The Will Trent Series 5-Book Bundle

by Karin Slaughter

  Will glanced back at Fierro to make sure he was ready, then, in one swift motion, pried back the sheet of plywood. Dirt and debris scattered as Will quickly backed away.

  “What is it?” Fierro’s voice was a hoarse whisper. “Do you see anything?”

  Will craned his neck to see what he had uncovered. The hole was deep and crudely dug, a thirty-by-thirty-inch square opening going straight down into the earth. Will kept at a low crouch as he made his way toward the hole. Aware that he was again offering his head as a target, he quickly glanced inside, trying to see what they were dealing with. He couldn’t see to the bottom. What he did discover was a ladder resting a few feet down from the top, a homemade deal with the rungs nailed crookedly to a pair of rotting two-by-fours.

  Lightning cracked in the sky, showing the tableau in full glory. It was like a cartoon: the ladder to hell.

  “Give me the light,” he whispered to Fierro. The detective was more than accommodating now, slapping the Maglite into Will’s reaching hand. Will looked back at the man. Fierro had taken a wide stance, his gun still pointed at the opening in the ground, fear widening his eyes.

  Will shone down the light. The cavern seemed to be L-shaped, going straight about five feet, then turning into what seemed to be the main area of the cave. Pieces of wood jutted out where the roof was shored up. There were supplies at the base of the ladder. Cans of food. Rope. Chains. Hooks. Will’s heart jumped as he heard movement down there, rustling, and he had to force himself not to jerk back.

  Fierro asked, “Is it—”

  Will put his finger to his lips, though he was pretty sure that the element of surprise was not on their side. Whoever was down there had seen the beam of the flashlight moving around. As if to reinforce this, Will heard a guttural sound from below, almost a moan. Was there another victim down there? He thought of the woman in the hospital. Anna. Will knew what electrical burns looked like. They stained the skin in a dark powder that never washed away. They stayed with you for a lifetime—that is, if you had a lifetime left in you.

  Will took off his suit jacket and tossed it behind him. He reached toward Fierro’s ankle and grabbed the revolver out of the holster. Before he could stop himself, Will swung his legs down into the hole.

  “Jesus Christ,” Fierro hissed. He looked over his shoulder at the dozens of cops who were a hundred feet away, no doubt realizing there was a better way to do this.

  Will heard the sound from below again. Maybe an animal, maybe a human being. He turned off the flashlight and jammed it into the back of his pants. There was something he should have said, like “Tell my wife I love her,” but he didn’t want to give Angie the burden—or the satisfaction.

  “Hold on,” Fierro whispered. He wanted to get backup.

  Will ignored him, shoving the revolver into his front pocket. Carefully, he tested his weight on the wobbly ladder, the heels of his shoes on the rungs so he could face the inside of the cavern as he descended. The space was narrow, his shoulders too broad. He had to keep one arm straight above his head so that he could fit down the hole. Dirt kept falling in clumps around him and roots scratched his face and neck. The wall of the shaft was just a few inches from his nose, bringing out a claustrophobia Will never knew he had. Every time he inhaled, he tasted mud in the back of his throat. He couldn’t look down, because there was nothing to see, and he was afraid that if he looked up, he might reverse direction.

  With each step, the smell got worse—feces, urine, sweat, fear. Maybe the fear was coming from Will. Anna had escaped from here. Maybe she had wounded her attacker in the process. Maybe the man was down there waiting with a gun or a razor or a knife.

  Will’s heart was beating so hard that he could feel it choking his throat. Sweat was pouring off him, and his knees were shaky as he took step after interminable step down. Finally, his foot hit soft earth. He felt around with the toe of his shoe, finding the rope at the base of the ladder, hearing the chain rattle. He would have to crouch down to get inside, leaving himself completely exposed to whoever was waiting.

  Will could hear panting, more mumbling. Fierro’s revolver was in his hand. He wasn’t sure how it had gotten there. The space was too tight for him to reach the flashlight, and it was falling down the back of his pants anyway. Will tried to make his knees bend, but his body would not comply. The panting was getting louder, and he realized it was coming from his own mouth. He looked up, seeing nothing but darkness. Sweat blurred his eyes. He held his breath, then dropped down in a squat.

  No gun went off. His throat was not slit. Hooks were not jammed into his eyes. He felt a breeze from the shaft, or was that something in front of his face? Was someone standing in front of him? Had someone just brushed their hand in front of his face? He heard movement again, chattering.

  “Don’t move,” Will managed. He held the gun in front of him, sweeping it back and forth like a pendulum in case someone was standing in front of him. With a shaking hand, he reached behind him for the flashlight. The panting was back, an embarrassing noise that echoed in the cave.

  “Never …” a man murmured.

  Will’s hand was slick with sweat, but it held steady to the grooved metal grip of the flashlight. He jammed his thumb into the button, turning on the light.

  Rats scattered—three big, black rats with plump bellies and sharp claws. Two of them went straight for Will. Instinctively, he backed up, slamming into the ladder, his feet tangling in the rope. He covered his face with his arms, and felt sharp claws dig into his skin as the rats bolted up the ladder. Will panicked, realizing he’d dropped the flashlight, and he snatched it up quickly, scanning the cave, looking for other occupants.

  Empty.

  “Crap …” Will exhaled, slumping to the ground. Sweat poured into his eyes. His arms throbbed where the rats had ripped the skin. He had to fight the overwhelming urge to escape up after them.

  He used the flashlight to take in his surroundings, sending roaches and other insects scrambling. There was no telling where the other rat had gone, and Will wasn’t going to go looking for him. The main part of the cavern was sunken, about three feet down from where Will was sitting. Whoever had designed the structure knew what they were doing. The depressed area would give a home-field advantage.

  Will slowly lowered himself down, keeping the light trained in front of him so there wouldn’t be any more surprises. The space was bigger than he had expected. It must have taken weeks to excavate the area, lifting out bucket after bucket of dirt, bringing down pieces of wood to keep the whole thing from caving in.

  He guessed the main area was at least ten feet deep and six feet wide. The ceiling was about six feet overhead—tall enough for him to stand up if he kept stooped over, but he didn’t trust his knees to lift him. The flashlight could not illuminate everything at once, so the space felt even more cramped than it was. Add to that the eeriness, the ungodly smells of Georgia clay mixed with blood and excrement, and everything started to feel smaller and darker.

  Against one wall was a low bed that had been thrown together with what looked like recycled wood. A shelf overhead held supplies: water jugs, soup cans, implements of torture Will had only seen in books. The mattress was thin, bloodstained foam sticking out of the torn black cover. There were chunks of flesh on the surface, some of it already rotting. Maggots swirled like churning waters. Strands of rope were bunched up on the floor by the bed, enough to wrap around someone head to toe, almost like a mummy. Deep scratch marks clawed into the wood on the sides of the bed. There were sewing needles, fishing hooks, matches. Blood pooled onto the dirt floor, running underneath the bed frame like a slow leak in a faucet.

  “Told …” a voice began, only to be drowned by static. There was a small television/radio sitting on a white plastic chair at the back of the cavern. Will kept down in a crouch as he moved toward the chair. He looked at the buttons, pressing a few before he managed to turn off the radio, remembering too late that he should have had his gloves on.

&n
bsp; He followed the cord of the television with his eyes, finding a large marine battery. The plug had been cut off the cord, the bare red and black wires attached to the terminals. There were other wires, their ends stripped down to the copper. They were blackened, and Will caught the familiar scent of an electrical burn.

  “Hey, Gomez?” Fierro called. His voice was all raw nerves.

  “It’s empty,” Will told him.

  Fierro made a hesitating noise.

  “I’m serious,” Will told him. He went back to the opening, craning up to see the man. “It’s empty.”

  “Christ.” Fierro’s head disappeared from view, but not before Will saw his hand shoot up in the sign of the cross.

  Will was ready to do some praying himself if he didn’t get out of here. He shone the light on the ladder, seeing where his own shoe prints had smeared into the bloody footprints on the rungs. Will looked down at his scuffed shoes, the dirt floor, finding more bloody footprints that he had smeared. He crammed his shoulders back into the shaft and put his foot on the rung, trying not to mess up anything else. Forensics wasn’t going to be happy with him, but there was nothing he could do about it now except apologize.

  Will froze. Anna’s feet had been cut, but the cuts were more like the nasty scrapes you get from stepping on sharp objects—pine needles, burrs, thorny vines. That was why he had assumed she had walked in the woods. She wasn’t bleeding enough to leave bloody footprints that were so pronounced he could see the ridges of the sole in the dirt. Will stood there with his hand above him, one foot on the ladder, debating.

  He gave a bone-weary sigh, then crouched back down, skipping the light along every corner of the cave. The rope was bothering him, the way it had been wrapped around the bed. His mind flashed on the image of Anna tied down, the rope wrapped in a continuous loop over and under the bed, securing her body to the frame. He pulled one of the lengths out from under the bed. The end was cut clean through, as were the others. He glanced around. Where was the knife now?

  Probably with that last stupid rat.

  Will pulled back the mattress, gagging from the smell, trying not to think about what his bare hands were touching. He kept the back of his wrist pressed under his nose as he pulled away slats of wood that supported the mattress, hoping to God the rat didn’t spring up and claw out his eyes. He made as much noise as he could, dropping the slats in a pile on the floor. He heard a squeaking sound behind him, and turned to find the rat crouched down in the corner, its beady eyes reflecting the light. Will had a piece of wood in his hand, and he thought about hurling it at the beast, but he was worried his aim wouldn’t be good enough in the narrow space. He was also worried it would piss off the rat.

  He laid the plank onto the pile, keeping a wary eye on the creature. Something else got his attention. There were scratch marks on the bottom of the bed slats—deep bloody gouges that didn’t look like they were made by an animal. Will shone the light into the opening under the bed. The dirt was excavated about six inches below the floor, running the length and width of the bed. Will reached down and picked up a small length of rope. Like the other pieces, this had been cut, too. Unlike the other pieces, there was a knot intact.

  Will pulled back the rest of the slats. There were four metal bolts underneath the bed, one at each corner. A piece of rope was tied through one bolt. Pink blood stained the cord. He felt the rope with his fingers. It was wet. Something sharp scraped his thumb. Will leaned in closer, straining to see what had scratched him. He picked at the cord with his fingernails, prying out the object so he could examine it more closely in the flashlight beam. Bile hit the back of his throat when he saw what he was holding.

  “Hey!” Fierro bellowed. “Gomez? You coming up or what?”

  “Get a search team out here!” Will rasped.

  “What’re you talkin—”

  Will looked at the piece of broken tooth in his hand. “There’s another victim!”

  CHAPTER THREE

  —

  Faith sat in the hospital cafeteria, thinking she felt the same way she’d felt the night of her junior prom: unwanted, fat and pregnant. She looked at the wiry Rockdale County detective sitting across from her at the table. With his long nose and greasy hair hanging down over his ears, Max Galloway had the surly yet perplexed look of a Weimaraner. What’s more, he was a poor sport. Every sentence he uttered to Faith alluded to the GBI taking away his case, beginning with his opening salvo when Faith asked to sit in on the interview with two of the witnesses: “I bet that bitch you work for is already primping her hair for the TV cameras.”

  Faith had held her tongue, though she couldn’t imagine Amanda Wagner primping anything. Sharpening her claws, maybe, but her hair was a structure that defied primping.

  “So,” Galloway said to the two male witnesses. “You guys were just driving around, didn’t see nothing, and then there’s the Buick and the girl on the road?”

  Faith struggled not to roll her eyes. She had worked homicide in the Atlanta Police Department for eight years before she had partnered with Will Trent. She knew what it was like to be the detective on the other side of that table, to have some arrogant jerk from the GBI waltz in and tell you he could run your case better than you could. She understood the anger and the frustration of being treated like an ignorant hick who couldn’t detect your way out of a paper bag, but now that Faith herself was GBI, all she could think about was the pleasure she would feel when she snatched this case right out from under this particularly galling ignorant hick.

  As for the paper bag, Max Galloway might as well have had one over his head. He had been interviewing Rick Sigler and Jake Berman, the two men who had come upon the car accident on Route 316, for at least half an hour and still hadn’t noticed that both men were gay as handbags.

  Galloway addressed Rick, the emergency medical technician who had helped the woman on the scene. “You said your wife’s a nurse?”

  Rick stared at his hands. He had a rose-gold wedding band around his finger and the most beautiful, delicate hands Faith had ever seen on a man. “She works nights at Crawford Long.”

  Faith wondered how the woman would feel knowing that her husband was out getting his knob polished while she was pulling the late shift.

  Galloway asked, “What movie did y’all go see?”

  He’d asked the two men this same question at least three times, only to be given the same answer. Faith was all for trying to trip up a suspect, but you had to have more intelligence than a russet potato to pull off that kind of thing—sadly, this was exactly the type of acumen that Max Galloway did not possess. From where Faith was sitting, it seemed like the two witnesses had just had the misfortune of finding themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time. The only positive aspect of their involvement was that the medic had been able to take care of the victim until the ambulance arrived.

  Rick asked Faith, “Do you think she’s going to be okay?”

  Faith assumed the woman was still in surgery. “I don’t know,” she admitted. “You did everything you could to help her, though. You have to know that.”

  “I’ve been at a million car accidents.” Rick looked back at his hands. “I’ve never seen anything like that before. It was … it was just awful.”

  In her normal life, Faith wasn’t a touchy-feely person, but as a cop, she knew when a softer approach was needed. She felt the urge to lean across the table and put her hands over Rick’s, to comfort him and draw him out, but she wasn’t sure how Galloway would react and she didn’t want to make herself any more of an enemy than she already was.

  Galloway said, “Did y’all meet at the theater or did you take one car?”

  Jake, the other man, shifted in his chair. He’d been very quiet from the beginning, only speaking when he was asked a direct question. He kept glancing at his watch. “I need to go,” he said. “I have to get up for work in less than five hours.”

  Faith glanced at the clock on the wall. She hadn’t realized it was comin
g up on one in the morning, probably because the insulin shot had given her a strange sort of second wind. Will had left two hours ago after giving her a quick rundown of what had happened, dashing off to the crime scene before she could offer to join him. He was persistent, and Faith knew that he would find a way to get this case. She just wished she knew what was taking him so long.

  Galloway pushed a pad and pen toward the men. “Give me all your phone numbers.”

  The color drained from Rick’s face. “Only call my cell. Please. Don’t call me at work.” He glanced nervously at Faith, then back at Galloway. “They don’t like me to get personal calls at work. I’m out in the bus all day. All right?”

  “Sure.” Max sat back in the chair, arms crossed over his chest, staring at Faith. “You hear that, vulture?”

  Faith gave the man a tight smile. She could take outright hate, but this passive-aggressive crap was getting on her last nerve.

  She took out two business cards and handed one to each man. “Please call me if you think of anything else. Even something that doesn’t seem important.”

  Rick nodded, tucking the card into his back pocket. Jake held on to his, and she imagined he was going to toss it into the first trashcan he came across. Faith’s impression was that the men didn’t know each other very well. They had been vague about details pertaining to their friendship, but each had presented a movie-ticket stub when asked. They had probably met in the theater, then decided to go somewhere more private.

  A cell phone began to play “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” Faith corrected her initial assumption, thinking it was more than likely the University of Georgia fight song, as Galloway flipped open his phone, saying, “Yeah?”

  Jake started to stand, and Galloway nodded to him, as if permission to leave had been asked and granted.

  “Thank you,” Faith told the two men. “Please call me if you think of anything else.”