Faith checked her own watch. “So, everyone will be there in a little over two hours?”
“Unless they read the message boards at four in the morning.” She asked Nick, “Can I use your laptop?”
Nick offered, “The computer in my office is more private.” He scooped up the Big Whitey files, telling Faith, “I’ll get started on these.”
Branson followed him to the door, but she didn’t leave. “I’m sorry for wasting y’alls time. I always try to be tough as I need to be, never tougher than I have to be.”
Will nodded, but Faith wouldn’t give an inch. She waited for Branson to leave, then blew out a puff of air.
Will said, “What do you think?”
“I think Tony Dell’s closer to Big Whitey than we thought.” He nodded, though they both knew that’s not what he was asking about.
“Whoever this Big Whitey is, he’s a freaking genius.” Faith couldn’t keep the admiration out of her voice. “He played them like a fiddle.”
“The two men in the house.” Will coughed a few times before he could continue. “I could see Tony slitting their throats, then going after the third guy with an ax. He’s a killer. He likes using his hands. He takes out the three of them, puts the brace on the basement door so Sid Waller’s trapped, then he walks away.”
“He was feeding Lena intel. He knew when the raid was going to happen.” Faith waited out another coughing fit. “You still think Tony’s not Big Whitey?”
Will gagged down some water. “I don’t know what to think anymore. He’s more like the point at the edge of somebody else’s sword.” Will coughed again. “And I know he’s got that weird thing with his sister. Stepsister. But I can’t see him with little boys. He couldn’t stand to be in the same room with his own nephew.”
“You never know what people get up to,” Faith said. “Do you think the stepsister knows anything?”
Will shrugged to save his voice. He’d have to find a way to get Cayla Martin to talk. There was no other option.
Faith stared at the grainy cell phone photo on the screen. “Poor little lamb. He can’t be more than seven.”
Will didn’t want to look at the screen, but once he did, he couldn’t take his eyes off the boy. It didn’t seem possible he was still alive. How had he survived living in that dank, dark hole? And what had been done to him while he was there?
“I’ll call Sara.” Faith took out her cell phone and dialed the number.
Will opened his mouth to tell her there was no point. Nothing came out. He couldn’t speak, but not because of his sore throat. It occurred to him that the boy was not talking because he had nothing to say.
His expression in the photo told the story. The boy would never be the same again. He would never sleep as deeply or play with the same abandon. Chasing a ball, flying a kite, helping his mother set the table—none of this would ever be done without constantly checking for danger. The boy did not want to go back to his parents. They wouldn’t recognize him. They would take one look and ask who was this damaged creature and what had he done with their real son. It was all captured in the grainy photo on the screen—the fear, the loneliness, the overwhelming shame.
Marie Sorensen had the same look. She had been stolen. She had been abused. She had been thrown away. Even when she got home, she never felt safe. She had made the only choice that was truly her own.
Will couldn’t blame her.
There wasn’t a box in the world that was big enough to contain those horrors. Everything she’d survived had made her want to die. Who could fault the boy for thinking the same thing?
“Sara’s not answering.” Faith ended the call. “Do you think she’s at the hospital?”
He didn’t answer.
Sara was finished with Will. That much was obvious. But somehow, for the brief time they were together, she had managed to change him. She had tamed his beasts. She had made him feel safe. She had made him feel whole. Sara hadn’t completely shuttered the file room, but she had made it seem further away—like someone else’s memory, someone else’s life.
Will had to tell her this, had to explain why she was so desperately needed.
“I’ll find her,” he told Faith.
If anyone could coax the boy into talking, it was Sara Linton.
13.
“Sara?”
Sara turned over in bed, trying to get away from the noise. She hadn’t fallen asleep last night so much as collapsed from exhaustion.
“Sara?” Nell said. “Sara?”
Sara woke slowly, rousing from a deep, dreamless sleep. She put her hand over her eyes. “What time is it?”
“Just after four-thirty.”
Sara dropped her hand. She looked up at Nell. They were in the hotel room. After what happened with Will last night, Sara didn’t have it in her to drive back to Atlanta. “Is Jared okay?”
Nell gave an odd smile. “Possum just called. He says they’re going to wake him up. I was about to leave for the hospital.”
Sara forced herself to sit up. She hurt in all the wrong places.
“I’ll go with you.”
“You need to get the door. There’s a man who wants to talk to you.”
Sara finally managed to put together the conversation. There was only one man in Macon right now who would want to talk to her. She wasn’t sure she wanted to talk to him. Still, she brushed her fingers through her hair as she went to the door.
And then her jaw dropped when she saw Will.
For just a moment, Sara found herself thinking that she was responsible for the damage to his face.
Then she realized that he’d been beaten.
“What happened?” She reached up to him, but there was nowhere Sara could touch Will that wasn’t injured. Even the blood vessels in his eyes were broken. “Did someone choke you?”
He swallowed. The pain made him cringe. His voice was hoarse. “Amanda sent me.”
Sara could hardly understand him. “Come in.”
Will didn’t move. She grabbed his arm, pulling him into the room.
“Nell, this is a friend of mine.” Sara let herself believe she was holding back details because Will was undercover. “He lives in Atlanta.”
“Nice to meet you.” Nell dug her hand into her purse, but her eyes were on Sara’s hand, which was still wrapped around Will’s arm.
Sara let go.
Nell said, “It’s good, Sara. I’m happy for you.” She held up her keycard. “I’ll be at the hospital.”
She nodded at Will before she left. The door closed automatically, slamming hard against the metal jamb.
Sara knew it would be pointless to go after her. She asked Will, “What happened?”
He put his fingers to his larynx as if he could force up the volume. “We’ve got about an hour.”
She stared, disbelieving. “What?”
“I know you don’t want me here.” He coughed, the effort from talking obviously too much. “Amanda asked me to—” He coughed again. And again. His face started turning red.
“Sit down.” Sara was still angry, but she couldn’t let him pass out in front of her. She found a tiny bottle of Tennessee whiskey in the minibar. “Drink half of this.”
Will sat down, but he wouldn’t take the bottle. He hated alcohol.
“You won’t get drunk,” Sara told him. He still wouldn’t take it.
She stuck the bottle in his face. “Think of it as medicine. It’ll numb your throat.”
Will reluctantly took the whiskey. He opened the cap. Instead of drinking the alcohol, he sniffed it. He scowled at the smell. He looked at the label even though Sara knew he couldn’t read the cursive script.
“Will, drink the goddamn whiskey.”
Her tone was sharper than she intended, but it worked.
He managed to swallow a mouthful before he gagged.
“Christ!” He heaved a cough from deep inside his chest. His eyes watered. He shook his head like a dog.
Sara crossed her arms
to stop herself from soothing him. She’d been too worn out last night to think beyond closing her eyes, but now it all came rushing back. Every ounce of concern she felt kept getting overwhelmed by anger.
Will coughed a few more times. He screwed the cap back on the bottle and threw it into the trashcan.
Sara asked, “Are we going to talk about what happened?”
He blinked to clear his eyes. “Amanda—”
“Sweetheart, if you say her name one more time, one of us is going to have to leave. And it won’t be me.”
His jaw set.
Sara wasn’t going to give in. “I mean it, Will. You come in here with your face all banged up. That cut should be stitched. You’ve got blood in your ear. You probably need an MRI. And I’m just supposed to pretend none of this exists, the same way I pretend you didn’t have a childhood and you don’t have scars all over your body and—” She couldn’t go on. The list was endless. “Talk to me, Will. I can handle the strong, but I can’t take the silent anymore.”
Predictably, he did the exact opposite. He crossed his ankle over his leg. She saw the bottom of his boot. The Cat’s Paw logo was on the heel.
Sara had to close her eyes for a moment so she didn’t lose control. She counted to ten, then twenty, before she could look at him again. “Will, your not talking to me about things is what got us into this mess in the first place.”
He swallowed. The alcohol had worked. He didn’t flinch this time. “I’m sorry.”
Sara felt like a schoolmarm, but she couldn’t stop herself from asking, “Sorry for what?”
He picked at the stitching on his boot. “When I chased you. When I—” He stopped. “What I did when I caught you.”
Sara blushed at the memory.
He said, “I was out of control.”
She couldn’t let him take all the blame. “We were both out of control.”
“I hurt you.”
“I’m not Amish, Will. I’ve had rough sex before.”
His startled look told her he thought it was something else.
“I didn’t tell you to stop.” Sara couldn’t understand how he could be so wrong about something so obvious. “I was never afraid of you. I was furious. I wanted to hurt you. But I wasn’t afraid.”
His eyes glistened. She couldn’t tell if it was from the whiskey anymore.
“Will, I was mad at you—I’m still mad—because you lied to me. Not just once, but repeatedly. Obviously, something happened to you last night, too. We took it out on each other. It’s what adults do sometimes. But you need to know that you can’t just fuck me silly and make everything better.”
He was still upset. His voice was filled with self-recrimination. “I never wanted to be that way with you.”
“Baby—” The word came out of her mouth so naturally. Sara could see the effect it had on him, and she understood that as bad as things were for her last night, they’d gotten so much worse for Will after he left.
Sara sat down on the edge of the bed. “Please, just talk to me.”
He didn’t look at her. He leaned forward, elbows on his knees. She could see his jaw clenching and unclenching. A dark red mark crisscrossed the side of his forehead. There was a waffle print to the pattern, as if someone had kicked him.
He said, “I came here for somebody else.”
“Who?”
Will gripped his hands together. He stared at the floor. When he finally spoke, his voice was so soft that she could barely hear him. “I feel like I’m disappearing.”
Of all the things he could’ve said, this was the least expected. Sara didn’t know how to respond.
Will obviously didn’t expect her to. His jaw worked again. She could tell every fiber of his being wanted to stop. Still, he said, “All my life, I’ve been invisible. At school. At the home. At work. I do my job. I go home. I get up the next morning and I do it all over again.” He gripped his hands tighter. Seconds passed before he managed to continue. “You changed that. You made me want to get up in the morning. You made me want to come home to you.” He finally met her gaze. “You’re the first person in my life who’s ever really seen me.”
Sara still couldn’t speak, but this time it was because she was too overwhelmed. The sound of his desolation broke her in two.
“I can’t go back to that.” His voice was gruff. “I can’t.”
Sara couldn’t let him. Her anger slipped away like sand through her fingers. She gently cradled her hand to his face. She knew this man. She knew his heart. Will hadn’t hurt her on purpose. He’d been stupid and stubborn, but not malicious. And Sara couldn’t be the woman Lena Adams thought she was. She couldn’t demand perfection. She couldn’t set her standards so high that no one could meet them.
She had already lost the first love of her life. She couldn’t lose the second one.
“Okay.” She rested her hand on the nape of his neck. “We’ll be okay.”
His eyes scanned her face, looking for any sign of equivocation. “Do you mean that?”
She nodded.
He nodded, too, as if he still needed to convince himself. “I’m sorry I hurt you. I was wrong.”
“Please, don’t do it again.” Sara closed the distance between them. She wrapped her arms around his shoulders. “I’m your girlfriend. This isn’t just about keeping things from me. It’s about trusting me. I may not understand, or agree, but you have to trust me enough to tell me the truth.”
“You’re right.” He held her close to his chest. His fingers stroked through her hair. She felt his lips press against the top of her head. “I need you to promise me something.”
She pulled back so that she could see him. “Okay.”
“Promise me we’re never going to break up again.”
She started to laugh, but there was a sincerity to his tone that stopped her.
Will said, “Actually, I’ll promise. I’ll never leave you.” He sounded more certain than she had ever heard him. “You can tell me to go, but I won’t. I’ll sleep in my car outside your house. I’ll follow you to work. To the gym. If you go out to dinner, I’ll be at the next table. If you go to a movie, I’ll be in the row behind you.”
Sara felt her brow furrow. “You’re going to stalk me?”
He shrugged his shoulder, as if this was all a done deal. “I love you.”
She finally laughed. “Well, that’s a really shitty way to say it.”
“I love you.”
Her response came as naturally as taking a breath before jumping into the deep end of the water. “I love you, too.”
He leaned in but didn’t kiss her. Despite his forceful words, he waited for permission. Sara touched her lips to his as softly as she could. The kiss was chaste, but it was enough.
He said, “We’re okay.”
She nodded. “We’re okay.”
He held her hand in both of his. He kissed her fingers. Then he turned her wrist and looked at her watch. “We need to go.”
“Where?”
He stood abruptly. “I’ll tell you about it on the way. Lena found something.”
Sara guessed, “A winning lottery ticket?”
“No.” He helped her up from the bed. “She found a little boy.”
Sara pulled her BMW into an open garage bay. There were two other cars inside the metal structure, which was several yards from a sprawling, single-story house. They were on a horse farm. She could see a few mares and a colt out by a red barn. The sun was just cracking the horizon. The horses silently chewed some grass as they watched the garage door close.
Sara recognized the black Suburban parked beside them as a G-ride, or a government-issued SUV. She assumed either Faith or Amanda was here. The sheriff’s cruiser in the far bay probably belonged to the owner of the farm. Keeping horses was as costly as it was risky. Normally, amateur farmers had to seek out more steady employment. Sara had been thrown from a horse twice in her life. She imagined owning a horse farm was only marginally less dangerous than being a she
riff’s deputy.
Will got out of the car. He opened the back door and retrieved her medical bag from the back seat. He didn’t hand Sara the bag. He carried it for her.
“This way,” Will said, heading toward a side door.
Sara followed him as he picked his way past various small machinery taking up the last bay in the four-bay garage. She took Will’s hand to steady herself as she stepped over a tractor attachment that looked like a gigantic yard rake. He held on longer than necessary. She stroked his fingers with her thumb, wishing she could erase the past twenty-four hours and start all over again. Or maybe not. In so many strange ways, she felt closer to Will than ever before.
Faith opened the door before Will could. She avoided looking at Sara. “Find it okay?”
Sara said, “The GPS led us straight here.”
“Good.” She reached into her purse and pulled out a handful of Jolly Ranchers candy. “The boy’s still asleep. We didn’t want to wake him until we had to. Denise and her girlfriend are in the house with one of the paramedics. The doctor read the message board, so he knows not to come.”
“Sounds good.” Will took the candy and shoved it into his pocket. “I’ve got around two hours before I’m due at the hospital.
What’s the plan?”
Sara felt her stomach lurch at the thought of him going back undercover, but she kept her thoughts to herself.
Faith said, “The other paramedic is on her way with the bus. I was about to head over to dispatch. I want to be sitting on the supervisor so no one panics when they go off-radio. We don’t know how far this thing reaches. I’ll stay there until I get the word that the boy’s in Atlanta.”
Will asked, “Who’s going to follow the ambulance? Sara’s not going without backup.”
“Denise will be behind them the whole way. She’ll have her piece and her shotgun. Amanda thinks a larger escort team would alert Big Whitey.”
Will held out his phone to Sara. “Use this to check in with Faith every half hour.”
Sara tried not to bristle at being ordered around. “I’ve got my hospital BlackBerry.”
“The 689 number?” She nodded, and he pocketed his phone. “I’m serious. These people don’t mind collateral damage. You need to call Faith every half hour until you’re safe at the hospital.”
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