The Kept Woman (Will Trent 8)

Faith didn’t think she would ever find the answer. She was so tired and so stressed out that she doubted she could tie her own shoes right now, let alone figure out why Angie Polaski did the awful things she did.

Amanda said, ‘Walk me through it.’

Reluctantly, Faith looked down at her notes again. ‘Harding is murdered Sunday night. Angie stages the scene to make it look like she, Angie, was murdered, but it’s actually Jo Figaroa, who probably shares her mother, Angie’s, rare blood type, B-negative.’

‘Hm.’ For once, Amanda hadn’t been ahead of her. ‘Do you think Angie murdered Jo?’

Faith wasn’t sure. ‘She’s a monster, but I can’t see her killing her own child.’

‘Neither can I, but Harding could have killed Jo, then Angie killed Harding. Or tried to, with the doorknob.’ Amanda asked, ‘What happened next?’

‘Angie takes the body out of the club. She torches Dale’s car, which sounds like something Angie would do if she was pissed off, and she’d be pissed off if Dale killed her kid.’ Faith couldn’t even contemplate a real-life scenario with her own children. There would be salt in the ground for a thousand years. ‘The nine-one-one comes in Monday morning at five. Then Monday night, Angie hands us Jo’s body at the funeral home and calls Will to torture him.’

‘Sara puts Josephine’s time of death around noon to one.’

‘That’s un-Sara-like specificity.’ Faith scribbled the time in the margins. She realized, ‘If Josephine died between noon and one, that means Angie had her in the trunk of her car until she left the body at the funeral home just before eight thirty PM.’

‘There was a lot of blood in the back seat, all type B-negative, and a little blood in the trunk that Sara says could have been left post mortem from the chest wound.’

Faith shivered at the coldness it would take to drive around with your own child bleeding to death in the back of your car.

‘It’s a timing issue,’ Amanda said. ‘Angie is dragging out the clock. That’s why she waited so long to get rid of the body.’

‘Or something changed in her plan,’ Faith guessed, but she really had no idea. She saw Amanda’s earlier logic, because Will was the one person who could probably figure out what Angie was thinking. He knew her motivations. He knew what she was capable of. But it wasn’t just Will she was fucking with. ‘Angie’s worked murder cases before. She knows what it’s like. All the blood and violence freaks you out no matter how many times you’ve seen it. You’re panicked you’re going to miss something. You can’t turn off your brain. You can’t sleep, even when there’s time. Throw in the emotional angle and she’s basically put us in Gitmo.’

Amanda said, ‘I’ll say what I said this morning: we’re missing something big.’

‘Maybe Reuben Figaroa can offer an explanation.’ She closed her notebook. All of the sense was gone. Her notes looked like one of Emma’s coloring projects. ‘I’ll never get back to sleep after this. I could use one of your Xanax.’ She looked up at Amanda. ‘What are you doing carrying around Xanax, anyway?’

‘Just a little trick from the old days.’ Amanda turned back to the steering wheel. ‘You have a suspect who’s too jumpy to talk, you crush half a pill into his coffee. He gets a little loosey-goosey and you have him sign on the dotted line.’

‘I can think of sixteen different ways that’s illegal.’

‘Only sixteen?’ Amanda chuckled as she pulled back onto the road. ‘Talk to your mother. She’s the one who came up with it.’

Faith could see her mother doing this in the seventies, but she couldn’t see Amanda doing it now, which meant that she’d dodged another question. Pressing her was not a mountain Faith was prepared to climb. ‘How are we going to approach Reuben? Is this a death notification or an interrogation? His wife has been missing since at least Sunday night. He hasn’t filed a report.’

‘We should handle this just as we would handle any suspicious death of a spouse.’ Amanda reminded her, ‘The husband is the first suspect. More women are murdered by their intimate partners than by any other group.’

‘Why do you think I stopped dating?’

The comment was meant as a joke, but Amanda cut her a side-look. ‘Don’t let this job turn you off men, Faith.’

Faith studied Amanda. This was the second time in as many days that she had tried to give her dating advice. ‘Where is this coming from?’

‘Experience,’ Amanda said. ‘Take it from a woman who has been doing this job for a very long time. It’s simple statistics. Men commit the most violent crimes. Everyone knows that, but not everyone sees it played out in the real world every single day like you and I do. Remind yourself that Will is a good man. At least when he’s not being pig-headed. Charlie Reed is exceptional—not that you should repeat that. Your thing with Emma’s father didn’t work out, but he’s still a good guy. Your father was a saint. Your brother can be an ass, but he would do anything for you. Jeremy is perfect in every way. Your Uncle Kenny is—’

‘A cheater and a womanizer?’

‘Don’t miss the forest for the trees, Faith. Kenny adores you. He’s still a good person. It just didn’t work out for us. But there’s someone out there who could work out for you. Don’t let the job tell you otherwise.’ She tapped her foot on the brake. ‘What was the street number?’

Faith hadn’t realized they were already on Cherokee Drive. She pointed to a large stone mailbox a few houses down from the country club. ‘There.’

Amanda turned into the driveway. An enormous black gate blocked her progress. She pressed the button on the security keypad. She waved at the security camera discreetly mounted in the tall bushes that blocked the view of the house from the road.

The Figaroas obviously valued their privacy. Faith guessed there was enough front yard for a football field. Still, she could make out the glimmer of lights on the bottom floor. ‘They’re already awake. Do you think the press got wind of this?’

‘If they did, we have a small pool of suspects who could’ve leaked the news.’

Collier again. He was the proverbial bad penny. If he knew Angie, did that mean he knew Dale Harding? And if Harding and Angie were the types of cops that Holden Collier kept company with, what did that say about Collier?

Faith was a big believer in guilt by association.

She asked Amanda, ‘Have you ever heard of a woman named Virginia Souza?’

Amanda shook her head.

‘Collier mentioned her before.’ Faith found her phone in her pocket. She read back through his texts, looking for the woman’s name. ‘Virginia Souza. Collier tracked her down because she worked Delilah’s corner, so they probably had the same pimp. Family said she OD’d six months ago, but that’s from Collier, and I don’t trust Collier because he’s a lying liar.’

‘You sound so much like your mother sometimes.’

‘I wish I could tell whether or not that was a compliment.’ Faith searched the state database for Virginia Souza’s rap sheet. ‘Here we go. Fifty-seven years old, which is a bit long in the tooth for a whore. Prostitution times a thousand, going back to the late seventies. Child endangerment. Child neglect. Accessory to the exploitation of a child. None of which Collier mentioned.’ Faith felt a cramp in her thumb as she paged through the woman’s sordid criminal history. ‘Several drunk and disorderlies. Shoplifting. No drug violations, which is odd since the family said she OD’d six months ago. Or Collier said the family said she OD’d six months ago. Two assaults, both on minors—Collier told me about those. Suspect in the kidnapping of a minor. Suspect in another exploitation. She really has a thing for kids. Known aliases: Souz, Souzie, Ginny, Gin, Mama.’