[Georgia 01] Genesis (aka Undone) Page 11

  She felt the seatbelt tense as Will slowed for a pedestrian darting across the road. Faith had no excuse for snapping at him, and he wasn't a stupid man—he obviously knew that something was wrong but, as usual, didn't want to push. She felt a pang of guilt for keeping secrets, but then again, Will wasn't exactly known for sharing. It had only been by accident that she'd stumbled onto the realization that he was dyslexic. At least, she thought it was dyslexia. There was certainly some reading issue there, but God knew what it was. Faith had figured out from watching him that Will could make out some words on his own, but it took forever, and he was wrong more often than not about the content. When she'd tried to ask him about the diagnosis, Will had shut her down so tersely that Faith had felt her face flush in embarrassment for asking the question in the first place.

  She hated to admit that he was right to hide the problem. Faith had worked on the force long enough to know that most police officers were barely out of the primordial ooze. They tended to be a conservative lot, and they didn't exactly embrace the unusual. Maybe dealing with the most freakish elements society had to offer made them reject any semblance of abnormality in their own ranks. Whatever the reason, Faith knew that if word of Will's dyslexia got out, there wasn't a cop around who would let it pass. He already had trouble fitting in. This would make him a permanent outsider.

  Will took a right on Moreland Avenue, and she wondered how he knew which way to go. Directions were an issue for him, left and right an insurmountable problem. Despite this, he was incredibly adept at hiding his disability. For those times when his shockingly good memory wouldn't suffice, he had a digital recorder that he kept in his pocket the way that most cops kept a notebook. Sometimes he slipped up and made a mistake, but most of the time, Faith found herself in awe of his accomplishments. He had gotten through school and then college with no one recognizing there was a problem. Growing up in an orphanage hadn't exactly given him a good start in life. His success was a lot to be proud of, which made the fact that he had to hide his disability even more heartbreaking.

  They were in the middle of Little Five Points, an eclectic part of the city that blended seedy bars and fashionably overpriced boutiques, when Will finally spoke. "You okay?"

  "I was just thinking," Faith began, though she didn't share her actual thoughts. "What do we know about the victims?"

  "Both of them have dark hair. Both are fit, attractive. We think the woman at the hospital's name is Anna. The license says the one hanging in the tree is Jacquelyn Zabel."

  "What about fingerprints?"

  "There was a latent on the pocketknife that belongs to Zabel. The print on her license came back unknown—it doesn't match Zabel and there's no match on the computer."

  "We should compare it to Anna's fingerprints and see if she's the one who made it. If Anna touched the license, then that puts both Anna and Jacquelyn Zabel in the cave together."

  "Good idea."

  Faith felt like she was pulling teeth, though she couldn't blame Will for being gun-shy, considering how mercurial her mood was lately. "Have you found out anything else about Zabel?"

  He shrugged, as if there wasn't much, but reeled off, "Jacquelyn Zabel is thirty-eight, unmarried, no children. The Florida Law Enforcement Bureau is giving us an assist—they're going to go through her place, do a phone dump, try to find next of kin other than the mother who was living in Atlanta. The sheriff says no one in town knows Zabel that well. She has one sort-of friend next door who's been watering her plants but doesn't know anything about her. There's been an ongoing feud with some of the other neighbors about people leaving out their trashcans on the street. The sheriff said Zabel's made a few nuisance complaints in the past six months over loud noises from pool parties and cars being parked in front of her house."

  Faith bit back the urge to ask him why he hadn't told her all this in the first place. "Has the sheriff ever met Zabel?"

  "He said he took a couple of the nuisance calls himself and didn't find her to be a very pleasant person."

  "You mean, he said she was a bitch," Faith clarified. For a cop, Will had a surprisingly clean vocabulary. "What did she do for a living?"

  "Real estate. The market's been off, but she looks pretty set— house on the beach, BMW, a boat at the marina."

  "Wasn't the battery you found in the cave for marine use?"

  "I had the sheriff check her boat. The battery's still there."

  "It was worth a shot," Faith mumbled, thinking they were still grasping at straws.

  "Charlie says the battery we found in the cave is at least ten years old. All the numbers are worn off. He's going to see if he can get some more information on it, but chances are it's a wash. You can pick up those things at yard sales." Will shrugged, adding, "The only thing it tells us is that the guy knew what he was going to do with it."

  "Why is that?"

  "A car battery is designed to deliver a short, large current like you need to crank your car. Once the car starts, the alternator takes over, and the battery isn't needed again until the next time you need to start the engine. A marine battery like from the cave is what's called a deep cycle battery, meaning it gives a steady current over a long period of time. You'd ruin a car battery pretty quickly if you tried to use it the way our guy was. The marine battery would last for hours."

  Faith let his words hang in the air, her brain trying to make sense of them. There was no way to make sense of it, though: what had been done to those women was not the product of a sound mind.

  She asked, "Where's Jacquelyn Zabel's BMW?"

  "Not in her driveway in Florida. And not at her mother's house."

  "Did you put out an APB on the car?"

  "In both Florida and Georgia." He reached around to the back seat and pulled out a handful of folders. They were all color-coded, and he thumbed through until he found the orange one, which he handed to Faith. She opened it to find a printout from the Florida Department of Motor Vehicles. Jacquelyn Alexandra Zabel's driver's license stared back at her, the picture showing a very attractive woman with long dark hair and brown eyes. "She's pretty," Faith said.

  "So's Anna," Will provided. "Brown hair, brown eyes."

  "Our guy has a type." Faith turned to the next page and read aloud from the woman's driving record, "Zabel's car is a 2008 red BMW 540i. Speeding ticket six months ago for going eighty in a fifty-five. Running a stop sign in a school zone last month. Failure to stop at a roadblock two weeks ago, refused to take a Breathalyzer, court date pending." She thumbed through the pages. "Her record was pretty clean until recently."

  Will absently scratched his forearm as he waited for another light to change. "Maybe something happened."

  "What about the notes Charlie found in the cave?"

  "'I will not deny myself,'" he recalled, taking out the blue folder. "The pages are being fingerprinted. They're from a standard spiral notebook, written in pencil, probably by a woman."

  Faith looked at the copy, the same sentence written over and over again like she'd done many times herself as punishment back in junior high school. "And the rib?"

  He was still scratching his arm. "No sign of the rib in the cave or the immediate area."

  "A souvenir?"

  "Maybe," he said. "Jacquelyn didn't have any cuts on her body." He corrected, "I mean, any deep cuts like what Anna had where the rib was removed. Both of them looked like they'd been through the same kind of stuff, though."

  "Torture." Faith tried to put herself in the mind of their perpetrator. "He keeps one woman on the top of the bed and one woman underneath. Maybe he trades them out—does one horrible thing to Anna, then swaps her out for Jacquelyn and does the horrible thing to her."

  "Then trades them back," Will said. "So, maybe Jacquelyn heard what happened to Anna with the rib, knew what was coming, and chewed her way through the rope around her wrist."

  "She must have found the penknife, or had it with her under the bed."

  "Charlie examined the slats under the
bed. He put them back together in sequence. The tip of a very sharp knife ran in the center of each slat where someone cut the rope from underneath the bed, head to foot."

  Faith suppressed a shudder as she stated the obvious. "Jacquelyn was under the bed while Anna was being mutilated."

  "And she was probably alive while we were searching the woods."

  Faith opened her mouth to say something along the lines of "It's not your fault," but she knew the words were useless. She felt guilt herself for not being out there during the search. She could not imagine how Will was feeling, considering he'd been blundering around in the woods while the woman was dying.

  Instead, she asked, "What's wrong with your arm?"

  "What do you mean?"

  "You keep scratching it."

  He stopped the car and squinted up at the street signs.

  "Hamilton," Faith read.

  He checked his watch, a ploy he used for telling left from right. "Both victims were probably well-off," he said, taking a right onto Hamilton. "Anna was malnourished, but her hair was nice—the color, I mean—and she'd had a manicure recently. The polish on her nails was chipped, but it looked professionally done."

  Faith didn't press him on how he knew a professional manicure from an amateur one. "These women weren't prostitutes. They had homes and probably jobs. It's unusual for a killer to choose victims who will be missed."

  "Motive, means, opportunity," he listed, stating the foundation for any investigation. "Motive is sex and torture and maybe taking the rib."

  "Means," Faith said, trying to think of ways the killer might have abducted his victims. "Maybe he rigs their cars to break down? He could be a mechanic."

  "BMWs are equipped with driver assist. You just press a button and they're on the phone with you and they send out a tow truck."

  "Nice," Faith said. The Mini was a poor man's BMW, which meant you had to use your own phone if you got stuck. "Jacquelyn's moving her mother's house. That means she probably contracted with a moving company or liquidation agent."

  "She'd need a termite letter to sell the house," Will added. You couldn't get a mortgage on a house inmost of the South without first proving that termites weren't feasting on the foundation. "So, our bad guy could be an exterminator, a contractor, a mover . . ."

  Faith got out a pen and started a list on the back of the orange folder. "Her real estate license wouldn't transfer up here, so she'd have to have an Atlanta agent to sell the house."

  "Unless she did a for-sale-by-owner, in which case she could have had open houses, could've had strangers in and out all the time."

  "Why didn't anyone notice she was missing?" Faith asked. "Sara said Anna was taken at least four days ago."

  "Who's Sara?"

  "Sara Linton," Faith said. He shrugged, and she studied him carefully. Will never forgot names. He never forgot anything. "The doctor from yesterday?"

  "Is that her name?"

  Faith resisted a "Come on."

  He asked, "How would she know how long Anna was kept?"

  "She used to be a coroner in some county way down south."

  Will's eyebrows went up. He slowed to look at another sign. "A coroner? That's weird."

  He was one to talk. "She was a coroner and a pediatrician."

  Will mumbled as he tried to make out the sign. "I took her for a dancer."

  "Woodland," Faith read. "A dancer? She's twenty feet tall."

  "Dancers can be tall."

  Faith clenched her teeth together so that she would not laugh out loud.

  "Anyway." He didn't add anything else, using the word to indicate an end to that part of the conversation.

  She studied his profile as he turned the wheel, the way he stared so intently at the road ahead. Will was an attractive man, arguably handsome, but he was about as self-aware as a snail. His wife, Angie Polaski, seemed to see beyond his quirks—among them his painful inability to conduct small talk and the anachronistic three-piece suits he insisted on wearing. In return, Will seemed to overlook the fact that Angie had slept with half the Atlanta police force, including—if graffiti in the ladies' toilet on the third floor was to be believed—a couple of women. They had met each other at the Atlanta Children's Home, and Faith supposed this was the connection that bound them together. They were both orphans, both abandoned by, presumably, crappy parents. As with everything in his personal life, Will did not share the details. Faith hadn't even known that he and Angie were officially married until Will showed up one morning wearing a wedding band.

  And she had never known Will to even give a passing glance to another woman until now.

  "This is it," he said, taking a right down a narrow, tree-lined street. She saw the white crime-scene van parked in front of a very small house. Charlie Reed and two of his assistants were already going through the trash on the side of the road. Whoever had taken out the trash was the neatest person in the world. There were boxes stacked up on the curb, three rows of two, each labeled with the contents. Beside these were a bunch of large black garbage bags lined up like a row of sentries. On the other side of the mailbox were a precisely aligned mattress and box spring, and a couple of pieces of furniture that the local trash trollers hadn't spotted yet. Behind Charlie's van were two empty Atlanta Police cruisers, and Faith assumed the patrolmen Will had requested were already canvassing the neighborhood.

  Faith said, "Her husband was a cop. Sounds like he was killed in the line of duty. I hope they fried the bastard."

  "Whose husband?"

  He knew damn well who she was talking about "Sara Linton's. The dancing doctor."

  Will put the car in park and cut the engine. "I asked Charlie to hold off on processing the house." He took two pairs of latex gloves out of his jacket pocket and handed one to Faith. "My guess is that it's packed up for the move, but you never know."

  Faith got out of the car. Charlie would have to close off the house as a crime scene as soon as he started collecting evidence. Letting Will and Faith check it out first meant that they wouldn't have to wait for everything to be processed before they started following up on clues.

  "Hey there," Charlie called, tossing them an almost cheery wave. "Got here just in time." He indicated the bags. "Goodwill was about to cart it off when we pulled up."

  "What've you got?"

  He showed them the tags on the bags where the contents had been neatly labeled. "Clothes, mostly. Kitchen items, old blenders, that sort of thing." He flashed a smile. "Beats the hell out of that hole in the ground."

  Will asked, "When do you think we'll have the analysis back from the cave?"

  "Amanda put a rush on it. There was a lot of shit down there, literally and figuratively. We prioritized the pieces we thought might be more important. You know that DNA from the fluids will take forty-eight hours. Fingerprints are run through the computer as they're developed. If there's something earth-shattering down there, we'll know by tomorrow morning at the latest." He mimed holding a telephone receiver to his ear. "You'll be the first call."

  Will indicated the garbage bags. "Find anything useful?"

  Charlie handed him a packet of mail. Will snapped off the rubber band and looked at each envelope before handing it to Faith. "Postmark's recent," he noticed. He could easily read numbers, if not words, which was one of the many useful tools he used to conceal his problem. He was also good at recognizing company logos. "Gas bill, electric, cable . . ."

  Faith read the name of the addressee, "Gwendolyn Zabel. That's a lovely old name."

  "Like Faith," Charlie said, and she was a little surprised to hear him utter something so personal. He hastily covered for it, saying, "And she lived in a lovely old house."

  Faith wouldn't call the small bungalow lovely, but it was certainly quaint with its gray shingles and red trim. Nothing had been done to update the place, or even simply keep it up. The gutters sagged from years of leaves and the roofline resembled a camel's back. The grass was neatly trimmed, but there were no flower beds
or carefully sculpted shrubs typical to Atlanta homes. All the other houses on the street but one had a second story added on or had simply been torn down to make way for a mansion. Gwendolyn Zabel must have been one of the last holdouts, the only two-bedroom, one-bath in the area. Faith wondered if the neighbors were glad to see the old woman go. Her daughter must have been happy to have the check from the sale. A house like this had probably cost around thirty thousand dollars when it was first built. Now, the land alone would be worth around half a million.

  Will asked Charlie, "Did you get the door unlocked?"

  "It was unlocked when I got here," he told them. "Me and the guys took a look around. Nothing jumped out, but you've got first dibs." He indicated the trash pile in front of him. "This is just the tip of the iceberg. The place is a freakin' mess."

  Will and Faith exchanged a look as they walked toward the house. Inman Park was far from Mayberry. You didn't leave your door unlocked unless you were hoping for an insurance claim.

  Faith pushed open the front door, walking back into the 1970s as she crossed the threshold. The green shag carpet on the floor was deep enough to cup her tennis shoes, and the mirrored wallpaper was kind enough to remind her that she'd put on fifteen pounds in the last month.

  "Wow," Will said, glancing around the front room. It was packed with untold amounts of crap: stacks of newspapers, paperback books, magazines.

  "This can't be safe to live in."

  "Imagine how it looked with all the stuff on the street back inside." Faith picked up a rusted hand blender sitting on the top of a stack of Life magazines. "Sometimes old people start collecting things and they can't stop."

  "This is crazy," he said, wiping his hand along a stack of old forty-fives. Dust flew into the stale air.

  "My grandmother's house was worse than this," Faith told him. "It took us a whole week just to be able to walk through to the kitchen."

  "Why would someone do this?"