Fractured, page 25
part #2 of Will Trent Series
Will could hear the shame in the man’s tone. It was a familiar sound to his ears. He looked back up at Paul. “Why did you hate me so much when we were kids?”
“I dunno, Trash, it was a long time ago.”
“I mean it, Paul. I want to know.”
Paul shook his head, and Will thought that was the only answer he was going to get until the man said, “You had it down, Trash. You knew how to do the time.”
“What do you mean?”
“You just accepted it. Being there, trapped at the home for the rest of your life. Not ever having anybody.” He stared at Will as if he still could not believe it. “You were content.”
Will thought about all the visiting days, all the times he combed his hair and changed into his best clothes and prayed that some couple would see him coloring pictures or playing on the swing and think, “That’s him. That’s the boy we want for our son.” No one did. No one ever did. That wasn’t contentment, that was resignation.
He told Paul, “It wasn’t like that at all.”
“That’s how you made it seem. Like you didn’t need anybody. Like you could handle everything. Like you were fine with whatever they gave you.”
“It was the exact opposite.”
“Maybe it was,” Paul admitted. “You know, when you’re a kid, you see things differently.”
Will heard the words come out of his mouth before he could stop himself. “I’m going to get Emma back for you.”
Paul nodded, obviously not trusting himself to speak.
“You’re going to have to be strong for her. That’s what you need to be thinking about: how you can help her.” Will added, “She’s got you, Paul. That’s the difference. Whatever she’s going through right now, she’s got you waiting at the end of it to help her.”
“I wish I could be strong,” he said. “I feel so fucking weak right now.”
“You’re not weak. You were the meanest bastard in a house full of bastards.”
“No, buddy.” He seemed resigned as he patted Will on the shoulder. “I was just the most scared.”
Behind the door, the sink turned on, water flooding out of the faucet. The paper towel dispenser screeched as the crank turned, then the door opened. Abigail’s makeup had been fixed, her lipstick reapplied.
“Okay,” Paul said, more to himself. He reached out his hand and she took it, nothing awkward in the gesture. Will led them down the hall and pressed the call button. Abigail had her head on Paul’s shoulder, her eyes closed as if she was willing herself to get through this. When the doors slid open, Will reached in and pressed his code into the keypad. Emma’s parents got on.
Paul gave him a stiff nod—not a thank-you, but an acknowledgment that Will was there.
Abigail didn’t give Will a second glance as the doors closed.
Will looked down at the photographs in his hand. Emma Campano smiled back at him in a toothy grin. He thumbed through the pictures. In some, she was with her parents. Others showed her with Kayla Alexander. Younger shots showed Emma with a group of girls in the school choir, another group on a skiing trip. She seemed even more vulnerable with a group than when she was alone, as if she could feel her separateness, her outsider status, as keenly as the prick of a pin. He saw in her eyes the trepidation of a kindred spirit.
Will tucked the photos into his pocket and headed toward the stairs.
AMANDA’S CORNER OFFICE was on the opposite side of the building from Will’s and a lifetime away from the squalor in which he toiled. Ahead was the ubiquitous view of the Home Depot parking lot. Up the street, the city loomed—skyscrapers, regal old buildings and in the mist-covered distance, the greenery of Piedmont Park.
Her desk was not the requisitioned metal type whose sharp corners had taken out more than one poor civil servant’s kneecap. Polished wood gleamed from under her leather blotter with its pink phone messages Caroline had left her. Her in and out trays were always empty. Will had never seen a speck of dust in the place.
Pictures of Amanda with various dignitaries hung alongside newspaper articles touting her triumphs. The walls were painted a soothing gray. The ceiling was made of crisp white squares rather than the dingy, water-stained tiles that were the hallmark of every other office in the building. She had an LCD TV and her own coffee bar. The air really was better up here.
“Get you anything?” Caroline, Amanda’s secretary, asked. She was the only woman who worked on Amanda’s team. Will supposed this was because Amanda had come up during the age of tokenism, when there was only one spot for a woman at the top. Or maybe it was because Amanda knew that men were easier for her to control.
“No, thank you,” he said. “Did Amanda tell you we’re—”
“Expecting a phone call?” she interrupted.
“Thanks.”
She smiled and returned to her desk outside the office.
Will had called Evan Bernard, Emma’s reading teacher, first thing this morning. The man had agreed to look at the threatening notes that Adam Humphrey had been sent. As Faith had suggested, Will was hoping the teacher could give his opinion as to whether or not they were looking at the work of a dyslexic. A cruiser had been dispatched to show him copies of the letters. Bernard was supposed to call as soon as he got them.
Will checked the time on his splintered cell phone, wondering where Amanda was. The numbers didn’t glow as brightly. Sometimes it rang when someone called, sometimes it flashed silently. Earlier, it had started vibrating for no apparent reason, and he had to take out the battery to get it to stop. He was worried about the phone, which was three years old and about three million models out of date. A new one would require him to learn a whole new set of directions. He would have to change over all the numbers and program in the functions. There went his vacation. Or maybe not. You needed a job to take a vacation.
“Looks like we’re getting good feedback from the press,” Amanda said, breezing into her office. “Paul Campano denied getting into a scuffle with you. He said it was an accident, that you fell.”
Will had stood when she entered the room and he was so shocked that he forgot to sit back down.
“Hamish Patel and his big mouth say otherwise.” Amanda eyed him as she fanned through the notes on her desk. “I’m going to guess from your appearance that Campano took a swing at you?”
Will sat down. “Yeah.”
“And I gather from the black eyes and swollen nose that you valiantly suffered his blows?”
Will tried, “If that’s what Hamish says.”
“Care to tell me why he took the swing in the first place?”
Will told her a favorable version of the truth. “The last thing I said to him before he hit me was that we needed a DNA sample.”
“That puts it nicely back on me.”
He asked, “Did Paul give the sample?”
“Yes, actually. So, either he’s extremely arrogant or he’s innocent.”
Will would’ve bet on both, but he still could not believe that Paul had covered for him. He hadn’t even hinted at the favor less than half an hour ago. Maybe this was the man’s way of paying him back for being such a jerk all those years ago. Or maybe he was still the same old Paul who liked to settle his scores when the adults weren’t watching.
“What about his affairs?”
“I called the dealership as soon as I got back to my office. If she doesn’t get back to me by noon, I’ll send a squad car to pick her up.” Will had to add, “My gut tells me Paul doesn’t have anything to do with this. Maybe if it was just a simple kidnapping—but it’s not.”
“We’ll know soon enough,” Amanda said. “I’ve fast tracked the comparison between Paul Campano and the DNA we found on Kayla Alexander. Beckey Keiper at the lab is going to call you as soon as the results are in.”
“I sent a cruiser over to Emma’s school,” Will said, barely able to get past his shock. “Bernard should be calling us any minute.”
“It’s extremely ironic that our resident dyslexic can’t tell us, isn’t it?”
Will tried not to squirm in his chair. He had called his boss at home only one other time in the last ten years, and that was to tell her that a colleague had been killed. Last night, she had been even icier to him when he’d explained that he had been unable to see anything unusual about the notes someone, probably the killer, had slipped under Adam Humphrey’s dorm room door.
He cleared his throat. “If you want my resignation—”
“When you leave this job it’ll be with my foot up your ass, not slinking out the door like a wounded kitten.” She sat back in her chair. “God dammit, Will.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Sorry doesn’t cut it right now.” She twisted the screw tighter. “Those letters are the first pieces of real evidence we have. ‘Leave her alone.’ ‘She belongs to me.’ Those are direct threats from our killer to one of our victims. If this is the work of someone with some kind of handicap—that’s our blood in the water, Will. We should have been circling this information as soon as we got it.”
“I’m aware of that.”
“Where would we be right now in this case if you had followed up on the spelling yesterday afternoon instead of first thing this morning?” She didn’t let him answer. “We’re going on three days here. Three days. I don’t have to tell you what that means.”
“What else do you want me to say?”
For once, she seemed to be at a loss for words. The condition was fleeting. “We’re burning daylight. When is this teacher supposed to call?”
“The cruiser should be there any minute.”
“What time is Gordon Chew supposed to be here?”
She meant the fingerprint expert from Tennessee. “Around eight-thirty. He was going to drive down first thing this morning.”
“He drove down last night,” she said, but didn’t elaborate. “What do we have?”
“A lot of nothing,” Will told her. “Charlie found fibers and footprints at the Ansley Park house, but we need someone or something to match them to before we can use them.” The gray dirt Charlie had found also came to mind, but he kept that information to himself, hoping against hope that something came of it. He cleared his throat before continuing. “The ransom call yesterday came from Kayla Alexander’s phone. It bounced off a cell tower that covers most of north Atlanta on up to Kennesaw Mountain.”
“We can try to triangulate the second call today, but I’m sure he watches enough television to know it takes time.” She paused, thinking. “I didn’t peg this for a kidnapping.”
“Neither did I,” Will said. “I’m still not sure I do.”
“There was proof of life.”
“I know.”
“Both parents confirm that it was their daughter’s voice on the phone. Are you still thinking that Emma Campano might be involved in this?”
“Something isn’t sitting right,” Will told her. “The scene was too sloppy.”
“Charlie says that based on the blood and shoe-print evidence he believes that only four people were in the house during the time of the crime.”
“I know.”
Amanda added another point that he had yet to consider. “If you’ve got a thing for young girls, you don’t leave one dead at the scene. You take them both with you.”
“Kayla was a fighter. Maybe she wouldn’t go peacefully.”
Amanda held up her hands. “We can talk in circles like this all morning and it won’t get us anywhere. I heard the proof of life from the call yesterday. The girl sounded terrified. Not movie terrified, not fake, this-is-how-I-think-I-should-sound-when-I’m-trying-to-sound-terrified terrified. She was making the sorts of noises you only make when you know that you are about to die.”
Will let her words sink in. Amanda was right. They had both heard true fear before—more times than either of them cared to remember. Emma Campano had not been acting. There was an ungodly tremble to her voice, a harsh rasp to her breathing. You couldn’t make that up. Absolute terror was a secret language you only learned by experience.
Will asked, “Was there any background noise on Emma’s part of the tape?”
“They say it’ll be noon at the soonest before they have anything substantive. Preliminarily, there’s traffic noise, a dog barking. The girl was in an enclosed area when her part of the recording was made.”
“So he drove her somewhere, took her out of the car, then made the recording.”
“That tells us that the ransom demand wasn’t an afterthought. We’ve seen how these guys work before. They get heated up, they take the girl, they rape her, they kill her, and then they make their plan. This was thought out from the beginning. Before he stepped foot in that house, he bought rope and duct tape. He found a knife. He had a place picked out where he knew he could take her.”
“If I were a more optimistic person, I would say that proves she’s still alive.”
“That was yesterday,” Amanda reminded him. “We’ll know about today in a little over two and a half hours.”
“Was the lab able to tell anything about the kidnapper’s voice?”
“You were right about him taping it off a computer and playing it back over the phone.” She read from one of the notes, “ ‘The VoiceOver utility is a standard feature found in Apple Macintosh’s universal access software. The voice selected by the caller is called Bahh.’ ” She looked up from the note. “So that narrows our suspect pool down to several million smug Apple computer owners.”
“Kayla Alexander’s parents should be—”
“They’re back,” she interrupted. “And you’re not to go within a hundred miles of them without an attorney.”
“Why?”
“They’re filing lawsuits against Westfield Academy, the Campanos and the Atlanta Police Department. I’m sure as soon as they realize we’re on the case, they’ll slap us with one, too.”
“On what grounds?”
“The school couldn’t keep the girl from leaving, the Campanos couldn’t keep the girl from dying and the police department couldn’t find their asses if you drew them a map.”
Caroline called from her office, “Evan Bernard is on line three.”
Will told Amanda, “Please let me handle this.”
“Are you trying to redeem yourself?”
“I’m trying not to piss off the man who’s trying to help us.”
“Don’t be ridiculous.” She pressed the speakerphone button. “Mr. Bernard, this is Amanda Wagner, I’m the deputy director of the special criminal apprehension team. I’ve got agent Will Trent here with me. Thank you so much for helping us this morning.”
“No problem,” he answered. “The policeman you sent came with his lights and siren blaring right up to the front door.” He gave a forced chuckle. “I have to admit, it was a little disconcerting.”
Amanda smiled her grandmotherly smile. “Consider it incentive to keep your nose clean.”
Will shook his head at the silence on the other end of the line. He took over the call, asking, “Mr. Bernard, can you give us your impression of the letters?”
“I have to admit, I find them curious.”
“Can you explain why?”
“The first one, which I would read as ‘she belongs to me,’ just doesn’t ring true. I told you yesterday that each dyslexic is different, and perhaps you’d be better off talking to a linguist for regional dialect and such, but in my opinion, you’re dealing with a phonetic speller, not a dyslexic.”
Will asked, “How can you be sure?”
“Well, I’m not.” He made a thinking noise. “All I can speak from is my own experience. With a dyslexic, I would expect the letters to be mixed up, not just misspelled or run together. Transposition is the most notable characteristic. For instance, Emma continually transposed the ‘e’ and ‘l’ in help, spelling it ‘h-l-e-p.’ ”
Amanda did nothing to hide her impatience. “What about the other ones?”
“The second one, ‘rapist,’ is correct, of course, but the third one, the ‘lev her along’ for ‘leave her alone’—and again, let me qualify this by saying that each person is different—but the ‘along’ seems odd. Typically, you would not expect to find the ‘g’ there. It’s what I would call a heavy letter, meaning it has a definitive sound within a word. You often see it used for ‘j’ or a ‘j’ used in its place, but you never see it just thrown in for no reason.” He made the thinking noise again. “But then the ‘lev’ gives me pause.”
Will was having a hard time following all the spelling, but he still asked, “Why is that?”
“Because, generally, that’s a dyslexic spelling. It’s the word in its purest form. No run-on, no ‘g’ thrown in for effect. I would assume that spell-check added it there.”
“So, what’s your opinion? Is someone trying to appear dyslexic or do they really have the disorder?”
“Well . . .” The man hesitated. “I’m not a doctor. I’m a reading teacher. But if you were to put a gun to my head, I’d say that you are looking at the work of an adult, probably of average intelligence, who simply never learned basic reading skills.”
Will looked up at Amanda and found her staring back at him. They were both unused to getting straight answers. Just to clarify, Will asked, “You don’t think this person has some sort of reading disability?”
“You asked for my honest opinion and I gave it to you. I would say that the person who wrote these letters never learned how to properly read or spell. At best, they’re on a second-or third-grade level.”
Amanda was obviously skeptical. “How is that possible?”
“I saw it more when I taught in the public school system, but it happens. Kids with all kinds of reading problems can slip through the cracks. You try to help them, but there’s nothing you can really do. That’s one of the reasons I moved to Westfield.”
In the background, they heard the class bell ring.
Bernard said, “I’m sorry, but I need to get to class. I can get someone to cover if you—”
“That’s okay,” Will told him. “Thank you for your time. If you could give those notes back to the patrolman who gave them to you?”
