Criminal

by Karin Slaughter

  Evelyn was visibly startled, but she tried, “We just—”

  “You want me to make you?” He snatched the Kel-Lite out of Evelyn’s hand and jabbed it into her chest. “You like that?” He jabbed her again, then again, until her back was to the wall. “Not so mouthy now, are you?”

  Amanda tried, “Rick—”

  “Shut up!” There was a flash of white skin as he jammed the flashlight up Evelyn’s skirt and pressed it between her legs. He warned, “Unless you want that for real, you better do as I damn well say. You hear me?”

  Evelyn didn’t speak. She could only nod. Her hands shook as they went up in surrender.

  “Don’t fuck around with me,” Landry warned. “You got that?”

  “She’s sorry,” Amanda said. “We’re both sorry. Rick, please. We’re sorry.”

  Slowly, he pulled the flashlight out from under Evelyn’s skirt. With one hand, he flipped it around and held out the handle to Amanda. He told her, “Get her the hell out of here.”

  Which is exactly what Amanda did.

  eight

  Present Day

  MONDAY

  The cabdriver gave Will a dubious look as he stopped in front of 316 Carver Street. “You sure this is the place, man?”

  “I’m sure.” Will checked the meter and handed him a ten. “Keep the change.”

  The guy seemed reluctant to take the money. “I know you’re a cop and all, but that don’t make much matter after dark. You feel me?”

  Will opened the door. “I appreciate the warning.”

  “You sure you don’t want me to wait?”

  “No, but thank you.” Will got out of the car. Still, the man dawdled. It wasn’t until Will walked toward the side of the building that the cab slowly pulled away.

  Will watched the taillights disappear down the street. Then he turned and picked his way past the tall weeds and brambles as he headed to the rear of the children’s home. Between the moon and the streetlights, he had a pretty clear path to the back of the house. He stepped around syringes and condoms, broken glass and piles of trash.

  He remembered Sara’s earlier warning about all the dangers inside the house. She’d been full of observations tonight. And pretty pissed off. Will couldn’t blame her. He was pretty pissed off himself. He was actually furious.

  Hell, he was still furious.

  Will’s fists clenched as he rounded the house. He knew he was in an almost delirious state of denial about what was really bothering him. His father out of prison. That monster breathing free air. Will pushed this back down, just as he’d been pushing it down since he first found out.

  The entire time Sara was stitching up his ankle, the only thing Will could think about was going into Amanda’s hospital room and beating the truth out of her. Why did the parole board let his father out of prison? Why did Amanda find out before Will? What else was she hiding from him?

  She had to be hiding something. She always hid something.

  And she would die before she let Will in on it. She was tougher than any man Will had ever known. She wasn’t exactly a liar, but she did things with the truth that made you think you were losing your mind. Will had given up on trying to be direct with Amanda a long time ago. Fifteen years of studying her personality had revealed nothing but the fact that she lived for subtleties and riddles. She delighted in tricking him. For every question Will had, she’d have another question, and pretty soon they’d be talking about things that would probably make him wish he hadn’t gotten out of bed this morning. Or this year. Or ever in his life.

  Why was she at the children’s home tonight? What was she looking for? How much did she know about his father?

  Will could already guess Amanda’s answers. She was out for an evening drive. Who didn’t enjoy a leisurely romp through the ghetto when they were supposed to be working a kidnapping case? She saw Will and Sara inside the house and wondered why they were there. Is it wrong to be curious? Of course she knew about his father. She was his boss. It was her job to know everything about Will.

  Except for one thing. The old broad had knocked her head hard enough to lose her legendary control.

  “I told Edna to shore up these steps a million times.”

  Edna, as in Mrs. Edna Flannigan.

  Amanda was in the middle of a high-profile case. The press was all over her. The director of the GBI was probably breathing down her neck. Yet, she’d stopped everything, grabbed a hammer, and headed here. There was only one way to get an honest answer about what she’d been up to, and Will was going to tear apart the children’s home with his bare hands if that’s what it took to find it. And then he was going to throw it right back into Amanda’s face.

  He stared at the back of the house. There had been a deck here at one time, but now there was only a gaping hole where a basement window used to be. The paramedics hadn’t been able to take Amanda out through the interior doorway. Instead, they’d kicked out the plywood covering the basement windows and chipped away the brick to enlarge one of the openings.

  Will looked up at the streetlight. Moths fluttered around, creating a strobe. He looked back at the window opening.

  In retrospect, there were better ways to do this. Will could’ve asked the cabdriver to drop him at home, which was less than a mile away. There were lots of tools in Will’s garage. Two sledgehammers, several pry bars, even a jackhammer he’d picked up secondhand at the Habitat Store. They were all well worn and well used. Will had bought his house for back taxes on the courthouse steps. It had taken him three years and every spare dime to turn it back into a home.

  The hardest part was convincing the drug addicts that the house was under new ownership. The first six months, Will had to sleep with his shotgun beside his sleeping bag. When he wasn’t tearing down walls and soldering copper pipe, he was going to the door and telling whoever had knocked that they would have to find somewhere else to smoke crack.

  Which was actually good preparation for what Will was about to do.

  He climbed in through the opening. The strobing streetlight illuminated most of the basement. Will used his cell phone to supplement its reach, picking his way past the broken stairs. Amanda Wagner was the very definition of preparedness. Will couldn’t imagine her going into the dark basement without her Maglite. He spotted the familiar metallic blue casing over by a set of empty shelves. He pressed the button. The flashlight was small enough to fit in his pocket, but the LCDs glowed like a headlamp on an old Chevy.

  Will hadn’t exactly been honest with Sara. He’d spent his fair share of time down in the basement with Angie. Of course, he hadn’t been on his elbows and toes taking measurements, but his memory of the place had somehow reduced it to a shoebox when in fact it was as large as the upper floors.

  Will ran his hand along the exterior walls. Smooth plaster was interrupted every sixteen inches by bumps from the studs underneath. A dividing wall split the center of the room. This construction was newer. The Sheetrock was edged with black mold. Chunks were missing at the bottom. Pairs of oddly spaced, yellow pine two-by-fours showed at the base like legs below a petticoat.

  There was a small room in the back with a sink and toilet, probably for the help. The walls were exposed lumber with knotty pine paneling on the outside. Will checked behind the fixtures. With his foot, he kicked apart the P-trap under the sink. Nothing was in the drain.

  He took off the lid on the toilet tank and found it empty. The bowl was filled with black water. He glanced around for something to search with other than his hand. The old knob-and-tube wiring hung limply from the joists. He pulled out a long section, folded it in lengths until it was stiff enough, and checked the bowl. Other than a noxious odor, there was nothing.

  Overhead, the flashlight picked up spiderwebs and termite damage in the floor joists as he walked around the room. The wooden storage shelves were empty. The coal chute was filled with black dust along with a couple of syringes and a used condom. He used the Maglite to examine the flue. Bird dr
oppings. Scratches. An animal had been trapped inside at some point. Will closed the metal door and twisted the handle to lock it into place.

  He took off his suit jacket and hung it from a nail in one of the joists. His Glock stayed on his belt where it was handy. He found Amanda’s hammer by the stairs. It had never been used. The price tag was still on. Midtown Hardware. Forty bucks.

  Will slipped the Maglite into his back pocket. The streetlight was enough for now. He studied the hammer. Forged blue steel with a smooth face and nylon end cap. Shock-reduction grip. It was a bricklayer’s tool, not something a framer would use. Will assumed Amanda had bought it for form, not function. Or maybe she’d picked it off the shelf because the blue matched her flashlight. Either way, there was a well-balanced heft to the tool. The claw was sharp and busted cleanly through the plaster when Will slammed it into the exterior wall.

  He pulled back the hammer and pounded it into the wall again, enlarging the hole. He punched out a chunk of plaster. It crumbled between his fingers. There was horsehair in the mix, tiny, silk strands that had held together the clay and limestone for almost a century.

  Will chipped away a large enough section to reach his hand behind the lath. The wood was rotted, still wet from rain that had poured through the foundation. He should probably be wearing gloves and goggles, or at least a mask. There was undoubtedly mold behind the plaster, maybe fungus from dry rot. The odor inside the wall was dank, the way houses smelled when they were dying. Will used the claw hammer to pry away another chunk of plaster. Then another.

  Slowly, he made his way around the perimeter of the basement, pulling down the plaster chunk by chunk, row by row. Then removing the lath, then brushing out the shredded newspapers that had been used for insulation, then moving on to the next section.

  He gripped Amanda’s Maglite between his teeth when the streetlight couldn’t reach the darkest corners. A white powder permeated the air. His eyes watered from the grit. His nose started to run from the dust and mold. The work wasn’t difficult, but it was tedious and repetitive, and the temperature of the basement seemed to rise with every step as Will worked his way around the room. He was sweating profusely by the time he pounded off the last chunk of plaster. Again, the lath came apart in his hand, like wet paper. He used the claw hammer to pull out the rotted wood. As he had done with every section thus far, Will shone the flashlight onto the bare opening.

  Nothing.

  He pressed his palm to the cold wall. There was only a thin layer of brick holding back the dirt around the foundation. Will had broken through some sections to check anyway, then stopped for fear he might cause a cave-in. He took his phone out of his pocket and looked at the time. Two minutes past midnight. He’d been doing this for three hours.

  All for nothing.

  Will pushed away from the wall. He coughed and spit out a wad of plaster.

  Three hours.

  No scribbled notes, no hidden passages. No severed hands or bags of magic beans. As far as he could tell, nothing had been disturbed inside the walls since the house had been built. The wood was so old he could see the hatch marks where the axes had hewn down the studs from larger trees.

  Will coughed again. The dust would not clear in the airless room. He used the back of his hand to wipe sweat off his forehead. His muscles were aching from the constant hacking of the hammer. Still, he started on the dividing wall down the center of the room. In many ways, the Sheetrock was harder to take down than the plaster. The paper was damp, but the gypsum was soaked through. The wall came down in tiny pieces. The pink insulation was filled with crawling bugs Will tried not to get in his mouth and nose. The studs were rotting from the floor up.

  Another forty minutes went by.

  Again, there was nothing.

  Which meant that the niggling question that had been bouncing around Will’s brain for the last two hours probably had to be asked: Why hadn’t he started out on the floor?

  Amanda had bought a bricklayer’s hammer. The basement floor was comprised entirely of paved brick. Will recognized the Chattahoochee Brick Company logo on some of the pieces. It was similar to the brick in his own home—fired from red Georgia clay in an Atlanta manufacturing plant that had been turned into loft apartments during the financial boom times.

  Will gripped the hammer in his hand. He’d thought Amanda had bought it because it was blue. He could hear her grating voice in his head: I thought you were a detective.

  Will hadn’t exactly been tidy as he’d destroyed the basement. There wasn’t an inch of floor that was clean. He put his back to the corner and looked out into the room. Without the wall down the center, it was easy to plan the grid pattern. Each brick was approximately eight by four inches. He could clear out five-by-nine rows, which would roughly be three-by-three-feet sections. In a fifteen-hundred-square-foot room, that would take approximately eleventy billion years.

  He kicked away debris with his foot, then got down on his knees to start on the first section. There was no pleasure in knowing that he’d devised a logical plan for tearing up the basement floor. Will swung the hammer in tight arcs, using the claw to pry up pieces of brick, squinting his eyes to keep out flying shards. Of course the brick didn’t come up easily. It was too late for easy. The clay was old. The firing technique back in the thirties wasn’t exactly scientific. Immigrants had probably worked sunup to sundown, backs and knees bent as they filled wooden forms with clay that would be air-dried, then fired in a kiln.

  The first row of bricks crumbled under the hammer’s claw. The edges were weak. They would not hold the center. Will had to use his bare hands to scoop out the pieces. Finally, by the third row, he had found a more successful system. He had to use precision with every swing of the hammer in order to wedge the claw into the cracks. Sand was packed into the joints. It got into Will’s eyes, flew up into his mouth. He clenched his teeth. He thought of himself as a machine as he worked back and forth across the room, clearing each section brick by brick, digging a few inches into the dirt to see what was underneath.

  He was a third of the way through when the futility overwhelmed him. He kicked away the debris covering the next section, then the next. He used Amanda’s Maglite to study each crack and crevice. The bricks were tight. Nothing had disturbed them—not in Will’s lifetime, or the building’s lifetime, or at any time at all.

  Nothing. Just like the walls. There was nothing.

  “Dammit!” Will flung the hammer across the room. He felt a tearing in his bicep. The muscle spasmed. Will clutched his arm. He stared into the loam, the useless fruits of his labor.

  Will thought about his revenge fantasies from the Grady ER. His mind flashed up an image of Amanda—terrified, willing to answer any question he asked. He’d been in plenty of fights during his lifetime, but he’d never used his fists on a woman. Amanda was probably sleeping like a baby back in her hospital bed while Will was chasing ghosts that he wasn’t even sure he wanted to find.

  He clenched his hands. There were tiny rips up and down his fingers—like paper cuts, only deeper. His sutured ankle felt like it was on fire. He tried to stand, but his knees wouldn’t hold him. He forced himself up to standing. This time he stumbled. He grabbed onto one of the studs. A splinter dug into his palm. He screamed just to let out some of the pain. There was not a muscle in his body that did not ache.

  All for nothing.

  Will took his handkerchief out of his pocket and wiped his face. He grabbed his jacket off the nail. The streetlight was no longer strobing when he pulled himself out of the basement. The air was so crisp that he started coughing. He spit out more chunks of plaster. Will went to the faucet in the middle of the yard. It was the same one he’d used as a kid during the summer months when Mrs. Flannigan locked them all out of the house and told them not to come back until suppertime. The pump handle was nearly rusted through.

  Carefully, Will moved the lever up and down until a thin stream of water came out of the spigot. He put his mouth to the wate
r and drank until he felt knives in his stomach. Then he put his head under the stream and washed off the grime. His eyes stung from the water. There were probably chemicals in there that he didn’t want to know about. A tannery had operated down the street when he was growing up. Will had probably drunk enough benzene to fill a cancer ward.

  Another souvenir from his childhood.

  He pushed himself up, using the pump for leverage. The handle snapped off. Will could only shake his head. He tossed the handle into the yard and started the long walk home.

  Will sat at his kitchen table, hands clutching a blue file folder. His eyes wouldn’t stay open. He was punch-drunk from exhaustion. He hadn’t bothered to go to bed. By the time he got home, it was already three in the morning. He had to leave by four to get to the airport in time for the business travelers. He’d taken a shower. He’d cooked a breakfast he couldn’t eat. He’d walked the dog around the block. He’d shined his scuffed shoes. He’d put on a suit and tie. He’d used Bactine on the thousands of tiny cuts and blisters on his hands. He’d wiped away the weird pink fluid seeping through the Band-Aid on his ankle.

  And now he couldn’t make himself get up from the table.

  Will picked at the edge of the file folder. His mother’s name was neatly typed on the label stuck to the tab. Will had seen the letters so many times that they were burned into his retinas. He was twenty-two years old before he finally gained access to her information. There was a lot of paperwork that had to be filled out. He’d had to go down to the courthouse. There were other things, too, all of which involved navigating the juvenile justice system. The biggest obstacle was Will. He’d had to get to a point in his life where the prospect of going before a judge didn’t bring on a cold sweat.

  Betty came in through the dog door. She gave Will a curious look. The dog was adopted, an embarrassingly tiny Chihuahua mix that had come to Will through no fault of his own. She put her front feet on his thigh. She looked perplexed when Will didn’t lean back to let her into his lap. After a while, she gave up, circling the floor three times before settling down in front of her food bowls.