The Kept Woman (Will Trent 8) (17 page)

So why was he here?

Will looked down at the thick gray envelope in his hands. The multi-colored logo for Kip Kilpatrick’s management company was in the corner. Angie’s name was typed above a PO box number. The box was located in a midtown UPS store. There were actually two envelopes inside the box, but the one with the colored logo was the one Will saw first, and his heart had stopped like a train smashing into a brick wall.

He had stood motionless in the UPS store, staring at the envelope, not touching it, trying to get over his shock. Here was a concrete link between Angie and Kip Kilpatrick and, by extension, Marcus Rippy. He should’ve called Amanda immediately, got in a forensic team for fingerprints and to run the security footage. But Will hadn’t done any of this, because among other things,
Amanda would want to know how he had tracked down the post office box number in the first place.

Angie’s bank had given Will copies of her statements showing her mailing address. He’d offered the manager his marriage certificate to prove that he was still legally married to Angie. The woman hadn’t needed to see it. All she’d needed was his driver’s license. Will’s name was still on Angie’s checking account, the same as it had been for the last twenty years.

He had not told Sara about the account.

Angie’s recent bank statement had shown an unusually large balance. She had always lived paycheck to paycheck. Will was the saver, the one who was terrified of running out of money and living on the streets again. Angie spent money as soon as it was in her pocket. She had told Will that she was going to die young so she might as well have fun.

Had she died young? Was forty-three middle-aged anymore?

The two-to-three-hour window to find Angie alive had closed hours ago. Sara was a good doctor. She knew how to read a crime scene and she knew how much blood was supposed to be inside of a body. Still, Will could not accept that Angie was dead. He wasn’t one for cosmic signs, but he knew that if something really bad happened to her, he would feel it in his gut.

Will folded the envelope in half, then shoved it into his back pocket as he headed toward the bank of elevators. He passed on two cars before realizing there was no way he would find one that wasn’t already packed with people from the parking deck. He looked at his watch. At 3:30 in the afternoon, the office workers should be pushing the clock to go home, not returning from late
lunches. The elevator he finally jammed himself into was filled with the lingering odor of alcohol and cigarettes. Buttons were pressed. Will looked at the panel. They were going to stop on almost every floor.

He had been to Kip Kilpatrick’s office only once, during the brief and uneventful interview with Marcus Rippy. Will could still recall the opulent details inside the offices, because it was the sort of place specifically designed to stick in your head.

110 Sports Management took up the top two floors of the building, seemingly so that they could build a fancy floating glass staircase connecting the two levels. There were life-sized Fathead stickers all over the walls showing players dunking basketballs, rushing the net and throwing game-winning touchdowns. Framed jerseys with familiar numbers were in a straight line outside the conference room like photos of past CEOs, which was appropriate because sport was a billion-dollar business. God-like athleticism wasn’t enough to pay the bills. You had to have lifestyle brands and sneaker endorsements and your own clothing line to prove that you’d really made it.

Behind all of those billion-dollar deals, you also had to have a team of lawyers and managers and agents and brokers who all got their cut. Which was great, but it also created problems. Coca-Cola was a billion-dollar industry too, but there were lots of cans of Coke and bottlers who could make more of it. If a can of Coke exploded, you could get another one out of the fridge. If an athlete got pulled over going 100 miles an hour down I-75 while snorting cocaine with a hooker in his lap, then your entire business was dead the second TMZ posted the mugshot.

There was only one Serena Williams. There was only one Peyton Manning. There was only one Marcus Rippy.

Will forced out the image that came to mind when he thought of Marcus Rippy. Not the many photos of the athlete standing by his three-hundred-thousand-dollar car or on board his private Gulfstream or with his hand resting on the massive head of his pure-bred Alaskan Husky. The one of him at home with his family, acting like a happy father and caring husband while Keisha Miscavage, the woman Rippy had brutally raped, had around-the-clock protection because of the death threats from his fans.

One word from the ballplayer could stop those guys. One line in an interview or post to his Twitter account would make it possible for Keisha Miscavage to go home and start putting her life back together.

Then again, Rippy probably got a kick out of knowing she was still imprisoned.

A bell dinged. Fifth floor. The elevator doors opened. A handful of people got off. Will stood with his back pressed against the wall. He put his hand to his neck, remembering a second too late that he wasn’t wearing a tie.

After Collier had dropped him at the house, Will had assumed he was on some sort of leave, if not outright fired. He remembered thinking that men who were unemployed did not have to wear a suit and tie. It was kind of the point of being unemployed. Now, he regretted his clothing choices, but when he set off from his house a few hours ago, he’d assumed he was going to be chasing down leads on Angie, not confronting Kip Kilpatrick.

The elevator stopped at the twelfth floor. Half of the people got off. No one else got on. Will kept his back to the wall. The car
stopped two more floors up. One person got on and took the ride to the next floor. By the time the car left the fifteenth floor, Will was finally alone. He watched the display flash as the elevator took an ear-popping ascent toward the top floor.

Each time the number changed, he thought,
Angie. Angie. Angie.

Was he deluding himself? Was she really dead?

Will had made his share of death notifications, steeling himself before knocking on a door, offering a shoulder to lean on or a face to scream at when he told a mother, father, husband, wife, child that their loved one would never come home again.

What was it like to be on the other side? Would Will get a call in an hour or a day or a week? Would he be told that a patrol car had rolled up on Angie’s Monte Carlo and found her lifeless body slumped over the wheel?

Will would have to identify her. He would need to see her face before he believed that she was gone. In the unrelenting summer heat, what would she look like after all that time? Bloated, unrecognizable. He had seen bodies like that before. They would have to run DNA, but even then, Will’s brain would always battle over whether or not that swollen, discolored face belonged to his wife or if Angie had managed to cheat death the way she always cheated everything else.

She was a survivor. She could still be out there. Collier was right. Angie always had a guy. Maybe one of those guys was a doctor. Maybe she was recovering right now, too frail to pick up the phone and let Will know that she was alive.

Not that she would ever call him so long as Sara was around.

Will pressed his fingers into his eyes.

The elevator stopped on the twenty-ninth floor. The doors slid open. White marble gleamed from every surface. A gorgeous, model-thin blonde looked up from her computer at the reception counter. Will recognized her from before, but he was certain she would not remember him.

He was wrong.

‘Agent Trent.’ Her smile dropped into a straight line. ‘Take a seat. Mr Kilpatrick is still in his meeting. He’ll be five or ten minutes.’

Kip Kilpatrick was smart, but he wasn’t clairvoyant. Last Will had heard, Amanda was meeting with Marcus Rippy’s agent/lawyer first thing tomorrow morning. Up until half an hour ago, even Will didn’t know he was going to be here. Or maybe Kilpatrick wasn’t expecting Will to show up so much as waiting for him to. It made sense. Marcus Rippy was Kilpatrick’s biggest client, his only can of Coke. The slimy agent had already scuttled a rape charge. Explaining away a dead body was a comparative cakewalk.

‘There.’ The woman pointed to a seating area.

Will followed her order, walking across the lobby, which was the same square footage of his entire house. There was a frosted-glass door that led to the offices and one that led to a bathroom, but other than that, the lobby was completely closed off from the rest of the business.

From the sparse decor, you’d never know that you were standing right outside one of the top sports agencies in the country. Will supposed that was by design. No prospective client wanted to sit in the lobby staring at the smiling face of his on-court rival. Conversely, if your star was fading, you didn’t want to see that some hot Young Turk’s picture had taken your place on the wall.

Will sank into one of the comfortable chairs beside an expanse of floor-to-ceiling windows. Everything in the lobby was chrome and dark blue leather. The view outside stretched all the way to downtown. The light gray walls had
110%
printed over and over again in a glossy clear varnish like wallpaper. There was a sign that hadn’t been here the last time: giant gold-leafed letters mounted on what looked like a nickel-plated quarter-inch sheet of metal that was taller than Will.

Will studied the letters. There were three lines of text, each at least eighteen inches tall. He watched the letters float around like sea anemones. An
M
crossed with an
A
. An
E
morphed into a
Y
.

Will had always had trouble reading. He wasn’t illiterate. He could read, but it took some time, and it helped if the words were printed or neatly written. The problem had plagued him since childhood. He’d barely graduated high school. Most of his teachers assumed he was just lazy or stupid or both. Will was in college when a professor mentioned dyslexia. It was a diagnosis he did not share with anyone else, because people assumed that slow reading meant you had a slow mind.

Sara was the first person Will had ever met who didn’t treat his disability like a handicap.

Man.

Age.

Ment.

Will silently read the three words from the sign a second, then a third time.

He heard the sound of a toilet flushing, then a faucet running, then an air hand dryer. The bathroom door opened. An older,
well-dressed African American woman came out. She leaned heavily on a cane as she walked toward the seating area.

The receptionist turned on a smile. ‘Laslo will come for you in another minute, Mrs Lindsay.’

Will stood up, because he had been raised by a woman old enough to be his grandmother, and Mrs Flannigan had taught them manners more suited to the Greatest Generation.

Mrs Lindsay seemed to appreciate the gesture. She smiled sweetly as she sat down on the couch opposite Will.

She asked, ‘Is it still hot as the dickens outside?’

He took his seat. ‘Yes, ma’am.’

‘Lord help us.’ She smiled at him again, then picked up a magazine.
Sports Illustrated
. Marcus Rippy was on the cover palming a basketball. Will looked out the window because seeing the man’s face made him want to throw his chair across the room.

Mrs Lindsay tore out a subscription card and started to fan herself.

Will crossed his leg over his knee. He sat back in the deep chair. His calf was throbbing. There was a dot of blood on the leg of his jeans. He felt like a lifetime had passed since his foot had broken through the rotted floor of the condemned office building. At home, he’d wrapped his bleeding calf in gauze, but apparently that hadn’t solved the problem.

He looked at his watch. He ignored the dried blood on the back of his hand. He checked his phone, which was packed with threats from Amanda. The only sound in the room was Mrs Lindsay turning an occasional page in her magazine and the sporadic clattering of the receptionist’s long fingernails hitting her keyboard.
Tap. Tap. Tap.
She was far from proficient.
Will couldn’t stop himself from duplicating the mantra from the elevator.

Angie. Angie. Angie.

She disappeared all the time. Months would go by, sometimes an entire year, and then one day Will would be eating dinner over the kitchen sink or lying on the couch watching TV and Angie would let herself into the house and act like only a few minutes had passed since the last time she’d seen him.

She would always say, ‘It’s me, baby. Did you miss me?’

That’s what she was doing now. She had disappeared, and she would be back, because she always came back eventually.

Will uncrossed his legs. He leaned forward, hands clasped between his knees. He twisted the cheap wedding ring around his finger. He’d bought the gold band for twenty-five bucks at a pawnshop. He had wanted to look legitimately married for the bank manager. Will could’ve saved the cash. The manager had barely glanced at his ID before giving him access to Angie’s entire financial life.

He picked at the ring. The gold was chipping off. It was nicer than the one Angie had given him.

Will dropped his hands. He wanted to stand up and pace, but he felt instinctively that the receptionist would not like that. Neither, he imagined, would Mrs Lindsay. Nothing was worse than watching someone else pace back and forth, plus it was a giant tip-off that you were nervous about something, and he didn’t want Kip Kilpatrick to know that he was nervous.

Should he be nervous? Will had the upper hand. At least he thought he did, but Kilpatrick had blindsided him before.

Will picked up a magazine. He recognized the
Robb Report
logo. There was a Bentley Bentayga SUV on the cover. Will
paged to the article. Numbers had never been a problem for him. He found the car’s specs and traced his finger under the text. The words were easier to make out because they were familiar from other specs in other magazines, because he loved cars. Twin turbo 6.0 liter W12. 600 h.p. and 664 lb-ft of torque. Top speed of 187 m.p.h. The interior photographs showed hand-embroidered leather seats and delicate reeding around the chrome gauges.