He asked, ‘What did you do?’
‘I didn’t do anything.’ Amanda dropped the pill case back into her pocket. ‘Angie disappeared. She abandoned her child. None of this should surprise you.’
Sara asked, ‘Did the baby survive?’
‘Yes. I never found out what happened to her. She was lost in the system.’
Their marriage application.
Angie had filled out the form. They were sitting outside the probate office. The sunflower ring was already on her finger. Angie had read the questions aloud. Over the age of sixteen? Sure. Ever been married before? Not that you know of. Father’s name? Who the fuck knows. Mother’s name? Doesn’t matter. Related to the intended spouse—uh-oh. Her pen scratched the paper as she scribbled in the answers. Children? Not me, baby. She had laughed her deep, husky laugh. Not that I know of, anyway . . .
Amanda said, ‘The daughter was born in January. She would be twenty-seven now. Delilah Palmer is twenty-two.’
Sara cleared her throat. ‘Do you know who the father is?’
Amanda said, ‘It’s not Will.’
Will wondered if that was true. That time in the basement. They hadn’t used a condom. Angie wasn’t on the pill. Then again, Will wasn’t the only boy she took into the basement.
Sara’s fingers were on his wrist again. ‘Your pulse is still thready.’
Will pulled away his hand. He stood up. He looked at the closed double doors. He did not need to see the body again to know the truth.
The sunflower ring. The car. The blood.
Her ring. Her car. Her blood.
Her baby.
Angie would abandon a baby. For some inexplicable reason, Will accepted this as proof above everything else. Angie did not have the capacity or the desire to care for something every single day for the rest of her life. Self-survival, not empathy, had always been her guiding principle. Will had seen it last Saturday and he could easily see it happening twenty-seven years ago. Angie went to the hospital. She’d had the baby. She’d left as soon as possible.
And now she was dead.
Will asked Sara, ‘Can we go home?’
‘Yes.’ She put her keys in his hand. ‘Go wait for me in the car. I’ll be right there.’
Amanda worked her BlackBerry. ‘I’ll tell Faith to wait with him.’
Will understood that a conversation was going to take place between Sara and Amanda, and that he would be the subject, but he didn’t have the wherewithal to fight it. His chest was still caught in a vise. There was a rock inside his stomach.
He climbed the stairs. He shoved his hand in his pocket to wipe it clean. What was left of the pill had melted into chalk. Some of the Xanax had gotten into his system. He was dizzy by the time he reached the end of the hall. His mouth tasted gritty. He tried three doors before he found the chapel. The lights were off, but between the large windows and the downtown glow, the rows of pews were easy to see.
He looked up at the arched ceiling. Huge chandeliers hung down like jewelry. Gray carpet lined the aisle between the pews. The stage was flat, a lectern to the side. He guessed it was as non-denominational as a chapel could be. Will had been to church twice with Sara, once at Easter and once on Christmas Eve. She wasn’t religious, but she loved the pageantry. Will could still recall his surprise when she sang along with the congregation. She knew all the words by heart.
Angie despised religion. She was one of those arrogant assholes who thought all believers were mentally deranged. She had been driven here in the trunk of her car. She had been carried down to the freezer. Her wedding ring was still on her finger. Had she been alive when the ring was put on? Had she asked the person with her to make sure that she wore it even in death?
Will felt a burning sensation in his chest. He was rubbing his skin raw. What were the symptoms of a panic attack? He didn’t want to ask Sara because she would probably shove another pill in his mouth.
Why had she done that? She knew he hated anything stronger than aspirin. He hated it even more that she had seen him upset. He’d acted like a pathetic kid. She would probably never want to have sex with him again.
Will sat down on the steps to the stage. He fished his phone out of his back pocket. Instead of Googling ‘panic attacks’, he lay back on the carpet. He looked up at the crystals sparkling in the chandelier. The weight started to lift off his chest. His lungs filled with air. He was floating. This was the Xanax. Will didn’t like it. Nothing good ever came out of losing control.
Delilah Palmer. She could’ve been at Rippy’s club when Harding died. She could’ve tried to save Angie. She could’ve driven Angie’s body here. She could’ve called in the false alarm to get Belcamino to leave, then watched him work the security panel at the elevator. One trip down to the basement. Another trip back up. She leaves Angie’s car here. She walks to her rental car and never looks back.
Will’s eyes would not stay open. He realized his head was where the casket would go during a funeral service. He would have to plan Angie’s funeral. It would be easier to have it here. She would want to be cremated. Belcamino could take care of that—put it on his form, process her for the crematorium.
Who would come to the funeral? Amanda and Faith, because they would feel obligated. Sara? He couldn’t ask her, but she would probably volunteer. What about her mother and father? They were good country people. Cathy would probably bake a casserole. Or would she? Will knew that Sara’s mother didn’t trust him. She wasn’t wrong. He hadn’t told Sara about Saturday. He hadn’t told her about a lot of things.
Cops would come to the funeral. That’s what you did when another cop died, no matter whether or not that cop was a good cop or a bad cop or retired. Lovers would attend—plenty of those. Old friends—not so much. Enemies, maybe. The father of her child. Maybe her child. Twenty-seven years old. Angry. Abandoned. Wanting answers that Will could not give.
He felt his eyelids relax. His face. His shoulders. An eerie silence settled in.
He was in a quiet chapel. It was the middle of the night. Angie was dead. This is when he should feel it: the overwhelming loss, the hollowness that Sara had described. She had been so angry at him for not being more devastated. Maybe something had broken inside of him. Maybe that was Angie’s last piece of vengeance: she had turned off the thing inside of Will that was capable of feeling.
His phone buzzed in his hand. Faith was probably looking for him. He answered, ‘I’m in the chapel.’
‘Really?’ Not Faith. Another woman, her voice low and cool.
Will looked at the screen. The caller ID was blocked. ‘Who is this?’
‘It’s me, baby.’ Angie gave her deep, husky laugh. ‘Did you miss me?’
One Week Earlier
MONDAY, 7:22 PM
Angie Polaski stood up from her desk. She closed her office door. Muffled voices bled through, some asshole agent bragging to another asshole agent about money. Her hand stayed wrapped around the doorknob, strangling it. She hated this place with its stupid rich kids. She hated the perfect secretaries. She hated the pictures on the wall. She hated the athletes who’d built this place.
She could go blind listing all the things she hated.
She sat back down at her desk. She stared at the screen on her laptop, feeling like actual fire was coming out of her eyes. If the damn computer hadn’t cost so much, she would’ve thrown it on the floor and crushed it with her heel.
She’s got his past. I’ve got him.
Angie checked the date on the email that Sara had written to her sister. Eight months ago. By Angie’s calculation, Sara had been screwing Will for only four months when she wrote the words. Pretty arrogant for her to think that Will was hers for the taking.
Angie arrowed up to reread the paragraph.
I never thought I could feel this way about another man again.
Sara sounded less like a doctor and more like a stupid teenage girl. It seemed appropriate. Sara Linton was the exact kind of simpering, clueless girl you�
�d find at the center of a kids’ novel—the one who stared moodily out the rain-streaked window and couldn’t decide whether or not to date the vampire or the werewolf. Meanwhile, the so-called bad girl, the girl who was fun at parties, the one who would give you the best fuck of your life, was relegated to the corner, bound to end up seeing the error of her bad-girl ways just before taking a stake to the heart.
I’ve got him.
Angie slammed the laptop closed.
She shouldn’t have cloned Sara’s laptop. Not because it was wrong—fuck that—but because it was torture reading the slow process of Sara falling in love with Will.
There were literally hundreds of emails from the last year and a half. Sara wrote to her younger sister four or five times a week. Tessa wrote back just as often. They talked about their lives in mind-numbing detail. They complained about their mother. They joked about their absentminded father. Tessa gossiped about the people living in Dirt Town, or wherever the hell she was a missionary. Sara talked about her patients at the hospital and new outfits she had bought for Will and how she had tried a new perfume for Will and that she had to get a doctor friend to write her a prescription because of Will.
If not for anything else, Angie despised Sara because she’d made her have to Google the words ‘honeymoon cystitis’.
Angie hadn’t been able to stomach the gooey, lovestruck bullshit for long. She had skimmed ahead through the emails, looking for clues that the new car smell was wearing off. Will was far from perfect. He had a habit of picking up everything you put down, putting it away before you were finished using it. He had to immediately fix anything that was broken, no matter what time of day it was. He flossed his teeth too much. He would leave one sheet of toilet paper on the roll because he was too cheap to waste it.
Had the most perfect night last night, Sara had written last month. My God, that man.
Angie stood up from her chair. She went to the window. She looked down at Peachtree. Evening rush hour. Cars were shuffling along the clogged roadway. She felt a pain in her hands. She looked down. Her fingernails were digging into her palms.
Was this what it felt like to be jealous?
Angie hadn’t expected Sara to stick around. Women like that didn’t like messy things, and Angie had repeatedly made it clear that Will’s life was messy. What she hadn’t anticipated was that Will would fight for Sara to stay. Angie had assumed the other woman was a trifle, something Will had been coerced into trying but would never enjoy, like the time Angie had talked him into buying a pair of sandals.
Then she had seen them together at Home Depot.
It was early spring, so maybe five months ago. Angie was at the store buying light bulbs. Will and Sara had walked through the entrance, so up each other’s butts that they hadn’t seen Angie standing five feet away. They were holding hands, swinging their arms back and forth in a wide arc. Angie had followed them to the gardening section. She had stood in the adjacent aisle listening to them talk about mulch, because that’s how tedious their lives were.
Sara had offered to get a shopping cart. Will had picked up the bag and thrown it onto his shoulder.
Babe, Sara had said. Look at how strong you are.
Angie waited for Will to tell her to get the fuck out, but he hadn’t. He had laughed. He had hooked his arm around her waist. Sara had nuzzled his neck like a dog. They had shuffled off to look at flowers and Angie had broken every single light bulb she had in her basket.
‘Polaski?’ Dale Harding stood in the doorway. His suit was wrinkled. The buttons of his shirt strained around his gut. She felt the usual disgust she always felt around Dale—not because of his weight or his sloppiness or that he had sold his own daughter to feed his gambling habit, but because Angie could never hate him as much as she wanted to.
He said, ‘Party’s about to start.’
‘Your eyes are yellow.’
He shrugged. ‘It’s what happens.’
Dale was checking out. They both knew this. They didn’t talk about it. ‘How’s Dee?’
‘She’s all right. Out of the closet.’
They both smirked at the double meaning. Delilah had busted out of her last rehab facility, so Dale had decided the quickest way to dry her out was to lock her in his closet.
He said, ‘I gotta line on a doc who’ll give her a legit script for the Suboxone.’
‘Good,’ Angie said. The maintenance drug was the only thing that kept Delilah off heroin. Because of government regulations, it was hard to come by. Angie had been scoring it through a dealer she didn’t quite trust, banking on Dale dying soon so that she could stop aiding and abetting his worthless junkie of a daughter. Wife. Whatever. ‘Did you talk to that lawyer?’
‘Yeah, but I—’
His answer was cut off by loud cheering. Champagne corks popped. Rap music pulsed through every speaker in the office. The party had started.
They both knew that Kip Kilpatrick would be looking for them. Dale stepped aside so that Angie could go first. She smoothed down her skirt as she walked. Her high heels were killing her feet, but she would be damned if she wasn’t going to go toe-to-toe with the young bitches in the office. They were all so clueless, their unlined faces and pouty lips contorting into confusion when Angie had to lean over the sink in the bathroom so she could get close enough to the mirror to reapply her eyeliner. There was no joy in telling them they were going to be forty-three someday, because when that day came, she would already be in a nursing home.
Or dead.
Maybe Dale had it right. Much easier to go out on your own terms. He probably would’ve done it a lot sooner if not for his worthless daughter. There was something to be said about living child-free.
‘There’s my girl.’ Kip Kilpatrick was standing at the top of the floating glass staircase. As usual, he had a basketball in his hands. The guy couldn’t go anywhere without the damn thing. He said, ‘I need you after this. My office.’
‘We’ll see.’ Angie brushed past him. She checked the room, looking for a familiar face. None of the big names had arrived yet. It was mostly twenty-somethings in skinny suits drinking Cristal like it was water.
She saw a large-scale architectural model underneath the LED sign. This was what the party was all about. The last pieces of the All-Star deal had finally come together. They were going to break ground in exactly two weeks. Angie looked down at the glass-enclosed model. Converted warehouses. Open-air shopping. Grocery store. Movie theater. Farmers’ market. Chic restaurants. Marcus Rippy’s abandoned nightclub.
Abandoned no more. The team would go in a week from now to spiff the place up. The club anchored the All-Star Complex, an almost-three-billion-dollar venture that all the agency’s big stars had invested in. And some of the little stars, too. Kilpatrick was in for ten million. Two other agents had invested half that. Then there was the team of lawyers, an international cavalcade of leeches who, as far as Angie could see, were worth every freaking dime.
Will had tried to crack the lawyers a month ago and come out the loser. Angie had been rooting for him. She really had been. He had faced them all across the weirdly large conference table, doing his best to get any kind of answer. Marcus and LaDonna Rippy were almost secondary. Every time Will opened his mouth, Marcus looked at the lawyers and the lawyers spun the answer into a kind of beautiful gibberish that only a Martian or a politician could understand.
Angie had watched the entire thing from her office one floor down. Will had no idea that everything in the conference room was recorded. He sure as shit didn’t know she was close by. On her screen she could see him looking more and more frustrated as the lawyers threw out more and more obstacles. All Angie could do was shake her head. Poor thing. He was asking Marcus questions when he should’ve been talking to LaDonna.
‘Hey, doll.’ Laslo was leaning against a desk. A flute of champagne was in his hand. He was wearing his usual tight black pants and shirt. The look wasn’t bad. He had a fantastic body. And a bitchy nose for fash
ion. He glanced down at her shoes. ‘How much?’
‘Fifty,’ she said, annoyed that he had noticed they were knockoffs. Thanks to her job, she finally had enough cash in the bank to buy the real thing, but they weren’t as comfortable as the fakes and her back could only take so much standing around before it started to spasm.
He said, ‘We gotta thing later.’
‘Kip already flagged me.’
Laslo sipped his champagne. They both watched Kip tossing the basketball in the air. His eyes were on the door to the lobby. He was like a lovelorn schoolgirl. Like Sara Linton waiting for Will to come home.
My heart jumps in my chest every time I hear his key in the door.
‘Yo.’ Laslo snapped his fingers. ‘You in there?’
She took his glass and downed the champagne. ‘What does Kip want?’
Laslo shushed his finger to his lips and walked away.
‘Ma’am?’ A good-looking waiter offered her a tray of champagne glasses.
Angie wasn’t old enough to be a God damm ma’am. She snatched a glass off the tray. She walked across the room, picking her way past the Snotleighs and Bratleighs who made up the 110 Sports Management team.
Five months ago, she had tapped Dale Harding for a job. He’d been his usual asshole self about it, but Angie knew how to be an asshole, too. She’d told him that she needed money to pay off her dealer. He’d believed her, because Dale’s life was filled with dealers and bookies who took out interest with their fists. Angie had never had a dealer problem. What she had was a Kip Kilpatrick problem. She needed a way into the agent’s inner circle, and Dale was ideally equipped to understand the expertise that Angie could bring to the table.
Many of Kip’s clients were from the street. They missed the girls they used to have fun with. Angie knew these girls. She understood how their habits were grinding them into the ground. Backing off the pipe or needle a little, cleaning up a little, and letting a rich basketball player show them a good time was a hell of a lot easier on their bodies than throwing down in the back seat of twenty different cars every single day. And if it put a little money in Angie’s pocket, all the better.
The Kept Woman (Will Trent 8) Page 23