Faith clapped dust from her arms and ran her fingers through her hair to get rid of the grit. The rotting meat smell was so pungent that she had to open the bedroom windows. And push out the screens, because the flies were starting to swarm. Ripping down the ceiling probably hadn’t been her best idea, but logic tended to go out the window when she was pissed off, and she was really pissed off at Dale Harding.
At the GBI, Faith had investigated her share of bad cops, and the one trait that they all had in common was that they thought they were still good guys. Theft, rape, murder, extortion, racketeering, pimping—it didn’t matter. They still thought the crimes they had committed were for the greater good. They were taking care of their families. They were protecting their brothers in blue. They had made a mistake. They would never do it again. It was annoying how they were all the same in their insistence that they were still basically good human beings.
Harding hadn’t just embraced his badness. He had forced it on others.
And now she had to go through even more of his crap.
Faith dragged the chair over to the window. She kicked the boxes in the same direction, then she sat down. She tried not to think about why the lid on the first box felt damp, but her mind still conjured up the useful fact that rats leave a trail of urine wherever they go.
She shuddered before digging into the stack of neatly labeled files.
Dale Harding had been a private eye, and the first box contained the sort of glamorous work done by PIs the world over: photos of cheating spouses in cheap motels, photos of cheating spouses in parked cars, photos of cheating spouses in alleyways and roadside gas stations and inside a kid’s playhouse in the backyard.
Harding’s record keeping was meticulous. Receipts for gas and meals and developing photos were stapled to expense reports. Daily logs followed the movements of his targets. He wrote in a tiny, block lettering and his spelling was exactly what you’d expect from a guy who probably went from high school to the police academy. Not that Faith hadn’t done the same, but at least she knew the difference between you’re and your.
Collier stood in the doorway. “Closet’s clear.”
“You probably should’ve had the bomb squad check it.”
Finally, he registered something other than cocky self-assuredness as they both realized that considering Harding, it wasn’t exactly a joke.
He said, “Something was in the closet at some point. There’s an impression in the carpet. Round, like a five-gallon bucket.”
Faith stood up so that she could see for herself. The two unis were back on their phones, heads down, thumbs working. She could probably murder Collier with the tire iron right in front of them and they wouldn’t notice.
The closet door had been propped up against the wall. Faith used the flashlight app on her phone to examine the inside of the four-by-eight walk-in closet. It was just as Collier had said. In the back corner, a circle impression was imprinted into the brown carpet. She scanned the rest of the closet. The rods had been removed. Wires dangled down where the light fixture should have been. The white walls were scuffed at the bottom. The enclosed space had a lingering odor of raw sewage.
Collier said, “We see this a lot. Drug mules come up from Mexico with pellets or powder heroin in their stomachs. They shit them out in a bucket, take their money, then head back to Mexico to fill up again.”
“You think a place like this, where they have to specifically ban lawn jockeys in the yards, wouldn’t be lighting up 9-1-1 if they saw a bunch of Mexicans going in and out of Harding’s house?” She told the unis, “Turn the door around.”
“We gotta boot. Dispatch called.” Neither looked up from their phones as they walked out of the room.
Collier seemed impressed. “Good guys, right?”
Faith wrapped her hands around the edges of the door. Of course it was solid wood. She tilted it onto its corner and swiveled the door around. She lost her grip at the last minute. The top edge of the door slammed into the wall, leaving a gash. Faith stepped back to look. There were scratch marks low on the wood. She double-checked the hinges, making sure she was looking at the side that faced into the closet.
“The rat?” Collier guessed.
Faith took a photo of the scratches. “We need to get forensics in here.”
“My guys or your guys?”
“Mine.” Faith sent the photo to Charlie Reed, who would likely be open to a change of scenery after processing Marcus Rippy’s nightclub for the last seven hours. She texted him the address and told him to process the closet first thing. She wasn’t a scientist, but a five-gallon bucket and a locked closet door with scratches on the back probably meant that someone had been kept inside.
Or, it could be more of Harding’s bullshit waste of their time.
Collier said, “The closet door was locked when we got here. Why lock the door when there’s nothing in there?”
“Why did Harding do anything?” Faith went back into the other bedroom. She sat down in the chair and started putting the cheating spouse files back into the first box. Collier stood in the doorway again. She told him, “There’s nothing here, at least not the kind of thing you’d hide behind a rat.”
“I don’t care what Violet said. That thing looked pregnant.” Collier sat down on the mattress. It made a farting sound. He gave Faith the exact look that she expected him to give. He pushed the lid off the second box. There were no file folders, just a stack of pages with lots of nude photos on top.
Collier took the pictures. He handed Faith the papers.
She thumbed through them quickly. Hospital admittance records. Arrest warrants. Rehab. Rap sheet. They were all for one person. Delilah Jean Palmer, twenty-two years old, current address the Cheshire Motor Inn, which was a known hangout for prostitutes. There was no family listed. From birth, Palmer had been a ward of the state.
She was also a current model for BackDoorMan.com. Palmer’s most recent booking photo showed the same woman from the racy pictures Sara had found inside Dale Harding’s wallet. Her hair was different in each photo, sometimes platinum blonde, sometimes her natural brown, sometimes purple or pink.
“It’s her.” Collier leaned over, his shoulder pressed against Faith’s arm. He showed her a larger image of the wallet-sized photos: Delilah Palmer leaning over a kitchen counter, her head turned back toward the camera, mouth open, approximating sexual excitement. He said, “I’m gonna guess she’s not a real blonde. See, I’m a fast learner, Mitchell. You should keep me around.”
Faith knew that the GBIs computer division was already looking into BackDoorMan.com, but she told Collier, “Why don’t you check the website?”
“Good idea.” He took out his phone. With any luck, he would waste the next hour looking at porn so that she could get some work done.
So, basically like every romantic relationship Faith had ever had in her life.
She returned to the documents for a more careful reading. She realized she was holding Delilah Palmer’s juvenile records, which was strange, because juvenile records were usually sealed. Palmer’s first arrest was at the age of ten for selling Oxy at John Wesley Dobbs Elementary in East Atlanta. Faith had spent quite some time at Dobbs while helping the state build a RICO case against the Atlanta Public School system for widespread cheating on standardized tests. Some of the faculty had hosted a fish and grits sit-down dinner where they erased and changed the answers on students’ Scantrons. Meanwhile, 99.5% of their struggling student body qualified for free or assisted lunch.
Faith studied Palmer’s first booking photo from twelve years ago. The girl’s hands were so small that she couldn’t hold the reader board straight for the camera. The top of her head didn’t reach the first line in the ruler painted on the wall behind her. There were scabs on her face. Her short brown hair was unwashed. She had dark circles under her eyes, either from lack of sleep, lack of food, or lack of belonging.
Delilah would’ve been an oddity at Dobbs, and not just because she had en
tered the drug trafficking trade at such an early age. Last month, when Faith was preparing documents for the RICO trial, she had to explain to the district attorney that she hadn’t made a mistake in her charts. In 2012, Dobbs did not have a 5% white student body. They had a total of five white students. Had the demographics been reversed, there was no way the city would’ve allowed that level of corruption to go unchecked for so long.
Faith flipped to Delilah’s next arrest. More Oxy sales at age twelve and then again at fifteen. By sixteen, Delilah had dropped out of school and was slinging heroin, which was what happened when you couldn’t afford Oxy anymore. A single 80 milligram pill could run sixty to one hundred dollars, depending on the market. The same money for a bag of heroin could keep you high for days.
She flipped ahead to the charging sheets. Parole. Diversion treatment. More parole. Rehab.
Despite her criminal history, Delilah Palmer had never spent more than a night in jail.
Her first prostitution arrest came at the end of her sixteenth year. There were four more arrests for solicitation, two more for selling pot and heroin, respectively, all accompanied by a free, one-night accommodation in the Fulton County jail.
Faith scanned the names of the arresting officers. Some of them were familiar. Most of them were from zone six, which made sense, because criminals were like everybody else. They tended to stay in their own neighborhoods.
Dale Harding had also worked in zone six. He had obviously kept an eye on Delilah Palmer for most of her life. Reading between the lines, Faith guessed that he’d called in every favor he had to keep the girl from doing serious time.
Collier said, “You gonna share or do I have to guess?”
“You smell like vomit.”
“I just threw up. Didn’t you hear me in the bathroom? It, like, echoed.”
She handed him Delilah Palmer’s rap sheet. “Two bedrooms, two beds. Someone was staying here with Harding.”
“You think it was this Palmer chick?” He frowned. “She ain’t much, but she could do better than Harding.”
Faith thought about the locked closet, the bucket, the sewage smell. Harding could’ve been doing his own rehab. Cold turkey in a closet was a hell of a lot cheaper than fifteen grand for in-patient treatment. Again. That might better explain the squalor. This place certainly looked like a junkie was living here.
“Didja see over there?” Collier nodded toward a retainer on the floor. “My sisters all wore those after they got their braces off. Like, not the same retainer, different ones, but they were all small, just like that one. Meaning it’s sized like what a girl would wear in her mouth.”
Faith couldn’t understand why he used so many words to say just one thing. “What about the website?”
“Nothing popped out.” He laughed. “Pun intended. I’m more of a front door man myself. Especially the knockers.”
Faith felt the strain of her eyes rolling.
“You know what, Mitchell? When I first met you, I figured we’d end up in a bedroom looking at porn.”
Faith started to stand.
“Hold on.” He grabbed a stack of photographs from the box. “Lookit these. Delilah’s been modeling for a while. The BackDoorMan.com ones, I’d say they started when she was around sixteen. The earlier ones don’t have a website or identifying marks, but I’d put her closer to twelve, maybe thirteen.”
Faith put the photos side by side with the mug shots from Delilah’s various arrests. Collier’s estimate was off by a few years. Faith could pin down the age back to the girl’s first arrest at ten years old. The illicit image was heartbreaking. Delilah was dressed in lace panties and a bra that must have been clipped in the back so it wouldn’t slide down to her feet. She didn’t have a waist yet, or curves, or anything but baby fat that the heroin would eventually wear away. Faith looked at her dull, lifeless eyes. Everything about the girl reeked of abandon.
Why was Harding, who by all accounts didn’t give a shit about anyone or anything, so interested in this abandoned girl? What did she mean to him?
Collier asked, “What’s next, Kemosabe?”
“I’ll be right back.” Faith stood up. She went back into the kitchen. Again, Collier followed her. He was like a kid, always underfoot. She longed for Will’s quiet self-containment. “We can be apart for longer than two seconds.”
“Then how will I know what you’re up to?”
She opened the freezer door. Ice cream and alcohol filled the shelves, but there was also a quart-sized Ziploc bag with a stack of papers shoved into the back. Freezer burn had melded it to a box of fish fingers. Faith had to hit the box on the side of the fridge to break away the bag.
People with chronic or end-stage diseases were told to leave valuable documents like medical directives in their freezer so that paramedics could easily find them. As horrible a man as Harding was, he had managed to follow the guideline. Except his directive explicitly stated that all possible measures should be taken to preserve his life.
“Je-sus,” Collier said, because of course he was reading over Faith’s shoulder. “The guy’s got a death warrant, but he wants the paramedics to keep him alive for as long as possible?”
“This was filled out two years ago. Maybe he forgot about it.” Faith found the contact information on the second page.
Next of kin: Delilah Jean Palmer
Relationship: daughter
“She was his kid,” Collier said, because he had forgotten that Faith had eyes in her head. “Her juvie rap sheet listed her as an orphan.”
There were three phone numbers beside Delilah’s name, two of which had lines drawn through them. All of them were in different shades of ink. Faith used Harding’s landline and dialed the most recent number. It went straight into a prerecorded message from the phone company informing Faith that the number had been disconnected.
She tried the other two numbers just to be sure.
Disconnected.
Collier took out his cell phone. “My turn to work some magic?”
“Help yourself.”
Collier started to follow her back to the bedroom, but she put her hand out to stop him. “We don’t have to do everything together.”
“What if the rat comes back? With its babies?”
“Scream really loud.”
She headed down the hallway again, glancing up the attic stairs because the rat was still up there, possibly giving birth to triplets, because that was the kind of day she was having. Thank God Faith had made more holes in the ceiling in case the thing decided it wanted to expand its territory.
She sat down in the chair and made herself look at the photos of Delilah again.
Putting aside how disgusting it was that a father kept pictures of his naked daughter, age twelve, bending over a stick riding horse, there was something off about the girl. Faith couldn’t articulate what made the photos different from the hundreds of similar photos she had seen throughout her law enforcement career, but it was there.
Exploitation had a common theme: misery. Delilah’s eyes were glassy, likely from the heroin that had either been given or withheld so that she would pose for the camera. Her thighs were red where someone had been rough with her. A thin powdering of makeup barely concealed the bruising around her neck. There was lipstick on her teeth. None of this was new or particularly surprising.
It was that same feeling Faith had been having all day: something wasn’t adding up.
Faith hated when things didn’t add up.
“It’s weird that they’re pictures, right?” Collier was hovering in the doorway again.
Faith said, “You mean like some fathers keep school pictures of their kids, only Harding kept naked photos?”
“No, I mean why doesn’t he have videos? Porn is the sole reason for the internet. It ruined the nudie pic industry. Even Playboy gave up the ghost.”
“You’re asking why Harding was looking at naked pictures of his daughter instead of naked videos?”
“Basically
. Shit.” He clapped his hand to his throat. He coughed. “I think I swallowed a fly.”
“Try keeping your mouth shut.”
“Ha-ha.” He sat down on the mattress again. It made the sound again. He gave her the look. Again. “I asked my girl in records to run a priority background on little Delilah. We’ll see what she’s been up to lately. With Harding dead, she’ll wind up in jail soon, and there won’t be anybody to get her out.”
“She could know something,” Faith said. “We have to figure out what Harding was up to over the last week or so of his life. That’s going to tell us why he ended up in Rippy’s nightclub.” She tried to talk through what was bothering her. “Was he a pedophile or a bad father?”
“My vote goes for both.”
“He must’a broken his piggy bank over this chick.” A cop’s currency was knowing who to call, and also knowing that when that person called you back, you did what they wanted no questions asked. “This isn’t asking a uni to lose a speeding ticket. These are high-level favors, lieutenants and parole officers and judges, even. No way he could pay all of that back. He worked white-collar. He didn’t have the juice. There was probably nobody left on the force who would answer his calls.”
“You know the story about the dad who stopped going to work. He couldn’t leave his little girl’s behind.”
Faith shook her head, wishing Collier would shut the hell up. Will’s sense of humor could be irreverent, but he would never, ever joke about a man molesting his own child.
Miraculously, Collier finally picked up on her mood. “Harding doesn’t have a computer or a printer.”
Faith checked the paper stock on the photos. “These weren’t printed at a lab. Somebody did them privately.”
“You think someone printed them out for him?”
“For what? Blackmail?” She thought about Harding’s windfall six months ago. He moved into the Mesa Arms. He bought a new car. “It would be the other way around. Harding’s the one who came into some scratch. I have a good mind to call the lottery board and run his name.”
The Kept Woman Page 12