Fractured (Will Trent 2)

"She's a fucking mess—face like raw hamburger, blood everywhere. I'm surprised the mother even recognized her." Leo paused, obviously seeing Will wanted a more concrete answer. "My guess? He beat her, then stabbed her to death."

Again, Will looked at the dead man on the floor. His palms were covered with dried blood, not what you would expect from a closed fist beating someone repeatedly, or, for that matter, a hand holding a knife. The knees of his black jeans looked dark, too, as if he had knelt in something wet. His T-shirt was bunched up just below his ribs. A fresh bruise spread down into the waist of his pants.

Will asked, "Was the mother injured?"

"Scratches on the back of her arms and hands, like I said before. There's a pretty deep cut on the palm from the glass on the floor." Leo catalogued, "Lots of bruises, busted lip, some blood in her ear. Maybe a sprained ankle. I thought it was broke, but she moved it." He rubbed his mouth, probably wishing there was a cigarette in it. "I called an ambulance, but she said she wasn't leaving until her daughter's removed."

"She say it like that, ‘removed'?"

Leo mumbled a curse under his breath as he pulled a spiral-bound notebook out of his pocket. He flipped to the right page and showed it to Will.

Will frowned at the indecipherable scrawl. "Did you fingerprint a chicken?"

Leo turned the notebook back around and read aloud, " ‘I will not leave my daughter here. I am not leaving this house until Emma leaves.' "

Will rolled the name around in his head, and the girl started to become a person to him rather than just another anonymous victim. She had been a baby once. Her parents had held her, protected her, given her a name. And now they had lost her.

He asked, "What's the mother saying?"

Leo flipped the notebook closed. "Just the bare facts. I'd bet my left one she was a lawyer before she got knocked up and gave it all up for the good life."

"Why is that?"

"She's being real careful about what she says, how she says it. Lots of ‘I felt this' and ‘I feared that.' "

Will nodded. A plea of self-defense relied solely on a person's perception that he or she was in imminent danger of death at the time of the attack. Campano was obviously laying the groundwork, but Will didn't know if that was because she was smart or because she was telling the truth. He looked down at the dead man again, the blood-caked palms, the soaked shirt. There was more here than met the eye.

Leo put his hand on Will's shoulder. "Listen, I gotta warn you—"

He stopped as the pocket doors slid open. Amanda stood beside a young woman. Behind them, Will could see another woman sitting on a deep couch. She was wearing a white tennis outfit. What must have been her injured foot was propped up on the coffee table. Her tennis shoes were on the floor underneath.

"Special Agent Trent," Amanda said, sliding the doors closed behind her. "This is Detective Faith Mitchell." Amanda looked Leo up and down like a bad piece of fish, then turned back to the woman. "Special Agent Trent is at your disposal. The GBI is more than happy to offer you any and all help." She raised an eyebrow at Will, letting him know that the opposite was true. Then, maybe because she thought he was stupid, she added, "I need you back in the office within the hour."

The fact that Will had anticipated this very thing happening did not make him any more prepared. His car was parked back at city hall. Donnelly was going to be stuck on the scene until they cleared it and any one of the beat cops outside would love a chance to get Will Trent alone in the back of a squad car.

"Agent Trent?" Faith Mitchell seemed annoyed, which made Will think he'd missed something.

He asked, "I'm sorry?"

"Yeah, you are," she mumbled, and Will could only blink, wondering what he had missed.

Leo didn't seem to find anything unusual about the exchange. He asked the woman, "The mother say anything?"

"The daughter's got a best friend." Like Leo, Faith Mitchell carried a small spiral-bound notebook in her pocket. She paged through it to reference the name. "Kayla Alexander. The mother says we can probably find her at school. Westfield Academy."

Will recognized the expensive private high school on the outskirts of Atlanta. "Why wasn't Emma in school?"

Faith answered Leo, though Will had asked the question. "There've been some truancy issues in the past."

Will was hardly an expert, but he couldn't imagine a teenage girl skipping school without taking her best friend along with her. Unless she was meeting her boyfriend. He looked at the stairs again, wishing that he could go up and examine the scene. "Why wasn't the mom here today?"

Faith said, "She's got some weekly thing at her club. She usually doesn't get back until three."

"So, if someone was watching the house, they'd know that Emma was here alone."

Faith told Leo, "I need some air." She walked out the door and stood at the edge of the porch with her hands on her hips. She was young, probably in her early thirties, of average height, and pretty in the way that thin blond women were naturally thought to be pretty—but there was something that kept her from being attractive. Maybe it was the scowl that had been on her face or the flash of raw hatred in her eyes.

Leo mumbled an apology. "Sorry, man. I was trying to tell you—"

Across the foyer, the pocket doors slid open again. Abigail Campano stood at the entrance, leg bent at an angle so she wouldn't put weight on her hurt ankle. Unlike Faith, there was something radiant about her blond hair and perfect, milky white skin. Even though her eyes were swollen from crying, her lip still bleeding where it had been busted open, the woman was beautiful.

"Ms. Campano," Will began.

"Abigail," she softly interrupted. "You're the agent from the GBI?"

"Yes, ma'am. I'd like to offer my condolences."

She stared at him in confusion, probably because she still hadn't come to terms with her daughter's death.

"Can you tell me a little bit about your daughter?"

The blank stare did not go away.

Will tried, "You told Detective Donnelly that she had been skipping school lately?"

She nodded slowly. "Obviously, she managed to..." Her voice trailed off as she looked at the dead man on the floor. "Kayla got her into skipping last year. She'd never done anything like that before. She was always a good girl. Always trying to do the right thing."

"There were other problems?"

"It all seems so inconsequential." Her lips trembled as she held back her emotions. "She started talking back, doing her own thing. She was trying to be her own person, and we still wanted her to be our little girl."

"Other than Kayla, did Emma have any friends? Boyfriends?"

Abigail shook her head, wrapping her arms around her waist. "She was so shy. She didn't make new friends easily. I don't know how this could have happened."

"Does Kayla have a brother?"

"No, she's an only child." Her voice caught. "Like Emma."

"Do you think you could make a list of the other kids she hung out with?"

"There were acquaintances, but Emma always picked one person to. .." Again, her voice trailed off. "She had no one but Kayla, really." There was something to her tone that was so final, so certain about her daughter's aloneness in the world, that Will could not help but feel some of her sadness. He also hoped to God that Leo was making plans to talk to this Kayla. If she was as much an influence in Emma Campano's life as her mother indicated, then she probably knew a lot more about what had happened here today than anyone else did.