The Kept Woman (Will Trent 8)

The swinging door banged open. Amanda, then Sara, then Charlie, crammed into the small vestibule.

Amanda asked Belcamino, ‘Where do you store the bodies?’

‘There’s a buzzer.’ His eyes darted toward the desk. Will let him go. The kid reached underneath the desk and found the button. The rear set of doors arced open.

Light green tiled walls. Dark green linoleum floor. Chemical smells. Bright lights. Low ceiling. About the size of a school classroom. There was a body at the front of the room. Elderly man. Wrinkled skin. White tufts of hair. A cloth covered his genitals. Tubes went out of his neck and connected him to a machine with a canister.

The walk-in freezer was in the back. Large stainless-steel door. Reinforced glass window. Amanda was already there. Her hand hovered over a green lighted button to open the door.

Will traversed the room. This was the second time today he’d walked toward an unknown, thinking that he was going to find Angie’s body. His vision sharpened. His ears picked up every sound.

The freezer door made a heavy clicking sound. Cold air seeped out from around the edges. An automatic arm opened the door at a glacial pace. Will had worked in a grocery store once. The walk-in where they kept the frozen foods was not dissimilar. Shelves on each side. Six tiers evenly spaced floor-to-ceiling. About fifteen feet deep, maybe ten feet high. Instead of bags of peas on the shelves, there were black body bags.

Four on one side. Four on the other.

‘Fuck me.’ Belcamino ripped a clipboard off the wall. He ran into the freezer. He checked the labels on the bags against the list. He was on the last body when he stopped. ‘There’s no tag.’

Will started to go inside. Sara caught him by the wrist. ‘You know you can’t be the one to find her.’

He had found her. He had figured out why the car was at the funeral home. He had led them into the basement. He couldn’t stop now. The bag was less than ten feet away. The shelves were tight. Angie’s nose would be less than half a foot from the corpse above her. She was claustrophobic. She was terrified of tight spaces.

‘Will.’ Sara’s hand moved to his arm. ‘You need to let them take care of her, okay? Let Charlie do his job. He has to take photographs. The bag needs to be preserved for fingerprints. There could be trace evidence on the floor. We have to do this the right way, or we’ll never be able to find out why she was left here.’

He knew all of this was true, but he couldn’t move.

‘Come on.’ She pulled at his arm.

He stepped back, then back again.

Charlie opened his duffel. He slipped on a pair of shoe protectors, then gloves. He put a fresh card in his camera. He checked the batteries, confirmed the date and time.

He started outside the freezer, slowly working his way in. He photographed the bag from every angle, kneeling down, leaning over the other bodies. He used his ruler for scale. He left marked cards on items of interest. It felt like an hour had passed before he finally told Ray Belcamino, ‘Get a gurney. The space is too tight. We’ll need to move her so we can open the bag.’

Belcamino disappeared into another room. He returned with a gurney. A white sheet was folded on the center. He kicked the wheels straight and forced the gurney up the small ramp that led to the freezer.

Charlie handed him a pair of gloves.

Obviously moving bodies was a job that Belcamino had done on his own before. He muscled the black bag onto the gurney like he was moving a rolled carpet. Will had to look away, because he was going to hit the kid if he had to watch him a second longer.

He heard the gurney being rolled out, the freezer door shutting with a thunk.

Amanda said, ‘Thank you, Mr Belcamino. You can wait upstairs.’

Belcamino offered no protest as he left the room.

Charlie took more photographs. He dragged over a step stool that was against the wall. He stood over the bag and took more photos. He used the ruler again to document scale.

Will stared at the contours of the black bag. He couldn’t make sense of what was underneath. And then he realized that the body was on its side, that whoever had taken it from the trunk had left it in the same position in which it had died.

Angie always slept on her side, close to him but not touching him. Sometimes at night her breath would tickle his ear and he would have to turn over so that he could go to sleep.

‘Faith?’ Charlie held out an extra pair of gloves. The fingers dangled in the air for a second before Faith finally took them.

Her hands were obviously sweating. She struggled to pull on the gloves. Her jaw was clamped tight. She hated dead bodies. She hated being in the morgue. She hated autopsies.

She grabbed the zipper and started to pull.

The sound was like a rip. Something tearing apart. Something breaking. The body was turned away from them. Will saw dark hair. Brown, the same color as Angie’s. The woman’s bare shoulder was revealed. The curve of her spine. The arc of her hip. Her legs were bent. Her hands were between her knees. Her toes were curled, the feet sickled.

Faith gagged. The smell was noxious, putrid. The body had been in the trunk for hours in the broiling sun. Heat had accelerated the decomposition. The skin was desiccated. The human body was made up of the same fiber and tissue as any other mammal. Both had the same reaction to heat, which was to release fluids.

Charlie spread open the bag. A trickle of blood turned pink by cholesterol splattered onto the floor.

Faith gagged again. She put the back of her hand under her nose. She squeezed her eyes closed. She was standing on the opposite side of the gurney. She had seen the face. She shook her head. ‘I can’t tell if it’s her. She’s just—’

‘Beaten,’ Charlie said.

Will looked at her back, blackened with patches that looked like soot. The same pattern was on her legs. On the soles of her feet.

‘Bleach,’ Sara said. The odor steamed off the bag.

‘She wasn’t scrubbed clean, though. It looks like the bleach was poured. Almost sloshed.’

‘Her clothes are gone,’ Amanda noted. ‘Someone was worried about trace evidence.’

Faith said, ‘She was somewhere other than the car.’

‘Her face looks like someone took a bat to her.’ Charlie did a cursory examination. ‘Contusions and lacerations on the face and neck. Fingernail scrapes. It looks like bones were broken.’ He knelt down with the camera, zooming in on the head, neck, chest, torso. ‘Multiple stab wounds.’ He asked Will, ‘Does she have any identifying marks? Tattoos?’

Will shook his head.

Then he remembered.

Time moved in double frame, as if someone had pressed the fast-forward on his life. Will was pulling away from Sara. He was walking around the gurney. He was pushing Charlie aside. He was looking at the body, the deep black bruises, the cuts, the mottled skin, and there it was: a single mole on her breast. Was it in the same place? Why couldn’t he remember where the mole was supposed to be?

He found himself on his knees. He looked at her face.

Bloated. Unrecognizable.

Her head was swollen to twice its size, black and red marks criss-crossing her face. Her lips were leaking fluid. Her nose was twisted to the side. More like a Halloween mask than a face.

Was it Angie?

Did it feel like Angie?

The numbness inside of Will had never really gone away. He felt nothing looking at this woman. He noticed the things he would notice on any case. Domestic homicide. Battery. Assault. Mouth open. Teeth broken. Lips chapped and swollen like too-ripe fruit. Her eyelids were thick, the consistency of wet bread. Blue veins and red arteries shot through almost translucent skin. Her cheek had been sliced with a very sharp knife or a razor. The skin flapped back, hanging open like a page in a book. He saw tissue, sinew, stark white of bone.