"The same way you handle everything else?"
The room went silent. Even the fan on Hamish's computer stopped spinning.
Abigail did not seem concerned that she had an audience. "Where were you, Paul? How did you handle it when Emma started hanging around Kayla?"
"That's not—"
"You said she was just acting out, that she was just being a teenager. To leave her alone. Look where leaving her alone got her. She sure as hell is alone now."
Paul was wholly unconvincing when he mumbled, "She was just being a kid."
"She was?" Abigail repeated. "You're still spouting that same parental wisdom? ‘Just let her figure things out on her own,' you said. ‘Just let her sow some wild oats.' Just like you did at that age. Only, look at you now—you're just a pathetic, needy bastard who can't even keep his daughter safe."
"I know you're upset," Paul said, sounding like the reasonable one. "Let's just talk about this later."
"That's exactly what you told me," she insisted. "Time and time again, you said we'd just talk about it later. Emma skipped school? We'll talk about it later. Emma's failing English? Talk about it later. Later, later, later. It's later!" She threw the phone across the room, smashing it into pieces against the wall. "It's later, Paul. Do you want to talk about it now? Do you want to tell me how I'm overreacting, how I'm the crazy one, I'm the overprotective one, how I just need to calm down and let kids be kids?" Her voice caught. "Are you calm, Paul? Are you calm while you're thinking about what that man, that animal, is doing to our daughter?"
All of the color drained from Paul's face. "Don't say that."
"You know what he's doing to her," she hissed. "You always said she was your beautiful girl. Do you think you're the only man who thinks that? Do you think you're the only man who can't control himself around hot young blondes?"
Paul glanced at Will nervously, telling him, "Get out."
"Don't," Abigail told Will. "I want you to hear this. I want you to know how my loving and devoted husband screws every twenty-year-old who crosses his path." She indicated her face, her body. "It's the car salesman in him. Every time one model gets out of date, he trades up to the newer one."
"Abigail, this isn't the time."
"When is the time?" she demanded. "When is it time for you to fucking grow up and admit that you were wrong?" Her fury heightened with each word. "I trusted you! I trusted you to keep us safe. I looked the other way because I knew that at the end of the day, you would always come back home to me."
"I did. I do." He was trying to soothe her, but Will could see it only made her angrier. "Abby—"
"Don't say my name!" she screamed, throwing her fists into the air. "Don't speak to me. Don't look at me. Don't say a God damn word to me until my daughter is home."
She ran toward the front door, slamming it behind her. Will heard her footsteps as she ran down the steps. When he looked out the window, he could see her on her knees in the grass, bending over at the waist as she keened.
"Get out," Paul said. His chest was heaving up and down as if the wind had been knocked out of him. "Please—just for now. Both of you. Just please get out."
CHAPTER NINE
FAITH STOOD OUTSIDE the morgue, her finger pressed into one ear to block out the noise as she talked to Ruth Donner on her cell phone. Tracking down Kayla Alexander's former nemesis had been somewhat easier than speaking in front of a group of terrified teenagers. In retrospect, Olivia McFaden's relieving her of the podium had been somewhat reminiscent of Travis and Old Yeller in the woodshed.
Still, Faith had managed to persuade Olivia McFaden to put her in touch with Ruth Donner's mother. The woman had given Faith an earful about Kayla Alexander, then volunteered her daughter's cell phone number. Ruth was a student at Colorado State. She was studying early childhood education. She wanted to be a schoolteacher.
"I couldn't believe it was Kayla," Ruth said. "It's been all over the news here."
"Anything you could think of would help," Faith said, raising her voice over the whir of a bone saw. She went up the stairs to the next landing, but she could still hear the motor. "Have you seen her since you left school?"
"No. Truthfully, I haven't had much contact with anybody since I left."
Faith tried, "Can you think of anyone who might want to hurt her?"
"Well, I mean.. ." Her voice trailed off. "Not to be cruel about it, but she wasn't very well liked."
Faith bit back the "no shit" that wanted to come, asking instead, "Did you know her friend Emma?"
"Not really. I saw her with Kayla, but she never said anything to me." She remembered, "Well, sometimes she would stare at me, but you know how it is. If your best friend hates somebody, then you have to hate them, too." She seemed to realize how childish that sounded. "God, it was all so desperate when I was in the middle of it, but now I look back and wonder why the heck any of it mattered, you know?"
"Yeah," Faith agreed, feeling in her gut that this was a dead end. She had checked flight manifests going in and out of Atlanta for the last week. Ruth Donner's name had not shown up on any airline manifests. "You have my number. Will you call me if you remember anything?"
"Of course," Ruth agreed. "Will you let me know if you find her?"
"Yes," Faith promised, though updating Ruth Donner wasn't high on her list of priorities. "Thank you."
Faith ended the call and tucked her phone into her pants pocket. She went back down the stairs, the scent of burned bone wafting up to meet her. Despite her earlier bravado with Will Trent, she hated being in the morgue. The dead bodies didn't bother her so much as the atmosphere, the industrial processing of death. The cold marble tile that wrapped floor to ceiling to deflect stains. The drains on the floor every three feet so that blood and matter could be washed away. The stainless steel gurneys with their big rubber wheels and plastic mattresses.
Summer was the medical examiner's peak period, a particularly brutal time of year. Often, you would find ten or twelve bodies stacked in the freezer. They lay there like pieces of meat waiting to be butchered for clues. The very thought brought an almost unbearable sadness.
Pete Hanson was holding up a pile of bloody, wet intestines when Faith walked in. He smiled brightly, giving her his usual greeting. "The prettiest detective in the building!"
She willed her stomach not to heave as he dropped the intestines onto a large scale. Despite being underground, the room was always disgustingly warm in the summer months, the compressor on the freezer pushing heat into the confined space faster than the air-conditioning could keep up with it.
"This one was full as a tick," Pete mumbled, writing down the number from the scale.
Faith had never met a coroner who wasn't eccentric in one way or another, but Pete Hanson was a special kind of freaky. She understood why he'd been divorced three times. The perplexing question was how he had found three women out there in the world who had agreed to marry him in the first place.