Fallen

by Karin Slaughter

  Mittal made an expansive gesture with his hands, indicating Charlie should continue.

  Will knew that this was Charlie’s favorite part of the job. There was a swagger to his walk as he went to the open doorway and clasped his hands together near his face as if he held a gun. “Evelyn comes back into the house. Pivots, sees bad guy number one waiting in the laundry room and shoots him in the head. The force spun him around like a pinwheel. That’s the exit wound you see at the back of his head.” Charlie turned back around, hands raised again in a classic Charlie’s Angel pose, which was the best way to make sure you got shot in the chest. “Then bad guy number two comes, probably from over there.” He pointed to the pass-through between the kitchen and dining room. “There’s a struggle. Evelyn loses her gun. See there?”

  Will followed his pointing finger to a plastic marker on the floor. Now that Charlie had put the suggestion in his head, he could see the faint, bloody outline of a handgun.

  “Evelyn grabs the knife off the counter. Her blood is on the handle, but it’s not on the blade.”

  Amanda interrupted, “It’s not just her blood on the knife?”

  “No. According to her personnel file, Evelyn is typed as O-positive. We’ve got B-negative coating the blade and here by the fridge.”

  They all looked down at a dozen large, round drops of blood on the floor.

  Mittal provided, “It’s a passive spatter. No arteries were compromised or there would be a spray pattern. All the samples were sent to the lab for DNA analysis. I imagine we’re looking at a week for results.”

  A smile played at Amanda’s lips as she stared at the blood. “Good girl, Ev.” There was a sound of triumph in her voice. “Any of the dead guys B-negative?”

  Charlie glanced at Mittal again. The man nodded his acquiescence. “The Asian in the ugly shirt was O-positive, which is a fairly common type across races. It’s Evelyn’s type. It’s my type. The other, the guy we’re calling Ricardo because of his tattoo, was B-negative, but here’s the kicker: he doesn’t have any stab wounds. I mean, he bled at some point. He was obviously tortured. But the blood we’re looking at here is a larger volume than anything—”

  Amanda interrupted, “So, we’ve got someone out there with a stab wound whose blood type is B-negative. Is that rare?”

  “Less than two percent of the U.S. Caucasian population is B-negative,” Charlie told them. “It’s a quarter of that for Asians, and around one percent for Hispanics. Bottom line, it’s a very rare blood type, which makes it probable that our dead B-negative Ricardo is genetically related to our missing and wounded B-negative.”

  “So, we’ve got a wounded man out there, blood type B-negative.”

  Charlie was ahead of her for once. “I already put a be-on-the-lookout at all hospitals within a hundred miles for a stab wound of any kind—male, female, white, black, orange. We’ve already had three rule-outs from domestics just in the last half hour. More people get stabbed than I’d realized.”

  Mittal made sure Charlie was finished, then pointed to the blood smeared across the floor. “These shoe prints are conducive to a struggle between a small woman and a medium-sized man, probably around seventy kilos. We can tell from the variation of light to dark in the print that there is a medial roll to the foot, or supination.”

  Amanda stopped the lesson. “Take me back to the stab wound. Are we talking fatal?”

  Mittal shrugged. “The medical examiner’s office would have to give you their opinion. As was stated earlier, there’s no blood spray on the walls or ceiling, from which we can posit that none of the arteries were damaged. This spatter, then, could perhaps be the result of a head wound, where one would find a fair amount of blood with minimal damage.” He looked at Charlie. “Do you concur?”

  Charlie nodded, but added, “A gut wound might bleed like this. I’m not sure how long you could last with that. If you trust the movies, not long. If a lung was punctured, then he’d have an hour, tops, before he suffocated. There’s absolutely no arterial spray, so it’s a seeping wound. I don’t disagree with Dr. Mittal about the possibility of a head wound.…” He shrugged, then disagreed anyway. “The blade was coated tip to hilt, which might indicate that the knife plunged into the body.” He saw the frown on Mittal’s face and backpedaled. “Then again, it could be that the victim grabbed the knife, which cut his hand and coated the blade through transfer.” He showed his hand, palm up. “In which case we’d have a B-negative out there with a wounded hand as well.”

  Amanda had never embraced the equivocations of crime scene science. She tried to sum it up in absolutes. “So, bad guy B-negative struggles with Evelyn. Then I suppose we bring in the second man, the Asian in the Hawaiian shirt, who later ended up dead in the bedroom. They managed to subdue Evelyn and take away her gun. And then there’s a third man, Ricardo, who was a hostage at one point, and then became a shooter, and then, thanks to Agent Mitchell’s quick action, became dead before he could injure anyone.” She turned to Will. “My money is on Ricardo being hooked up in all of this, torture or not. He pretended to be a hostage to try to leverage Faith.”

  Mittal looked uncomfortable with the finality in her tone. “That is an interpretation.”

  Charlie tried to smooth things over. “There’s always the chance that—”

  There was a sound similar to the rush of a tropical waterfall. Mittal unzipped his clean suit and felt around in his pants pockets. He pulled out his cell phone and said, “If you will excuse me,” before heading back into the garage.

  Amanda turned to Charlie. “Brass tacks?”

  “They’re not giving me full access, but there’s no reason for me to disagree with what Ahbi’s said so far.”

  “And?”

  “I don’t want to sound racist,” Charlie began, “but you don’t often see Mexicans and Asians working together. Especially Los Texicanos.”

  “Younger kids aren’t as hung up on that sort of thing,” Will offered, wondering if that could be called progress.

  Amanda didn’t acknowledge either comment. “What else?”

  “The list by the phone.” Charlie pointed to a piece of yellow paper with a bunch of numbers and names. “I took the liberty to call the number for Zeke. I left a message for him to get in touch with you.”

  Amanda looked at her watch. “What about the rest of the house? Did forensics find anything?”

  “Not that they’ve told me. Ahbi’s not being overtly rude, but he’s not going out of his way to volunteer anything, either.” Charlie paused before adding, “It seems obvious whatever the bad guys were looking for wasn’t found, otherwise they would’ve cleared out the minute Faith pulled up.”

  “And we’d be planning Evelyn’s funeral.” Amanda didn’t dwell on the fact. “Whatever they were searching for—what would you guess the size of this mysterious item to be?”

  “No telling,” Charlie admitted. “Obviously, they were looking everywhere—drawers, closets, cushions. I think they got angrier as they went through the house and started destroying on top of searching. They ripped open the beds, broke the baby’s toys. There’s a lot of fury in there.”

  “How many searchers?”

  “I’m sorry, Dr. Wagner.” Mittal was back. He tucked his phone into his pocket but left his white suit gaping open. “That was the ME. He’s been delayed by the discovery of another body at the apartment fire. What was your question?”

  Charlie answered for her, perhaps sensing that Amanda’s tone might get them thrown out of the house. “She was asking how many searchers you thought there were.”

  Mittal nodded. “An educated guess would be three to four men.”

  Will saw the disgusted look on Amanda’s face. It had to be more than three, otherwise all the suspects were dead and Evelyn Mitchell had kidnapped herself.

  Mittal continued, “They did not wear gloves. Perhaps they thought Captain Mitchell would relent without a struggle.” Amanda snorted a laugh and Mittal gave another one of his patented
pauses. “There are fingerprints on most surfaces, which of course we will share with the GBI.”

  Charlie said, “I’ve already called the lab. We’ve got two techs coming in to digitize them and put them in the database. From there it’s only a matter of time before we know if they’re in the system.”

  Amanda indicated the kitchen. “Once Evelyn was neutralized, they would’ve started their search in here. They were looking through drawers, so it’s something that would fit in a drawer.” She looked up at Charlie, then Mittal. “Any tire tracks? Footprints?”

  “Nothing of consequence.” Mittal walked her over to the kitchen window and started pointing out things in the backyard that had been checked. Will studied the broken CDs on the floor. Beatles. Sinatra. No AC/DC. The player was white plastic, smudged with black fingerprint powder. Will used his thumbnail to press the eject button. The tray was empty.

  Amanda’s voice came back to him. “Where did they keep Evelyn while they were tearing up the house?”

  Mittal started toward the living room. Will took up the rear as Charlie and Amanda followed the doctor through the path of debris. The setup was similar to Mrs. Levy’s house, minus the sunken aspect of the living room. Opposite the couch and a wingback chair were a wall of bookshelves and a small plasma-screen television with a foot-sized crack in the center. Most of the books were strewn across the floor. The couch and chairs had been gutted, their frames broken. There was a stereo on the shelf by the TV, the old record-playing kind, but the speakers were busted and the arm had been wrenched off the turntable. A small pile of vinyl records had obviously met the hard edge of someone’s heel.

  There was a Thonet-style bentwood chair against the wall, the only thing in the room that seemed to have remained intact. The seat was thatched. The legs were scuffed. Mittal pointed to where chunks of veneer had been ripped off. “It appears that duct tape was used. I found adhesive where Captain Mitchell’s feet would’ve been.” He lifted up the chair and moved it away from the wall. A yellow plastic number marker had been placed beside a dark stain. “One can surmise from the blood drops on the carpet that Captain Mitchell’s hands were hanging down. The cut to her finger was still bleeding, but not with any significance. Perhaps my colleague is correct in assuming that she wrapped the wound in a paper towel.”

  Amanda leaned down to look at the bloodstain, but Will was more interested in the chair. Evelyn’s hands had been tied behind her back. He used his foot to tilt the chair forward so he could see the bottom of the thatched seat. There was a mark underneath, an arrowhead, drawn in blood.

  Will looked out into the room, trying to figure out what the arrow was pointing to. The couch directly across from the chair was gutted, as was the wingback chair to the side. The hardwood floors meant nothing could be hidden under a carpet. Was Evelyn pointing to something in the backyard?

  He heard a hiss of air through teeth. Will glanced up to find Amanda giving him such a searing look that he dropped the chair back into place without his brain being aware of what his foot was doing. She gave a slight shake of her head, indicating he should keep his mouth shut about the find. Will glanced at Charlie. They had all three seen the arrow under the chair while Mittal, oblivious, waxed poetic on the efficacy of fingerprinting on porous versus nonporous surfaces.

  Charlie opened his mouth to speak, but Amanda talked over him. “Dr. Mittal, in your opinion, was the glass door broken with a found object, such as a rock or lawn ornament?” She glared at Charlie, and Will thought if she was capable of shooting lasers from her eyes, they would’ve sealed Charlie’s mouth shut. “I’m just wondering how well this attack was planned. Did they bring something to break the glass? Did they surround the house? If so, did they know the layout ahead of time?”

  Mittal frowned, because these were questions none of them were capable of answering. “Dr. Wagner, these are not scenarios that can be forensically evaluated.”

  “Well, let’s just toss it around and see what sticks. Was a brick used to break the glass?”

  Charlie started shaking his head. Will recognized the internal conflict. Like it or not, this was Mittal’s crime scene, and there was evidence under the chair—possibly important evidence—that the man had missed. Charlie was obviously torn. As with most things that had to do with Amanda, there was the right thing to do and then there was the thing that she was ordering him to do. Each decision had its consequence.

  Mittal was shaking his head, too, but only because Amanda wasn’t making sense. “Dr. Wagner, we have searched every inch of this crime scene, and I am telling you we have not found any more items of substance than what I have already detailed.”

  Will knew for a fact they hadn’t checked every inch. He asked, “Has anyone checked the Malibu?”

  That took Charlie’s mind off his troubles. His brow furrowed. Will had made the same mistake with Faith’s Mini. All of the violence had taken place inside the house, but the cars were still part of the crime scene.

  Amanda was the first to move. She had made her way out to the carport and opened the driver’s side door of the Malibu before anyone thought to ask her what she was doing.

  Mittal said, “Please, we’ve not yet processed—”

  She gave him a withering look. “Did you think to check the trunk?”

  His stunned silence was enough of an answer. Amanda popped the trunk. Will was standing just inside the kitchen doorway, which gave him a raised view of the scene. There were several plastic grocery bags in the trunk, their contents flattened down by the dead body on top of them. As in the kitchen, blood coated everything—soaking into the cereal box, dripping down the plastic wrap around the hamburger buns. The dead man was a big guy. His body was folded almost in two where he’d been bent to fit into the space. A deep gash in his bald head showed splintered bone and bits of brain. His jeans were wrinkled. His shirtsleeves were rolled up. There was a Los Texicanos tattoo on his forearm.

  Evelyn’s gentleman friend.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  THE GEORGIA DIAGNOSTIC AND CLASSIFICATION PRISON WAS located in Jackson, about an hour south of Atlanta. The drive was usually a quick shot down I-75, but the Atlanta Motor Speedway was having some kind of exhibition event that slowed traffic to a crawl. Undeterred, Amanda kept hopping on and off the shoulder, jerking the wheel quickly to pass groups of sluggish cars. The SUV’s tires made a strumming sound as they grazed the rumble strips meant to deter drivers from leaving the roadway. Between the noise and the vibration, Will found himself fighting an unexpected wave of motion sickness.

  Finally, they made it through the worst of the traffic. At the speedway exit, Amanda took one last dash onto the shoulder, then popped the SUV back onto the road. The tires skipped. The chassis shook. Will rolled down the window for some fresh air to help settle his stomach. The wind slapped his face so hard that he felt his skin ripple.

  Amanda pressed the button to roll the window back up, giving him the look she reserved for stupid people and children. They were going over a hundred miles an hour. Will was lucky he hadn’t been sucked out the window.

  She let out a long sigh as she stared back at the road. One hand rested in her lap, while the other was firmly wrapped around the steering wheel. She was wearing her usual power suit: a bright blue skirt and matching jacket with a light-colored blouse underneath. Her high-heel shoes exactly matched the color of her suit. Her fingernails were trim but manicured. Her hair was its usual helmet of salt-and-pepper gray. Most days, Amanda seemed to have more energy than all the men on her team. Now, she looked tired, and Will could see the worry lines around her eyes were more pronounced.

  She said, “Tell me about Spivey.”

  Will tried to click his brain back over to his old case against Captain Evelyn Mitchell’s team. Boyd Spivey was the former lead detective on the narcotics squad who was currently biding his time on death row. Will had talked to the man only once before Spivey’s lawyers advised him to keep his mouth shut. “I don’t find it hard to believe he
beat someone to death with his fists. He was a big guy, taller than me, carried about fifty more pounds, all of it muscle.”

  “Gym rat?”

  “I’d guess steroids gave him a boost.”

  “How did that work for him?”

  “They made him uncontrollably angry,” Will recalled. “He’s not as smart as he thinks, but I wasn’t able to get him to confess, so maybe I’m not either.”

  “You still sent him to prison.”

  “He sent himself to prison. His house in the city was paid for. His house at the lake was paid for. All three of his kids were in private school. His wife worked ten hours a week and drove a top-of-the-line Mercedes. His mistress drove a BMW. He kept his brand new Porsche 911 parked in her driveway.”

  “Men and their cars,” she mumbled. “He doesn’t sound very smart to me.”

  “He didn’t think anyone would ask questions.”

  “Generally, they don’t.”

  “Spivey was good at keeping his mouth shut.”

  “As I recall, all of them were.”

  She was right. In a corruption case, the usual strategy was to find the weakest member and persuade him or her to turn on his or her fellow conspirators in exchange for a lighter sentence. The six detectives belonging to Evelyn Mitchell’s narcotics squad had proven immune to this strategy. None of them would turn on the other, and all of them routinely insisted that Captain Mitchell had nothing to do with their alleged crimes. They went out of their way to protect their boss. It was both admirable and incredibly frustrating.

  Will said, “Spivey worked on Evelyn’s squad for twelve years—longer than any of them.”

  “She trusted him.”

  “Yes,” Will agreed. “Two peas in a pod.”

  Amanda cut him a sharp look. “Careful.”

  Will felt his jaw tighten so hard that the bone ached. He didn’t see how ignoring the most important part of this case was going to get them anywhere. Amanda knew as well as Will that her friend was guilty as hell. Evelyn hadn’t lived large, but like Spivey, she’d been stupid in her own way.