“Did APD go at the husband?”
“Rod Zanger, and yes, they went at him like a pack of velociraptors. Rod claimed he had no idea where she was, why she was missing, all the usual. But he couldn’t account for his whereabouts the Wednesday morning she disappeared. No receipts, no phone records, no alibi witnesses. He said he was home in their Buckhead mansion with a cold. On the maid’s day off. And the gardener’s. APD were really looking at him hard.”
“Was her car garaged at work?”
“In her space at One Museum, conveniently located in a blind spot the security cameras didn’t cover. She walked to work sometimes if the weather was good. But, her purse and phone were found locked in the trunk.”
“That sounds familiar.”
“Almost like a pattern.” She asked, “Do you remember the divorce? It was pretty big, a reverse Cinderella story. They met at Duke Law School. Rod was the poor cowboy from Wyoming. Callie was the wealthy Southern debutante who swept him off his feet. The papers called him a kept man.”
Will shook his head, because he only read car magazines and magazines about cars.
Faith had gotten a text. She held up her phone in front of her face instead of the other way around. Jeremy was still begging for her help.
She swiped away the request, telling Will, “Here’s where it gets interesting. Thirty-six hours after Zanger was reported missing, she was found wandering along Cascade Road in the middle of the night. Dazed and confused. Blood was pouring from a head wound. Her clothes were torn. She was covered in mud. Her shoes were missing. At the hospital, they treated her for a severe concussion and exposure.”
“What kind of head wound?” he asked. “Hammer-shaped?”
“The police report doesn’t specify and the newspaper stories are annoyingly vague. But Zanger was taken to Grady, and Sara used to work there, so …?”
“You want her to violate patient privacy?”
Faith pivoted away from that pipe dream. “Zanger signed herself out of the hospital the next morning. According to the papers, there’s no record of her being admitted to any other metro hospitals. According to APD, she refused to file an official statement or to even submit to an informal interview. She wouldn’t talk to anybody. The husband wouldn’t talk. The mother sure as shit wouldn’t talk. So the investigation was dropped and the divorce settlement was put under seal and the newspapers had nothing else to report and here we are two years later.”
Will asked, “How did Zanger get from Cascade Road to the hospital?”
“Older couple driving their grandbaby around trying to get her to fall asleep. Which only works on grandbabies, by the way. Not on your own children.”
“There’s a lot of wooded areas near Cascade.”
“I want to get a giant satellite map of the state so I can put Xs on where the women lived, where they were found, and the last known location where they were seen alive.”
“I bet Miranda has a map.”
Faith bristled, which was probably why he’d brought it up. “Riddle me this, Batman: if Dirk Masterson was so sure that she was hunting a serial killer, then why didn’t she go to the police?”
“Because she knew that exactly what’s going to happen would happen?”
Faith looked at her phone, responding to Jeremy’s text with more attention than was warranted. Will had advocated for letting Miranda and Gerald Caterino work out a legally binding, interest-accruing repayment plan, but Will would’ve let Bonnie Parker skate so long as she pinky swore she would never rob a bank with Clyde Barrow again.
Will said, “I’m not saying Miranda is an upstanding citizen, but we wouldn’t know about any of this without her. She’s the one who fed the information to Gerald. Gerald sent them to Nesbitt. Nesbitt got us here.”
“Thanks for the summary of the last two days,” Faith said. “Miranda Newberry can’t even tell the truth about where she’s going for lunch. She set up a fake company with a fake name and a fake website and a legitimate bank account so she could cash checks. Do you really think Gerald Caterino is her only victim?”
Will didn’t have an answer this time.
“Cheaters gonna cheat,” Faith reminded him. “But, seriously, can we talk about the obvious? I’d be damned if I’d be eating at Wendy’s and wearing a dress the color of a clown’s fart if someone had given me a tax-free windfall of thirty grand.”
Will’s phone started ringing. He tapped the button.
Faith said, “It’s us. You’re on speaker.”
Amanda asked, “How far away are you from Zanger’s office?”
Faith guessed, “Five minutes?”
“Sara’s about the same from HQ. The Van Dornes got here early. Caroline has put them in the conference room. I want you both back here ASAP.”
Faith assumed they had decided to ask the parents for permission to exhume the body. She decided against pushing Amanda on the serial killer angle again. “We’re going to hit rush hour. I’m not sure how long it will take for us to get back.”
Will asked, “What about Brock’s files?
“Sara took a preliminary look-see. Everything is there. The coroner’s report. Sara’s original autopsy notes. The labs, photographs, even a video of the crime scene. The blood and urine screens came back negative but for cannabinoids. Truong was a student; that only goes to reason.” Amanda said, “This is from Sara: Rohypnol and GHB have short half-lives and undergo rapid metabolism, thus the toxicology results in and of themselves can’t exclude possible drugging. The symptoms could include one or all of the following: amnesia, loss of consciousness, a sense of euphoria, a sense of paranoia, and loss of muscle control, meaning legs and arms paralyzed. The effects can linger for eight to twelve hours.”
Will asked, “What about the blue Gatorade?”
“The lab confirmed a sugary substance consistent with a sports drink, blue in color, found in the stomach contents.” Amanda ordered, “Report back immediately after you speak with Zanger.”
“Wait,” Faith couldn’t let it go after all. “Are you going to ask anything about the serial killer spreadsheet?”
“I would only ask why not one of my highly trained investigators spotted these possible connections before a civilian posing as a porn detective stumbled across them.”
Faith took the dig, because it was clearly meant for her. “Do you realize how many cases I could find if I had sixty billion hours to waste in front of my computer?”
Will gave her the side-eye.
Amanda said, “The great thing about not learning from your mistakes, Faith, is that you get to keep making them until you do.”
Faith opened her mouth.
Will ended the call before she could get a word out.
He waited a beat, then told Faith, “You know Amanda is probably working this behind the scenes, right?”
Faith wasn’t going to get into a discussion about Amanda’s habit of playing hide-and-seek with information. She liked being the Great Wizard behind the curtain. Faith was tired of sitting in Dorothy’s basket.
Will said, “Amanda had a gut feeling about Masterson. That’s why she kept pushing on the ISP. She knows this is a serial. You have to trust that she has a plan. She’s trying to keep us reined in.”
“I guess this is the second day in a row I am going to have to tell a man that I am not a horse.”
Will stared ahead at the road. “Zanger was missing for thirty-six hours. What reason would she have for not filing a report?”
“Fear?” Faith asked, because that was the reason most women didn’t report attacks. She offered up the second one, “Maybe she was worried no one would believe her?”
“She had to go to the hospital. There was physical proof that she was injured.”
“Maybe she didn’t want to deal with it? Her divorce was seriously nasty. Her husband was banging strippers. The strippers talked. Then Callie’s ex-boyfriend came out with a story about her being an Adderall freak in college. All of this wasn’t just local gossip. It made it to the national news. And then, on top of everything else, she gets raped?” Faith had been spared that particular trauma, but she’d been a pregnant fifteen-year-old back when they still burned witches. She knew what it felt like to have everyone talking about you, judging you, dissecting you like a specimen under a microscope.
She told Will, “We don’t honestly know what happened to Callie Zanger in the woods. Look at the other side of the coin. She has a stressful, high-powered job, and in the middle of all of that, she’s going through a bad divorce where her most intimate details are being shared by strangers. Maybe she couldn’t take it anymore. She went into the woods to end it. Whatever she did didn’t work, so she changed her mind and walked out, and now she’s embarrassed.”
Will didn’t answer immediately. “Do you believe that’s what happened?”
Faith figured a woman like that would disappear into a Four Seasons spa before she walked into the woods. “No.”