What?
When Will was a kid and things got crazy, he’d imagine that his brain was a stack of lunch trays. He’d always been a big fan of food served in compartments—pizza in the big rectangle, corn, tater-tots and apple sauce in the squares. Visualizing trays gave him clearly defined sections to store his problems so that he could deal with them later. Or not. The stacking system had gotten him through some harrowing times. If a foster parent was rough with him, or a teacher yelled at him for being stupid, he would put that bad feeling in a compartment and when all the compartments got full, he would toss another tray on the stack.
Will didn’t know where to store the three conversations with Sara. The last two made very little sense. Sara normally refused to talk about dinner before lunchtime. She was never, ever going to bring Will McDonald’s. That left the first call, which had lasted less than one minute, to scrutinize. Sara had sounded confused, then angry, then robotic, then like she was about to start crying.
Will rubbed his jaw.
He was missing the most obvious clue.
Sara had told him she was standing in the middle of a parking lot. That’s why she had ended the call. She was not going to break down in front of an audience. For all of her talk about open lines of communication, she tended to Michigan J. Frog her emotions. In public, her mood was always steady. In private, she could break down in a way that not many people would guess she was capable of. Will could count on one hand the number of times he had seen Sara absolutely lose it. Sometimes it happened when she was angry, sometimes when she was hurt, but always, always, she did it behind closed doors.
He looked into the rearview mirror. The road stretched behind him. Sara was half the state away by now. He slid his phone out of his pocket. He could locate Sara with an app, but he knew where Sara was, and the app would not tell him what she was thinking.
Will looked down at his phone. The lock screen showed a photo of her with the dogs. Betty was tucked up under Sara’s chin. Bob and Billy, her two giant greyhounds, were both pushing their way into her lap. Sara’s glasses were askew. She’d been trying to do a crossword puzzle. She’d started laughing and Will had taken the picture and she had begged him to erase it because she thought she looked goofy, so Will had set it as his wallpaper, and none of that mattered right now because—
Why hadn’t she texted him?
“Good Lord, Will. How do you sit here?” Faith demanded. “I mean, physically, how does your body fit into this space?”
Will glanced over. She was pushing back on her seat, trying to steal some legroom.
“Emma’s car seat is in the way.”
She asked, “Why didn’t you move it?”
“It’s your car.”
“And you’re a giant man.” She got on her knees to make room in the back.
Will stuck his phone in his pocket. He tried to keep up the conversation. “I thought they were hard to put in. Car seats.”
“It’s not rocket surgery.” She raked back her seat and stretched out her legs in the glorious free space. “Do you know how many Saturdays I spent stopping parents to check their seats when I was in uniform? You wouldn’t believe how stupid people are. There was this one couple—”
Will struggled to pay attention to the story, which took an unexpected turn into a drug bust and having to call animal control. He waited until Faith took a breath then nodded toward her notes. “Anything stick out?”
“The cell phones are bothering me.” She had zeroed in on Daryl Nesbitt’s offer to trade information. “The operation has to be sophisticated. More so than the usual. Before the riot, the warden confiscated four hundred phones. That’s a hell of a lot to keister in. I mean, I’ve seen an asshole. I’ve seen a phone. I don’t get how it works. Like, physically. Look at my phone.”
Will looked at the iPhone X in her hand. He told her, “One of those could fetch three thousand dollars inside.”
“I could probably do two at a time.”
Her phone dinged with a message. Then another message. Then another.
Will guessed Amanda was behind the dings. She sent each sentence in its own separate text because the Geneva Conventions did not apply to her team.
Faith summarized, “Amanda says Nesbitt has serious medical issues with his leg, and that’s what’s driving the one-week deadline. I assume the fact that she’s texting means they’re at the funeral home.”
Will looked at the clock. Amanda had made good time. He guessed Lena’s house was another ten minutes away. They had already swung by the Macon Police Department, hoping to surprise her. They’d been the ones who were surprised. Lena was home on maternity leave. She was a month from her due date.
Faith said, “I should take the lead with Lena.”
Will hadn’t considered a strategy, but he said, “That makes sense. She’s pregnant. You’ve got two kids.”
“I’m not bonding with that dingo over motherhood.” Faith scowled. “I hate pregnant women. Especially first-timers. They’re so smug, like something magical took place and suddenly, they’re growing life. You know how I magically grew Jeremy? I let a horny fifteen-year-old moron trick me into thinking I couldn’t get pregnant if it was only the tip.”
Will studied the GPS display on the dashboard.
Faith said, “I should take the lead with Lena because I’ve met your lying, duplicitous bitch of an ex-wife. And I’ve read your case notes from the last two times you investigated Lena.”
“Only the first time was an investigation. And she was cleared of wrongdoing. At least any wrongdoing I could prove.” Will realized he wasn’t exactly defending himself. “The second time was happenstance. Lena just happened to be caught up with some guys who—”
“‘Just happened to be caught up.’” Faith gave him a pointed look. “You don’t step in dog shit unless you’re following a dog.”
Will was no stranger to a dog park. “All you have to do is look down.”
Faith groaned. “You don’t see the bad in Lena. You don’t see the bad in anybody who’s like her.”
Will had to concede, silently, that she could perhaps, possibly, be right. He had always had a soft spot for angry, damaged women. More often than not, the person they hurt the most was themselves.
He also had to concede that they hadn’t driven to Macon for a therapy session. They were trying to get information from Lena, and Will of all people knew how difficult that was going to be.
He told Faith, “She’s changeable.”
“Like a demon?”
“Like a person you trust until you don’t trust them,” Will said. “You’re talking to her, and what she’s saying makes sense, but then, suddenly, without you seeing why or when it happened, she’s angry or she’s hurt or she’s paranoid and you’re dealing with an angry, hurt, paranoid person.”
“Sounds lovely.”
“The hard part is, sometimes she can be a really good cop.” He caught Faith’s snort of disbelief. “She has the instinct. She knows how to talk to people. She doesn’t cheat all of the time. Just some of the time.”
“Being a little corrupt is like being a little pregnant,” Faith said. “What I really want to get my hands on is Lena’s notebooks. This was one of her first big cases. Amanda’s right—when you’re just starting out, you write down every fart in the wind. That’s where Lena would’ve made her mistakes. We can hang her with her own words.”
Will knew she was right. Those first few years on the job, your spiral-bound notebook felt like a diary. Your boss didn’t check it over. It wasn’t an official, sworn report. It wasn’t a statement of fact. It was where you put down stray thoughts and niggling details that you wanted to follow up on. And then a defense attorney subpoenaed it and a judge agreed and the next thing you knew, you were sweating it out on the witness stand trying to explain that DQ was where you’d gone to lunch, not the initials of an alternate suspect who could be the real murderer.
Will said, “Lena’s cunning. The second we ask for her notebooks, she’s going to know we’re trying to jam her up. And she’s had plenty of time to think about it. Tons of people saw us at the station. There’s no way she didn’t get a call that the GBI asked for her location.”
“Cops are such bitchy little gossips,” Faith complained. “But we didn’t tell anybody which case we’re looking into. Lena’s probably got a lot of cases she’s worried about. Her luck is going to run out eventually, and I’m going to be there with the handcuffs.”
Will was surprised by her vehemence. “When did you get such a hard-on for her?”
“She’s thirty-two years old. She’s got fifteen years of policing under her belt. She doesn’t get the benefit of the doubt anymore. Plus,” Faith held up her finger, as if to signify this was the important part, “I’m Sara’s friend. The enemy of my friend is my nemesis.”
“I don’t think that’s what Churchill said.”