CHAPTER ONE

Will Trent stared out the window of the car as he listened to his boss yell into her cell phone. Not that Amanda Wagner ever really raised her voice, but she had a certain edge to her tone that had caused more than one of her agents to burst into tears and walk off an active investigation—no mean feat considering the majority of her subordinates at the Georgia Bureau of Investigation were men.

“We’re at”—she craned her neck, squinting at the street sign—“the Prado and Seventeenth.” Amanda paused. “Perhaps you could look up the information on your computer?” She shook her head, obviously not liking what she was hearing.

Will tried, “Maybe we should keep driving around? We might find—”

Amanda covered her eyes with her hand. She whispered into the phone, “How long until the server is back up?” The answer caused her to breathe out a heavy, pronounced sigh.

Will indicated the screen dominating the middle of the woodlined dashboard. The Lexus had more bells and whistles than a clown’s hat. “Don’t you have GPS?”

She dropped her hand, considering his question, then began fiddling with some knobs on the dashboard. The screen didn’t change, but the air-conditioning whirred higher. Will chuckled, and she cut him off with a nasty look, suggesting, “Maybe while we’re waiting for Caroline to find a street map, you can get the owner’s manual out of the glove box and read the directions for me.”

Will tried the latch, but it was locked. He thought this pretty much summed up his relationship with Amanda Wagner. She often sent him the way of locked doors and expected him to find his way around them. Will liked a good puzzle as much as the next man, but just once, it would have been nice to have Amanda hand him the key.

Or maybe not. Will had never been good at asking for help—especially from someone like Amanda, who seemed to keep a running list in her head of people who owed her favors.

He looked out the window as she berated her secretary for not keeping a street map on her person at all times. Will had been born and raised in Atlanta, but didn’t often find himself in Ansley Park. He knew that it was one of the city’s oldest and wealthiest neighborhoods, where over a century ago, lawyers, doctors and bankers had built their enviable estates so that future lawyers, doctors and bankers could live as they did—safely cloistered in the middle of one of the most violent metropolitan cities this side of the Mason-Dixon. The only thing that had changed over the years was that the black women pushing white babies in strollers were better compensated these days.

With its twisting turns and roundabouts, Ansley seemed designed to confuse, if not discourage, visitors. Most of the streets were tree-lined, broad avenues with the houses tucked up on hills to better look down on the world. Densely forested parks with walking trails and swing sets were everywhere. Some of the walkways were still the original cobblestone. Though all the homes were architecturally different, there was a certain uniformity to their crisply painted exteriors and professionally landscaped lawns. Will guessed this was because even a fixer-upper started at the one million mark. Unlike his own Poncey-Highland neighborhood, which was less than six miles from here, there were no rainbow-colored houses or methadone clinics in Ansley.

On the street, Will watched a jogger stop to stretch and surreptitiously check out Amanda’s Lexus. According to the news this morning, there was a code-red smog alert in effect, advising people not to breathe the outside air unless they absolutely had to. No one seemed to be taking that to heart, even as the temperature inched past the one hundred mark. Will had seen at least five joggers since they’d entered Ansley Park. All were women and all so far had fit the stereotype of the perky, perfect soccer mom with their Pilates-toned bodies and bouncy ponytails.

The Lexus was parked at the bottom of what seemed to be a popular hill, the street behind them lined with tall oaks that cast the pavement into shadow. All of the runners had slowed to look at the car. This wasn’t the type of neighborhood where a man and a woman could sit in a parked vehicle for very long without someone calling the police. Of course, this wasn’t the kind of neighborhood where teenage girls were brutally raped and murdered in their own homes, either.

He glanced back at Amanda, who was holding the phone to her ear so tightly it looked as if she might snap the plastic in two. She was an attractive woman if you never heard her speak or had to work for her or sit in a car with her for any length of time. She had to be in her early sixties by now. When Will had first started at the GBI over ten years ago, Amanda’s hair had been more pepper than salt, but that had changed drastically over the last few months. He didn’t know if this was because of something in her personal life or an inability to get an appointment with her hairdresser, but she had lately begun showing her years.

Amanda started pressing buttons on the console again, obviously trying to work the GPS. The radio came on and she quickly turned it off again, but not before Will caught the opening notes of a swing band. She muttered something under her breath and pressed another button, which caused Will’s window to slide down. He felt a blast of hot air like someone had opened an oven door. In the side mirror, he saw a jogger at the top of the hill, the leaves on the dogwoods stirring in the breeze.

Amanda gave up on the electronics. “This is ridiculous. We’re the top investigatory arm in the state and we can’t even find the God damn crime scene.”

Will turned around, his seat belt straining against his shoulder as he looked up the hill.

Amanda asked, “What are you doing?”

“That way,” he said, pointing behind them. The limbs of the trees overhead were intertwined, casting the street in a dusklike darkness. There was no breeze this time of year, just relentless heat. What he had seen was not rustling leaves but the blue lights of a police cruiser bouncing off the shadows.

Amanda gave another heavy sigh as she put the car into gear and started a U-turn. Without warning, she slammed on the brakes, her arm shooting out in front of Will as if she could stop him from going through the windshield. A large white van blared its horn as it sped by, the driver shaking his fist, mouthing obscenities.

“Channel Five,” Will said, recognizing the local news station’s logo on the side of the van.

“They’re almost as late as we are,” Amanda commented, following the news van up the hill. She took a right, coming on a lone police cruiser blocking the next left. A smattering of reporters was already at the scene, representing all the local stations as well as CNN, which had their world headquarters a few miles up the road. A woman strangling the man who had killed her daughter would be big news in any part of the world, but the fact that the daughter was white, that the parents were wealthy and the family was one of the city’s most influential gave it an almost giddy, scandalous tinge. Somewhere in New York City, a Lifetime movie executive was drooling into her BlackBerry.

Amanda pulled out her badge and waved it at the cop as she rolled past the blockade. There were more police cruisers up ahead along with a couple of ambulances. The doors were open, the beds empty. Paramedics stood around smoking. The hunter green BMW X5 parked in front of the house seemed out of place among the emergency vehicles, but the gigantic SUV made Will wonder where the coroner’s van was. He wouldn’t be surprised if the medical examiner had gotten lost, too. Ansley was not a neighborhood well known to someone earning a civil servant’s salary.

Amanda put the car into reverse to parallel park between two of the cruisers. The park sensor controls started beeping as she tapped on the gas. “Don’t dawdle in there, Will. We’re not working this case unless we’re taking it over.”

Will had heard some variation on this same theme at least twice since they had left city hall. The dead girl’s grandfather, Hoyt Bentley, was a billionaire developer who had made his share of enemies over the years. Depending on who you talked to, Bentley was either a scion of the city or a crony from way back, the sort of moneyed crook who made things happen behind the scenes without ever getting his hands dirty. Whichever version of the man’s story was true, he had deep enough pockets to buy his share of political friends. Bentley had made one phone call to the governor, who had reached out to the director of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, who had in turn assigned Amanda the task of looking into the murder.

If the killing had any markings of a professional hit or hinted at something deeper than a simple assault and burglary gone wrong, then Amanda would make a phone call and snatch the case away from the Atlanta Police Department faster than a toddler taking back a favorite toy. If this was just a random, everyday tragedy, then she would probably leave the explanations to Will while she toodled back to city hall in her fancy car.

Amanda put the gear into drive and inched forward. The gap between the beeps got furiously short as she edged closer to the police car. “If Bentley’s got someone mad enough to kill his granddaughter, this case goes to a whole new level.”

She sounded almost hopeful at the prospect. Will understood her excitement—breaking this kind of case would be yet another feather in Amanda’s cap—but Will hoped he never got to the point where he saw the death of a teenage girl as a career stepping-stone. Though he wasn’t sure what he should think of the dead man, either. He was a murderer, but he was also a victim. Considering Georgia’s pro–death penalty stance, did it really matter that he had been strangled here in Ansley Park rather than strapped to a gurney and given a lethal injection at Coastal State Prison?

Will opened the door before Amanda put the car into park. The hot air hit him like a punch to the gut, his lungs temporarily straining in his chest. Then the humidity took over, and he wondered if this was what it felt like to have tuberculosis. Still, he put on his suit jacket, covering the paddle holster clipped to the back of his belt. Not for the first time, Will questioned the sanity of wearing a three-piece suit in the middle of August.

Amanda seemed untouched by the heat as she joined Will. A group of uniformed policemen stood clustered at the bottom of the driveway, watching them walk across the street. Recognition dawned in their eyes, and Amanda warned Will, “I don’t have to tell you that you’re not exactly welcome by the Atlanta Police Department right now.”

“No,” Will agreed. One of the cops in the circle made a point of spitting on the ground as they passed by. Another one settled on a more subtle raised middle finger. Will plastered a smile on his face and gave the officers a big thumbs-up to let them all know there were no hard feelings.

From her first day in office, Atlanta’s mayor had pledged to weed out the corruption that ran unchecked during her predecessor’s reign. Over the last few years, she had been working closely with the GBI to open cases against the most blatant offenders. Amanda had graciously volunteered Will to go into the lions’ den. Six months ago, he had closed an investigation that had resulted in the firing of six Atlanta police detectives and forced the early retirement of one of the city’s highest-ranking officers. The cases were good—the cops were skimming cash off of narcotics busts—but nobody liked a stranger cleaning their house, and Will had not exactly made friends during the course of his investigation.

Amanda had gotten a promotion out of it. Will had been turned into a pariah.

He ignored the hissed “asshole” aimed at his back, trying to focus on the crime at hand as they walked up the curving driveway. The yard was brimming with all kinds of exotic-looking flowers that Will was hard-pressed to name. The house itself was enormous, stately columns holding up a second-floor balcony, a winding set of granite stairs leading to the front doors. Except for the smattering of surly cops marring the scene, it was an impressive estate.

“Trent,” someone called, and he saw Detective Leo Donnelly making his way down the front steps. Leo was a short man, at least a full foot less than Will’s six-three. His gait had taken on an almost Columbo-like shuffle since they’d last worked together. The effect was that of an agitated monkey. “What the fuck are you doing here?”

Will indicated the cameras, offering Leo the most believable explanation. Everybody knew the GBI would throw a baby into the Chattahoochee if it meant getting on the nightly news. He told the detective, “This is my boss, Dr. Wagner.”

“Hey,” Leo said, tossing her a nod before turning back to Will. “How’s Angie doing?”

“We’re engaged.” Will felt Amanda’s scrutiny focus on him with a cold intensity. He tried to deflect, indicating the open doorway with a nod of his head. “What’ve we got here?”

“A shitload of hate for you, my friend.” Leo took out a cigarette and lit it. “You better watch your back.”

Amanda asked, “Is the mother still inside?”

“First door on the left,” Leo answered. “My partner’s in there with her.”

“Gentlemen, if you’ll excuse me.” Amanda dismissed Leo the way she might a servant. The look she gave Will wasn’t that much more pleasant.

Leo exhaled a line of smoke as he watched her go up the stairs. “Puts a chill on things, don’t she? Like fucking dry ice.”

Will defended her automatically, in that sort of way that you defend a useless uncle or slutty sister when someone outside of the family attacks them. “Amanda is one of the best cops I’ve ever worked with.”

Leo fine-tuned his appraisal. “Nice ass for a grandma.”

Will thought back to the car, the way Amanda’s arm had shot out in front of him when she thought they were going to get hit by the news van. It was the most maternal thing he had ever seen her do.

Leo offered, “Bet she’s a lot of work in the sack.”

Will tried not to shudder as he forced the image from his mind. “How’ve you been?”

“Prostate’s got me leaking like a fucking sieve. Haven’t been laid in two months and I got this cough that won’t go away.” He coughed, as if to prove it, then took another hit off the cigarette. “You?”

Will squared his shoulders. “I can’t complain.”

“Not with Angie Polaski at home.” Leo’s suggestive laugh reminded Will of what an asthmatic child molester would sound like if he smoked three packs a day. Angie had worked vice for fifteen years before taking medical leave from the force. Leo was under the impression that she was a whore just because her job had required her to dress like one. Or maybe it was the many different men she’d slept with over the years.

Will offered, “I’ll tell her you said hello.”

“Do that.” Leo stared up at Will, taking a deep pull on the cigarette. “What are you really doing here?”

Will tried to shrug it off, knowing that Leo would be furious if he had his case snatched out from under him. “Bentley’s got a lot of connections.”

Leo dubiously raised an eyebrow. Despite the rumpled suit and the way his forehead sloped like a caveman’s, he had been a cop long enough to recognize when someone hadn’t exactly answered a question. “Bentley called you in?”

“The GBI can only involve itself in cases when it’s invited by the local police force or government.”

Leo snorted a laugh, smoke coming out of his nostrils. “You left out kidnapping.”

“And bingo,” Will added. The GBI had a task force that investigated bingo parlors in the state. It was the sort of job you got when you pissed off the wrong person. Two years ago, Amanda had exiled Will to the north Georgia mountains, where he had spent his time arresting meth-dealing hillbillies and reflecting on the dangers of disobeying his direct superior. He didn’t doubt a bingo transfer was in his future should he ever rile her again.

Will indicated the house. “What happened here?”

“The usual.” Leo shrugged. He took a long drag on his cigarette, then stubbed it out on his shoe. “Mom comes home from playing tennis, the door’s open.” He put the butt in his jacket pocket as he led Will into the house. “She goes upstairs and sees her daughter, dead and diddled.” He indicated the curving staircase that swept over their heads. “The killer’s still here, sets his sights on the mom—who’s fucking hot, by the way—fighting ensues, and, surprise, he’s the one that winds up dead.”

Will studied the grand entranceway. The doors were a double set, one fixed, one open. The broken side window was a good distance from the knob. Someone would have to have a long arm to reach in and unlock the door.

He asked, “Any pets?”

“There’s a three-hundred-year-old yellow Lab. He was in the backyard. Deaf as a freakin’ post, according to the mother. Probably slept through the whole thing.”

“How old’s the girl?”

“Seventeen.”

The number echoed in the tiled foyer, where the smell of lavender air freshener and Leo’s sweaty, nicotine stench competed alongside the metallic tinge of violent death. At the bottom of the stairs lay the source of the most dominant of all the odors. The man was lying on his back with his hands palms up near his head as if in surrender. A medium-sized kitchen knife with a wooden handle and a jagged edge was a few feet from his hand, lying in a nest of broken glass. His black jeans looked soiled, the skin of his neck bruised red from strangulation. The smattering of a mustache under his nose made his lip look dirty. Acne spotted his sideburns. One of his sneakers had come untied, the laces stiff with dried blood. Incongruously, the killer’s T-shirt had a dancing cherry on it, the stem cocked at a jaunty angle. The shirt was dark red, so it was hard to tell if the darker parts were blood, sweat, urine or a combination of all three.

Will followed the dead man’s gaze up to the chandelier hovering overhead. The glass made a tinkling noise as it swayed in the artificial breeze from the air-conditioning. White spots of light danced around the foyer, reflecting the sunlight that came in through the palladium window over the doors.

Will asked, “Do you have an ID on him yet?”

“Looks like his wallet’s in his back pocket, but he’s not going anywhere. I don’t want to roll the body until Pete gets here.” He meant Pete Hanson, the city medical examiner. “Perp looks pretty young, you know?”

“Yeah,” Will agreed, thinking that the killer was probably not old enough to buy alcohol. Amanda had been excited by the prospect of a contract killing. Unless Hoyt Bentley’s enemies had a crack team of mercenary frat boys on the payroll, Will doubted there was a connection.

He asked, “Domestic?”

Leo shrugged again, a gesture that was more like a tic. “Looks like it, huh? Boyfriend snaps, kills the girl, panics when the mom comes home and goes after her. Problem is, Campano swears she’s never seen him before in her life.”

“Campano?” Will echoed, feeling his gut tighten at the name.

“Abigail Campano. That’s the mother.” Leo studied him. “You know her?”

“No.” Will looked down at the body, hoping his voice would not give him away. “I thought the last name was Bentley.”

“That’s the wife’s father. The husband’s Paul Campano. He owns a bunch of car dealerships. You heard the commercials, right? ‘We never say no at Campano.’ ”

“Where is he?”

Leo’s cell phone started to ring and he slid it off the clip on his belt. “Shouldn’t be too much longer. He was on the phone with her when it happened. He’s the one who called 9-1-1.”

Will cleared his throat so his voice would come back. “Might be interesting to know what he heard.”

“You think?” He studied Will closely as he opened his cell phone, answering, “Donnelly.”

Leo stepped outside and Will looked around the foyer, taking in the dead body, the broken glass. Obviously, there had been a massive struggle here. Blood streaked the floor, two different sets of tennis shoes leaving smeared waffle prints across the creamy white tile. A frail, antique-looking table had fallen on its side, a glass bowl shattered beside it. There was a busted cell phone that looked as if it had been stepped on. Mail was scattered around like confetti and a woman’s handbag was overturned, the contents adding to the mess.

Over by the wall, there was a lamp sitting upright on the floor as if someone had placed it there. The base was cracked and there was a tilt to the shade. Will wondered if someone had turned it right side up or if the lamp, defying all probabilities, had landed upright. He also wondered if anyone had noticed the bloody bare footprint beside the lamp.

His eyes followed the curving line of the polished wooden stairs, seeing two sets of bloody tennis-shoe prints heading down but no other bare footprints. There were scuffs and deep ruts in the walls where shoes and body parts had dug out the plaster, indicating at least one person had fallen. The trip must have been brutal. Abigail Campano had known she was fighting for her life. For his part, the dead kid at the bottom of the stairs was no lightweight. The definition of his muscles was evident under the red T-shirt. He must have been shocked to find himself overpowered even as he pulled his last breath.

In his head, Will sketched a diagram of the house, trying to get his bearings. A long hallway under the stairs led to the back of the house and what looked like the kitchen and family room. There were two rooms off the front entrance, probably originally intended to be parlors to give the men separate space from the women. Pocket doors closed off one room, but the second, which looked to be used as a library, was open. Dark paneling dominated the open parlor. Bookshelves lined the walls and a fireplace with a deep hearth already had wood laid for a fire. The furniture was heavy, probably oak. Two large leather chairs dominated the space. Will assumed the other parlor was the opposite, the walls painted in white or cream and the furnishings less masculine.

Upstairs, there would probably be the usual layout to these old houses: five or six bedrooms connected by a long, T-shaped hallway with what would have originally been servants’ stairs leading down to the kitchen in the back. If the other houses in the neighborhood were anything to go by, there would be a carriage house outside that had been converted to a garage with an apartment overhead. Measuring and mapping it all out for the reports would be a lot of work. Will was glad the task wouldn’t fall to him.

He was also glad he wouldn’t have to explain why the single bloody footprint on the foyer was heading up the stairs instead of running out the front doorway.

Leo came back into the house, obviously annoyed by the phone call. “Like I don’t got enough people sticking their heads up my ass with this prostate thing.” He indicated the scene. “You solve this one for me yet?”

Will asked, “Who does the green BMW on the street belong to?”

“The mother.”

“What about the girl—does she have a car?”

“A black Beemer, if you can believe it, 325 convertible. Parents took it away when her grades started to slide.” He pointed to the house across the street. “Nosey neighbor turned her in when she saw the car in the driveway during school hours.”

“Did the neighbor see anything today?”

“She’s even older than the dog, so don’t get your hopes up.” He gave a half shrug of his shoulder, allowing, “We’ve got somebody over there talking to her right now.”

“The mother’s sure she doesn’t recognize the killer?”

“Positive. I had her look at him again when she was more calmed down. Never seen him before in her life.”

Will looked back at the dead man. Everything was adding up but nothing made sense. “How’d he get here?”

“No idea. Could’ve taken the bus and walked from Peachtree Street.”

Peachtree, one of the busiest streets in Atlanta, was less than ten minutes away. Buses and trains went back and forth over-and underground bringing thousands of people to the office buildings and shops along the strip. Will had heard of criminals doing more stupid things than timing a brutal murder around a bus schedule, but the explanation didn’t feel right. This was Atlanta. Only the desperately poor or ecologically eccentric took public transportation. The man on the floor was a clean-cut white kid wearing what looked like a three-hundred-dollar pair of jeans and a two-hundred-dollar pair of Nikes. Either he had a car or he lived in the neighborhood.

Leo offered, “We’ve got patrol out looking for a car that don’t belong.”

“You were the first detective on the scene?”

Leo took his time answering, making sure Will knew that he was doing so as a courtesy. “I was the first cop, period,” he finally said. “Nine-one-one came in around twelve-thirty. I was finishing lunch at that sandwich place on Fourteenth. I got here maybe two seconds before the cruiser pulled up. We checked the house, made sure no one else was here, then I told everybody to get the hell out.”

Fourteenth Street was less than a five-minute drive from where they stood. It was luck that the first responding officer had been a detective who could secure the scene. “You were the first one to talk to the mother?”

“She was freaked the fuck out, let me tell you. Hands were shaking, couldn’t get her words out. Took about ten minutes for her to calm down enough to get the story out.”

“So, this looks clean to you? Some kind of domestic violence scene between two teenagers, then the mom comes in and puts a kink in it?”

“Is that what Hoyt Bentley sent you to check out?”

Will skirted the question. “This is a sensitive case, Leo. Bentley plays golf with the governor. He sits on the board of half the charities in town. Wouldn’t you be more surprised if we weren’t here?”

Leo half shrugged, half nodded. Maybe there was something bothering him about the scene, too, because he kept talking. “There’s defensive wounds on the mother. You can see signs of the struggle, what with all the broken shit and the walls being bashed in. Dead kid’s got more of the same, including some bite marks on his fingers where the mother tried to get his hands off her. The girl upstairs—he had some time with her. Panties down, bra pushed up. Blood everywhere.”

“Was there a struggle upstairs?”

“Some, but not like down here.” He paused before offering, “You wanna see her?”

Will appreciated the gesture, but Amanda had made it more than clear that she didn’t want him to get involved in this unless it had the markings of a professional hit. If Will saw something upstairs, no matter how innocuous, he might end up having to testify about it later in court.

Still she couldn’t fault him for being curious. “How was the girl killed?”

“Hard to tell.”

Will glanced behind him at the open front door. The air-conditioning in the house was on full blast, trying to keep up with the heat coming in. “Did you already get pictures of everything in here?”

“Upstairs and down,” Leo told him. “We’ll dust for prints and the usual shit once the bodies are taken away. By the way, that’s when I’ll shut the door, since you seem to have a stick up your ass about it. I’m trying to keep the tourists down to a minimum here.” He added, “Case like this, there are gonna be some heavy guns on it.”

Will thought that was an understatement. No one had reported a strange car in the neighborhood. Unless Leo’s public transportation theory held up, the kid was most likely a resident of Ansley Park. Knowing how these things worked, he probably came from a family of lawyers. Leo would need to do everything exactly by the book or he’d end up dangling by his short hairs the minute he took the stand.

Will rephrased his earlier question. “How did she die?”

“She’s a fucking mess—face like raw hamburger, blood everywhere. I’m surprised the mother even recognized her.” Leo paused, obviously seeing Will wanted a more concrete answer. “My guess? He beat her, then stabbed her to death.”

Again, Will looked at the dead man on the floor. His palms were covered with dried blood, not what you would expect from a closed fist beating someone repeatedly, or, for that matter, a hand holding a knife. The knees of his black jeans looked dark, too, as if he had knelt in something wet. His T-shirt was bunched up just below his ribs. A fresh bruise spread down into the waist of his pants.

Will asked, “Was the mother injured?”

“Scratches on the back of her arms and hands, like I said before. There’s a pretty deep cut on the palm from the glass on the floor.” Leo catalogued, “Lots of bruises, busted lip, some blood in her ear. Maybe a sprained ankle. I thought it was broke, but she moved it.” He rubbed his mouth, probably wishing there was a cigarette in it. “I called an ambulance, but she said she wasn’t leaving until her daughter’s removed.”

“She say it like that, ‘removed’?”

Leo mumbled a curse under his breath as he pulled a spiral-bound notebook out of his pocket. He flipped to the right page and showed it to Will.

Will frowned at the indecipherable scrawl. “Did you fingerprint a chicken?”

Leo turned the notebook back around and read aloud, “ ‘I will not leave my daughter here. I am not leaving this house until Emma leaves.’ ”

Will rolled the name around in his head, and the girl started to become a person to him rather than just another anonymous victim. She had been a baby once. Her parents had held her, protected her, given her a name. And now they had lost her.

He asked, “What’s the mother saying?”

Leo flipped the notebook closed. “Just the bare facts. I’d bet my left one she was a lawyer before she got knocked up and gave it all up for the good life.”

“Why is that?”

“She’s being real careful about what she says, how she says it. Lots of ‘I felt this’ and ‘I feared that.’ ”

Will nodded. A plea of self-defense relied solely on a person’s perception that he or she was in imminent danger of death at the time of the attack. Campano was obviously laying the groundwork, but Will didn’t know if that was because she was smart or because she was telling the truth. He looked down at the dead man again, the blood-caked palms, the soaked shirt. There was more here than met the eye.

Leo put his hand on Will’s shoulder. “Listen, I gotta warn you—”

He stopped as the pocket doors slid open. Amanda stood beside a young woman. Behind them, Will could see another woman sitting on a deep couch. She was wearing a white tennis outfit. What must have been her injured foot was propped up on the coffee table. Her tennis shoes were on the floor underneath.

“Special Agent Trent,” Amanda said, sliding the doors closed behind her. “This is Detective Faith Mitchell.” Amanda looked Leo up and down like a bad piece of fish, then turned back to the woman. “Special Agent Trent is at your disposal. The GBI is more than happy to offer you any and all help.” She raised an eyebrow at Will, letting him know that the opposite was true. Then, maybe because she thought he was stupid, she added, “I need you back in the office within the hour.”

The fact that Will had anticipated this very thing happening did not make him any more prepared. His car was parked back at city hall. Donnelly was going to be stuck on the scene until they cleared it and any one of the beat cops outside would love a chance to get Will Trent alone in the back of a squad car.

“Agent Trent?” Faith Mitchell seemed annoyed, which made Will think he’d missed something.

He asked, “I’m sorry?”

“Yeah, you are,” she mumbled, and Will could only blink, wondering what he had missed.

Leo didn’t seem to find anything unusual about the exchange. He asked the woman, “The mother say anything?”

“The daughter’s got a best friend.” Like Leo, Faith Mitchell carried a small spiral-bound notebook in her pocket. She paged through it to reference the name. “Kayla Alexander. The mother says we can probably find her at school. Westfield Academy.”

Will recognized the expensive private high school on the outskirts of Atlanta. “Why wasn’t Emma in school?”

Faith answered Leo, though Will had asked the question. “There’ve been some truancy issues in the past.”

Will was hardly an expert, but he couldn’t imagine a teenage girl skipping school without taking her best friend along with her. Unless she was meeting her boyfriend. He looked at the stairs again, wishing that he could go up and examine the scene. “Why wasn’t the mom here today?”

Faith said, “She’s got some weekly thing at her club. She usually doesn’t get back until three.”

“So, if someone was watching the house, they’d know that Emma was here alone.”

Faith told Leo, “I need some air.” She walked out the door and stood at the edge of the porch with her hands on her hips. She was young, probably in her early thirties, of average height, and pretty in the way that thin blond women were naturally thought to be pretty—but there was something that kept her from being attractive. Maybe it was the scowl that had been on her face or the flash of raw hatred in her eyes.

Leo mumbled an apology. “Sorry, man. I was trying to tell you—”

Across the foyer, the pocket doors slid open again. Abigail Campano stood at the entrance, leg bent at an angle so she wouldn’t put weight on her hurt ankle. Unlike Faith, there was something radiant about her blond hair and perfect, milky white skin. Even though her eyes were swollen from crying, her lip still bleeding where it had been busted open, the woman was beautiful.

“Ms. Campano,” Will began.

“Abigail,” she softly interrupted. “You’re the agent from the GBI?”

“Yes, ma’am. I’d like to offer my condolences.”

She stared at him in confusion, probably because she still hadn’t come to terms with her daughter’s death.

“Can you tell me a little bit about your daughter?”

The blank stare did not go away.

Will tried, “You told Detective Donnelly that she had been skipping school lately?”

She nodded slowly. “Obviously, she managed to …” Her voice trailed off as she looked at the dead man on the floor. “Kayla got her into skipping last year. She’d never done anything like that before. She was always a good girl. Always trying to do the right thing.”

“There were other problems?”

“It all seems so inconsequential.” Her lips trembled as she held back her emotions. “She started talking back, doing her own thing. She was trying to be her own person, and we still wanted her to be our little girl.”

“Other than Kayla, did Emma have any friends? Boyfriends?”

Abigail shook her head, wrapping her arms around her waist. “She was so shy. She didn’t make new friends easily. I don’t know how this could have happened.”

“Does Kayla have a brother?”

“No, she’s an only child.” Her voice caught. “Like Emma.”

“Do you think you could make a list of the other kids she hung out with?”

“There were acquaintances, but Emma always picked one person to …” Again, her voice trailed off. “She had no one but Kayla, really.” There was something to her tone that was so final, so certain about her daughter’s aloneness in the world, that Will could not help but feel some of her sadness. He also hoped to God that Leo was making plans to talk to this Kayla. If she was as much an influence in Emma Campano’s life as her mother indicated, then she probably knew a lot more about what had happened here today than anyone else did.

Will asked Abigail, “Is there anyone who might have a grudge against you or your husband?”

She kept shaking her head, transfixed by the sight of the dead man lying in her foyer. “It all happened so fast. I keep trying to think what I did … what else I could have …”

“I know you’ve been asked this before, but are you sure you don’t recognize the man?”

Abigail’s eyes closed, but he imagined that she could still see her daughter’s murderer. “No,” she finally answered. “He’s a stranger to me.”

Suddenly there was a man screaming from the front of the house. “Get the fuck out of my way!”

Will heard scuffling outside, cops yelling for someone to stop, then Paul Campano barreled up the front steps like a man on fire. He rammed Faith Mitchell out of his way as he burst into the house. A uniformed patrolman caught her as she stumbled back, perilously close to the edge of the porch. Neither of them looked happy, but Leo waved his hand, telling them to let it go.

Paul stood in the foyer, fists clenched. Will wondered if this was something genetic—that you were either the type of person who clenched your fists all the time or you weren’t.

“Paul …” Abigail whispered, rushing to him.

Even holding his wife, Paul kept his hands fisted.

Faith was obviously still bristling. Her tone was clipped. “Mr. Campano, I’m Detective Mitchell with the Atlanta Police Department. This is Detective Donnelly.”

Paul wasn’t interested in introductions. He was staring at the dead man over his wife’s shoulder. “Is that the fucker who did this?” His voice turned to a growl. “Who is he? What’s he doing in my house?”

Faith and Leo exchanged a look that Will would’ve missed if he hadn’t been watching them for his own cues. They were partners; they obviously had a shorthand, and it looked like this time Faith was taking the short straw.

She suggested, “Mr. Campano, let’s go out on the porch and talk about this.”

“Who the fuck are you?” Paul glared at Will, his beady eyes almost swallowed by the extra weight on his face.

Will shouldn’t have been surprised by the question, or even the way it was phrased. The last time Paul Campano had talked to him this way, Will was ten years old and they were both living in the Atlanta Children’s Home. A lot had changed since then. Will had gotten taller and his hair had gotten darker. The only thing that changed about Paul was he seemed to have gotten heavier and meaner.

Leo supplied, “Mr. Campano, this is Agent Trent with the GBI.”

Will tried to talk Paul down a little, to make him feel like he could help. “Do you know if your daughter had any enemies, Mr. Campano?”

“Emma?” he asked, glaring at Will. “Of course not. She was only seventeen years old.”

“How about you?”

“No,” he snapped. “No one who would do …” He shook his head, unable to complete the sentence. He looked back at the dead killer. “Who is this bastard? What did Emma ever do to him?”

“Anything you can give us will help. Maybe you and your wife could—”

“She’s up there, isn’t she?” Paul interrupted, looking up. “My baby’s upstairs.”

No one answered him, but Leo took a couple of steps toward the stairs to block the way.

Paul said, “I want to see her.”

“No,” Abigail warned, her voice shaking. “You don’t want to see her like that, Paul. You don’t want to know.”

“I need to see her.”

“Listen to your wife, sir,” Faith coaxed. “You’ll get to see her soon. You just need to let us take care of her right now.”

Paul barked at Leo, “Get the fuck out of my way.”

“Sir, I don’t think—”

Leo took the brunt of his anger. Paul slammed him into the wall as he bolted up the stairs. Will ran up after the man, almost knocking into him as Paul stopped cold at the top of the landing.

He stood frozen, staring at his daughter’s lifeless form at the end of the hallway. The girl was at least fifteen feet away, but her presence filled the space as if she were right there beside them. All the fight seemed to drain out of Paul. Like most bullies, he could never sustain any one emotion.

“Your wife was right,” Will told him. “You don’t want to see her like this.”

Paul went quiet, his labored breathing the only audible noise. His hand was to his chest, palm flat as if he was saying the pledge of allegiance. Tears brimmed in his eyes.

He swallowed hard. “There was this glass bowl on the table.” His voice had gone flat, lifeless. “We got it in Paris.”

“That’s nice,” Will said, thinking that never in a million years could he imagine Paul in Paris.

“It’s a mess up here.”

“There are people who can clean it up for you.”

He went silent again, and Will followed his gaze, taking in the scene. Leo was right about downstairs being worse than up, but there was something even more sinister and unsettling in the air up here. The same bloody shoe prints were here, crisscrossing the white carpeting up and down the long hall. Streaks of blood slashed across the white walls where either the knife or a fist had arced over the body, repeatedly punching or plunging into the flesh. For some reason, the most troubling part to Will was the single red handprint on the wall directly over the victim’s head where her attacker had obviously rested his weight as he raped her.

“Trashcan, right?”

Paul Campano wasn’t looking for the garbage. He had called Will “Trashcan” when they were children. The memory put a lump in Will’s throat. He had to swallow before he could answer. “Yeah.”

“Tell me what happened to my daughter.”

Will debated, but only for a moment. He had to turn sideways to get past Paul and go into the hallway. Careful not to disturb anything, he stepped into the crime scene. Emma’s body was parallel to the walls, her head facing away from the stairs. As he walked toward her, Will’s eyes kept going back to the handprint, the perfect formation of the palm and fingers. His gut roiled as he thought about what the guy had been doing when he left the impression.

Will stopped a few feet from the girl. “She was probably killed here,” he told Paul, knowing from the pool of blood soaking into the carpet that the girl had not been moved. He crouched down by the body, resting his hands on his knees so that he wouldn’t accidentally touch anything. Emma’s shorts were bunched around one ankle, her feet bare. Her underwear and shirt had been yanked out of the way by her attacker. Teeth marks showed dark red against the white of her breasts. Scrapes and bruises trailed up the insides of her thighs, swollen welts showing the damage that had been done. She was thin, with shoulder-length blond hair like her mother and broad shoulders like her dad. There was no telling what she had looked like in life. Her face was beaten so severely that the skull had collapsed on itself, obscuring the eyes, the nose. The only point of reference was the mouth, which gaped open in a toothless, bloody hole.

Will checked on Paul. The man still stood frozen at the top of the stairs. His big, meaty hands were clasped in front of his chest like a nervous old woman waiting for bad news. Will didn’t know what exactly he could see, if the distance softened some of the violence or made it worse.

Will told him, “She was beaten. I can see what looks like two knife wounds. One’s just below her breast. The other is above her belly button.”

“She got it pierced last year.” Paul gave a strained laugh. Will looked back at him and Paul took this as a sign to continue. “She and her best friend went to Florida and came back with …” He shook his head. “You think shit like that’s funny when you’re a kid, but when you’re a parent and your daughter comes home with a ring in her belly …” His face crumpled as he fought emotions.

Will turned his attention back to the girl. There was a silver ring looped through the skin of her belly button.

Paul asked, “Was she raped?”

“Probably.” He’d said the word too fast. The sound hung in the stagnant air.

“Before or after?” Paul’s voice shook. He was more than familiar with the dark deeds men were capable of.

The blood on her abdomen and chest was smeared, indicating someone had lain on top of her after the worst of the beating was over. Still, Will told him, “The coroner will have to answer that. I can’t tell.”

“Are you lying to me?”

“No,” Will answered, trying not to look at the handprint, to let the guilt eat him up inside so that he ended up being the one to tell this man the horrible truth about his daughter’s violent, degrading death.

Suddenly he felt Paul behind him.

Will stood, blocking him. “This is a crime scene. You need to—”

Paul’s mouth dropped open. He slumped against Will like all the air had left his body. “It’s not …” His mouth worked, tears welling into his eyes. “It’s not her.”

Will tried to turn the man away from the sight of his daughter. “Let’s go downstairs. You don’t need to see any more of this.”

“No,” Paul countered, his fingers digging into Will’s arm. “I mean it. It’s not her.” He shook his head back and forth, vehement. “It’s not Emma.”

“I know this is hard for you.”

“Fuck you, with what you know!” Paul pushed himself away from Will. “Has anybody ever told you that your daughter is dead?” He kept shaking his head, staring at the girl. “That’s not her.”

Will tried to reason with him. “Her navel is pierced like you said.”

He shook his head, his words choking in his throat. “It’s not—”

“Come on,” Will coaxed, pushing him back a few steps, trying to keep him from contaminating the scene any more than he already had.

Paul’s words came out in an almost giddy rush. “Her hair, Trash. Emma’s got longer hair than that. It goes down to her back almost. And she’s got a birthmark on her right arm—Emma does. Look, there’s nothing there. There’s no birthmark.”

Will checked the arm. Except for the blood, the skin was a perfect white.

“Right arm,” Paul insisted, annoyed. He pointed to the other arm. “She’s got a birthmark.” When Will did not respond, he took out his wallet. Receipts and papers fell onto the floor as he dug around inside. “It’s weird, shaped like a handprint. The skin’s darker there.” He found what he was looking for and handed Will a photograph. Emma was much younger in the picture. She was wearing a cheerleading outfit. One arm was cocked to her hip, holding a pom-pom. Paul was right; the birthmark looked as if someone had wrapped his hand around her arm and left a print.

Still, Will said, “Paul, let’s not—”

“Abby! It’s not her. It’s not Emma!” Paul was laughing, elated. “Look at her arm, Trash. There’s nothing there. This isn’t Emma. It’s gotta be Kayla. They look alike. They trade clothes all the time. It’s got to be her!”

Abigail ran upstairs, Faith fast behind her.

“Stay back.” Will blocked their way, holding out his arms like a crossing guard, physically pushing Paul back. The man was still smiling a fool’s grin. All he was thinking was that his daughter wasn’t dead. His mind hadn’t made the next leap.

“Keep them here,” Will told Faith. She nodded, stepping in front of the parents. Carefully, Will walked back toward the dead girl. He crouched down again, studying the shoe prints, the spray on the wall. Crossing the dead girl’s body was a fine arc of blood that caught his attention. It went just under her breasts like a finely drawn line. Will hadn’t noticed it the first time, but right now, he would have bet his pension that the blood had come from the kid downstairs.

“It’s not her,” Paul insisted. “It’s not Emma.”

Faith began, “It’s hard sometimes when you lose someone you love. Denial is understandable.”

Paul exploded. “Would you listen to me, you stupid bitch? I’m not going through the twelve steps of grief. I know what my fucking daughter looks like!”

Leo called, “Everything okay up there?”

“It’s under control,” Faith said, sounding like the exact opposite was true.

Will looked at the dead girl’s bare feet. The soles were clean, seemingly the only part of her body that didn’t have some pattern of blood on it.

He stood up, asking Abigail, “Tell me what happened.”

She was shaking her head, unable to let herself hope. “Is it Emma? Is that her?”

Will took in the faint streaks of dark red on the skirt of Abigail’s white tennis dress, the transfer patterns across her chest. He kept his voice firm, even though his heart was thumping hard enough to press against his ribs. “Tell me exactly what happened from the moment you got here.”

“I was in my car—”

“From the stairs,” Will interrupted. “You came up the stairs. Did you go to the body? Did you come into this area?”

“I stood here,” she said, indicating the floor in front of her.

“What did you see?”

Tears streamed down her cheeks. Her mouth moved, trying to get out words as her eyes scanned the dead body. Finally, she said, “I saw him standing over her. He had a knife in his hand. I felt threatened.”

“I know you felt like your life was in danger,” Will assured her. “Just tell me what happened next.”

Her throat worked. “I panicked. I stepped back and fell down the stairs.”

“What did he do?”

“He came after me—came down the stairs.”

“Did he have the knife in his hand?” She nodded. “Was it raised?”

She nodded again, then shook her head. “I don’t know. No. It was at his side.” She tightened her hand to her side to show him. “He was running down the stairs. It was at his side.”

“Did he raise the knife when he got to the bottom of the stairs?”

“I kicked him before he got to the bottom. To throw him off balance.”

“What happened to the knife?”

“He dropped it when he fell. I—He hit me in the head. I thought he was going to kill me.”

Will turned around, looked at the shoe prints again. They were scattered, chaotic. Two people had stepped in the blood, walked back and forth, struggled. “Are you sure you didn’t come into the hallway up here at all?”

She nodded her head.

“Listen to me very carefully. You didn’t walk around up here? You didn’t go to your daughter? You didn’t step in any blood?”

“No. I was here. Right here. I stopped at the top of the stairs and he came toward me. I thought he was going to kill me. I thought …” She put her hand to her mouth, unable to continue. Her voice cracked as she asked her husband, “It’s not Em?”

Will told Faith, “Keep them both right here,” as he headed down the stairs.

Leo was standing in the front doorway, talking to one of the uniformed patrolmen. He asked Will, “What’s going on?”

“Don’t wait for Pete,” he ordered, stepping over the body. “I need an ID on this guy right now.” He found Abigail Campano’s shoes in the parlor under the coffee table. The tread was a court zigzag, not a waffle pattern. Except for a couple of scuff marks on the toes, there wasn’t a trace of blood on them.

In the foyer, Leo was taking a pair of latex gloves from his pocket. “The nosey neighbor across the street says she saw a car parked in the driveway a couple of hours ago. Could be yellow, could be white. Could be four doors, could be two.”

Will checked the dead man’s sneakers. Waffle pattern, dried blood caked in the tread. He said, “Give me those.” Leo handed him the gloves and Will put them on. “You got your pictures, right?”

“Yeah. What’s going on?”

Carefully, Will peeled up the dead man’s T-shirt. The material was still soaking wet where it had bunched up at the waist, and it left an odd, pinkish hue on the exposed skin.

Leo asked, “You wanna tell me what you’re doing?”

There was so much blood that it was hard to see anything. Will gently pressed the abdomen, and a narrow slit opened up in the flesh, black liquid oozing out.

“Shit,” Leo hissed. “Did the mother stab him?”

“No.” Will saw how it must have happened. The young man kneeling beside the body upstairs, a knife plunged into his chest. He would have pulled out the knife, arterial blood spraying over the dead girl’s body. The man would’ve tried to stand, staggering to get help even as his lung collapsed. That’s when Abigail Campano had appeared at the top of the stairs. She saw the man who had killed her daughter. He saw the woman who could possibly save them all.

Leo looked up the stairs, then back at the dead kid, finally understanding. “Shit.”

Will snapped off the gloves, trying not to think about all the lost time. He went to the bloody bare footprint, saw that the weight had been on the ball of the foot when it was made. There was a small cluster of blood droplets on the bottom stair—six of them.

Will talked it out for Leo’s benefit as much as his own. “Emma was unconscious. The killer carried her over his shoulder.” Will narrowed his eyes, putting the pieces together. “He stopped here at the bottom of the stairs to catch his breath. Her head and arms were hanging down his back. The blood drops on the bottom tread are almost perfectly round, which means they fell straight down.” Will pointed to the footprint. “He shifted her weight forward. Her foot touched the floor—that’s why it’s facing up the stairs instead of toward the door. After carrying her down the stairs, he had to readjust the body so that he could carry her out the front door.”

Leo tried to cover himself. “The mother’s story held up. There was no way I could—”

“It doesn’t matter.” Will glanced up. Abigail and Paul Campano were staring over the railing, watching, disbelieving. “Does Kayla have a car?”

Abigail spoke hesitantly. “She drives a white Prius.”

Will took out his phone and hit the speed dial. He told Leo, “Try to nail down the old lady on the car—show her a photo array if you have to. Check all 9-1-1 calls coming out of the area in the last five hours. Get your guys to recanvass the neighborhood. There were a lot of joggers out earlier who are probably back home by now. I’ll notify highway patrol; there’s an on-ramp to the interstate less than a mile from here.” Will put the phone to his ear just as Amanda picked up. He didn’t waste time with pleasantries. “I need a team here. It looks like we’ve got a kidnapping.”