You dumbass was the last thing she’d said to him that night, and the next morning she was gone.
Angie was awful to live with. She was constantly breaking things, borrowing things, never putting his stuff back where it belonged. Will’s mind strained for one single good memory but all he saw was static, the fuzzy white and black patches that used to show on TV when the station went off the air.
Sara squeezed his hand. He looked down at their intertwined fingers. One of the first things he’d noticed about Sara was how long and graceful her fingers were. He didn’t know if that came with being a surgeon or if it was simply because everything about her was beautiful.
He studied her face. Her sharp chin. Her button nose. Her long auburn hair that was pinned up into a swirl at the back of her head.
She usually took her hair down after work. Will knew this was for his sake, that it drove her crazy when her hair fell into her eyes. She was constantly pushing it back and he never told her to pin it up because he was selfish.
Every relationship, romantic or otherwise, had a certain level of selfishness. It went back and forth depending on who was stronger or who needed it most. Amanda sucked up selfishness like a sponge. Faith gave it away too easily. Angie reached down your throat and grabbed it and then kicked you in the balls for thinking you could have it in the first place.
Will had always thought that he and Sara shared an emotional equivalence, but was Will taking all the selfishness for himself? He had lied to her about what had happened with Angie last Saturday. He had lied to her about the letter Angie had left for him in the post office box. He had lied about his and Angie’s joint bank account. He had lied about not doing everything he could do to find her.
Angie. Angie. Angie.
She was dead now. Maybe. Most likely. He would have a clean slate. For the first time in thirty years, Will’s confidante, his torturer, his source of support and source of pain was gone.
He shivered.
Sara turned down the air conditioner. ‘Are you okay?’
‘Yes.’ He looked out the window so she could not see his face. The elephant shifted its weight. Will could almost feel his ribs flex from the pressure. His vision strobed. He opened his mouth and tried to fill his lungs.
They were in midtown. The bright lights outside the window hurt his eyes. His ears buzzed with the fan blowing out cold air from the dash. Underneath the sound, there was music. Soft women’s voices harmonizing over a steel guitar. Sara never turned off the radio, she only turned the volume down low.
She released his hand so that she could put on the blinker. They were at 1885 Sommerset. Instead of a building, there was a house, a sprawling English Tudor that took up half a city block. The lawn sloped toward the street, neatly trimmed grass and well-manicured flowers led up to stone steps.
Angie’s car had been found at a funeral home.
Sara pulled into the parking lot. An old pickup truck with a yellow Lab in the passenger’s seat was leaving the scene. A patrol car was parked on the grass. The officer was sitting behind the wheel typing into the laptop mounted onto the dash. Will recognized Amanda’s Suburban and Faith’s red Mini. Charlie Reed was there in his white crime scene van, but for some reason he was sitting behind the wheel instead of processing Angie’s car. The black Dodge Charger belonged to Collier and Ng. The GBI was still in charge, but Angie’s car had been found in the Atlanta city limits and there was still an active murder investigation.
The two detectives were sitting on the hood the same as they’d been this morning. Ng still had on his wraparound sunglasses. He did the chin nod thing when Will got out of the car. Collier waved, but Amanda must have put them under strict orders to keep their distance, because neither of them approached.
Angie’s Monte Carlo SS was parked in a handicapped space in front of the building. She would park in a handicapped space because that’s what she did. Yellow crime scene tape roped off the area. The trunk was open. The driver’s door was open. Even from twenty yards, Will could smell the sickly sweet odor of death. Or maybe it was like his arm hurting. He only smelled death because someone had planted the idea in his mind.
Amanda came out of a side door. Unusually, her BlackBerry wasn’t in her hand. She had a lot of things she could yell at Will about right now, but she didn’t. ‘Uniformed patrol spotted Angie’s car an hour ago. The funeral home closed at six, but there’s an intern who sleeps here for overnight calls.’
‘An intern?’ Will tried to ask the question that a cop would.
‘From the local mortuary school.’ Amanda crossed her arms. ‘He was picking up a body at a nursing home when the uni found Angie’s car. Faith is talking to him in the chapel.’
Will studied the house. He guessed the large two-story structure at the end was the chapel.
Amanda said, ‘The uni smelled an odor. He popped the trunk using the latch inside the car. He called in the cadaver dog. It hit on the scent immediately.’
Will looked at the car again. Parked at an angle. Hastily abandoned. The windows were down. His vision flashed up an image: Angie slumped over the wheel. He blinked and it was gone.
‘Will?’ Sara said.
He looked at her.
‘Why are you rubbing your chest?’
Will hadn’t realized he was rubbing his chest. He stopped. He told Amanda, ‘There are license plate scanners on Spring and Peachtree.’
She nodded. Scanners all over the city tracked the movement of traffic and searched for the license plates of stolen or suspect vehicles. ‘The data is being sent to the computer division for analysis.’
Will looked out at the street. Sommerset and Spring was a busy corner. Midtown was heavily monitored. Every major intersection had a camera.
Amanda said, ‘We’ve requested footage from GDOT and APD. We’ll comb through it as soon as it’s in hand. Search teams are on the way.’
Will said what she already knew. ‘Someone left the car here. They would need to drive away or—’
‘I’ve got everybody in the state looking for Delilah Palmer.’
Will had forgotten about Dale Harding’s wife or daughter or both. Palmer was a young prostitute with a drug problem. She had grown up in the system. The only parent she’d ever known had exploited her. She could’ve been Angie twenty years ago, except that Angie had managed to pull herself out. Or at least make it seem that way. Will wasn’t so sure she had managed to escape anything.
Sara’s hand pressed against the small of his back. ‘You okay?’
Will walked toward the car. The smell grew more pungent as he got closer. You didn’t need a bloodhound to know that something bad had happened here. He stopped at the crime scene tape. The trunk of Angie’s car was lined with a scratchy charcoal-colored carpet that he’d gotten from a roll at Pep Boys. He had leaned over the trunk for hours lining up the seams, gluing it in place.
Amanda shined a police-issue Maglite into the trunk. There was a dark stain in the carpet, just a little off from the center. The only thing in the trunk was a red plastic bottle of transmission fluid.
Will knelt down. He examined the pavement under the car. The transmission was leaking. The car was probably his now. He would have to fix it before he sold it.
‘Will?’ Sara put her hand on his shoulder. She knelt beside him. ‘Look at me.’