Love, like water, always flowed down the path of least resistance.
Sara had grown up in a small town. The last time she had seriously dated, girls were not allowed to call boys on the telephone and boys were required to ask the girl's father for permission to date his daughter. Those practices were quaint now, almost laughable, but Sara found herself wishing for them. She didn't understand the nuances of adult dating, but she had forced herself to try, to see if that part of her had died with Jeffrey, too.
There had been two men since she moved to Atlanta, both fixed up through nurses at the hospital and both exhaustingly unremarkable. The first man had been handsome and smart and successful, but there was nothing else behind his perfect smile and good manners, and he hadn't called back after Sara had burst into tears the first time they'd kissed. The second man had been three months ago. The experience was a little better, or maybe she was fooling herself. She had slept with him once, but only after four glasses of wine. Sara had gritted her teeth the entire time as if the act was a test she was determined to pass. The man had broken it off with her the next day, which Sara had not realized until she checked her voicemail at home a week later.
If she had only one regret about her life with Jeffrey, it would be this one: Why hadn't she kissed him more? Like most married couples, they had developed a secret language of intimacy. A long kiss usually signaled the desire for sex, not simple affection. There were the odd pecks on the cheek and the quick smacks before they went to work, but nothing like when they had first started seeing each other—when passionate kisses were titillating and exotic gifts that didn't always lead to ripping off each other's clothes.
Sara wanted to be back at that beginning, to enjoy those long hours on the couch with Jeffrey's head in her lap, kissing him deeply, her fingers running through his soft hair. She longed for those stolen moments in parked cars and in hallways and movie theaters when Sara thought she would stop breathing if she didn't feel his mouth pressed to hers. She wanted that surprise of seeing him at work, that thump in her heart when she caught sight of him walking down the street. She wanted that thrill in her stomach when the phone rang and she heard his voice on the line. She wanted that rush of blood to her center when she was driving alone in her car or walking down the aisle at the drugstore and smelled him on her skin.
She wanted her lover.
The vinyl curtain slid back, squeaking on the rail. Jill Marino, one of the ICU nurses, flashed Sara a smile as she put Anna's chart on the bed.
"Have a good night?" Jill asked. She bustled around the room, checking the leads, making sure the IV was running. "Blood gases came back."
Sara opened the chart and checked the numbers. Last night, the pulse oximeter on Anna's finger kept detecting low oxygen levels in her blood. They seemed to have leveled out on their own this morning. Sara was constantly humbled by the human body's ability to heal itself. "Makes you feel superfluous, doesn't it?"
"Maybe doctors," Jill teased. "Nurses?"
"Good point." Sara stuck her hand into her lab coat pocket, feeling the letter inside. She had changed into fresh scrubs after working on Anna last night, automatically moving the letter to the pocket of the clean coat. Maybe she should open it. Maybe she should sit down and rip it open and get it over with once and for all.
Jill asked, "Something wrong?"
Sara shook her head. "No. Thanks for putting up with me last night."
"You made my job a little easier," the nurse admitted. The ICU was, as usual, packed to the rafters. "I'll call you if anything changes." Jill put her hand to Anna's cheek, smiling down at the woman. "Maybe our girl will wake up today."
"I'm sure she will." Sara didn't think Anna could hear her, but it made her feel good to hear the words said.
The two cops stationed outside the room tipped their hats to Sara as she left the room. She could feel their eyes follow her as she walked down the hall—not because they thought she was attractive, but because they knew she was a cop's widow. Sara had never discussed Jeffrey with anyone at Grady, but there were enough cops in and out of the ER every day that the news had spread. It quickly became one of those known secrets that everyone talked about, just not in front of Sara. She hadn't intended to become a tragic figure, but it kept people from asking questions, so she did not complain.
The great mystery was why she had so easily talked about Jeffrey with Faith Mitchell. Sara liked to think that Faith was just a really good detective rather than admit what was probably closer to the truth, which was that Sara was lonely. Her sister was living halfway around the world, her parents were four hours and a lifetime away, and Sara's days were filled with little more than work and whatever was on television when she got home.
What's worse, she had a nagging suspicion that it wasn't Faith she'd found enticing, but the case. Jeffrey had always used Sara as a sounding board during his investigations, and she missed having that part of her brain engaged.
Last night, for the first time in forever, the last thing on Sara's mind before she fell asleep had not been Jeffrey, but Anna. Who had abducted her? Why had she been chosen? What clues had been left on her body that might explain the motivations of the animal who'd hurt her? Talking to Faith in the cafeteria last night, Sara had finally felt like her brain was doing something more useful than just keeping her alive. And it was probably the last time she would feel that way again for a very long while.
Sara rubbed her eyes, trying to wake herself up. She had known that life without Jeffrey would be painful. What she wasn't prepared for was that it would be so damn irrelevant.
She was almost to the elevators when her cell phone rang. She turned on her heel, walking back toward Anna's room as she opened the phone. "I'm on my way."
Mary Schroder said, "Sonny's about ten minutes out."
Sara stopped, her heart dropping in her chest at the nurse's words. Sonny was Mary's husband, a patrolman who worked the early shift. "Is he all right?"
"Sonny?" she asked. "Of course he is. Where are you?"
"I'm upstairs in the ICU." Sara changed course, heading back toward the elevator. "What's going on?"
"Sonny got a call about a little boy abandoned at the City Foods on Ponce de Leon. Six years old. Poor thing was left in the back of the car for at least three hours."
Sara punched the button for the elevator. "Where's the mother?"
"Missing. Her purse is on the front seat, the keys are in the ignition and there's blood on the ground beside the car."
Sara felt her heart speed back up. "Did the boy see anything?"
"He's too upset to talk, and Sonny's useless. He doesn't know how to deal with kids that age. Are you on your way down?"
"I'm waiting for the elevator." Sara double-checked the time. "Is Sonny sure about the three hours?"
"The store manager noticed the car when he came into work. He said the mother was there earlier, freaking out because she couldn't find her kid."
Sara jammed the button again, knowing full well the gesture was useless. "Why did he take three hours to call it in?"
"Because people are assholes," Mary answered. "People are just plain, goddamn assholes."
CHAPTER SEVEN
FAITH'S RED MINI WAS PARKED IN HER DRIVEWAY WHEN SHE woke up that morning. Amanda must have followed Will here, then taken him home. He had probably thought he was doing Faith a favor, but Faith still wanted to rake him over the coals. When Will had called this morning to tell her that he would pick her up at their usual eight-thirty, she had snapped a "Fine" that seemed to float over his head.
Her anger had evened out somewhat when Will had told her what had happened last night—his idiotic foray into the cave, finding the second victim, dealing with Amanda. The last part sounded particularly challenging; Amanda never made things easy. Will had sounded exhausted, and Faith's heart went out to him as he described the woman hanging in the tree, but as soon as she got off the phone, she was furious with him all over again.
What was he doing
going down into that cave alone with no one but that idiot Fierro topside? Why the hell hadn't he called Faith to come help search for the second victim? Why in God's name did he think he was doing her a favor by actively preventing her from doing her job? Did he think she wasn't capable, wasn't good enough? Faith wasn't some useless mascot. Her mother had been a cop. Faith had worked her way up from patrol to homicide detective faster than anyone else on the squad. She hadn't been picking daisies when Will stumbled across her. She wasn't damn Watson to his Sherlock Holmes.
Faith had forced herself to take a deep breath. She was just sane enough to realize that her level of fury might be out of proportion. It wasn't until she sat down at the kitchen table and measured her blood sugar that she realized why. She was hovering around one-fifty again, which, according to "Your Life With Diabetes," could make a person nervous and irritable. It didn't help her nervousness and irritability one whit when she tried to inject herself with the insulin pen.
Her hands were steady as she turned the dial for what she hoped was the correct units, but her leg started shaking as she tried to stick herself with the needle, so that she looked like a dog who was enjoying a particularly good scratch. There had to be some part of her unconscious brain that kept her hand hovering frozen over her shaking thigh, unable to willfully inflict pain on herself. It was probably somewhere near that damaged region that made it impossible for Faith to enter into a long-term relationship with a man.
"Screw it," she had said, almost like a sneeze, jamming the pen down, pressing the button. The needle burned like hellfire, even though the literature on the device claimed it was virtually pain-free. Maybe after sticking yourself six zillion times a week, a needle jamming into your leg or your abdomen felt relatively painless, but Faith wasn't to that point yet and she couldn't imagine herself ever being there. She was sweating so badly by the time she pulled out the needle that her underarms were sticky.
She spent the next hour dividing her time between the phone and the Internet, reaching out to various governmental organizations to get the investigation moving while scaring the ever-loving shit out of herself by investigoogling type 2 diabetes on her laptop computer. The first ten minutes were spent on hold with the Atlanta Police Department while she looked for an alternate diagnosis in case Sara Linton was wrong. That proved to be a pipe dream, and by the time Faith was on hold with the GBI's Atlanta lab, she had stumbled upon her first diabetic blog. She found another, then another—thousands of people letting loose about the travails of living with a chronic disease.
Faith read about pumps and monitors and diabetic retinopathy and poor circulation and loss of libido and all the other wonderful things diabetes could bring into your life. There were miracle cures and device reviews and one nut who claimed that diabetes was a government plot to extract billions of dollars from the unsuspecting public in order to wage the war for oil.
As Faith waded through the conspiracy pages, she was ready to believe anything that might get her out of having to live the rest of her life under constant measurement. A lifetime of following every fad diet Cosmo could spit out had taught her to count carbs and calories, but the thought of turning into a human pincushion was almost too much to bear. Thoroughly depressed—and on hold with Equifax—she had quickly clicked back to the pharmaceutical pages with their images of smiling, healthy diabetics riding bicycles and doing yoga and playing with puppies, kittens, small children, kites, sometimes a combination of all four. Surely, the woman swinging around the adorable toddler wasn't suffering from vaginal dryness.
Surely, after spending all morning on the telephone, Faith could have called the doctor's office and scheduled an appointment for later this afternoon. She had the number Sara had scribbled down at her elbow—of course she'd done a search on Delia Wallace, checking to see if she'd been sued for malpractice or had a history of drunk driving. Faith knew every detail of the doctor's education as well as her driving record, but still could not make the call.
Faith knew she was looking at desk time because of the pregnancy. Amanda had dated Faith's uncle Ted until the relationship had petered out around the time Faith had entered junior high. Boss Amanda was very different from Aunt Amanda. She was going to make Faith's life miserable in the way that only a woman can make another woman miserable for doing the things that most women do. That sort of living hell Faith was prepared for, but would Faith be allowed to return to her job even though she had diabetes?
Could she go out in the field, carry a gun and round up the bad guys if her blood sugar was out of whack? Exercise could lead to a precipitous drop. What if she was chasing a suspect and fainted? Emotional moments could stress her blood sugar as well. What if she was interviewing a witness and didn't realize she was acting crazy until internal affairs was called in? And what about Will? Could she be trusted to have his back? For all her complaints about her partner, Faith had a deep devotion to the man. She was at times his navigator, his buffer against the world and his big sister. How could she protect Will if she couldn't protect herself?
Maybe she wouldn't even have a choice in the matter.
Faith stared at her computer screen, contemplating doing another search to see what the standard policy was for diabetics in law enforcement. Were they shoved behind desks until they atrophied or quit? Were they fired? Her hands went to the laptop, her fingers resting on the keyboard. As with the insulin pen, her brain froze her muscles, not letting herself press the keys. She tapped her finger lightly on the "H" in a nervous tick, feeling the flop sweat come back. When the phone rang, she nearly jumped out of her skin.
"Good morning," Will said. "I'm outside when you're ready."
Faith shut down the laptop. She gathered up the notes she had taken from her phone calls, loaded her diabetes paraphernalia into her purse and walked out the front door without a look back.
Will was in an unmarked black Dodge Charger, what they called a G-ride, slang for government issued car. This particular beauty had a key scratch cutting along the panel over the back tire and a large antenna mounted on a spring so the scanner could pick up all signals within a hundred-mile area. A blind three-year-old would've been able to tell it was a cop car.
She opened the door and Will said, "I've got Jacquelyn Zabel's Atlanta address."
He meant the second victim, the woman who had been hanging facedown in the tree.
Faith got in the car and buckled her seatbelt. "How?"
"The Walton Beach sheriff called me back this morning. They checked with her neighbors down there. Apparently, her mother just went into a retirement home and Jacquelyn was up here packing up the house to sell it."
"Where's the house?"
"Inman Park. Charlie's going to meet us there. I've reached out to the Atlanta police for some feet on the ground. They say they can give me two patrols for a couple of hours." He reversed the car down the driveway, glancing at Faith. "You look better. Did you get some sleep?"
Faith didn't answer his question. She pulled out her notebook, going through the list of things she had accomplished on the phone this morning. "I had the splinters of wood that were taken from underneath Anna's fingernails transferred to our lab. I sent a tech to fingerprint her at the hospital first thing. I put out a statewide APB for any missing women matching Anna's age and description—they're going to try to send over a sketch artist for a drawing. Her face is pretty bruised. I'm not sure anyone would recognize her from a photograph."
She flipped to the next page, skimming her notes. "I checked the NCIC and VICAP for comparable cases—the FBI isn't tracking anything similar, but I put our details into the database just in case something hits." She went to the next page. "I put an alert on Jacquelyn Zabel's credit cards so we'll know if someone tries to use them. I called the morgue; the autopsy is scheduled to start around eleven. I put in a call to the Coldfields—the man and wife in the Buick that hit Anna. They said we could come by and talk to them at the shelter where Judith volunteers, even though they've already told
that nice Detective Galloway everything they know, and speaking of that prick, I woke up Jeremy at school this morning and made him leave a message on Galloway's voicemail saying he was from the IRS and needed to talk to him about some irregularities."
Will chuckled at this last bit.
"We're waiting on Rockdale County to fax over the crime-scene reports and whatever witness statements they have. Other than that, that's all I've got." Faith closed her notebook. "So, what did you do this morning?"
He nodded toward the cup holder. "I got you some hot chocolate."
Faith stared longingly at the take-away cup, dying to lick off the foamy puddle of whipped cream that had squirted through the slit in the lid. She had lied to Sara Linton about her usual diet. The last time Faith had jogged anywhere, she had been rushing from her car to the front door of the Zesto's, hoping to get a milkshake before they closed. Breakfast was usually a Pop-Tart and a Diet Coke, but this morning, she had eaten a boiled egg and a piece of dry toast, the kind of thing they served at the county jail. The sugar in the hot chocolate would probably kill her, though, and she said, "No thanks," before she could change her mind.
"You know," he began, "if you're trying to lose weight, I could—"
"Will," she interrupted. "I've been on a diet for the last eighteen years of my life. If I want to let myself go, I'm going to let myself go."
"I didn't say—"
"Besides, I've only gained five pounds," she lied. "It's not like I need a Goodyear sign strapped to my ass."
Will glanced at the purse in her lap, his mouth drawn. Finally, he said, "I'm sorry."
"Thank you."
"If you're not going to . . ." He let his words trail off, taking the cup out of the holder. Faith turned on the radio so she wouldn't have to listen to him swallow. The volume was low, and she heard the dull murmur of news coming from the speakers. She pressed the buttons until she found something soft and innocuous that wouldn't get on her nerves.
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