The Kept Woman (Will Trent 8) (27 page)

The two detectives were sitting on the hood the same as they’d been this morning. Ng still had on his wraparound sunglasses. He did the chin nod thing when Will got out of the car. Collier waved, but Amanda must have put them under strict orders to keep their distance, because neither of them approached.

Angie’s Monte Carlo SS was parked in a handicapped space in front of the building. She would park in a handicapped space because that’s what she did. Yellow crime scene tape roped off the area. The trunk was open. The driver’s door was open. Even from twenty yards, Will could smell the sickly sweet odor of death. Or maybe it was like his arm hurting. He only smelled death because someone had planted the idea in his mind.

Amanda came out of a side door. Unusually, her BlackBerry wasn’t in her hand. She had a lot of things she could yell at Will
about right now, but she didn’t. ‘Uniformed patrol spotted Angie’s car an hour ago. The funeral home closed at six, but there’s an intern who sleeps here for overnight calls.’

‘An intern?’ Will tried to ask the question that a cop would.

‘From the local mortuary school.’ Amanda crossed her arms. ‘He was picking up a body at a nursing home when the uni found Angie’s car. Faith is talking to him in the chapel.’

Will studied the house. He guessed the large two-story structure at the end was the chapel.

Amanda said, ‘The uni smelled an odor. He popped the trunk using the latch inside the car. He called in the cadaver dog. It hit on the scent immediately.’

Will looked at the car again. Parked at an angle. Hastily abandoned. The windows were down. His vision flashed up an image: Angie slumped over the wheel. He blinked and it was gone.

‘Will?’ Sara said.

He looked at her.

‘Why are you rubbing your chest?’

Will hadn’t realized he was rubbing his chest. He stopped. He told Amanda, ‘There are license plate scanners on Spring and Peachtree.’

She nodded. Scanners all over the city tracked the movement of traffic and searched for the license plates of stolen or suspect vehicles. ‘The data is being sent to the computer division for analysis.’

Will looked out at the street. Sommerset and Spring was a busy corner. Midtown was heavily monitored. Every major intersection had a camera.

Amanda said, ‘We’ve requested footage from GDOT and APD. We’ll comb through it as soon as it’s in hand. Search teams are on the way.’

Will said what she already knew. ‘Someone left the car here. They would need to drive away or—’

‘I’ve got everybody in the state looking for Delilah Palmer.’

Will had forgotten about Dale Harding’s wife or daughter or both. Palmer was a young prostitute with a drug problem. She had grown up in the system. The only parent she’d ever known had exploited her. She could’ve been Angie twenty years ago, except that Angie had managed to pull herself out. Or at least make it seem that way. Will wasn’t so sure she had managed to escape anything.

Sara’s hand pressed against the small of his back. ‘You okay?’

Will walked toward the car. The smell grew more pungent as he got closer. You didn’t need a bloodhound to know that something bad had happened here. He stopped at the crime scene tape. The trunk of Angie’s car was lined with a scratchy charcoal-colored carpet that he’d gotten from a roll at Pep Boys. He had leaned over the trunk for hours lining up the seams, gluing it in place.

Amanda shined a police-issue Maglite into the trunk. There was a dark stain in the carpet, just a little off from the center. The only thing in the trunk was a red plastic bottle of transmission fluid.

Will knelt down. He examined the pavement under the car. The transmission was leaking. The car was probably his now. He would have to fix it before he sold it.

‘Will?’ Sara put her hand on his shoulder. She knelt beside him. ‘Look at me.’

He looked at her.

‘I think we should go. There’s nothing here.’

Will stood up, but he didn’t go. He went to the driver’s side of the car. The door was wide open. A half-empty bottle of tequila was in the footwell. A joint was in the ashtray. Candy wrappers. Gum. Angie had a sweet tooth.

He asked Amanda, ‘It was like this when the uni rolled up?’

She nodded.

The open door would act like a flag to whoever drove by, which meant the car was left to be found sooner rather than later. Will took the flashlight from Amanda. He shined the light into the car. The interior was light gray. The shift for the manual transmission jutted out from the floor between the seats. He saw blood on the steering wheel. Blood on the driver’s seat. Blood on the white circle on top of the black shifter knob. It was an 8-ball. Angie had picked it out of a magazine. This was before the internet. Will had gone to three different stores to find an adapter so it would screw onto the stick.

He turned the flashlight, examining the back seat. More blood, almost black from baking in the sun all day. There was a smear near the door handle. Too small for a handprint. Maybe a closed fist punching out. Maybe a desperate last move to get away. Someone had lain bleeding in the back seat. Someone had lain bleeding in the trunk. Someone had been bleeding or covered in blood when they drove the car away.

He asked Amanda, ‘Two bodies and the driver?’

Amanda had obviously considered this. ‘She could’ve been moved from the back seat to the trunk.’

‘Still bleeding?’ he asked, meaning still alive.

‘Gravity,’ Sara said. ‘If there was a chest wound, and she was on her side, depending on how she was positioned, you might expect that amount of blood to seep out post mortem.’

‘She,’ Will said. ‘What about Delilah Palmer?’

‘I had someone at Grady run down her blood type. She had an admit for an OD last year. She’s O-positive. Angie was B-negative.’ Amanda’s hand was on his arm. She had tried to let him work this out on his own, leaving Charlie in his van, calling off Collier and Ng, but now she was going to give him the truth. ‘Wilbur, I know this is hard to hear, but everything points toward Angie.’ She laid it out for him. ‘Angie’s blood type was all over the crime scene. We found her purse, her gun. This is her car. Charlie already typed the blood for me. The back seat, the trunk and the front seat are all B-negative. We’ve got the DNA on rush, but given the rarity of the blood type, the likelihood that it’s not Angie is slim to none. And it’s a hell of a lot of blood, Will. Too much blood for her to walk away.’

Will mulled over her words. The stain in the trunk was in the area you would expect from a chest wound. Arterial spray was found on the walls of the room where Dale Harding died. Arteries were in the heart. The heart was in the chest.

Will tried to play out a likely scenario. Angie in the back seat, bleeding to death. The driver some guy she’d called because she always had a guy she could call. He would be desperately trying to get her help, and then he would realize that it was too late. And then he would put her in the trunk because he couldn’t drive around the city with a dead woman in the back seat of the car. And then he would wait until sundown and drive the car here.

‘The manager is on the way.’ Faith came walking down a lighted path. An open spiral notebook was in her hand. She looked at Will, then looked at him again.

Amanda said, ‘And?’

Faith referenced her notes. ‘Inside, we’ve got Ray Belcamino, twenty-year-old male Caucasian, no record. Mortuary student at Gupton-Jones. He clocked into work at approximately five fifteen for a five-thirty shift. His call-in sheet has him three times off the premises, once to Piedmont Hospital at six forty-three, another to the Sunrise Nursing home at seven oh two, and a third, a false alarm, at eight twenty-two.’ She looked up. ‘Apparently it’s a thing for interns to call in fake deaths to prank each other.’

‘Of course it is,’ Amanda said.

‘All three times, Belcamino used the commercial entrance near the chapel, behind the fence. There’s a service elevator that goes down to the basement. He can’t see the parking lot over the fence. He drove in from the west each time, so he didn’t pass the parking lot and he didn’t see the car.’

Amanda asked, ‘Closed-circuit cameras?’

‘Six, but they’re all trained on the doors and windows, not the parking lot.’

Will asked, ‘Did you check the Dumpster?’

‘First thing. Nothing.’

He asked, ‘Were any of the doors tampered with?’

‘No, and there’s an alarm system. Every door and window is wired.’

‘How is the elevator accessed?’

‘There’s a keypad.’

Will asked, ‘Can the keypad be seen from behind the fence?’

‘Yeah. And it turns off the alarm, too.’

Amanda asked, ‘Where are you going with this?’

‘Why bring a car that has a dead body in a trunk to a funeral home?’

They all looked back at the building.

Faith said, ‘I’ll go. Wait here.’

Will didn’t wait. He didn’t run, either, but his stride was twice as long as Faith’s. He reached the chapel before she did. He opened the door before she did. He passed the pews and walked onto the stage and found the door that led to the back half of the funeral home before she did.

Behind the scenes was scuffed and utilitarian. Drop ceiling, peeling linoleum. There was a long hallway running the entire back of the building. Two massive elevator doors stood sentry at one end. Will knew that there was likely an identical set of elevator doors to the outside and that this was where the bodies were transported down to the basement. He headed toward the elevator, assuming there would be stairs. Faith was right behind him. She was jogging to catch up, so Will started jogging so that she couldn’t.

The metal stairs were old and jangly. His footsteps jarred the railing. At the bottom, there was a landing with a swinging door. Will pushed through to a small office, more like a vestibule. There was another set of double doors behind a wooden desk, and at the desk sat a young man who could only be Ray Belcamino.

The kid jumped up. His iPad clattered to the floor.

Will tried the double doors. Locked. No windows. ‘How many bodies do you have in here?’

Belcamino’s eyes darted to Faith as she came through the swinging door

She was out of breath. ‘I need your logs. We have to match each body to a name.’

The kid looked panicked. ‘Is one missing?’

Will wanted to grab him by the collar. ‘We need a body count.’

‘Seven,’ he said. ‘No, eight. Eight.’ He picked up the iPad. He started tapping the screen. ‘The two tonight, three more from this week, one being processed, two awaiting cremation.’

Faith grabbed the iPad. She glanced through the list. She told Will, ‘I don’t recognize any of the names.’

‘What names?’ Belcamino had started to sweat. He either knew something or suspected something. ‘What’s wrong?’

Will pushed him back against the wall. ‘Who are you working with?’

‘Nobody!’ Panic cracked his voice. ‘Here! I work here!’

The swinging door banged open. Amanda, then Sara, then Charlie, crammed into the small vestibule.

Amanda asked Belcamino, ‘Where do you store the bodies?’

‘There’s a buzzer.’ His eyes darted toward the desk. Will let him go. The kid reached underneath the desk and found the button. The rear set of doors arced open.

Light green tiled walls. Dark green linoleum floor. Chemical smells. Bright lights. Low ceiling. About the size of a school classroom. There was a body at the front of the room. Elderly man. Wrinkled skin. White tufts of hair. A cloth covered his genitals. Tubes went out of his neck and connected him to a machine with a canister.

The walk-in freezer was in the back. Large stainless-steel door. Reinforced glass window. Amanda was already there. Her hand hovered over a green lighted button to open the door.

Will traversed the room. This was the second time today he’d walked toward an unknown, thinking that he was going to find Angie’s body. His vision sharpened. His ears picked up every sound.

The freezer door made a heavy clicking sound. Cold air seeped out from around the edges. An automatic arm opened the door at a glacial pace. Will had worked in a grocery store once. The walk-in where they kept the frozen foods was not dissimilar. Shelves on each side. Six tiers evenly spaced floor-to-ceiling. About fifteen feet deep, maybe ten feet high. Instead of bags of peas on the shelves, there were black body bags.

Four on one side. Four on the other.

‘Fuck me.’ Belcamino ripped a clipboard off the wall. He ran into the freezer. He checked the labels on the bags against the list. He was on the last body when he stopped. ‘There’s no tag.’

Will started to go inside. Sara caught him by the wrist. ‘You know you can’t be the one to find her.’

He
had
found her. He had figured out why the car was at the funeral home. He had led them into the basement. He couldn’t stop now. The bag was less than ten feet away. The shelves were tight. Angie’s nose would be less than half a foot from the corpse above her. She was claustrophobic. She was terrified of tight spaces.

‘Will.’ Sara’s hand moved to his arm. ‘You need to let them take care of her, okay? Let Charlie do his job. He has to take photographs. The bag needs to be preserved for fingerprints.
There could be trace evidence on the floor. We have to do this the right way, or we’ll never be able to find out why she was left here.’

He knew all of this was true, but he couldn’t move.

‘Come on.’ She pulled at his arm.

He stepped back, then back again.

Charlie opened his duffel. He slipped on a pair of shoe protectors, then gloves. He put a fresh card in his camera. He checked the batteries, confirmed the date and time.

He started outside the freezer, slowly working his way in. He photographed the bag from every angle, kneeling down, leaning over the other bodies. He used his ruler for scale. He left marked cards on items of interest. It felt like an hour had passed before he finally told Ray Belcamino, ‘Get a gurney. The space is too tight. We’ll need to move her so we can open the bag.’

Belcamino disappeared into another room. He returned with a gurney. A white sheet was folded on the center. He kicked the wheels straight and forced the gurney up the small ramp that led to the freezer.