Fractured, page 38
part #2 of Will Trent Series
“It’s not that,” she said, still not sure she’d heard correctly. “Your partner?” she repeated. “Amanda’s been keeping me off every important event in this case,” Faith said, thinking the missed press conference was just the icing on the cake. “Why would she want me on her team?”
Will had the grace to look guilty. “That was actually me keeping you out of the loop,” he admitted. “But not on purpose. Honest.”
She was too tired to manage anything but an exasperated, “Will.”
“I’m sorry,” he said, holding out his hands in an open shrug. “But, listen, it’s best you know what you’d be getting into.”
“This is the last thing I expected,” Faith admitted. She was still unable to wrap her head around the offer.
“I told you about the crappy dental.” He held up his hand, showed her the scar from the nail gun. “And keep in mind that Amanda doesn’t take prisoners.”
Faith rubbed her face. She let the enormity of the situation sink in. “I keep hearing those clicks in my ear from Warren dry-firing on you.” She paused, not trusting herself to speak. “He could have killed you.” She added, “And I would have killed him.”
Will tried for levity. “You seemed pretty cool to me.” His voice went up in a falsetto as he mimicked, “ ‘Drop it, motherfucker!’ ”
She felt her cheeks redden. “I guess my inner Police Woman came out.”
“Pepper Anderson was a sergeant. You’re a detective.”
“And you are pathetic for knowing that.”
He smiled, rubbing his jaw. “Yeah, you’re probably right.” He waited a few seconds before saying, “I mean it, Faith. I won’t take it personally if you say no.”
She cut to the heart of the matter. “I don’t know if I can do this kind of job every day. At least with the murder squad, we know where to look.”
“Boyfriend, husband, lover,” Will said, a familiar refrain. “I’m not going to lie. It takes the life out of you.”
She thought of Victor Martinez, his many phone calls. Jeremy was finally out of the house. She had met a man who might possibly be interested in her despite the fact that she was painfully ill-prepared for an adult relationship. She’d finally managed to get some grudging respect around the homicide squad, even if their highest compliment so far was, “You’re not that stupid for a blonde.”
Did Faith want to invite more complications into her life? Shouldn’t she just coast through on her detective’s shield, then work private security like every other retired cop she knew?
Will glanced up and down the hallway. “Did Paul just disappear?” he asked, and she realized it was a question meant to put them back on more comfortable footing.
Faith was glad for the familiar ground. “I haven’t seen him.”
“Typical,” he remarked.
Faith turned in her chair to look at Will. His nose was still bruised, a sliver of blue tracing beneath his right eye. “Did you really grow up in foster care?”
He didn’t register the question. His face stayed blank.
“I’m sorry,” she apologized, just as he answered, “Yes.”
Will leaned forward, his elbows on his knees. Faith waited for him to say something, but he seemed to be doing the same thing with her.
She blurted out, “Moms I’d like to fuck.”
“What?”
“That first day with Jeremy. You asked me what a MILF is. It stands for ‘Moms I’d Like to Fuck.’ ” He narrowed his eyes, probably trying to put it into context. He must have remembered, because he said, “Ouch.”
“Yeah,” Faith agreed.
Will clasped his hands together. He twisted around his watch and checked the time. Instead of making a comment, pulling some small talk out of the air, he simply stared at the floor. She saw that his shoes were scuffed, the hem of his pants caked with dirt from climbing under the fence to the North Avenue house.
“What did Warren say to you?” she asked. “I know that he said something. I saw the way your face changed.”
Will kept staring at the floor. She thought he was not going to answer, but he did. “Colors.”
Faith did not believe him any more now than she had before. “He told you the colors on the file folders?”
“It’s a trick,” he answered. “Remember what Bernard said, about how dyslexics are good at hiding their problem from other people?” He looked back at her. “The colors tell you what’s inside the folders.”
With all that had happened in the last few hours, Faith had almost forgotten her earlier revelation about Will’s inability to read. She thought about the psych evaluation Will had shoved in Warren’s face, the way he had pressed his finger to each differently colored dot as he called out the findings. Will had never looked at the words. He had let the colors guide him.
“What about the last sheet?” she asked. “Warren was functionally illiterate. He had some ability to read. Why couldn’t he see that it was a dress-code memo?”
Will kept his eyes trained at the wall opposite. “When you get upset, it’s harder to see the words. They move around. They blur.”
So Faith wasn’t crazy, after all. Will did have some sort of reading problem. She thought about the way he always patted his pockets, looking for his glasses, when there was something to read. He hadn’t noticed the rural route address on Adam Humphrey’s license or read the Web page on Bernard’s computer that talked about teacher retirement. Still, she had to admit if you stacked him up against Leo Donnelly or any other man in the homicide division, he came out the better cop.
She asked, “What other tricks would Warren use?”
“A digital recorder. Voice recognition software. Spell-check.”
Faith wondered if she could have been any more blind. She was supposed to be a detective and she had missed all of the obvious signs right under her nose. “Is that why Warren fixated on the colors?” she asked. “Did he see the different colors on your file folders and figure out you—”
“Colors,” Will interrupted. “He said the colors.” A big, sloppy grin spread across his face. “That’s what Warren was trying to tell me.”
“What?”
He stood up, excitement replacing exhaustion. “We need to go to the copy center.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
WILL WALKED DOWN through the cells, not looking at the crime-scene tape covering the open doorway where Warren Grier had hanged himself. He could feel the cold stares of the prisoners follow him to the end of the hall. There were the usual sounds of jail: men talking trash, other men weeping.
Evan Bernard was in one of the larger holding cells. Men who raped young girls were always targeted by other prisoners. The ones who were attached to sensational cases could pretty much kiss their lives good-bye. The transgendered cell was the only safe place for a man like Bernard. The women were usually arrested for crimes of circumstance: stealing food, public vagrancy. Most of them were too feminine to get construction work and too masculine to turn tricks. Like Evan Bernard, they would have been torn apart in the general population.
The teacher had his hands hanging outside the bars, his elbows on the supports. The cell was a large one, at least fifteen feet wide. Beds were stacked three high across the space. As he walked up, Will noticed that the women were all huddled around a single bunk, as if they, too, could not stand the sight of Evan Bernard.
Will had a sheet folded up under his arm. The material was thick prison issue, bleached and starched to within an inch of its life. When he propped it up between the bars, it stayed that way.
Bernard made a point of looking at the sheet. “Poor kid. The girls are crazy upset.”
Will glanced into the cell. The girls looked ready to rip him apart.
Bernard said, “I’m not talking to you without my lawyer present.”
“I don’t want you to talk,” Will said. “I want you to listen.”
He shrugged. “Nothing else to pass the time.”
“Do you know how he did it? How he strangled himself?”
“I assumed he was the victim of some sort of police brutality.”
Will smiled. “Do you want to know or not?”
Bernard raised his eyebrow, as if to say, Go on.
Will took down the sheet, unfolding it. He explained as he worked. “It’s hard to figure out, right? It doesn’t make sense that you can asphyxiate yourself just sitting on the floor.” He looped the sheet through his hand, wrapping the material around his arm.
“What you do is, you tie one end around the doorknob, and then you loop it around your neck like this.” Will jerked the sheet tight, his skin pressing out between the folds. “You kneel down with your head close to the knob, and then you start breathing really fast and really hard until you hyperventilate.”
Bernard smiled, as if he finally understood.
“And then, just before you pass out, you kick your legs out from underneath yourself.” Will pulled the sheet away. “And then you wait.”
“It wouldn’t take long,” Bernard said.
“No, just a few minutes.”
“Is that why you came down here, Mr. Trent, to tell me this tragic tale?”
“I came down here to tell you that you were right about something.”
“You’ll have to narrow that down for me. I’ve been right about so many things.”
Will looped the sheet through the bars, letting the material hang down either side. “You told me that dyslexics were good at developing tricks so that they can blend in with everybody else. True?”
“True.”
“It got me to thinking about Warren, because that day he went to Emma Campano’s house, there were lots of things for him to remember.” Will listed them out. “What time Kayla was going to let him into the house. Where Emma’s room was. How many pairs of gloves to bring. Where to transfer her from one car to the other.”
Bernard shook his head. “This is fascinating, Mr. Trent, but what on earth does it have to do with me?”
“Well,” Will began, digging in his jacket pocket for his digital recorder. “Since Warren couldn’t write down lists, he made recordings.” Bernard shook his head again. He wouldn’t have recognized the recorder because it belonged to Will. “Warren used his cell phone to make recordings,” Will explained. “He transferred them to compact discs that he kept filed along with customer artwork at the copy store.”
Bernard seemed less sure of himself.
“Blue, red, purple, green,” Will repeated. “That was the sequence he used for his discs.” He clicked on the player. Evan Bernard’s voice was easily distinguishable. “No, Warren, the rope and tape will be in the trunk. Kayla will give you the keys.”
Warren mumbled, “I know, I know.”
On the tape, Bernard was obviously agitated. “No, you don’t know. You need to listen to what I’m saying. If you do this right, none of us will get caught.”
A girl’s voice they had verified was Kayla Alexander’s, said, “You want me to write it down for you, Warren? You want me to make a list?”
Will clicked off the recorder. “You can hear the rest in court.”
“I’m going free in an hour,” Bernard said. “My lawyer told me—”
“Your lawyer doesn’t know about the DVDs.” Charlie Reed had been wrong about the cables in back of Bernard’s home computer. They had been attached to a recordable DVD drive.
Will told the man, “We have at least a dozen videos showing you in your special room, Evan. My partner is at Westfield Academy with Olivia McFaden right now. We made stills from the videos—pictures that show the girls’ faces right alongside yours. So far, they’ve identified six students from the school.” Will asked, “How many more do you think we’ll find? How many women do you think are going to come forward?”
“I want my lawyer. Now.”
“Oh, he’s coming. He seemed really eager to talk to you when I told him about the new charges.” Will put his hand on the sheet, pushing it into the cell. “Here you go, Evan. I don’t want you to ever think that I didn’t leave you enough rope to hang yourself with.”
BETTY WAS ON the couch when Will came home, which meant that Angie wasn’t there. He took off his jacket and loosened his tie as he adjusted the thermostat. He had been in the house less than a minute and he was already annoyed. Angie knew he liked to keep the air on for Betty. She tended to get nasty heat rashes in the summer.
The answering machine was flashing. There was one message.
Will pressed the button and heard Paul Campano’s voice come out of the speaker.
“Hey, Will,” he said, and that was enough. Will stopped the tape, not wanting to know what the rest of the message said. He didn’t want to hear Paul humbled or grateful. The man had said his name instead of calling him Trash. That was all that Will had ever wanted to hear.
He scooped the dog off the couch and took her to the kitchen, where he was surprised to find her water bowl was filled. He examined Betty’s bug-eyed face, as if he could tell whether or not she had stopped drinking just by looking at her. He was fairly certain Angie hadn’t bothered to fill up the bowl during the day. Betty licked Will’s face and he gave her a pet before putting her down on the floor. He scooped some kibble in her food bowl, then tossed her a piece of her favorite cheese, before going into the bedroom.
It was like an oven in the back of the house. He stripped out of his vest, shirt and pants as he walked to the bed, tossing them all on a chair. Will wasn’t sure what time it was, but he was so tired that it didn’t make a difference. The fact that Angie never made the bed actually seemed like a good thing as he slid between the sheets.
Unbidden, a long, heavy sigh came out of his chest as he closed his eyes. He put his hands on his chest, then he put them down at his sides. He rolled over. He kicked the sheets off. Finally, he ended up on his back again, staring up at the ceiling.
The phone rang, piercing the solitude. Will debated whether or not to answer. He checked the clock. It was ten in the morning. There was no one in the world right now that he wanted to talk to. Amanda wasn’t about to pat him on the back, the press would not know how to get his phone number and Angie was off doing her own thing—whatever that was.
He picked it up before the machine clicked on.
“Hi,” Faith said. “Are you busy?”
“Just lying around in my underwear.” There was no response. “Hello?”
“Yes.” She said the word like a statement, and he realized that yet again he’d blurted out the wrong thing. He was about to apologize when she said, “I told Amanda I’m taking the job.”
Several responses came to mind, but Will weighed them out, not trusting himself not to say something stupid. “Good,” he managed, more like a croak.
“It’s because we caught him.” Bernard, she meant. “If we hadn’t, I probably would’ve been fine going back to my little desk in the murder squad and biding my time until retirement.”
“You’ve never struck me as the type of cop who works on a time clock.”
“It was a really easy habit to fall into when I was partnered with Leo,” she admitted. “Maybe it’ll be different with you.”
He laughed. “I can honestly say that I’ve never had a woman look at being stuck with me as a positive thing.”
She laughed, too. “At least I can help you with your reports.”
Will felt his smile drop. They had not discussed Faith’s obvious realization that there were second-graders in her neighborhood who could read better than Will. He said, “I don’t need help, Faith. Really.” To cut some of the tension, he added, “But, thank you.”
“All right,” she agreed, but the strain was still there.
He tried to think of something else to say—a joke, a bad pun about his illiteracy. Nothing came except the glaring reminder that there was a reason he did not tell people about his problem. Will did not need help with anything. He could pull his own weight, and had for years.
He asked, “When do you start?”
“It’s complicated,” she said. “I’ve got a provisional certificate until I finish my degree, but, basically, I’ll be in your office first thing a week from Monday.”
“My office?” Will asked, getting a sinking sensation. He knew how Amanda worked. She had come down to his office a year ago and noted that, if Will kept his knees up around his ears, another desk could easily be wedged into the space. “That’ll be great,” he said, trying to keep things upbeat.
“I’ve been thinking a lot about Kayla.”
He could tell as much from her tone of voice. “You mean the lawsuit?”
“No. Her motivation.” Faith was silent again, but this time she seemed to be gathering her thoughts. “Nobody liked Kayla except Emma. Her parents were shitty. The whole school hated her.”
“From all reports, she was reviled for a reason.”
“But Bernard’s such a manipulative bastard, it’s hard to tell whether or not she was in it for the thrill or because he told her to do it.”
Will did not want to accept that it was possible for a seventeen-year-old girl to be so sadistic. The only thing he knew for certain was that with Warren dead and Bernard pointing his finger at everyone but himself, they would never really know the truth. “I doubt even Kayla knew the difference.”
“Mary Clark still doesn’t know.”
He considered the poor woman, the damage that had been done to her psyche. On the surface, Mary was living a good life: well educated, married with children, teaching at an upscale school. And yet, all of that meant nothing because of something tragic that had happened to her over a decade ago. It was the same way he had thought of Emma early on in this case: everything she survived would make her want to die every day for the rest of her life. If the GBI and the Atlanta police and every other police force in America really cared about stopping crime, they would take all the money they poured into prisons and the courts and homeland security and spend every nickel on protecting children from the bastards who preyed on them. Will could pretty much guarantee the investment would pay off in saved lives.
“I should go,” Faith told him. “I’m having lunch with Victor Martinez in two hours and I’m still wearing the same clothes he saw me in last time.”
