Triptych (Will Trent 1)

“How recent?”

Four months ago, fifteen-year-old Julie Cooper had been brutally raped, her tongue bitten in two. There was no telling how long her attacker had been operating under the radar. He told Leo, “Let’s go back at least eight months.”

“Just Atlanta or metro area, too?”

“Metro,” Will said, knowing that he’d just tripled the work.

“They don’t exactly keep that list up-to-date,” Leo pointed out. “I’ll have to do some cross-checking, mark off the ones that went back in, moved away, whatever.”

“I appreciate it.” Will felt the need to add, “I know this is a needle in a haystack, but we don’t have much more to go on.”

“I’m with you, man.” Leo stood up. “Shouldn’t take more than a day or so to get them together. You want me to leave them on your desk?”

“That’d be great.”

“I’ll take the first half,” Leo offered. “We’re working this together, right?”

“Right,” Will echoed, though he didn’t exactly count Donnelly as an ally.

Will took out his cell phone as Leo shut the door. He dialed Angie’s number, listened to the rings as he waited for her to answer.

She must have recognized his number on the caller ID. “What’s up?”

“Why would Michael’s wife file a restraining order against him?”

She exhaled slowly, taking her time with the answer. “Because he beats her.”

Will felt as if he had been beaten himself.

She asked, “You there?”

He didn’t think he could form the words. “Did he hit you, Angie?”

“What you should be asking is how long they’ve been married.”

“Did he ever hit you?”

“No, Will. He never hit me.”

“Are you lying to me?”

Her laugh was that strange, disaffected laugh she gave when she needed to distance herself from something. “Why would I lie to you, baby?”

“Aleesha’s pimp got shot this morning.”

“It wasn’t me.”

“Can you be serious for just one minute?”

“What do you want me to say, Will?”

“There’s a missing girl,” he told her. “Her name is Jasmine Allison. She lives three floors down from Aleesha’s place. Sunday night, somebody paid her twenty bucks to make a phone call to the police to report that Aleesha was being attacked. Now, she’s missing.”

Angie’s tone changed. “When was she last seen?”

“Yesterday afternoon.”

“Do you have any leads?”

“None.”

“How old is she?”

“Fourteen.”

Angie let out a soft breath. “Is anyone downtown taking this seriously?”

“Yeah, they’re bending over backward to help the GBI.”

She tried to take up for them. “They’ve got a lot of work to do down there.”

“I’m not saying they don’t.”

“Has she run away before?”

“Twice.”

“It’s not something I’d put at the top of my roster if I was working in missing persons. Teenage girls run away all the time. We both know that. They’ve probably got hotter cases right now.”

“Her home situation’s not that bad.”

“People run away for other reasons.” Angie would know. She’d run away so many times that even Will had lost count.

He looked at the copy he’d made of the letter Aleesha had written to her mother. She’d used pencil on lined paper, so the reproduction wasn’t that good. He tried to pick out some words but his eyes couldn’t focus. Aleesha had probably run away from home, too.

Angie offered, “I’ll talk to some people I know downtown and see if I can light a fire under them. They might take it better from me than some cocksucker from the GBI.”

“Thank you.”

Will closed the phone and looked at the display.

It was time to pay Aleesha Monroe’s mother a visit.

Will seldom drove his car to work unless he knew that he would be on his own that day. Most of the time, he took his motorcycle in so that whoever he was partnered with had to drive. Unless he was going to one of his usual haunts—the grocery store, the local Cuban restaurant, the movies—putting him behind the wheel of a car was an invitation to get lost. He could read street signs eventually, but only at the expense of the other cars behind him. Maps, with their tiny print that skipped across the page, might as well have been written in Swahili and when he got frustrated, which tended to happen when the horns started blaring, Will quickly forgot how to tell left from right.

Driving to Miriam Monroe’s house was an exercise in patience. Will ignored the angry stares and nasty shouts as he slowly made his way up DeKalb Avenue. The Monroes lived in Decatur near Agnes Scott College, a pricey little area with old Victorians and the sorts of houses most people could only dream about. Fortunately, the neighborhood wasn’t large and with a little trial and error, he would find her house before the sun went down.

Will tapped his foot on the brake as he followed the fork across the railroad tracks and onto College Avenue. He tried not to take it personally when a skinny old woman in a powder blue Cadillac sped past him, her fist shaking in the air.

With great effort, Will had managed to push Angie from his mind. He needed to work the case from the beginning to see if there was anything he had missed. There had to be some detail, some clue, that he just wasn’t picking up on.

Thirty-two Paisley Avenue was a grand old home with a wraparound porch and a massive weeping willow draping its branches across the front yard. The house was sandblasted brick on the bottom and darkly painted shingles along the top. The tile roof was covered with pine needles, and Will imagined with the large number of trees in the yard, the Monroes had a constant battle on their hands just keeping the gutters clean.

He parked his car on the street and double-checked the mailbox, making out the name MONROE in bold black letters. Still, he checked the street number against the address from the envelope.

The doorbell was the old-fashioned kind that was an actual bell mounted to the center of the heavy front door. Will twisted the bow-tie piece of metal and could hear the shrill ring echoing in the house.

Footsteps clicked on tile; a woman’s as well as a dog’s.

“Hello?”

Will assumed a wary eye was pressed to the peephole in the door. This was a nice neighborhood, but they were still close enough to Atlanta to make the residents careful about opening their doors to strangers.

“I’m Agent Will Trent with the Georgia Bureau of Investigation,” Will said, holding up his identification. “I’m looking for Miriam Monroe.”

There was a hesitation, maybe a sigh, then the bolt was turned and the door opened.

Miriam Monroe looked just like her daughter. At least, her daughter would have looked like this had she lived a different life. Where Aleesha had been malnourished, almost skeletal, her mother was a robust woman, with long curly hair and an open way about her that seemed to invite people in. There was a glow in her cheeks, a sparkle in her eyes, and even though her mouth was pursed as she stared at Will, her expression guarded as she waited for him to speak, he could tell that she was the sort of woman who sought out the positive in life.