She sounded like she was giving testimony in court. Every observation had supporting evidence, every educated guess was framed as an estimation. Faith asked, "How long do you think she was kept?"
"At least four days. Though gauging by how malnourished she was, it might be as much as a week to ten days."
Faith didn't want to think about the woman being tortured for ten days. "How are you so sure about the four days?"
"The cut on the breast here," Sara replied, indicating the side of her own breast. "It was deep, already septic, with signs of insect activity. You'd have to talk to an entomologist to pin down the pupation—the developmental stage of the insect—but considering she was still alive, that her body was relatively warm and there was a fresh blood supply to feed on, four days is a solid guess." She added, "I don't imagine they'll be able to save the tissue."
Faith kept her lips pressed tightly together, resisting the urge to put her hand over her own breast. How many pieces of yourself could you lose and still go on?
Sara kept talking, though Faith had not prompted her. "The eleventh rib, here," she touched her abdomen. "That was recent, probably earlier today or late yesterday, and done with precision."
"Surgical precision?"
"No." She shook her head. "Confidence. There were no hesitation marks, no test cuts. The person was confident in what they were doing."
Faith thought the doctor seemed pretty confident herself. "How do you think it was done?"
Sara took out her prescription pad and started drawing a bunch of curved lines that only made sense when she explained, "The ribs are numbered in pairs starting at the top and going down, twelve each side, left and right." She tapped the lines with her pen. "Number one is just under the clavicle and twelve is the last one here." She looked up to make sure Faith was following. "Now, eleven and twelve at the bottom are considered to be 'floating,' because they don't have an anterior connection. They only connect at the back, not the front." She drew a straight line to indicate the spine. "The top seven ribs connect at the back and then attach to the sternum—like a big crescent. The next three rows connect roughly to the ribs above. They're called false ribs. All of this is very elastic so that you can breathe, and it's also why it's hard to break a rib with a direct blow—they bend quite a bit."
Faith was leaning forward, hanging on her every word. "So, this was done by someone with medical knowledge?"
"Not necessarily. You can feel your own ribs with your fingers. You know where they are in your body."
"But, still—"
"Look." She sat up straight, raising her right arm and pressing the fingers of her left hand into her side. "You run your hand down the posterior axillary line until you feel the tip of the rib—eleven, with twelve a little farther back." She picked up the plastic knife. "You slice the knife into the skin and cut along the rib—the tip of the blade could even scrape along the bone as a guide. Push back the fat and muscle, disarticulate the rib from the vertebra, snap it off, whatever, then grab hold and yank it out."
Faith felt queasy at the thought.
Sara put down the knife. "A hunter could do it in under a minute, but anyone could figure it out. It's not precision surgery. I'm sure you could Google up a better drawing than the one I've made."
"Is it possible that the rib was never there? That she was born without it?"
"A small portion of the population is born with one pair fewer, but the majority of us have twenty-four."
"I thought men were missing a rib?"
"You mean like Adam and Eve?" A smile curved Sara's lips, and Faith got the distinct impression the woman was trying not to laugh at her. "I wouldn't believe everything they told you in Sunday School, Faith. We all have the same number of ribs."
"Well, don't I feel stupid." It wasn't a question. "But, you're sure about this, that the rib was taken out?"
"Ripped out. The cartilage and muscle were torn. This was a violent wrenching."
"You seem to have given this a lot of thought."
Sara shrugged, as if this was just the product of natural curiosity. She picked up the knife and fork again, cutting into the chicken. Faith watched her struggle with the desiccated meat for a few seconds before she put back down the utensils. She gave a strange smile, almost embarrassed. "I was a coroner in my previous life."
Faith felt her mouth open in surprise. The doctor had said it the same way you might confide a hidden acrobatic talent or youthful indiscretion. "Where?"
"Grant County. It's about four hours from here."
"Never heard of it."
"It's well below the gnat line," Sara admitted. She leaned her arms on the table, a wistful tone to her voice when she revealed, "I took the job so that I could buy out my partner in our pediatric practice. At least I thought I did. The truth was that I was bored. You can only give so many vaccinations and stick so many Band-Aids on skinned knees before your mind starts to go."
"I can imagine," Faith mumbled, though, she was wondering which was more alarming: that the doctor who had just diagnosed her with diabetes was a pediatrician or that she was a coroner.
"I'm glad you're on this case," Sara said. "Your partner is . . ."
"Strange?"
Sara gave her an odd look. "I was going to say 'intense.' "
"He's pretty driven," Faith agreed, thinking this was the first time since she'd met Will Trent that anyone's first impression of him had been so complimentary. He usually took awhile to grow on you, like cataracts or shingles.
"He seemed very compassionate." Sara held up her hand to stop any protest. "Not that cops aren't compassionate, but they usually don't show it."
Faith could only nod. Will seldom showed any emotions, but she knew that torture victims cut him close to the bone. "He's a good cop."
Sara looked down at her tray. "You can have this if you want. I'm not really hungry."
"I didn't think you came in here to eat."
She blushed, caught.
"It's all right," Faith assured her. "But, if you're still offering the Coldfields' information . . ."
"Of course."
Faith dug out one of her business cards. "My cell number is on the back."
"Right." She read the number, a determined set to her mouth, and Faith saw that not only did Sara know she was breaking the law, she obviously didn't care. "Another thing—" Sara seemed to be debating whether or not to speak. "Her eyes. The whites showed petechia, but there weren't any visible signs of strangulation. Her pupils wouldn't focus. It could be from the trauma or something neurological, but I'm not sure she could see anything."
"That might explain why she walked out in the middle of the road."
"Considering what she's been through . . ." Sara didn't finish the sentence, but Faith knew exactly what she meant. You didn't have to be a doctor to understand that a woman who'd been through that kind of hell might deliberately walk into the path of a speeding car.
Sara tucked Faith's business card into her coat pocket. "I'll call you in a few minutes."
Faith watched her leave, wondering how in the hell Sara Linton had ended up working at Grady Hospital. Sara couldn't be more than forty, but the emergency room was a young person's game, the sort of place you ran screaming from before you hit your thirties.
She checked her phone again. All six bars were lit, meaning the signal was bright and clear. She tried to give Will the benefit of the doubt. Maybe his phone had fallen apart again. Then again, every cop on the scene would have a cell phone, so maybe he really was an asshole.
It did occur to Faith as she got up from the table and made her way to the parking lot that she could call Will herself, but there was a reason Faith was pregnant and unmarried for the second time in less than twenty years, and it wasn't because she was good at communicating with the men in her life.
CHAPTER FOUR
WILL STOOD AT THE MOUTH OF THE CAVE, LOWERING DOWN a set of lights on a rope so that Charlie Reed would have something better than a flashlight to
help him collect evidence. Will was soaked to the bone, even though the rain had stopped half an hour ago. As dawn approached, the air had turned chillier, but he would rather stand on the deck of the Titanic than go down into that hole again.
The lights hit the bottom and he saw a pair of hands pull them into the cavern. Will scratched his arms. His white shirt showed pindrops of blood where the rats had clawed their way over him, and he was wondering if itching was a sign of rabies. It was the kind of question he would normally ask Faith, but he didn't want to bother her. She had looked awful when he'd left the hospital, and there was nothing she could do here but stand in the rain alongside him. He would catch her up on the case in the morning, after she'd had a good night's sleep. This case wasn't going to be solved in an hour. At least one of them should be well rested as they headed into the investigation.
A helicopter whirred overhead, the chopping sound vibrating in his ears. They were doing infrared sweeps, looking for the second victim. The search teams had been out for hours, carefully combing the area within a two-mile radius. Barry Fielding had shown up with his search dogs, and the animals had gone crazy for the first half hour, then lost the scent. Uniformed patrolmen from Rockdale County were doing grid searches, looking for more underground caves, more clues that might indicate the other woman had escaped.
Maybe she hadn't managed to escape. Maybe her attacker had found her before she could reach help. Maybe she had died days or even weeks ago. Or maybe she had never existed in the first place. As the search wore on, Will was getting the impression that the cops were turning against him. Some of them didn't think there was a second victim at all. Some of them thought Will was keeping them out in the freezing cold rain for no reason other than he was too stupid to see that he was wrong.
There was one person who could clarify this, but she was still in surgery back at Grady Hospital, fighting for her life. The first thing you normally did in an abduction or murder case was put the victim's life under a microscope. Other than assuming her name was Anna, they knew nothing about the woman. In the morning, Will would pull all the missing persons reports in the area, but those were bound to be in the hundreds, and that was excluding the city of Atlanta, where on average, two people a day went missing. If the woman came from a different state, the paperwork would increase exponentially. Over a quarter of a million missing persons cases were reported to the FBI every year. Compounding the problem, the cases were seldom updated if the missing were found.
If Anna wasn't awake by morning, Will would send over a fingerprint technician to card her. It was a scattershot way of trying to find her identity. Unless she had committed an arrestable crime, her fingerprints would not be on file. Still, more than one case cracked open based on following procedure. Will had learned a long time ago that a slim chance was still a chance.
The ladder at the mouth of the cavern shook and Will steadied it as Charlie Reed made his way up. The clouds had passed with the rain, letting through some of the moonlight. Though the deluge had passed, there was the occasional drop, sounding like a cat smacking its lips. Everything in the forest had a strange, bluish hue to it, and there was enough light now that Will didn't need his flashlight to see Charlie. The crime-scene tech's hand reached out, slapping a large evidence bag on the ground at Will's feet as he climbed to the surface.
"Shit," Charlie cursed. His white clean suit was caked in mud. He unzipped it as soon as he was topside, and Will could see that he was sweating so badly his t-shirt was stuck to his chest.
Will asked, "You okay?"
"Shit," Charlie repeated, wiping his forehead with the back of his arm. "I can't believe . . . .Jesus, Will." He leaned over, bracing his hands on his knees. He was breathing hard, though he was a fit man and the climb was not a difficult one. "I don't know where to start."
Will understood the feeling.
"There were torture devices . . ." Charlie wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. "I've only seen that kind of thing on television."
"There was a second victim," Will said, raising up his voice at the end so that Charlie would take his words as an observation that needed confirming.
"I can't make sense of anything down there." Charlie squatted down, resting his head in his hands. "I've never seen anything like it."
Will knelt down alongside him. He picked up the evidence bag. "What's this?"
He shook his head. "I found them rolled up in a tin can by the chair."
Will spread the bag flat on his leg and used the penlight from Charlie's kit to study the contents. There were at least fifty sheets of notebook paper inside. Each page was covered front to back in cursive pencil. Will squinted at the words, trying to make sense out of them. He had never been able to read well. The letters always tended to mix up and turn around. Sometimes, they blurred so much that he felt motion sickness just trying to decipher their meaning.
Charlie didn't know about Will's problem. Will tried to draw out some information from him, asking, "What do you make of these notes?"
"It's crazy, right?" Charlie was rubbing his thumb and forefinger along his mustache, a nervous habit that only came out during dire circumstances. "I don't think I can go back down there." He paused, swallowing hard. "It just feels . . . evil, you know? Just plain damn evil."
Will heard leaves rustling, branches snapping. He turned to find Amanda Wagner making her way through the woods. She was an older woman, probably in her sixties. She favored monochromatic power suits with skirts that hit below her knee and stockings that showed off the definition of what Will had to admit were remarkably good calves for a woman he often thought of as the AntiChrist. Her high heels should have made it difficult for her to find her footing, but, as with most obstacles, Amanda conquered the terrain with steely determination.
Both men stood as she approached.
As usual, she didn't bother with pleasantries. "What's this?" She held out her hand for the evidence bag. Other than Faith, Amanda was the only person in the bureau who knew about Will's reading issues, something she both accepted and criticized at the same time. Will trained the penlight on the pages and she read aloud, " 'I will not deny myself. I will not deny myself.' " She shook the bag, checking the rest of the pages. "Front and back, all the same sentence. Cursive, probably a woman's handwriting." She handed the notes back to Will, giving him a pointed look of disapproval. "So, our bad guy's either an angry schoolteacher or a self-help guru."
She addressed Charlie. "What else have you found?"
"Pornography. Chains. Handcuffs. Sexual devices."
"That's evidence. I need clues."
Will took over for him. "I think the second victim was bolted underneath the bed. I found this in the rope." He took a small evidence bag from his jacket pocket. It contained part of a front tooth, some of the root still attached. He told Amanda, "That's an incisor. The victim at the hospital had all of her teeth intact."
She scrutinized Will more than the tooth. "You're sure about this?"
"I was right in her face trying to get information," he answered. "Her teeth were chattering together. They were making a clicking sound."
She seemed to accept this. "What makes you think the tooth was recently lost? And don't tell me gut instinct, Will, because I've got the entire Rockdale County police force out here in the wet and cold, ready to lynch you for sending them on a wild-goose chase in the middle of the night."
"The rope was cut from underneath the bed," he told her. "The first victim, Anna, was tied down to the top of the bed. The second victim was underneath. Anna couldn't have cut the rope herself."
Amanda asked Charlie, "Do you agree with this?"
Still shaken up, he took his time answering. "Half of the cut ends of the rope were still under the bed. It would make sense that they would fall that way if they were cut from underneath. Cut from the top, the ends would be on the floor or still on top of the bed, not underneath it."
Amanda was still dubious. She told Will, "Go on."
"T
here were more pieces of rope tied to the eyebolts under the bed. Someone cut themselves away. They would still have the rope around their ankles and at least one wrist. Anna didn't have any rope on her."
"The paramedics could've cut it off," Amanda pointed out. She asked Charlie, "DNA? Fluids?"
"All over the place. We should get them back in forty-eight hours. Unless this guy's on the database . . ." He glanced at Will. They all knew that DNA was a shot in the dark. Unless their abductor had committed a crime in the past that caused his DNA to be taken, then logged into the computer, there was no way he would come up as a match.
Amanda asked, "What about the waste situation?"
Initially, Charlie didn't seem to understand the question, but then he answered, "There aren't any empty jars or cans. I guess they were taken away. There's a covered bucket in the corner that was used as a toilet, but from what I can tell, the victim—or victims—were tied up most of the time and didn't have a choice but to go where they were. I couldn't tell you if any of this points to one or two captives. It depends on when they were taken, how dehydrated they were, that kind of thing."
She asked, "Was there anything fresh underneath the bed?"
"Yes," Charlie answered, as if surprised by the revelation. "Actually, there was an area that tested positive for urine. It would be in the right place for someone lying down on their back."
Amanda pressed, "Wouldn't it take longer for liquid to evaporate underground?"
"Not necessarily. The high acidity would have a chemical reaction with the pH in the soil. Depending on the mineral content and the—"
Amanda cut him off. "Don't educate me, Charlie, just give me facts that I can use."
He looked at Will apologetically. "I don't know if there were two hostages at the same time. Someone was definitely kept under the bed, but it could have been that the abductor moved the same victim from place to place. The body fluids could've also drained off from above." He told Will, "You were down there. You saw what this guy is capable of." The color had drained from his face again. "It's awful," he mumbled. "It's just awful."
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