The front doors to the office building had been chained shut, but the junkies had pulled the boards off a window. The door to the basement and the doors to the elevator shafts were a different beast. The metal had been welded to the jamb. This hadn’t put a damper on the party. The lobby was riddled with broken glass and pieces of steel from fractured desks and chairs. The building was old enough to be built from wood and not concrete. It was a wonder the thing hadn’t burned down. Fires had been started on the asbestos tile floors and the smoke had blackened the asbestos tiled ceilings. Urine stained the walls. Everything of any value had been broken or carted off long ago. Even the copper wires had been stripped out of the walls.
The structure was ten stories, almost perfectly square. Will gathered that each of the floors was divided into twenty offices, ten on each side, with a long, open cubicle area down the center and two bathrooms at the back. The layout was less like a maze and more like an Escher drawing. Some of the rooms had makeshift stairs built from stacked crates and desks that led to rotted holes in the ceilings. These wobbly stairs led to locked doors or smaller rooms on different floors that needed to be searched after he finished the one below. Will felt like a pinball banging from one side of the building to the other, up some creaky, stacked crates, down some shifting, stacked desks, prying open cabinets and lifting downed bookcases and kicking over piles of paperwork that had been left to rot for decades.
Angie.
He had to find Angie.
Amanda had wasted almost an hour of Will’s life, making him wait outside the governor’s office while she briefed the man on what little they had so far in the Dale Harding murder investigation. Will had spent the time convincing himself that she was right. He couldn’t look for Angie. He couldn’t be the one to find her. The press would latch onto the story and Will wouldn’t just see the end of his career, he would probably see the inside of a prison cell. He could ruin Amanda’s life in the process. Faith’s. Sara’s. The damage would be irreparable.
Unless he found Angie alive. Unless she was able to tell the story of what had really happened inside Rippy’s club.
That was when Will had walked outside the state capitol and hailed a cab.
Forty minutes had passed since then. If Sara was right, if Angie only had a few more hours, then he might be too late.
But he couldn’t stop looking.
Will pushed open the last door to the last office on the third floor. There were no boards on the windows. Sunlight drenched the small room. Will pushed a desk away from the wall. A rat darted out. Will jumped back. His foot went through a rotted floorboard. He felt the skin along the back of his calf rip open like a zipper. He quickly wrenched his leg out of the hole, praying a stray needle or piece of broken glass hadn’t infected him. His pants were torn. Blood streamed into his shoe. Nothing he could do about either right now.
A set of stairs was at the end of the hall. The concrete treads ran up the structure like a spine, broken windows on every other landing shooting blinding light into his eyes. Will grabbed the handrail and swung himself up to the next flight. His knee almost buckled on the landing. His leg might be hurt worse than he’d originally thought. He could feel blood pooling into the heel of his shoe. His sock made a squishing noise as he climbed to the next floor.
“Hey.” Collier was waiting for him. The yellow hard hat was back on his head. He was leaning against the doorjamb. His arms were crossed over his chest. “End of the line, buddy. You gotta get outta here.”
Will said, “Move.”
“Your boss lady shit a brick when I told her you were here. I literally watched it pinch out between her legs.” Collier grinned. “Guess she’ll pinch out another one when she finds out I’m in here, too.”
Collier didn’t move, so Will shoved him aside.
“Come on, bro. This place ain’t safe.” Collier had to jog to keep up with Will’s longer stride. “I’m in charge of the search teams. If you fall through the floor and break your neck, that’s on my record.”
“I already fell through the floor.” Will strode up the hallway. He entered the first office. Dingy carpet. Broken chairs. Rusted metal desk.
Collier followed him, standing in the doorway, watching Will search the room. “What’s your deal, bro?”
Will saw the edge of a mattress. Newspapers covered the surface. He could make out a shape underneath. He used his foot to kick away the papers, breath caught in his chest until he saw that the shape was a blanket, not Angie.
Collier said, “This is some crazy shit, man.”
Will turned around. Collier was still blocking the doorway.
Will asked, “Where’s your partner?”
“Ng’s ball-deep in missing persons reports, plus he’s waiting for our domestic from last night to get out of surgery. He won’t see sunshine for days.”
“Why don’t you go help him?”
“’Cause I’m helping you.”
“No, you’re not.” Will towered over him. “Move, or I’ll move you.”
“Is this about before with your girlfriend? Mistress? Whatever?” Collier smirked. “Lookit, dude, you should’a told me you were seeing her. Handle it like a man.”
“You’re right.” Will reared back his fist and punched him in the side of the head—not just for Sara, but for being an asshole and being in the way.
Collier’s hands went up a second too late. The blow was harder than Will intended, or maybe Collier was just one of those guys who couldn’t take a punch. His eyes rolled back in his head. His mouth fished open. He dropped like a sack of shit thrown from wherever it is you throw sacks of shit from, knocked out cold before he hit the floor.
Will experienced five seconds of sheer bliss before he came back to his senses. He looked down at his hand, startled by his own sudden act of violence. He flexed his fingers. The skin had broken over two of his knuckles. Trickles of blood slid down his wrist. For a moment, he found himself wondering if the hand had acted of its own accord, some kind of possession he couldn’t control. This wasn’t him. He didn’t just haul off and punch people, even people like Collier, who deserved it.
This was Angie’s real power over Will: she brought out the very worst in him.
Will untucked his shirt. He wiped the blood off his hand. He tucked the shirt back in. He leaned down. He grabbed Collier by the shoulders and propped him up in the doorway. Then he walked across the hall and continued searching for Angie.
Another office. Another desk. Another overturned bookshelf. A shopping cart with an old IBM Selectric. He turned around. There was a metal cabinet by the door. Every other office seemed to have one. Six feet tall. Three feet wide. Eighteen inches deep. Unlike the others, the doors were closed.
Will wiped the sweat off his palms. He wrapped his fingers around the handle. He tried to turn the latch. Rust kept it from moving. He put his shoulder into it, practically lifting the cabinet off the floor. There was a loud pop. The door squealed open.
Empty.
She might hide in a cabinet. Angie liked dark places. Places where she could see you but you couldn’t see her. The basement at the Children’s Home was her favorite retreat. Someone had dragged a futon downstairs and laid it on the cold brick floor. Kids would smoke down there. Do other things. Mrs. Flannigan, the lady who ran the home, couldn’t handle the stairs. Her knees were old. She carried a lot of weight. She had no idea what was going on down there. Or maybe she did. Maybe she understood that physical comforts were all they had to offer each other.
Will took out his handkerchief. He wiped the back of his neck.
He would never forget being down in the basement with Angie. His first time. He wasn’t shaking so much as vibrating with excitement and fear and dread that he would do it wrong or too soon or backward and she would laugh at him and he would have to kill himself.
Angie was three years older than Will. She’d done a lot of things with a lot of boys, some other things with a lot of men, not always her choice, but the fact was that she knew what she was doing and he did not.
Just the touch of her hands made him shiver. He was clumsy. He forgot things, like how to unbutton his own pants. At that point in his life, the only people who had ever touched Will were either hurting him or stitching him up. He couldn’t help himself. He started crying. Really crying. Not like the hot tears streaming down his face when his nose was broken or when he cut open his own arm with a straight razor.
Big, gulping, humiliating sobs.
Angie hadn’t laughed at him. She had held him. Her arms around his back. Her legs wrapped with his. Will hadn’t known what to do with his hands. He had never been held before. He had never been physically close to another human being. They had stayed in the basement for hours, Angie holding him, kissing him, showing him what to do. She had promised to never let Will go, but the truth was that things between them were never the same. She could never look at him again without seeing him as broken.
The next time Will had felt that close to a woman was almost thirty years later.
“Trent!” Collier was at the end of the hall, bobbing like a Weeble Wobble. He winced as his fingers touched his ear. Blood streaked down the side of his face and neck.
Will returned his handkerchief to his pocket. He pushed open another door, searched another room.
Angie, he kept thinking. Where are you hiding?
There was no use calling for her because he knew that she would not want to be found. Angie was a wild animal. She did not show weakness. She slinked away to lick her wounds in private. Will had always known that when her time came, she would go off somewhere and die on her own. The same as the woman who’d raised her.
Or at least tried to raise her.
Angie was just a kid when Deidre Polaski injected her final not-fatal-enough overdose of heroin. The woman had spent the next thirty-four years in a vegetative coma inside a state-run hospice facility. Angie had once told Will that she wasn’t sure which was worse: living with Deidre’s pimp or living at the Children’s Home.
“Trent!” Collier braced his hands against the wall. Spit drooled out of his mouth. “Jesus Christ. What the fuck did you hit me with, a sledgehammer?”
Will struggled against his guilt, forcing himself not to apologize. He pushed open the next door. He felt his stomach clench as his eyes scanned what was left of the bathroom. The floor had rotted through. Broken toilets, sinks, and pipes had crashed to the level below.
There was another metal storage cabinet on the other side of the hole. Doors closed. Could Angie be inside? Would she cling to the wall, edging her way to the other side of the room so she could close herself off and wait to die?
Collier said, “You’re not going in there.” He stood behind Will, his hand covering his bloody ear. “No kidding, man. You’ll fall to your death.”
Will took out his handkerchief and handed it to him.
Collier hissed a curse as he put the cloth to his ear. “That cabinet’s a foot wide, dude. How thin is this chick?”
“She could fit in there.”
“Sitting down?”
Will imagined Angie sitting in the cabinet. Eyes closed. Listening.
Collier said, “Okay, this chick is hurt, all right? Real bad. She has all these other rooms to choose from, but this is the one she goes into, the one with the giant hole in it. How’s she even gonna get over there?”
He had a point. Angie wasn’t athletic. She hated sweat.
Will turned around. He went into the bathroom across the hall.
Again, Collier watched him from the doorway, arms folded, leaning against the jamb. “They told me you were a stubborn prick.”
Will kicked open a stall door.
“I guess you got your ass handed to you by the good doctor?”
“Shut up.” Will heard the echo of Sara saying the same two words a few hours ago. He’d never seen her that mad before.
Collier said, “What’s your secret, man? I mean, no offense, but Brad Pitt you ain’t.”
Will grabbed Collier’s shirt and moved him out of the way.
Angie wasn’t on this floor. Six more to go. Will headed toward the stairs and started the climb to the next level. Was he doing this the wrong way? Should he have started at the top floor instead of the bottom? Was there an attic in this place? A top-floor C-Suite with a panoramic view?
Tactically, higher ground was always better. The office building was right across the street from Rippy’s club. Angie could’ve been watching the whole time. She would’ve seen the patrol car roll up, the fire department, the crime scene vans, the detectives, all of them spinning their wheels trying to figure out what the hell was happening while Angie was up on the tenth floor the entire time laughing her ass off.
Or bleeding to death.
Will passed the fifth floor, the sixth. He was winded by the time he saw a large 8 painted at the top of the next landing. He stopped, hands on his knees so he could lean over to catch his breath. The heat was getting to him. Sweat dripped onto the floor. His lungs were screaming. His hamstrings were aching. Blood dribbled down the side of his shoe. The cuts on his knuckles had opened up again.
Was this a mistake?
Angie wouldn’t climb these stairs on a good day, let alone with a life-threatening injury. She hated exercise.
Will sat down on the stairs. He rubbed his face and shook the excess sweat off his hands. Was he sure that Angie was even in the building? Where was her car? Shouldn’t Will be trying to find out where she was living instead of risking his life searching a condemned building?
And what about Sara?
“Holy Mother of Christ.” Collier had stopped a few flights down. He was panting like a locomotive. “I think I need stitches in my ear.”
Will leaned his head back against the wall. Had he lost Sara? Had Angie, with this final, violent act managed to do what she couldn’t do for the last year?
Betty was his only saving grace. Early on in their relationship, Sara had kept volunteering to watch Betty while Will was working late. At first, he thought it was because she wanted to know about his cases, but then he had slowly realized that she was using his dog to lure him over to her apartment. It had taken Will a long time to accept that a woman like Sara would want to be with him.
She wouldn’t have agreed to pick up Betty if she wanted to end things now.
Would she?
“Trent.” Collier was like a broken record. His feet scuffed the stairs as he made it to the landing below Will. “What’s the point of this, dude? You think she’s hiding under a typewriter?”
Will looked down at him. “Why are you here?”
“It seemed like a good idea when I was outside. What’s your excuse?” Collier seemed genuinely interested. “Dude, you know she’s not in here.”
Will looked up at the ceiling. Graffiti stared back.
Why was he here?
Maybe the better question was: where else would he be? There were no clues to follow. No leads to run down. He had no idea where Angie was living. Where she was working. Why she was in Rippy’s building. How she had gotten herself tangled up in a rape case Will couldn’t make against a man he despised.
Well, maybe he knew the answer to the last one. Angie always inserted herself into Will’s business. She was stealth, like a cat tracking its prey, then leaving the poor, dead creature as a trophy on Will’s doorstep so that he had to figure out what to do with the body.
There were so many unmarked graves in Will’s past that he had lost count.
Collier said, “I called around about your wife.” He leaned his shoulder against the wall. He crossed his arms again. The good news was the blood around his ear was drying. The bad news was that it had glued Will’s handkerchief to his skin.
“And?” Will said, though he could guess what Collier had found out. Angie slept around. Frequently and indiscriminately. She was the worst kind of cop. You couldn’t trust her to have your back. She was a loner. She had a death wish.
Collier was uncharacteristically diplomatic. “She sounds like she’s a real piece of work.”
Will couldn’t disagree with him.
“I’ve known gals like that. They’re a lot of fun.” Collier was still keeping his distance. He didn’t want to get hit again. “The thing is, they’ve always got people they can fall back on.”
Will had said the same thing to Sara, but it sounded shitty coming out of Collier’s mouth.
“You really think she’d run across the street to this dump?” Collier slid down the wall so he could sit. He was still out of breath. “Lookit, I never met the broad, but I’ve known plenty of broads like her.” He glanced up at Will, probably to make sure he wasn’t coming down the stairs. “No offense, bro, but they’ve always gotta backup plan. You know what I mean?”
Will knew what he meant. Angie always had a guy she could run to. That guy hadn’t always been Will. She had different men she used at different times in her life. When it wasn’t Will’s turn, he went to work, he retiled his bathroom, he restored his car, and he convinced himself the whole time that he wasn’t waiting for her to come back into his life. Dreading. Anticipating. Aching.
Collier said, “My take is, the shit went down last night, she’s injured, so she pulled out her phone—which we can’t find—and she called up a guy and he came rushing over to help.”
“What if Harding was the guy?”
“You think she only had one guy?”
Will took a deep breath. He held on to it for as long as he could.
Collier asked, “We leaving now?”
Will pushed himself up. Heat exhaustion put stars in his eyes. He steadied himself for a moment. He blinked away sweat. He turned around and resumed his climb up the stairs.
“Jesus Christ,” Collier muttered. The soles of his shoes hit the treads like sandpaper. “You ask me, you oughta be running back down these stairs and telling ol’ Red you’re fucking sorry.”
Collier was right. Will owed Sara an apology. He owed her more than that. But he had to keep moving forward because taking a step back, letting himself think about what he was doing and why, was a thread he couldn’t let unravel.
Collier said, “That’s a good lookin’ woman you got there.”
“Shut up.”
“I’m just sayin’, dude. Simple observation.”
Up ahead, Will saw a painted 9 marking the next landing. He kept climbing. The heat intensified with every step. He braced his hand against the wall. He went through the list again: he didn’t know where Angie lived. He didn’t know where she worked. He didn’t know who her friends were. If she had friends. If she wanted friends. She had been the center of his existence for well over half of his life and he didn’t know a damn thing about her.
“You got prime rib at home,” Collier said. “You don’t run out to McDonald’s for a Happy Meal.” He laughed. “I mean, not so Prime Rib ever finds out. ’Cause, shit, man, we all like a greasy cheeseburger every now and then, am I right?”
Will turned the corner at the 9. He looked up to the next landing.
His heart stopped.
A woman’s foot.
Bare. Dirty.
Bloody cuts crisscrossed the soles.
“Angie?” He whispered the word, afraid to say it louder because she might disappear.
Collier asked, “What’d you say?”
Will stumbled up the stairs. He could barely carry his own weight. He was on his knees by the time he reached the landing.
Angie was lying facedown on the floor. Long brown hair wild. Legs splayed. One arm underneath her, the other over her head. She was wearing a white dress he’d seen before. Cotton, see-through, which is why she wore the black bra underneath. The dress rode up her legs, showing matching black bikini underwear.
Blood radiated from beneath her still body, cresting in a halo over her head.
Will put his hand on her ankle. The skin was cold. He felt no pulse.
His head dropped down. He squeezed his eyes shut against the tears that came.
Collier was behind him. “I’ll call it in.”
“Don’t.” Will needed a minute. He couldn’t hear the call on the radio. He couldn’t take his hand from Angie’s leg. She was thinner than the last time he’d seen her—not Saturday, that was just a glimpse, but about sixteen months ago. It was the last time they were together. Deidre had finally died, all alone in the nursing home because Angie didn’t see her anymore. Will was on a case when it happened. He had driven back to Atlanta to be with Angie. Sara was in the picture by then, like a blur at the edge of the frame that might be something or nothing at all, depending on how things developed.
Will had told himself that he owed Angie one last chance, but she had known the minute she looked into his eyes that all that weight between them—that Pandora’s box of shared horrors that they both carried on their backs—had finally been lifted.
Will cleared his throat. “I want to see her face.”
Collier’s mouth opened, but he didn’t say what he was supposed to say—that they should leave the body in situ, that they needed to call in forensics and Amanda and everybody else who would pick over Angie Polaski’s lifeless body like carrion.
Instead, Collier climbed the stairs and went to the head of Angie’s body. He didn’t bother to glove up before he slipped his hands under her thin shoulders. He said, “On three?”
Will forced himself to move. To get up on his knees. To wrap his hands around Angie’s ankles. Her skin was smooth. She shaved her legs every day. She hated having her feet touched. She liked fresh milk in her coffee. She loved the perfume samples that came in magazines. She loved dancing. She loved conflict and chaos and all the things he could not stand. But she looked out for Will. She loved him like a brother. A lover. A sworn enemy. She hated him for leaving her. She didn’t want him anymore. She couldn’t let him go.
She would never, ever hold him like she held him in that basement ever again.
Collier counted down. “Three.”
Wordlessly, they lifted the body and turned her onto her back. She wasn’t stiff. The arm over her head flailed, crossing itself over her eyes, as if she couldn’t face the fact that she was gone.
Her swollen lips were chapped. Dark blood smeared down her chin. White powder speckled her hair and face.
Will’s hand shook as he reached out to move the arm. There was blood—not just from her mouth and nose, but from needle tracks. On her neck. Between her grimy fingers. On her arms.
Will felt his heart start to jackhammer. He was light-headed. His fingers touched her cool skin. Her face. He had to see her face.
The arm moved.
Collier asked, “Did you do that?”
Unaided, the woman’s arm slid off her face, flopped onto the ground.
Her mouth slit open, then her rheumy eyes.
She looked at Will.
He looked back.
It wasn’t Angie.