"There's a baby," Will said, so furious that he could barely speak. "A little baby who was dying."
"So there's a baby. What the fuck do I care?"
Rage came in a black, blinding intensity, so that it wasn't until Will was on top of the man, his fist slamming back and forth like a jackhammer, that Will realized what he was doing. And he didn't stop himself. He didn't want to stop. He was thinking about that baby lying in his own shit, the killer shoving him into the trash room so he'd starve to death, the prostitute wanting to trade information about him to get her own ass out of the sling and Angie . . . there was Angie on top of this steaming pile of excrement, pulling Will's strings like she always did, fucking with his head so that he felt like he belonged in the trash heap with all the rest of them.
"Will!" Faith screamed. She was reaching her hands out in front of her the way you do when you're talking to a crazy person. Will felt a deep pain in his shoulders as both cops pinned his arms behind his back. He was panting like a rabid dog. Sweat dripped down his face.
"All right," Faith said, her hands still out as she came closer. "Let's calm down. Just calm down." She put her hands on Will, something he realized she had never done before. Her palms were on his face, forcing him to look at her instead of Simkov, who was writhing on the floor. "Look at me," she ordered, her voice low, like her words were something only they could hear. "Will, look at me."
He forced himself to meet her gaze. Her eyes were intensely blue, wide open in panic. "It's all right," Faith told him. "The baby's gonna be all right. Okay? All right?"
Will nodded, feeling the cops loosen their grip on his arms. Faith was still standing in front of him, still had her hands on his face.
"You're all right," she told him, talking to him in the same tone she had used with the baby. "You're going to be fine."
Will took a step back so that Faith would have to let him go. He could tell she was almost as terrified as the doorman. Will was scared, too—scared that he still wanted to beat the man, that if the cops hadn't been there, if it had just been him and Simkov alone, Will would have beaten him to death with his bare hands.
Faith kept her gaze locked with Will's just a moment longer. Then, she turned her attention to the bloodied pulp on the floor. "Get up, asshole."
Simkov groaned, curling into a ball. "I can't move."
"Shut up." She jerked Simkov's arm.
"My nose!" he yelled, so dizzy that the only thing that kept him up was his shoulder slamming into the wall. "He broke my nose!"
"You're fine." Faith glanced up and down the hall. She was looking for security cameras.
Will did the same, relieved to find none.
"Police brutality!" the man screamed. "You saw it. You're all my witnesses."
One of the cops behind Will said, "You fell, buddy. Don't you remember?"
"I didn't fall," the man insisted. Blood was pooling out of his nose, squeezing through his fingers like water from a sponge.
The other paramedic was starting an IV on the baby. He didn't look up, but said, "Better be careful where you walk next time."
And just like that, Will was the kind of cop he had never wanted to be.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
FAITH'S HANDS WERE STILL SHAKING AS SHE STOOD IN FRONT OF Anna Lindsey's ICU room. The two cops who had been on guard outside the woman's door were chatting with the nurses behind the desk, but they kept glancing up, as if they knew what had happened outside Anna Lindsey's penthouse apartment and weren't quite sure what to think about it. For his part, Will stood across from her, hands in his pockets, eyes staring blankly down the hallway. She wondered if he was in shock. Hell, she wondered if she was in shock.
In both her personal and her private life, Faith had been the focus of a lot of angry men, but she had never witnessed anything like the violence Will had shown. There had been a moment in that hallway outside the Beeston Place penthouse when Faith had been afraid that Will would kill the doorman. It was his face that had shocked her— cold, merciless, driven toward nothing but keeping his fist slamming into the other man's face. Like everyone else's mother in the world, Faith's had always told her to be careful what she wished for. Faith had wished that Will would be a little more aggressive. Now she would give anything to have him back the way he was before.
"They won't say anything," Faith told him. "The cops, the paramedics."
"It doesn't matter."
"You found that baby," she reminded him. "Who knows how long it would've taken before somebody—"
"Stop."
There was a loud ding as the elevator doors opened. Amanda hit the ground at a trot. She scanned the hall, taking in who was around, probably trying to neutralize witnesses. Faith braced herself for crushing recriminations, lightning-fast suspensions, maybe the loss of their badges. Instead, Amanda asked them, "Are you both all right?"
Faith nodded. Will just stared at the floor.
"Glad to see you finally grow a pair," Amanda told Will. "You're suspended without pay for the rest of the week, but don't think for a goddamn minute that means you're going to stop working your ass off for me."
Will's voice sounded thick in his throat. "Yes, ma'am."
Amanda strode toward the stairwell. They followed, and Faith noticed her boss had none of her usual grace, none of her control. She seemed just as shocked as they were.
"Shut the door."
Faith saw that her hands were still shaking as she pulled it closed.
"Charlie's processing Anna Lindsey's apartment," Amanda told them, her voice echoing up the stairs. She adjusted her tone. "He'll call if he finds anything. Obviously, the doorman is off-limits to you." She meant Will. "Forensics should be back tomorrow morning, but don't get your hopes up, considering the state of the apartment. Tech hasn't been able to break into the computers the women were using. They're running all the password programs they have. It could take weeks or months to crack it. The anorexia website is hosted through a shell company in Friesland, wherever the hell that is. It's overseas. They won't give us registration information, but tech was able to pull up the stats for the site on the web. They get around two hundred unique users a month. That's all we know."
Will didn't speak, so Faith asked, "What about the vacant house behind Olivia Tanner's?"
"The shoe prints are for a men's size eleven Nike sold in twelve hundred outlets across the country. We found some cigarette butts in the Coke can behind the bar. We'll try to pull DNA, but there's no telling who they belong to."
Faith asked, "What about Jake Berman?"
"What the hell do you think?" Amanda took a breath as if to calm herself. "We've released a sketch and his booking photo through the state network. I'm sure the press will pick up on it, but we've asked them to hold off at least twenty-four hours."
Faith's mind was jumbled with questions, but nothing would come out. She had been standing in Olivia Tanner's kitchen less than an hour ago and she could not for the life of her remember one detail about the house.