CHAPTER TEN

Will stood behind Gail and Simon Humphrey as they waited in front of the viewing window. The setup was the sort that was always shown on television and in movies: a simple curtain hung on the other side of the glass. Will would press a button, and the drape would be slowly drawn back, revealing the cleaned-up victim. The sheet would be tucked up to the chin in order to cover the baseball stitches holding together the Y-incision. Cue the mother slumping against her husband.

But the camera couldn’t capture everything. The pungent smell of the morgue. The distant whine of the giant freezers where they stored the bodies. The way the floor seemed to suck at the soles of your shoes as you walked toward that window. The heaviness of your arm as you reached out to push that button.

The curtain pulled back. Both parents stood, silent, probably numb. Simon was the first to move. He reached out and pressed his hand against the glass. Will wondered if he was remembering what it felt like to hold his son’s hand. Was that the sort of thing fathers did? At the park, out in public, fathers and sons were always playing ball or tossing Frisbees, the only contact between them a rustle of the hair or a punch on the arm. This seemed to be how dads taught their boys to be men, but there had to be a point, maybe early on, when they were able to hold their hands. One tiny one engulfed by one big one. Adam would have needed help crossing the street. In a crowd, you wouldn’t want him to wander off.

Yes, Will decided. Simon Humphrey had held his son’s hands.

Gail turned to Will. She wasn’t crying, but he sensed a familiar reserve, a kindred spirit. She would be at the hotel later tonight, maybe in the shower or sitting on the bed while her husband went for a walk, and then she would allow this moment to crash over her. She would be back in front of that window, looking at her dead son. She would collapse. She would feel her spirit leaving her body and know it might never return.

For now, she said, “Thank you, Agent Trent,” and shook his hand.

He led them down the hallway, asking them about the hotel where they would stay, giving them advice on where to have supper. He was aware of how foolish the small talk sounded, but Will also knew that the distraction would help them make it through the building, to give them the strength they needed to leave their child in this cold, dark place.

They had rented a car at the airport, and Will went with them as far as the garage. Through the glass panel in the door, he watched Gail Humphrey stumble. Her husband caught her arm and she shrugged him off. He tried again and she slapped at him, yelling, until he wrapped his arms around her to make her stop.

Will turned away, feeling like an intruder. He took the stairs up the six flights to his office. At half past eight, everyone but the skeleton crew had already gone home for the day. The lights were out, but he would have known his way even without the faint glow of the emergency exit signs. Will had a corner office, which would have been impressive if it hadn’t been this particular corner. Between the Home Depot across the street and the old Ford Factory next door that had been turned into apartment buildings, there wasn’t much to look at. Sometimes, he convinced himself that the abandoned railroad tracks with their weeds and discarded hypodermic needles offered something of a parklike view, but daydreaming only worked during the day.

Will turned on his desk lamp and sat down. He hated nighttime on days like this, where there was nothing he could do but catch up on paperwork while he waited for other people to bring him information. There was an expert in Tennessee who specialized in detecting fingerprints on paper. Paper was tricky and you only got a couple of tries developing prints before the process ruined the evidence. The man was driving down first thing in the morning to look at the notes. The recording of the ransom call was being hand-delivered to the University of Georgia’s audiology lab, but the professor had warned them it would take many hours to isolate the sounds. Charlie was working late at the lab trying to process all the evidence they had collected. Tips from the hotline were being followed up on, cops sifting through the pranksters and nutjobs, trying to find a viable lead.

Will had paperwork to do on all of this, but instead of turning to his computer, he sat back in his chair and stared at his blurred reflection in the dark window. They were coming up on thirty-six hours since Abigail Campano had come home to find her life turned upside down. Two people were still dead. One girl was still missing. And, still, not a single suspect was in sight.

He didn’t understand the ransom demand. Will was no rookie. He had worked kidnapping cases before. He had worked abduction cases. There were basic tenets to both. Kidnappers wanted money. Abductors wanted sex. He could not reconcile the brutal way in which Kayla Alexander had been killed with the phone call this morning demanding one million dollars. It just did not add up.

Then there was the fight between Abigail and Paul Campano. Angie had been right: Paul was cheating on his wife. Apparently, he liked young blondes, but did that include his own daughter, and possibly Kayla Alexander? Amanda had told Will to get the man’s DNA. Maybe she was right, too. Add in Faith, who had managed to get Gabriel Cohen to talk, and that just left Will as the odd man out—literally—because he was the only one who brought absolutely nothing to this case.

Will turned back to his desk, knowing that overthinking the problem would not bring him any closer to a solution. His cell phone was laid out on his desk in two pieces. During his fight with Paul, the clamshell had snapped off and the screen had cracked. Will held the lid in place and taped it back onto the phone with several pieces of Scotch tape. The phone still worked. When he’d left the Campano house, he had been able to hold it together in order to check his voice mail. Faith Mitchell’s messages had gotten progressively more important, her voice going up in excitement as she told him about the threatening notes Gabe Cohen had kept from them.

Will still wasn’t sure she had made the right decision about keeping the kid out of the system, but he had to trust her instincts.

At least they had more information on the car now. A computer search of graduate students working at the Georgia Tech Research Institute in Ireland had revealed the name Farokh Pansing. After a few phone calls, they had located a cell phone number and woken the man up from what sounded like a very deep sleep. The physics major had given Will a loving description of the blue 1981 Chevy Impala he had left behind. No air-conditioning. No seat belts. The driver’s door stuck when it rained. The engine leaked like a sieve. The undercarriage was so rusted out that, from the backseat, you could watch the road pass under your shoes. Because of its age, the state of Georgia considered the car a classic and it was therefore exempt from any emissions requirements. Farokh had sold the ancient car to Adam Humphrey for four hundred dollars. The state had no record of Adam ever applying for insurance or a tag.

They had issued a new alert on the Impala, but the warning only pertained to the state of Georgia. Emma Campano could easily be in Alabama or Tennessee or the Carolinas. Given the almost two days that had passed since her abduction, she could well be in Mexico or Canada.

Will’s computer gave a chug like a train, indicating that the system was running. Will had been out of the office for two days. He needed to check his e-mail and file his daily reports. He put on the headphones and adjusted the microphone, preparing to dictate the report. After opening up a blank Word document, he pressed the start key, but found himself at a loss for words. He stopped the recorder and sat back in his chair. When he reached up to rub his eyes, he gasped from the pain.

Paul hadn’t broken his nose, but he’d managed to whack it hard enough to move the cartilage. With the ransom recording to analyze and the threatening notes to rush to the lab, Will hadn’t had time to look at himself in the mirror until about ten minutes before the Humphreys had shown up to identify their son. Will’s nose had been broken several times in the past. It was already crooked enough. With the bruises, he looked like a bar brawler, which did not exactly engender trust in the Humphreys. The father had accepted his mumbled excuse about a rough football game the weekend before, but the mother had looked at him as if he had a giant “liar” sticker pinned to his head.

Will tapped the space bar on his computer and used the mouse to click on the e-mail icon. He slipped the headphones on and listened to his e-mails. The first three were spam, the second was from Pete Hanson, telling him the basic information Faith had already relayed about the autopsies of Adam Humphrey and Kayla Alexander.

The third e-mail was from Amanda Wagner. She had called a press conference for six-thirty the next morning. Will guessed she had been following the news as closely as he had. Absent anything else to cover, the reporters had started targeting the parents, picking apart their lives, slowly pointing the finger back at the victims. The press would be in for a disappointment if they thought they’d be able to talk to the Campanos tomorrow. Amanda was a master at controlling the press. She would parade out Paul and Abigail for the cameras, but she would do all the talking. Will couldn’t think how she would manage to put a muzzle on Paul, but he’d seen her pull too many rabbits out of her hat in the past to worry about logistics.

Amanda’s e-mail ended curtly. “You are to be in my office directly after the press conference,” the computer read. Will gathered she had heard about Paul Campano bashing his face in.

Will pressed play again, listening to Amanda’s terse message as if he could divine some nuance. The program allowed you to assign different voices to people. Pete sounded like Mickey Mouse. Amanda was Darth Vader. Sitting alone in his dark office, the sound gave Will an involuntary shudder.

Then it gave him an idea.

He opened up Pete’s e-mail again and selected a different voice to read the text. He went through each option, listening to the nuances. Will realized he was doing this the wrong way. He opened a new e-mail and clicked in the text area, then took out his digital recorder and selected the file that had the kidnapper’s voice on it.

He held the player up to the microphone and let it dictate the text:

“Is this the mother?”

Then Abigail, stuttering, “Y-yes … This is Emma’s mother. Is Emma all right? Can I talk to Emma?”

“I have your daughter.”

“What do you want? Tell me how to get Emma back.”

“I want one million dollars.”

“Okay … When? Where? Just tell me what you want.”

“I will call you tomorrow at ten-thirty a.m. with details.”

“No—wait! How do I—”

Will cut off the recording, excitement taking hold. Playing back each line, he isolated the kidnapper’s sentences and deleted Abigail’s. Next, he went through each voice option, searching for one that sounded similar to the kidnapper’s.

The last one in line was the one he used for Amanda Wagner. His finger hovered over the mouse. He clicked the button. The headphones sent out a foreboding, deep voice.

“Is this the mother?”

Will looked up, sensing he was not alone. Faith Mitchell stood in the doorway.

He jumped up, yanking off the headphones as if he had something to be guilty about. “I thought you were going home.”

She walked into his office and sat down. The desk lamp cast her in a harsh light. She looked older than her thirty-three years. “What are you doing?”

“The audiotape of the ransom demand,” he began, then figured he could just as easily show her. He picked up his digital recorder and pressed play. “This is the audio.” Will kept his thumb on the button, listening along with Faith to the kidnapper’s phone call this morning, Abigail Campano’s terrified responses. He stopped it at the same place as before. “Now this is something I just did in my computer. It’s got one of those speaking options for lazy people where it reads stuff to you.” He moved the mouse over to the start button, saying, “I didn’t even remember I had it on here. I guess it’s some ADA thing.” He pulled out the headphone jack so the speakers would play. “Ready?”

She nodded.

He pressed play, and the kidnapper’s words came out of the computer speakers in the Darth Vader voice.

“Is this the mother?”

“Jesus Christ,” she murmured. “It’s almost exactly the same.”

“I think he must have written the sentences and prerecorded them coming out of the computer speakers.”

“That’s why the sentence construction’s so simple. There aren’t any contractions.”

Will looked at the computer screen as he repeated them back from memory. “I have your daughter. I want one million dollars. I will call you this time tomorrow with details.”

He picked up the phone and called Hamish Patel, who was driving the tape up to the University of Georgia in Athens.

Hamish sounded as excited as Will felt. He told Will, “If you manage to keep your job, you might actually break this case.”

Will made excuses. He didn’t want to think about what Amanda had in store for him tomorrow morning, but he imagined she was concocting a special kind of hell for the agent who had gotten into a fight with the father of a kidnapping victim. The GBI was planning another sex sting at the Atlanta airport. Will might be stuck in a bathroom stall on the B Concourse, waiting for a married father of three to tap his foot and ask for a blow job.

He rang off with Hamish and told Faith, “They’re going to check into it. These guys deal with computers and audio enhancement all of the time. I’m sure they would’ve figured it out in ten seconds.”

“Saves them ten seconds, then,” she pointed out. “I can’t help but think where we’d be if I’d been able to get Gabe to talk yesterday.”

“He wasn’t ready,” Will told her, though there was no way of knowing whether or not that was true. “Maybe if you’d pushed him yesterday, he would have gone over the edge without telling us anything.”

“What do you think about the notes?”

“Someone—probably the kidnapper—was trying to warn or threaten Adam.”

“ ‘She belongs to me,’ ” Faith quoted. “That’s a pretty definitive statement.”

“It supports the kidnapper knowing Emma, at least.”

“What about the way they were written?”

Will nodded, as if he knew what she was talking about. “That’s a good point. What do you think about it?”

She tapped her finger to her mouth as she considered it. “Either the person who wrote them is dyslexic or they’re trying to make it seem like they are.”

Will felt the glimmer of pride from a few moments ago disappear like a flash of lightning. The notes were misspelled. He had missed an important clue because of his own stupidity. What else had he missed? What other evidence had gone by the wayside because Will couldn’t wrap his head around them?

Faith asked, “Will?”

He shook his head, not trusting himself to speak. He would have to call Amanda, tell her what he had missed. She had a way of finding out these things on her own. He didn’t know how to handle it other than to confess and wait for the ax to fall.

“Go ahead and say it,” Faith told him. “It’s not like I haven’t been wondering.”

He clasped his hands under the desk. “Wondering what?”

“Whether or not Emma’s involved in this.”

Will looked down at his hands. He had to swallow past the lump in his throat. “It’s possible,” he admitted. He tried to refocus his attention, using a roundabout question to find out how Faith had arrived at Emma Campano being involved. “Kayla certainly knew how to inspire hate in people, but it’s a huge leap, don’t you think?”

“Kayla was such an awful person, and from the sound of it, Emma was one step up from her lapdog. She might have snapped.”

“You think a seventeen-year-old girl is capable of doing all this—killing people, staging her own kidnapping?”

“That’s the question, isn’t it?” Faith leaned her elbows on his desk. “I hate to say this, but considering what Mary Clark said about her, if Emma was dead and Kayla was missing, I would have no problem believing Kayla was in on it.”

“Did Clark’s alibi for yesterday check out?”

“She was in class all day.” Faith continued, “Ruth Donner, the girl who was archenemies with Kayla last year, was out of the state. There aren’t any other girls in particular at the school who were Kayla’s sworn enemies. I mean, not any one who stands out from the crowd.”

“What about Gabe Cohen?”

She pressed her lips together, not answering for a moment. “There’s no evidence that links him to either of the girls.” She added, “I think he’s told us everything he knows.”

“What about the gun?”

“He mentioned it for a reason, but I checked his book bag and his dorm top to bottom. If Adam bought a gun, he didn’t give it to Gabe. Maybe he kept it in his car.”

“Which means our abductor probably has it,” Will pointed out. “Where was Gabe yesterday when this was all going down?”

“In a class, but it was in one of those huge lecture halls. He didn’t have to sign in, the teacher doesn’t take attendance. It’s a shaky alibi.” She paused. “Listen, if you think I made a bad call, we can go pick him up right now. Maybe sitting in a jail cell will jog his memory.”

Will did not relish the prospect of sweating an eighteen-year-old kid based on a hunch, especially considering Gabe Cohen’s suicidal ideation. He listed the points in Gabe’s favor. “He doesn’t have a car on campus. He doesn’t have a place to hide Emma. We have no connection between him and either girl. No motive, no opportunity, no means.”

“I think he’s troubled,” she said. “But I don’t think he’s capable of this sort of thing.” Faith laughed. “Of course, if I was good at spotting the ones who had murder in their hearts, I’d be running the world.”

It was a sentiment Will had often thought himself. “What’s the school doing with him?”

“Victor says it’s a delicate situation,” she said. “They’re really caught in the middle.”

“How so?”

“Do you remember the dozen or so suicides at MIT back in the nineties?”

Will nodded. The stories of parents suing the university had made national news.

“The schools have a legal obligation—in loco parentis,” she cited, the phrase that basically said the school acted as parents to the students while they were enrolled. “Victor’s going to recommend to the father that Gabe be committed for psychiatric evaluation.”

Will couldn’t help but notice that she kept using the dean’s name. “Have him committed?” he asked. “That seems kind of drastic.”

“They have to be careful. Even if Gabe’s just blowing smoke, they have to take him seriously. I doubt Tech will allow him back in without a doctor’s assurance that he’s okay.” She shrugged. “Even then, they’ll probably make him check in with counselors every day.”

Will liked the idea of Gabe Cohen being on psychiatric lock-down instead of left out in the world to his own devices. At least this way, he knew how to get his hands on the kid if he wanted to.

He said, “Let’s go back to the murders.”

“All right.”

“Kayla was killed by someone who hated her. I can’t believe the killer would take that much time with her otherwise. All those stab wounds, pulling down the underwear, pushing up the shirt. Classic debasement and overkill. You don’t punch somebody’s face off unless you know who they are and despise them for it.” He suggested, “Maybe you’re right. Maybe Emma snapped.”

“She would have to kill her best friend—beat her, stab her, possibly rape her with something that, according to Pete, had a condom on it—then hit Adam over the head and stab him, then create this hoax for her parents to fall for.” She added, “And that still doesn’t explain the sperm found in Kayla Alexander’s vagina.”

“Or maybe Emma just stood by while it was all happening.” He reminded her, “Charlie says there were four people in that house.”

“True,” Faith conceded. “But I have to put this in there some-where: for a girl like Emma Campano, living where she lives, having the father and grandfather that she has, a million dollars isn’t a lot of money.”

Will hadn’t considered that, but she was right. Ten million would be more on par with Paul’s lifestyle. Then again, one million would be a lot easier to hide.

He said, “Bernard, Emma’s teacher, said that she was highly organized. This took a lot of planning.”

Faith shook her head. “I don’t understand kids anymore. I really don’t.” She stared out the window at the apartments next door. “I hope I did the right thing with Gabe.”

Will gave her one of Amanda’s more solid pieces of advice. “You can only make decisions with the information you have at the time.”

She was still looking out the window. “I’ve never been up to this floor before.”

“We try to keep out the hoi polloi.”

She smiled weakly. “How did it go with the Humphreys?”

“As bad as you would expect.”

Faith chewed her lip, still staring out the window. “When I first saw Adam yesterday, all I could do was think about my son. Maybe that’s why I missed so many things. We lost hours when we could have been looking for her.”

It was the most personal thing she had ever shared. Will had said so many wrong things to her lately that he knew better than to try to comfort her.

“I feel like we should be doing something,” she said, her frustration obvious.

He told her the same things he had been telling himself. “It’s a waiting game now. We’re waiting on Charlie to process the evidence. We’re waiting on the fingerprint guy. We’re waiting on—”

“Everything,” she said. “I’m half tempted to follow up nutjobs from the tip line.”

“That wouldn’t be the most productive use of your time.”

Faith sighed in response. She looked bone-tired. Will imagined that getting some sleep was probably the only productive thing they could do tonight. Being fresh tomorrow morning when some of the evidence came in was key.

Will told her as much. “We’ll have more to go on tomorrow morning.” He checked the time. It was almost nine o’clock. “They’re going to turn off the air-conditioning to the top floors in ten minutes. You should go home and try to get some sleep.”

“Empty house,” she told him. “Jeremy is enjoying his independence a little too much. I thought at least he’d miss me a little.”

“I guess children can be stubborn sometimes.”

“I bet you were a real handful for your mother.”

Will shrugged. He supposed that was true enough. You didn’t stick a baby in a trashcan because he was easy. “Maybe I could …” Will hesitated, but decided he might as well. “Would you like to go get a drink or something?”

She startled. “Oh, my God.”

He realized two seconds too late that he’d put his foot in his mouth again. “I have a girlfriend. I mean, a fiancée. We’re engaged.” The details rushed out. “Angie Polaski. She used to work vice. I’ve known her since I was eight.”

She seemed even more startled. “Eight?”

Will realized he should close his mouth and think about what he was saying before he let it out. “It sounds more romantic than it actually is.” He paused. “I just … you said you didn’t want to go to an empty house. I was just trying to … I don’t know.” He laughed nervously. “I guess my feral monkey is acting up again.”

She was nice about it. “We’ve both had a long day.”

“I don’t even drink.” Will stood as Faith did. He put his hand in his pocket and felt something unfamiliar mixed in with the change. He pulled out the vial with the gray powder in it, surprised the plastic hadn’t broken during his scuffle with Paul.

“Will?”

He realized that his initial impression of the vial was probably hers, that he was holding an ounce of cocaine. “It’s dirt,” he told her. “Or some kind of powder. I found it at the Campano house.”

“You found it?” she asked, taking the vial from him. “Since when do you work collection?”

“Since, uh …” Will held out his hand for the sample. “You really shouldn’t be touching that.”

“Why not?”

“It’s not evidence.”

“It’s sealed.” She showed him the unbroken strip of tape with Charlie’s initials on it.

Will didn’t have an answer for her.

Faith was instantly suspicious. “What’s going on here?”

“I stole it from the Campano crime scene. Charlie turned his back and I swiped it before he could catalogue it into the system.”

She narrowed her eyes. “Is that recorder on?”

He took the player off his desk, opened the back and shook out the batteries. “The powder was found in the foyer. It’s ripe for a cross-contamination argument. We were all in and out of the area. It could have been brought in by one of us. Hell, for all I know, it was, but—”

“But?”

“But maybe not. It doesn’t match any of the soil around the house. It wasn’t on Adam’s shoes or the girls’ shoes. It could have been brought in by the killer.”

“That sounds like information you got from the person who collected the evidence.”

“Charlie has no idea that I’m doing this.”

She obviously did not believe him, but Faith did not press the point. “Hypothetically, what would I do with it?”

“Maybe reach out to someone at Tech?”

She vehemently shook her head. “I’m not getting my son involved in—”

“No, of course not,” he interrupted. “I thought maybe you could talk to Victor Martinez?”

“Victor?” she echoed. “I barely know the man.”

“You knew him well enough to call him about Gabe Cohen.”

“That’s different,” she insisted. “He’s head of student services. Taking care of Gabe Cohen is his job.”

Will tried, “He wouldn’t think the request was odd coming from you. If I called him out of the blue, there would be all kinds of formalities, red tape. We need to keep this quiet, Faith. If that powder leads us to an area we can search, and we find the man who did this …”

“Then the chain of evidence would be compromised and the arrest might get thrown out.” She gave a heavy sigh. “I need to think about this, Will.”

He had to make sure she understood the implications. “I’m asking you to break the law. You realize that?”

“It runs in the family, right?”

He could see her words were angrier than she’d intended, but he also knew that she had been struggling over the last day and a half to make the best of their marriage of convenience.

Will told her, “I don’t want you to do something you can’t live with, Faith. Just make sure you get the sample back to me if you decide against it.”

She wrapped her hand around the vial and held it to her chest. “I’m going to go now.”

“Are you—”

She kept the vial in her hand. “What are we doing tomorrow?”

“I’ve got a meeting first thing with Amanda. I’ll meet you back here around eight o’clock. Gordon Chew, the fingerprint expert, is driving down from Chattanooga to see if he can find any latents on our notes.” He glanced around the office, his parklike view. “If I’m not here by eight-fifteen, check the men’s toilets at the airport.”