CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Faith watched Ivan Sambor swing back the metal battering ram and slam it into Evan Bernard’s front door. The wooden jamb splintered in a satisfying way, the cheap dead bolt breaking in two as the metal door swung back on its hinges.

She had easily seen inside the apartment from the outside, but Faith walked through the four rooms with her gun drawn, checking the kitchen, the bathroom and the two small bedrooms. Her impression now was the same as when she had first arrived on the scene: Evan Bernard had known they were coming, known that his earlier arrest for sex with a teenage girl would come to light and that the obvious conclusion would be drawn between what happened on the coast and what happened to Kayla Alexander. Bernard had probably stripped the apartment the minute he had gotten home from school that first day.

Faith could smell bleach in every corner of the house. The closet doors had been left open, easily seen from the bedroom windows. There wasn’t a speck of dust anywhere—not on the kitchen table, the many bookshelves or, when out of curiosity she decided to check, the blades of the ceiling fans. Even the tops of the doors had been dusted.

Faith holstered her gun and called in Charlie Reed and his team. She leaned her shoulder against the door outside the second bedroom. The walls were pink. Blue and white clouds were painted on the ceiling. The furniture was cheap, probably secondhand, but it reminded Faith of a bedroom set she had seen in the Sears catalogue when she was a little girl. The small chest of drawers and the four-poster bed were laminated in white Formica with swirly, gold trim outlining the knobs and various other architectural details. Fluffy pink pillows were scattered on the bed. There was framed artwork of Winnie the Pooh with Tigger. It was the sort of room every girl dreamed about in the 1980s.

Outside, she heard Will Trent asking one of the cops where Faith was. He had probably blown through every light on the five-mile stretch between Westfield and Evan Bernard’s apartment.

Will’s jaw was clenched as he walked down the hallway. He had an air of fury about him, and seeing the girly bedroom did nothing to change his disposition. His throat worked as he took in the pink curtains and lace bedspread. Several seconds passed before he could speak. “Do you think he held her here?”

Faith shook her head. “It’s too obvious.”

Neither one of them walked into the room. Faith knew there would be no evidence in the white sheets, no telltale strands of hair in the freshly vacuumed carpet. Bernard had kept this showcase for his own benefit. She could imagine him coming into the room, sitting on the bed and living out his sick fantasies.

“It’s younger than seventeen,” Faith said. “The room, I mean. It’s the kind of stuff you’d buy for a ten-or eleven-year-old.”

“Did you get the pants?”

“They were in the garbage,” she told him. “Do you think we’ll get any DNA off them?”

“We’d better,” he said. “The second ransom call had the same proof of life from yesterday. Maybe the kidnapper got spooked because he saw us around the school.”

“Or she’s already dead.”

“I can’t accept that,” Will told her, his voice firm.

Faith chose her words carefully. “Statistically, children taken by strangers are killed within the first three hours of their abduction.”

“She wasn’t taken by a stranger,” Will insisted, and she wondered where he got his certainty. “The kidnapper prerecorded the part about calling back at four. He obviously needed more time. We’ll get the new proof of life then.”

“You can’t be certain of any of that, Will. Look at the facts. Evan Bernard’s not talking. We have no idea who his accomplice is. There’s not a chance in hell we’ll find something here to—”

“I’m not going to have this conversation with you.”

So they were back to him being the boss again. Faith bit her lip, trying not to let her sarcasm escalate the situation. He could live in fairyland all he wanted, but Faith was fairly certain that there would not be a happy ending to this story.

Will pressed the point. “I can’t believe she’s dead, Faith. Emma’s a fighter. She’s out there somewhere waiting for us to find her.”

The passion in his voice was unmistakable, and instead of feeling irritated, she now felt sorry for him.

He said, “I should’ve gotten more from Bernard. He was so smug, so sure that he was in control. I feel like I played right into his hands.”

“You got him to admit to having sex with Kayla.”

“He’s going to make bail in twenty-four hours. If his lawyer’s any good, he’ll get the trial postponed until no one remembers who Emma Campano is. Even with the parents pushing for a prosecution, he could end up walking.”

“He admitted on tape to having sex with her.”

“I hadn’t read him his rights. He could argue that I coerced him.” Will shook his head, obviously angry with himself. “I screwed it up.”

“He knew we were coming to his apartment,” Faith said. “This place is immaculate. He didn’t clean like this overnight. He prepared the space for us. He’s playing some kind of game.”

“I should have run a background check on him yesterday.”

“There was no reason to,” she countered. “We both assumed that the school had checked him out.”

“They did,” Will reminded her. “Just not recently.”

Charlie called from the other room, “Hey, guys.”

Faith and Will went into the master bedroom, which had a decidedly more masculine flair. The furniture was heavy, stained a dark charcoal and sitting low to the ground in a sterile, modern way. Over the bed was hanging a huge canvas of a blond-haired, blue-eyed girl. She was obviously young, though not so young that the painting could be deemed child pornography. It was certainly pornographic, though. The girl was naked, her chest thrust out, her legs wide open. There was a sexy twinkle in her eyes, a kittenish pout to her lips. Everything glistened unnaturally.

Charlie was sitting at a desk that was built into an armoire.

“His computer,” Charlie said. “Look at this.”

Faith saw that the monitor showed a live image of the second bedroom.

Will said, “The camera must be mounted in the Winnie the Pooh poster.”

“Christ,” Faith whispered. “Are there any files?”

Charlie was clicking through the directory. “I’m not seeing anything,” he told them. “We’ll have the forensic techs look at this, but it’s my guess that an external hard drive was used.” He pulled some loose cables out from behind the computer. “These would’ve recorded sound and video onto the drive. He could completely bypass the computer’s hard drive.”

“The main computer wouldn’t keep any records?”

Charlie shook his head, opening and closing files as he checked for anything incriminating. Faith saw spreadsheets, homework assignments.

She asked, “What about e-mail?”

“There are two addresses on here. One is through the cable company for Internet service. All that’s on there is spam—Viagra offers, Nigerian money laundering, that sort of thing. There’s no address book, no sent mails, nothing. The other one looks like his school e-mail. I read through everything; they’re just correspondences with parents, memos from the principal. Nothing suspicious and nothing personal.”

“Could he have kept a new e-mail address on the hard drive?”

“You’d have to ask someone who knows more about computers than me,” Charlie said. “Blood and guts I can tell you about. Computers are just a hobby.”

Will said, “He wouldn’t put a camera in that room unless he was taping himself so he could watch it later. We need to find that hard drive.”

“I didn’t find anything in Adam’s room,” Faith reminded him. “His computer was stolen a week before the crime was committed.”

“What about Gabe Cohen?”

“Nothing jumped out,” Faith told him. “I checked his computer, but like Charlie said, I’m not an expert.”

“It’d be a stretch asking to see it again.”

She wondered if that was some kind of dig at her for not arresting Gabe Cohen. They were both frustrated and angry. She decided to let the comment pass. “Did you find anything in Bernard’s desk at school?”

“Nothing,” Will answered. “Maybe the accomplice is keeping the hard drive or a computer for him? Maybe there’s a laptop?”

“What about his car?”

“Cleaner than the house,” Will said. “Smells like bleach and vinegar.”

Charlie stated the obvious. “If you find the video files, that’s the smoking gun.”

Will said, “I’ll get copies of all his phone records, landline and cell.”

“This guy is smart,” Faith pointed out. “He’d have one of those pay-as-you-go lines. There’s no way we can trace them.”

“We’ve already fucked this up twice from making assumptions. Bernard is smart, but he can’t think of everything.” Will asked, “Charlie, can you check his Internet history?”

Charlie clicked the icon for the Internet browser. A page popped up with a scantily clad teenager doing a split over the words, “Barely Legal.” He opened the root directory. “Looks like he emptied the cache, but I can still recover some of the pages.” After a few more clicks, he found Bernard’s recently viewed pages. The first linked to Westfield Academy’s grading program. The next few were retail outlets you would expect a teacher to be interested in—Barnes & Noble, Wal-Mart. Apparently, Bernard had been searching for a copy of Wuthering Heights.

“Here we go,” Charlie said, pulling up a chat room. Faith leaned in for a closer look, but the site was one intended for teachers who were looking to retire. Another chat room was for West Highland terrier lovers.

Will asked, “What about the first site?”

Charlie went back to Barely Legal. “It’s got a disclaimer on the front that says all the girls are of age. As far as the Internet is concerned, as long as they’re not obviously underage, like, children, then that’s all you need.”

Faith looked around the room, feeling a slight sense of disgust as she thought about Evan Bernard sleeping here. She went to the bedside table and opened the drawer from the bottom with her foot. “More porn,” she said, not touching the magazines. There was a girl on the front cover who looked about twelve, but the masthead insisted otherwise, proclaiming, Legal Horny Honeys.

Will had slipped on a pair of gloves. He pulled out the magazines. All of them had teenage-looking cover girls. All of them implied that the girls were of legal age. “Perfectly legal.”

“Detective?” Ivan Sambor’s large frame filled the doorway. He held a couple of plastic evidence bags in his meaty hands. Faith saw a large pink vibrator and a set of fur-lined handcuffs, also pink. “Found these in the other room.”

Will said, “Tell the lab those have priority.”

Ivan nodded, leaving the room.

Faith told Will, “Bernard doesn’t have any other properties in his name either in the state of Georgia, the Carolinas, Tennessee or Alabama.”

“Let’s broaden the search,” Will said, though Faith thought that was a shot in the dark. Bernard would not use his real name if he had a silent partner to act as a front.

She said, “I’ve got a team calling all the storage rental places within a thirty-mile area.”

“Check under the names of any family members,” Will told her. “We need to know who his friends are. Maybe there’s an address book.” He glanced around the room, scanning every piece of furniture, every painting on the wall. “The judge limited the scope of our search warrant to evidence tying Kayla Alexander to Bernard. We could argue that we’re looking for names of other victims. Even if he’s convicted for Kayla, Bernard could be out in two to three with good behavior.”

“He’ll be a registered sex offender. He’ll never teach again.”

“That’s a small price to pay for kidnapping and murder.”

“You’re sure he’s involved in the other crimes, that it’s not just what he said: he had sex with her, she went her way, he went back to school?”

“You saw that bedroom, Faith. He’s into young girls.”

“All that means is that he is into raping them, not murdering them.”

“He learned in Savannah that it’s dangerous to leave witnesses.”

“Sorry to interrupt,” Charlie said, “but maybe you should consider the fact that he was also looking into retiring.”

Will seemed puzzled. “How do you know that?”

“The Web site?” Faith asked, wondering how he had forgotten about it so quickly. “Charlie, pull it up again.”

Charlie did as she asked, finding the correct Web page. He scrolled through the list of questions and responses. “I’m not sure what screen name he went by. They’re all pretty innocuous.” He clicked to the next page. “Basically, they’re talking about what benefits they retain after retirement, consultancy jobs to help pay the bills—that sort of thing.” The screen changed as he selected a new link. “Georgia’s teacher retirement program.” He leaned closer to the screen to read the details. “All right, this deals with private versus public school teaching. With the state retirement program, you have to have a certain number of years vested to qualify for a pension. Private, you’re on your own.” He scrolled down, skimming the text. “It says here that they have to go thirty years to get full retirement.”

“Maybe he decided he couldn’t wait it out,” Faith said. “A million dollars would certainly help pave the way toward a comfortable early retirement.”

Will told her, “Bernard’s only been at Westfield for twelve years. He told us he was teaching in the public school system at one point. Let’s find out where he taught before that.”

“He would’ve left in the mid-nineties,” Faith said, doing the math in her head. “Maybe there was some impropriety they swept under the rug.”

“I know teachers don’t make a lot of money, but don’t you think it’s odd that he’s living in this crappy apartment at his age?”

Charlie suggested, “Maybe he’s been spending all his spare cash on flights to Thailand to pick up underage girls.”

Faith asked, “Do you think we have enough cause to look at his financial records?”

Will shook his head. “We didn’t list financial documents in the search warrant.”

Charlie cleared his throat. Faith looked at the computer screen. He had pulled up Evan Bernard’s accounts at the local credit union. “Let this be a lesson not to store your passwords in your key-chains.”

Will said, “Check to see if he made any payments to storage facilities.”

Charlie moved the mouse around, highlighting each account as he read through the details. “Nothing’s popping up. He pays twelve hundred a month for this place. His utilities are about what you’d expect. Groceries, dry cleaners, car payments, a couple of PayPal payments.” He read through the rest. “It looks like most of his money goes into his 401-K. The guy’s socking it away for retirement.”

Faith asked, “What does he bring home every month?”

“Around twenty-three hundred.”

Faith stared at the computer screen. She could hear policemen outside the window, laughing about something. Traffic noise from the street filled the air with a low hum. This was the sort of place you rented when you were fresh out of college, not heading toward your fifties and looking to retire. She said, “Evan Bernard’s been teaching for how many years and he doesn’t own his own house?”

“Could be divorced,” Charlie suggested. “An ex-wife could have bled him dry.”

“We’ll check court records,” Will said. “If he’s got an ex, maybe she found out what he was doing and left him. If we can corroborate that Kayla was a pattern, we might be able to get a judge to deny bail.”

“We already tried the neighbors. Most of them were gone—probably at work. There’s a stay-at-home mom in the unit across the garden. She says she’s never met Bernard, never seen anything suspicious going on.”

“Send a couple of units back around seven tonight. More people should be home by then.” Will went to the closet and checked the top shelves. “Maybe he’s got a photo album or something.”

“We won’t find anything he doesn’t want us to.”

Will kept searching the closet, taking down boxes, checking their contents. “We know he was gone from the school for two hours.” He pulled out a stack of yearbooks and dropped them on the bed. There were almost twenty in all, their cheerful covers screaming school spirit. He picked up the top one, which was emblazoned with the Westfield Academy crest, and started thumbing through the pages. “That’s not enough time to do the murders, hide Emma and get back to school. The accomplice must have done the heavy lifting. Bernard would have known Emma came from a wealthy family.”

“Kayla’s parents were well-off. Why not take her, too? Why kill her if she represents money?”

Will closed the yearbook and held it in his hand. “Are we sure Kayla wasn’t involved?”

Faith glanced at Charlie, who was still checking out the computer files.

Will didn’t seem to mind talking in front of the man. “Kayla Alexander was a nasty piece of work.” He dropped the yearbook and picked up the next one. “We haven’t found one person who’s said otherwise.”

“She’d have to be pretty sick to be screwing Bernard in her car while she knew that her best friend was about to be kidnapped.” Faith considered something. “Maybe Kayla felt threatened by Emma’s affair with Adam.”

Will picked up on her train of thought. “Kayla might know that Adam and Emma were parking in the garage. The nosey neighbor told on the girls last year. They had to find somewhere else to park.”

“I’ve been wondering why Kayla parked her white Prius in the driveway of the Campano house when she knew that the last time they were caught skipping, it was because the neighbor saw a car in the driveway.”

He stopped searching the pages. “Something’s bothered me since I saw the Prius in the parking lot. Everything the killer touched had blood smeared on it: the trunk, the door handles, the steering wheel. Everything except for the duct tape and the rope in the trunk.”

“Do you think Kayla brought them for the killer to use?”

“Maybe.”

“Hold on,” Faith said, trying to process all of this. “If Kayla was involved, why did she get killed?”

“She had a reputation for being nasty.”

“You’ve said all along that the killer must have known her.”

His phone started ringing, and he slid it out of his pocket. The thing was pathetic, the pieces held together with Scotch tape. “Hello?”

Faith picked up one of the yearbooks and thumbed through it so she wasn’t standing there doing nothing. She glanced up once at Will, trying to read his expression as he listened to the call. Impassive as usual.

“Thank you,” he said, then ended the call. “Bernard’s fingerprints don’t match the thumbprint on the letter.”

Faith held the yearbook to her chest. It felt heavy in her hands. “So his accomplice handled the threatening notes.”

“Why send the notes? Why show their hand?”

Faith shrugged. “Could be they were trying to scare away Adam so Emma would be alone in the house.” She contradicted herself. “In that case, why didn’t Kayla just drive Emma to the house? It had to be that they weren’t getting along.”

Will opened the Westfield yearbook from last year and flipped through the pages. “We need to go back to the beginning. There’s a second man out there.” He traced his finger across the rows of student photographs. “Bernard’s not the kind of guy who gets his hands dirty.”

“My friend at Tech said he would probably have news today,” Faith told him, hoping she wouldn’t have to be more specific about the vial of gray powder she had asked Victor to have tested. Will might have been okay speaking freely around Charlie Reed, but Faith didn’t know the man well enough to trust him with her career.

Will said, “Go to Tech. See if there are any results.” He found Kayla Alexander’s class picture and tore out the page from the yearbook. He handed it to Faith. “While you’re there, ask Tommy Albertson if he’s ever seen this girl hanging around either Adam or Gabe Cohen. Ask everybody in the dorm if you have to.” He flipped to another page and found Bernard’s faculty photograph. He tore it out, saying, “Show this one, too.”

Faith took the photographs.

Will opened another yearbook, searching for his own copies of the photos. “I’m going to go to the Copy Right and do the same.”

Faith looked at the bedside clock. “You said the next ransom call is supposed to come at four?”

Carefully, he tore out the right pages. “The killer is probably with Emma right now, getting the second proof of life.”

Faith put the yearbook on the bed. She started to walk away, but stopped, knowing something was different. She fanned out the yearbooks, finding the three that did not belong. They were thicker, their colors not as vibrant. “Why does Bernard have yearbooks from Crim?” Faith asked. The Alonzo A. Crim High School was located in Reynoldstown, a transitional area in east Atlanta. It was probably one of the seedier schools in the system.

Will told her, “At least we know where Bernard taught before he moved to Westfield.”

Faith was silent as she thumbed through the pages. She had never been one to believe in fate or spirits or angels sitting on your shoulder, but she had long trusted what she thought of as her cop’s instinct. Carefully, she skimmed the index in the back for Evan Bernard’s name. She found his photo in the faculty section, but he also sponsored the newspaper staff.

Faith found the appropriate page for the staff photo. The kids were in the usual silly poses. Some of them wearing fedoras that had “press” tags sticking out of them. Some had pencils to their mouths or were eyeballing the camera over folded newspapers. A pretty young blonde stood out, not because she wasn’t hamming for the camera, but because she stood very close to a much younger-looking Evan Bernard. The photo was black-and-white, but Faith could imagine the color of her strawberry blond hair, the freckles scattered across her nose.

She told Will, “That’s Mary Clark.”

According to a very angry Olivia McFaden, within half an hour of Evan Bernard’s arrest, Mary Clark had abandoned her classroom. The teacher had simply taken her purse out of the desk, told her students to read the next section in their textbooks, then left the building.

Faith found the woman easily enough. Mary’s beat-up Honda Civic was parked outside her family’s home on Waddell Street in Grant Park. People took good care of their homes here, but it was nothing like the richer climes of Ansley Park, where professionally manicured lawns and expensive gray-water reclamation tanks made sure the lawns stayed green, flowers kept blooming, all through the summer. Trashcans lined the road, and Faith had to idle the Mini while the garbage truck slowly made its way up the hill, emptying the cans and crawling along to the next house.

Grant Park was a family-friendly neighborhood that managed to be barely affordable while still being in the city limits of Atlanta. Trees arched overhead and fresh paint gleamed in the afternoon sun. The houses were a mixed variety, some shotgun style, some Victorian. All of them had seen a whirlwind of remodeling and renovation during the housing boom, only to find all their paper equity gone when the boom went to a bust.

Still, a handful of houses had been passed by in the race for bigger and better—single-story cottages popped up here and there, neighboring homes looming two and three stories above them. Mary Clark’s house was one of these poor cousins. From the outside, Faith guessed the house probably had two bedrooms and one bathroom. Nothing about the house overtly pointed to disrepair, but there was a certain air of neglect to the place.

Faith walked up the stone steps. A large two-toddler stroller of the type used for runners seemed to be taking up permanent space on the front porch. Toys were scattered about. The porch swing looked weathered from its place on the ground. The hardware and chains rusted in a pile beside it. Faith gathered someone had started the weekend project with great intentions but never followed through. The front door was painted a high gloss black, the window curtained on the other side. There was no doorbell. She raised her hand to knock just as the door opened.

A short, bearded man stood in the doorway. He had a small child on either hip, each in various states of oblivious happiness at the prospect of a stranger at the door. “Yes?”

“I’m Detective Faith Mitchell with the—”

“It’s okay, Tim,” a distant voice called. “Let her in.”

Tim didn’t seem to want to comply, but he stepped back, letting Faith come into the house. “She’s in the kitchen.”

“Thank you.”

Tim seemed to want to say something more to her—a warning, perhaps?—but he kept his mouth closed as he left the house with the twins. The door clicked shut behind him.

Faith glanced around the room, not knowing whether she was expected to stay here or to find the kitchen. The Clarks had chosen a post-college eclectic style for the living room, mixing brand-new pieces with old. A ratty couch sat in front of an ancient-looking television set. The leather recliner was modern and fashionable, but for faint scratches on the legs that showed signs of a recent visit from a cat. Toys were scattered all over the place; it was as if FAO Schwarz had fired off a bunker-buster from their New York headquarters.

A quick glance into the open doorway of what must have been the master bedroom showed even more toys. Even at fifteen, Faith had known not to let Jeremy have every room of the house. It was no wonder parents looked exhausted all of the time. There was no space in their homes that belonged completely to them.

“Hello?” Mary called.

Faith followed the voice, walking down a long hallway that led to the back of the house. Mary Clark was standing at the sink, her back to the window. She held a cup of coffee in her hand. Her strawberry blond hair was down around her shoulders. She was wearing jeans and a large, ill-fitting T-shirt that must have belonged to her husband. Her face was blotchy, her eyes red-rimmed.

Faith said, “Do you want to talk about it?”

“Do I have a choice?”

Faith sat down at the table, a 1950s metal and laminate set with matching chairs. The kitchen was cozy, far from modern. The sink was mounted onto a one-piece unit that had been painted a pastel green. All of the cabinets were the original metal. There was no dishwasher, and the stove tilted to the side. Matching pencil marks on either side of the doorway celebrated each growth spurt Mary’s twins had experienced.

Mary tossed her coffee into the sink, put the cup on the counter. “Tim said that I should stay out of this.”

Faith gave her back her earlier comment. “Do you have a choice?”

They both stared at each other for a moment. Faith knew the way people acted when they had something to hide, just as she knew how to spot the cues that they wanted to talk. Mary Clark showed none of the familiar traits. If Faith had to guess, she would say the woman was ashamed.

Faith clasped her hands in front of her, waiting for the woman to speak.

“I guess I’m fired?”

“You’ll have to talk to McFaden about that.”

“They don’t really fire teachers anymore. They just give them the shittiest classes until they quit or kill themselves.”

Faith did not respond.

“I saw them take Evan out of the school in handcuffs.”

“He admitted to having sex with Kayla Alexander.”

“Did he take Emma?”

“We’re building a case against him,” Faith told her. “I can’t tell you details.”

“He was my teacher at Crim thirteen years ago.”

“That’s a pretty bad neighborhood.”

“I was a pretty bad girl.” Her sarcasm was loud and clear, but there was pain underneath the boast, and Faith waited her out, figuring the best way to find the truth was to have Mary lead her there.

The woman slowly walked over to the table and pulled out a chair. She sat down with a heavy sigh, and Faith caught a whiff of alcohol on her breath. “Evan was the only bright spot,” Mary told her. “He’s the reason I wanted to be a teacher.”

Faith was not surprised. Mary Clark, with her pretty blond hair, her piercing blue eyes, was exactly Evan Bernard’s type. “He molested you?”

“I was sixteen. I knew what I was doing.”

Faith wouldn’t let her get away with that. “Did you really?”

Tears came into the woman’s eyes. She looked around for a tissue, and Faith got up to get her a paper towel off the roll.

“Thank you,” she said, blowing her nose.

Faith gave her a few seconds before asking, “What happened?”

“He seduced me,” she said. “Or maybe I seduced him. I don’t know how it happened.”

“Did you have a crush on him?”

“Oh, yeah.” She laughed. “Home wasn’t exactly nice for me. My father left when I was little. My mother worked two jobs.” She tried to smile. “I’m just another one of those stupid women with a father fixation, right?”

“You were sixteen,” Faith reminded her. “You weren’t a woman.”

She wiped her nose. “I was a handful. Smoking, drinking. Skipping school.”

Just like Kayla, Faith thought. “Where did he take you?”

“His house. We hung out there all the time. He was cool, you know? The cool teacher who let us drink at his place.” She shook her head. “All we had to do was worship him.”

“Did you?”

“I did everything he wanted me to do.” Mary shot her a searing look. “Everything.”

Faith could see how easily Mary had probably played into Bernard’s hands. He had given her safe harbor, but he was also the person who could bring it all to an end with one phone call to her parents.

“How long did it last?”

“Too long. Not long enough.” She said, “He had this special room. He kept the door locked. No one was allowed in there.”

“No one?” Faith asked, because obviously, Mary Clark had seen it.

“It was all done up like a little girl’s room. I thought it was so pretty. White furniture, pink walls. It was the kind of room I thought all the rich girls had.”

The man certainly was a creature of habit.

“He was sweet at first. We talked about my dad leaving us, how I felt abandoned. He was nice about it. He just listened. But then he wanted to do other things.”

Faith thought of the handcuffs, the vibrator they had found in Bernard’s special room. “Did he force you?”

“I don’t know,” Mary admitted. “He’s very good at making you think that you want to do something.”

“What kinds of things?”

“He hurt me. He …” She went very quiet. Faith gave her space, not pressing the woman, knowing that she was fragile. Slowly, Mary pulled down the collar of the baggy T-shirt. Faith saw the raised crescent of a scar just above her left breast. She had been bitten hard enough to draw blood. Evan Bernard had left his mark.

Faith let out a long breath of air. How close had she come as a kid to being just like Mary Clark? It was the luck of the draw that the older man in her life had been a teenage boy instead of a sadistic pedarest. “Did he handcuff you?”

Mary put her hand over her mouth, only trusting herself to nod.

“Were you ever afraid for your life?”

Mary did not answer, but Faith could see it in the woman’s eyes. She had been terrified, trapped. “It was all a game for him,” she said. “We would be together one day, and then the next, he would break it off with me. I lived in constant fear that he would finally leave me, and I would be all alone.”

“What happened?”

“He quit in the middle of the year,” Mary told her. “I didn’t see him again until my first day at Westfield. I just stood there like a gawking teenager, like it was thirteen years ago and he was my teacher. I felt all these things for him, things that I shouldn’t feel. I know it’s sick, but he was the first man I loved.” She looked up at Faith, almost begging her to understand. “All the things he did to me, all the humiliation and the pain and the grief … I don’t know why I can’t break this connection I have with him.” She was crying again. “How sick is that, that I still have feelings for the man who raped me?”

Faith looked at her hands, not trusting herself to answer. “Why did Evan leave your school?”

“There was another girl. I don’t remember her name. She was hurt really badly—raped, beaten. She said that Evan did it to her.”

“He wasn’t arrested?”

“She was a troublemaker. Like me. Another kid stood up for him, gave him an alibi. Bernard could always get kids to lie for him, but he still quit anyway. I think he knew they were onto him.”

“Did you ever see him again? I mean, after he left school, did he try to get in touch with you?”

“Of course not.”

Something in her tone made Faith ask, “Did you try to get in touch with him?”

The tears came back, humiliation marring her pretty features. “Of course I did.”

“What happened?”

“He had another girl there,” she said. “In our room. My room.” Tears rolled down her cheeks. “I screamed at them, threatened to call the police, said whatever stupid thing I could think of to get him back.” She stared at the markings on the doorjamb, the milestones of her children’s lives. “I remember it was pouring down raining, and cold—cold like it never gets here. I think it actually snowed that year.”

“What did you do?”

“I offered myself to him, whatever he wanted, however he wanted.” She nodded her head, as if agreeing with the memory that she had been willing to debase herself in any way for this man. “I told him I would do anything.”

“What did he say?”

She looked back at Faith. “He beat me like a dog with his hands and fists. I lay there in the street until the morning.”

“Did you go to the hospital?”

“No. I went home.”

“Did you ever go back?”

“Once, maybe three or four months later. I was with my new boyfriend. I wanted to park in front of Evan’s house. I wanted someone else to fuck me there, like I could pay him back.” She chuckled at her naiveté. “Knowing Evan, he would’ve stood at the window, watching us, jerking himself off.”

“He wasn’t there?”

“He had moved. I guess he was on to greener pastures, on to our illustrious Westfield Academy.”

“And you never spoke to him again—not until you saw him your first day at school?”

“No. I wasn’t so stupid that I didn’t understand.”

“Understand what?”

“Before, he never left bruises where people could see them. That’s how I knew it was over. He kicked my face so hard that my cheekbone fractured.” She put her hand to her cheek. “You can’t tell, can you?”

Faith looked at the woman’s pretty face, her perfect skin. “No.”

“It’s on the inside,” she said, stroking her cheek the way she probably soothed her children. “Everything Evan did to me is still on the inside.”

Will walked through the parking lot behind the Copy Right, feeling time start to crush in on him. Evan Bernard would be out of jail this time tomorrow. His accomplice was no closer to being identified. There were no clues to follow up on, no breaks on the horizon. The forensic evidence was a wash. The DNA would take days to process. Amanda was ruthless in her focus. She worked cases to win them, cutting her losses when she felt the odds stacking against her. Unless the four o’clock ransom call revealed something earth-shattering, she would soon start pulling resources, assigning priorities to other cases.

They thought Emma was dead. Will could feel it in the way Faith looked at him, the careful words Amanda chose when she talked about the teenage girl. They had all given up on her—everyone but Will. He could not accept that the girl was gone. He would not accept anything less than bringing a living, breathing child back to Abigail Campano.

He pressed the button beside the door and was buzzed in immediately. As Will walked down the hallway to the Copy Right, he could hear the high-pitched whir of the machines working at full speed. The construction crew on the street added to the cacophony, hammer drills and concrete mixers providing a steady beat. Inside the store, the plate-glass windows facing Peachtree Street were vibrating from the activity.

“Hey, man!” Lionel Petty called. He was sitting behind the front counter, his head bent over a paper plate that contained a very large steak and French fries. Will recognized the logo on the paper sack beside him as that of the Steakery, a fast-food place specializing in large portions of dubiously inexpensive meat.

“You got my phone call!” Petty said, obviously excited. “The construction crew came back this morning. I was shocked, man. Somebody must’ve screwed up their orders.” He looked closely at Will. “Damn, man, you got creamed.”

“Yeah,” Will said, stupidly touching his bruised nose.

The noise level died down a bit and Petty stood up to check the machines.

Will asked, “The contractors—is it the same crew?”

He stopped at one of the copiers and began loading in reams of paper. “Some of them look familiar. The foreman’s been coming in and out of the garage with his big-ass truck. Warren’s pissed about it, but there’s nothing we can do because we don’t technically own the lot.”

Will thought about what the manager had told him, how most of their customers never came to the building. “Why does he care?”

“The trash, man—all that litter. It’s a matter of respect.” He closed the machine and pressed a button. The copier whirred back to life, adding a deep hum to the chorus of spinning wheels and shuffling paper. Loud beeping came from outside as a Bobcat front loader backed into position to move the steel plates off the road.

Petty sat down in front of his meal. “The dust gets dragged all over the carpet. It’s so fine that we can’t vacuum it up.”

“What dust?”

Petty cut into the meat, grease and blood squirting onto the paper plate. “The concrete they use underground.”

Will thought of the gray powder. He glanced back at the construction workers. The Bobcat rammed its front shovel into the edge of one of the steel plates, revealing a gaping hole in the road. “What does it look like?”

Petty cupped his hand to his ear. “What?”

Will didn’t answer. The hand at Petty’s ear held a cheap-looking knife. The handle was wood, the grommets holding it together a faded gold. The blade was jagged but sharp.

Will tried to swallow, his mouth suddenly going dry. The last time he had seen a knife like that, it was lying inches from Adam Humphrey’s lifeless hand.