Will Trent was worried about his dog. Betty was getting her teeth cleaned, which sounded like a ridiculous waste of money for a pet, but when the vet had explained to Will all the terrible things that poor dental hygiene could do to an animal, he had been ready to sell his house in order to buy the little thing a few more precious years.
Apparently, he wasn’t the only idiot in Atlanta who was ensuring his pet had better health care than many Americans. He glanced at the line of people waiting to enter the Dutch Valley Animal Clinic. A recalcitrant Great Dane was bottlenecking the front door while several cat owners gave each other knowing looks. Will turned back to the street. He wiped the sweat off his neck, unsure whether he was perspiring from the intense, late August heat or from the sheer panic of not knowing whether or not he had made the right decision. He’d never had a dog before. He’d never been solely responsible for an animal’s well-being. He put his hand to his chest. He could still feel the memory of Betty’s heart jangling like a tambourine as he handed her over to the vet tech.
Should he go back inside and rescue her?
The sharp beep of a car horn startled him out of his apprehension. He saw a flash of red as Faith Mitchell drove past in her Mini. She made a wide U-turn, then pulled up alongside Will. He was reaching for the handle when she leaned over and pushed open the door.
“Hurry,” she said, her voice raised over the whine of the air-conditioning, which was set to polar. “Amanda already sent two texts asking where the hell we are.”
Will hesitated before getting into the tiny car. Faith’s government-issued Suburban was in the shop. There was a baby’s car seat strapped into the backseat, which left approximately thirty inches of space up front into which he could wedge his six-feet-four-inch frame.
Faith’s phone chirped with a new text. “Amanda.” She said the name like a curse, which was how most people said it. Deputy Director Amanda Wagner was their boss at the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. She was not known for her patience.
Will tossed his suit jacket into the backseat then folded himself into the car like a burrito. He tilted his head into the extra few inches afforded by the closed sunroof. The glove box pressed into his shins. His knees almost touched his face. If they were in an accident, the coroner would have to scrape his nose off the inside of his skull.
“Murder,” Faith said, letting her foot off the brake before he’d even closed the door. “Male, fifty-eight years old.”
“Nice,” Will said, relishing the death of a fellow human being as only a law enforcement officer can. In his defense, both he and Faith had spent the last seven months pushing boulders up some very steep hills. She had been loaned out to a special task force investigating the Atlanta Public Schools cheating scandal and he had been stuck in the particular hell of a high-visibility rape investigation.
Faith said, “Atlanta 9-1-1 got the call around five this a.m.” She had an air of giddiness about her as she relayed the details. “An unidentified male caller said there was a dead body near those abandoned warehouses off Chattahoochee. Lots of blood. No murder weapon.” She slowed for a red light. “They’re not releasing cause of death on the radio, so it must be pretty bad.”
Something inside the car started to beep. Will reached blindly for his seat belt. “Why are we working this?” The GBI couldn’t just walk onto a case. They had to be ordered in by the governor or asked in by the local cops. The Atlanta Police Department dealt with murder on a weekly basis. They didn’t generally ask for help. Especially from the state.
“The victim is an Atlanta cop.” Faith grabbed his seat belt and buckled him in like he was one of her kids. “Detective first grade Dale Harding, retired. Ever heard of him?”
Will shook his head. “You?”
“My mom knew him. Never worked with him. He was in white-collar crimes. Took early medical leave, then popped up doing private security. Mostly knuckle dragging and knee-breaking.” Faith had been with the APD for fifteen years before she’d partnered with Will. Her mother had retired as a captain. Between the two of them, they were familiar with practically everyone on the force. “Mom says that knowing Harding’s reputation, he probably pissed off the wrong pimp or missed the vig with his bookie and got a bat to the head.”
The car jerked as the light changed. Will felt a sharp jab in his ribs from his Glock. He tried to shift his weight. Despite the frigid air-conditioning, sweat had already glued the back of his shirt to the seat. The skin peeled away like a Band-Aid. The clock on the dash read 7:38 in the morning. He couldn’t let himself think about how sweltering it would be by noon.
Faith’s phone chirped with a text. Then chirped again. And again. “Amanda.” She groaned. “Why does she break up the lines? She sends three separate sentences in three separate texts. All caps. It’s not fair.” Faith drove with one hand and texted back with the other, which was dangerous and illegal, but Faith was one of those cops who only saw infractions in other people. “We’re about five minutes out, right?”
“Probably closer to ten with traffic.” Will reached over to steady the steering wheel so they wouldn’t end up on the sidewalk. “What’s the address on the warehouse?”
She scrolled back through her texts. “It’s a construction site near the warehouses. Three-eighty Beacon.”
Will’s jaw clamped down so tight that he felt a lightning bolt of pain shoot into his neck. “That’s Marcus Rippy’s nightclub.”
Faith gave him a startled look. “Are you kidding me?”
Will shook his head. There was nothing about Marcus Rippy that he would kid about. The man was a pro basketball player who’d been accused of drugging and raping a college student. Will had spent the last seven months building a pretty solid case against the lying asshole, but Rippy had hundreds of millions of dollars to spend on lawyers and specialists and experts and publicists who had all made sure that the case never went to trial.
Faith asked, “What’s a dead ex-cop doing inside Marcus Rippy’s club less than two weeks after Rippy walks on a rape charge?”
“I’m sure his lawyers will have a plausible explanation by the time we get there.”
“Jesus.” Faith dropped her phone into the cup holder and put both hands back on the wheel. She was quiet for a moment, probably considering all the ways this had just turned bad for them. Dale Harding was a cop, but he’d been a bad cop. The hard truth about murder in the big city was that in general, the deceased rarely turned out to be a shining, upstanding citizen. Not to blame the victim, but they tended to be involved in activities—like pissing off pimps and not paying bookies—where it made sense that they would eventually end up murdered.
Marcus Rippy’s involvement changed everything.
Faith slowed the car as morning traffic thickened like paste. “I know you said you didn’t want to talk about your case crapping out, but now I need you to talk about it.”
Will still didn’t want to talk about it. Over a five-hour period, Rippy had repeatedly assaulted his victim, sometimes beating her, sometimes strangling her into unconsciousness. Standing beside her hospital bed three days later, Will could make out the dark lines where Rippy’s fingers had gripped her neck the same way he would palm a basketball. There were other bruises documented in the medical report. Cuts. Lacerations. Tearing. Blunt force trauma. Bleeding. The woman could not speak above a whisper, but she still told her story, and she kept telling it to anyone who would listen until Rippy’s lawyers shut her up.
Faith asked, “Will?”
“He raped a woman. He paid his way out of it. He’ll do it again. He probably did it before. And none of that matters because he knows how to handle a basketball.”
“Wow, that’s a lot of information. Thank you.”
Will felt the pain in his jaw intensify. “The day after New Year’s Eve. Ten in the morning. The victim was found unconscious inside Marcus Rippy’s house by one of the maids. The maid called Rippy’s head of security, who called Rippy’s business manager, who called Rippy’s lawyers, who eventually called a private ambulance to take her to Piedmont Hospital. Two hours before the victim was reportedly found, around eight a.m., Rippy’s private jet left for Miami with him and his entire family on board. He claims the vacation was on the books all along, but the flight plan was filed half an hour before takeoff. Rippy said he had no idea the victim was in the house. Never saw her. Never talked to her. Didn’t know her name. They’d had a big New Year’s Eve party the night before. A couple of hundred people were in and out of the residence.”
Faith said, “There was a Facebook post of—”
“Instagram,” Will said, because he’d had the pleasure of trawling the internet for hours of party footage that people had filmed with their phones. “Someone at the party posted a gif of the victim slurring her words before she threw up into an ice bucket. Rippy’s people had the hospital do a tox screen. She had pot, amphetamines, and alcohol in her system.”
“You said she was unconscious when they brought her into the hospital. Did she give permission for Rippy’s people to see her drug screen?”
Will shook his head because it didn’t matter. Rippy’s team had paid off someone at the hospital lab and leaked the results of the blood test to the press.
“You gotta admit, he’s got a great name for it. Rapey/Rippy.” Faith twisted her lips to the side as she thought it out. “The house is huge, right?”
“Sixteen thousand square feet.” Will’s head called up the layout he’d studied for so many hours that it was still imprinted in his brain. “It’s shaped like a horseshoe with a swimming pool in the middle. The family lives in the main section, the top of the horseshoe. The two wings off the back have a bunch of guest suites, and there’s a nail salon, an indoor basketball court, massage room, gym, movie theater, playroom for his two kids. You name it, they have it.”
“So, logically, something bad could happen in one part of the house without someone in the other part knowing.”
“Without two hundred people knowing. Without the maids and the butlers and the valets and the caterers and the cooks and the bartenders and the assistants and the whoever else knowing.” Will had been given a two-hour tour of the Rippy estate by the family’s chief of security. Cameras were mounted at every possible angle around the exterior of the house. There were no blind spots. Motion sensors detected anything heavier than a leaf landing in the front yard. No one could go in or out of the estate without someone knowing about it.
Except for the night of the assault. There had been a bad storm. The power kept cutting in and out. The generators were state-of-the-art, but for some reason the external DVR that recorded footage from the security cameras was not jacked into the backup power grid.
Faith said, “Okay, I saw the news. Rippy’s people said she was a nutjob looking for a payday.”
“They offered her money. She told them no.”
“Could’ve been waiting for a higher number.” Faith drummed her fingers on the steering wheel. “Is it possible her wounds were self-inflicted?”
That had been the contention of Rippy’s lawyers. They’d even found an expert who was willing to testify that the giant finger marks around her neck and back and thighs were made by her own hand.
“She had this bruise here—” Will indicated his own back. “Like a fist print between her shoulder blades. A big fist. You could see the finger marks, same as the bruises on her neck. She had a severe contusion on her liver. The doctors put her on bed rest for two weeks.”
“There was a condom with Rippy’s semen—”
“Found in a hall bathroom. The wife says they had sex that night.”
“And he leaves the used condom in the hall bath, not the master?” Faith frowned. “Was the wife’s DNA on the outside of the condom?”
“The condom was on a tile floor that had been recently mopped with a cleaner that contained bleach. There was nothing we could use on the outside.”
“Any DNA found on the victim?”
“There were some unidentified strands, all female, probably picked up at her dorm.”
“Did the victim say who invited her to the party?”
“She came with a group of college friends. None of them can remember who got the initial invite. None of them knew Rippy personally. Or at least none of them claimed to. And all four of them immediately distanced themselves from the victim when I started knocking on doors.”
“And the victim positively ID’d Rippy?”
“She was standing in line for the bathroom. This was after she threw up in the ice bucket. She says she only had one drink, but it made her sick, like something wasn’t right. Rippy approached her. She recognized him immediately. He was nice, told her there was another bathroom down the hallway in the guest wing. She followed him. It was a long walk. She was feeling a little dizzy. He put his arm around her, kept her steady. He led her into the last guest suite at the end of the hall. She went to the toilet. She came out and he was sitting on the bed with his clothes off.”
“And then what?”
“And then she woke up in the hospital the next day. She had a bad concussion from being punched or hit in the head. She’d obviously been strangled repeatedly, lost consciousness a few times. The doctors think she won’t ever completely recover her memory of that night.”
“Hm.”
Will felt the full weight of her skepticism in the sound.
Faith asked, “The hall bath where the condom was found?”
“Six doors down from the guest suite, so they passed it on the way there, and he passed it on his way back to the party.” Will added, “There’s video evidence from phones that show Rippy at the party off and on all night, so he went back and forth to work his alibi. Plus, half his team backed him up. Jameel Gordon, Andre Dupree, Reuben Figaroa. The day after the assault, they all showed up at the APD, lawyers in tow, each of them telling the exact same story. By the time the GBI caught the case, every single one of them declined to be interviewed again.”
“Typical,” Faith noted. “Rippy said that he never even saw the victim at the party?”
“Correct.”
“The wife was pretty vocal, right?”
“She was a megaphone for his defense.” LaDonna Rippy had gone on every talk show and news program that would have her. “She backed up everything that her husband said, including that she never saw the victim at the party.”
“Hm.” Faith sounded even more skeptical.
Will added, “And people who saw the victim that night said she was drunk and falling all over every basketball player she could get her hands on. Which, if you look at the gif of her puking and combine that with the tox screen, makes sense. But then you look at the rape kit and you know that she was brutally raped, and the victim knows that Rippy was sitting on that bed, totally naked, when she came out of the bathroom.”
“Devil’s advocate?”
Will nodded, though he knew what was coming.
“I can see why it fell apart. It’s he said/she said, and Rippy gets the benefit of the doubt because that’s how the Constitution works. Innocent until blah-blah-blah. And let’s not forget that Rippy is filthy rich. If he lived in a trailer park, his court-appointed lawyer would’ve pled him down to five years for false imprisonment to keep him off the sex offender registry, end of story.”
Will didn’t respond because there was nothing else to say.
Faith gripped the steering wheel. “I hate rape cases. You don’t throw a murder case to a jury and they ask, ‘Well, was the guy really murdered or is he lying because he wants the attention? And what was he doing in that part of town? And why was he drinking? And what about all those murderers he dated before?’”
“She wasn’t sympathetic.” Will hated that this even mattered. “Her family’s a mess. Single mom with a drug habit. No idea who the dad is. She had some drug issues in high school, a history of self-cutting. She was coming off academic probation at her college. She dated around, spent a lot of time on Tinder and OKCupid, like everybody her age. Rippy’s people found out she had an abortion a few years ago. She basically wrote their trial strategy for them.”
“There’s not much daylight between being a good girl and a bad one, but once you cross that line—” Faith blew out a stream of air. “You can’t imagine the shit people said about me when I got pregnant with Jeremy. One day I was a junior high school honor student with her entire life ahead of her and the next day I was a teenage Mata Hari.”
“You were shot for being a spy?”
“You know what I mean. I was a pariah. Jeremy’s dad was sent to live with family up north. My brother still hasn’t forgiven me. My dad got forced out of his Lodge. He lost a ton of customers. None of my friends would speak to me. I had to drop out of school.”
“At least it was different when you had Emma.”
“Oh, yeah, a single thirty-five-year-old woman with a twenty-year-old son and a one-year-old daughter is constantly praised for her excellent life choices.” She changed the subject. “She had a boyfriend, right? The victim?”
“He broke up with her a week before the assault.”
“Oh, for godsakes.” Faith had worked enough rape investigations to know that a defense lawyer’s dream was an accuser with an ex-boyfriend she was trying to make jealous.
“He stepped up after the assault,” Will said, though he wasn’t a fan of the ex-boyfriend. “Stayed by her side. Made her feel safe. Or at least tried to.”
“Dale Harding’s name never came up during the investigation?”
He shook his head.
A news truck sped by, dipping into the oncoming traffic lane for twenty yards before taking an illegal turn.
Faith said, “Looks like news at noon has its lead story.”
“They don’t want news. They want gossip.” Up until Rippy’s case had been dismissed, Will couldn’t leave GBI headquarters without some well-coifed anchor trying to bait him into a career-ending sound bite. He got off light considering the death threats and online stalking Rippy’s fans lobbed at his accuser.
Faith said, “I guess this could be a coincidence. Harding being found dead at Rippy’s club?”
Will shot her a look. No cop believed in coincidence, especially a cop like Faith.
“Okay,” she relented, shuffling the steering wheel as she followed the news van’s illegal dip and dash. “At least we know why Amanda sent four texts.” Her phone chirped. “Five.” Faith grabbed the phone. Her thumb slid across the screen. She hooked a sharp turn. “Jeremy finally updated his Facebook page.”
Will took over the steering as she typed a message to her son, who was using the summer months away from college to drive across the country with three of his friends, seemingly for the sole purpose of worrying his mother.
Faith mumbled as she typed, bemoaning the stupidity of kids in particular and her son in specific. “Does this girl look eighteen to you?”
Will glanced at a photo of Jeremy standing very close to a scantily clad blonde. The grin on his face was heartbreakingly hopeful. Jeremy was a skinny, nerdy little kid studying physics at Georgia Tech. He was so out of the blonde’s league that he might as well have been a cantaloupe. “I would be more worried about the bong pipe on the floor.”
“Oh, fer fucksake.” Faith looked like she wanted to throw the phone out the window. “He’d better hope his grandmother doesn’t see this.”
Will watched as Faith forwarded the picture to her mother to make sure this very thing happened.
He pointed to the next intersection. “This is Chattahoochee.”
Faith was still cursing the photo as she took the turn. “As the mother of a son, I look at that picture and I think, ‘Don’t get her pregnant.’ Then I look at it as the mother of a daughter and I think, ‘Don’t get stoned with a guy you just met because his friends could gang-rape you and leave you dead in a hotel closet.’”
Will shook his head. Jeremy was a good kid with good friends. “He’s twenty years old. You have to start trusting him sometime.”
“No I don’t.” She dropped her phone back into the cup holder. “Not if he still wants food, clothes, a roof over his head, health insurance, an iPhone, video games, pocket money, gas money—”
Will tuned out the long list of all the things Faith was going to take away from her poor son. His mind instantly went to Marcus Rippy. The basketball player’s smug face as he sat back in the chair with his arms crossed and his mouth shut. His wife’s hateful glares every time Will asked a question. His conceited business manager and his slick lawyers, who were all as interchangeable as Bond villains.
Keisha Miscavage, Marcus Rippy’s accuser.
She was a tough young woman, defiant, even from her hospital bed. Her hoarse whispers were peppered with fucks and shits and her eyes stayed constantly squinted, as if she were interviewing Will instead of the other way around. “Don’t feel sorry for me,” she’d warned him. “Just do your fucking job.”
Will had to admit, if only to himself, that he had a soft spot for hostile women. It killed him that he’d failed Keisha so miserably. He couldn’t even watch basketball anymore, let alone play it. Every time his hand touched a ball he wanted to shove it down Marcus Rippy’s throat.
“Holy crap.” Faith coasted to a stop several yards behind a news van. “Half the police force is here.”
Will studied the parking lot outside the car window. Her estimate didn’t seem far off. The scene was vibrating with people. A semi truck hauling lights. The APD crime scene investigation bus. The GBI Department of Forensic Sciences Mobile Lab. APD cruisers and unmarked cop cars scattered around like pick-up sticks. Yellow crime scene tape roped off a smoldering, burned-out car with a halo of water steaming off the scorching asphalt. Techs swarmed the area, laying down numbered yellow markers by anything that could be evidence.
Faith said, “I bet I know who called in the body.”
Will guessed, “Crack addict. Raver. Runaway.” He took in the vault-like building in front of them. Marcus Rippy’s future nightclub. Construction had stopped six months ago when the rape charge had looked like it was going to stick. The poured concrete walls were rough and weathered, darkened along the bottom by several overlays of graffiti. Weeds had cracked up around the foundation. There were two giant windows, high up, tucked into opposite corners of the street-side of the building. The glass was tinted almost black.
Will didn’t envy the job of the techs who had to inventory every condom, needle, and crack pipe on-site. There was no telling how many fingerprints and shoeprints were inside. The broken glow necklaces and pacifiers indicated ravers had made good use of the space.
Faith asked, “What’s the story on the club?”
“The investors put construction on hold while they waited for Rippy’s problems to go away.”
“Do you know if they’re back in?”
Will muttered an expletive under his breath—not because of the question, but because his boss was standing in front of the building with her hands on her hips. Amanda looked at her watch, then looked at them, then looked at her watch again.
Faith added her own expletive as she got out of the car. Will blindly reached for the round door handle, which was roughly the circumference of an M&M. The door popped back on its hinges. Hot air rushed in. Atlanta was at the tail end of the hottest, most humid summer on record. Going outside was like walking straight into the mouth of a yawning dog.
Will unfolded himself from the car, trying to ignore the audience of cops standing several feet away. Their voices didn’t carry, but he was pretty sure they were waging bets on how many more clowns would come out of the tiny vehicle.
Fortunately, Amanda’s attention had been pulled away by one of the crime scene analysts. Charlie Reed was easily recognizable by his handlebar mustache and Popeye build. Will scanned the area, looking for other familiar faces.
“Mitchell, right?”
Will turned around to find himself looking at a remarkably handsome man. The guy had dark wavy hair and a cleft in his chin, and he looked at Faith with the eyes of an all-conquering frat boy.
“Hi.” Faith’s voice had a weird, high pitch. “Have we met?”
“Never had the pleasure.” The man ran his fingers through his boyish, floppy hair. “You look like your mom. I worked with her when I was in uniform. I’m Collier. This is my partner Ng.”
Ng gave an almost imperceptible tilt of his chin to convey his coolness. His hair was a buzz cut, military style. He was wearing dark, wraparound glasses. Like his partner, he wore jeans and a black apd police T-shirt—in contrast to Will, who looked like the maître d’ at an old Italian steakhouse.
“I’m Trent,” Will said, straightening his shoulders, because at least he had the height advantage. “What’ve we got here?”
“A clusterfuck.” Ng looked out at the building instead of looking up at Will. “I hear Rippy’s already on a plane to Miami.”
Faith asked, “Have you been inside?”
“Not upstairs.”
Faith waited for more, then tried again. “Can we talk to the unis who found the body?”
Ng feigned a strain on his memory. He asked his partner, “You remember their names, bro?”
Collier shook his head. “Drawing a blank.”
Faith was no longer enamored. “Hey, 21 Jump Street, should we leave so you two can finish jerking each other off?”
Ng laughed, but he didn’t provide any more information.
“For godsakes.” Faith said, “You know my mom, Collier. Our boss is her old partner. What do you think she’s gonna say when we have to ask her to catch us up to speed?”
Collier gave a weary sigh. He rubbed the back of his neck as he looked off into the distance. The sun picked out slivers of gray in his hair. There were deep lines at the corners of his eyes. He was probably in his mid-forties, which made him a few years older than Will, which for some reason made Will feel better.
“All right.” Collier finally relented, but not before doing the fingers-through-the-hair thing again. “Switchboard gets an anonymous tip there’s a dead body, this location. Twenty minutes later, a two-man uni rolls up. They sweep the building. Find the DB, male, upstairs inside one of the rooms. Stabbed in the neck. A real bloodbath. One of ’em recognizes Harding from choir practice—drunk, gambler, poon hound, typical old-school five-o. I’m sure your mom’s got some stories.”
Ng said, “We were working a domestic when we got the call. That was some violent shit. Chick’s gonna be in surgery for days. Full moon always brings out the crazy.”
Faith ignored his war story. “How’d Harding or whoever gain access into the building?”
“Looks like bolt cutters.” Collier shrugged. “The padlock was cut clean, which probably took some muscle, so we’re thinking a man did it.”
“You find the bolt cutters?”
“Nope.”
“What’s the story on the car?”
“It was throwing off heat like Chernobyl when we got here. We called in AFD to hose it down. They say an accelerant was used. Gas tank exploded.”
“No one called in a vehicle fire?”
“Yeah, it’s shocking,” Ng said. “You wouldn’t think all the junkies and whores squatting in these warehouses would pull a Kitty Genovese.”
Faith said, “Look who knows his urban legends.”
Will scanned the abandoned warehouses—one on either side of Rippy’s club. A construction sign advertised mixed-use housing coming soon, but the faded condition indicated that soon hadn’t come soon enough. The buildings were four stories each, at least a block deep. Red brick from the turn of the century before last. Gothic arches with stained glass that had been broken out long ago.
He turned around. There was a matching office building across the street, at least ten stories tall, maybe more if it had a basement. Yellow signs posted over the chained doors indicated that the building was scheduled for demolition. The three structures were massive relics of Atlanta’s industrial past. If Rippy’s investors had gone all in, now that the rape case had disappeared, the project could net them all millions, maybe billions, of dollars.
Faith asked, “Were you able to pull the VIN off the car?”
Collier supplied, “White, 2016 Kia Sorento, registered to one Vernon Dale Harding. AFD says it was probably burning for four or five hours.”
“So, someone killed Harding and torched his car, then someone else, or maybe the same guy, called it into 9-1-1 five hours later.”
Will stared at the nightclub. “Why here?”
Faith shook her head. “Why us?”
Ng didn’t understand that the question was rhetorical. He threw his hand out toward the building. “This was supposed to be some kind of nightclub. Dance floor below, VIP rooms circled around the top, like an atrium in a mall. I thought there might be a gang involved, slinging up a dope club like this in the middle of Shitown, so I called my girl, she did a record check, Rippy’s name came up and I was like, ‘Oh shit.’ So I kicked it up to my boss. He gives your ballbreaker a courtesy call and she’s out here ten minutes later flossing her teeth with our short hairs.”
They all looked at Amanda. Charlie Reed was gone, and a tall, willowy redhead had taken his place. She was pinning up her hair as she talked to Amanda.
Ng gave a low whistle. “Damn, son. Lookit that fine Girl Scout. Wonder if the paint matches the trim?”
Collier grinned. “I’ll let you know in the morning.”
Faith glanced down at Will’s clenched fists. “That’s enough, guys.”
Collier kept grinning. “We’re just having fun, officer.” He winked at her. “But you should know I got kicked out of Girl Scouts for eating some Brownies.”
Ng guffawed, and Faith rolled her eyes as she walked away.
“Red,” Will told the detectives. “Everybody calls her Red. She’s a crime scene tech, but she gets in the way a lot, so keep an eye on her.”
Collier asked, “She seeing anybody?”
Will shrugged. “Does it matter?”
“Not a bit.” Collier spoke with the extreme certainty of a man who had never been rejected by a woman. He gave Will a cocky salute. “Thanks for the four-one-one, bro.”
Will forced his fists to unclench as he walked toward Amanda. Faith was heading into the building, probably to get out of the heat. The red-haired woman was signing herself into the crime scene at the front gate. She saw Will and smiled, and he smiled back because her name wasn’t Red, it was Sara Linton, and she wasn’t a crime scene tech, she was the medical examiner, and it was none of Collier’s and Ng’s God damn business what matched where because three hours ago she had been underneath Will in bed whispering so many filthy things into his ear that he had momentarily lost the ability to swallow.
Amanda didn’t look up from her BlackBerry when Will approached. He stood in front of her, waiting, because that’s what she usually made him do. He was intimately familiar with the top of her head, the spiral at the crown that spun her salt-and-pepper hair into a helmet.
Finally, she said, “You’re late, Agent Trent.”
“Yes, ma’am. It won’t happen again.”
She narrowed her eyes, dubious of the apology. “That odor in the air is the smell of shit hitting the fan. I’ve already been on the phone with the mayor, the governor, and two district attorneys who refuse to come out here because they don’t want the news cameras capturing them anywhere near another case involving Marcus Rippy.” She looked down at her phone again. The BlackBerry was her mobile command post, sending and receiving updates from her vast network of contacts, only some of them official.
She said, “There are three more satellite trucks on their way here, one of them national. I’ve got over thirty e-mails from reporters asking for statements. Rippy’s lawyers have already called to say they’ll be handling all questions, and any indication that we’re unfairly targeting Rippy could lead to a harassment lawsuit. They won’t even meet with me until tomorrow morning. Too busy, they say.”
“Same as before.” Will had been granted exactly one sit-down with Marcus Rippy, during which time the man had remained almost completely silent. Faith was right. One of the more galling things about people with money was that they really knew their constitutional rights.
He asked Amanda, “Are we officially in charge or is APD?”
“Do you think I would be standing here if I wasn’t officially in charge?”
Will glanced back at Collier and Ng. “Does Captain Chin Cleft know that?”
“You think he’s cute?”
“Well, I wouldn’t say—”
Amanda was already walking toward the building. Will had to trot to catch up with her. She had the quick gait of a Shetland pony.
They both signed in with the uniformed officer in charge of access to the crime scene. Instead of going inside, Amanda made Will stand just out of reach of the shade so that the sun would turn his skull into a kiln.
She said, “I knew Harding’s father when I was a rookie. Senior was a beat cop who spent his money on whores and the dog track. Died of an aneurysm back in ’85. Left his son his gambling habit. Dale took a medical retirement that ran out two years ago. He cashed out his pension earlier this year.”
“Why was he on medical leave?”
“HIPAA,” she said, referring to the law that, among other things, barred cops from making doctors tell them intimate details about their patients. “I’m working some back channels to get the information, but this isn’t good, Will. Harding was a bad cop, but he’s a dead cop, and his body is lying inside a building owned by a man we very publicly could not put away for rape.”
“Do we know if Harding has any connection to Rippy?”
“If only I had a detective who could figure that out.” She turned on her heel and walked into the building. The electricity was still off. The interior was dank and cavernous, the dark, tinted windows giving the space a ghostly cast. They both slipped on shoe protectors. Suddenly, the generators roared to life. Xenon lights popped on, illuminating every square inch of the building. Will felt his retinas flinch in protest.
There was a cacophony of clicks as Maglites were turned off and stored. Will’s eyes adjusted to find exactly what he expected to find: trash, condoms and needles, an empty shopping cart, lawn chairs, soiled mattresses—for some reason, there were always soiled mattresses—and too many spent beer cans and broken liquor bottles to count. The walls were covered with multicolored graffiti that went up at least as high as a person’s arm could reach with a can of spray paint. Will recognized some gang tags—Suernos, Bloods, Crips—but for the most part there were bubbled names with hearts, peace flags, and a couple of gigantic, well-endowed unicorns with rainbow eyes. Typical raver art. The great thing about ecstasy was that it made you really happy until it stopped your heart from beating.
Ng’s description of the layout was fairly accurate. The building had an upstairs atrium that opened to the bottom floor like in a shopping mall. A temporary wooden railing ringed the balcony, but there were gaps where a less careful person might get into trouble. The main floor was huge, multitiered with concrete half-walls designating private seating areas and a large open space for dancing. What was probably meant to be the bar arced around the back of the building. Two grand, curved staircases reached to the second floor, which was at least forty feet up. The concrete stairs hugging the walls gave the impression of a cobra’s fangs about to bite down on the dance floor.
An older woman wearing a yellow hard hat approached Amanda. She had another hard hat in her hand, which she gave to Amanda, who in turn gave it to Will, who in turn set it on the floor.
The woman offered no preamble. “Found in the parking lot: an empty, clear plastic bag with a paper label insert. Said bag contained at one time a tan canvas tarp, missing from the scene. The tarp is Handy brand, three feet seven by five feet seven, widely available.” She paused her tired drone to take a breath. “Also found: a slightly used roll of black duct tape, outer plastic wrap not yet located. Weather report indicates a deluge, this vicinity, thirty-six hours previous. The paper label on the tarp bag and the edges of the tape do not show exposure to said weather event.”
Amanda said, “Well, I suppose we have a window at least, sometime over the weekend.”
“Canvas tarp,” Will repeated. “That’s what painters use.”
“Correct,” the woman said. “No paint or painter’s tools have been located inside or outside the building.” She continued, “The stairs: both sets are part of the scene and still being processed. Found so far: items from a woman’s purse, what looks like tissue. The guts kind, not Kleenex.” She pointed to a scissor lift. “You’ll need to use that to go up. We’ve put out a call for an operator. He’s twenty-five minutes out.”
“Are you shitting me?” Collier had sneaked up on them. “We can’t use the stairs?” He was warily eyeing the scissor lift, which was a hydraulic machine that lifted a platform straight into the air, kind of like a very shaky, open-air elevator with nothing but a thin safety rail between you and certain death.
Amanda asked Will, “Do you know how to operate that thing?”
“I can figure it out.” The machine was already plugged in. Will found the key hidden inside the auxiliary battery box. He used the tip of the key to press the tiny reset button on the bottom. The scissor lift stuttered a quick up-and-down, and they were in business.
Will grabbed the safety rail and climbed up the two steps by the motor. Amanda reached for his hand so she could follow. Her movements looked effortless, mostly because Will did all the lifting. She was light, less than the weight of a boxing heavy bag.
They both turned around and waited for Collier. He glanced at the fang-like stairs.
Amanda tapped her watch. “You’ve got two seconds, Detective Collier.”
Collier took a deep breath. He grabbed the yellow hard hat off the floor. He clamped it down on his head and scampered up the platform like a frightened baby monkey.
Will turned the key to start the motor. In truth, he had worked construction jobs during his college years and he could operate just about any machine on a work site. Still, he stuttered the platform a bit just for the pleasure of watching Collier white-knuckle the safety rail.
The motor made a grinding noise as they started their ascent. Sara was on the stairs helping one of the techs collect evidence. She was wearing khakis and a fitted navy blue GBI T-shirt that flattered her in more ways than two. Her hair was still pulled back, but some of the strands had come loose. She’d put on her glasses. He liked the way she looked in her glasses.
Will had known Sara Linton for eighteen months, which was roughly seventeen months and twenty-six days longer than any other period of sustained happiness in his life. He practically lived at her apartment. Their dogs got along. He liked her sister. He understood her mother. He was scared of her father. She had officially joined the GBI two weeks ago. This was their first case together. He was embarrassed by how excited he was to see her.
Which is why Will made himself look away, because mooning over your girlfriend at a grisly crime scene was probably how serial killers got their start.
Or maybe he would just be a regular murderer, because Collier had decided to take his mind off his vertigo by staring at Sara’s ass while she bent over to help the tech.
Will shifted his weight again. The platform shook. Collier made a noise halfway between a gag and a yelp.
Amanda gave Will one of her rare smiles. “My first rollout was for a guy who fell off the top of a scaffolding. This was back before Hazmat and all those silly safety regulations. There wasn’t much for the coroner. We hosed his brains off the sidewalk and into the gutter.”
Collier leaned over so he could use his arm to wipe the sweat from his face and still hold on to the railing.
The lift shook of its own accord as Will stopped the platform a few inches below the concrete balcony. The wooden railing had been pulled away. Across from the opening, half-inch slabs of moldy four-by-sixteen drywall were stacked chest-high. The thick layer of dust on the buckets of joint compound indicated they had been there since construction stopped six months ago. Graffiti dripped lazily across everything—the floor, the walls, the construction materials—with two more ubiquitous rainbow-eyed unicorns standing sentry at the top of each stairway.
Heavy wooden doors lined what Will assumed were the VIP rooms. The custom-carved mahogany had been stained a rich espresso, probably at the factory, but the graffiti artists had done their best to black out the finish. Yellow numbered crime scene markers dotted the entire span of the balcony, from one set of stairs to the other. Several Tyvek-clad techs were photographing and collecting evidence. Some of the VIP rooms were being sprayed down with luminol, a chemical that made body fluids glow an otherwordly blue when exposed to a black light.
Will didn’t want to think about all the body fluids they’d find.
Faith stood at the far end of the balcony, her head back as she drank from a bottle of water. She was wearing a white Tyvek suit. The zip was undone. The arms were tied around her waist. She had obviously passed herself off as a tech so she could get up to the crime scene without having to wait for the scissor lift. Sealed evidence bags were piled in front of her, alongside neatly stacked boxes of gloves, evidence bags, and protective clothing. The murder room was a few feet away, the wooden door opened out. Light strobed as the position and state of the body were documented by the crime scene photographer. They wouldn’t be allowed inside until every inch was recorded.
Amanda pulled out her phone and read her new messages as she walked toward the kill room. “CNN is here. I’m going to have to update the governor and the mayor. Will, you’ll take point on this while I’m hand-holding. Collier, I need you to see if Harding has any family. My recollection is that there’s an aunt on the father’s side.”
“Yes, ma’am.” Collier’s shoulder rubbed the wall as he followed at a distance.
“Take off that hard hat. You look like one of the Village People.” She checked her phone again. Obviously, a new piece of information had come in. “Harding has four ex-wives. Two are still on the force, both in records. Track them down and find out if there’s a bookie or pimp whose name kept coming up.”
Collier stumbled to keep up as he left the hat on the floor. “You think his exes were still talking to him?”
“Am I really getting that question from you?” Her words obviously hit their mark because Collier responded with a quick nod. She dropped her phone back into her pocket. “Faith, run it down for me.”
“Doorknob to the neck.” Faith pointed to the side of her own neck. “It matches the other doorknobs up here, so we can assume the killer didn’t bring it for the purpose of murder. They found a G43 by the car. The action is jammed, but at least one round was fired. Charlie is running the serial number through the system right now.”
“That’s the new Glock,” Collier said. “What’s it look like?”
“Lightweight, slim profile. The grip is rough, but it’s pretty impressive for concealed carry.”
Collier asked another question about the gun, which was manufactured specifically for government use. Will tuned him out. The gun wasn’t going to solve this case.
He stepped around some marked, bloody shoe prints and bent down to get a closer look at the lockset in the door. The backplate was rectangular, about three by six inches, and screwed to the door. It was cast, plated in polished brass with a heavily detailed, raised design featuring a cursive R at the center. Rippy’s logo. Will had seen it all over the man’s house. He squinted at the latch bolt, the long metal cylinder that kept the door closed or, when turned, allowed it to open. He saw scrapes around the hollow square where the doorknob spindle was supposed to go. And then he looked down at the floor and saw the long screwdriver with the numbered yellow card beside it.
Someone had been shut inside the room, and someone else had used the screwdriver to gain entry.
Will stood back up to look at the kill scene. The photographer stepped across the body, trying not to slip in the blood.
There was a lot of blood.
Sprayed on the ceiling, spattered and splattered on walls, glistening against the nearly black crisscross of competing graffiti. The floor was flooded, like someone had opened the spigot on Harding’s carotid and let it run dry. Light danced off the dark, congealing liquid. Will could taste metal in his mouth as oxygen hit iron. Underneath it all, he caught a whiff of piss that for some reason made him feel sorrier for the guy than the doorknob sticking Frankenstein-like out of the meaty hambone of his neck.
In policing, there wasn’t a lot of dignity in death.
Dale Harding’s body was in the center of the room, which was about fifteen feet square with a vaulted ceiling. He was flat on his back, a big, bald guy wearing a cheap, shiny suit that wouldn’t close around his ample gut, more like a cop of his father’s generation than his own. His shirt had come untucked on one side. His red-and-blue-striped tie was split like the legs of a hurdler. The waistband of his pants was rolled over. His stainless steel TAG Heuer had turned into a tourniquet on his wrist because his body was swelling with the various juices of decay. A gold diamond ring cut into his pinky finger. Black dress socks stretched around his waxy, yellow ankles. His mouth was open. His eyes were closed. He obviously had some kind of eczema. The dry skin around his mouth and nose looked like it was speckled with sugar.
Weirdly, there was only a slash of blood on the front of his body, like a painter had flicked a brush at him. There were a few drops on his face, but nothing else, especially where you’d expect it, around the too-tight collar of his shirt.
“These were found on the stairs.”
Will turned back around.
Faith was rolling the evidence bag in her hands so that she could read the labels on the contents. “Bare Minerals. Mac. Light browns in the eye shadows. Espresso brown mascara. Chocolate eyeliner. The foundation and powder are a light medium.”
Amanda said, “So, probably a white woman.”
“There’s also a tin of lip balm. La Mer.”
“Rich white woman,” Amanda amended. Will knew the brand, but only because Sara wore it. He’d accidentally seen the receipt and nearly had a heart attack. The balm cost more per ounce than a brick of heroin.
Amanda said, “So, we can assume a woman was here with Harding.”
“And now she’s not,” Faith said. “Doorknob to the neck sounds like something a woman would do.”
Amanda asked, “Where’s the purse?”
“Inside the room. It looks torn, like it got caught on something.”
“And only the makeup fell out?”
Faith picked up the other evidence bags and listed off the contents. “One car key, Chevy, model unknown, no key chain. A hairbrush with long brown hair in the bristles—they’ll get that to the lab ASAP. Tin of Altoids, spearmint. Various coins with purse fuzz. Pack of Puffs tissue. Plastic contact lens case. A tube of ChapStick, the poor woman’s La Mer.”
“No wallet?”
Faith shook her head. “The photographer says he didn’t see one in the purse, either, but we’ll look when he’s finished.”
“So, we have a dead cop and a missing woman.” Amanda read Will’s expression. “She hasn’t left the house. I talked to her an hour ago and checked in with the sheriff’s deputy who’s parked outside.”
Keisha Miscavage, Marcus Rippy’s accuser. Her name hadn’t been released to the press, but nobody stayed anonymous with the internet. Keisha had been forced into hiding three months ago, and she still had twenty-four-hour police protection because of credible death threats from several of Rippy’s fans.
Collier said, “What about all these gang tags? I’m counting two up here, at least four downstairs. We should get the gang task force on this, round up some bangers.”
Faith asked, “Should we round up all the unicorns, too?”
Amanda shook her head. “This is about the woman. Let’s assume that she was in this room. Let’s also assume she had something to do with the disposition of the victim, if we can call Harding the victim.” She looked down at the contents from the purse. “This is a white, fairly wealthy woman meeting a dirty cop in a bad part of town in the middle of the night. Why? What was she doing here?”
Collier said, “Paying for it’s easier than marrying it. Maybe she was an escort, only he didn’t wanna or couldn’t pay and she got mad?”
Faith countered, “Strange place to meet up for a blow job.”
“That’s a small tarp,” Will said, because Amanda didn’t spend her weekends strolling the tarp section at her local hardware store. “Standard would be a five by seven, six by twelve, but the package outside was for a three feet seven by five feet seven, which is forty-three inches by sixty-seven. Harding’s at least a forty-inch waist, and around six feet tall.”
Amanda stared at him. “I need that in English.”
“If the killer brought the tarp to the scene in order to dispose of a body, then the tarp he purchased was for a much smaller person.”
“A woman-sized tarp,” Faith said. “Great.”
Amanda was nodding. “Harding met the woman here to kill her, but she managed to get the upper hand.”
“She’s injured.” Sara came up the stairs. Her glasses were hooked on her shirt collar. She used the back of her arm to wipe the sweat off her forehead. “There are bloody, bare footprints going up the left set of stairs. Likely a woman’s, probably size seven or eight, with a heavy strike that indicates she was running.” She pointed back at the stairs. “Second tread down, there’s an impact point that indicates she fell and hit her head, likely at the crown. We found some long, brown hair in the spatter, similar to what was found in the hairbrush.” She pointed to the other set of stairs. “On the right, we’ve got more footprints, walking, and passive spatter leaving a trail toward the emergency side exit, then it disappears on the metal stairs. Passive spatter indicates a weeping wound.”
“Ran up and walked down?” Amanda guessed.
“It’s possible.” Sara shrugged. “There have been hundreds of people in and out of this building. Someone could have made the footprints last week and someone else could’ve left the drops of blood last night. We’ll need to sequence DNA on every sample before we can definitively say what belongs to whom.”
Amanda glowered. DNA could take weeks. She preferred her science more instantaneous.
“Finished.” The photographer started peeling off his Tyvek suit. His clothes were soaking wet. His hair looked painted onto his head. He told Amanda, “You can have the room. I’ll get the photos processed and uploaded as soon as I get back.”
She nodded. “Thank you.”
Sara pulled a fresh pair of gloves from her back pocket. “These shoe prints here—” She pointed to the floor, which looked like it belonged in an Arthur Murray studio. “They’re from the first responders. Two sets. One went into the room, probably to see the face. The treads for both are nearly identical. Haix Black Eagles. Police-issue.”
Collier bristled. “They said in their statements that they didn’t enter the room.”
“You might want to go back at them.” Sara slipped on a fresh pair of shoe protectors as she explained, “There’s a lot of blood. They recognized the victim. He’s a fellow officer. That’s a lot to—”
“Hold on, Red.” Collier held up his hand like a traffic cop. “Don’t you think you should wait for the ME before you go traipsing in there?”
Sara gave him a look that had once presaged the two most miserable hours of Will’s life. “I’m the medical examiner, and I would prefer that you call me Sara or Dr. Linton.”
Faith barked a laugh that echoed through the building.
Sara braced her hand against the wall as she walked into the room. Ripples spread through the pool of blood. She picked up the purse in the corner. The strap was broken. There was a long tear down the side. The bag was black textured leather with heavy brass zips and buckles and a padlock at the clasp, the kind of thing that could be very expensive or very cheap.
“I don’t see a wallet.” Sara held up a gold tube of lipstick. “Sisley, rose cashmere. I’ve got the same at home.” Her eyebrows furrowed. “The gold is scratched off on the side, just like mine. Must be a manufacturing defect.” Sara dropped the lipstick back into the purse. She tested the weight. “This doesn’t feel like Dolce & Gabbana.”
“No.” Amanda peered inside the bag. “It’s counterfeit. See the stitching?”
“The ampersand is in the wrong font, too.” Faith spread plastic on the ground so they could do a more careful inventory. “Why buy a fake D&G when you can afford Sisley and La Mer?”
Amanda said, “Twenty-five-hundred-dollar purse versus fifty-dollar lipstick?”
Faith said, “You can palm the lipstick, but not the purse.”
“Maybe a tester. The scratch could be from peeling off the label.”
Will tried to give Collier a conspiratorial “us manly men have no idea what they’re talking about” look, but Collier was already giving him an “I want to shoot you in the face” look.
Sara went back into the room. This was her first opportunity to really examine the murder scene. Will had caught glimpses of this side of her before, but never in an official capacity. She took her time exploring the room, silently studying the blood patterns, the spray on the ceiling. The graffiti did not make her job easy. The walls were painted black in places from oversprayed logos and tags. She got close to everything, putting on her glasses so she could differentiate between the spray paint and the blood evidence. She walked around the perimeter of the room twice before beginning her examination of the body.
She couldn’t kneel in the blood, so she squatted down at Harding’s thick waist. She searched his front pants pockets, handing Faith a melted Three Musketeers, an opened pack of Skittles, a wad of cash strapped by a green rubber band, and some loose change. Next, she checked Harding’s suit jacket. There was a folded sheet of paper inside the breast pocket. Sara unfolded the page. “Racing form. Online betting.”
“Dogs?” Amanda guessed.
“Horses.” Sara handed the form to Faith, who set it on the plastic alongside the other items.
“No cell phones,” Faith noted. “Not on Harding. Not in the purse. Not in the building.”
Sara patted down the body, checking to see if she’d missed anything obvious in his clothes. She pushed open Harding’s eyelids. She used both hands to force open his jaw so she could look inside the mouth. She unbuttoned his shirt and pants. She studied every inch of his bloated abdomen. She pulled back the unbuttoned cuffs of his shirtsleeves and looked at his forearms. She lifted his pant legs and pushed down his socks.
Finally, she said, “Livor mortis indicates the body hasn’t been moved, so he died here, in this position, on his back. I’ll need to get ambient and liver temp, but he’s in full rigor, which means he’s been dead for more than four but less than eight hours.”
“So we’re talking a timeline of Sunday night into Monday morning,” Faith said. “The fire department estimates the car was set on fire four to five hours ago, which brings us to three a.m., today. The 9-1-1 came in at five a.m.”
“Sorry, but can I ask a question about that?” Collier was obviously still licking his wounds, but he just as obviously wanted to prove his usefulness. “He’s got mold around his mouth and nose. Wouldn’t that take a lot longer than five hours to grow?”
“It would, but it’s not mold.” Sara asked, “Can you help me roll the body onto the side? I don’t want him falling forward.”
Collier pulled two shoe protectors out of the box. He gave Sara a lopsided grin as he slid the booties over the old protectors he’d put on when he entered the building. “I’m Holden, by the way. Like in the book. My parents were hoping for a disaffected loner.”
Sara smiled at the stupid joke, and Will wanted to kill himself.
Collier kept grinning, taking the gloves Sara offered, making a show of stretching out the fingers with his child-sized hands. “How do you want to do this?”
“On my three.” Sara counted down. Collier grunted as he lifted Harding’s shoulders and tried to roll him onto his side. The body was stiff and tilted like a hinge. The weight wouldn’t transfer without sending Harding facedown into a pool of blood, so Collier had to brace his elbows against his knees to keep the body raised.
Sara peeled up Harding’s jacket and shirt so she could examine his back. Will gathered she was looking for punctures. She pressed her gloved fingers into the skin, testing for open wounds and finding nothing. The dark blood on the floor had made Harding look like he’d been dipped into a pan of motor oil.
She asked Collier, “You okay for another minute?”
“Sure.” The word got mangled in his throat. Will could see the veins in his neck popping out. Harding was at least two-fifty, maybe more. Collier’s arms were shaking from the effort of keeping him tilted up.
Sara changed into a fresh pair of gloves. She reached into Harding’s back pocket and pulled out a thick, nylon wallet. The Velcro made a ripping sound when she opened it. She called out her findings. “Ticket stubs, receipts for fast-food places, betting slips, two different photographs of a naked blonde courtesy of BackDoorMan.com. Some business cards.” She looked at Collier. “You can put him down, but be careful.”
Collier groaned as he settled the body back to the floor.
“You’re going to want to see this.” Sara passed one of the business cards to Faith. Will recognized the full-color logo. He had seen it countless times on documents turned over by Marcus Rippy’s sports management team.
“Motherfuck,” Faith muttered. “Kip Kilpatrick. He’s Rippy’s manager, right? I saw him on TV.”
Will looked at Amanda. She had her eyes closed like she wished she could wipe the man’s name from her mind. Will felt the same way. Kip Kilpatrick was Marcus Rippy’s manager, head lawyer, best friend, and all-around fixer. There was no legal proof, but Will was certain Kilpatrick had used his thugs to pay off two witnesses from the New Year’s Eve party and intimidated a third into silence.
Sara said, “I hate to make things worse, but the doorknob missed Harding’s jugulars and carotids. And his esophagus. And pretty much anything that matters. There’s no blood in his mouth or nose. There was very little bleeding from the spindle, just a trickle that’s dried down the side of his neck. He doesn’t have any other significant injuries. This blood, or at least this volume of blood, isn’t from him.”
“What?” Amanda sounded more exasperated than shocked. “Are you certain?”
“Positive. The back of his clothes wicked up blood from the floor, and the swipe of blood on his shirt is clearly from someone else. His major arteries are intact. There are no significant wounds in his head, torso, arms, or legs. The blood you see in this room is not from Dale Harding.”
Will felt surprised, and then he felt stupid for being surprised. Sara had read the scene better than he had.
“So, whose blood is it?” Faith asked. “Ms. La Mer?”
“It seems likely.” Sara stood up carefully so she wouldn’t lose her balance.
Amanda tried to make sense of the information. “Our missing woman hit her head on the stairs, then she left her bloody footprints as she ran across the balcony, and then what?”
“There was a violent struggle between two people in this room. There are signs of high-velocity spatter on the ceiling, which suggests that an artery was punctured, and as I said, it wasn’t Harding’s.” Sara walked over to the far corner. “We’re going to need some alternate light sources because the graffiti is so dark, but can you see this swipe along the wall? That’s from someone’s hand, and the hand was covered in blood. The shape and span are small, more like a woman’s.”
Will had noticed the smeared line of blood before, but not that it ended with a visible set of fingers. They reminded him of the finger-shaped bruises on Keisha Miscavage’s neck.
Amanda told Sara, “There were no unsolved shootings last night. Are we talking stabbing, then?”
Sara shrugged. “Maybe.”
“Maybe,” Amanda repeated. “Wonderful. I’ll tell the hospitals to maybe look out for an unexplained stabbing with a serious head injury.”
“I can do that.” Collier started typing into his phone. “I got a buddy works the precinct at Grady Hospital. He can check with the ER pronto.”
“We’ll need Atlanta Medical and Piedmont, too.”
Collier nodded as he typed.
Faith said, “Sara, back up a minute for me. The doorknob didn’t kill Harding, but he’s obviously dead. So, what happened?”
“His bad choices happened. He’s morbidly obese. He’s unusually bloated. His eyes show signs of conjunctival erythema. I’m guessing he has an enlarged heart, hypertension. There are needle marks on his abdomen and thighs that indicate he’s an insulin-dependent diabetic. His diet was fast food and Skittles. Whether it was from depression or self-harm or for some other reason, he wasn’t managing his condition.”
Collier looked skeptical. “So Harding conveniently slipped into a diabetic coma during the middle of a death match?”
“It’s more complicated than that.” Sara indicated the area around her own mouth. “Harding’s face. You thought it was mold, but mold usually grows in a colony or clump. Think about bread when it goes bad. My first guess was seborrheic dermatitis, but now I’m fairly certain it’s uremic frost.”
Will said, “I thought I smelled urine.”
“Good catch.” Sara handed Collier a bag for his gloves and shoe protectors. “Urea is one of the toxins that’s supposed to be filtered out through the kidneys. If the kidneys don’t work for some reason—diabetes and hypertension are good reasons—then the body tries to excrete the urea through sweat. The sweat evaporates, the urea crystallizes, and that leads to uremic frost.”
Collier nodded like he understood. “How long does that take?”
“Not long. He’s been living with chronic end-stage renal disease. He was getting treatment at some point. He has a graft for vascular access in his arm. Uremic frost is very rare, but it tells us that for whatever reason, he stopped getting dialysis, probably within the last week to ten days.”
“Jesus,” Faith said. “So is this a murder or not?”
Amanda said, “It seems they both tried to kill each other and both likely succeeded.” She told Sara, “Let’s focus on the missing woman. You said there was a violent struggle in this room that Harding obviously lost, but not before he managed to do quite a bit of damage to his opponent, as evidenced by the blood. Given her wounds, could the woman walk out of here and drive herself away?” She amended, “No maybes or possiblies. You’re not speaking to the court, Dr. Linton.”
Sara still hedged. “Let’s start with the impact on the stairs. If it’s from the missing woman’s head, then she took a pretty hard blow. Her skull was probably fractured. At the very least, she’s concussed.” Sara looked back over the kill room. “The volume of blood loss is the real danger. I’d estimate this is just over two liters, maybe a thirty- to thirty-five percent loss. That’s a borderline Class III hemorrhage. In addition to stopping the bleed, she’d need fluids, probably a transfusion.”
“She could use the tarp,” Will said. “To stop the bleeding. The tarp is missing. There was a roll of duct tape found in the parking lot.”
“Possible,” Sara agreed. “But let’s talk about the nature of the injury. If the blood came from the chest or neck, she would be dead. It can’t be from the belly, because the blood would stay in the belly. So, that leaves the limbs. A good gash in the groin could do this. She would likely be able to walk, but not without difficulty. Same with the medial malleolus, the inside of the ankle. She could still drag or crawl her way out. There’s also this—” Sara held up her arms to protect her face, palms out. “A horizontal cut to the radial or ulnar arteries, then the arms flail and blood sprays around the room like a garden hose, which is basically what the artery would be at that point.” She looked back at Harding. “I’d expect him to have more blood on him if that was the case.”
Amanda said, “Thank you, doctor, for that litany of multiple choices. How much time do we have to find this woman?”
Sara took the dig in stride. “None of those injuries are the type that can go untreated, even if she manages to stop the bleeding. Given the four-to-five-hour window on time of death and the volume of blood loss, I’d say without medical intervention, she might have two to three more hours before her organs start shutting down.”
“You work the dead, we’ll find the living.” Amanda turned to Will and Faith. “We’ve got a clock ticking. Our number one goal is to locate this woman, get her medical help, then find out what the hell she was doing here in the first place.”
Collier asked, “What about BackDoorMan.com? Does that bring in Rippy?”
“That’ll be Harding’s kink,” Will said. “Rippy has a definite type.”
Faith supplied, “Dark hair, smart mouth, killer body.”
Collier said, “His wife is a blonde.”
Faith rolled her eyes. “I’m a blonde. She’s a bottle.”
“You can discuss hair color after we find the woman.” Amanda told Collier, “Get that partner of yours to run missing persons reports submitted within the last forty-eight hours. Women, young, Rippy’s type.” Collier nodded, but she wasn’t finished. “I need at least ten uniforms to check both warehouses and the office building. Call in a structural engineer on the building; it looks iffy. I want feet, not just eyeballs, on every single floor, every nook and cranny, no stone unturned. Our victim-slash-murderer could be bleeding out or hiding right under our noses. None of us wants to read that headline in the paper tomorrow morning.”
She turned to Faith. “Go to Harding’s place of residence. I’ll have the warrant signed by the time you get there. Harding called himself a private investigator. It makes sense that he was investigating a woman, possibly for Rippy. She could be another victim or she could’ve been blackmailing him for money, or both. Harding will have a file, photographs, notes, hopefully a home address for the girl.”
She pointed to Will. “Go with her. Harding can’t be living in luxury. There will be liquor stores, check cashers, strip joints, in his neighborhood. They’ll probably sell burner phones. Cross the IMEIs with any security footage to see if we can pin a phone number to Harding, then cross-reference the numbers against any that are linked to Kip Kilpatrick or Marcus Rippy.”
There was a chorus of “yes, ma’am’s” all around.
Will heard metal scraping concrete. The scissor lift had brought Charlie Reed to the second floor. He had a grim look on his face as he approached them.
Amanda said, “Spit it out, Charlie. We’re already against the clock.”
Charlie fidgeted with his cell phone. “I got back the info on the Glock 43.”
“And?”
Charlie kept his gaze glued to Amanda. “Maybe we should—”
“I said spit it out.”
He took a deep breath. “It’s registered to Angie Polaski.”
Will felt a sudden tightness in his chest. He tasted acid on his tongue.
Dark hair. Smart mouth. Killer body.
There was a burning sensation on the side of his face. People staring at him. Waiting for his reaction. A bead of sweat rolled into his eye. He looked up at the ceiling because he didn’t trust himself to look at anything else.
It was Collier who finally broke the silence with a question. “What am I missing here?” No one answered, so he asked, “Who’s Angie Polaski?”
Sara had to clear her throat before she could speak. “Angie Polaski is Will’s wife.”