shot in the chest when they made their escape to the silver Chevy Malibu. She had gone down firing, hitting Hurley in the leg and his accomplice in the shoulder before Hurley turned around and shot her in the face.

  Faith opened the door. She told Amanda, “They detonated the bombs in the parking deck while they were driving away.”

  “Correct.”

  “It’s like Novak,” Faith said. “He always set off bombs as a distraction, not as a means to an end.”

  “Good girl. You’ve been hammering around that nail all day.”

  Amanda sprinted up the stairs. They ended up in the third-floor recovery room. Rows of gurneys were screened off by hospital curtains. There was a nurse’s station, an ice machine, a clearly marked bathroom. The space was empty except for a cop and three crime scene techs. The bed in the second bay was cordoned off with yellow tape. Blood dripped across the floor, heading in the direction of the second set of stairs.

  Amanda showed her ID to the officer by the door while Faith signed them into the crime scene log.

  The cop said, “Dr. Lawrence is on his way up. He did two tours in Iraq. No-bullshit kind of guy.”

  “Are you the police?” A woman had appeared behind the nurse’s station. She was crying, clearly distraught. “I couldn’t stop it. I tried to—”

  “You’re Lydia Ortiz?” Amanda asked.

  The woman cupped her hands to her face. All she could do was nod. She probably had friends in the parking deck. She had come face to face with a mass murderer and a woman who had been abducted right in front of her eleven-year-old daughter.

  Faith said, “Take your time.” She found her notebook in her bag. She flipped past a bunch of empty pages. She twisted her pen open.

  Amanda asked, “What are the symptoms of appendicitis?”

  “Uh—” Ortiz hadn’t been expecting the question. “Nausea, vomiting, spiked fever, constipation.”

  “Does it hurt?” Amanda asked. She was trying to center the woman with the familiar.

  “Yes, the pain is off the charts. Here.” She put her hand to her right lower abdomen. “Breathing, moving, coughing—it feels like you’re being stabbed.”

  “How long before it ruptures?”

  She shook her head, but said, “Twenty-four to seventy-two hours from onset of symptoms. And it doesn’t rupture like a balloon. It’s more like a tear. The bacteria leaks into your bloodstream, where it leads to sepsis.”

  Faith could’ve looked this up on WebMD, but she wrote it down in her notebook anyway.

  “Now,” Amanda said. “Take me through when you first saw Michelle. They brought her into recovery. Was she on a gurney?”

  “Yes.” Ortiz took a tissue from her pocket. She blew her nose. “She was in bay two. One of the porters brought her husband—he said to call him Hurley—from the waiting room. I introduced myself to him. I ran down the usual post-op care.”

  “Did he ask any questions?”

  “No. He barely listened. He kept asking for the scripts.”

  “Scripts?”

  “Prescriptions. Antibiotics. Generic. You can get them for free at Walmart. I got the feeling that he wanted them so they could leave.”

  “What was her medical prognosis?”

  “I’m not supposed to tell you because of patient’s rights, but fuck it. She needed to be admitted. The husband refused. She signed herself out AMA—against medical advice. The doctor was loading her up with antibiotics. She’s going to need follow-up care. Sepsis isn’t a joke.”

  “Would she have died without the surgery?”

  “Yes. She could die anyway. Hurley didn’t seem interested in managing her care.”

  Faith stared at her notepad. Ortiz didn’t know about the car accident, that Hurley had a team and that the team had abducted a doctor. Faith wrote down a question for later: Hurley needed Michelle alive—for what?

  Amanda asked, “When did you recognize the patient as Michelle Spivey?”

  “I didn’t. Not at first. It was the husband who set me off. There was something about him. He felt squirrely. We get abusers sometimes, where the husband won’t leave the wife alone. He’s afraid she’ll ask for help.”

  “Did she show any signs of abuse?”

  “She looked malnourished. I gave her some warm blankets, but then I realized she didn’t have socks. So I put socks on her feet. That’s when I saw the track marks.”

  Faith looked up from her notebook.

  Ortiz said, “That’s when it happened. I was putting on her socks. I looked up at her face, and from a different angle, something clicked. Her hair’s been cut and bleached blonde, but I recognized her. And that’s when she looked at me—right in the eye. She mouthed the word ‘Help.’”

  Faith wanted to make sure she got this right. “She asked you for help?”

  “Not audibly. But you can read the word on somebody’s lips, right?” Ortiz walked over to the bed. “I was here. She was sitting up.
”

  “Did the husband see her mouth the word?”

  “No. I mean—I don’t know for sure. I went back to the nurse’s station. I said I was going to get her some Vaseline. Her lips were really chapped. I gave the emergency code to Daniel, the porter. He was real cool about it, just slipped out the door, but the husband had picked up on something. When I turned around, he was making her put on her pants. She couldn’t get them zipped. The sutures broke. She was bleeding. She started to cry. He wouldn’t let her put on her shirt. He gave her his jacket. He pulled her into the stairs. That’s the last I saw of them. I heard gunfire downstairs. We got the alarm to shelter in place. Then a few minutes later, the bombs went off.” She shook her head. “They’re saying Hurley had a group of men with him, that they shot a bunch of people.”

  Amanda didn’t offer to fill in the blanks. She walked around the gurney. She looked down at the floor. “Is this her shirt?”

  Ortiz nodded.

  Amanda bent down. She used a pencil to move the shirt. Cotton, short-sleeved, button-up front, white with red vertical stripes. “Homespun.”

  Faith knelt beside her. The seams looked handstitched. The cloth could’ve been from a sack of flour.

  “Thank you, Ms. Ortiz.” Amanda stood up. She told Faith, “Meet me in the hall.”

  Faith used her phone to photograph the shirt. She zoomed in on the seams. The buttons were all the same color, but they were mismatched. Michelle Spivey had worked at the CDC. She was a marathoner, a mother of an almost teenager. She didn’t strike Faith as the type of woman who would make her own clothes.

  “I’m sorry,” Ortiz said. “I should’ve—I don’t know. I should’ve stopped him.”

  “He would’ve killed you.” Faith found one of her business cards. “Call me if you think of anything else, okay?”

  Back in the stairwell, Amanda was ending a call on the satellite phone. She told Faith, “Sara’s mother is claiming that her daughter went with the kidnappers in order to protect Will.”

  Faith could very easily see that happening, but putting it in a police report could mean a lot of bad things for a law enforcement career, especially if the press got hold of it.

  Amanda said, “I asked her to take a cooling-off period before she signs her statement. I’m not sure she was listening. She came across as a raving bitch.”

  Faith felt a new knot in her stomach. She would be a raving bitch, too, if someone abducted one of her children.

  She asked Amanda, “Who wears homespun?”

  “Not a woman who makes $130,000 a year.”

  Faith skipped over the astounding salary and tried to talk out what she knew. “So, Hurley kidnaps Michelle Spivey. He makes her wear homespun. He takes her to the hospital to get her appendix out instead of dumping her on the side of the road. He calls up his buddies to bring some bombs so they can escape?” She couldn’t put together any of this. “Why?”

  Amanda looked over the railing. “Dr. Lawrence?”

  “Guilty.” A short, stocky man came into view. He was wearing pinstriped pajama pants and dress shoes. His scrub shirt was spattered with blood. Smeared black eyeliner rimmed his eyes. He looked like he’d rolled out of bed after a night of raving and run to the hospital the second he’d heard the siren.

  Lawrence didn’t make apologies for his appearance. “I can hold off wiring his jaw shut as long as you want. He deserves to suffer.”

  “What about my man downstairs?”

  “I popped a staple in his scalp. He’s disoriented, concussed. He took a hell of a beating to his lower belly. He’s probably got a cracked rib or two. He needs a CT to rule out bleeding.”

  Amanda asked, “What can you give him to get him back on his feet right now?”

  Lawrence thought for a moment. “This’ll have my ass in front of the medical board, but a tab of Percocet 10 should do the trick. Tell him to take half if you want to keep him awake.”

  “What if I need him more than awake?”

  Lawrence scratched his prickly beard. “An ammonium inhaler might—”

  “Poppers?” Faith felt the word explode out of her mouth. “You can’t be serious.”

  “It’s not a popper. It’s a nasal irritant. It’ll make him take a really deep breath and put a lot of oxygen in his body.” He told Amanda, “We’ve got some downstairs. Give him a hit when he needs his game face on.”

  Faith shook her head. She didn’t trust any of this.

  Lawrence was already leaving. “Find Conrad downstairs if you want the meds.”

  “He won’t take medication,” Faith told Amanda. Will treated headaches with root beer and strained muscles with more exercise.

  Amanda said, “I have a hunch that Robert Hurley didn’t abduct Michelle Spivey. I think a man named Adam Humphrey Carter took her. He spent six years upstate for sexual assault. And I think he’s with Sara right now.”

  Faith put her hand to her mouth. Georgia distinguished the crime of rape from sexual assault. The latter meant that the assailant had supervisory or custodial authority over the victim; a teacher or a daycare worker or—

  “Carter was a Newnan County police officer,” Amanda confirmed. “He pulled over a twenty-two-year-old woman, dragged her into the woods, raped and battered her, then left her for dead.”

  “Where did—” Faith struggled to get out a question. “You didn’t pull Carter’s name out of a hat. Why do you think he’s involved?”

  “There are things I can’t tell you right now. It’s a hunch, but it’s a well-informed hunch.” Amanda gave Faith a moment. “I’ve asked a friend to send the video of Spivey’s abduction to your private email.”

  “Wait, there’s video?” Faith had been following the story over the last month. She’d thought it was just another horrible, random kidnapping. “The news said there were no suspects.”

  Amanda didn’t explain the deception. “These are the pieces we need to focus on putting together right now: Is Carter the man in the Spivey abduction video? If Carter is the abductor, can Will identify him as one of the men who took Sara?”

  The idea that Carter could have Sara made Faith feel sick. “And then?”

  “Then they can’t argue that Michelle is being trafficked. You heard about the track marks. They could say that Carter finished with Michelle, then sold her on to Hurley. A transaction, not an alliance.”

  The more she talked, the less clear things got. “Who’s ‘they’ who’re going to argue that? And why does it matter what the motivation is?” Faith felt her watch tapping her wrist. The haptic feedback was signaling that she had an alert. She glanced down, saying, “I guess cell service is—”

  Sara Linton tried to reach you, but you were unavailable.

  “Fuck.” Faith scrolled through the Walkie-Talkie options. “Sara—”

  Talk With Sara.

  Open Walkie-Talkie.

  “Fuck.”

  “Faith,” Amanda said. “For godsakes. Sara what?”

  “She tried to Walkie me at 2:17. That was twenty-one minutes ago.” Sara could be on her way to Tennessee, the Carolinas, Alabama, Florida. “Fuck.”

  “What did she say?”

  “It doesn’t work like that.” Faith started to explain that the app worked on the FaceTime platform, but then she remembered her audience. “It’s like a real walkie-talkie. It doesn’t record or store the message. You have to listen to it when it comes in.”

  Amanda’s lips snapped into a tight line. She exhaled sharply, then said, “They found the BMW ten minutes ago.”

  Faith’s jaw dropped.

  “There was an explosion. The gas tank was set on fire. There’s a body in the back seat. They can’t tell if it’s male or female. The car has to cool down before they can go in.”

  Faith reached behind her to find the wall. She needed something solid to keep her anchored. Sara wasn’t only Will’s girlfriend. She was Faith’s friend. Maybe even her best friend.

  “You can’t tell Will any of this.” Amanda starte
d down the stairs. “He can’t help us if he’s in mourning.”

  Faith dragged behind her. She felt punch-drunk. Will had a right to know what was happening. Faith was his partner. Her job was to be honest with him. Or at least as honest as she could be.

  Amanda pulled open another door. They were in the ER. She stopped the first worker she could find. “I need Conrad.”

  Will was slouched on a gurney at the end of the hall. Faith ran toward him, calling, “Will.”

  He blinked long and slow. “Did you find Sara?”

  “No. The entire state is looking for her.” Faith told herself it was useless to tell him about the burned-out BMW until they knew who was inside. She gently pushed up his head so she could see his face. “Are you okay?”

  His chin dropped back to his chest. “I let them steal her.”

  She tried to make him look up, but he shook away her hand.

  “It-it fast.” He said. “The shed. It— the street. But, before a-an explosion. And then the cars. They took her.”

  Amanda had no patience for his rambling. “Why are you slumped over like a hobo?” She tried to force him to lie down. Her hand lifted his shirt.

  “Jesus Christ,” Faith said. His skin looked like a bunch of jumbled Rorschach ink blots.

  Amanda gave Faith a sharp look, telling her to pull herself together. “Faith, go find a doctor. Tell them he could be bleeding internally.”

  Faith walked down the hallway. She used the back of her hand to wipe her eyes. Grit scratched at her skin. It killed her to see Will this way. She turned around and watched Amanda holding out a pill for Will to take. He shook his head. She broke it in half and Will tossed it into his mouth.

  “You need me again?” A male nurse stood with his hands gripped around his stethoscope. His name tag read CONRAD. He said, “Your boss is a bitch.”

  “Tell her that while you’re helping my partner.” Faith pushed open the bathroom door. She went into the first stall, sat down, and put her head in her hands. She didn’t cry. She just sat there until she no longer had the desire to curl into a ball.