Will wanted to pull away, to keep going, but his body would not respond. For the second time that evening, he sat back on his knees and looked down at Warren Grier. The younger man’s last words still echoed in his ears. “Colors,” Warren had said. He had figured out Will’s filing system, the way he used the colors to indicate what was inside the folders. “You use colors just like me.” Warren Grier had finally found a kindred spirit. Ten minutes later, he had killed himself.
Another hand went around Will’s arm. Faith helped him stand. He hadn’t realized she was there, hadn’t seen the circle of cops that had formed around him.
“Come on,” she said, keeping her hand on his arm as she walked with him up the hallway. There were catcalls, the kind of remarks you expected men behind bars to make when a pretty woman walked by. Will ignored them, fighting the urge to slump against Faith, to do something foolish like reach out to her.
Faith sat him down at Billy’s desk. She knelt in front of him, raised her hand to his cheek. “You had no way of knowing he’d do that.”
Will felt the coolness of her palm against his face. He put his hand over hers, then gently pulled it away. “I’m not much good at taking comfort, Faith.”
She nodded her understanding, but he could read the pity in her eyes.
“I shouldn’t have lied to him,” Will said. “The stuff about the cigarette burns.”
Faith sat back, looking up at him. He could not tell whether she believed him or was simply humoring him. “You did what you had to do.”
“I pushed him too hard.”
“He put that sheet around his own neck.” She reminded him, “He also pulled the trigger, Will. You would be dead now if those chambers had been full. He may have been more pathetic than Evan Bernard, but he was just as cold and calculating.”
“Warren was doing what he was programmed to do. Everything he had in his life—everything—was a struggle. No one gave him anything.” Will felt his jaw clench. “Bernard’s educated, well liked, he has a good job, friends, family. He had a choice.”
“Everyone has a choice. Even Warren.”
She would never understand because she had never been completely alone in the world. He told her, “I know Emma’s alive somewhere, Faith.”
“It’s been a long time, Will. Too long.”
“I don’t care what you say,” he told her. “She’s alive. Warren wouldn’t have killed her. He wanted things from her, things he was in the process of taking. You heard how he talked in the interview. You know he was keeping her alive.”
Faith did not respond, though he could see the answer in her eyes: she was just as certain Emma Campano was dead as Will was that the girl was alive.
Instead of arguing with him, she changed the subject. “I just talked to Mary Clark.” She walked him through the discovery of the yearbooks in the photographs Will had taken of Warren’s apartment, the phone call to the teacher wherein Mary Clark confirmed that Warren had given Bernard an alibi all those years ago. As Faith spoke, Will could finally see everything coming into focus. Bernard would have been the only anchor in Warren’s life. There was nothing the young man would not have done for his mentor.
Faith told him the other things the teacher had said. “Bernard let them come to his house and drink, smoke, do whatever they wanted. Then, when he was finished using them, he tossed them away.”
“He probably tutored Warren,” Will guessed. “He would’ve been the only adult in his life who tried to help him instead of treating him like there was something wrong with him.” Warren would have lain in front of an oncoming train if Bernard told him to. The young man’s refusal to implicate the teacher suddenly made sense.
“This shows a pattern with the girls,” Faith told him. “Bernard will get more time in prison if Mary tells a jury what happened to her.”
Will did not believe for a second that Mary Clark finally had the strength to confront her abuser. “I want him to die,” he mumbled. “All those girls he raped—he might as well have killed them. Who was Mary Clark going to be before Evan Bernard got hold of her? What kind of life was she going to have? All that went out the door the minute he set his sights on her. That girl Mary was going to be is dead, Faith. How many other girls did he kill like that? And now Kayla and Adam and God knows what Emma’s going through.” He stopped, swallowing back his emotions. “I want to be there when they put the needle in his arm. I want to jam it in myself.”
Faith was so taken aback by his vehemence that, for a few seconds, she could not trust herself to speak. “We can look for other witnesses,” she finally told him. “There have to be other girls. Tie it in with the allegations at Georgia Tech and he could get thirty, forty years.”
Will shook his head. “Bernard killed Adam and Kayla, Faith. I know he didn’t do it with his own hands, but he knew what Warren was capable of. He knew that he had complete and total control over him, that he could pull the trigger and Warren would shoot.” Will thought about Warren, how desperately he must have wanted to fit in. Sitting around Bernard’s house with the other kids, drinking beer and talking about all the losers who were still at school, must have been the closest he ever came to being part of a family.
Faith said, “The room in his house thirteen years ago was just like the one we found in Bernard’s apartment. He’s been doing this for years, Will. As soon as his picture goes out on the news, we’re going to have—”
“Where?” Will interrupted. “Did Mary say where the house was?”
“I thought you checked his last residence?”
“I did.” Will felt the final piece click into place. “Bernard’s background check showed another house. He bought it fifteen years ago and sold it three years later. I didn’t think anything about it, but—”
Faith took out her cell phone, dialed in a number. “Mary knows where the house is.”
Faith drove, following the Atlanta police cruiser down North Avenue. The lights were on, but the siren was silent. Will was silent, too. He kept thinking about Warren Grier, the soft give to his chest as Will tried to press the life back into his heart. What had compelled the man to wrap the sheet around his neck, to take his own life? Was he afraid that he would not be able to hold out much longer, that Will would push him so hard that he would end up betraying Evan Bernard? Or was it just a means to an end, Warren’s desperate, grand plan to make sure that he spent the rest of his life with Emma Campano?
The cruiser bumped along construction sites in front of the Coca-Cola building, streetlights illuminating the road. Faith slowed so that the bottom of her car would not be ripped apart.
She said, “I don’t want to find the body.”
Will looked at her profile, the way the blue lights flashed against her pale skin. He understood what she meant: she wanted Emma Campano to be found, she just didn’t want to be the one who discovered her. “She’s going to be alive,” Will insisted. He could not think otherwise—especially after Warren. “Emma is going to be alive, and she’s going to tell us that Evan Bernard did this, that he put Warren up to everything.”
Faith kept her own counsel, staring at the road ahead, probably thinking that Will was a fool.
Houses started to appear on the side of the road, dilapidated Victorians and cottages that had been boarded up long ago. Ahead, the cruiser’s lights cut off as they approached Evan Bernard’s old address. There were no streetlights here. The moon was covered in clouds. At almost midnight, the only source of light came from the automobile headlights.
“Look,” Faith said, pointing to the car Adam Humphrey had purchased from a departing grad student. The blue Chevy Impala was one car among many rusted-out heaps parked along a desolate stretch of North Avenue. There had been a priority alert out for two days to locate the vehicle. No one had reported seeing it. Had the car been sitting here the whole time, Emma Campano rotting in the trunk? Or had Warren left her alive to let nature run its course? Even at this time of night, the heat was unbearable. Inside the car would h
ave been twenty to thirty degrees hotter. Her brain would have literally fried in the heat.
Will and Faith got out of the Mini. He shined his Maglite on the houses and vacant lots that lined the street as they walked toward the car. Most of the homes had been torn down, but three had survived. They were utilitarian, wood-frame structures that had probably been thrown up after the Second World War to accommodate Atlanta’s population explosion.
Bernard’s house was at the end, the street numbers still nailed to the front door. The windows and doors were boarded over. Hurricane fencing had been erected to keep out vagrants, but that hadn’t stopped them from digging under in several places. Various drug paraphernalia on the sidewalk and littering the street indicated that some hadn’t even bothered to do that.
One of the cops from the cruiser was checking the interior of the Impala. His partner stood beside the car, a crowbar in his hand. Will took the bar and wedged it into the trunk. Without pause, he popped the lock, the metal lid creaking open. They all gagged from the smell of feces and blood.
The trunk was empty.
“The house,” Faith said, shining her flashlight back at the looming structure. It was two stories tall, the roof sagging in the middle. “There could be junkies in there. There are needles all over the place.”
Wordlessly, Will walked toward the house. He dropped down, wriggling under the fence, pulling himself up on the other side. He did not stop to help Faith as he headed up the broken concrete walk to the house. The front door was nailed shut. Will thought one of the boards over the window looked loose. He pulled it free with his hands. His flashlight showed the dust on the sill had been rubbed away. Someone had been here before him.
He hesitated. Faith was right. This could be a crack house. Dealers and junkies could be conducting business inside. They could be armed, high or both. Either way, they would not exactly welcome the police into their shooting den.
One of the porch boards squeaked. Faith stood behind him, her flashlight shining on the ground.
He kept his voice low. “You don’t have to do this.”
Faith ignored him as she slid in between the rotted boards.
Will checked on the other cops, making sure they were guarding the front and the rear of the house, before going in after her. Inside, Faith had her gun drawn, the flashlight tucked up beside the muzzle, the same way every cop had been trained to do. The house felt claustrophobic, with its low ceilings and trash piled into the corners. There were more needles than he could count, clumps of tinfoil and a few spoons—all the signs that the space was an active shooting den.
Faith pointed down, meaning she would search this level. Will drew his gun and went toward the stairs.
He tested his foot on each tread, hoping he would not step on rotted wood and end up in the basement. There was a tingling at the base of his spine. He reached the top of the stairs, keeping his flashlight aimed low. There was a sliver of moonlight coming through the boarded windows, just enough to see by. Will turned off the light and gently placed it on the floor. He stood there, listening for sounds of life. All he heard was Faith walking downstairs, the house groaning as the heat soaked into the wood.
Will smelled pot, chemicals. They could be in a meth lab. There could be a junkie hiding behind one of the doors, waiting to stick Will with a needle. He stepped forward, his foot crunching broken glass. There were four bedrooms upstairs with one bathroom between them. The door at the end of the hall was closed. All the other doors had been taken off their hinges, probably stolen for scrap. In the bathroom, the fixtures were gone, the copper pipe pulled out of the wall. Holes had been punched into the ceiling. The plaster walls were broken along the light switches where someone had checked for copper wire in the wall. It was aluminum, Will saw, the kind that he had ripped out of his own house because building codes had outlawed its use many years ago.
Faith whispered, “Will?” She was making her way up the stairs. He waited until she was with him, then indicated the closed door at the end of the hallway.
Will stopped in front of the only door. He tried the knob, but it was locked. He indicated that Faith should step back, then lifted his foot and kicked open the door. Will knelt, pointing his gun blindly into the room. Faith’s flashlight cut through the dark like a knife, searching corners, the open closet.
The room was empty.
They both holstered their weapons.
“It’s just like the other one.” Faith shone her flashlight over the faded pink walls, the dirty white trim. There was a bare double mattress on the floor, dark stains flowering at the center. A tripod with a camera was mounted in front of it.
Will took the flashlight and checked the slot for the memory stick. “It’s empty.”
“We should call Charlie,” Faith said, probably thinking about the evidence that needed to be collected, the DNA on the mattress.
“He knows better than to leave traces of himself,” Will said. He could not get Evan Bernard’s smug face out of his mind. The man was so certain that he wouldn’t get caught. He was right. At the moment, all they could charge Bernard with was having sex with Kayla Alexander. Will did not know what the statute of limitations was for Mary Clark, nor was he certain that the woman would testify against a man whom she still considered in many ways to have been her first lover.
There was a scraping noise. Will turned around to see what Faith was doing, but she was standing completely still in the middle of the room. He heard the scrape again, and, this time, he realized it was coming from the ceiling.
Faith mouthed, Junkie?
Will skimmed the low ceiling with his flashlight, checking every corner of the room. Like the rest of the house, the plaster had been busted out around the light switch. Will saw a dark stain around the hole, what might be a footprint. There was a hole above his head, insulation and Sheetrock hanging down in pieces.
“Emma?” He almost choked on the girl’s name, afraid to say the word, to give himself hope. “Emma Campano?” He slammed his hand into the ceiling. “It’s the police, Emma.”
There was more scraping, the distinctive sound of rats.
“Emma?” Will reached up, tearing chunks of Sheetrock down from the low ceiling. His hands did not work fast enough, so he used the flashlight to make the opening larger. “Emma, it’s the police.” He dug his foot into the hole in the wall, propelling himself up into the attic.
Will stopped, halfway in the attic, his foot firmly supported by the lath in the wall. Hot air enveloped him, so intense that his lungs hurt from breathing it. The girl lay in a heap up against the eaves. Her skin was covered in a fine, white powder from the Sheetrock. Her eyes were open, her lips together. A large rat was inches from her hand, his retinas flashing like mirrors in the beam of the flashlight. Will pulled himself the rest of the way into the attic. Rats scrambled everywhere. One darted across the girl’s arm. He saw scratch marks where the animals had dug into her skin.
“No,” Will whispered, crawling on his hands and knees across the supports. Blood congealed on her abdomen and thighs. Welts strangled her neck. Will swung the flashlight at a greedy rat, his heart aching at the sight of the girl. How could he tell Paul that this was how he had found his daughter? There was no smell of decay, no flies burrowing into her flesh. How could any of them go on knowing that only a few hours had separated the girl from life and death?
“Will?” Faith asked, though he could tell from her tone of voice that she knew what he had found.
“I’m sorry,” Will told the girl. He could not stand her blank, lifeless stare. He had not believed once during the investigation that she was dead—even when evidence had stacked up to the contrary. He had insisted that there was no way she was gone, and now, all he could think was that his hubris had made the truth that much more unbearable.
Will reached over to close her eyes, pressing his fingers into the lids, gently lowering them. “I’m sorry,” he repeated, knowing that would never be enough.
Emma’s eye
s popped back open. She blinked, focusing on Will.
She was alive.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Faith stood in Emma Campano’s hospital room, watching Abigail with her daughter. The room was dark, the only light coming from the machines that were hooked up to the girl. Fluids, antibiotics, various mixtures of chemicals designed to make her well again. Nothing could heal her spirit, though. No medical device could revive her soul.
While Faith was pregnant, she had secretly decided that the baby in her womb was a little girl. Blond hair and blue eyes, dimples in her cheeks. Faith would buy her matching pink outfits and braid ribbons into her hair while her daughter talked about school crushes and boy bands and secret wishes.
Jeremy had pretty quickly shattered that dream. Her son’s feelings ran toward uncomplicated matters involving football and action heroes. His musical tastes were deplorable and hardly worth talking about. His wishes were hardly secret: toys, video games and—to Faith’s horror—the slutty little redhead who lived down the street.
The past few days, Faith had let her mind go to that dark place every parent visits at one time or another: what would I do if the phone rang, the police knocked on the door, and some stranger told me that my child was dead? That was the terror that lurked in every mother’s heart, that gruesome fear. It was like knocking on wood or making the sign of the cross—letting the thought come into your mind served as a talisman against the thing actually happening.
Watching Emma sleep, Faith realized there were worse things than getting that phone call. You could get your child back, but her identity—her essence—could be gone. The horrors Emma experienced were written on her body: the bruises, the scratches, the bite marks. Warren had taken his time with the girl, living out every sick fantasy that he could conjure. He had given her neither food nor water. Emma had been forced to defecate and urinate in the same room in which she slept. Her hands and feet had been tied. Repeatedly, she had been strangled to the point of passing out, then resuscitated. The girl had screamed so much that her voice was nothing more than a raw whisper.
The Will Trent Series 7-Book Bundle Page 77