—
Pauline McGhee was hard to look at, even as she held her child in her lap. Her mouth had been ripped to shreds by the metal wire she’d chewed through, so she mumbled as she tried to speak, her lips tightly held together. Tiny sutures held the skin in place like something out of Frankenstein. And yet, she was hard to feel any sympathy for, perhaps because she kept referring to Faith as “bitch” more than any man ever had.
“Bitch,” she said now, “I don’t know what I can tell you. I haven’t seen my family in twenty years.”
Will shifted in his chair beside Faith. His arm was in a sling tight to his chest and he was in visible pain, but he had insisted on coming in for the interview. Faith couldn’t blame him for wanting answers. Unfortunately, it was fast becoming obvious that they weren’t going to get them from Pauline.
“Tom has lived in sixteen different cities over the last thirty years,” Will told her. “We’ve found cases in twelve of them—women who were abducted and never returned. They were always in pairs. Two women at a time.”
“I know what a fucking pair is.”
Will opened his mouth to speak, but Faith reached under the table, pressing his knee. Their usual tactics weren’t working. Pauline McGhee was a survivor, willing to step over anything or anyone to save her own skin. She had kicked Olivia Tanner into unconsciousness in order to make sure she was the first one to escape the basement. She would have strangled her own brother to death if Faith hadn’t stopped her. She wasn’t someone who could be reached through empathy.
Faith took a gamble. “Pauline, stop the bullshit. You know you can leave this room at any time. You’re staying for a reason.”
The injured woman looked down at Felix, stroking his hair. For just an instant, Pauline McGhee seemed almost human. Something about the child transformed her so that Faith suddenly understood the hard outer shell was a defense against the world that only Felix could penetrate. The boy had fallen asleep in her arms as soon as his mother sat down at the conference table. His thumb kept going to his mouth, and Pauline moved it away a few times before giving in. Faith could understand why she wouldn’t want to let her son out of sight, but this was hardly the kind of thing you’d want to bring a kid to.
Pauline asked, “Were you really going to shoot me?”
“What?” Faith asked, even though she knew exactly what the woman meant.
“In the hall,” she said. “I would’ve killed him. I wanted to kill him.”
“I’m a police officer,” Faith answered. “It’s my job to protect life.”
“That life?” Pauline asked, incredulous. “You know what that bastard did.” She lifted her chin toward Will. “Listen to your partner. My brother killed at least two dozen women. Do you really think he deserves a trial?” She pressed her lips to the top of Felix’s head. “You should’ve let me kill him. Put him down like a fucking dog.”
Faith didn’t answer, mostly because there was nothing to say. Tom Coldfield was not talking. He wasn’t bragging about his crimes or offering to tell where the bodies were buried in exchange for his life. He was resolved to go to prison, probably death row. All he had asked for was bread and water and his Bible, a book that had so many scribbled notations in the margins that the words were barely legible.
Still, Faith had tossed and turned in bed over the last few nights, reliving those few seconds in the hallway. Sometimes she let Pauline kill her brother. Sometimes she ended up having to shoot the woman. None of the scenarios sat well with her, and she had resigned herself to knowing that these emotions were the type that only time could heal. The process of moving on was helped by the fact that the case was no longer Faith and Will’s responsibility. Because Matthias Thomas Coldfield’s crimes had crossed state lines, he was the FBI’s problem now. Faith was only allowed to interview Pauline because they thought the women shared a bond. They were dead wrong.
Or maybe not.
Pauline asked, “How far along are you?”
“Ten weeks,” Faith answered. She had been at the edge of insanity when the paramedics arrived at Tom Coldfield’s house. All she could think about was her baby, whether or not it was still safe. Even when the heartbeat had bleated through the fetal monitor, Faith had kept sobbing, begging the EMTs to take her to the hospital. She’d been sure they were all wrong, that something horrible had happened. Oddly, the only person who could convince her otherwise had been Sara Linton.
On the plus side, her whole family knew she was pregnant now, thanks to the Grady nurses referring to Faith as “that hysterical pregnant cop” her entire stay in the ER.
Pauline stroked back Felix’s hair. “I got so fat with him. It was disgusting.”
“It’s hard,” Faith admitted. “It’s worth it, though.”
“I guess.” She brushed her torn lips across her son’s head. “He’s the only thing good about me.”
Faith had often said the same thing about Jeremy, but now, facing Pauline McGhee, she saw how lucky she was. Faith had her mother, who loved her despite all Faith’s faults. She had Zeke, even though he had moved to Germany to get away from her. She had Will, and for better or worse, she had Amanda. Pauline had no one—just a small boy who desperately needed her.
Pauline said, “When I had Felix, it just made me think about her. Judith. How could she hate me so much?” She looked up at Faith, expecting an answer.
Faith said, “I don’t know. I can’t imagine how anyone could hate their own child. Any child, for that matter.”
“Well, some kids just suck, but your own kid …”
Pauline went quiet again for such a long time that Faith wondered if they were back to square one again.
Will spoke. “We need to know why all of this happened, Pauline. I need to know.”
She was staring back out the window, her son held close to her heart. She spoke so quietly that Faith had to strain to hear her. “My uncle raped me.”
Faith and Will were both silent, giving the woman space.
Pauline confided, “I was three years old, then four, then coming up on five. I finally told my grandmother what was happening. I thought the bitch would save me, but she turned it around like I was some devil child.” Her lips twisted into a bitter sneer. “My mother believed them, not me. She chose their side. Like always.”
“What happened?”
“We moved away. We always moved when things got bad. Dad put in for a transfer at work, we sold the house and then we started all over again. Different town, different school, same fucking situation.”
Will asked, “When did it get bad with Tom?”
“I was fifteen.” Pauline shrugged again. “I had this friend, Alexandra McGhee—that’s where I got my name when I changed it. We lived in Oregon a couple of years before we moved to Ann Arbor. That’s when it really started with Tom—when everything got bad.” Her tone had turned to a dull narrative, as if she was giving a secondhand account of something mundane instead of revealing the most horrible moments of her life. “He was obsessed with me. Like, in love with me. He followed me around, and he would smell my clothes and try to touch my hair and …”
Faith tried to hide her revulsion, but her stomach clenched at the image the other woman’s words conjured.
Pauline said, “Suddenly, Alex stopped coming over. We were best friends. I wanted to know if I’d said something, or done something …” Her voice trailed off. “Tom was hurting her. I don’t know how. At least, I didn’t know how in the beginning. I found out soon enough.”
“What happened?”
“She was writing this sentence everywhere, over and over again. On her books, on the soles of her shoes, the back of her hand.”
“I will not deny myself,” Will guessed.
Pauline nodded. “It was this exercise one of the doctors at the hospital gave me. I was supposed to write the sentence, convince myself not to binge and purge, like writing a fucking sentence a zillion times would make it all go away.”
“Did you know Tom was making Alex write the sentence?”
“She looked like me,” Pauline admitted. “That’s why he liked her so much. She was like a substitution for me—same color hair, same height, about the same weight but she looked fatter than me.”
The same qualities that had drawn Tom to all the recent victims: Each woman resembled his sister.
Pauline told them, “I asked him about it—why he was making her write the sentence. I mean, I was pissed, right? And I yelled at him, and he just hit me. Not like a slap, but with his fist. And when I fell down, he started beating me.”
Faith asked, “What happened next?”
Pauline stared blankly out the window, as if she was alone in the room. “Alex and I were in the woods. We’d go out there to smoke after school. The day that Tom beat me, I met her out there. At first, she wouldn’t say anything, but then she just broke down. She finally told me that Tom had been taking her into the basement of our house and doing things to her. Bad things.” She closed her eyes. “Alex took it because Tom said if she didn’t, then he would start doing it to me. She was protecting me.”
She opened her eyes, staring at Faith with startling intensity. “Alex and I were talking about what to do. I told her it was useless telling my parents, that nothing would happen. So we decided to go to the police. There was this cop I knew. Only, I guess Tom followed us out to the woods. He was always watching us. He had this baby monitor he hid in my room. He’d listen to us and …” She shrugged, and Faith could very easily guess what Tom had been doing while he listened to his sister and her friend.
Pauline continued, “Anyway, Tom found us in the woods. He hit me in the back of the head with a rock. I don’t know what he did to Alex. I didn’t see her for a while. I think he was working on her, trying to break her. That was the hardest part. Was she dead? Was he beating her? Torturing her? Or maybe he’d let her go and she was keeping quiet because she was scared of him.” She swallowed. “But it wasn’t that.”
“He was keeping her in the basement again. Priming her for the really bad stuff.”
“No one heard her down there?”
Pauline shook her head. “Dad was gone, and Mom …” She shook her head again. Faith was convinced they would never really know what Judith Coldfield knew about her son’s sadistic ways.
Pauline said, “I don’t know how long it lasted, but eventually, Alex ended up in the same place as me.”
“Where was that?”
“In the ground,” she said. “It was dark. We were blindfolded. He put cotton in our ears, but we could still hear each other. We were tied up. Still … we knew we were underground. There’s a taste, right? Kind of like a wet, dirty taste you get in your mouth. He had dug a cave. It must’ve taken him weeks. He always liked to plan everything, to control every last detail.”
“Was Tom with you all the time after that?”
“Not at first. I guess he was still working on his alibi. He just left us there for a few days—tied up so we couldn’t move, couldn’t see, could barely hear anything. We screamed at first, but …” She shook her head as if she could shake away the memory. “He brought us water, but not food. I guess a week went by. I was okay—I’d gone longer than that without eating. But Alex … She broke. She kept crying all the time, begging me to do something to help her. Then Tom would come, and I’d beg him to shut her up, to make it so I didn’t have to hear it.” She went silent again, lost in her memories. “And then one day, something changed. He started in on us.”
“What did he do?”
“At first, he just talked. He was all into biblical stuff—stuff my mom put into his head about him being a replacement for Judas, who betrayed Jesus. She was always saying how I had betrayed her, how she had carried me to be a good kid, but I had turned out rotten, made her family hate her with my lies.”
Faith quoted the last sentence she had heard Tom Coldfield utter. “ ‘O Absalom, I am risen.’ ”
Pauline shivered, as if the words cut through her. “It’s from the Bible. Ammon raped his own sister, and once he was finished with her, he cast her out for being a whore.” Her torn lips twisted into an approximation of a smile. “Absalom was Ammon’s brother. He killed him for raping their sister.” She gave a harsh laugh. “Too bad I didn’t have another brother.”
“Was Tom always obsessed with religion?”
“Not a regular religion. Not normal. He twisted the Bible to suit whatever he wanted to do. That’s why he was keeping me and Alex underground—so that we would have a chance to be reborn like Jesus.” She looked up at Faith. “Crazy shit, right? He’d go on and on for hours, telling us how bad we were, talking about how he was going to redeem us. He’d touch me sometimes, but I couldn’t see …” She shuddered again, her whole body shaking from the movement. Felix stirred, and she soothed him back to sleep.
Faith felt her heart thumping in her chest. She could remember her own struggle with Tom, the feel of his hot breath in her ear when he told her, “Fight.”
Will asked, “What did Tom do when he stopped talking to you and Alex?”
“What do you think he did?” she asked sarcastically. “He didn’t know what he was doing, but he knew he liked it when he hurt us.” She swallowed, her eyes tearing up. “It was our first time—both of us. We were only fifteen. Girls didn’t sleep around a lot back then. We weren’t angels or anything, but we weren’t sluts, either.”
“Did he do anything else?”
“He starved us. Not like what he did to the other women, but bad enough.”
“The trash bags?”
She gave a single, tight nod. “We were trash to him. Nothing but trash.”
Tom had said as much in the hallway. “No one missed you or Alex when Tom had you in the cave?”
“They thought we’d run away. Girls do that, right? They just run away from home, and if the parents are there to say that the girls are bad, that they lie all the time and can’t be trusted, then it’s no big deal, right?” She didn’t let them answer. “I bet Tom got a hard-on lying to the cops, telling them he had no idea where we’d gone.”
“How old was Tom when this happened?”
“Three years younger than me.”
“Twelve,” Will said.
“No,” Pauline corrected. “He hadn’t had his birthday yet. He was only eleven when it happened. He turned twelve a month later. Mom had a party. The little freak was out on bail and she threw him a birthday party.”
“How did you get out of the cave?”
“He let us go. He said he was going to kill us if we told anybody, but Alex told her parents anyway, and they believed her.” She snorted a laugh. “Fuck me if they didn’t believe her.”
“What happened to Tom?”
“He was arrested. The cops called, and Mom took him down to the station. They didn’t come get him. They didn’t arrest him. They just called us on the phone and said to bring him in.” She paused, collecting herself. “Tom had a psychiatric evaluation. There was all this talk about sending him to adult prison, but he was only a kid, and the shrinks were screaming about how he needed help. Tom could look younger when he wanted—much younger than he actually was. Bewildered, like he didn’t understand why people were saying all these bad things about him.”
“What did the courts decide to do?”
“He was diagnosed with something. I don’t know. Psychopath, probably.”
“We have his Air Force records. Did you know he served?” Pauline shook her head, and Faith told her, “Six years. He was discharged in lieu of court-martial.”
“What does that mean?”
“Reading between the lines, I’d guess that the Air Force didn’t want—or know how—to treat his disorder, so they offered him an honorable discharge and he took it.” Tom Coldfield’s military records were written in the sort of departmental code only a seasoned vet could decipher. As a doctor, Faith’s brother, Zeke, had recognized all the clues. The nail in the coffin was the fact that Tom had never been called back up to serve in Iraq, even at the height of the war when enlistment standards had dropped to almost nonexistent.
Will asked, “What happened to Tom in Oregon?”
Pauline answered in a measured tone. “He was supposed to go to the state hospital, but Mom talked to the judge, said we had family back east and could we take him back and put him in a hospital there so he could be close to the people who cared about him. The judge said okay. I guess they were glad to get rid of us. Sort of like with the Air Force, huh? Out of sight, out of mind.”
“Did your mother get him treatment?”
“Hell no,” she laughed. “My mother did the same fucking thing all over again. She said Alex and I were lying, that we had run away and gotten hurt by a stranger, and we were trying to pin it on Tom because we hated him and we wanted people to feel sorry for us.”
Faith felt a sickness in the pit of her stomach, wondering how a mother could be so blind to her child’s suffering.
Will asked, “Is that when you changed your names to Coldfield?”
“We changed them to Seward after what happened to Tom. It wasn’t easy. There were bank accounts, all sorts of documents to file to make it legal. My dad started asking questions. He wasn’t happy, because he actually had to do something, you know? Go down to the courthouse, get copies of birth certificates, fill out forms. They were in the middle of changing everything over to Seward when I ran away. I guess when they left Michigan, they changed it back to Coldfield. It’s not like Oregon was following up on Tom. As far as they were concerned, his case was closed.”
“Did you ever hear from Alex McGhee?”
“She killed herself.” Pauline’s voice was so cold it sent a chill down Faith’s spine. “I guess she couldn’t take it. Some women are like that.”
Will asked, “You’re sure your father didn’t know what was going on?”
“He didn’t want to know,” Pauline answered. But there was no way of confirming this. Henry Coldfield had suffered a massive coronary upon hearing what had happened to his wife and son. He’d died en route to the hospital.
Will kept pressing. “Your father never noticed—”
“He traveled all the time. He was gone for weeks, sometimes as much as a whole month. And even when he was home, he was never really home. He was flying his plane or off hunting or playing golf or just doing whatever the hell he wanted to do.” Pauline’s tone got angrier with every word. “They had this kind of bargain, you know? She kept the house running, didn’t ask him to help with anything, and he got to do whatever he wanted so long as he handed over his paycheck and didn’t ask any questions. Nice life, huh?”
“Did your father ever hurt you?”
“No. He was never there to hurt me. We saw him at Christmas and Easter. That was about it.”
“Why Easter?”
“I don’t know. It was always special to my mother. She would dye eggs and hang up streamers and stuff. She would tell Tom the story of his birth, how he was special, how she had wanted a son so badly, how he’d made her life complete.”
“Is that why you chose to run away on Easter?”
“I ran away because Tom was digging another hole in the backyard.”
Faith gave her a moment to collect her thoughts. “This was in Ann Arbor?”
Pauline nodded, a faraway look in her eyes. “I didn’t recognize him, you know?”
“When he abducted you?”
“It happened so fast. I was so damn happy to see Felix. I thought I’d lost him. And then my brain started to make the connection that it was Tom standing there, but it was too late by then.”
“You recognized him?”
“I felt him. I can’t describe it. I just knew with every part of my body that it was him.” She closed her eyes for a few seconds. “When I came to in the basement, I could still feel him. I don’t know what he did to me while I was passed out. I don’t know what he did.”
Faith suppressed a shudder at the thought. “How did he find you?”
“I think he always knew where I was. He’s good at tracking people down, watching them, figuring out their habits. I guess I didn’t make it too hard, using Alex’s name like I did.” She gave a humorless laugh. “He called me at work about a year and a half ago. Can you believe that? What are the odds that I’d take a call like that and it would be Tom on the other end?”
“Did you know it was him on the phone?”
“Fuck no. I would’ve grabbed Felix and run.”
“What did he want when he called?”
“I told you. It was a cold call.” She shook her head, disbelieving. “He told me about the shelter, that they would take donations and give blank receipts. We’ve got all these rich clients, and they give away their furniture to charity for the tax write-off. It makes them feel better about ditching a fifty-thousand-dollar living room set and buying an eighty-thousand-dollar one.”
Faith couldn’t even comprehend the numbers. “So, you decided to refer your clients to the shelter?”
“I was pissed at Goodwill. They give you a time frame, like between ten and noon. Who can wait for that? My clients are millionaires. They can’t sit around all morning waiting for some homeless dude to show up. Tom said the shelter would make an exact appointment and be there on time. And they always were. They were friendly and clean, which, trust me, is saying a lot. I told everybody to use them.” She realized what she had said. “I told everybody.”
“Including the women on your Internet board?”
She kept silent.
Faith told her what they had found out over the last few days. “Anna Lindsey’s firm started giving the shelter legal advice six months ago. Olivia Tanner’s bank became a major donor last year. Jackie Zabel called the shelter to pick up things from her mother’s house. They all heard about the shelter somewhere.”
“I didn’t … I didn’t know.”
They still hadn’t managed to break into the chat room. The site was too sophisticated, and cracking the passwords no longer had a priority for the FBI, since their guy was already sitting in jail. Faith needed the confirmation, though. She had to hear it from Pauline. “You posted about the shelter, didn’t you?”
“Tell me,” Faith said, and for some reason, the request worked.
“Yeah. I posted it.”
Faith hadn’t realized that she had been holding her breath. She let it out in a slow stream. “How did Tom know they all had eating disorders?”
Pauline looked up. Some of her color seeped back into her cheeks. “How did you know?”
Faith thought about the question. They knew because they had investigated the women’s lives, just as methodically as Tom Coldfield had. He’d followed them around, spied on their most intimate moments. And none of them had known he was doing it.
Pauline asked, “Is the other woman all right? The one I was with.”
“Yes.” Olivia Tanner was well enough to refuse to talk to the police.
“She’s a tough bitch.”
“So are you.” Faith told her, “It might help to talk to her.”
“I don’t need help.”
Faith didn’t bother to argue.
Pauline said, “I knew Tom would find me eventually. I kept training myself. Making sure I could go without food. Making sure I could last.” She explained, “When it was me and Alex, he would hurt whoever screamed the loudest, whoever broke first. I made sure it wasn’t me. That’s how I helped myself.”
Will asked, “Your father never asked why your mother wanted to change your names and move?”
“She told him it was to give Tom a fresh start—give us all a fresh start.” She gave a humorless laugh, directing her words toward Faith. “It’s always about the boys, isn’t it? Mothers and their sons. Fuck the daughters. It’s the sons they really love.”
Faith put her hand to her stomach. The gesture had become second nature over the last few days. All along, she had been thinking that the child inside of her was a boy; another Jeremy who would draw pictures and sing to her. Another toddler who would puff out his chest when he told his friends that his mom was a cop. Another young man who was respectful of women. Another adult who knew from his single mother how hard it was to be the fairer sex.
Now Faith prayed that she would have a daughter. Every woman they had met on this case had found a way to hate herself long before Tom Coldfield had gotten hold of her. They all were used to depriving their bodies of everything from nourishment to warmth to something as vital as love. Faith wanted to show her own child a different path. She wanted a girl she could raise who might have a chance of loving herself. She wanted to see that girl grow into a strong woman who knew her value in the world. And she never wanted either of her children to meet someone as bitter and damaged as Pauline McGhee.
Will told Pauline, “Judith’s in the hospital. The bullet just missed her heart.”
The woman’s nostrils flared. Tears came into her eyes, and Faith wondered if there was still a part of her, no matter how small, that wanted some kind of bond with her mother.
Faith offered, “I can take you to see Judith if you want.”
She snorted a laugh, angrily wiping away her tears. “Bitch, don’t even. She was never there for me. I’m sure as shit not going to be there for her.” She shifted her son on her shoulder. “I need to get him home.”
Will tried. “If you could just—”
“Just what?”
He didn’t have an answer for her. Pauline stood up and walked to the door, trying to hold Felix as she reached for the knob.
Faith told her, “The FBI will probably be getting in touch with you.”
“The FBI can kiss my ass.” She managed to get the door open. “And so can you.”
Faith watched her walk down the hallway, shifting Felix as she turned toward the elevators. “God,” she said softly. “It’s hard to feel sorry for her.”
“You did the right thing,” Will told her.
Faith saw herself in Tom Coldfield’s hallway again, her gun pointed at Pauline’s head, Tom bucking on the floor. They weren’t trained to wing suspects. They were trained to fire a rapid bullet spread straight over the center of the chest.
Unless you were Amanda Wagner. Then you squeezed off a single shot that did enough damage to take them down but not take their life.
Will asked, “If you had to do it again, would you let Pauline kill Tom?”
“I don’t know,” Faith confessed. “I was operating on autopilot. I just did what I was trained to do.”
“Considering what Pauline’s been through …” Will began, then stopped himself. “She’s not very nice.”
“She’s a cold-blooded bitch.”
“I’m surprised I haven’t fallen in love with her.”
Faith laughed. She had seen Angie at the hospital when they brought Will out of surgery. “How is Mrs. Trent doing?”
“She’s making sure my life insurance policies are paid up.” He took out his phone. “I told her I’d be back by three.”
Faith didn’t make a comment about the new phone, or the wary look on his face. She supposed Angie Polaski was back in Will’s life now. Faith would just have to get used to her, the same way you tolerated an annoying sister-in-law or the boss’s whorishly obnoxious daughter.
He pushed back his chair. “I guess I should go.”
“You want me to drive you home?”
“I’ll walk.”
He only lived a few blocks over, but he’d been in surgery less than seventy-two hours ago. Faith opened her mouth to protest, but Will stopped her.
“You’re a good cop, Faith, and I’m glad you’re my partner.”
There were few things he could have said that would have stunned her more. “Really?”
He leaned down and kissed the top of her head. Before she could respond, he told her, “If you ever see Angie on top of me like that, don’t give her a warning, all right? Just pull the trigger.”