He looked down at his hand, the wedding ring on his finger. Was he stupid or just pathetic? He couldn’t tell the difference anymore. He bet Sara Linton wasn’t the sort of woman who pulled this kind of crap in a relationship. Then again, Will bet Sara’s husband hadn’t been the kind of pussy who would let it happen.
“God, I hate autopsies.” Faith pushed her way into his office, her color still off. Will knew she hated autopsies—it was an obvious aversion—but this was the first time he’d ever heard Faith admit to it. “Caroline left a message on my cell.” She meant Amanda’s assistant. “We can’t talk to Joelyn Zabel without counsel present.”
Jackie Zabel’s sister. “Is she really going to sue the department?”
She dropped her purse on his desk. “As soon as she finds a lawyer in the Yellow Pages. Are you ready to go?”
He looked at the time on the computer. They were supposed to meet the Coldfields in half an hour, but the shelter was less than ten minutes away. “Let’s talk this through a little bit more,” he suggested.
There was a folding chair against the wall, and Faith had to close the door before she could sit down. Her own office was not much larger than Will’s, but you could at least stretch your legs out in front of you without your feet hitting a wall. Will wasn’t sure why, but they always ended up back in his office. Maybe it was because Faith’s office had, in fact, been a storage closet. There was no window and it still held the lingering scent of urine cake and toilet cleaner. The first time she had closed the door, she’d nearly passed out from the fumes.
Faith nodded toward the computer. “What’ve you got?”
Will turned the monitor around so that Faith could read Amanda’s email.
Faith squinted at the screen, scowling. He kept the background bright pink and the letters navy blue, which for some reason made it easier for him to make out the words. She mumbled under her breath as she adjusted the colors, then slid over the keyboard so she could type a reply. The first time she had done this, Will had complained, but over the last few months, he’d come to realize that Faith was just plain bossy, no matter who she was dealing with. Maybe it came from being a mother since the age of fifteen, or maybe it was just a natural inclination, but she wasn’t comfortable unless she was doing everything herself.
With Jeremy off to college and Victor Martinez apparently out of the picture, Will was taking the brunt of her bossiness. He supposed this was what it was like to have an older sister. But then again, Angie acted the same way with Will and he was sleeping with her. When she was around.
Faith said, “Amanda should already have the autopsy report on Jacquelyn Zabel by now.” She typed as she talked. “What do we have? No fingerprints or trace evidence to follow. Plenty of DNA in sperm and blood, but no matches so far. No ID or even last name on Anna. An attacker who blinds his victims, punches out their eardrums, makes them drink Drano. The trash bags … shit, I can’t even begin to understand that. He tortures them with God knows what. One had a rib removed …” She hit the arrow key, going back to add something earlier in the line. “Zabel was probably going to be next.”
“The aspirin,” Will said. The aspirin found in Jacquelyn Zabel’s stomach was ten times more than the average person would take.
“Nice of him to give them something for their pain.” Faith arrowed back down the screen. “Can you imagine? Trapped in that cave, can’t hear him coming, can’t see what he’s doing, can’t scream for help.” Faith clicked the mouse, sending the email, then sat back in the chair. “Eleven trash bags. How did Sara miss that on the first victim?”
“I don’t imagine you stop to do a pelvic exam when a woman comes in with nearly every bone in her body broken and one foot in the grave.”
“Don’t get testy with me,” she said, though Will didn’t think he was being testy at all. “She doesn’t belong in the middle of this case.”
“Who?”
Faith rolled her eyes, using the mouse to click open the browser.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
“I’m going to look her up. Her husband was a cop when he died. I’m sure whatever happened to him made the news.”
“That’s not fair.”
“Fair?” Faith tapped the keyboard. “What do you mean, ‘fair’?”
“Faith, don’t intrude in her personal—”
She hit the enter key. Will didn’t know what else to do, so he reached down and unplugged the computer. Faith jiggled the mouse, then pressed the space bar. The building was old—the power was always going off. She glanced up, noticing the lights were still on.
“Did you turn off the computer?”
“If Sara Linton wanted you to know the details of her personal life, then she would tell you.”
“You’d think you’d have better posture with that stick up your ass.” Faith crossed her arms, giving him a sharp look. “Don’t you think it’s weird how she’s inserting herself into our investigation? I mean, she’s not a coroner anymore. She’s a civilian. If she wasn’t so pretty, you’d see how strange—”
“What does her beauty have to do with anything?”
Faith was kind enough to let his words hang over their heads like a neon sign flashing idiot. She gave it almost a full minute to burn out before saying, “Don’t forget I have a computer in my office. I can look her up there just as easily.”
“Whatever you find out, I don’t want to know.”
Faith rubbed her face with her hands. She stared at the gray sky outside the window for another solid minute. “This is crazy. We’re spinning our wheels here. We need a break, something to follow.”
“Pauline McGhee—”
“Leo is drawing a blank on the brother. He says her house is clean—no documents, no indication of parents, relatives. No record of an alias, but that’s easy enough to hide if you pay the right people enough money. Pauline’s neighbors haven’t changed their story, either: They either don’t know her or don’t like her. Either way, they can’t tell us anything about her life. He talked to the teachers at the kid’s school. Same thing. I mean, Christ, her son is in care right now because the mother doesn’t have any close friends who are willing to take him.”
“What’s Leo doing now?”
She checked her watch. “Probably trying to figure out how to knock off early.” She rubbed her eyes again, obviously tired. “He’s running McGhee’s fingerprints, but that’s a long shot unless she’s ever been arrested.”
“Is he still worried about us treading on his case?”
“Even more so than before.” Faith pressed her lips together. “I bet it’s because he’s been sick. They do that, you know—look at what your insurance is costing, try to push you out if you’re too much of a drain on the system. God forbid you have a chronic disease that requires expensive medication.”
Thankfully, that wasn’t something Will or Faith had to worry about yet. He said, “Pauline’s abduction could be separate from our case, something as simple as an argument that set off her brother, or a stranger abduction. She’s an attractive woman.”
“If she’s not connected to our case, it’s more likely someone she knew is involved.”
“So, that’s the brother.”
“She wouldn’t have warned the kid about him unless she was worried.” Faith added, “Of course, there’s also that Morgan guy—arrogant bastard. I was ready to slap him through the phone when I talked to him. Maybe there was something going on between him and Pauline.”
“They worked together. She could’ve pushed him too far and he snapped. That happens a lot when men work with bossy women.”
“Ha-ha,” Faith allowed. “Wouldn’t Felix recognize Morgan if he was the abductor?”
Will shrugged. Kids could block out anything. Adults weren’t bad at it, either.
Faith pointed out, “Neither of our two known victims has children. Neither of them has been reported missing, as far as we know. Jacquelyn Zabel’s car is gone. We have no idea if Anna has a car,
since we don’t even know her last name.” Her tone was getting sharper as she ticked off each dead end. “Or her first name. It could be something other than Anna. Who knows what Sara heard?”
“I heard it,” Will defended. “I heard her say ‘Anna.’ ”
Faith skipped over his response. “Do you still think there might be two abductors?”
“I’m not sure about anything right now, except that whoever is doing this is no amateur. His DNA is everywhere, which means he probably doesn’t have a criminal record he’s worried about. We don’t have any clues because he didn’t leave any. He’s good at this. He knows how to cover his tracks.”
“A cop?”
Will let the question go unanswered.
Faith reasoned it out. “There’s something he’s doing that makes women trust him—lets him get close enough to snatch them without anyone seeing.”
“The suit,” Will said. “Women—men, too—are more likely to trust a well-dressed stranger. It’s a class judgment, but it’s true.”
“Great. We just need to round up all the men in Atlanta who were wearing suits this morning.” She held up her fingers, ticking off a list. “No fingerprints on the trash bags found in either woman. Nothing to trace on any of the items found in the cave. The bloody print on Jacquelyn Zabel’s driver’s license belongs to Anna. We don’t know her last name. We don’t know where she lived or worked or if she has family.” Faith had run out of fingers.
“The abductor obviously has a method. He’s patient. He excavates the cave, gets it ready for his captives. Like you said, he probably watches the women before he abducts them. He’s done this before. Who knows how many times.”
“Yeah, but his victims haven’t lived to talk about it, or we’d have something come up in the FBI database.”
Will’s desk phone rang, and Faith picked it up. “Mitchell.” She listened for a few beats, then took her notepad out of her purse. She wrote in neat block letters, but Will was incapable of deciphering the words. “Can you follow up on that?” She waited. “Great. Call me on my cell.”
She hung up the phone. “That was Leo. The prints came back from Pauline McGhee’s SUV. Her real name is Pauline Agnes Seward. She had a missing persons report filed in Ann Arbor, Michigan, back in ’89. She was seventeen. According to the report, her parents said there was some kind of argument that set things off. She was off the straight and narrow—doing drugs, sleeping around. Her prints were on file because of a shoplifting rap she pleaded nolo on. The locals made a cursory search, put her in the database, but this is the first hit they’ve had in twenty years.”
“That jibes with what Morgan said. Pauline told him she ran away from home when she was seventeen. What about the brother?”
“Nothing came up. Leo’s going to do a deeper background search.” Faith put the pad back in her pocketbook. “He’s trying to track down the parents. Hopefully they’re still in Michigan.”
“Seward doesn’t sound like a common name.”
“It’s not,” she agreed. “Something would’ve come up in the computer if the brother was involved in a serious crime.”
“Do we have an age range? A name?”
“Leo said he’d get back to us as soon as he found something.”
Will sat back in his chair, leaned his head against the wall. “Pauline still isn’t part of our case. We don’t have a pattern to match her with.”
“She looks like our other victims. No one likes her. She’s not close to anyone.”
“She might be close to her brother,” Will said. “Leo says Pauline had Felix through a sperm donor, right? Maybe the brother is the donor?”
Faith made a noise of disgust. “God, Will.”
Her tone made him feel guilty for suggesting such a thing, but the fact was their job was all about thinking of the worst things that could happen. “Why else would Pauline warn her son that his uncle is a bad man she needed to protect him from?”
Faith was reluctant to answer. Finally, she said, “Sexual abuse.”
“I could be way off,” he admitted. “Her brother could be a thief or an embezzler or a drug addict. He could be a con.”
“If a Seward had a record in Michigan, Leo would have already pulled him up on the computer search.”
“Maybe the brother’s been lucky.”
Faith shook her head. “Pauline was scared of him, didn’t want her son around him. That points to violence, or fear of violence.”
“Like you said, if the brother was threatening or stalking her, there’d be a report somewhere.”
“Not necessarily. He’s still her brother. People don’t run to the police when it’s a family matter. You know that.”
Will wasn’t so sure, but she had a point about Leo’s computer search. “What would make you warn Jeremy away from your brother?”
She gave it some thought. “I can’t think of anything Zeke could do that would make me tell Jeremy not to talk to him.”
“What if he hit you?”
She opened her mouth to answer, then seemed to change her mind. “It’s not about whether I would put up with it—it’s about what Pauline would do.” Faith was quiet, thinking. “Families are complicated. People put up with a lot of shit because of blood.”
“Blackmail?” Will knew he was grasping at straws, but he continued, “Maybe the brother knew something bad about Pauline’s past? There has to be a reason she changed her name at seventeen. Fast-forward to now. Pauline has a lucrative job. She’s good on her mortgage. She drives a nice car. She’d probably be willing to pay a lot of money to keep it that way.”
Will shot down his own idea. “On the other hand, if the brother is blackmailing her, he needs her to keep working. There’s no reason to take her.”
“It’s not like she’s being held for ransom. Nobody cares that she’s gone.”
Will shook his head. Another dead end.
Faith said, “Okay, maybe Pauline’s not involved in our case. Maybe she’s got some kind of weird Flowers in the Attic thing going on with her brother. What do we do now? Just sit around and wait for a third—or fourth—woman to be taken?”
Will didn’t know how to answer that. Fortunately, he didn’t have to.
Faith looked at her watch. “Let’s go talk to the Coldfields.”
—
There were children at the Fred Street Women’s Shelter—something Will hadn’t anticipated, though of course it made sense that homeless women would also have homeless children. A small area at the front of the shelter was cordoned off for their play. Their ages were varied, but he assumed they were all under the age of six, because the older kids would be in school this time of day. All the children were dressed in mismatched, faded clothes and playing with toys that had seen better days: Barbie dolls with short haircuts, Tonka toys with missing wheels. Will supposed he should have felt sad for them, because watching them play was much like a scene from his own childhood, but the exception here was that these kids had at least one parent who was looking out for them, one connection to the normal world.
“Good Lord,” Faith mumbled, digging into her purse. There was a jar for donations on the counter by the front entrance, and she shoved in a couple of tens. “Who’s watching these kids?”
Will looked down the hall. The walls were decorated with paper Easter cutouts and some of the children’s drawings. He saw a closed door with the symbol for a women’s restroom. “She’s probably in the toilet.”
“Anyone could snatch them.”
Will didn’t think many people wanted these children. That was part of the problem.
“Ring bell for service,” Faith said, he supposed reading from the sign below the bell, which even a monkey could have figured out.
Will reached over and rang the bell.
She said, “They do computer training here.”
“What?”
Faith picked up one of the brochures on the counter. Will saw pictures of smiling women and children on the front, a couple of co
rporate logos that named the big-money sponsors along the bottom. “Computer training, counseling, meals.” Her eyes went back and forth as she skimmed the text. “Medical counseling with a Christian focus.” She dropped the pamphlet back in with the others. “I guess that means they tell you you’re going to hell if you have an abortion. Good advice for women who’ve already got one mouth they can’t afford to feed.” She tapped the bell again, this time hard enough to make it spin off the counter.
Will picked up the bell from the floor. When he stood, he found a large Hispanic woman behind the counter, an infant in her arms. She spoke in a distinctive Texas drawl, her words directed toward Faith. “If you’re here to arrest someone, we ask that you don’t do it in front of the children.”
“We’re here to talk to Judith Coldfield,” Faith replied, keeping her voice low, mindful that the kids were not only watching but had guessed her occupation just like the woman.
“Walk around the side of the building to the storefront. Judith’s working retail today.” She didn’t wait for a thank-you. Instead, she turned around with the child and went back down the hallway.
Faith pushed open the door, heading out into the street again. “These places annoy the hell out of me.”
Will thought a homeless shelter was a strange thing to hate, even for Faith. “Why is that?”
“Just help them. Don’t make them pray about it.”
“Some people find solace in prayer.”
“What if they don’t? Then they’re not worthy of being helped? You may be homeless and starving to death, but you can’t have a free meal or a safe place to sleep unless you agree that abortion is an abomination and that other people have the right to tell you what to do with your body?”
Will wasn’t sure how to answer her, so he just followed her around the side of the brick building, watching her angrily hitch her purse up on her shoulder. She was still mumbling when they rounded the corner to the storefront. There was a large sign out front that probably had the name of the shelter on it. The economy was bad for everybody these days, but especially for charities who depended on people feeling flush enough to help their fellow man. Many of the local shelters took in donations that they sold in order to help pay for basic operations. Window lettering advertised various items inside the store. Faith read them off as they walked to the entrance.
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