Mary Schroder said, “Sonny’s about ten minutes out.”
Sara stopped, her heart dropping in her chest at the nurse’s words. Sonny was Mary’s husband, a patrolman who worked the early shift. “Is he all right?”
“Sonny?” she asked. “Of course he is. Where are you?”
“I’m upstairs in the ICU.” Sara changed course, heading back toward the elevator. “What’s going on?”
“Sonny got a call about a little boy abandoned at the City Foods on Ponce de Leon. Six years old. Poor thing was left in the back of the car for at least three hours.”
Sara punched the button for the elevator. “Where’s the mother?”
“Missing. Her purse is on the front seat, the keys are in the ignition and there’s blood on the ground beside the car.”
Sara felt her heart speed back up. “Did the boy see anything?”
“He’s too upset to talk, and Sonny’s useless. He doesn’t know how to deal with kids that age. Are you on your way down?”
“I’m waiting for the elevator.” Sara double-checked the time. “Is Sonny sure about the three hours?”
“The store manager noticed the car when he came into work. He said the mother was there earlier, freaking out because she couldn’t find her kid.”
Sara jammed the button again, knowing full well the gesture was useless. “Why did he take three hours to call it in?”
“Because people are assholes,” Mary answered. “People are just plain, goddamn assholes.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
—
Faith’s red Mini was parked in her driveway when she woke up that morning. Amanda must have followed Will here, then taken him home. He had probably thought he was doing Faith a favor, but Faith still wanted to rake him over the coals. When Will had called this morning to tell her that he would pick her up at their usual eight-thirty, she had snapped a “Fine” that seemed to float over his head.
Her anger had evened out somewhat when Will had told her what had happened last night—his idiotic foray into the cave, finding the second victim, dealing with Amanda. The last part sounded particularly challenging: Amanda never made things easy. Will had sounded exhausted, and Faith’s heart went out to him as he described the woman hanging in the tree, but as soon as she got off the phone, she was furious with him all over again.
What was he doing going down into that cave alone with no one but that idiot Fierro topside? Why the hell hadn’t he called Faith to come help search for the second victim? Why in God’s name did he think he was doing her a favor by actively preventing her from doing her job? Did he think she wasn’t capable, wasn’t good enough? Faith wasn’t some useless mascot. Her mother had been a cop. Faith had worked her way up from patrol to homicide detective faster than anyone else on the squad. She hadn’t been picking daisies when Will stumbled across her. She wasn’t damn Watson to his Sherlock Holmes.
Faith had forced herself to take a deep breath. She was just sane enough to realize that her level of fury might be out of proportion. It wasn’t until she sat down at the kitchen table and measured her blood sugar that she realized why. She was hovering around one-fifty again, which, according to Your Life with Diabetes, could make a person nervous and irritable. It didn’t help her nervousness and irritability one whit when she tried to inject herself with the insulin pen.
Her hands were steady as she turned the dial for what she hoped were the correct units, but her leg started shaking as she tried to stick herself with the needle, so that she looked like a dog who was enjoying a particularly good scratch. There had to be some part of her unconscious brain that kept her hand hovering frozen over her shaking thigh, unable to willfully inflict pain on herself. It was probably somewhere near that damaged region that made it impossible for Faith to enter into a long-term relationship with a man.
“Screw it,” she had said, almost like a sneeze, jamming the pen down, pressing the button. The needle burned like hellfire, even though the literature on the device claimed it was virtually pain-free. Maybe after sticking yourself six zillion times a week, a needle jamming into your leg or your abdomen felt relatively painless, but Faith wasn’t to that point yet and she couldn’t imagine herself ever being there. She was sweating so badly by the time she pulled out the needle that her underarms were sticky.
She spent the next hour dividing her time between the phone and the Internet, reaching out to various governmental organizations to get the investigation moving while scaring the ever-loving shit out of herself by investiGoogling type 2 diabetes on her laptop computer. The first ten minutes were spent on hold with the Atlanta Police Department while she looked for an alternate diagnosis in case Sara Linton was wrong. That proved to be a pipe dream, and by the time Faith was on hold with the GBI’s Atlanta lab, she had stumbled upon her first diabetic blog. She found another, then another—thousands of people letting loose about the travails of living with a chronic disease.
Faith read about pumps and monitors and diabetic retinopathy and poor circulation and loss of libido and all the other wonderful things diabetes could bring into your life. There were miracle cures and device reviews and one nut who claimed that diabetes was a government plot to extract billions of dollars from the unsuspecting public in order to wage the war for oil.
As Faith waded through the conspiracy pages, she was ready to believe anything that might get her out of having to live the rest of her life under constant measurement. A lifetime of following every fad diet Cosmo could spit out had taught her to count carbs and calories, but the thought of turning into a human pincushion was almost too much to bear. Thoroughly depressed—and on hold with Equifax—she had quickly clicked back to the pharmaceutical pages with their images of smiling, healthy diabetics riding bicycles and doing yoga and playing with puppies, kittens, small children, kites, sometimes a combination of all four. Surely, the woman swinging around the adorable toddler wasn’t suffering from vaginal dryness.
Surely, after spending all morning on the telephone, Faith could have called the doctor’s office and scheduled an appointment for later this afternoon. She had the number Sara had scribbled down at her elbow—of course she’d done a search on Delia Wallace, checking to see if she’d been sued for malpractice or had a history of drunk driving. Faith knew every detail of the doctor’s education as well as her driving record, but still could not make the call.
Faith knew she was looking at desk time because of the pregnancy. Amanda had dated Faith’s uncle Ted until the relationship had petered out around the time Faith had entered junior high. Boss Amanda was very different from Aunt Amanda. She was going to make Faith’s life miserable in the way that only a woman can make another woman miserable for doing the things that most women do. That sort of living hell Faith was prepared for, but would Faith be allowed to return to her job even though she had diabetes?
Could she go out in the field, carry a gun and round up the bad guys if her blood sugar was out of whack? Exercise could lead to a precipitous drop. What if she was chasing a suspect and fainted? Emotional moments could stress her blood sugar as well. What if she was interviewing a witness and didn’t realize she was acting crazy until internal affairs was called in? And what about Will? Could she be trusted to have his back? For all her complaints about her partner, Faith had a deep devotion to the man. She was at times his navigator, his buffer against the world and his big sister. How could she protect Will if she couldn’t protect herself?
Maybe she wouldn’t even have a choice in the matter.
Faith stared at her computer screen, contemplating doing another search to see what the standard policy was for diabetics in law enforcement. Were they shoved behind desks until they atrophied or quit? Were they fired? Her hands went to the laptop, her fingers resting on the keyboard. As with the insulin pen, her brain froze her muscles, not letting her press the keys. She tapped her finger lightly on the H in a nervous tick, feeling the flop sweat come back. When the phone rang, she nearly jumped out of her skin.
“Good morning,” Will said. “I’m outside when you’re ready.”
Faith shut down the laptop. She gathered up the notes she had taken from her phone calls, loaded her diabetes paraphernalia into her purse and walked out the front door without a look back.
Will was in an unmarked black Dodge Charger, what they called a G-ride, slang for government-issued car. This particular beauty had a key scratch cutting along the panel over the back tire and a large antenna mounted on a spring so the scanner could pick up all signals within a hundred-mile area. A blind three-year-old would’ve been able to tell it was a cop car.
She opened the door and Will said, “I’ve got Jacquelyn Zabel’s Atlanta address.”
He meant the second victim, the woman who had been hanging upside down in the tree.
Faith got in the car and buckled her seatbelt. “How?”
“The Walton Beach sheriff called me back this morning. They checked with her neighbors down there. Apparently, her mother just went into a retirement home and Jacquelyn was up here packing up the house to sell it.”
“Where’s the house?”
“Inman Park. Charlie’s going to meet us there. I’ve reached out to the Atlanta police for some feet on the ground. They say they can give me two patrols for a couple of hours.” He reversed the car down the driveway, glancing at Faith. “You look better. Did you get some sleep?”
Faith didn’t answer his question. She pulled out her notebook, going through the list of things she had accomplished on the phone this morning. “I had the splinters of wood that were taken from underneath Anna’s fingernails transferred to our lab. I sent a tech to fingerprint her at the hospital first thing. I put out a statewide APB for any missing women matching Anna’s age and description—they’re going to try to send over a sketch artist for a drawing. Her face is pretty bruised. I’m not sure anyone would recognize her from a photograph.”
She flipped to the next page, skimming her notes. “I checked the NCIC and VICAP for comparable cases—the FBI isn’t tracking anything similar, but I put our details into the database just in case something hits.” She went to the next page. “I put an alert on Jacquelyn Zabel’s credit cards so we’ll know if someone tries to use them. I called the morgue; the autopsy is scheduled to start around eleven. I put in a call to the Coldfields—the man and wife in the Buick that hit Anna. They said we could come by and talk to them at the shelter where Judith volunteers, even though they’ve already told that nice Detective Galloway everything they know, and speaking of that prick, I woke up Jeremy at school this morning and made him leave a message on Galloway’s voicemail saying he was from the IRS and needed to talk to him about some irregularities.”
Will chuckled at this last bit.
“We’re waiting on Rockdale County to fax over the crime-scene reports and whatever witness statements they have. Other than that, that’s all I’ve got.” Faith closed her notebook. “So, what did you do this morning?”
He nodded toward the cup holder. “I got you some hot chocolate.”
Faith stared longingly at the takeout cup, dying to lick off the foamy puddle of whipped cream that had squirted through the slit in the lid. She had lied to Sara Linton about her usual diet. The last time Faith had jogged anywhere, she had been rushing from her car to the front door of Zesto’s, hoping to get a milk shake before they closed. Breakfast was usually a Pop-Tart and a Diet Coke, but this morning, she had eaten a boiled egg and a piece of dry toast, the kind of thing they served at the county jail. The sugar in the hot chocolate would probably kill her, though, and she said, “No, thanks,” before she could change her mind.
“You know,” he began, “if you’re trying to lose weight, I could—”
“Will,” she interrupted. “I’ve been on a diet for the last eighteen years of my life. If I want to let myself go, I’m going to let myself go.”
“I didn’t say—”
“Besides, I’ve only gained five pounds,” she lied. “It’s not like I need a Goodyear sign strapped to my ass.”
Will glanced at the purse in her lap, his mouth drawn. Finally, he said, “I’m sorry.”
“Thank you.”
“If you’re not going to …” He let his words trail off, taking the cup out of the holder. Faith turned on the radio so she wouldn’t have to listen to him swallow. The volume was low, and she heard the dull murmur of news coming from the speakers. She pressed the buttons until she found something soft and innocuous that wouldn’t get on her nerves.
She felt the seatbelt tense as Will slowed for a pedestrian darting across the road. Faith had no excuse for snapping at him, and he wasn’t a stupid man—he obviously knew that something was wrong but, as usual, didn’t want to push. She felt a pang of guilt for keeping secrets, but then again, Will wasn’t exactly known for sharing. It had only been by accident that she’d stumbled onto the realization that he was dyslexic. At least, she thought it was dyslexia. There was certainly some reading issue there, but God knew what it was. Faith had figured out from watching him that Will could make out some words on his own, but it took forever, and he was wrong more often than not about the content. When she’d tried to ask him about the diagnosis, Will had shut her down so tersely that Faith had felt her face flush in embarrassment for asking the question in the first place.
She hated to admit that he was right to hide the problem. Faith had worked on the force long enough to know that most police officers were barely out of the primordial ooze. They tended to be a conservative lot, and they didn’t exactly embrace the unusual. Maybe dealing with the most freakish elements society had to offer made them reject any semblance of abnormality in their own ranks. Whatever the reason, Faith knew that if word of Will’s dyslexia got out, there wasn’t a cop around who would let it pass. He already had trouble fitting in. This would make him a permanent outsider.
Will took a right on Moreland Avenue, and she wondered how he knew which way to go. Directions were an issue for him, left and right an insurmountable problem. Despite this, he was incredibly adept at hiding his disability. For those times when his shockingly good memory wouldn’t suffice, he had a digital recorder that he kept in his pocket the way that most cops kept a notebook. Sometimes he slipped up and made a mistake, but most of the time, Faith found herself in awe of his accomplishments. He had gotten through school and then college with no one recognizing there was a problem. Growing up in an orphanage hadn’t exactly given him a good start in life. His success was a lot to be proud of, which made the fact that he had to hide his disability even more heartbreaking.
They were in the middle of Little Five Points, an eclectic part of the city that blended seedy bars and fashionably overpriced boutiques, when Will finally spoke. “You okay?”
“I was just thinking,” Faith began, though she didn’t share her actual thoughts. “What do we know about the victims?”
“Both of them have dark hair. Both are fit, attractive. We think the woman at the hospital’s name is Anna. The license says the one hanging in the tree is Jacquelyn Zabel.”
“What about fingerprints?”
“There was a latent on the pocketknife that belongs to Zabel. The print on her license came back unknown—it doesn’t match Zabel and there’s no match on the computer.”
“We should compare it to Anna’s fingerprints and see if she’s the one who made it. If Anna touched the license, then that puts both Anna and Jacquelyn Zabel in the cave together.”
“Good idea.”
Faith felt like she was pulling teeth, though she couldn’t blame Will for being gun-shy, considering how mercurial her mood was lately. “Have you found out anything else about Zabel?”
He shrugged, as if there wasn’t much, but reeled off, “Jacquelyn Zabel is thirty-eight, unmarried, no children. The Florida Law Enforcement Bureau is giving us an assist—they’re going to go through her place, do a phone dump, try to find next of kin other than the mother who was living in Atlanta. The sheriff says no one in
town knows Zabel that well. She has one sort-of friend next door who’s been watering her plants but doesn’t know anything about her. There’s been an ongoing feud with some of the other neighbors about people leaving out their trashcans on the street. The sheriff said Zabel’s made a few nuisance complaints in the past six months over loud noises from pool parties and cars being parked in front of her house.”
Faith bit back the urge to ask him why he hadn’t told her all this in the first place. “Has the sheriff ever met Zabel?”
“He said he took a couple of the nuisance calls himself and didn’t find her to be a very pleasant person.”
“You mean, he said she was a bitch,” Faith clarified. For a cop, Will had a surprisingly clean vocabulary. “What did she do for a living?”
“Real estate. The market’s been off, but she looks pretty set—house on the beach, BMW, a boat at the marina.”
“Wasn’t the battery you found in the cave for marine use?”
“I had the sheriff check her boat. The battery’s still there.”
“It was worth a shot,” Faith mumbled, thinking they were still grasping at straws.
“Charlie says the battery we found in the cave is at least ten years old. All the numbers are worn off. He’s going to see if he can get some more information on it, but chances are it’s a wash. You can pick up those things at yard sales.” Will shrugged, adding, “The only thing it tells us is that the guy knew what he was going to do with it.”
“Why is that?”
“A car battery is designed to deliver a short, large current like you need to crank your car. Once the car starts, the alternator takes over, and the battery isn’t needed again until the next time you need to start the engine. A marine battery like from the cave is what’s called a deep-cycle battery, meaning it gives a steady current over a long period of time. You’d ruin a car battery pretty quickly if you tried to use it the way our guy was. The marine battery would last for hours.”
Faith let his words hang in the air, her brain trying to make sense of them. There was no way to make sense of it, though: What had been done to those women was not the product of a sound mind.
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