The Kept Woman (Will Trent 8) (46 page)

‘Marcus Rippy.’ Amanda spat out the name like a bad taste in her mouth. ‘This entire day has been a giant circle leading directly back to him.’

Will stood up. ‘The patrol car can access footage from the street cameras.’

He didn’t wait for a response. He jogged up the aisle. He was outside and in the parking lot by the time they exited the building. Will pulled open the cruiser’s passenger-side door and got into the car. The uni gave a startled bark.

Will pointed to the laptop mounted on the dash. ‘I need the footage from every camera in the area.’

‘I was just pulling that up for your boss.’ The uni punched some keys. ‘These are the ones you want to see. I got two different angles, one from the street that runs in front of the funeral home, one that runs along the back.’

Faith opened the back door and slid into the car.

Amanda knelt beside Will. She told the uni, ‘Dunlop, tell me you found something.’

‘Yes, ma’am.’ Dunlop pointed to the screen. ‘This is right after the funeral van left at eight twenty-two.’

The prank call for a bogus body pick-up. Not a joke from another mortuary student, but a ruse to get Belcamino out of the building.

‘This is where the car first comes in.’ Dunlop turned the laptop around. Will saw the street corner, the rear entrance to the service alley. The night vision was fuzzy. The street lights weren’t helping. At 8:24:32, Angie’s black Monte Carlo SS turned into the alley that ran behind the funeral home. The driver’s face was a blob. A flash of blonde hair under a black hoodie. The car disappeared from the camera’s view as it rolled up the paved alley.

Will hit the arrow key, fast-forwarding the video to pick up the car again. Six minutes passed before the Monte Carlo drove back down the service alley and turned onto the street.

Faith said, ‘She went to the back door where the elevator is. She came back out. Six minutes is enough time to put a body in the freezer.’

Dunlop reached over and tapped some keys. ‘It picks up again here on the front street view.’

The Monte Carlo turned into the lot, using the entrance that was fifteen feet away from where they were. Angie’s car glided into the handicapped parking space. The driver got out. The roof of the car was about four and a half feet off the ground. The woman was around five-eight, close to Angie’s height. She was overweight, not like Angie, or maybe she had bulked up her
clothes. The long-sleeved hoodie must have been sweltering, but she kept the hood on, head down, hands deep in her pockets as she walked up the street.

Faith asked, ‘Is it Angie?’

Will shook his head. He was out of the identifying Angie business.

‘Could be Delilah Palmer,’ Faith guessed. ‘Blonde hair, but Delilah changed her hair a lot.’

Amanda said, ‘Dunlop, where do you pick her up next?’

‘Nowhere. She’s either lucky or she knows the cameras.’ He tapped another few keys. He fast-forwarded and reversed through several different street angles before giving up. ‘She could’ve walked under the bridge, jumped into a car on the interstate. Headed up to Tech. Downtown. There are lots of blind spots where she could’a parked another car or had somebody waiting for her. Hell . . .’ He shrugged. ‘She could’ve jumped on a bus.’

‘Check the buses,’ Will said, because that sounded like something Angie would do. Or maybe not. He was the last person who could predict her behavior.

Amanda’s knees popped as she stood up. ‘Tell me about this Josephine Figaroa.’

‘Basketball wife.’ Faith got out of the car. ‘Oxy. That’s all I know.’

Will said, ‘The husband. Reuben “Fig” Figaroa, one of Marcus Rippy’s alibi witnesses for the night of the rape. He’s a power forward. Very physical. Rebounds well on defense. Kip Kilpatrick’s client.’

‘This hole just keeps getting deeper,’ Amanda said.

‘Here’s her DL.’ Faith showed them her phone. She had pulled up Josephine Figaroa’s driver’s license.

Will studied the photo. Dark hair. Thin and tall. Almond-shaped eyes. Olive skin. She looked like Angie from twenty years ago.

Did she look like Will? Did she have his height? Did she have his problems?

Amanda said, ‘Inasmuch as you can tell anything, the photo resembles the woman in the basement.’

Faith said, ‘She’s a carbon copy of Angie.’

Will said nothing.

‘You two.’ Amanda waved over Collier and his partner. They had been so quiet that Will had forgotten they were there. ‘Ng. Take off those stupid sunglasses. I put you on missing person reports. Josephine Figaroa. Did she come up?’

‘Fig’s wife?’ His face was small without the glasses. ‘No, she wasn’t in any of my searches. I would recognize the name.’

Amanda told Faith, ‘You’ll come with me to talk to the husband. See if we can get an ID, figure out whether or not the wife is missing in the first place. I don’t trust Angie as far as I can throw her, and believe me, if she was here, I would throw her.’

Collier said, ‘The wife’s a pill popper. She did a two-day stint in the Fulton lockup. Got out Saturday. Supposed to be going to rehab this morning.’

‘And now she’s at a funeral home with knife wounds in her chest.’ Amanda tucked her hands into her hips. ‘I don’t trust any of this. Angie’s misdirecting us for a reason. She’s buying time so she can make her play.’

‘What’s the play?’ Collier asked. ‘This is a lot of dead bodies for a game.’

Amanda said, ‘It’s only a game to
her
.’

‘Josephine has a kid.’ Faith held up her phone again. ‘I found the husband’s Facebook page. Anthony. Six years old.’

Anthony. Jo Figaroa’s son. Angie’s daughter. Will’s grandson?

The picture showed a small boy with a furtive smile.

‘Look at the shape of his eyes,’ Faith said. ‘Those are some strong genes.’

Were they Will’s genes, too?

1989. Angie was stuck in a group home with over a dozen other kids.

Except for that time when she wasn’t.

Faith said, ‘There’s not a missing six-year-old white boy on the wire. We’d know about it immediately.’

Ng said, ‘That’s for damn sure.’

‘Collier,’ Amanda said. ‘What’s your progress on locating Delilah Palmer?’

‘I was gonna tell you before. We found her rental car abandoned in Lakewood. Wiped clean.’

‘Dammit, Collier!’ Faith slammed her hand on the trunk of the cruiser. ‘You found her car? I have to hear about your God damm gas station hot dogs but you can’t text me when—’

Will realized that Sara had disappeared.

He scanned the front of the building, the lawn, the parking lot. He walked toward the street. She was behind her BMW, leaning against the bumper, staring into the distance. The overhead light put a halo around her. Her expression was unreadable. He didn’t know if she was upset or concerned or afraid or furious.

They were ending the day exactly the same way they had started it.

Will walked away from the noise and the screaming and maybe even his job, because he didn’t care about any of them anymore.

He told Sara, ‘Let’s go home.’

She gave him the keys. He opened the passenger door for her, then walked around the front and got behind the wheel. He was backing out of the space when she took his hand. Will felt his heart lift in his chest. This wasn’t the Xanax. Sara’s presence soothed him. Earlier tonight, she had been willing to walk away from him—not to hurt him, but because she only ever wanted what was best for him.

He said, ‘I don’t think I can talk about any of this right now.’

She squeezed his hand. ‘Then we won’t.’

Faith paged through her notebook as Amanda drove them to Reuben Figaroa’s house. Her columns were hardly worth reviewing. Will had been right when he’d told her there wasn’t a case to be built. Faith saw what he had seen: a bunch of arrows, a bunch of unanswered questions. Nothing added up, even when you threw in the name Josephine Figaroa. The dead woman was just another arrow that indirectly led back to Marcus Rippy.

Maybe she should try to link them to Angie.

Her eyes started to blur. She looked up, blinking to clear her vision. The streets of Buckhead were deserted. It was almost one in the morning. Faith had been dead asleep in front of the television when Amanda had called her to the funeral home. She could barely recall dropping Emma off at her mother’s house. She was so exhausted that her brain hurt, but this was the job. There was no such thing as a reasonable hour to notify a man that his wife was dead.

Not that Faith was absolutely certain that the woman at the funeral home was Jo Figaroa. She certainly
could be
the woman in the driver’s license photo, but Angie’s involvement skewed everything. Faith’s policy toward liars was to always discount everything they said, no matter how much sense their story made. It wasn’t easy. The human brain had an annoying need to give people the benefit of the doubt. Especially people you cared about.

For instance, Faith was trusting Will when he said that Angie hadn’t told him anything else important, even though he had spent a hell of a lot of time on the phone with her just to be told a victim’s name.

Amanda said, ‘Your mother used to pin her notes up on the wall so that we could see all the moving pieces.’

Faith smiled. The pinholes were still there. ‘Do you think that Jo Figaroa is Angie’s daughter?’

‘Yes.’

‘Who’s the father?’ She didn’t get an answer, so she suggested the obvious one. ‘Will?’

‘I’m not so sure about that.’ Amanda slowed the car. She pulled over to the side of the road. She put the gear in park. She turned to Faith. ‘Tell me what you know about Denny.’

‘Denny?’ Faith shook her head. ‘Who’s Denny?’

‘Short for Holden,’ Amanda explained. ‘Though Denny is two syllables. Holden is two syllables. I suppose that means it’s not short, just less pretentious.’

Faith was too tired for semantics. ‘Let’s just stick with Collier.’

‘Start from the beginning. What did he do? How did he present himself?’

Faith had to pause for a moment so that she could put together her day. It seemed like an eternity had passed since she’d picked up Will at the animal clinic this morning, which was technically yesterday morning because it was past midnight.

She told Amanda about the first meeting with Collier and Ng outside Rippy’s club, the interminable amount of time she’d spent with him at Dale Harding’s, the texts that told her nothing, the tedious observations about his personal life, the constant sexual innuendo, the reluctance to carry on an adult conversation about the case.

‘I don’t trust him,’ Faith admitted. ‘He keeps pushing this Mexican heroin cartel angle. He didn’t tell me about finding Delilah’s car, but he told me about every useless whore he talked to in Lakewood.’

Amanda confirmed, ‘Ng said that they were handling a domestic call when they got routed to the nightclub?’

Faith strained to recall his exact words. ‘He said it was pretty violent, which means they were probably at the hospital. Grady is close to Rippy’s club, about a ten-minute drive at that time of morning. It would make sense for them to take the call.’

‘The nine-one-one came in at five AM,’ Amanda reminded her. ‘Would you volunteer to investigate a dead body at a warehouse at the end of your shift?’

Faith shrugged. ‘Dead cop. The unis recognized Harding. You’d push your shift for a cop.’

‘True,’ Amanda agreed. ‘What else is bothering you about him?’

Faith struggled to articulate her gut feeling. ‘He keeps showing up. He was with Will when he found the Jane Doe in the
office building. He drove him home. He was there tonight at the funeral home. What was he doing there?’

‘Collier and Ng are our APD liaisons. They’re working parts of the case. It makes sense that he’d get the call about the car.’

‘I guess.’ Faith tried to pluck out the obvious answer. ‘Maybe Collier’s just an idiot who keeps falling up. His dad was on the job. He’s obviously got some juice.’

Amanda said, ‘Milton Collier was on the job for two years. He took a fifty-one off a twenty-four, lost two fingers before he could call a sixty-three.’

Faith accessed her arcane knowledge of ten-codes from Amanda’s soup-can-and-string days. Collier’s dad had been stabbed by a crazy person and lost some fingers before backup arrived. She asked Amanda, ‘And?’

‘Milton clocked out on a medical disability. The wife was a schoolteacher. They made ends meet by taking in foster kids. Dozens at a time. Collier was one of them. Eventually they adopted him.’

‘Huh,’ Faith said, because Collier had overshared just about everything, down to his twisted nut sack in high school, but he hadn’t mentioned that he’d been in the system the same as Delilah Palmer.

The same as Angie, too.

Faith asked, ‘Were Collier and Angie ever in the same home together, like when she was sixteen years old and pregnant?’

‘That’s an interesting question, isn’t it?’ Amanda didn’t give the answer, but Faith knew she would find out. Amanda asked, ‘What else did Angie say on the phone call with Will?’

‘It was brief,’ she lied, because the call had lasted just under three minutes. ‘I’m sure she spent some time taunting him.’

‘Why is that, do you think?’

‘Because she’s a terrible human being.’

Amanda gave her a sharp look. ‘She’s cunning is what she is. Look at our day. Angie had us running around in circles. East Atlanta. Lakewood. North Atlanta. Will was all over midtown. You were stuck at Harding’s. I was at Kilpatrick’s. What’s more, Angie has knocked Will out of the equation, which shows brilliant strategy. Will knows her intimately. He could be our best ally in helping us figure out what Angie is really up to, but she has rendered him completely useless. You saw how he was in the basement.’

Faith had seen how broken Will had been, and what’s more, she hadn’t been able to take it. He had been making a weird whooping sound, like he couldn’t catch his breath. Faith ran from the room so that he wouldn’t see her crying.

She asked Amanda, ‘You think Angie’s fucking with him so that he won’t figure out what she’s really up to?’

‘If I were teaching a class on mind games, that play would be part of my curriculum.’