—
Faith’s red Mini was parked in her driveway when she woke up that morning. Amanda must have followed Will here, then taken him home. He had probably thought he was doing Faith a favor, but Faith still wanted to rake him over the coals. When Will had called this morning to tell her that he would pick her up at their usual eight-thirty, she had snapped a “Fine” that seemed to float over his head.
Her anger had evened out somewhat when Will had told her what had happened last night—his idiotic foray into the cave, finding the second victim, dealing with Amanda. The last part sounded particularly challenging: Amanda never made things easy. Will had sounded exhausted, and Faith’s heart went out to him as he described the woman hanging in the tree, but as soon as she got off the phone, she was furious with him all over again.
What was he doing going down into that cave alone with no one but that idiot Fierro topside? Why the hell hadn’t he called Faith to come help search for the second victim? Why in God’s name did he think he was doing her a favor by actively preventing her from doing her job? Did he think she wasn’t capable, wasn’t good enough? Faith wasn’t some useless mascot. Her mother had been a cop. Faith had worked her way up from patrol to homicide detective faster than anyone else on the squad. She hadn’t been picking daisies when Will stumbled across her. She wasn’t damn Watson to his Sherlock Holmes.
Faith had forced herself to take a deep breath. She was just sane enough to realize that her level of fury might be out of proportion. It wasn’t until she sat down at the kitchen table and measured her blood sugar that she realized why. She was hovering around one-fifty again, which, according to Your Life with Diabetes, could make a person nervous and irritable. It didn’t help her nervousness and irritability one whit when she tried to inject herself with the insulin pen.
Her hands were steady as she turned the dial for what she hoped were the correct units, but her leg started shaking as she tried to stick herself with the needle, so that she looked like a dog who was enjoying a particularly good scratch. There had to be some part of her unconscious brain that kept her hand hovering frozen over her shaking thigh, unable to willfully inflict pain on herself. It was probably somewhere near that damaged region that made it impossible for Faith to enter into a long-term relationship with a man.
“Screw it,” she had said, almost like a sneeze, jamming the pen down, pressing the button. The needle burned like hellfire, even though the literature on the device claimed it was virtually pain-free. Maybe after sticking yourself six zillion times a week, a needle jamming into your leg or your abdomen felt relatively painless, but Faith wasn’t to that point yet and she couldn’t imagine herself ever being there. She was sweating so badly by the time she pulled out the needle that her underarms were sticky.
She spent the next hour dividing her time between the phone and the Internet, reaching out to various governmental organizations to get the investigation moving while scaring the ever-loving shit out of herself by investiGoogling type 2 diabetes on her laptop computer. The first ten minutes were spent on hold with the Atlanta Police Department while she looked for an alternate diagnosis in case Sara Linton was wrong. That proved to be a pipe dream, and by the time Faith was on hold with the GBI’s Atlanta lab, she had stumbled upon her first diabetic blog. She found another, then another—thousands of people letting loose about the travails of living with a chronic disease.
Faith read about pumps and monitors and diabetic retinopathy and poor circulation and loss of libido and all the other wonderful things diabetes could bring into your life. There were miracle cures and device reviews and one nut who claimed that diabetes was a government plot to extract billions of dollars from the unsuspecting public in order to wage the war for oil.
As Faith waded through the conspiracy pages, she was ready to believe anything that might get her out of having to live the rest of her life under constant measurement. A lifetime of following every fad diet Cosmo could spit out had taught her to count carbs and calories, but the thought of turning into a human pincushion was almost too much to bear. Thoroughly depressed—and on hold with Equifax—she had quickly clicked back to the pharmaceutical pages with their images of smiling, healthy diabetics riding bicycles and doing yoga and playing with puppies, kittens, small children, kites, sometimes a combination of all four. Surely, the woman swinging around the adorable toddler wasn’t suffering from vaginal dryness.
Surely, after spending all morning on the telephone, Faith could have called the doctor’s office and scheduled an appointment for later this afternoon. She had the number Sara had scribbled down at her elbow—of course she’d done a search on Delia Wallace, checking to see if she’d been sued for malpractice or had a history of drunk driving. Faith knew every detail of the doctor’s education as well as her driving record, but still could not make the call.
Faith knew she was looking at desk time because of the pregnancy. Amanda had dated Faith’s uncle Ted until the relationship had petered out around the time Faith had entered junior high. Boss Amanda was very different from Aunt Amanda. She was going to make Faith’s life miserable in the way that only a woman can make another woman miserable for doing the things that most women do. That sort of living hell Faith was prepared for, but would Faith be allowed to return to her job even though she had diabetes?
Could she go out in the field, carry a gun and round up the bad guys if her blood sugar was out of whack? Exercise could lead to a precipitous drop. What if she was chasing a suspect and fainted? Emotional moments could stress her blood sugar as well. What if she was interviewing a witness and didn’t realize she was acting crazy until internal affairs was called in? And what about Will? Could she be trusted to have his back? For all her complaints about her partner, Faith had a deep devotion to the man. She was at times his navigator, his buffer against the world and his big sister. How could she protect Will if she couldn’t protect herself?
Maybe she wouldn’t even have a choice in the matter.
Faith stared at her computer screen, contemplating doing another search to see what the standard policy was for diabetics in law enforcement. Were they shoved behind desks until they atrophied or quit? Were they fired? Her hands went to the laptop, her fingers resting on the keyboard. As with the insulin pen, her brain froze her muscles, not letting her press the keys. She tapped her finger lightly on the H in a nervous tick, feeling the flop sweat come back. When the phone rang, she nearly jumped out of her skin.
“Good morning,” Will said. “I’m outside when you’re ready.”
Faith shut down the laptop. She gathered up the notes she had taken from her phone calls, loaded her diabetes paraphernalia into her purse and walked out the front door without a look back.
Will was in an unmarked black Dodge Charger, what they called a G-ride, slang for government-issued car. This particular beauty had a key scratch cutting along the panel over the back tire and a large antenna mounted on a spring so the scanner could pick up all signals within a hundred-mile area. A blind three-year-old would’ve been able to tell it was a cop car.
She opened the door and Will said, “I’ve got Jacquelyn Zabel’s Atlanta address.”
He meant the second victim, the woman who had been hanging upside down in the tree.
Faith got in the car and buckled her seatbelt. “How?”
“The Walton Beach sheriff called me back this morning. They checked with her neighbors down there. Apparently, her mother just went into a retirement home and Jacquelyn was up here packing up the house to sell it.”
“Where’s the house?”
“Inman Park. Charlie’s going to meet us there. I’ve reached out to the Atlanta police for some feet on the ground. They say they can give me two patrols for a couple of hours.” He reversed the car down the driveway, glancing at Faith. “You look better. Did you get some sleep?”
Faith didn’t answer his question. She pulled out her notebook, going through the list of things she had accomplished on the phone this morning. “I had the splinters of wood that were taken from underneath Anna’s fingernails transferred to our lab. I sent a tech to fingerprint her at the hospital first thing. I put out a statewide APB for any missing women matching Anna’s age and description—they’re going to try to send over a sketch artist for a drawing. Her face is pretty bruised. I’m not sure anyone would recognize her from a photograph.”
She flipped to the next page, skimming her notes. “I checked the NCIC and VICAP for comparable cases—the FBI isn’t tracking anything similar, but I put our details into the database just in case something hits.” She went to the next page. “I put an alert on Jacquelyn Zabel’s credit cards so we’ll know if someone tries to use them. I called the morgue; the autopsy is scheduled to start around eleven. I put in a call to the Coldfields—the man and wife in the Buick that hit Anna. They said we could come by and talk to them at the shelter where Judith volunteers, even though they’ve already told that nice Detective Galloway everything they know, and speaking of that prick, I woke up Jeremy at school this morning and made him leave a message on Galloway’s voicemail saying he was from the IRS and needed to talk to him about some irregularities.”
Will chuckled at this last bit.
“We’re waiting on Rockdale County to fax over the crime-scene reports and whatever witness statements they have. Other than that, that’s all I’ve got.” Faith closed her notebook. “So, what did you do this morning?”
He nodded toward the cup holder. “I got you some hot chocolate.”
Faith stared longingly at the takeout cup, dying to lick off the foamy puddle of whipped cream that had squirted through the slit in the lid. She had lied to Sara Linton about her usual diet. The last time Faith had jogged anywhere, she had been rushing from her car to the front door of Zesto’s, hoping to get a milk shake before they closed. Breakfast was usually a Pop-Tart and a Diet Coke, but this morning, she had eaten a boiled egg and a piece of dry toast, the kind of thing they served at the county jail. The sugar in the hot chocolate would probably kill her, though, and she said, “No, thanks,” before she could change her mind.
“You know,” he began, “if you’re trying to lose weight, I could—”
“Will,” she interrupted. “I’ve been on a diet for the last eighteen years of my life. If I want to let myself go, I’m going to let myself go.”
“I didn’t say—”
“Besides, I’ve only gained five pounds,” she lied. “It’s not like I need a Goodyear sign strapped to my ass.”
Will glanced at the purse in her lap, his mouth drawn. Finally, he said, “I’m sorry.”
“Thank you.”
“If you’re not going to …” He let his words trail off, taking the cup out of the holder. Faith turned on the radio so she wouldn’t have to listen to him swallow. The volume was low, and she heard the dull murmur of news coming from the speakers. She pressed the buttons until she found something soft and innocuous that wouldn’t get on her nerves.
She felt the seatbelt tense as Will slowed for a pedestrian darting across the road. Faith had no excuse for snapping at him, and he wasn’t a stupid man—he obviously knew that something was wrong but, as usual, didn’t want to push. She felt a pang of guilt for keeping secrets, but then again, Will wasn’t exactly known for sharing. It had only been by accident that she’d stumbled onto the realization that he was dyslexic. At least, she thought it was dyslexia. There was certainly some reading issue there, but God knew what it was. Faith had figured out from watching him that Will could make out some words on his own, but it took forever, and he was wrong more often than not about the content. When she’d tried to ask him about the diagnosis, Will had shut her down so tersely that Faith had felt her face flush in embarrassment for asking the question in the first place.
She hated to admit that he was right to hide the problem. Faith had worked on the force long enough to know that most police officers were barely out of the primordial ooze. They tended to be a conservative lot, and they didn’t exactly embrace the unusual. Maybe dealing with the most freakish elements society had to offer made them reject any semblance of abnormality in their own ranks. Whatever the reason, Faith knew that if word of Will’s dyslexia got out, there wasn’t a cop around who would let it pass. He already had trouble fitting in. This would make him a permanent outsider.
Will took a right on Moreland Avenue, and she wondered how he knew which way to go. Directions were an issue for him, left and right an insurmountable problem. Despite this, he was incredibly adept at hiding his disability. For those times when his shockingly good memory wouldn’t suffice, he had a digital recorder that he kept in his pocket the way that most cops kept a notebook. Sometimes he slipped up and made a mistake, but most of the time, Faith found herself in awe of his accomplishments. He had gotten through school and then college with no one recognizing there was a problem. Growing up in an orphanage hadn’t exactly given him a good start in life. His success was a lot to be proud of, which made the fact that he had to hide his disability even more heartbreaking.
They were in the middle of Little Five Points, an eclectic part of the city that blended seedy bars and fashionably overpriced boutiques, when Will finally spoke. “You okay?”
“I was just thinking,” Faith began, though she didn’t share her actual thoughts. “What do we know about the victims?”
“Both of them have dark hair. Both are fit, attractive. We think the woman at the hospital’s name is Anna. The license says the one hanging in the tree is Jacquelyn Zabel.”
“What about fingerprints?”
“There was a latent on the pocketknife that belongs to Zabel. The print on her license came back unknown—it doesn’t match Zabel and there’s no match on the computer.”
“We should compare it to Anna’s fingerprints and see if she’s the one who made it. If Anna touched the license, then that puts both Anna and Jacquelyn Zabel in the cave together.”
“Good idea.”
Faith felt like she was pulling teeth, though she couldn’t blame Will for being gun-shy, considering how mercurial her mood was lately. “Have you found out anything else about Zabel?”
He shrugged, as if there wasn’t much, but reeled off, “Jacquelyn Zabel is thirty-eight, unmarried, no children. The Florida Law Enforcement Bureau is giving us an assist—they’re going to go through her place, do a phone dump, try to find next of kin other than the mother who was living in Atlanta. The sheriff says no one in town knows Zabel that well. She has one sort-of friend next door who’s been watering her plants but doesn’t know anything about her. There’s been an ongoing feud with some of the other neighbors about people leaving out their trashcans on the street. The sheriff said Zabel’s made a few nuisance complaints in the past six months over loud noises from pool parties and cars being parked in front of her house.”
Faith bit back the urge to ask him why he hadn’t told her all this in the first place. “Has the sheriff ever met Zabel?”
“He said he took a couple of the nuisance calls himself and didn’t find her to be a very pleasant person.”
“You mean, he said she was a bitch,” Faith clarified. For a cop, Will had a surprisingly clean vocabulary. “What did she do for a living?”
“Real estate. The market’s been off, but she looks pretty set—house on the beach, BMW, a boat at the marina.”
“Wasn’t the battery you found in the cave for marine use?”
“I had the sheriff check her boat. The battery’s still there.”
“It was worth a shot,” Faith mumbled, thinking they were still grasping at straws.
“Charlie says the battery we found in the cave is at least ten years old. All the numbers are worn off. He’s going to see if he can get some more information on it, but chances are it’s a wash. You can pick up those things at yard sales.” Will shrugged, adding, “The only thing it tells us is that the guy knew what he was going to do with it.”
“Why is that?”
“A car battery is designed to deliver a short, large current like you need to crank your car. Once the car starts, the alternator takes over, and the battery isn’t needed again until the next time you need to start the engine. A marine battery like from the cave is what’s called a deep-cycle battery, meaning it gives a steady current over a long period of time. You’d ruin a car battery pretty quickly if you tried to use it the way our guy was. The marine battery would last for hours.”
Faith let his words hang in the air, her brain trying to make sense of them. There was no way to make sense of it, though: What had been done to those women was not the product of a sound mind.
She asked, “Where’s Jacquelyn Zabel’s BMW?”
“Not in her driveway in Florida. And not at her mother’s house.”
“Did you put out an APB on the car?”
“In both Florida and Georgia.” He reached around to the back seat and pulled out a handful of folders. They were all color-coded, and he thumbed through until he found the orange one, which he handed to Faith. She opened it to find a printout from the Florida Department of Motor Vehicles. Jacquelyn Alexandra Zabel’s driver’s license stared back at her, the picture showing a very attractive woman with long dark hair and brown eyes. “She’s pretty,” Faith said.
“So’s Anna,” Will provided. “Brown hair, brown eyes.”
“Our guy has a type.” Faith turned to the next page and read aloud from the woman’s driving record, “Zabel’s car is a 2008 red BMW 540i. Speeding ticket six months ago for going eighty in a fifty-five. Running a stop sign in a school zone last month. Failure to stop at a roadblock two weeks ago, refused to take a Breathalyzer, court date pending.” She thumbed through the pages. “Her record was pretty clean until recently.”
Will absently scratched his forearm as he waited for another light to change. “Maybe something happened.”
“What about the notes Charlie found in the cave?”
“ ‘I will not deny myself,’ ” he recalled, taking out the blue folder. “The pages are being fingerprinted. They’re from a standard spiral notebook, written in pencil, probably by a woman.”
Faith looked at the copy, the same sentence written over and over again like she’d done many times herself as punishment back in junior high school. “And the rib?”
He was still scratching his arm. “No sign of the rib in the cave or the immediate area.”
“Maybe,” he said. “Jacquelyn didn’t have any cuts on her body.” He corrected, “I mean, any deep cuts like what Anna had where the rib was removed. Both of them looked like they’d been through the same kind of stuff, though.”
“Torture.” Faith tried to put herself in the mind of their perpetrator. “He keeps one woman on the top of the bed and one woman underneath. Maybe he trades them out—does one horrible thing to Anna, then swaps her out for Jacquelyn and does the horrible thing to her.”
“Then trades them back,” Will said. “So, maybe Jacquelyn heard what happened to Anna with the rib, knew what was coming and chewed her way through the rope around her wrist.”
“She must have found the penknife, or had it with her under the bed.”
“Charlie examined the slats under the bed. He put them back together in sequence. The tip of a very sharp knife ran in the center of each slat where someone cut the rope from underneath the bed, head to foot.”
Faith suppressed a shudder as she stated the obvious. “Jacquelyn was under the bed while Anna was being mutilated.”
“And she was probably alive while we were searching the woods.”
Faith opened her mouth to say something along the lines of “It’s not your fault,” but she knew the words were useless. She felt guilt herself for not being out there during the search. She could not imagine how Will was feeling, considering he’d been blundering around in the woods while the woman was dying.
Instead, she asked, “What’s wrong with your arm?”
“What do you mean?”
“You keep scratching it.”
He stopped the car and squinted up at the street signs.
“Hamilton,” Faith read.
He checked his watch, a ploy he used for telling left from right. “Both victims were probably well-off,” he said, taking a right onto Hamilton. “Anna was malnourished, but her hair was nice—the color, I mean—and she’d had a manicure recently. The polish on her nails was chipped, but it looked professionally done.”
Faith didn’t press him on how he knew a professional manicure from an amateur one. “These women weren’t prostitutes. They had homes and probably jobs. It’s unusual for a killer to choose victims who will be missed.”
“Motive, means, opportunity,” he listed, stating the foundation for any investigation. “Motive is sex and torture and maybe taking the rib.”
“Means,” Faith said, trying to think of ways the killer might have abducted his victims. “Maybe he rigs their cars to break down? He could be a mechanic.”
“BMWs are equipped with driver assist. You just press a button and they’re on the phone with you and they send out a tow truck.”
“Nice,” Faith said. The Mini was a poor man’s BMW, which meant you had to use your own phone if you got stuck. “Jacquelyn’s moving her mother’s house. That means she probably contracted with a moving company or liquidation agent.”
“She’d need a termite letter to sell the house,” Will added. You couldn’t get a mortgage on a house in most of the South without first proving that termites weren’t feasting on the foundation. “So, our bad guy could be an exterminator, a contractor, a mover …”
Faith got out a pen and started a list on the back of the orange folder. “Her real estate license wouldn’t transfer up here, so she’d have to have an Atlanta agent to sell the house.”
“Unless she did a for-sale-by-owner, in which case she could have had open houses, could’ve had strangers in and out all the time.”
“Why didn’t anyone notice she was missing?” Faith asked. “Sara said Anna was taken at least four days ago.”
“Who’s Sara?”
“Sara Linton,” Faith said. He shrugged, and she studied him carefully. Will never forgot names. He never forgot anything. “The doctor from yesterday?”
“Is that her name?”
Faith resisted a “Come on.”
He asked, “How would she know how long Anna was kept?”
“She used to be a coroner in some county way down south.”
Will’s eyebrows went up. He slowed to look at another sign. “A coroner? That’s weird.”
He was one to talk. “She was a coroner and a pediatrician.”
Will mumbled as he tried to make out the sign. “I took her for a dancer.”
“Woodland,” Faith read. “A dancer? She’s twenty feet tall.”
“Dancers can be tall.”
Faith clenched her teeth together so that she would not laugh out loud.
“Anyway.” He didn’t add anything else, using the word to indicate an end to that part of the conversation.
She studied his profile as he turned the wheel, the way he stared so intently at the road ahead. Will was an attractive man, arguably handsome, but he was about as self-aware as a snail. His wife, Angie Polaski, seemed to see beyond his quirks—among them his painful inability to conduct small talk and the anachronistic three-piece suits he insisted on wearing. In return, Will seemed to overlook the fact that Angie had slept with half the Atlanta police force, including—if graffiti in the ladies’ toilet on the third floor was to be believed—a couple of women. They had met each other at the Atlanta Children’s Home, and Faith supposed this was the connection that bound them together. They were both orphans, both abandoned by, presumably, crappy parents. As with everything in his personal life, Will did not share the details. Faith hadn’t even known that he and Angie were officially married until Will showed up one morning wearing a wedding band.
And she had never known Will to even give a passing glance to another woman until now.
“This is it,” he said, taking a right down a narrow, tree-lined street. She saw the white crime-scene van parked in front of a very small house. Charlie Reed and two of his assistants were already going through the trash on the side of the road. Whoever had taken out the trash was the neatest person in the world. There were boxes stacked up on the curb, three rows of two, each labeled with the contents. Beside these were a bunch of large black garbage bags lined up like a row of sentries. On the other side of the mailbox were a precisely aligned mattress and box spring, and a couple of pieces of furniture that the local trash trollers hadn’t spotted yet. Behind Charlie’s van were two empty Atlanta police cruisers, and Faith assumed the patrolmen Will had requested were already canvassing the neighborhood.
Faith said, “Her husband was a cop. Sounds like he was killed in the line of duty. I hope they fried the bastard.”
“Whose husband?”
He knew damn well who she was talking about. “Sara Linton’s. The dancing doctor.”
Will put the car in park and cut the engine. “I asked Charlie to hold off on processing the house.” He took two pairs of latex gloves out of his jacket pocket and handed one to Faith. “My guess is that it’s packed up for the move, but you never know.”
Faith got out of the car. Charlie would have to close off the house as a crime scene as soon as he started collecting evidence. Letting Will and Faith check it out first meant that they wouldn’t have to wait for everything to be processed before they started following up on clues.
“Hey there,” Charlie called, tossing them an almost cheery wave. “Got here just in time.” He indicated the bags. “Goodwill was about to cart it off when we pulled up.”
“What’ve you got?”
He showed them the tags on the bags where the contents had been neatly labeled. “Clothes, mostly. Kitchen items, old blenders, that sort of thing.” He flashed a smile. “Beats the hell out of that hole in the ground.”
Will asked, “When do you think we’ll have the analysis back from the cave?”
“Amanda put a rush on it. There was a lot of shit down there, literally and figuratively. We prioritized the pieces we thought might be more important. You know that DNA from the fluids will take forty-eight hours. Fingerprints are run through the computer as they’re developed. If there’s something earth-shattering down there, we’ll know by tomorrow morning at the latest.” He mimed holding a telephone receiver to his ear. “You’ll be the first call.”
Will indicated the garbage bags. “Find anything useful?”
Charlie handed him a packet of mail. Will snapped off the rubber band and looked at each envelope before handing it to Faith. “Postmark’s recent,” he noticed. He could easily read numbers, if not words, which was one of the many useful tools he used to conceal his problem. He was also good at recognizing company logos. “Gas bill, electric, cable …”
Faith read the name of the addressee: “Gwendolyn Zabel. That’s a lovely old name.”
“Like Faith,” Charlie said, and she was a little surprised to hear him utter something so personal. He hastily covered for it, saying, “And she lived in a lovely old house.”
Faith wouldn’t have called the small bungalow lovely, but it was certainly quaint with its gray shingles and red trim. Nothing had been done to update the place, or even simply keep it up. The gutters sagged from years of leaves and the roofline resembled a camel’s back. The grass was neatly trimmed, but there were no flower beds or carefully sculpted shrubs typical to Atlanta homes. All the other houses on the street but one had a second story added on or had simply been torn down to make way for a mansion. Gwendolyn Zabel must have been one of the last holdouts, the only two-bedroom, one-bath in the area. Faith wondered if the neighbors were glad to see the old woman go. Her daughter must have been happy to have the check from the sale. A house like this had probably cost around thirty thousand dollars when it was first built. Now the land alone would be worth around half a million.
Will asked Charlie, “Did you get the door unlocked?”
“It was unlocked when I got here,” he told them. “Me and the guys took a look around. Nothing jumped out, but you’ve got first dibs.” He indicated the trash pile in front of him. “This is just the tip of the iceberg. The place is a freakin’ mess.”
Will and Faith exchanged a look as they walked toward the house. Inman Park was far from Mayberry. You didn’t leave your door unlocked unless you were hoping for an insurance claim.
Faith pushed open the front door, walking back into the 1970s as she crossed the threshold. The green shag carpet on the floor was deep enough to cup her tennis shoes, and the mirrored wallpaper was kind enough to remind her that she’d put on fifteen pounds in the last month.
“Wow,” Will said, glancing around the front room. It was packed with untold amounts of crap: stacks of newspapers, paperback books, magazines.
“This can’t be safe to live in.”
“Imagine how it looked with all the stuff on the street back inside.” Faith picked up a rusted hand blender sitting on the top of a stack of Life magazines. “Sometimes old people start collecting things and they can’t stop.”
“This is crazy,” he said, wiping his hand along a stack of old forty-fives. Dust flew into the stale air.
“My grandmother’s house was worse than this,” Faith told him. “It took us a whole week just to be able to walk through to the kitchen.”
“Why would someone do this?”
“I don’t know,” she admitted. Her grandfather had died when Faith was a child, and her granny Mitchell had lived on her own for most of her life. She had started collecting things in her fifties, and by the time she was moved into a nursing home, the house had been filled to the rafters with useless things. Looking around another lonely old woman’s house, seeing a similar accumulation, made Faith wonder if someday Jeremy would be saying the same thing about Faith’s housekeeping.
At least he would have a little brother or sister to help him. Faith put her hand to her stomach, wondering for the first time about the child growing inside of her. Was it a girl or a boy? Would it have her blonde hair or its father’s dark Latino looks? Jeremy looked nothing like his father, thank God. Faith’s first love had been a gangly hillbilly with a build that was reminiscent of Spike from the Peanuts cartoon. As a baby, Jeremy had been almost delicate, like a thin piece of porcelain. He’d had the sweetest little feet. Those first few days, Faith had spent hours staring at his tiny toes, kissing the bottoms of his heels. She had thought that he was the most remarkable thing on the face of the earth. He had been her little doll.
“Faith?”
She dropped her hand, wondering what had come over her. She’d taken enough insulin this morning. Maybe she was just feeling the typical hormonal swings of pregnancy that had made being fourteen such a pleasure for Faith as well as everyone around her. How on Earth was she going to go through this again? And how was she going to do it alone?
“Faith?”
“You don’t have to keep saying my name, Will.” She indicated the back of the house. “Go check the kitchen. I’ll take the bedrooms.”
He gave her a careful look before heading into the kitchen.
Faith walked down the hallway toward the back rooms, picking her way through broken blenders and toasters and telephones. She wondered if the old woman had scavenged for these things or if she had accumulated them over a lifetime. The framed photographs on the walls looked ancient, some of them in sepia and black-and-white. Faith scanned them as she made her way back, wondering when people had started smiling for photographs, and why. She had some older photos of her mother’s grandparents that were particularly treasured. They had lived on a farm during the Depression, and a traveling photographer had taken a shot of their small family as well as a mule that was called Big Pete. Only the mule had been smiling.
There was no Big Pete on Gwendolyn Zabel’s wall, but some of the color photographs showed not one but two different young girls, both with dark brown hair hanging down past their pencil-thin waists. They were a few years apart in age, but definitely sisters. None of the more recent photographs showed the two posing together. Jacquelyn’s sister seemed to prefer desert settings for the shots she sent her mother, while Jacquelyn’s photos tended to show her posing on the beach, a bikini low across her boyishly thin hips. Faith could not help but think if she looked that great at thirty-eight years old, she’d be taking picture of herself wearing a bikini, too. There were very few recent pictures of the sister, who appeared to have grown plumper with age. Faith hoped she had kept in touch with her mother. They could do a reverse trace on the telephone and find her that way.
The first bedroom did not have a door. Stacks of debris filled the room—more newspapers and magazines. There were some boxes, but for the most part, the small bedroom was filled with so much trash it was impossible to go more than a few feet in. A musty odor filled the air, and Faith remembered a story she’d seen on the news many years ago about a woman who’d gotten a paper cut from an old magazine and ended up dying from some strange disease. She backed out of the room and glanced into the bathroom. More junk, but someone had cleared a path to the toilet and scrubbed it clean. A toothbrush and some other toiletries were lined up on the sink. There were piles of garbage bags in the bathtub. The shower curtain was almost black with mold.
Faith had to turn sideways to get past the door to the master bedroom. She saw the reason as soon as she was inside. There was an old rocking chair near the door, so piled with clothes that it was ready to topple over except for the door propping it up. More clothes were scattered around the room, the sort of stuff that would be called vintage and sold for hundreds of dollars down the street in the funky clothing stores of Little Five Points.
The house was warm, which made it more difficult for Faith to get her sweaty hands into the latex gloves. She ignored the pinprick of dried blood on the tip of her finger, not wanting to think about anything else that would turn her into a sobbing mess.
She started on the chest of drawers first. All of the drawers were open, so it was just a matter of pushing around clothes, looking for stashed letters or an address book that might list family relations. The bed was neatly made, the only item in the house about which “neat” could be said to describe it. There was no telling if Jacquelyn Zabel had slept in her mother’s bedroom or if she had opted for a hotel downtown.
Or maybe not. Faith saw an open duffel bag sitting beside a laptop case on the floor. She should have spotted the items immediately, because they were both obviously out of place, with their distinctive designer logos and soft leather shells. Faith checked the laptop case, finding a MacBook Air that her son would’ve killed for. She booted it up, but the welcome screen asked for a username and password. Charlie would have to send it through the proper channels to try to crack it, but in Faith’s experience, Macs that had been password-protected were impossible to decode, even by the manufacturer.
Next, Faith looked through the duffel. The clothes inside were designer—Donna Karan, Jones of New York. The Jimmy Choos were particularly impressive, especially to Faith, who was wearing a skirt that was the equivalent of a camping tent, since she couldn’t find any pants in her closet that would button anymore. Jacquelyn Zabel apparently suffered no such sartorial quandaries, and Faith wondered why someone who could obviously afford otherwise chose to stay in this awful house.
So, Jacquelyn had apparently been sleeping in the room. The neatly made bed, a glass of water and a pair of reading glasses on the table beside it all pointed to a recent inhabitant. There was also a giant, hospital-size bottle of aspirin. Faith opened the container and found it half empty. She would probably need some aspirin herself if she were packing up her mother’s home. Faith had seen the heartbreak her father suffered when he’d had to put his mother in an assisted-living facility. The man had passed away years ago, but Faith knew that he had never gotten over having to put his mother in a home.
Unbidden, Faith felt her eyes fill with tears. She let out a groan, wiping her eyes with the back of her hand. Since she’d seen a plus sign on the pregnancy test, a day hadn’t gone by without Faith’s brain conjuring some story to make her burst into tears.
She returned to the duffel. She was feeling around for pieces of paper—a notebook, a journal, a plane ticket—when she heard yelling coming from the other side of the house. Faith found Will in the kitchen. A very large and very angry woman was screaming in his face.
“You pigs have no right to be here!”
Faith thought the woman looked just like the type of aging hippie who would use the word “pigs.” Her hair was braided down her back and she was wearing a horse-blanket shawl around her body in lieu of a shirt. Faith guessed that the woman was officially the last holdout in the neighborhood, soon to be the crappiest house on the street. She didn’t look like the yoga-loving mommies who probably lived in the renovated mansions.
Will remained remarkably cool, leaning against the refrigerator with a hand in his pocket. “Ma’am, I need you to calm down.”
“Fuck you,” she shot back. “Fuck you, too,” she added, seeing Faith in the doorway. Close up, Faith thought the woman was in her late forties. It was hard to tell, though, since her face was twisted into an angry red knot. She had the sort of features that seemed built for fury.
Will asked, “Did you know Gwendolyn Zabel?”
“You have no right to question me without a lawyer.”
Faith rolled her eyes, reveling in the sheer childish joy of the gesture.
Will was more mature in his approach. “Can you tell me your name?”
She turned instantly reticent. “Why?”
“I’d like to know what to call you.”
She seemed to scroll through her options. “Candy.”
“All right, Candy. I’m Special Agent Trent with the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, this is Special Agent Mitchell. I’m sorry to tell you that Mrs. Zabel’s daughter has been in an accident.”
Candy pulled the blanket closer. “Was she drinking?”
Will asked, “Did you know Jacquelyn?”
“Jackie.” Candy shrugged her shoulders. “She was here for a few weeks to get her mother’s house sold. We talked.”
“Did she use a real estate agent or sell it herself?”
“She used a local agent.” The woman shifted her stance, blocking Faith from her view. “Is Jackie okay?”
“I’m afraid she’s not. She was killed in the accident.”
Candy put her hand to her mouth.
“Have you seen anyone hanging around the house? Anyone suspicious?”
“Of course not. I’d call the police.”
Faith suppressed a snort. The ones who screamed about the pigs were always the ones who called the police for help at the first whiff of trouble.
Will asked, “Does Jackie have any family we can get in touch with?”
“Are you fucking blind?” Candy demanded. She jerked her head toward the refrigerator. Faith could see a list of names and phone numbers taped to the door that Will was leaning against. The words emergency numbers were typed in bold print at the top, less than six inches away from his face. “Christ, don’t they teach you people to read?”
Will looked absolutely mortified, and Faith would have slapped the woman if she had been standing close enough. Instead, she said, “Ma’am, I’m going to need you to go downtown and make a formal statement.”
Will caught her eye, shook his head, but Faith was so furious she struggled to keep her voice from shaking. “We’ll get a cruiser to take you to City Hall East. It’ll only take a few hours.”
“Why?” the woman demanded. “Why do you need me to—”
Faith took out her cell phone and dialed her old partner at the Atlanta Police Department. Leo Donnelly owed her a favor—make that several favors—and she intended to use them to make this woman’s life as difficult as possible.
Candy said, “I’ll talk to you here. You don’t need to take me downtown.”
“Your friend Jackie is dead,” Faith said, her anger making her tone sharp. “Either you’re helping our investigation or you’re obstructing it.”
“Okay, okay,” she said, holding up her hands in surrender. “What do you want to know?”
Faith glanced at Will, who was looking at his shoes. She pressed her thumb on the end button, disconnecting the call to Leo. She asked Candy, “When’s the last time you saw Jackie?”
“Last weekend. She came over for some company.”
“What kind of company?”
Candy equivocated, and Faith started to dial Leo’s number again.
“All right,” the woman groaned. “Jesus. We smoked some weed. She was freaked out about all this shit. She hadn’t visited her mom in a while. None of us knew how bad it had gotten.”
“ ‘None of us’ meaning who?”
“Me and a couple of the neighbors. We kept an eye on Gwen. She’s an old woman. Her daughters live out of state.”
They must have not kept too close an eye on her if they hadn’t realized she was living in a firetrap. “Do you know the other daughter?”
“Joelyn,” she answered, nodding toward the list on the fridge. “She doesn’t visit. At least, she hasn’t in the ten years I’ve lived here.”
Faith glanced at Will again. He was staring somewhere over Candy’s shoulder. She asked the woman, “The last time you saw Jackie was a week ago?”
“That’s right.”
“What about her car?”
“It was in the driveway until a couple of days ago.”
“A couple as in two?”
“I guess it’s closer to four or five. I’ve got a life. It’s not like I track the comings and goings of the neighborhood.”
Faith ignored the sarcasm. “Have you seen anyone suspicious hanging around?”
“I told you no.”
“Who was the real estate agent?”
She named one of the top Realtors in town, a man who advertised on every available bus stop in the city. “Jackie didn’t even meet him. They handled it all on the phone. He had the house sold before the sign even went up in the yard. There’s a developer who has a standing offer on all the lots, and he closes in ten days with cash.”
Faith knew this was not uncommon. Her own poor house had been subject to many such offers over the years—none of them worth taking because then she wouldn’t be able to afford a new house in her own neighborhood. “What about movers?”
“Look at all this shit.” Candy slapped her hand against a crumbling pile of papers. “The last thing Jackie told me was that she was going to have one of those construction Dumpsters delivered.”
Will cleared his throat. He wasn’t looking at the wall anymore, but he wasn’t exactly looking at the witness, either. “Why not just leave everything here?” he asked. “It’s mostly trash. The builder is going to bulldoze it anyway.”
Candy seemed appalled by the prospect. “This was her mother’s house. She grew up here. Her childhood is buried under all this shit. You can’t just throw that all away.”
He took out his phone as if it had rung. Faith knew the vibration feature was broken. Amanda had nearly gutted him in a meeting last week when it had started ringing. Still, Will looked at the display, then said, “Excuse me.” He left by the back door, using his foot to move a pile of magazines out of the way.
Candy asked, “What’s his problem?”
“He’s allergic to bitches,” Faith quipped, though if that were true, Will would be covered in a head-to-toe rash after this morning. “How often did Jackie visit her mother?”
“I’m not her social secretary.”
“Maybe if I take you downtown, it’ll jog your memory.”
“Jesus,” she muttered. “Okay. Maybe a couple of times a year—if that.”
“And you’ve never seen Joelyn, her sister, visit?”
“Nope.”
“Did you spend much time with Jackie?”
“Not much. I wouldn’t call us friends or anything.”
“What about when you smoked together last week? Did she say anything about her life?”
“She told me the nursing home she sent her mom off to cost fifty grand a year.”
Faith suppressed the urge to whistle. “There goes any profit from the house.”
Candy didn’t seem to think so. “Gwen’s been failing for a while now. She won’t last the year. Jackie said might as well get her something nice on her way out.”
“Where’s the home?”
“Sarasota.”
Jackie Zabel lived on the Florida Panhandle, about five hours’ drive away from Sarasota. Not too close and not too far. Faith said, “The doors weren’t locked when we got here.”
Candy shook her head. “Jackie lived in a gated community. She never locked her doors. One night, she left her keys in her car. I couldn’t believe it when I saw them in the ignition. It was dumb luck that it wasn’t stolen.” She added ruefully, “But Jackie was always pretty lucky.”
“Was she seeing anyone?”
Candy turned reticent again.
Faith waited her out.
Finally, the woman said, “She wasn’t that nice, okay? I mean, she was fine to get stoned with, but she was kind of a bitch about things, and men wanted to fuck her, but they didn’t want to talk to her afterward. You know what I mean?”
Faith wasn’t in a position to judge. “What things was she a bitch about?”
“The best way to drive up from Florida. The right kind of gas to put in your car. The proper way to throw out the freaking trash.” She indicated the cluttered kitchen. “That’s why she was doing this all by herself. Jackie’s loaded. She could afford to pay a crew to clean out this place in two days. She didn’t trust anyone else to do it the right way. That’s the only reason she’s been staying here. She’s a control freak.”
Faith thought about the neatly tied bundles out by the street. “You said she wasn’t seeing anyone. Were there any men in her life—ex-husbands? Ex-boyfriends?”
“Who knows? She didn’t confide in me much and Gwen hasn’t known the day of the week for the last ten years. Honestly, I think Jackie just needed a couple of tokes to take off the edge, and she knew I was holding.”
“She was okay when she unclenched.”
“You asked if she’d been in a drunk-driving accident.”
“I know she got stopped in Florida. She was really pissed about that.” Candy was sure to add, “Those stops are completely bogus. One measly glass of wine and they’re cuffing you like you’re some kind of criminal. They just want to make their quota.”
Faith had done many of those stops herself. She knew she had saved lives just as sure as she knew Candy had probably had her own run-ins with the cops. “So, you didn’t like Jackie, but you spent time with her. You didn’t know her well but you knew she was fighting a DUI rap. What’s going on here?”
“It’s easier to go with the flow, you know? I don’t like causing trouble.”
She certainly seemed fine with causing it for other people. Faith took out her notebook. “What’s your last name?”
“Smith.”
Faith gave her a sharp look.
“I’m serious. It’s Candace Courtney Smith. I live in the only other shitty house on the street.” Candy glanced out the window at Will. Faith saw that he was talking to one of the uniformed patrolmen. She could tell from the way the other man was shaking his head that they hadn’t found anything useful.
Candy said, “I’m sorry I snapped. I just don’t like the police around.”
“Why is that?”
She shrugged. “I had some problems a while back.”
Faith had already guessed as much. Candy certainly had the angry disposition of a person who had sat in the back of a squad car on more than one occasion. “What kind of problems?”
She shrugged again. “I’m only saying this because you’re going to find out about it and come running back here like I’m an ax murderer.”
“Go on.”
“I got picked up on a solicitation when I was in my twenties.”
Faith was unsurprised. She guessed, “You met a guy who got you hooked on drugs?”
“Romeo and Juliet,” Candy confirmed. “Asshole left me holding his stash. He said I wouldn’t go down for it.”
There had to be a mathematical formula out there that calculated to the second how long it took a woman whose boyfriend got her hooked on drugs to get turned out on the street in order to support both their habits. Faith imagined the equation involved a lot of zeroes behind the decimal point.
Faith asked, “How long were you in for?”
“Shit,” she laughed. “I flipped on the asshole and his dealer. I didn’t spend day one in prison.”
Still not surprised.
The woman said, “I stopped the hard stuff a long time ago. The weed just keeps me mellow.” She glanced at Will again. Obviously, there was something about him that was making her nervous.
Faith called her on it. “What are you so worried about?”
“He doesn’t look like a cop.”
“What does he look like?”
She shook her head. “He reminds me of my first boyfriend, all quiet and nice, but his temper—” She smacked her hand into her palm. “He beat me pretty bad. Broke my nose. Broke my leg once when I didn’t earn out for him.” She rubbed her knee. “Still hurts me when it’s cold.”
Faith saw where this was going. It wasn’t Candy’s fault that she’d tricked herself out to get high and more than likely failed her share of Breathalyzers. The evil boyfriend was to blame, or the stupid cop meeting his quota, and now Will was getting his turn as the bad guy, too.
Candy was a skilled enough manipulator to know when she was losing her audience. “I’m not lying to you.”
“I don’t care about the sordid details of your tragic past,” Faith stated. “Tell me what you’re really worried about.”
She debated for a few seconds. “I take care of my daughter now. I’m straight.”
“Ah,” Faith said. The woman was worried her child would be taken away.
Candy nodded toward Will. “He reminds me of those bastards from the state.”
Will as a social worker certainly was a better fit than Will as an abusive boyfriend. “How old is your daughter?”
“She’s almost four. I didn’t think I’d be able to—All the shit I’ve been through.” Candy smiled, her face changing from an angry fist into something that might be called a moderately attractive plum. “Hannah’s a little sweetheart. She loved Jackie a lot, wanted to be like her with her nice car and her fancy clothes.”
Faith didn’t think Jackie sounded like the kind of woman who wanted a three-year-old pawing her Jimmy Choos, not least of all because kids tended to be sticky at that age. “Did Jackie like her?”
Candy shrugged. “Who doesn’t like kids?” She finally asked the question that a less self-absorbed person would’ve asked ten minutes ago. “So, what happened? Was she drunk?”
“She was murdered.”
Candy opened her mouth, then closed it. “Killed?”
Faith nodded.
“Who would do that? Who would want to hurt her?”
Faith had seen this enough times to know where it was heading. It was the reason she had held back the true cause of Jacquelyn Zabel’s death. No one wanted to speak ill of the dead, even a fried-out hippie wannabe with an anger problem.
“She wasn’t bad,” Candy insisted. “I mean, she was good deep down.”
“I’m sure she was,” Faith agreed, though the opposite was more likely true.
Candy’s lip quivered. “How am I gonna tell Hannah that she’s dead?”
Faith’s phone rang, which was just as well because she did not know how to answer the question. Worse, part of her didn’t care, now that she’d wrung out all the information she needed. Candy Smith was hardly number one on the list of horrible parents, but she wasn’t a stellar human being, either, and there was a three-year-old child out there who was probably paying for it.
Faith answered the phone. “Mitchell.”
Detective Leo Donnelly asked, “Did you just call me?”
“I hit the wrong button,” she lied.
“I was about to call you anyway. You put out that BOLO, right?”
He meant the Be On the Look Out Faith had sent around to all the zones this morning. Faith held up her finger to Candy, asking for a minute, then walked back into the family room. “What’ve you got?”
“Not exactly a miss-per,” he said, meaning a missing person. “Uniform patrol found a kid asleep in an SUV this morning, mom nowhere to be found.”
“And?” Faith asked, knowing there had to be more. Leo was a homicide detective. He didn’t get called out to coordinate social services.
“Your BOLO,” he said. “It kind of matches the mom’s description. Brown hair, brown eyes.”
“What’s the kid saying?”
“Fuck-all,” he admitted. “I’m at the hospital with him now. You’ve got a kid. You wanna come see if you can get anything out of him?”