“It doesn’t matter.” She put down the bottle of water, her shaking hands spilling some onto the carpet. “What else?”
“We’re trying to track down your brother.” Dr. Zeke Mitchell was a surgeon in the Air Force, stationed somewhere in Germany. “Amanda reached out to a friend at Dobbins Air Reserve. They’re cutting through some of the red tape.”
“My phone …” She seemed to realize where she’d left it. “Mama has his number by the phone in the kitchen.”
“I’ll get it as soon as we’re finished,” Will promised. “Tell me what happened.”
She took a stuttered breath. He could see her struggle with the knowledge of what she had done. “I killed two people.”
Will held both her hands. Her skin was still cold and clammy. She had a slight tremor, but he didn’t think it was from her blood sugar issues. “You saved two little girls, Faith.”
“The man in the bedroom—” She stopped. “I don’t understand what happened.”
“Are you confused again? Do you need me to get Dr. Linton?”
“No.” She shook her head for so long he thought maybe he should get Sara anyway. “She’s not bad, Will. My mom is not a dirty cop.”
“We don’t need to talk about—”
“Yes, we do,” Faith insisted. “Even if she was, which she’s not, she’s been retired for five years. She’s not on the job anymore. She doesn’t go to the fundraisers or the events. She doesn’t talk to anybody from that old life. She plays cards on Fridays with some of the ladies in the neighborhood. She goes to church every Wednesday and Sunday. She watches Emma while I’m at work. Her car is five years old. She just made the last mortgage payment on the house. She’s not mixed up in anything. There’s no reason for anybody to think …” Her lip started to tremble. Tears threatened to fall.
Will told her the concrete things he could point to. “There’s a mobile command center outside. All the highways are being watched. Evelyn’s photo is on all the news stations. Every cruiser policing the metro area has her picture. We’re lighting up all the snitches to see if they’ve heard anything. They’ve trapped and traced all your phones in case any ransom demands are made. Amanda pitched a fit, but they put one of their detectives in your house to monitor all mail and calls. Jeremy’s at your house. They’ve got a plainclothes assigned to him. You’ll get somebody, too.”
Faith had worked kidnapping cases before. “Do you really think there’s going to be a ransom demand?”
“It could happen.”
“They were Texicanos. They were looking for something. That’s why they took her.”
Will asked, “What were they looking for?”
“I don’t know. The house was turned upside down. The Asian said he’d trade my mother for whatever they were looking for.”
“The Asian said he’d trade?”
“Yes, he had a gun on the Texicano—the one in the backyard.”
“Hold on.” They were doing this the wrong way. “Work with me, Faith. Treat your memory like a crime scene. Start from the beginning. You had that in-service this morning, right? Computer training?”
She started to nod. “I was late getting home by almost two hours.” She laid out every detail from her morning until now, how she had tried to call her mother, how she’d heard music playing in the house when she got out of her car. Faith hadn’t realized that something was wrong until well after the music stopped. Will let her run through the story—the torn-up house, the dead man she’d found and the two that she had killed herself.
When she was finished, he played it all back in his head, seeing Faith standing in the carport by the shed, going back to her car. Despite her recent medical issues, her memory seemed crystal clear now. She had called dispatch, and then she had gotten her gun. Will felt this detail picking at a spot in his brain. Faith knew that Will was home today. They had talked about it yesterday afternoon. She was complaining about having to go do computer training, and he told her he was going to wash his car and take care of the yard. Will lived 2.3 miles away from where they were sitting. He could’ve gotten here in under five minutes.
But Faith hadn’t called him.
“What is it?” she asked. “Did I miss something?”
He cleared his throat. “What was the song that was playing when you pulled up?”
“AC/DC,” she said. “ ‘Back in Black.’ ”
The detail seemed strange. “Is that what your mom usually listens to?”
She shook her head. She was obviously still in shock, her mind reeling from what had happened.
He wrapped his hands around her arms, trying to get her to concentrate. “Think this through, all right?” He waited for her to look at him. “There are two dead men in the house. Both are Asian. The guy in the backyard is Mexican. Los Texicanos.”
She focused herself. “The Asian in the bedroom—he was wearing this loud Hawaiian shirt. He sounded southside.” She meant his accent. “He had a gun on the Texicano. He was threatening to kill him.”
“Did he say anything else?”
“I shot him.” Her lip started to tremble again.
Will had never seen Faith cry and he didn’t want to now. “The guy in the shirt had a gun pointed at someone’s head,” he reminded her. “The Texicano was already beaten up, possibly tortured. You feared for his life. That’s why you pulled the trigger.”
She nodded, though he could see self-doubt brimming in her eyes.
He said, “After Hawaiian Shirt went down, the Texicano ran out into the yard, right?”
“Right.”
“And you chased after him, and he raised his gun toward those little girls and fired, so you shot him, too, right?”
“Yes.”
“You were protecting the hostage in the bedroom and you were protecting those two girls in your neighbor’s backyard. Right?”
“Yes,” she said, her voice stronger. “I was.”
She was getting back to her old self. Will allowed himself to feel a little bit of relief. He dropped her hands. “You remember the directive, Faith. Deadly force is authorized when your life or the lives of others are at stake. You did your job today. You just have to articulate what you were thinking. People were in danger. You shoot to immediately stop the threat. You don’t shoot to wound.”
“I know.”
“Why didn’t you wait for backup?”
She didn’t answer.
“The dispatcher told you to wait outside. You didn’t wait outside.”
Faith still didn’t answer.
Will sat back on the table, hands between his knees. Maybe she didn’t trust him. They had never talked openly about the case he’d built against her mother, but he knew Faith assumed that it was the detectives on the squad, not the captain in charge, who had messed up. As smart as she was, she was still naïve about the politics of the job. Will had noticed in every corruption case he’d worked that the heads that tended to roll in this business were the ones that didn’t have gold stars on their collars. Faith was too low on the food chain to have that kind of protection.