The Kept Woman (Will Trent 8) (50 page)

Faith stepped back so that Amanda could take over. She knew when a witness had turned against her.

Amanda said, ‘Start with the gunshot.’

‘I was across the street in the office building, bedding down for the night, right? Then I hear this gunshot and I’m like, “What the fuck?” Like, could it be a backfire from a car? Could it be a gangbanger, which, holy shit, that ain’t my jam.’ She coughed to clear some phlegm from her throat. ‘Anyway, so I’m lying there thinking about what can I do. Then I decide I need to check it out in case there’s some kind of gang thing going down, get my ass outta there, ya know?’

Amanda nodded.

‘I’m on the third floor, tucked up in my crib, so it takes me a little while to get down. Place is a goddam deathtrap. Before I’m out the door, I hear a car streak off, like burning rubber.’

Will bit his lip so a curse wouldn’t slip out. Jane Doe had gotten there too late.

Amanda clarified, ‘You heard a car leaving the scene?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Did you see the car?’

‘Sort of. Looked black, with some red along the bottom.’

Angie’s car was black with red stripes.

Jane said, ‘But there was another car in the parking lot. White, kind of foreign-looking.’

Dale Harding’s Kia.

‘And, so, I go back up to my crib, right? Don’t need to get involved in that shit with cars running off in a hurry. I been out there on the street long enough to know a deal gone bad when I see it.’

Will felt a moment of disappointment, but then Jane started talking again.

‘So I’m back up in my crib, just lyin’ there, and I get to thinking, well, shit, you know what I’m thinking. Maybe I got it wrong. This is a transactional kind of neighborhood. I got some scratch in my pocket. There’s a car outside that building, another car just screeched off, it seems like there’s gonna be a dealer inside, right? Simple economics.’ She pushed herself up in the bed again. ‘So I mosey on back across the parking lot, go inside the building, and it’s dark as shit. Windows are tinted or something. I’m walking around blind and then my eyes get with the program and I see there’s this gal on the floor. At first I thought she was dead. Started checking her pockets, but then she moved and I was like, “Whoa.” ’

Amanda asked, ‘This is the bottom floor, not the upper level?’

‘Correct-o-mundo.’

‘Where was she lying on the floor, exactly?’

‘Shit, I dunno. I’d need a map, right? Not like I was paying attention. I just walked into the building and boom, there she was.’

‘What did she look like?’

‘Dark hair. White gal. She’s laid out on her side. Can’t move her arms and legs, can barely move her head, but she’s making this moaning sound so I’m like, “All right, that’s it. I’m gettin’ the fuck outta here,” only I can’t because there’s another car pulls up in the parking lot.’

‘The same car?’

‘Yeah, but I seen it for real this time. Square nose like an older car. But I ain’t no car expert, right?’

Angie’s Monte Carlo was black with a square nose. Why had she returned to the scene? Why had she left in the first place?

Amanda asked, ‘How much time had passed since the car first peeled off?’

‘Mebbe ’bout thirty minutes? I dunno. Don’t have to punch a clock in my line of business.’ Jane continued, ‘So, the car is out front, so I booked it to the back. Hid behind that bar thing. Peeking out, like . . .’ She elongated her neck. ‘And I see this second bitch comes in. Tall. White. Long hair like the first one. Thinner. Don’t ask me what her face looked like because who the hell can see in that place? Like a fucking tomb.’ She pointed to the pitcher on her bedside table. ‘Gimme some of that, will ya, honey?’

Will was closest, so he poured some water into a Styrofoam cup.

Jane took a drink, drawing out the tension with a loud gulping sound. ‘Okay, so the second bitch comes in, and she’s just fucking furious, right? Kicking things around. Cursing. Motherfuck this. Motherfuck that.’

Definitely Angie. But why was she mad? What had she screwed up?

‘She goes upstairs like she’s marching against Hitler, you know what I mean? Feet just pounding.’ She put down her cup. ‘I hear her upstairs, doing what, I don’t know. Throwing shit around. Going in and out of rooms. Leaving shit. Moving shit.’

Staging the crime scene.

‘She’s got a flashlight. Did I tell you that?’

Amanda said, ‘No.’

‘One’a them little lights that’s real strong. That’s why I’m not leaving my cover, right? Didn’t want that light shining on me. Who knows what the bitch would do?’

She went silent.

Amanda repeated, ‘And?’

‘Oh, well eventually the bitch came back downstairs. She says another couple’a three motherfucks, kicks the chick on the floor. Real hard. And the chick, she moans loud-like: “Uhhhhhn.” That’s when it got interesting.’

Again Jane went silent.

Amanda warned, ‘Don’t draw this out.’

‘All right, I’m just trying to have some fun here. I don’t get to talk to people much.’ Jane took another drink of water. ‘So, bitch just stands there listening to her moan for a coupla minutes. Staring down at her like “You piece of shit.” Then, wham, bitch just grabs the chick by the leg and starts dragging her out of the building. And man . . .’ She shook her head. ‘That chick was moaning before, but when the bitch yanked on her leg, that’s when the screaming started.’

Will felt a pain in his jaw. Had Angie dragged her own mortally wounded, paralyzed daughter out of the building?

‘Then, bitch comes back in
again
and starts kicking things around again.’

Hiding the fact that she’d dragged a body across the floor.

‘She leaves for real this time. Next thing I hear something like a car door slamming. Lots of car doors slamming.’

Faith asked, ‘Could it have been a trunk?’

‘I don’t got, like, radar ears, bitch. It was just lots of things slamming shut on a car.’ She looked exasperated. She didn’t like Faith asking questions. ‘Anyway, then there’s this
whoosh!
like I don’t know what. Big
whoosh
. And I look up at the windows—now the windows are blacked out, right, but I see these flames shooting up like a Viking funeral. Just . . .’ She waved her arm around. ‘All over the place.’ She dropped her hand. ‘That’s it. The car pulled away.’

Amanda asked, ‘Did you see anyone else?’

‘Nah, that’s the truth. Just the bitch and the chick and the fire.’

‘No children?’

‘What the hell would a kid be doing there? It was the middle of the night. Should be tucked up in bed.’

Amanda asked, ‘You didn’t go upstairs to see what the first woman did up there?’

Jane licked her lips. ‘Well, I might’a. Just out of curiosity.’

Amanda rolled her hand, indicating she could continue.

‘There was a dude up there. Not dead, but just as good as. The light was better on account of the windows are right across from the balcony.’

‘And?’

‘Bastard was a fucking whale. Sleeping real sound, but like I said—not dead. But close. You could tell. Or at least I could. I seen some people die in my time. Pissed himself already. Had a doorknob in his neck. Like that guy from TV. You remember that show?’ She snapped her fingers twice, like in
The Addams Family
.

Will provided, ‘Lurch, but I think you mean Frankenstein.’

‘That’s right.’ She winked at him. ‘I knew you were the smart one, honey.’

Amanda said, ‘I’m waiting to hear where the coke came in.’

‘Dead guy’s jacket pocket.’ She patted her chest. ‘If I squatted down, stretched my arm real far, I could take it without getting blood all over me. Two fucking grams. I ain’t seen that much blow since I was a kid.’

‘So you went across the street because . . .’

‘I couldn’t stay in there with that guy dying. That’s just weird. And who knew if the bitch would come back? God damm, she already left and came back once.’ Jane started breaking off pieces of Styrofoam from the cup. ‘So I moseyed back across the street, partied until the sun came up. Then the cops rolled in, so I was like, shit, I better cheese it up the stairs. Once I started climbing, I couldn’t stop until I got to the top. That blow was fucking pure, man. One hundred percent.’

Will saw Faith roll her eyes. Every dealer said his blow was pure.

Amanda asked, ‘Is that it? You’re not leaving anything out?’

‘Hell, it don’t seem like it, but you never know, right?’

Amanda typed on her BlackBerry. ‘I’m going to have another agent take your statement. He’ll bring a sketch artist who will talk you through the night, try to jog your memory.’

‘That seems like a lot of trouble to go through.’

‘Consider it part of your get-out-of-jail-free card.’ Amanda motioned for Will and Faith to follow her out of the room. She walked a few feet down from Jane’s room, stopping in front of the nurses’ station.

Faith asked, ‘Do we believe her?’

Amanda said, ‘Charlie found a bloodstain on the lower level. He thought it came from a nosebleed.’

Will said, ‘Angie could know how to stage a crime scene.’

‘I’m trying to wrap my head around this.’ Faith tried to talk it out. ‘Somehow Jo bled out in the room upstairs, then she made her way to the bottom floor, where she collapsed. Angie leaves for some reason. She comes back for some reason. She drags Jo to her Monte Carlo, blows up Dale’s Kia, then drives off again?’ She added, ‘And leaves her own daughter marinating in her trunk for six hours?’

Will stifled his impulse to say that Angie wouldn’t do something like that.

Amanda said, ‘I’m getting a lot of pushback on that warrant for Figaroa’s telephone. We got the street surveillance approved, but just barely. No one has left the Figaroa house except Laslo. He was sent to McDonald’s for breakfast. He bought three cups of coffee and three breakfast platters.’

‘Three, not four, which means that they didn’t get anything for Anthony.’ Faith said, ‘Let me get my notes. I need to talk this out again.’

Will didn’t want to listen to another recap.

He looked past Faith’s shoulder, pretending that he was listening. He watched the nurse typing something onto a tablet computer. All of the patient files at Grady were digitized. The whiteboard behind the nurses’ station was still low-tech. They hand-wrote patient names and updated their status so that they could keep track of the ward. As Will watched, the nurse went to the board and erased Jane Doe 1. She wrote in a new name with a red marker. All caps, which was easier for him to read. And it helped that he had seen the name several times before.

He said, ‘Delilah Palmer.’

Amanda asked, ‘What about her?’

He pointed to the board.

The nurse had overheard him. She explained, ‘Domestic abuse. They can’t find the boyfriend. She walked into the ER with a knife sticking out of her chest.’

‘When?’ Faith asked.

‘Early Monday, right before my shift.’

Will said, ‘I thought we checked the hospitals for stabbing victims.’

‘
We
didn’t.’ Faith sounded furious. She told the nurse, ‘Olivia, the patient’s been Jane Doe One since I was here last night. What changed?’

‘The orderly checked her clothes before he took them down to the incinerator. He found her driver’s license.’ Olivia capped the marker. ‘She’s still in an induced coma, so you can’t interview her. Anyway, I thought this was being handled by the APD.’

Amanda asked, ‘Who caught the case?’

‘I can look it up here.’ Olivia referenced the tablet computer. Her face broke into a smile. ‘Oh, it was Denny. Denny Collier.’

‘Subarachnoid hemorrhage,’ Gary Quintana said. ‘That sounds like spiders.’

‘It’s a spidery area,’ Sara told him. ‘But basically it means she had bleeding in that part of the brain.’

‘Oh, wow. Weird.’ Gary continued reading Josephine Figaroa’s preliminary autopsy report. Whatever Amanda had said to the young man yesterday morning had clearly left a mark. His shirtsleeves were rolled down. He wore a knit tie in place of his heavy gold necklace. Even his ponytail had been neutered. Instead of jutting proudly from the back of his head, the hair had been gathered into a neat bun.

She was sad to see the ponytail go.

‘Okay.’ Gary read aloud from the conclusion. ‘Cause of death is an epidural hemorrhage. What’s that?’

‘It’s another type of intracranial bleed.’ Sara could tell he wanted to know more. ‘She experienced an external trauma to her head. The skull fractured, tearing her middle meningeal artery, which branches off the external carotid and helps supply blood to the brain. Blood filled the space between the dura mater and the skull. The skull holds a fixed volume, meaning it can’t expand. All of that extra blood put too much pressure on her brain.’

‘What happens when that happens?’

‘In general, the patient loses consciousness transiently. At the time of injury, they’re typically knocked out for a few minutes. Then they wake up and exhibit a normal level of consciousness. That’s why these bleeds are so dangerous. There’s a severe headache, but they’re lucid until the bleed progresses enough to shut down the brain. Left untreated, they slip into a coma and die.’

‘Wow.’ He looked at the gurney that held Figaroa’s body. They were standing in the hallway outside the APD morgue, which was located in the sub-basement of Grady Hospital. The gurney was pushed up against the wall, awaiting transport. Thanks to a batch of bad meth, the medical examiner had a full house.

Gary said, ‘She sure went through some hell.’

‘She did.’

He returned to the report. ‘What about “fracture of the cervical vertebrae?” That’s the neck, right? That sounds really bad, too.’

‘It is. She would’ve likely been paralyzed.’

‘Her heart was bruised, too.’ He frowned, disturbed by the findings. ‘Somebody whooped the hell out of her.’

‘Not necessarily.’ Sara explained, ‘The skull fractures are evenly distributed. The ribs and cervical vertebrae are fractured,
as you said, but the thoracic vertebrae and long bones aren’t. She’s not really bruised except on one side. Did you notice that?’

‘Yeah, what’s that mean?’

‘That it’s very likely that she either fell or was pushed from a great height. The cervical fractures are a tip-off. You don’t get those from being beaten. She fell from at least twenty feet up. She hit the ground on her side. Her skull fractured, the artery tore, and then a few hours later, she died from the brain hemorrhage.’