First up was Faith. She had been gutted by the Callie Zanger interview. Will hadn’t been much better. The drive back to headquarters had been excruciating for both of them, Faith because she was trying not to cry, and Will because seeing Faith trying so hard not to cry had made him want to break things.
He craned his ear toward his open office door. Faith’s door was closed. She had arrived fifteen minutes ago. He could hear her poking around, but she hadn’t come by and he wasn’t sure she wanted to be bothered.
Will looked at the clock on his computer. One minute down.
He let his thoughts travel to the next woman he was worried about: Sara. The exhumation of Shay Van Dorne was not going to be easy. But that wasn’t all that was troubling him. They had both fallen asleep on the couch last night, Sara’s head like dead weight on his chest, but every time Will thought about the connection between them, his brain threw up the image of an extension cord lying two feet away from the socket.
Will couldn’t figure out a way to plug back in.
Sara had told him about the U-Store being across the street from the cemetery, and Will had believed her when she said that she hadn’t visited Jeffrey, but every time he found himself thinking about the Chief, he wanted to grab Sara, throw her over his shoulder, and lock her in a room like a caveman.
Or a serial killer.
Will picked at the Band-Aid Sara had wrapped around his knuckle. He had never thought of himself as the jealous type. Then again, Angie had never wholly belonged to him. She’d been screwing around since she was old enough to sneak out of a window. Will had been mildly irritated by her bad reputation, and furious about the syphilis, but he had found all kinds of ways to justify her non-monogamy. Angie had been damaged by so many men in her life. Sex was her way of stealing back some of that power. Will was the only man she had ever really loved. Or at least that’s what she had told him.
Being with Sara, knowing what love really felt like, had exposed the extent of her lie.
“Mornin’, hoss.” Nick sauntered into his office. “Meeting’s about to start.”
Will thought about punching him.
“Lookit, bud.” Nick sat down on the couch without being asked. “Can I be honest with you?”
Will turned his chair to face him. Usually, when someone asked if they could be honest, that meant they’d either been lying before or they were going to start lying now.
Nick said. “First time I heard you were hooking up with Sara, I gotta admit, I wanted to kill you so dead that even God wouldn’t look for your body.”
Will had never hooked up with Sara. “You could still try.”
“Nah, man, I can see where her heart is.”
Will didn’t know what to say, so he said nothing.
“You fuck it up, though …” Nick grinned like an angry clown. “Take a little advice from a dead man’s grave. Ain’t no woman on earth as good as the one you got right there in the palm of your hand.”
They locked eyes. Will ran through a few responses, but he figured throwing out a “no shit, hoss” was probably not going to keep this pissing contest at a draw.
He went with his old standard. He grunted, then nodded, then waited for Nick to leave.
Will’s eyes slid back to the time on his computer.
Nick had run up a one-minute deficit.
Faith’s office was on the way to the stairs. Will did the door-knock-walk-in thing to tell her it was time for the meeting. The words got caught in his throat.
Faith’s head was on the desk. Her face was buried in her arm.
Will swallowed, trying to find the right thing to say. “Faith?”
She turned her head, squinting at Will. “I am so fucking hungover.”
Will’s relief was cut by exasperation. He had never been a fan of alcohol. When he was a kid, a drunk adult generally meant Will was about to take a beating. “It’s almost seven.”
“Super.” Faith gathered up her notebook and Starbucks coffee. Her clothes were wrinkled. She had dark circles under her eyes. “Amanda and Mom forced me into choir practice last night. I passed out when they started talking about their CHiPS fantasies.”
Will winced.
“Right?” Faith closed the door behind her. “I totally get horndogging over Eric Estrada, but Larry Wilcox? Seriously, Amanda?”
“So you two are okay?”
“Ehn. I’m not going to change. She’s not going to change. Naysayers gonna nay.” Faith laughed. “And that is my third and last horse joke in as many days.”
Will wasn’t sure it was a joke, but he was glad to hear Faith back to her usual sarcastic self.
He held open the door to the stairs. Faith’s voice echoed off the concrete as she told him a story about her ex taking Emma and some of her friends to play at the Fun Zone.
“Welcome to parenthood, my dude.” Faith cackled. “You paid sixty bucks to expose your kid to a communicable disease.”
Will held open the next door. Faith started another story. He let his thoughts wander back to Sara. He could still feel the weight of her head on his chest. The way she had looked at him last night was different. She was hesitant. She was still worried about his feelings. Will felt petty because a deep, dark, maybe even sadistic part of him liked the idea of her being unsure.
Amanda was not in her office, but Nick had already snagged a spot on the couch. His cowboy boot rested on the edge of the coffee table. Faith sat next to him, diving into the usual small talk. Will leaned his back against the wall, which he had done so many times before that he was surprised his shoulder blades hadn’t worn an indentation into the cinderblock.
He heard the clop of Amanda’s tiny feet approaching. She looked exactly the same as she did every day. Salt-and-pepper helmet hair. Skirt and matching jacket. Make-up discreetly applied. If she was hungover, she was keeping it all on the inside.
“We need to make this quick.” Amanda handed Faith a stack of papers. She shot Nick a look that sent his foot to the floor. She leaned against the desk, which was generally as close as she ever came to sitting down. “I’ve got to drive to the capitol this morning to brief the head of the oversight committee. One of our victims is in his district. I don’t need his panties in a wad.”
Will looked down at the pages as Faith flipped through them. He recognized some of the names of the thirteen law enforcement jurisdictions where the bodies had been found.
Amanda asked Will, “What’s the subpoena you filed this morning?”
Will told her about his trip to One Museum. “We know from APD that there was nothing from the parking lot, but there’s a camera in the hallway outside Zanger’s apartment. If you could put a rush on the—”
“I’ll call the judge on my way downtown,” she said. “While you’re waiting, I need you to be my eyes on the Van Dorne autopsy. The second, and I do mean the second, Sara confirms or denies that Shay Van Dorne was murdered, you are to text me. Understood?”
She didn’t wait for a response. She told Faith and Nick, “Your butts are in your desk chairs this morning. Go through the lists. Make the appointments. Remember, we’re ostensibly reviewing the collection of data regarding missing persons reports. Tread carefully as you feel people out. I don’t want anyone getting suspicious. Do it—”
“Quietly,” Faith said.
Amanda raised an eyebrow as they locked into a silent battle of the wills.
Nick said, “Ma’am, if I may?”
Amanda took her time looking in his direction.
“I’ve been thinking about Daryl Nesbitt,” Nick said. “I know it’s clear to just about everybody in this building how I felt about Jeffrey Tolliver, but it’s hard for me to think that he got this case so damn wrong.”
Amanda rolled her hand to keep him talking.
Nick asked, “What made y’all exonerate Nesbitt so fast?”
Will realized that he had not been told about Heath Caterino, Beckey’s son. This wasn’t a naysayer situation. Amanda was keeping the information in a tight circle because the boy could be in mortal danger.
“Good question.” Amanda had always been an agile liar. She barely missed a beat. “Our labs found an old DNA report from the Truong autopsy. We ran it against an envelope that Daryl Nesbitt mailed to Gerald Caterino. There wasn’t a match.”
Nick pulled at his beard. He was clearly looking for holes in the story.
Will knew the real story, and he saw a gaping hole that none of them had spotted. “Why are we so sure Daryl is the one who licked the back of the envelope?”
The office was silent except for the fan on Amanda’s computer.
“Fu-u-uck.” Faith turned around to look at Will. “Con’s gonna con.”
“Nick.” Amanda picked up the phone on her desk. She stabbed in a number, telling him, “Go to the prison right now. I want a fresh buccal swab from Daryl Nesbitt in the lab by noon.”
She waited until Nick was gone to put down the phone. She told Faith, “Speak.”
“The lab report Gerald Caterino gave me was the original, not a copy. He sent Heath’s buccal swab along with the envelope from Daryl Nesbitt to an AABB-accredited, court-recognized commercial lab. They specialize in paternity cases. The report was definitive. Nesbitt was completely ruled out as Heath’s father.”