The Will Trent Series 5-Book Bundle

by Karin Slaughter

  Not that she needed his approval anymore. Lena was sick of worrying what other people thought about her. Part of looking ahead to her new life required her never to look back. The only things she was taking with her from Grant County were her clothes and her fiancé, neither of which she thought she could live without.

  “Ready?” Jared was sitting in his truck. He leaned over and pushed open the door.

  Lena slid across the seat so he could put his arm around her. “Are things going to be okay with you and Sara?” He’d had coffee with her this morning. Lena gathered things hadn’t gone well.

  “Don’t worry about it.” Jared’s jaw tightened as he put the car in gear and pulled out onto the road. He didn’t like giving bad news. “Aunt Sara will come around.”

  “I wouldn’t hold my breath.”

  He kissed the top of her head. “She just doesn’t know who you are.”

  “No, she doesn’t.”

  He reached down and turned on the radio. Joan Jett started singing about her bad reputation. Lena stared into the rearview mirror. She could see the road disappearing behind her, Grant County getting smaller with every mile. She wanted to feel something for the place—a sense of loss, a sense of nostalgia. All she felt was relief to have it finally behind her.

  Did Sara Linton know Lena? Probably better than anybody else alive. But Jared didn’t need to know that. He didn’t need to know about the mistakes Lena had made, or the people whose lives she had ruined. Things were going to be different in Macon. This was her clean slate. Her new beginning.

  Besides, Lena had never told a man the truth in her life. She wasn’t about to start now.

  For Victoria

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  My appreciation to the usual suspects: Victoria Sanders, Kate Elton, and Kate Miciak. I’d also like to add Gail Rebuck, Susan Sandon, Richard Cable, Margie Seale, Robbert Ammerlaan, Pieter Swinkels, Silvie Kuttny-Walster, Berit Boehm, Per Nasholm, Alysha Farry, Chandler Crawford, and Markus Dohle. And I guess Angela Cheng-Caplan, if she can handle the love.

  Isabel Glusman, thank you for your letters, and Emily Bestler, thank you for raising such a great kid. Dr. David Harper helped me figure out how to kill people. Dr. David Worth helped me figure out eyeballs. Any mistakes are my own. Trish Hawkins was instrumental in giving me insight into the complexities of dyslexia. Debbie Teague, you are such a trouper for sharing your experiences; every time I write about Will, I think of your amazing strength of spirit. Mo Hayder: thanks for all the free research on scuba diving, suckah! To Andrew Johnston I offer my apologies for you know what, and no, there’s no compensation. Same goes for you, Miss Kitty.

  Thanks to Beth Tindall of Cincinnati Media for all the usual web crap. Jamey Locastro can arrest me anytime. Fiona Farrelly and Ollie Malcolm were very gracious helping me figure my way around the thing that involves the plot of this story, which I won’t mention here in case people read this before they read the actual book, which they shouldn’t be doing anyway. Thanks also to the folks who helped by discussing this subject matter but didn’t want to be named for obvious reasons. To Speaker David Ralston: I thank you very much for introducing me to some great people. GBI Director Vernon Keenan and John Bankhead, thanks for your time. I will never fire a shotgun again without thinking of our lovely day outside the women’s prison. I hope I’ve honored the work y’all and all the agents and support staff at the GBI do for the great state of Georgia.

  My daddy made me soup and cornbread during critical times, which I may have conflated because of the cornbread and soup, which—did I mention?—I will probably need more of. D.A. showed amazing perseverance through this whole process. As always, you are my heart.

  To my readers: y’all are the best. For further reading, try the GPZ anthology, check out issue 15.05 of Wired magazine, or, if you really want to get upset, investigoogle Jessie Gelsinger. For those of you with a wild hair, GPGP.net is an interesting site as well. Hey, folks, while you’re online, check me out on Facebook or my website, karinslaughter.com. I love getting letters, but please remember this is a work of fiction.

  Fallen is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2011 by Karin Slaughter

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Delacorte Press, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  DELACORTE PRESS is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc., and the colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Slaughter, Karin

  Fallen : a novel / Karin Slaughter.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-0-345-52822-3

  1. Policewomen—Fiction. 2. Georgia—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3569.L275F37 2011

  813′.54—dc22 2011004941

  www.bantamdell.com

  Cover design: Carlos Beltrán

  Cover photograph: Michael Trevillion

  v3.1

  Contents

  Master - Table of Contents

  Fallen

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Saturday Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Sunday Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Monday Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Thursday Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Other Books by This Author

  About the Author

  CHAPTER ONE

  Faith Mitchell dumped the contents of her purse onto the passenger seat of her Mini, trying to find something to eat. Except for a furry piece of gum and a peanut of dubious origin, there was nothing remotely edible. She thought about the box of nutrition bars in her kitchen pantry, and her stomach made a noise that sounded like a rusty hinge groaning open.

  The computer seminar she’d attended this morning was supposed to last three hours, but that had stretched into four and a half thanks to the jackass in the front row who kept asking pointless questions. The Georgia Bureau of Investigation trained its agents more often than any other agency in the region. Statistics and data on criminal activities were constantly being drummed into their heads. They had to be up to date on all of the latest technology. They had to qualify at the range twice a year. They ran mock raids and active shooter simulations that were so intense that for weeks after, Faith couldn’t go to the bathroom in the middle of the night without checking shadows in doorways. Usually, she appreciated the agency’s thoroughness. Today, all she could think about was her four-month-old baby, and the promise Faith had made to her mother that she would be back no later than noon.

  The clock on the dash read ten after one o’clock when she started the car. Faith mumbled a curse as she pulled out of the parking lot in front of the Panthersville Road headquarters. She used Bluetooth to dial her mother’s number. The car speakers gave back a static-y silence. Faith hung up and dialed again. This time, she got a busy signal.

  Faith tapped her finger on the steering wheel as she listened to the bleating. Her mother had voicemail. Everybody had voicemail. Faith couldn’t remember the last time she’d heard a busy signal on the telephone. She had almost forgotten the sound. There was probably a crossed wire somewhere at the phone company. She hung up and tried the number a third time. />
  Still busy.

  Faith steered with one hand as she checked her BlackBerry for an email from her mother. Before Evelyn Mitchell retired, she had been a cop for just shy of four decades. You could say a lot about the Atlanta force, but you couldn’t claim they were behind the times. Evelyn had carried a cell phone back when they were more like purses you strapped around your shoulder. She’d learned how to use email before her daughter had. She’d carried a BlackBerry for almost twelve years.

  But she hadn’t sent a message today.

  Faith checked her cell phone voicemail. She had a saved message from her dentist’s office about making an appointment to get her teeth cleaned, but there was nothing new. She tried her phone at home, thinking maybe her mother had gone there to pick up something for the baby. Faith’s house was just down the road from Evelyn’s. Maybe Emma had run out of diapers. Maybe she’d needed another bottle. Faith listened to the phone ring at her house, then heard her own voice answer, telling callers to leave a message.

  She ended the call. Without thinking, she glanced into the back seat. Emma’s empty car seat was there. She could see the pink liner sticking out over the top of the plastic.

  “Idiot,” Faith whispered to herself. She dialed her mother’s cell phone number. She held her breath as she counted through three rings. Evelyn’s voicemail picked up.

  Faith had to clear her throat before she could speak. She was aware of a tremor in her tone. “Mom, I’m on my way home. I guess you took Em for a walk …” Faith looked up at the sky as she merged onto the interstate. She was about twenty minutes outside of Atlanta and could see fluffy white clouds draped like scarves around the skinny necks of skyscrapers. “Just call me,” Faith said, worry needling the edge of her brain.

  Grocery store. Gas station. Pharmacy. Her mother had a car seat identical to the one in the back of Faith’s Mini. She was probably out running errands. Faith was over an hour late. Evelyn would’ve taken the baby and … Left Faith a message that she was going to be out. The woman had been on call for the majority of her adult life. She didn’t go to the toilet without letting someone know. Faith and her older brother, Zeke, had joked about it when they were kids. They always knew where their mother was, even when they didn’t want to. Especially when they didn’t want to.

  Faith stared at the phone in her hand as if it could tell her what was going on. She was aware that she might be letting herself get worked up over nothing. The landline could be out. Her mother wouldn’t know this unless she tried to make a call. Her cell phone could be switched off, or charging, or both. Her BlackBerry could be in her car or her purse or somewhere she couldn’t hear the telltale vibration. Faith glanced back and forth between the road and her BlackBerry as she typed an email to her mother. She spoke the words aloud as she typed—

  “On-my-way. Sorry-I’m-late. Call-me.”

  She sent the email, then tossed the phone onto the seat along with the spilled items from her purse. After a moment’s hesitation, Faith popped the gum into her mouth. She chewed as she drove, ignoring the purse lint clinging to her tongue. She turned on the radio, then snapped it back off. The traffic thinned as she got closer to the city. The clouds moved apart, sending down bright rays of sunshine. The inside of the car began to bake.

  Ten minutes out, Faith’s nerves were still on edge, and she was sweating from the heat in the car. She cracked the sunroof to let in some air. This was probably a simple case of separation anxiety. She’d been back at work for a little over two months, but still, every morning when Faith left Emma at her mother’s, she felt something akin to a seizure take hold. Her vision blurred. Her heart shook in her chest. Her head buzzed as if a million bees had flown into her ears. She was more irritable than usual at work, especially with her partner, Will Trent, who either had the patience of Job or was setting up a believable alibi for when he finally snapped and strangled her.

  Faith couldn’t recall if she had felt this same anxiety with Jeremy, her son, who was now a freshman in college. Faith had been eighteen when she entered the police academy. Jeremy was three years old by then. She had grabbed onto the idea of joining the force as if it was the only life preserver left on the Titanic. Thanks to two minutes of poor judgment in the back of a movie theater and what foreshadowed a lifetime of breathtakingly bad taste in men, Faith had gone straight from puberty to motherhood without any of the usual stops in between. At eighteen, she had relished the idea of earning a steady paycheck so that she could move out of her parents’ house and raise Jeremy the way that she wanted. Going to work every day had been a step toward independence. Leaving him in day care had seemed like a small price to pay.

  Now that Faith was thirty-four, with a mortgage, a car payment, and another baby to raise on her own, she wanted nothing more than to move back into her mother’s house so that Evelyn could take care of everything. She wanted to open the refrigerator and see food that she didn’t have to buy. She wanted to turn on the air conditioner in the summer without worrying about having to pay the bill. She wanted to sleep until noon, then watch TV all day. Hell, while she was at it, she might as well resurrect her father, who’d died eleven years ago, so that he could make her pancakes at breakfast and tell her how pretty she was.

  No chance of that now. Evelyn seemed happy to play the role of nanny in her retirement, but Faith was under no illusion that her life was going to get any easier. Her own retirement was almost twenty years away. The Mini had another three years of payments and would be out of warranty well before that. Emma would expect food and clothing for at least the next eighteen years, if not more. And it wasn’t like when Jeremy was a baby and Faith could dress him in mismatched socks and yard sale hand-me-downs. Babies today had to coordinate. They needed BPA-free bottles and certified organic applesauce from kindly Amish farmers. If Jeremy got into the architectural program at Georgia Tech, Faith was looking at six more years of buying books and doing his laundry. Most worryingly, her son had found a serious girlfriend. An older girlfriend with curvy hips and a ticking biological clock. Faith could be a grandmother before she turned thirty-five.

  An unwelcome heat rushed through her body as she tried to push this last thought from her mind. She checked the contents of her purse again as she drove. The gum hadn’t made a dent. Her stomach was still growling. She reached over and felt around inside the glovebox. Nothing. She should stop at a fast-food place and at least get a Coke, but she was wearing her regs—tan khakis and a blue shirt with the letters GBI emblazoned in bright yellow on the back. This wasn’t the best part of town to be in if you were law enforcement. People tended to run, and then you had to chase them, which wasn’t conducive to getting home at a reasonable hour. Besides, something was telling her—urging her—to see her mother.

  Faith picked up her phone and dialed Evelyn’s numbers again. Home, cell, even her BlackBerry, which she only used for email. All three brought the same negative response. Faith could feel her stomach flip as the worst scenarios ran through her mind. As a beat cop, she’d been called out onto a lot of scenes where a crying child had alerted the neighbors to a serious problem. Mothers had slipped in the tub. Fathers had accidentally injured themselves or gone into coronary arrest. The babies had lain there, wailing helplessly, until someone had figured out that something was wrong. There was nothing more heart wrenching than a crying baby who could not be soothed.

  Faith chided herself for bringing these horrible images to mind. She had always been good at assuming the worst, even before she became a cop. Evelyn was probably fine. Emma’s naptime was at one-thirty. Her mother had probably turned off the phone so the ringing wouldn’t wake the baby. Maybe she’d run into a neighbor while checking the mailbox, or gone next door to help old Mrs. Levy take out the trash.

  Still, Faith’s hands slipped on the wheel as she exited onto Boulevard. She was sweating despite the mild March weather. This couldn’t just be about the baby or her mother or even Jeremy’s unconscionably fertile girlfriend. Faith had been diagnos
ed with diabetes less than a year ago. She was religious about measuring her blood sugar, eating the right things, making sure she had snacks on hand. Except for today. That probably explained why her thinking had gone sideways. She just needed to eat something. Preferably in view of her mother and child.

  Faith checked the glovebox again to make sure it was really empty. She had a distant memory of giving Will her last nutrition bar yesterday while they were waiting outside the courthouse. It was that or watch him inhale a sticky bun from the vending machine. He had complained about the taste but eaten the whole bar anyway. And now she was paying for it.

  She blew through a yellow light, speeding as much as she dared down a semi-residential street. The road narrowed at Ponce de Leon. Faith passed a row of fast-food restaurants and an organic grocery store. She edged up the speedometer, accelerating into the twists and turns bordering Piedmont Park. The flash of a traffic camera bounced off her rearview mirror as she sailed through another yellow light. She tapped on the brakes for a straggling jaywalker. Two more grocery stores blurred by, then came the final red light, which was mercifully green.

  Evelyn still lived in the same house Faith and her older brother had grown up in. The single-story ranch was located in an area of Atlanta called Sherwood Forest, which was nestled between Ansley Park, one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in the city, and Interstate 85, which offered the constant roar of traffic, depending on which way the wind was blowing. The wind was blowing just fine today, and when Faith rolled down her window to let in more fresh air, she heard the familiar drone that had marked most every day of her childhood.

  As a lifelong resident of Sherwood Forest, Faith had a deep-seated hatred for the men who had planned the neighborhood. The subdivision had been developed after World War II, the brick ranch houses filled by returning soldiers who took advantage of low VA loans. The street planners had unabashedly embraced the Sherwood concept. After taking a hard left onto Lionel, Faith crossed Friar Tuck, took a right on Robin Hood Road, coasted through the fork at Lady Marian Lane, and checked the driveway of her own house on the corner of Doncaster and Barnesdale before finally pulling into her mother’s driveway off Little John Trail.