Fractured (35 page)

Off camera, a reporter asked, "Why aren't you releasing his name?"

"The arraignment in the morning will make it part of the public record," she said, sidestepping the obvious, which was that they were keeping Warren's name out of the press as long as they could in order to keep some helpful do-gooder from offering him legal advice. The fact that Lionel Petty had already submitted an I-Report to CNN.com of him and Warren Grier standing beside one of the copy machines at work would soon work against them.

Another reporter was obviously thinking the same thing as Faith. "What about the missing girl? Any leads on her whereabouts?"

"We believe it's only a matter of time before Emma Campano is found."

Faith noted that the woman did not say whether the girl would be found dead or alive. She felt a sudden pang of envy for Amanda and her position. Like Faith's mother, Amanda had worked her way to the top. If Faith had to put up with a little misogyny now and then, she could not imagine what it was like for her mother's generation.

Amanda had started in the secretarial pool, just like Evelyn Mitchell, back when the women officers had to wear below-the-knee wool skirts as they fetched coffee and typed up requisitions. Amanda had clawed her way to the top, only to have a bunch of idiots with primordial ooze dripping out of their noses heckle her as she broke one of the biggest cases the city had seen since Wayne Williams was spotted tossing a body into the Chattahoochee.

And where was Faith after all those years of progress and women's lib? She was still in the equivalent of the secretarial pool, she supposed. To be fair, she had volunteered for the task of cataloguing all the evidence Will had taken from Warren Grier's tiny abode. That was before she'd seen the piles of boxes they had taken from the boardinghouse and stacked around her desk. There were at least six of them, all filled to the top with papers. Warren was a pack rat, the kind of man who couldn't throw out a receipt or a movie ticket. He still had pay stubs from the copy center that went back almost ten years.

Faith touched her jaw, bruised and tender from where Warren's elbow had caught her. She had found an ancient Lean Cuisine in the back of the freezer in the break room. The bag was hard as a rock, but it felt good on her mouth. She hated getting hit. Not that anyone particularly enjoyed it, but Faith had learned a long time ago that puking was her natural response to pain. Holding a bag of frozen spaghetti and meatballs was not helping matters. A small price to pay considering what Emma Campano had probably gone through.

Will was escorting Warren Grier to the holding cells. There was only one question he had yet to get answered: Where was Emma? Even if the girl was still alive, time was running out. Faith thought about the conditions in which she might be kept: locked up in a room somewhere or, worse, shoved in the trunk of a car. Today, the temperature had hit one hundred before noon. The heat was unrelenting, even at night. Did Emma have water? Did she have food? How long before her supplies ran out? Death by dehydration took a week to ten days, but that was without a head wound and the broiling heat. Were they going to spend the next two weeks counting off the hours until Emma Campano could no longer draw breath?

"Hey, Mitchell. How's it working with that rat?" Robertson asked. He was sitting at his desk, leaning so far back in his chair that it looked like it might break.

"Fine," she told him, wondering why no one was giving Will credit for letting the Atlanta police duckwalk Evan Bernard out of Westfield Academy in front of the rolling cameras.

Robertson wagged his finger at her. "Be careful around that fucker. Never trust a Statey."

"Gotcha. Thanks."

"Fucking GBI. Taking our case, making it look like they did all the heavy lifting." There were noises of agreement from around the room.

What selective memory they all seemed to have. Faith would've probably been joining in if she hadn't been there that first day, watching Will connect the dots that had been in front of them all along.

Robertson seemed to be waiting for her to say something else, maybe take a jibe at Will or make a nasty comment about the GBI, but Faith was at a loss. A week ago, the words would have rushed out like beer from a tap. Now, the well had run dry.

Faith turned back to the work in front of her, trying to block out the noises of the squad room. She didn't have the strength at the moment to start going through the boxes from Warren's apartment, so she concentrated on her computer screen. Will had used a digital camera to take pictures of Warren Grier's living quarters, and she scrolled through the series of shots, which showed basically the same small room from six different angles.

Every mundane detail of Warren's existence had been captured, from his toiletries to his sock drawer. There were boxes and boxes of papers under his bed, overflowing with school report cards and official-looking forms from his time in the foster care system. There was a close-up of a manual for a Mac laptop computer, a phone number scribbled on the front. Faith tilted her head, wondering why Will had turned the camera upside down.

She picked up her cell phone and dialed the number, sticking her finger in her other ear to block out the noise. The phone rang once, twice, then a local theater picked up and started giving movie times for the next shows. No news flash there. The six billion ticket stubs sitting in a box at Faith's feet revealed his passion for the silver screen.

Faith went back to the pictures, trying to divine a clue that might lead to the missing girl. All she saw was the sad one-room apartment where Warren had lived all of his adult life. There were no photographs of family, no calendars with dates marked for dinners with friends. From all appearances, he had no friends, no one he could turn to.

That was no kind of excuse, though. By his own admission, Will had grown up under similar circumstances. He had lived in state care until he was eighteen. He'd become a cop-and a damn good one. His social skills left something to be desired, but there was something underneath all his awkwardness that was oddly endearing.

Or maybe it was something her mother had told her ages ago: the easiest way for a man to get into your heart was if you imagined what he was like as a child.

Faith clicked through the photos again, trying to see if anything stood out. She ran through the usual suspects: a garage, a storage facility, an old family cabin in the woods. None of these seemed to be likely hiding places that Warren could use. He had no car, no extra belongings to store, no family to speak of.

Something had to break. There had to be a path back to Emma Campano that was not yet illuminated. Evan Bernard was going to make bail in less than twelve hours. He would be back on the street, free to do what he wanted until his trial date for having sex with Kayla Alexander. Unless they found something to link him to the crimes at the Campano house, he was looking at nothing more than a slap on the wrist, probably three years in jail, then he would get his life back.

And then what would he do? There were too many other ways for a man with an interest in girls to find victims. Church. SAT tutoring. Youth groups. Evan Bernard would probably move out of state. Maybe he would fail to register as a sex offender in his new town. He might live near a swimming pool or a high school or even a day care center. Warren Grier was not going to flip. Whatever hold Bernard had on the young man was unbreakable. The only thing Faith and Will had done was make Bernard's life from here on out more difficult. They had found absolutely nothing to keep him locked up for the rest of his miserable existence, and nothing that brought them closer to finding Emma Campano.

And then there was the fact that Faith knew how these guys tended to work. Bernard had raped the girl in Savannah, but that couldn't have been his first time, and Kayla would not be his last. Was there another girl out there that he was grooming for his sick fantasies? Was there another teenager who was going to have her life turned upside down by the sick bastard?

Faith put down the frozen bag, working her jaw to make sure no permanent damage had been done. She put her hand to her face and, unbidden, the memory of Victor stroking her cheek came back to her. He had called three times on her cell phone, each message progressively more apologetic. In the end, he had resorted to blatant flattery, which, being honest, had done a good deal to help crack her resolve. Faith wondered if there was ever going to be a time when she understood any of the men in her life.

Will Trent was certainly an enigma. The way he had spoken to Warren in the interrogation room had been so intimate that Faith found herself unable to look him in the eye. Had all of that really happened to Will? Was he the damaged product of the state adoption program, just like Warren Grier?

What Will had said about the cigarette burns had felt so real. Under the jacket and the vest and the dress shirt, was he hiding similar scars? Faith had been in central booking when they took the photographs of Warren's damaged torso. As a police officer, she had seen many cigarette burns on many victims as well as suspects. They were unsurprising at this point, the kind of thing you expected alongside the tattoos and the track marks. People did not generally choose a life of crime for the adventure. They were junkies and criminals for a reason, and the reason usually could be found in their early home life.

Was Will just a really good liar? When he talked about what it felt like to touch the burn marks, was he speaking from experience, or making a calculated guess? Three days had passed since she'd first met the man and she knew as much about him now as she had on that very first day. And she still did not understand how he worked the job. Warren had tried to kill him, but instead of sticking the younger man in with pedophiles and rapists, Will had walked him down to the cells to make sure he got one to himself. And then there was Evan Bernard. Any cop worth his salt knew that the best way to sweat out someone like that arrogant prick was to stick him in with the nastiest motherfuckers on the cell block, yet Will had basically given him a pass, sticking him in with the shemales.

Faith figured it was too late in the day to guess his strategy- and besides, it wasn't as if he ever consulted her on anything. He kept all the details of the case locked up in his head and maybe, if Faith was lucky, he let some of it out when the mood struck him. He worked like no other cop she had ever met. There wasn't even a murder board in his office-a chronological listing of what happened when, who did what, the suspects and the victims pictured side by side so that clues could be tracked, leads could be followed. There was no way he could keep it all in his head. Maybe he kept it all on his precious tape recorder. Either way, if something happened to Will, there would be no logical point for the next lead investigator to pick up on. It was such a blatant disregard for procedure that Faith was shocked Amanda allowed it to happen.

Analyzing Amanda and Will's relationship was just wasting time. Faith went back to the computer, her hand resting on the mouse. The screen flickered up, showing a photograph of Warren Grier's bookshelf. Faith hadn't put it together before, but she found it pretty odd that a man who could not read would have books in his home.

She squinted her eyes at the titles, then thought better of it, giving her eyes a break and clicking the button to zoom in on the photo. There were several graphic novels, which made sense, and what looked like manuals for various pieces of office equipment. The spines were all sectioned together by color rather than title. The books on the bottom shelf were taller, the words blurred from being out of the camera lens's center frame. Faith guessed from their size that they were art books-the expensive type that you put on your coffee table for show.

Faith zoomed in closer on the bottom shelf, but still could not make out any of the titles. Something was familiar about the thick gray spines of three of the books. She put her chin in her hand, wincing at the pain from her bruised jaw. Why did the spines look so familiar?

She opened one of the boxes from Warren's apartment, looking to see if any of the books had been packed. They all seemed to contain papers and receipts from over the last ten years. Faith skimmed through the stacks, wondering why in the hell Will had taken all of this crap from the scene. Was it really necessary for them to know that Warren had paid a hundred ten dollars to Vision Quest for an eye exam six years ago?

More importantly, why would Will waste Faith's time asking her to go through stuff that was basically trash? She felt her irritation building as she skimmed page after page of useless documentation. Faith could understand why Warren would keep all of this-he would have no way of knowing whether or not it would be important one day, but why would Will want it catalogued into evidence? He didn't strike her as a needle-in-a-haystack kind of person, and with Bernard and Warren behind bars, there were certainly better uses to make of her time.

Slowly, Faith sat up in her chair, holding the dated bill in her hands but not really looking at it. Her mind flashed on different scenes from the last few days: Will reaching for the directory at the dorm even though the sign clearly said it was broken. The way she had found him at the school yesterday morning, his head bent over the newspaper as he touched his finger to each word on the page. Even at Evan Bernard's house today, he had thumbed through every page of the yearbooks rather than simply turning to the index and looking up the man's name, as Faith had done when she'd found the photograph of Mary Clark.

Two days ago, after Evan Bernard's insightful diagnosis that the abductor was functionally illiterate, Faith had had but one question: How can someone get through school without learning how to read and write?

"It happens," Will had told her. He had sounded so certain. Was that because it had happened to him?

Faith shook her head, though she was only arguing with herself. It didn't make sense. You had to have an advanced degree to get into the GBI. They didn't let just anybody in. Barring that, every government agency functioned on mounds and mounds of paperwork. There were reports to fill out, requisitions to be filed, casebooks to be submitted. Had Faith ever seen Will fill out anything? She thought about his computer setup, the fact that he had a microphone. Why would he need a microphone for his computer? Did he dictate his reports?