Fractured (37 page)

The cruiser bumped along construction sites in front of the Coca-Cola building, streetlights illuminating the road. Faith slowed so that the bottom of her car would not be ripped apart.

She said, "I don't want to find the body."

Will looked at her profile, the way the blue lights flashed against her pale skin. He understood what she meant: she wanted Emma Campano to be found, she just didn't want to be the one who discovered her. "She's going to be alive," Will insisted. He could not think otherwise-especially after Warren. "Emma is going to be alive, and she's going to tell us that Evan Bernard did this, that he put Warren up to everything."

Faith kept her own counsel, staring at the road ahead, probably thinking that Will was a fool.

Houses started to appear on the side of the road, dilapidated Victorians and cottages that had been boarded up long ago. Ahead, the cruisers' lights cut off as they approached Evan Bernard's old address. There were no streetlights here. The moon was covered in clouds. At almost midnight, the only source of light came from the automobile headlights.

"Look," Faith said, pointing to the car Adam Humphrey had purchased from a departing grad student. The blue Chevy Impala was one car among many rusted-out heaps parked along a desolate stretch of North Avenue. There had been a priority alert out for two days to locate the vehicle. No one had reported seeing it. Had the car been sitting here the whole time, Emma Campano rotting in the trunk? Or had Warren left her alive to let nature run its course? Even at this time of night, the heat was unbearable. Inside the car would have been twenty to thirty degrees hotter. Her brain would have literally fried in the heat.

Will and Faith got out of the Mini. He shined his Maglite on the houses and vacant lots that lined the street as they walked toward the car. Most of the homes had been torn down, but three had survived. They were utilitarian, wood-frame structures that had probably been thrown up after the Second World War to accommodate Atlanta's population explosion.

Bernard's house was at the end, the street numbers still nailed to the front door. The windows and doors were boarded over. Hurricane fencing had been erected to keep out vagrants, but that hadn't stopped them from digging under in several places. Various drug paraphernalia on the sidewalk and littering the street indicated that some hadn't even bothered to do that.

One of the cops from the cruiser was checking the interior of the Impala. His partner stood beside the car, a crowbar in his hand. Will took the bar and wedged it into the trunk. Without pause, he popped the lock, the metal lid creaking open. They all gagged from the smell of feces and blood.

The trunk was empty.

"The house," Faith said, shining her flashlight back at the looming structure. It was two stories tall, the roof sagging in the middle. "There could be junkies in there. There are needles all over the place."

Wordlessly, Will walked toward the house. He dropped down, wriggling under the fence, pulling himself up on the other side. He did not stop to help Faith as he headed up the broken concrete walk to the house. The front door was nailed shut. Will thought one of the boards over the window looked loose. He pulled it free with his hands. His flashlight showed the dust on the sill had been rubbed away. Someone had been here before him.

He hesitated. Faith was right. This could be a crack house. Dealers and junkies could be conducting business inside. They could be armed, high or both. Either way, they would not exactly welcome the police into their shooting den.

One of the porch boards squeaked. Faith stood behind him, her flashlight shining on the ground.

He kept his voice low. "You don't have to do this."

Faith ignored him as she slid in between the rotted boards.

Will checked on the other cops, making sure they were guarding the front and the rear of the house, before going in after her. Inside, Faith had her gun drawn, the flashlight tucked up beside the muzzle, the same way every cop had been trained to do. The house felt claustrophobic, with its low ceilings and trash piled into the corners. There were more needles than he could count, clumps of tin foil and a few spoons-all the signs that the space was an active shooting den.

Faith pointed down, meaning she would search this level. Will drew his gun and went toward the stairs.

He tested his foot on each tread, hoping he would not step on rotted wood and end up in the basement. There was a tingling at the base of his spine. He reached the top of the stairs, keeping his flashlight aimed low. There was a sliver of moonlight coming through the boarded windows, just enough to see by. Will turned off the light and gently placed it on the floor. He stood there, listening for sounds of life. All he heard was Faith walking downstairs, the house groaning as the heat soaked into the wood.

Will smelled pot, chemicals. They could be in a meth lab. There could be a junkie hiding behind one of the doors, waiting to stick Will with a needle. He stepped forward, his foot crunching broken glass. There were four bedrooms upstairs with one bathroom between them. The door at the end of the hall was closed. All the other doors had been taken off their hinges, probably stolen for scrap. In the bathroom, the fixtures were gone, the copper pipe pulled out of the wall. Holes had been punched into the ceiling. The plaster walls were broken along the light switches where someone had checked for copper wire in the wall. It was aluminum, Will saw, the kind that he had ripped out of his own house because building codes had outlawed its use many years ago.

Faith whispered, "Will?" She was making her way up the stairs. He waited until she was with him, then indicated the closed door at the end of the hallway.

Will stopped in front of the only door. He tried the knob, but it was locked. He indicated that Faith should step back, then lifted his foot and kicked open the door. Will knelt, pointing his gun blindly into the room. Faith's flashlight cut through the dark like a knife, searching corners, the open closet.

The room was empty.

They both holstered their weapons.

"It's just like the other one." Faith shone her flashlight over the faded pink walls, the dirty white trim. There was a bare double mattress on the floor, dark stains flowering at the center. A tripod with a camera was mounted in front of it.

Will took the flashlight and checked the slot for the memory stick. "It's empty."

"We should call Charlie," Faith said, probably thinking about the evidence that needed to be collected, the DNA on the mattress.

"He knows better than to leave traces of himself," Will said. He could not get Evan Bernard's smug face out of his mind. The man was so certain that he wouldn't get caught. He was right. At the moment, all they could charge Bernard with was having sex with Kayla Alexander. Will did not know what the statute of limitations were for Mary Clark, nor was he certain that the woman would testify against a man whom she still considered in many ways to have been her first lover.

There was a scraping noise. Will turned around to see what Faith was doing, but she was standing completely still in the middle of the room. He heard the scrape again, and, this time, he realized it was coming from the ceiling.

Faith mouthed,
Junkie?

Will skimmed the low ceiling with his flashlight, checking every corner of the room. Like the rest of the house, the plaster had been busted out around the light switch. Will saw a dark stain around the hole, what might be a footprint. There was a hole above his head, insulation and Sheetrock hanging down in pieces.

"Emma?" He almost choked on the girl's name, afraid to say the word, to give himself hope. "Emma Campano?" He slammed his hand into the ceiling. "It's the police, Emma."

There was more scraping, the distinctive sound of rats.

"Emma?" Will reached up, tearing chunks of Sheetrock down from the low ceiling. His hands did not work fast enough, so he used the flashlight to make the opening larger. "Emma, it's the police." He dug his foot into the hole in the wall, propelling himself up into the attic.

Will stopped, halfway in the attic, his foot firmly supported by the lath in the wall. Hot air enveloped him, so intense that his lungs hurt from breathing it. The girl lay in a heap up against the eaves. Her skin was covered in a fine, white powder from the Sheetrock. Her eyes were open, her lips together. A large rat was inches from her hand, his retinas flashing like mirrors in the beam of the flashlight. Will pulled himself the rest of the way into the attic. Rats scrambled everywhere. One darted across the girl's arm. He saw scratch marks where the animals had dug into her skin.

"No," Will whispered, crawling on his hands and knees across the supports. Blood congealed on her abdomen and thighs. Welts strangled her neck. Will swung the flashlight at a greedy rat, his heart aching at the sight of the girl. How could he tell Paul that this was how he had found his daughter? There was no smell of decay, no flies burrowing into her flesh. How could any of them go on knowing that only a few hours had separated the girl from life and death?

"Will?" Faith asked, though he could tell from her tone of voice that she knew what he had found.

"I'm sorry," Will told the girl. He could not stand her blank, lifeless stare. He had not believed once during the investigation that she was dead-even when evidence had stacked up to the contrary. He had insisted that there was no way she was gone, and now, all he could think was that his hubris had made the truth that much more unbearable.

Will reached over to close her eyes, pressing his fingers into the lids, gently lowering them. "I'm sorry," he repeated, knowing that would never be enough.

Emma's eyes popped back open. She blinked, focusing on Will.

She was alive.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

FAITH STOOD IN Emma Campano's hospital room, watching Abigail with her daughter. The room was dark, the only light coming from the machines that were hooked up to the girl. Fluids, antibiotics, various mixtures of chemicals designed to make her well again. Nothing could heal her spirit, though. No medical device could revive her soul.

While Faith was pregnant, she had secretly decided that the baby in her womb was a little girl. Blond hair and blue eyes, dimples in her cheeks. Faith would buy her matching pink outfits and braid ribbons into her hair while her daughter talked about school crushes and boy bands and secret wishes.

Jeremy had pretty quickly shattered that dream. Her son's feelings ran toward uncomplicated matters involving football and action heroes. His musical tastes were deplorable and hardly worth talking about. His wishes were hardly secret: toys, video games and-to Faith's horror-the slutty little redhead who lived down the street.

The past few days, Faith had let her mind go to that dark place every parent visits at one time or another: what would I do if the phone rang, the police knocked on the door, and some stranger told me that my child was dead? That was the terror that lurked in every mother's heart, that gruesome fear. It was like knocking on wood or making the sign of the cross-letting the thought come into your mind served as a talisman against the thing actually happening.

Watching Emma sleep, Faith realized there were worse things than getting that phone call. You could get your child back, but her identity-her essence-could be gone. The horrors Emma experienced were written on her body: the bruises, the scratches, the bite marks. Warren had taken his time with the girl, living out every sick fantasy that he could conjure. He had given her neither food nor water. Emma had been forced to defecate and urinate in the same room in which she slept. Her hands and feet had been tied. Repeatedly, she had been strangled to the point of passing out, then resuscitated. The girl had screamed so much that her voice was nothing more than a raw whisper.

Faith could not help herself. Her pity did not lie with the child, but with the mother. She thought about what Will had said earlier, how Evan Bernard had by all rights killed Mary Clark. There were two Emma Campanos now-the one before Warren, and the one after. That little girl Abigail had nursed and played peekaboo with, the pretty child she had taken to school in the mornings and dropped off at movie theaters and malls on the weekends was gone. All that was left was the shell of her girl, an empty vessel that would be filled with the thoughts of a stranger.

Abigail was obviously thinking of these things. She could barely touch the girl, seemed to have to force herself to hold Emma's hand. Faith herself could not even meet the mother's eyes. How could you mourn the death of your child when she was still alive?

Abigail spoke softly. "She's awake."

Slowly, Faith walked over. They had tried to question the girl on the way to the hospital, firing questions at her one after the other. Emma had lain on the gurney, her eyes staring blankly at the ambulance ceiling, her answers coming out in monosyllabic bites. She had gotten progressively agitated until she was cowering against the rails, the impact of her ordeal slowly sinking in. She had become so hysterical that they had sedated her so that she would not hurt herself. Her reaction was strikingly similar to her mother's.

"Hi, honey," Faith began. "Do you remember me?"

The girl nodded. Her eyelids were heavy, though the medication had long worn off. The clock on the heart monitor read 6:33 a.m. Light peeked out around the edges of the metal blinds over the window. The sun had risen unnoticed as she slept.

They had figured out quickly that it was the men who set her off. The male paramedics touching and prodding, even Will trying to hold her hand, had made her panic like a trapped animal. Emma could not stand the sight of any of them, could not tolerate the male doctors. Even her own father upset the girl so much that she became physically ill.

Faith asked Emma, "You sure you want to do this?"

She nodded.

"I need to ask you some questions," Faith told her. "Do you think you can talk to me?"

She nodded again, wincing at the pain when she moved.

Abigail's fingertips touched her daughter's arm. "If it's too much-"

"I want to," Emma insisted, her voice strained, like a person much older than her few years.

"Tell me what you remember," Faith urged, knowing that the girl had probably been doing everything she could to forget.

"It was Kayla," she said, her tone certain. "We heard her screaming. Adam went out in the hall, and I saw the man stab him."

"Warren?"

She nodded.

Abigail reached for the glass of water beside the bed. "Drink something, honey."

"No," she refused. "I need to say."

Faith was surprised at her courage, but then she remembered that twice now, Emma Campano had been written off for dead and twice the girl had fought back. "Tell me what happened."

"Adam told me to hide in the closet." She paused, some of her resolve breaking. "The next thing I remember, I was in the room, and the man was on top of me."

Faith asked, "Did he say anything to you?"

"He said that he loved me." She glanced quickly at her mother. "I told him that I did, too. He was nicer when I did."

"That was smart," Faith told her. "You did what you needed to do to keep him from getting angry."

"Are you sure…" The girl squeezed her eyes shut. The heart monitor beeped. Cold air came out of the vent over the bed. "You're sure he's dead?"

"Yes," Faith told her, putting all the certainty she could in her voice. "I saw him myself. He died last night."

She kept her eyes tightly closed.

"Are you sure that no one else came?" Faith asked. This had been the first question put to the girl, and she was just as unequivocal in her answer then as she was now.

"No."

Faith could not let it go. She had to be sure. "Warren didn't talk about anyone he was working with? No one came into the room with you?"

Her eyes were still closed. Faith thought that she had fallen asleep, but the girl's head moved slowly from side to side. "No one," she said. "I was completely alone."

Abigail reached out, but pulled back her hand, not knowing where she could touch her daughter, which spots would cause comfort or pain. She admitted as much, saying, "I don't know what to do."

Faith took the woman's hand and wrapped it around her daughter's. "You already lost her once. It's up to you to make sure you don't lose her again."

*

FAITH COULD SEE Will and Amanda standing at the end of the hallway outside Emma's room. Both of them looked up at her expectantly. She shook her head, letting them know that Evan Bernard was still in the clear.

Amanda took out her phone and Will said something to stop her. Faith could not hear his voice and, frankly, she did not care. She went back to the row of plastic chairs lining the hallway and sat down with a groan. Her exhaustion was so deep that she felt dizzy. Sleep was all she needed, just a few minutes and then she could go with Will to scour Warren Grier's apartment again. They would turn the man's office upside down at the Copy Right, interview everyone who had ever known him or come into contact with him. Mary Clark had remembered Warren and Bernard together. There was bound to be someone else out there who knew even more than she did.

Faith's head jerked up as she caught herself dozing. Her phone was ringing. She took it out of her pocket, checking the caller ID. It was Victor again. He was nothing if not persistent.

"You gonna get that?" Will asked.

Faith looked up at him. He looked as tired as she felt. "He'll call back." She tucked the phone back into her pocket. "What was that about?"

He slumped into the chair beside her, his long legs blocking the hallway. "The prosecutor says the judge won't deny bail." He rubbed his eyes. "Bernard's going to be out on the streets before noon."

"Did yelling at Amanda help?"

"It's easier to blame her for all the evil things that happen in the world." He put his face in his hands, exhaustion slowing down every move. "What did I miss on this, Faith? How can we keep him locked up?"

Faith thought about what was behind the door across the hall. Warren was dead, but there was still someone out there who should be punished for the crime. They had to make a case against Bernard. Will was right-he had to be punished.

She asked, "What did Amanda say?"

"She's moving on. Emma is back, we've got one dead prisoner and a lawsuit from the Alexanders to deal with. This case has basically been downgraded because we have a living victim." He shook his head. "What kind of job is this where a dead seventeen-year-old is more important than a living one?"

"My boss hasn't taken me off this yet," Faith told him. "I'll work with you as long as they let me."

"Well, that's the other thing."

Faith could hear the trepidation in his voice and it shot a cold chill through her. "Did Amanda find out about the gray powder?"

He looked at her, confused. "Oh," he said, understanding. "No, worse than that. Amanda is going to ask you to be my partner."

Faith was so tired that she was certain she had heard wrong. "Your partner?"

"I understand if you don't want to do it."

"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.