“ ‘She belongs to me,’ ” Faith quoted. “That’s a pretty definitive statement.”
“It supports the kidnapper knowing Emma, at least.”
“What about the way they were written?”
Will nodded, as if he knew what she was talking about. “That’s a good point. What do you think about it?”
She tapped her finger to her mouth as she considered it. “Either the person who wrote them is dyslexic or they’re trying to make it seem like they are.”
Will felt the glimmer of pride from a few moments ago disappear like a flash of lightning. The notes were misspelled. He had missed an important clue because of his own stupidity. What else had he missed? What other evidence had gone by the wayside because Will couldn’t wrap his head around them?
Faith asked, “Will?”
He shook his head, not trusting himself to speak. He would have to call Amanda, tell her what he had missed. She had a way of finding out these things on her own. He didn’t know how to handle it other than to confess and wait for the ax to fall.
“Go ahead and say it,” Faith told him. “It’s not like I haven’t been wondering.”
He clasped his hands under the desk. “Wondering what?”
“Whether or not Emma’s involved in this.”
Will looked down at his hands. He had to swallow past the lump in his throat. “It’s possible,” he admitted. He tried to refocus his attention, using a roundabout question to find out how Faith had arrived at Emma Campano being involved. “Kayla certainly knew how to inspire hate in people, but it’s a huge leap, don’t you think?”
“Kayla was such an awful person, and from the sound of it, Emma was one step up from her lapdog. She might have snapped.”
“You think a seventeen-year-old girl is capable of doing all this—killing people, staging her own kidnapping?”
“That’s the question, isn’t it?” Faith leaned her elbows on his desk. “I hate to say this, but considering what Mary Clark said about her, if Emma was dead and Kayla was missing, I would have no problem believing Kayla was in on it.”
“Did Clark’s alibi for yesterday check out?”
“She was in class all day.” Faith continued, “Ruth Donner, the girl who was archenemies with Kayla last year, was out of the state. There aren’t any other girls in particular at the school who were Kayla’s sworn enemies. I mean, not any one who stands out from the crowd.”
“What about Gabe Cohen?”
She pressed her lips together, not answering for a moment. “There’s no evidence that links him to either of the girls.” She added, “I think he’s told us everything he knows.”
“What about the gun?”
“He mentioned it for a reason, but I checked his book bag and his dorm top to bottom. If Adam bought a gun, he didn’t give it to Gabe. Maybe he kept it in his car.”
“Which means our abductor probably has it,” Will pointed out. “Where was Gabe yesterday when this was all going down?”
“In a class, but it was in one of those huge lecture halls. He didn’t have to sign in, the teacher doesn’t take attendance. It’s a shaky alibi.” She paused. “Listen, if you think I made a bad call, we can go pick him up right now. Maybe sitting in a jail cell will jog his memory.”
Will did not relish the prospect of sweating an eighteen-year-old kid based on a hunch, especially considering Gabe Cohen’s suicidal ideation. He listed the points in Gabe’s favor. “He doesn’t have a car on campus. He doesn’t have a place to hide Emma. We have no connection between him and either girl. No motive, no opportunity, no means.”
“I think he’s troubled,” she said. “But I don’t think he’s capable of this sort of thing.” Faith laughed. “Of course, if I was good at spotting the ones who had murder in their hearts, I’d be running the world.”
It was a sentiment Will had often thought himself. “What’s the school doing with him?”
“Victor says it’s a delicate situation,” she said. “They’re really caught in the middle.”
“How so?”
“Do you remember the dozen or so suicides at MIT back in the nineties?”
Will nodded. The stories of parents suing the university had made national news.
“The schools have a legal obligation—in loco parentis,” she cited, the phrase that basically said the school acted as parents to the students while they were enrolled. “Victor’s going to recommend to the father that Gabe be committed for psychiatric evaluation.”
Will couldn’t help but notice that she kept using the dean’s name. “Have him committed?” he asked. “That seems kind of drastic.”
“They have to be careful. Even if Gabe’s just blowing smoke, they have to take him seriously. I doubt Tech will allow him back in without a doctor’s assurance that he’s okay.” She shrugged. “Even then, they’ll probably make him check in with counselors every day.”
Will liked the idea of Gabe Cohen being on psychiatric lock-down instead of left out in the world to his own devices. At least this way, he knew how to get his hands on the kid if he wanted to.
He said, “Let’s go back to the murders.”
“All right.”
“Kayla was killed by someone who hated her. I can’t believe the killer would take that much time with her otherwise. All those stab wounds, pulling down the underwear, pushing up the shirt. Classic debasement and overkill. You don’t punch somebody’s face off unless you know who they are and despise them for it.” He suggested, “Maybe you’re right. Maybe Emma snapped.”
“She would have to kill her best friend—beat her, stab her, possibly rape her with something that, according to Pete, had a condom on it—then hit Adam over the head and stab him, then create this hoax for her parents to fall for.” She added, “And that still doesn’t explain the sperm found in Kayla Alexander’s vagina.”
“Or maybe Emma just stood by while it was all happening.” He reminded her, “Charlie says there were four people in that house.”
“True,” Faith conceded. “But I have to put this in there some-where: for a girl like Emma Campano, living where she lives, having the father and grandfather that she has, a million dollars isn’t a lot of money.”
Will hadn’t considered that, but she was right. Ten million would be more on par with Paul’s lifestyle. Then again, one million would be a lot easier to hide.
He said, “Bernard, Emma’s teacher, said that she was highly organized. This took a lot of planning.”
Faith shook her head. “I don’t understand kids anymore. I really don’t.” She stared out the window at the apartments next door. “I hope I did the right thing with Gabe.”
Will gave her one of Amanda’s more solid pieces of advice. “You can only make decisions with the information you have at the time.”
She was still looking out the window. “I’ve never been up to this floor before.”
“We try to keep out the hoi polloi.”
She smiled weakly. “How did it go with the Humphreys?”
“As bad as you would expect.”
Faith chewed her lip, still staring out the window. “When I first saw Adam yesterday, all I could do was think about my son. Maybe that’s why I missed so many things. We lost hours when we could have been looking for her.”
It was the most personal thing she had ever shared. Will had said so many wrong things to her lately that he knew better than to try to comfort her.
“I feel like we should be doing something,” she said, her frustration obvious.
He told her the same things he had been telling himself. “It’s a waiting game now. We’re waiting on Charlie to process the evidence. We’re waiting on the fingerprint guy. We’re waiting on—”
“Everything,” she said. “I’m half tempted to follow up nutjobs from the tip line.”
“That wouldn’t be the most productive use of your time.”
Faith sighed in response. She looked bone-tired. Will imagined that getting some sleep was pr
obably the only productive thing they could do tonight. Being fresh tomorrow morning when some of the evidence came in was key.
Will told her as much. “We’ll have more to go on tomorrow morning.” He checked the time. It was almost nine o’clock. “They’re going to turn off the air-conditioning to the top floors in ten minutes. You should go home and try to get some sleep.”
“Empty house,” she told him. “Jeremy is enjoying his independence a little too much. I thought at least he’d miss me a little.”
“I guess children can be stubborn sometimes.”
“I bet you were a real handful for your mother.”
Will shrugged. He supposed that was true enough. You didn’t stick a baby in a trashcan because he was easy. “Maybe I could …” Will hesitated, but decided he might as well. “Would you like to go get a drink or something?”
She startled. “Oh, my God.”
He realized two seconds too late that he’d put his foot in his mouth again. “I have a girlfriend. I mean, a fiancée. We’re engaged.” The details rushed out. “Angie Polaski. She used to work vice. I’ve known her since I was eight.”
She seemed even more startled. “Eight?”
Will realized he should close his mouth and think about what he was saying before he let it out. “It sounds more romantic than it actually is.” He paused. “I just … you said you didn’t want to go to an empty house. I was just trying to … I don’t know.” He laughed nervously. “I guess my feral monkey is acting up again.”
She was nice about it. “We’ve both had a long day.”
“I don’t even drink.” Will stood as Faith did. He put his hand in his pocket and felt something unfamiliar mixed in with the change. He pulled out the vial with the gray powder in it, surprised the plastic hadn’t broken during his scuffle with Paul.
“Will?”
He realized that his initial impression of the vial was probably hers, that he was holding an ounce of cocaine. “It’s dirt,” he told her. “Or some kind of powder. I found it at the Campano house.”
“You found it?” she asked, taking the vial from him. “Since when do you work collection?”
“Since, uh …” Will held out his hand for the sample. “You really shouldn’t be touching that.”
“Why not?”
“It’s not evidence.”
“It’s sealed.” She showed him the unbroken strip of tape with Charlie’s initials on it.
Will didn’t have an answer for her.
Faith was instantly suspicious. “What’s going on here?”
“I stole it from the Campano crime scene. Charlie turned his back and I swiped it before he could catalogue it into the system.”
She narrowed her eyes. “Is that recorder on?”
He took the player off his desk, opened the back and shook out the batteries. “The powder was found in the foyer. It’s ripe for a cross-contamination argument. We were all in and out of the area. It could have been brought in by one of us. Hell, for all I know, it was, but—”
“But?”
“But maybe not. It doesn’t match any of the soil around the house. It wasn’t on Adam’s shoes or the girls’ shoes. It could have been brought in by the killer.”
“That sounds like information you got from the person who collected the evidence.”
“Charlie has no idea that I’m doing this.”
She obviously did not believe him, but Faith did not press the point. “Hypothetically, what would I do with it?”
“Maybe reach out to someone at Tech?”
She vehemently shook her head. “I’m not getting my son involved in—”
“No, of course not,” he interrupted. “I thought maybe you could talk to Victor Martinez?”
“Victor?” she echoed. “I barely know the man.”
“You knew him well enough to call him about Gabe Cohen.”
“That’s different,” she insisted. “He’s head of student services. Taking care of Gabe Cohen is his job.”
Will tried, “He wouldn’t think the request was odd coming from you. If I called him out of the blue, there would be all kinds of formalities, red tape. We need to keep this quiet, Faith. If that powder leads us to an area we can search, and we find the man who did this …”
“Then the chain of evidence would be compromised and the arrest might get thrown out.” She gave a heavy sigh. “I need to think about this, Will.”
He had to make sure she understood the implications. “I’m asking you to break the law. You realize that?”
“It runs in the family, right?”
He could see her words were angrier than she’d intended, but he also knew that she had been struggling over the last day and a half to make the best of their marriage of convenience.
Will told her, “I don’t want you to do something you can’t live with, Faith. Just make sure you get the sample back to me if you decide against it.”
She wrapped her hand around the vial and held it to her chest. “I’m going to go now.”
“Are you—”
She kept the vial in her hand. “What are we doing tomorrow?”
“I’ve got a meeting first thing with Amanda. I’ll meet you back here around eight o’clock. Gordon Chew, the fingerprint expert, is driving down from Chattanooga to see if he can find any latents on our notes.” He glanced around the office, his parklike view. “If I’m not here by eight-fifteen, check the men’s toilets at the airport.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Faith sat at her kitchen table. Except for the nightlight on the stove, the room was bathed in darkness. She’d gotten out a bottle of wine, a glass, the corkscrew, but they all sat unused on the table in front of her. All those years, she had wanted nothing more than to have Jeremy old enough to move out of the house so she could have some semblance of a life. Now that he was gone, she felt like she had a gaping hole in her chest where her heart used to be.
Drinking wouldn’t help. She always got maudlin with wine. Faith reached for the wineglass to put it away, but ended up knocking it over instead. She grabbed for it, but the rim bounced off the edge of the table, then shattered on the tile floor. Faith knelt down, picking up the sharp shards of the broken wineglass. She thought about turning on the lights the second before a sliver cut into her skin.
“Dammit,” she muttered, putting her finger in her mouth. She walked over to the sink, let cold water pour over the wound. She turned on the light above the sink, watching the blood pool and wash away, pool and wash away.
Her vision blurred as tears welled into her eyes. She felt foolish at the melodrama, but no one was around to ask her why she was crying over what amounted to a nasty paper cut, so Faith let the tears come. Besides, she had plenty to cry about. Tomorrow morning would mark the third day since Emma had been taken.
What was Abigail Campano going to do when she woke up tomorrow? Would sleep bring some kind of amnesia, so that at first light, she would have to remember all over again that her baby was gone? What would she do then? Was she going to think about all the breakfasts she had made, all the soccer practices and school dances and homework she had helped with? Or would her thoughts move to the future rather than the past: graduation, weddings, grandchildren?
Faith took a tissue and wiped her eyes. She realized how faulty her thinking had been. No mother could sleep when her child was in danger. Faith had spent many sleepless nights of her own, and she’d known exactly where Jeremy was—or where he was supposed to be. She had worried about car accidents and underage drinking and, God forbid, some little girl he was seeing who might be just as stupid as Faith had been at that age. It was bad enough to have a son fifteen years her junior, but a grandchild who was a mere sixteen years younger than that would have been crushing.
Faith laughed out loud at the thought, tossing the tissue into the trashcan. She should call her mother and commiserate, or at the very least apologize for the millionth time, but the person Faith really wanted right now was her father.
/> Bill Mitchell had died of a stroke seven years ago. The whole ordeal had been mercifully quick. He had clutched his arm and fallen down on the kitchen floor one morning, then died peacefully at the hospital two nights later. Faith’s brother had flown in from Germany. Jeremy had taken off the day from school. Bill Mitchell had always been a considerate man, and even in death he managed to be mindful of the needs of his family. They were all in the room with him when he passed. They’d all had time to say good-bye. Faith did not think a day went by when she didn’t think of her father—his kindness, his stability, his love.
In many ways, Bill Mitchell had handled his teenage daughter’s pregnancy better than his wife. He had adored Jeremy, had relished the role of grandfather. It wasn’t until much later that Faith found out the real reason Bill had stopped attending his weekly Bible study meetings and quit the bowling team. At the time, he’d said he wanted to be with his family more, to do some projects around the house. Now Faith knew that they had asked him to leave because of her. Faith’s sin had rubbed off on him. Her father, a man so devout that he had once considered the ministry as a vocation, had never stepped foot in a church again, not even for Jeremy’s baptism.
Faith wrapped a paper towel around her finger to catch the remaining trickles of blood. She turned on the lights and got the broom and dustpan from the pantry. She swept up the glass, then got out the stick vacuum to get the smaller pieces. She hadn’t been home in two days, so the kitchen was messier than she usually kept it. Faith ran the vacuum over the tiles, angling the bristles into corners.
She rinsed off the dishes in the sink and put them in the dishwasher. She scoured the sink and put the dish towels in the washing machine along with a load of clothes that she found in her bathroom hamper. She was cleaning out the dryer lint trap when she remembered the uncomfortable moment with Will Trent, when just for a moment, she had thought he was asking her out on a date.
Angie Polaski. For the first time since she’d met him, Faith felt sorry for the man. Talk about sloppy seconds. Was there such a thing as sloppy thousandths? Polaski’s conquests were legend in the squad room. There were even jokes to rookies about how they had to pass through those legs to become one of the finest cops in the city.
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