She was waiting for him to continue.
“It’s like …” Guilt weighed on him, because this wasn’t just Will’s private misery. It was Angie’s, too. He knew so much about her life, the deep, dark, horrible things that strangers could only guess at. There was a reason she was so drawn to violence. Sometimes, he thought of himself as her Pandora’s Box. That was the problem between them. They had known each other’s most intimate secrets. He didn’t want to make the same mistake with Sara. “I don’t know.”
She carefully stroked his hair behind his ear. “I knew the first time I made love to you that she had never let you in.”
Will felt embarrassed. There were so many invisible ways that Angie had screwed him up. He was like a constantly reincarnating suicide bomber, but Angie held the detonator every time.
“You are inside me,” Sara told him. “You have my heart. You have every part of me.”
Will looked at the printout on his desk. The letters blurred. If something happened to him, all that would be left were reams of typed pages with stupid misspellings that even a third-grader would spot.
He told her, “I’m sorry.”
“My love, you have nothing to be sorry for. I was wrong. Everything I did with you yesterday was wrong. I am so lucky, so grateful, to have you.” Sara gently turned his head back in her direction. “You are smart, and funny, and handsome, and sexy. And I love the way you make me finish every time.”
Will’s jaw tightened. He hadn’t asked for compliments, and he felt stupid that she thought he needed them.
“I know we can’t be okay right now, but can we be all right?” Her fingers lightly smoothed the tension out of his jaw. There was nothing sexual about her touch. She was reconnecting with him, trying to clear away his doubt. “What can I do to make you sure of me?”
Will did not have an answer. She was right. He was not okay. The only thing that would get him to all right was to stop talking. He pulled Sara into his lap. Her arms wrapped around his shoulders. She laid her head on his chest. He could tell she was listening to his heartbeat. He breathed deeply, trying to slow the pace. He felt confused and whiplashed. He yearned for that safety that only Sara had ever given him.
Two knocks at the door introduced Faith.
She saw Sara in Will’s lap and said, “Oh. Shit.”
Will tensed, but Sara simply raised her head.
She asked Faith, “Is the meeting about to start?”
“Yep. Yep-yep-yep.” Faith clasped her hands together. “Yessiree.”
The heel of her shoe got caught in the door as she rushed to close it.
Sara told Will, “I brought you a suit from home. When you didn’t show up at your house this morning, I figured you’d need a change of clothes.”
He got a petty kind of solace at the thought of Sara waiting for him to come home.
She looked at his bleeding hand. “I want to clean that before you leave.”
He grunted.
“I should get my notes for the meeting.” She stood up and adjusted her dress, which was light and flowy in all the right places.
Will realized that she was not wearing her usual work uniform of light-colored slacks and a dark blue GBI shirt. Her long, curly hair was hanging down around her shoulders instead of clipped up out of the way. She was wearing heels. Her eyeliner was darker than usual. She had even put on lipstick.
If Will had noticed these things when Sara had first walked into his office, maybe he wouldn’t have had to tell her that Angie’s idea of a good time was antagonizing him into fucking the shit out of her.
“I’ll see you there.” Sara stroked his face one more time before leaving.
Will stared at the back of the door long enough that the blood on his desk congealed. He gathered his notes. Out of habit, he reached for his jacket off the back of his chair. He tried to re-center his thoughts on the case. Lena Adams. Gerald, Beckey and Heath Caterino. He was going to have to talk about them. In front of other people. People who knew him. Some of whom knew about his reading issue.
Amanda never asked Will to lead briefings. She usually let Faith take the lead because Faith loved taking the lead. He didn’t know if Amanda was punishing him for not dressing professionally or if she was calling on him the way his teachers used to call on him because they thought they were helping Will come out of his shell when in fact what they were doing was exposing him to his worst nightmare.
He looked for Faith in the hall. Then in her office. He found her in the kitchen getting a cup of coffee.
He said, “Sorry about that.”
“About what?”
Which was how they were going to leave it.
Will followed Faith into the squad room. She sat at one of the desks in the front row. Will felt like he needed to recalibrate his opinion of what they could talk about. Not that they had talked about anything last night. When he’d knocked on Faith’s door, she hadn’t asked him what the hell he was doing there. She had fed him a gallon of ice cream and beat his ass up and down Vice City until midnight.
“’Sup?” Charlie Reed took a seat beside Faith. Rasheed was next. He came in carrying two cups of coffee that apparently were not meant to be shared. Gary Quintana, Sara’s assistant, joined them on the front row, all lined up like teacher’s pets.
Will leaned his back against the wall. He was not a teacher’s pet.
“Mornin’, bud.” Nick Shelton clapped Will on the shoulder as he passed by, doing that weird grip-pat thing again. His jeans were so tight that Will imagined he had to lie down on the floor to tug them on. Nick sat a few chairs away from Charlie. He opened up his tooled-leather briefcase that looked like it had been stolen from Patsy Cline.
“Hey.” Sara winked at him as she entered the room. Will watched her walk to the front row. She had pinned up her hair. He studied the graceful curve of her neck as she sat beside Faith. Sara gave her a one-armed hug that Faith seemed happy to return, a woman’s version of a fist bump to smooth things over.
Will guessed he should sit down, if only to avoid Amanda’s further ire. He took the desk in the row behind Sara, off to the side so he could see her profile. She was reading her notes. Her fingers absently twirled her hair.
He made himself look at something other than Sara.
The briefing room was a typical government rectangle with frayed carpet and a drop-ceiling that had dropped too many times. The floor-to-ceiling windows overlooked the parking lot. Water stains spotted the tiles. The desks were mostly squeaky or broken or both. The overhead projector was a relic that Amanda would not let go of. The television was the tube kind with a portable VCR the size of a wooden pallet. The only indication that they were living in the twenty-first century came from the four Smart Boards at the front of the room. The interactive displays could be hooked up to computers, tablets, even phones.
Will recognized Faith’s handiwork. She had projected Gerald Caterino’s murder closet across the four panels. Every photograph, printout, police report and notation that had been recorded on her phone was blown up onto the boards.
He still had no idea how Faith had figured out that Heath Caterino was Beckey’s child. The saliva on the back of Daryl Nesbitt’s prison envelope had proven Faith’s hypothesis. Gerald had shown them the DNA test results from the strip-mall lab that specialized in forcing men to pay child support. All of the genetic markers excluded Daryl Nesbitt from paternity. He was not Heath’s father, which meant he had not raped Beckey Caterino.
No wonder the girl’s father had slept with a gun by his bed for the past five years.
Will heard the click of Amanda’s cloven hooves in the hallway. She was texting on her phone even as she took her place at the podium. Eventually, she looked up. No preamble. She jumped right in.
“We have several unknowns, but this is where we’re at: As Dr. Linton will outline, there are compelling circumstantial connections between the two Grant County victims and the murder of Alexandra McAllister. That’s it. For the purposes of our discussion, we treat the Caterino, Truong and McAllister cases as most likely perpetrated by the same unknown suspect. As to the other victims from the newspaper articles, we have nothing but supposition. For those of you keeping score, it takes three victims to make a serial killer. For those of you who cannot count, we have two dead women. Rebecca Caterino is most certainly alive. Will? You’re first. Then Dr. Linton, then Faith, then I need Nick and Rasheed to update me on the Vasquez murder at the prison.”
Will felt a nauseating stir deep within his bowels. He would’ve loosened his tie if he had been wearing one. Which was clearly Amanda’s point.
He said, “We interviewed—”
“Podium.”