“Will—”
He went to the attached bathroom and checked the trash there. “I want to talk to the doorman.”
“Why don’t you let—”
Will left the room before she had finished. He walked into the living room again, checking under the couches, pulling the stuffing out of some of the chairs to see if anything—anyone—was hidden inside.
The cop was testing the coke, pleased with what he found. “This is a righteous bust. I need to call this in.”
“Give me a minute,” Will told him.
One of the paramedics asked, “You want us to stick around?”
Faith said “No” just as Will said “Yes.”
He made himself clear. “Don’t go anywhere.”
Faith asked the man, “Do you know an EMT named Rick Sigler?”
“Rick? Yeah,” the guy said, like he was surprised she’d asked.
Will blocked out their conversation. He went back to the front powder room, breathing through his mouth so the shit and piss wouldn’t make him throw up. He closed the door, then went back to the front entrance, the confetti dots. He stooped down to study them. He was pretty sure they were in dried urine.
Will stood, going out into the hall and looking back in at the apartment. Anna’s penthouse took up the entire top floor of the building. There were no other units, no neighbors. No one who could hear her scream or see her attacker.
The killer would’ve stood outside her door where Will stood now. He glanced down the hall, thinking the man might’ve come up the stairs—or maybe down. There was a fire exit. He could’ve been on the roof. Or maybe the worthless doorman would’ve let him in through the front entrance, even pressed the button for him on the elevator. There was a peephole in Anna’s penthouse door. She would’ve checked it first. All of these women were cautious. Who would she let in? A delivery person. Maintenance. Maybe the doorman.
Faith was coming toward him. Her face was unreadable, but he knew her well enough to know what she was thinking: It’s time to go.
Will looked down the hall again. There was another door halfway down on the wall opposite the apartment.
Faith said, “Will—” but he was already heading for the closed door. He opened it. There was a small metal door inside for the trash chute. Boxes were piled in a stack, recyclables. There was a basket for glass, one for cans. A baby rested in the bin for plastics. His eyes were closed to a slit, his lips slightly parted. His skin was white, waxy.
Faith came up behind Will. She grabbed his arm. Will could not move. The world had stopped spinning. He held on to the doorknob so his knees would not give out on him. A noise came from Faith’s mouth that sounded like a low keening.
The baby turned his head toward the sound, his eyes slowly opening.
“Oh, my God,” Faith breathed. She pushed Will out of the way, dropping to her knees as she reached for the child. “Get help! Will, get help!”
Will felt the world return to normal. “Out here!” he called to the paramedics. “Bring your kit!”
Faith held the baby close as she checked for cuts and bruises. “Little lamb,” she whispered. “You’re okay. I’ve got you now. You’re okay.”
Will watched her with the child, the way she smoothed back his hair and pressed her lips to his forehead. The baby’s eyes were barely open, his lips white. Will wanted to say something, but his words kept getting caught in his throat. He felt hot and cold at the same time, like he might start sobbing right there in front of the world.
“I’ve got you, sweetheart,” Faith murmured, her voice choked with anguish. Tears streamed down her face. Will had never seen her being a mother, at least not with an infant. It broke his heart to see this gentle side of Faith, the part of her that cared so deeply about another human being that her hands shook as she held the child close to her chest.
She whispered, “He’s not crying. Why is he not crying?”
Will finally managed to speak. “He knows no one will come.” He leaned down, cupping his hand around the boy’s head as it rested on Faith’s shoulder, trying not to think about the hours the child had spent alone up here, crying himself out, waiting for someone to come.
The paramedic gasped in surprise. He called to his partner as he took the baby from Faith. The diaper was full. The boy’s belly was distended; his head lolled to the side.
“He’s dehydrated.” The medic checked his pupils for a reaction, lifting his chapped lips to check his gums. “Malnourished.”
Will asked, “Is he going to be okay?”
The man shook his head. “I don’t know. He’s bad off.”
“How long—” Faith’s voice caught. “How long has he been in here?”
“I don’t know,” the man repeated. “A day. Maybe two.”
“Two days?” Will asked, sure he was wrong. “The mom’s been gone at least a week, maybe more.”
“More than a week and he’d be dead.” Gently, the medic turned the child over. “He’s got sores from lying in one place for too long.” He cursed under his breath. “I don’t know how long it takes for this to happen, but someone’s been giving him water, at least. You can’t survive without it.”
Faith said, “Maybe the prostitute …”
She didn’t finish, but Will knew what she was saying. Lola had probably been keeping an eye on Anna’s baby after Anna had been abducted. Then she’d gotten locked up and the kid was left alone. “If Lola was taking care of him,” Will said, “she would need to get in and out of the building.”
The elevator doors slid open. Will saw a second cop standing with Simkov, the doorman. There was a darkening bruise underneath his eye and his eyebrow was split where it had been slammed against the hard marble counter.
“That one.” The doorman pointed triumphantly at Will. “He’s the one who jumped me.”
Will’s fists tightened. His jaw was so clenched he thought his teeth might break. “Did you know this baby was up here?”
The doorman’s sneer was back. “What do I know about a baby? Maybe the night guy was—” He stopped, looking into the open door of the penthouse. “Jesus, Mary and Joseph,” he mumbled, then said something in his foreign tongue. “What did they do up here?”
“Who?” Will asked. “Who was up here?”
“Is that man dead?” Simkov asked, still staring into the trashed penthouse. “Holy Christ, look at this place. The smell!” He tried to go into the apartment, but the cop jerked him back.
Will gave the doorman another chance, carefully enunciating each word of his question. “Did you know this baby was up here?”
Simkov shrugged, his shoulders going up high to his ears. “What the fuck do I know what goes on up here with the rich people? I make eight dollars an hour and you want me to keep up with their lives?”
“There’s a baby,” Will said, so furious that he could barely speak. “A little baby who was dying.”
“So there’s a baby. What the fuck do I care?”
Rage came in a black, blinding intensity, so that it wasn’t until Will was on top of the man, his fist slamming back and forth like a jackhammer, that Will realized what he was doing. And he didn’t stop himself. He didn’t want to stop. He was thinking about that baby lying in his own shit, the killer shoving him into the trash room so he’d starve to death, the prostitute wanting to trade information about him to get her own ass out of the sling and Angie … there was Angie on top of this steaming pile of excrement, pulling Will’s strings like she always did, fucking with his head so that he felt like he belonged in the trash heap with all the rest of them.
“Will!” Faith screamed. She was reaching her hands out in front of her the way you do when you’re talking to a crazy person. Will felt a deep pain in his shoulders as both cops pinned his arms behind his back. He was panting like a rabid dog. Sweat dripped down his face.
“All right,” Faith said, her hands still out as she came closer. “Let’s calm down. Just calm down.” She put her hands on Will, someth
ing he realized she had never done before. Her palms were on his face, forcing him to look at her instead of Simkov, who was writhing on the floor. “Look at me,” she ordered, her voice low, like her words were something only they could hear. “Will, look at me.”
He forced himself to meet her gaze. Her eyes were intensely blue, wide open in panic. “It’s all right,” Faith told him. “The baby’s gonna be all right. Okay? All right?”
Will nodded, feeling the cops loosen their grip on his arms. Faith was still standing in front of him, still had her hands on his face.
“You’re all right,” she told him, talking to him in the same tone she had used with the baby. “You’re going to be fine.”
Will took a step back so that Faith would have to let him go. He could tell she was almost as terrified as the doorman. Will was scared, too—scared that he still wanted to beat the man, that if the cops hadn’t been there, if it had just been him and Simkov alone, Will would have beaten him to death with his bare hands.
Faith kept her gaze locked with Will’s just a moment longer. Then she turned her attention to the bloodied pulp on the floor. “Get up, asshole.”
Simkov groaned, curling into a ball. “I can’t move.”
“Shut up.” She jerked Simkov’s arm.
“My nose!” he yelled, so dizzy that the only thing that kept him up was his shoulder slamming into the wall. “He broke my nose!”
“You’re fine.” Faith glanced up and down the hall. She was looking for security cameras.
Will did the same, relieved to find none.
“Police brutality!” the man screamed. “You saw it. You’re all my witnesses.”
One of the cops behind Will said, “You fell, buddy. Don’t you remember?”
“I didn’t fall,” the man insisted. Blood was pooling out of his nose, squeezing through his fingers like water from a sponge.
The other paramedic was starting an IV on the baby. He didn’t look up, but said, “Better be careful where you walk next time.”
And just like that, Will was the kind of cop he had never wanted to be.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
—
Faith’s hands were still shaking as she stood in front of Anna Lindsey’s ICU room. The two cops who had been on guard outside the woman’s door were chatting with the nurses behind the desk, but they kept glancing up, as if they knew what had happened outside Anna Lindsey’s penthouse apartment and weren’t quite sure what to think about it. For his part, Will stood across from her, hands in his pockets, eyes staring blankly down the hallway. She wondered if he was in shock. Hell, she wondered if she was in shock.
In both her personal and her private life, Faith had been the focus of a lot of angry men, but she had never witnessed anything like the violence Will had shown. There had been a moment in that hallway outside the Beeston Place penthouse when Faith had been afraid that Will would kill the doorman. It was his face that had shocked her—cold, merciless, driven toward nothing but keeping his fist slamming into the other man’s face. Like everyone else’s mother in the world, Faith’s had always told her to be careful what she wished for. Faith had wished that Will would be a little more aggressive. Now she would give anything to have him back the way he was before.
“They won’t say anything,” Faith told him. “The cops, the paramedics.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“You found that baby,” she reminded him. “Who knows how long it would’ve taken before somebody—”
“Stop.”
There was a loud ding as the elevator doors opened. Amanda hit the ground at a trot. She scanned the hall, taking in who was around, probably trying to neutralize witnesses. Faith braced herself for crushing recriminations, lightning-fast suspensions, maybe the loss of their badges. Instead, Amanda asked them, “Are you both all right?”
Faith nodded. Will just stared at the floor.
“Glad to see you finally grow a pair,” Amanda told Will. “You’re suspended without pay for the rest of the week, but don’t think for a goddamn minute that means you’re going to stop working your ass off for me.”
Will’s voice sounded thick in his throat. “Yes, ma’am.”
Amanda strode toward the stairwell. They followed, and Faith noticed her boss had none of her usual grace, none of her control. She seemed just as shocked as they were.
“Shut the door.”
Faith saw that her hands were still shaking as she pulled it closed.
“Charlie’s processing Anna Lindsey’s apartment,” Amanda told them, her voice echoing up the stairs. She adjusted her tone. “He’ll call if he finds anything. Obviously, the doorman is off-limits to you.” She meant Will. “Forensics should be back tomorrow morning, but don’t get your hopes up, considering the state of the apartment. Tech hasn’t been able to break into the computers the women were using. They’re running all the password programs they have. It could take weeks or months to crack it. The anorexia website is hosted through a shell company in Friesland, wherever the hell that is. It’s overseas. They won’t give us registration information, but tech was able to pull up the stats for the site on the web. They get around two hundred unique users a month. That’s all we know.”
Will didn’t speak, so Faith asked, “What about the vacant house behind Olivia Tanner’s?”
“The shoe prints are for a men’s size eleven Nike sold in twelve hundred outlets across the country. We found some cigarette butts in the Coke can behind the bar. We’ll try to pull DNA, but there’s no telling who they belong to.”
Faith asked, “What about Jake Berman?”
“What the hell do you think?” Amanda took a breath as if to calm herself. “We’ve released a sketch and his booking photo through the state network. I’m sure the press will pick up on it, but we’ve asked them to hold off at least twenty-four hours.”
Faith’s mind was jumbled with questions, but nothing would come out. She had been standing in Olivia Tanner’s kitchen less than an hour ago and she could not for the life of her remember one detail about the house.
Will finally spoke. His voice sounded as defeated as he looked. “You should fire me.”
“You’re not getting off that easy.”
“I’m not kidding, Amanda. You should fire me.”
“I’m not kidding either, you ignorant jackass.” Amanda tucked her hands into her hips, looking more like the usual, annoyed Amanda that Faith was familiar with. “Anna Lindsey’s baby is safe because of you. I think that’s a win for the team.”
He scratched at his arm. Faith could see that the skin on his knuckles was broken and bleeding. She was reminded of that moment in the hallway when she had her hands on his face, the way she had willed him to be okay because Faith didn’t know how she could handle being in the world if Will Trent stopped being the man she had shared her life with almost every day for the past year.
Amanda caught Faith’s eye. “Give us a minute.”
Faith pushed the door open and walked back into the hall. There was a low hum of activity in the ICU, but nothing like downstairs in the emergency room. The cops were back at their station in front of Anna’s door, and their eyes followed Faith as she passed.
One of the nurses told her, “They’re in exam three.”
Faith didn’t know why she was being given this information, but she went to exam three anyway. She found Sara Linton inside. The doctor was standing by a plastic bassinet. She was holding the baby in her arms—Anna’s baby.
“He’s bouncing back,” Sara told Faith. “It’ll take a couple of days, but he’ll be fine. Mostly, I think being back with his mom again will help them both.”
Faith couldn’t be a human being right now, so she made herself be a cop. “Did Anna say anything else?”
“Not much. She’s in a lot of pain. They upped the morphine now that she’s awake.”
Faith ran her hand down the baby’s back, feeling the soft give of his skin, the tiny bones of his spine. “How long do you
think he was left alone?”
“The EMT was right. I’d say two days, tops. Otherwise, we’d be in a very different situation.” Sara moved the baby to her other shoulder. “Someone was giving him water. He’s dehydrated, but not as bad as some I’ve seen.”
“What are you doing here?” Faith asked. The question came out without any forethought. She heard it sound in her ears, and thought it was a good one—good enough to repeat. “Why are you here? Why were you with Anna in the first place?”
Sara gently returned the baby to the bassinet. “She’s my patient. I was checking on her.” She tucked a blanket around the infant. “Just like I checked on you this morning. Delia Wallace’s office said you haven’t called.”
“I’ve been a little busy rescuing babies off of trash piles.”
“Faith, I’m not the enemy here.” Sara’s tone took on the annoying tenor of someone trying to be reasonable. “This isn’t just about you anymore. You have a child inside of you—another life you’re responsible for.”
“That’s my decision.”
“Your decision clock is running out. Don’t let your body make it for you, because if it’s between the diabetes and the baby, the diabetes will always win out.”
Faith took a deep breath, but that didn’t do anything to help matters. She let loose. “You know, you may be trying to force yourself onto my case, but I’ll be damned if I’ll let you force yourself into my private life.”
“Excuse me?” Sara had the gall to sound surprised.
“You’re not a coroner anymore, Sara. You’re not married to a police chief. He’s dead. You saw him blown to pieces with your own two eyes. You’re not going to get him back by hanging out at the morgue and shoving your way onto an investigation.”
Sara stood there with her mouth open, seemingly incapable of responding.
Shockingly, Faith burst into tears. “Oh, my God, I’m so sorry! That was so awful.” She put her hand to her mouth. “I can’t believe I said—”
Sara shook her head, looking down at the floor.
“I’m so sorry. God, I’m sorry. Please forgive me.”
The Will Trent Series 5-Book Bundle Page 111