“Amanda—”
She placed the knife back in the drawer. “Faith will be your partner going forward on this investigation. We’ve pissed off the Atlanta Police Department enough this year without pulling another major case from them, and I’d rather partner you with a goat than put Leo Donnelly on this.”
“I don’t want her.”
“I don’t care,” she shot back. “Will, this is a major case I’m handing you. You’re thirty-six years old now. You’re never going to move up if—”
“We both know this is as far as I’m going to get.” He didn’t give her room to disagree. “I’m never going to do PowerPoint presentations or stand in front of a chalkboard filling in a timeline.”
She pursed her lips, staring at him. He wondered why the disappointment in her eyes bothered him so much. As far as he knew, Amanda didn’t have any children or even a family. She wore a wedding ring sometimes, but that seemed to be more for decoration than declaration. For all intents and purposes, she was as much an orphan as he was. Sometimes, he thought that she was like the dysfunctional, passive-aggressive mother he’d never had—a fact which made Will glad that he had grown up in the children’s home.
She said, “It’s dry erase now. You don’t get chalk on your hands.”
“Oh, well … sign me up.”
She smiled ruefully. “How do you know Paul Campano?”
“I knew him when I was ten years old. We didn’t get along.”
“Is that why he doesn’t want to talk to you?”
“It could be,” Will admitted. “But I think my knowing him might also be a way in.”
“Hoyt Bentley has posted a fifty-thousand-dollar reward for information leading to his granddaughter’s safe return. He wanted to come out of the gate with half a million, but I managed to talk him down.”
Will didn’t envy her the task. Men like Bentley were used to being able to buy their way out of anything. A more lucrative reward would have backfired in so many ways, including bringing out every fruitcake in the city.
“I bet you they’re going to hire their own people to stick their noses into this.”
Will recognized a sucker bet when he saw one. Atlanta’s wealthy had a bevy of private security forces at their disposal. Hoyt Bentley had enough money to buy every last one of them. “I’m sure Paul and his father-in-law think they can take care of this themselves.”
“I hope whoever they hire knows the difference between paying off a CEO’s mistress and negotiating a ransom.”
Surprised, Will said, “Do you think there will be a ransom demand?”
“I think there will be several—none of them from our kidnapper.” She crossed her arms, leaning against the counter. “Tell me what’s bothering you.”
Will didn’t have to think in order to answer her question. “Two teenage girls, at least one teenage boy, alone in a house during the middle of the day. The parents don’t know where any of them are. They say their daughter has changed lately, that she’s been acting out. Somebody had sex in that bed upstairs. Where were Emma and Adam when Kayla was being butchered? Where was Emma when Adam was stabbed? We have to ask whether or not Emma Campano is a victim or an offender.”
Amanda let that sink in, considering the possibilities. “I’m not saying you’re wrong,” she finally told him. “But there’s a big difference between being a rebellious teenager and being a cold-blooded killer. Nothing about the scene points to anything ritualistic. I’m not saying you’re wrong to consider the possibility, but let’s just treat this as a straight abduction until we find something that points to more nefarious origins.”
Will nodded.
“What’s your game plan?”
“Charlie’s going to be here all night, so anything big forensic-wise should be on your desk first thing in the morning. We’ve got APD pulling parking tickets in the area for the last week. I’ve got a two-man unit checking storm drains to see if anything was ditched—another weapon, some clothing, whatever. I want to talk to some folks at the school where these girls went and see if they have any enemies—and spread that out to the Alexanders, too. I think it’s sketchy they left their kid alone for three weeks while they’re half a world away. Do you have an ETA on the dogs?”
“Barry Fielding was on a training run up in Ellijay when I called,” she told him, referring to the director of the GBI canine unit. “He should be here with a team within the next half hour.” She returned to something Will had said earlier. “Let’s go back two months on those parking tickets in the area. Go ahead and pull 9-1-1 calls, too. There can’t be that many, but touching on what you said about the kids being alone here today, if this has been an ongoing thing …” She let Will fill in the blank: Don’t stop questioning what Emma Campano’s role was in all of this. “What are you going to be doing?”
“I’m going to go to the school myself to get a better idea of who these girls are. Were. I also want to talk to the mother. She was out of it today. Maybe she’ll be more helpful tomorrow.”
“She’s a lot stronger than she looks.”
“She strangled a man with her bare hands. I don’t think you need to tell me to watch out for her.”
Amanda looked around the kitchen, appraising the stainless steel gleaming from every corner, the granite countertops. “This is not going to turn out well, Will.”
“You think the girl is already dead?”
“I think if she’s lucky she is.”
They were both silent. Will couldn’t guess what was on Amanda’s mind. For his part, he was thinking how ironic it was that Paul had everything they could only dream about when they were kids—family, wealth, security—and yet one violent intervention by fate had managed to sweep it all away. You expected that kind of thing to happen when you were living in an orphanage, kids stacked twelve to a room in a house that was no larger than a shoebox. You didn’t expect it living smack-dab in the middle of Mayberry.
Movement outside the kitchen window caught Will’s attention. Faith Mitchell looked grim as she walked along the back patio by the pool. She opened one of the French doors, asking, “Am I interrupting?”
Amanda demanded, “What’ve you got?”
The young woman closed the door and walked into the kitchen, looking almost contrite. “Adam Humphrey was a student at Georgia Tech. He lives in Towers Hall on campus.”
Amanda pumped her fist in the air. “This is your break.”
Will told Faith, “Call campus security. Have them check the room.”
“I did,” she answered. “The door was locked, but the room was empty. I’ve got a number to call when we get on campus. The dean wants to talk to legal before they give us access to the room, but he says that’s just a formality.”
“Let me know if I need to find a judge.” Amanda glanced at her watch. “It’s coming on four o’clock now. I’m late for a closed door with the mayor. Call me the minute you have anything.”
Will crossed the room to leave. Then he realized that he still didn’t have a car. He realized Amanda was still here, leaning against the counter, waiting for him to do exactly what she wanted.
Faith asked, “Do you want me to go wait outside the Alexander house to see if the parents have anyone checking in on Kayla?”
Will thought about Adam Humphrey’s dorm room, all the papers and notes that would have to be catalogued, all the drawers and shelves that would have to be searched.
He said, “You’re going to come to Tech with me.”
Her expression turned from surprised to cautious. “I thought I was only doing scut work.”
“You are.” Will opened the door she’d just closed. “Let’s go.”
CHAPTER THREE
The literature on Faith’s Mini Cooper claimed that the front seats could easily accommodate a passenger or driver over six feet tall. As with anything, a few extra inches made all the difference, and Faith had to admit that it brought her a small amount of pleasure watching the man who had helped force her mothe
r off the job awkwardly trying to fold his long body into her car. Finally, Will moved the seat back so that it was almost touching the rear window and angled himself in.
“All right?” she asked.
He looked around the cab, his neatly parted, sandy blond hair brushing against the glass sunroof. She thought of a prairie dog poking its head outside its hole.
He gave a small nod. “Let’s go.”
She let off the clutch as he reached around for the seat belt. For months, even the thought of this man’s name could invoke the kind of deeply felt hatred that made Faith feel like she should vomit just to get the taste out of her mouth. Evelyn Mitchell hadn’t shared many details of the internal investigation with her daughter, but Faith had seen the toll the relentless questioning had taken. Day by day, her strong, impervious mother had been whittled into an old woman.
Will Trent was a key factor in that transformation.
Being honest, there was plenty of blame to go around. Faith was a cop, and she knew all about the blue code of silence, but she also knew that it was the betrayal of Evelyn’s own men—those greedy bastards who thought it was okay to steal so long as it was drug money—that had finally taken all the fight out of her mother. Still, Evelyn had refused to testify against any of her team. That the city had let her keep her pension was a miracle of sorts, but Faith knew that her mother had friends in high places. You didn’t become a captain with the Atlanta Police Department by shunning politics. Evelyn was a master at knowing how the game worked.
For her part, Faith had always assumed Will Trent was some kind of bumbling, rat squad jerk-off who loved to put his thumb on good cops and grind them out of the force. She hadn’t anticipated that Trent would be the clean-cut, lanky man crammed into the car beside her. Nor had she considered that he might actually know his way around the job. His reading of the crime scene, the way he had been right about Humphrey being a college student—something that Faith, of all people, should have picked up on—had not been the detecting of some Bureau pencil pusher.
Like it or not, she was stuck with him, and somewhere out there was a missing girl, and two sets of parents who were about to get the worst news of their lives. Faith would do everything she could to help solve this case because at the end of the day, that was all that really mattered. Still, she didn’t offer to turn up the Mini’s air-conditioning, though Will must have been sweating to death in that ridiculous three-piece suit, and she certainly didn’t offer him an olive branch by opening up the conversation. As far as she was concerned, he could sit there with his knees around his ears and boil in his own sweat.
Faith signaled as she pulled out onto Peachtree Street and accelerated into the far right lane, only to come to a complete stop behind a dirt-encrusted pickup truck. They were officially caught up in the hurry-up-and-wait game that was Atlanta’s afternoon rush-hour traffic, which started around two-thirty and tapered off at eight. Add in all the construction, and this meant that the five-mile trip to Georgia Tech, which was just across the interstate, would take approximately half an hour. Gone were the Starsky and Hutch days of being able to slap a siren on your roof and blow through traffic. This was Will Trent’s case, and if he’d wanted to bypass rush hour, he should have commandeered a cruiser to take them to Tech instead of a bright red Mini with a peace sign on the bumper.
As they inched past the High Museum of Art and Atlanta Symphony Hall, Faith’s mind kept going back to the crime scene. She had gotten to the Campano house about ten minutes behind Leo. Faith’s mother had always said that the hardest scenes to come onto were the ones involving kids. Her advice was to forget your family, focus on the job and cry about it on your own time. Like every piece of good advice her mother had ever given her, Faith had pushed it aside. It wasn’t until she’d walked into that house today that she had realized how true her mother’s words had been.
Seeing Adam Humphrey’s lifeless body, his sneakers the same brand and color as the ones Faith had bought her own son just the weekend before, had been a punch in the gut. She had stood in the foyer, the heat at her back, feeling as if all the air was gone from her lungs.
“Jeremy,” Leo had said, invoking her son. He wasn’t offering sympathy. He wanted Faith to form some kind of miraculous mother bond with Abigail Campano and make the woman tell them what the hell had happened.
The Mini shook as a bus rumbled by. They were in a long line of traffic, waiting to take a right turn, when she noticed Will was sniffing his hand. Faith stared out the window as if this was some sort of normal human behavior.
He held out his sleeve. “Does this smell like urine to you?”
She inhaled without thinking, the way you smell bad milk if someone holds it under your nose. “Yes.”
He bumped his head against the roof as he leaned up to get his cell phone out of his back pocket. He dialed a number, waited a few seconds, then without preamble told the person at the end of the line, “I think there’s urine in the back of Emma’s closet. I thought it might be from the dog bed, but I’m pretty sure it was fresh.” He nodded as if the other person could see him. “I’ll hold.”
Faith waited silently. Will’s hand was on his knee, his fingers playing with the sharp crease in his pants. He was an average-looking man, probably a few years older than her, which would put him in his mid-thirties. Back at the crime scene, she had noticed a faint scar where his upper lip had been split open and stitched back together in a slightly crooked line. Now, with the late-afternoon sun coming in through the glass roof, she could see another scar jagging from his ear down his neck, following the jugular and disappearing into the collar of his shirt. Faith was no forensics expert, but she would have guessed that someone had come at him with a serrated knife.
Will put his hand up to his face, scratching his jaw, and Faith quickly looked back at the road.
“Good,” he said into the phone. “Is there a way to compare it to the O-negative at the bottom of the stairs?” He paused, listening. “Thank you. I appreciate the effort.”
Will snapped the phone closed and dropped it in his pocket. Faith waited for an explanation, but he seemed content to keep his thoughts to himself. Maybe he just saw her as his personal driver. Maybe he associated her too closely with Leo Donnelly’s mistake. She could not fault him for painting her with the same brush. Faith had been at the scene, had stood by chewing the fat with the mother while all the clues at the scene were waiting to be put together. She was Leo’s partner, not his underling. Everything he had missed, Faith had missed, too.
Still, curiosity began to nag at her, then anger started to take hold. She was a detective on the Atlanta police force, not a lackey. Because of her mother’s rank, rumors had always followed every promotion Faith received, but everyone on the homicide squad had quickly figured out that she was there because she was a damn good cop. Faith had stopped having to prove herself years ago, and she didn’t like being left out now.
She tried to keep her tone even, asking, “Are you going to tell me what that was about?”
“Oh.” He seemed surprised, as if he had forgotten she was there. “I’m sorry. I’m not used to working with other people.” He turned his body as much as he could to face her. “I think Emma was hiding in the closet. She must have urinated on herself. Charlie said most of it was absorbed by the shoes, but it puddled a little on the floor in the back of the closet. I must’ve transferred it with my gloves when I searched the dog bed and not realized they were wet.”
Faith tried to catch up. “They’re going to try to match the DNA in the urine to the blood you think came from Emma at the bottom of the step?”
“If she’s a secretor, then they can do a surface match in about an hour.”
About eighty percent of the population was categorized as secretors, meaning their blood type showed up in body fluids like saliva and semen. If Emma Campano was a secretor, they could easily tell her blood type by testing the urine.
Faith said, “They’ll have to confirm it with DNA
, but it’s a good start.”
“Exactly.” He seemed to be waiting for more questions, but Faith didn’t have any. Finally he turned back around in his seat.
Faith edged up on the clutch as the light changed. They moved about six feet before the light changed back and traffic stopped. She thought about Emma Campano, kidnapped, reeking of her own urine, her last image that of her best friend lying slaughtered on the ground. It made her want to call her son, even if he would be annoyed to hear from his overprotective mother.
Will started to move around again. She realized he was trying to take off his jacket, bumping his head against the windshield and sideswiping the rearview mirror in the process.
She said, “We’re going to be at this light for a while. Just get out of the car and take it off.”
He put his hand on the door handle, then stopped, giving a forced chuckle. “You’re not going to drive away, are you?”
Faith stared at him in response. He moved with some speed as he got out of the car, removed the jacket and returned to his seat just as the light changed.
“That’s better,” he said, carefully folding the jacket. “Thank you.”
“Put it on the backseat.”
He did as he was told, and she rolled the car forward another six feet before the light changed again. Faith had never been good at hating anyone face-to-face. Even with some of the criminals she arrested, she found herself understanding, though certainly not condoning, their actions. The man who had come home to find his wife in bed with his brother and killed them both. The woman who shot the husband who had been abusing her for years. People were not that complicated when it came down to it. Everyone had a reason for everything they did, even if that reason was sometimes stupidity.
This line of thought brought her back to Emma Campano, Kayla Alexander and Adam Humphrey. Were they all somehow involved with each other, or were they strangers until today? Adam was a freshman at Georgia Tech. The girls were seniors at an ultra-exclusive private school in a neighboring city about ten miles away. There had to be some kind of connection. There had to be a reason they were all in that house today. There had to be a reason Emma was taken.
The Will Trent Series 5-Book Bundle Page 47