Sara shook her head, looking down at the floor.
“I’m so sorry. God, I’m sorry. Please forgive me.”
Sara took her time speaking. “I guess Amanda caught you up on the details.”
“I looked it up on the computer. I didn’t—”
“Agent Trent read it, too?”
“No.” Faith made her voice firm. “No. He said it was none of his business, and he’s right. It’s none of my business, either. I shouldn’t have looked. I’m sorry. I am just an awful, awful person, Sara. I can’t believe I said that to you.”
Sara bent down to the baby, put her hand to his face. “It’s okay.”
Faith floundered for something to say, rattling off all the horrible things she could think about herself. “Look, I lied to you about my weight. I’ve gained fifteen pounds, not ten. I eat Pop-Tarts for breakfast, sometimes for dinner but usually with a Diet Coke. I never exercise. Ever. The only time I run is when I’m trying to make it to the bathroom before the commercial’s over, and honest to God, since I got TiVo, I don’t even do that anymore.”
Sara was still silent.
“I’m so sorry.”
She kept fiddling with the blanket, tucking it in tighter, making sure the baby was in a tight little cocoon.
“I’m sorry,” Faith repeated, feeling so awful she thought she might throw up.
Sara kept her thoughts to herself. Faith was trying to figure out how to gracefully leave the room when the doctor said, “I knew it was fifteen pounds.”
Faith felt some of the tension start to dissipate. She knew better than to ruin it by opening her mouth.
Sara said, “No one ever talks to me about him. I mean, in the beginning, of course, but now no one even says his name. It’s like they don’t want to upset me, like saying his name might send me back to …” She shook her head. “Jeffrey. I can’t remember the last time I said that out loud. His name is—was—Jeffrey.”
“It’s a nice name.”
Sara nodded. Her throat worked as she swallowed.
“I saw pictures,” Faith admitted. “He was good-looking.”
A smile curved Sara’s lips. “He was.”
“And a good cop. You could tell by the way they wrote the reports.”
“He was a good man.”
Faith floundered, trying to think of something else to say.
Sara beat her to it, asking, “What about you?”
“Me?”
“The father.”
In her mortification, Faith had forgotten about Victor. She put her hand to her stomach. “You mean my baby’s daddy?”
Sara allowed a smile.
“He was looking for a mother, not a girlfriend.”
“Well, that was never Jeffrey’s problem. He was very good at taking care of himself.” Her eyes took on a faraway look. “He was the best thing that ever happened to me.”
“Sara—”
She went through the desk drawers and found a glucose monitor. “Let’s test your blood sugar.”
This time, Faith was too contrite to protest. She held out her hand, waited for the lancet to pierce her skin.
Sara talked as she went through the procedure. “I’m not trying to get back my husband. Believe me, if it was as simple as walking onto a case, I would sign up at the police academy tomorrow.”
Faith winced as the needle pierced her skin.
“I want to feel useful again,” Sara said, her voice taking on a confessional tone. “I want to feel like I’m doing more to help people than prescribing ointments for rashes that would probably go away on their own and patching up thugs so they can go back on the street and shoot each other again.”
Faith hadn’t considered that Sara’s motivations might be so altruistic. She supposed it reflected badly on herself that she always assumed everyone approached life with selfish intentions. She told Sara, “Your husband sounded … perfect.”
Sara laughed as she filled the test strip. “He left his jockstrap hanging on the bathroom doorknob, he slept around the first time we were married—which I found out for myself when I came home from work early one day—and he had an illegitimate son he never knew about until he was forty.” She read the machine, then showed it to Faith. “What do you think? Juice or insulin?”
“Insulin.” She confessed, “I ran out at lunch.”
“I gathered.” Sara picked up the phone and called one of the nurses. “You need to get this under control.”
“This case is—”
“This case is ongoing, just like all the other cases you’ve worked and all the ones you’ll work in the future. I’m sure Agent Trent can spare you for a couple of hours while you get this squared away.”
Faith wasn’t sure Agent Trent could spare anything at the moment.
Sara checked on the baby again. “His name is Balthazar,” she said.
“Here I was thinking we had saved him.”
She was kind enough to laugh, but her words were serious. “I’m board certified in pediatric medicine, Faith. I graduated at the top of my class at Emory University and I’ve devoted nearly two decades of my life to helping people, whether they’re living or dead. You can question my personal motivations all you like, but don’t question my medical abilities.”
“You’re right.” Faith felt even more contrite. “I’m sorry. It’s been a really hard day.”
“It doesn’t help when your blood sugar is out of whack.” There was a rap on the door, and Sara walked over, taking a handful of insulin pens from the nurse. She shut the door and told Faith, “You have to take this seriously.”
“I know I do.”
“Postponing dealing with it isn’t going to work. Take two hours out of your day to see Delia so that you can get yourself right and focus on your work.”
“I will.”
“Mood swings, sudden tempers—these are all symptoms of your disease.”
Faith felt like her mother had just scolded her, but maybe that’s exactly what she needed right now. “Thank you.”
Sara put her hands on the bassinet. “I’ll leave you to it.”
“Wait,” Faith said. “You deal with young girls, right?”
Sara shrugged. “I used to a lot more when I had my private practice. Why?”
“What do you know about thinspo?”
“Not a lot,” the doctor admitted. “I know it’s a word for pro-anorexia propaganda, usually on the Internet.”
“Three of our victims have a connection to it.”
“Anna’s still very thin,” Sara observed. “Her liver and kidney functions are off, but I thought that was because of what she’d been through, not anything she’d done to herself.”
“Could she be anorexic?”
“It’s possible. I really didn’t consider the disorder because of her age. Anorexia is generally a teenage issue.” Sara recalled, “Pete flagged up something similar during Jacquelyn Zabel’s autopsy. She was very thin, but then again, she was starved and denied water for at least two weeks. I just assumed she had started out slightly underweight. Her frame was small.” She leaned down to Balthazar and stroked the side of his cheek. “Anna couldn’t have had a baby if she was starving herself. Not without serious complications.”
“Maybe she got it under control long enough to have him,” Faith guessed. “I’m never quite sure which is which—is anorexia where they throw up?”
“That’s bulimia. Anorexia denotes starvation. Sometimes anorexics use laxatives, but they don’t purge. There’s growing evidence about genetic determinism—chromosomal blips that predispose them to the disorder. Usually, there’s some kind of environmental trigger that sets it off.”
“Like child abuse?”
“Could be. Sometimes it’s bullying. Sometimes it’s body dysmorphia. Some people blame magazines and movie stars, but it’s far more complicated than just one thing. Boys are starting to get it more, too. It’s extremely difficult to treat because of the psychological component.”
Faith thought about their victims. “Is there a certain type of personality that’s drawn to it?”
Sara considered the question before replying. “I can only tell you that the handful of patients I dealt with who suffered from the disease got extreme pleasure from starving themselves. It takes a huge amount of willpower to fight the body’s physiological imperative for food. They might feel like everything else in their life is out of whack, and the only thing they can manipulate is whether or not they put food in their mouths. There’s also a physical response to starvation—light-headedness, euphoria, sometimes hallucinations. It can duplicate the same type of high you get from opiates, and the feeling can be incredibly addictive.”
Faith tried to remember how many times she’d made jokes about wishing she had the willpower to be anorexic for a week.
Sara added, “The biggest problem with treatment is that it’s much more socially acceptable for a woman to be too thin than it is for a woman to be overweight.”
“I have yet to meet a woman who is happy with her weight.”
Sara gave a rueful laugh. “My sister is, actually.”
“Is she some kind of saint?”
Faith had been joking, but Sara surprised her, answering, “Close. She’s a missionary. She married a preacher a few years ago. They’re helping AIDS babies in Africa.”
“Good God, I hate her and I’ve never even met her.”
“Trust me, she has her faults,” Sara confided. “You said three victims. Does that mean another woman has been taken?”
Faith realized that Olivia Tanner’s status hadn’t yet hit the news. “Yes. Keep that under wraps if you can.”
“Of course.”
“Two of them seemed to take a lot of aspirin. The new one we found out about today had six jumbo bottles in her house. Jacquelyn Zabel had a large bottle by her bed.”
Sara nodded, like something was starting to make sense. “It’s an emetic in high doses. That would explain why Zabel’s stomach was so ulcerated.” She added, “And it would explain why she was still bleeding when Will found her. You should tell him that. He was upset about not getting there in time.”
Will had a hell of a lot more than that to be upset about right now. Still, Faith remembered, “He needs your apartment number.”
“Why?” Sara answered her own question. “Oh, his wife’s dog.”
“Right,” Faith said, thinking the lie was the least she could do for Will.
“Twelve. It’s on the directory.” She put her hands back on the edge of the bassinet. “I should take this boy to his mother.”
Faith held open the door and Sara rolled out the bassinet. The hum of the hallway buzzed in her ears until Faith shut the door. She sat on the stool by the counter and lifted her skirt, looking for a spot that wasn’t already black and blue from the needles. The diabetes pamphlet had said to move the injection sites around, so Faith checked her stomach, where she found a pristine roll of white fat that she pinched between her thumb and forefinger.
She held the insulin pen a few inches from her belly but didn’t inject herself. Somewhere behind all those Pop-Tarts was a tiny baby with tiny hands and feet and a mouth and eyes—breathing every breath she took, peeing every ten minutes when she ran to the bathroom. Sara’s words had brought things home for Faith, but holding Balthazar Lindsey had awakened something in Faith that she had never felt in her life. As much as she had loved Jeremy, his birth was hardly a celebration. Fifteen was not an appropriate age for baby showers, and even the nurses at the hospital had looked at her with pity.
This time would be different, though. Faith was old enough so that it was acceptable for her to be a mother. She could walk through the mall with her baby on her hip without worrying people would assume she was her own child’s older sister. She could take him to the pediatrician and sign all his forms without getting her mother to cosign. She could tell his teachers to go screw themselves during PTA meetings without worrying about being sent to the principal’s office herself. Hell, she could drive now.
She could do it right this time. She could be a good mother from start to finish. Well, maybe not start. Faith catalogued all the things she had done to her baby just this week: ignored him, denied his existence, passed out in a garage, contemplated abortion, exposed him to whatever Sam Lawson was carrying, fallen off a porch step and risked both their lives trying to stop Will from pounding a Yugoslavian doorman’s head into the fine looped carpet lining the penthouse hallway at Beeston Place.
And here they were now, mother and child in the Grady ICU, and she was about to poke a needle somewhere near his head.
The door opened.
“What the hell are you doing?” Amanda demanded. She figured it out for herself quickly enough. “Oh, for the love of God. When were you going to tell me about this?”
Faith rolled her shirt back down, thinking it was a little late for modesty. “Right after I told you I’m pregnant.”
Amanda tried to slam the door but the hydraulic hinge wouldn’t let her. “Goddamn it, Faith. You’re never going to get ahead with a baby.”
Her hackles rose. “I got this far with one.”
“You were a kid in uniform making sixteen thousand dollars a year. You’re thirty-three now.”
Faith tried, “I guess this means you won’t be throwing me a baby shower.”
Her look would have cut glass. “Does your mother know?”
“I thought I’d let her enjoy her vacation.”
Amanda slapped her palm to her forehead, which would’ve been comical if not for the fact that she held Faith’s life in her hands. “A dyslexic half-wit with a temper problem and a fertile, fat diabetic who lacks a rudimentary understanding of birth control.” She jabbed her finger in Faith’s face. “I hope you like that pairing, young lady, because you’re going to be stuck with Will Trent forever now.”
Faith tried to ignore the “fat” part, which, honestly, hurt the most. “I can think of worse things than being partnered with Will Trent for the rest of my life.”
“You’d just better be damned glad the security cameras didn’t catch his little tantrum.”
“Will’s a good cop, Amanda. He wouldn’t still be working for you if you didn’t believe that.”
“Well—” She cut herself off. “Maybe when he’s not putting his abandonment issues on full display.”
“Is he all right?”
“He’ll live,” Amanda replied, not sounding too convinced. “I sent him to track down that prostitute. Lola.”
“She’s not in jail?”
“There was a pretty big score in the apartment—heroin, meth, coke. Angie Polaski managed to get Lola kicked for being an informant.” Amanda shrugged. She couldn’t always control the Atlanta police department.
“Do you think it’s a good idea to have Will looking for Lola, considering how angry he was about that baby being left alone?”
The old Amanda was back—the one who couldn’t be questioned. “We’ve got two missing women and a serial killer who knows what to do with them. There has to be some movement on this case before it gets away from us. The clock is ticking, Faith. He could be watching his next victim right now.”
“I was supposed to meet with Rick Sigler today—the paramedic who worked on Anna.”
“I sent someone around to Sigler’s house an hour ago. His wife was there with him. He adamantly denied knowing anyone named Jake Berman. He barely admitted he was on the road that night.”
Faith could not think of a worse way to question the man. “He’s gay. The wife doesn’t know.”
“They never do,” Amanda countered. “At any rate, he wasn’t interested in talking, and we don’t have enough right now to drag him down to the station.”
“I’m not sure he’s a suspect.”
“Everyone is a suspect as far as I’m concerned. I read the autopsy report. I’ve seen what was done to Anna. Our bad guy likes to experiment. He’s going to keep doing this until we stop him.”
Faith had been running on adrenaline for the past few hours, and she felt it spark up again at Amanda’s words. “Do you want me to watch Sigler?”
“I’ve got Leo Donnelly parked outside his house right now. Something tells me you don’t want to be trapped in a car with him all night.”
“No, ma’am,” Faith answered, and not just because Leo was a chain smoker. He would probably blame Faith for putting him on Amanda’s shit list. He would be right.
“Someone needs to go to Michigan to find the files on Pauline Seward’s family. The warrant’s being expedited, but apparently nothing past fifteen years is on the computers. We need to find someone from her past and we need to find them fast—the parents, hopefully the brother, if it’s not our mysterious Mr. Berman. For obvious reasons, I can’t send Will to read through the files.”
Faith put the insulin pen down on the counter. “I’ll do it.”
“Do you have this diabetes thing under control?” Faith’s expression must’ve been answer enough. “I’ll send one of my agents who can actually do their job.” She waved her hand, dismissing any objections Faith might have. “Let’s just move on from that until it bites us in the ass again, shall we?”
“I’m sorry about this.” Faith had apologized more in the last fifteen minutes than she had in her entire life.
Amanda shook her head, indicating she wasn’t willing to discuss the stupidity of the situation. “The doorman’s asked for a lawyer. We’re scheduled to talk to them first thing in the morning.”
“You arrested him?”
“Detained. He’s obviously foreign-born. The Patriot Act gives us twenty-four hours to hold him while we check his immigration status. Hopefully, we can turn his apartment upside down and find something more concrete to hammer him with.”
Faith wasn’t one to argue with the true course of justice.
Amanda asked, “What about Anna’s neighbors?”
“It’s a quiet building. The apartment below the penthouse has been vacant for months. They could’ve set off an atom bomb up there and no one would’ve known.”
“The dead guy?”
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