Fallen Read online

  “Glad to see you, too.” She pushed past him and walked down the hall toward the kitchen. Despite what she’d told Jeremy, Faith hadn’t eaten anything of substance since two o’clock, and she could feel that familiar throbbing headache and wave of nausea that signaled something wasn’t right.

  “If anything happens to Mom—”

  “What, Zeke?” Faith spun around to face him. He had always been a bully, and just like all of his kind, standing up to him was the only way to stop it. “What are you going to do to me? Throw away my dolls? Give me an Indian burn?”

  “I didn’t—”

  “I’ve spent the last six hours being grilled by assholes who think I got my mother kidnapped and went on a murderous rampage. I don’t need the same kind of crap from my asshole brother.”

  She turned back around and walked toward the kitchen. There was a ginger-haired young man sitting at her table. His jacket was off. A Smith and Wesson M&P hung out of his tactical-style shoulder holster like a black tongue. The straps were tight around his chest, making his shirt blouse out. He was thumbing through the Lands’ End catalogue that had come in the mail yesterday, pretending he hadn’t just heard Faith screaming at the top of her lungs. He stood when she entered the room. “Agent Mitchell, I’m Derrick Connor with the APD hostage negotiation task force.”

  “Thank you for being here.” She hoped her tone sounded genuine. “I take it there haven’t been any phone calls?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “Any updates?”

  “No, ma’am, but you’ll be the first to hear.”

  Faith doubted that very seriously. Ginger wasn’t just here to catch phone calls. Until the brass said otherwise, Faith had a dark cloud hanging over her head. “There’s another officer here?”

  “Detective Taylor. He’s checking the perimeter. I can get him for you if—”

  “I’d just like some privacy, please.”

  “Yes, ma’am. I’ll be right outside if you need me.” Connor nodded to Zeke before leaving by the sliding glass door.

  Faith groaned as she sat down at the table, feeling like she’d been on her feet for hours, even though she’d been sitting for most of the day. Zeke still had his arms crossed over his chest. He was blocking the doorway as if he thought she might try to bolt.

  She asked, “Are you still in the Air Force?”

  “I got transferred to Eglin four months ago.”

  Right around the time Emma was born. “In Florida?”

  “Last time I checked.” Her questions were obviously ratcheting up his anger. “I’m in the middle of a two-week in-service at the VA hospital on Clairmont. It’s a good thing I just happened to be in town or Jeremy would’ve been alone all day.”

  Faith stared at her brother. Zeke Mitchell had always looked like he was standing at attention. Even at ten years old, he’d acted like an Air Force major, which was to say that he had been born with a giant steel rod shoved up his ass.

  She asked, “Does Mom know you were stateside?”

  “Of course she does. We were supposed to have dinner tomorrow night.”

  “You didn’t think to tell me?”

  “I didn’t want the drama.”

  Faith let out a long sigh as she sat back in the chair. There it was—the defining word of their relationship. Faith had brought drama to Zeke’s senior year by getting pregnant. Her drama had forced him to leave high school early and sign away ten years of his life to the military. There was more drama when she decided to keep Jeremy, and a heaping pile of drama when she’d cried uncontrollably at their father’s funeral.

  “I’ve been watching the news.” He said it like an indictment.

  Faith pushed herself up from the table. “Then you know I killed two men today.”

  “Where were you?”

  Her hands shook as she opened the cabinet and took out a nutrition bar. She had said it like it was nothing—she had killed two men today. Faith had noticed during the interrogation that the more she talked about it, the more anesthetized she became to the reality of the act, so that saying it now only made her feel numb.

  Zeke repeated, “I asked you a question, Faith. Where were you when Mom needed you?”

  “Where were you?” She tossed the bar onto the table. Her mind was spinning out again. She should test her blood sugar before she ate anything. “I was at a training seminar.”

  “You were late.”

  She assumed he was making a lucky guess. “I wasn’t late.”

  “I talked to Mom this morning.”

  Faith felt her senses sharpen. “What time? Did you tell the police?”

  “Of course I told the police. I talked to her around noon.”

  Faith had gotten to their mother’s house less than two hours later. “Did she seem okay? What did she say?”

  “She said that you were late again, Faith, like you always are. That’s how it is. The world bends to your schedule.”

  “Christ,” she whispered. She couldn’t take this right now. She was suspended from work for God only knew how long. Her mother could be dead. Her son was devastated and she couldn’t get her brother out of her face long enough to catch her breath. Adding to the stress, her head felt like it was trapped in a vise. She fished around in her purse for her blood-testing kit. Slipping into a coma, while at the moment an attractive prospect, wasn’t going to help anything.

  Faith laid out the kit on the table. She hated being watched when she tested her blood, but Zeke didn’t seem inclined to give her any privacy. Faith changed the needle in the pen, unwrapped a sterile wipe. Zeke watched her like a hawk. He was a doctor. She could almost hear his brain cataloguing the wrong way she was doing things.

  Faith squeezed some blood onto the strip. The number flashed up. She showed Zeke the LED because she knew that he would ask.

  He said, “When was your last meal?”

  “I had some cheese crackers at the station.”

  “That’s not enough.”

  She got up and opened the refrigerator. “I know.”

  “It’s high. Probably from the stress.”

  “I know that, too.”

  “What’s your last A1C?”

  “Six point one.”

  He sat down at the table. “That’s not bad.”

  “No,” she agreed, getting her insulin out of the fridge door. It was actually a hair above her target, which was pretty damn good considering Faith had just had a baby.

  “Do you really think what you said?” He paused, and she could tell it took a lot out of him to ask the question. “Do you think we’ll get her back?”

  She sat back down. “I don’t know.”

  “Was she injured?”

  Faith shook her head and shrugged at the same time. The police weren’t sharing anything with her.

  His chest rose and fell. “Why would someone take her? Are you …” For a change, he tried to be sensitive. “Are you messed up in something?”

  “Why are you such a jerk all the time?” She didn’t expect an answer. “Mom ran a narc squad for fifteen years, Zeke. She made enemies. That was part of her job. And you know about the investigation. You know why she retired.”

  “That was four years ago.”

  “These things don’t have a time limit. Maybe somebody decided they want something from her.”

  “Like what? Money? She doesn’t have any. I’m on all her accounts. She’s got her pension from the city, some of Dad’s retirement, and that’s it. Not even Social Security yet.”

  “It has to be related to a case.” Faith drew the insulin into the syringe. “Her entire team went to prison. A lot of very bad people were pissed off to see their bought-and-paid-for cops taken out of the game.”

  “You think Mom’s guys are involved in this?”

  Faith shook her head. They had always called Evelyn’s team “Mom’s guys,” mostly because it was easier to keep track of them that way. “I have no idea who’s involved or why.”

  “Are you lo
oking into all their old cases and interviewing perps?”

  “ ‘Perps’? Where the hell did you get that from?” Faith lifted up her shirt just enough to jab the needle into her belly. There was no immediate rush; the drug didn’t work that way. Still, Faith closed her eyes, willing the nausea to pass. “I’m suspended, Zeke. They took my badge and my gun and told me to go home. Tell me what you want me to do.”

  He folded his hands on the table and stared at his thumbs. “Can you make some phone calls? Work some sources? I don’t know, Faith. You’ve been a cop for twenty years. Call in some favors.”

  “Fifteen years, and there’s no one to call. I killed two men today. Did you not see the way that cop was looking at me? They think I’m involved in this. No one is going to do me any favors.”

  His jaw worked. He was used to his orders being followed. “Mom still has friends.”

  “And they’re all probably shitting their pants right now worried that whatever she’s messed up in that got her kidnapped is going to blow back on them.”

  He didn’t like that. His chin tucked into his chest. “All right. I guess there’s nothing you can do. We’re helpless. And so is Mom.”

  “Amanda’s not going to take this lying down.”

  Zeke snorted in disbelief. He had never liked Amanda. It was one thing for his baby sister to try to boss him around, but he wasn’t going to take it from someone who wasn’t blood. It was a strange reaction considering Zeke, Faith, and Jeremy had all grown up calling her Aunt Mandy, an endearment that Faith was fairly certain would get her fired if she used it today. Still, they had always thought that Amanda was part of their family. She was so close to Evelyn that at times she’d passed for a surrogate.

  But she was still Faith’s boss, and she still kept her foot firmly planted on the back of Faith’s neck, just like she did with everyone else who worked for her. Or came into contact with her. Or smiled at her in the street.

  Faith opened the nutrition bar and took a large bite. The only sound in the kitchen was her chewing. She wanted to close her eyes, but was afraid of the images she would see. Her mother tied up, mouth gagged. Jeremy’s red-rimmed eyes. The way those cops had looked at her today, like the stink of her involvement was too much to stomach.

  Zeke cleared his throat. She thought that the hostilities had passed, but his posture indicated otherwise. If there was one constant in her life, it was Zeke’s enduring sense of moral superiority.

  She tried to get it over with. “What?”

  “That Victor guy seemed surprised to hear about Emma. Wanted to know how old she was, when she was born.”

  She choked, trying to swallow. “Victor was here? In the house?”

  “You weren’t around, Faith. Someone had to stay with your son until I got here.”

  The string of curses that came to Faith’s mind was probably worse than anything Zeke had heard while stitching up soldiers in Ramstein.

  He said, “Jeremy showed him her picture.”

  Faith tried to swallow again. She felt like rusty nails were catching in her throat.

  “Emma’s got his coloring.”

  “Jeremy’s?”

  “This some kind of pattern with you? You like being an unwed mother?”

  “Hey, didn’t they tell you when you got back that Ronald Reagan isn’t president anymore?”

  “Jesus, Faith. Be serious for once. The guy has a right to know he’s a father.”

  “Trust me, Victor’s not interested in being a father.” The man couldn’t even pick up his dirty socks off the floor or remember to leave the toilet seat down. God only knew what he’d forget with a baby.

  Zeke repeated, “He has a right to know.”

  “So, now he knows.”

  “Whatever, Faith. As long as you’re happy.”

  Any normal human being would’ve trounced off after dropping that bon mot, but Zeke Mitchell never walked away from a fight. He just sat there, staring at her, willing her to crank it back up. Faith reverted to old ways. If he was going to act like he was ten, then so was she. She ignored his presence, flipping through the Lands’ End catalogue, ripping out the page that showed the underwear Jeremy liked so she could order it for him later.

  She flipped to the thermal shirts, and Zeke tilted back in his chair, staring out the window.

  This tension was nothing new between the two of them. Faith’s selfishness was Zeke’s favorite one-note song. As usual, she accepted his disapproval as part of her penance. He had good reason to hate her. There was no moving past an eighteen-year-old boy finding out his fourteen-year-old sister was pregnant. Especially when Jeremy got older and Faith saw what it was like for teenage boys—not the walk in the park it had seemed when she was a teenage girl—Faith had felt guilty for what she’d done to her brother.

  As hard as it was for her father, who was asked not to attend his men’s Bible study, and her mother, who was ostracized by most every woman in the neighborhood, Zeke had endured a special hell because of Faith’s unexpected pregnancy. He’d come home from school at least once a week with a bloody nose or black eye. When they asked him about it, he refused to talk. He sneered at Faith over the dinner table. He shot her looks of disgust if she walked by his room. He hated her for what she’d done to the family, but he would rain down hell on anyone who said a word against her.

  Not that she could remember much from that time. Even now, it was one long, miserable blur of slobbering self-pity. It was hard to believe that so much had changed in twenty years, but Atlanta, or at least Faith’s part of it, had been more like a small town back then. People were still riding high on the Reagan/Bush wave of conservative values. Faith was a spoiled, selfish teenager when it happened. All she could focus on was how miserable her own life was. Her pregnancy had been a result of her first—and, at the time, she vowed last—sexual encounter. The father’s parents had immediately moved him out of state. There was no birthday party when she turned fifteen. Her friends abandoned her. Jeremy’s father never wrote or called. She had to go to doctors who probed and prodded her. She was tired all the time, and cranky, and she had hemorrhoids and back pain and everything ached every time she moved.

  Faith’s father was away a lot, suddenly required to take business trips that had never before been part of his job description. The church had been the center of his life, but that center was abruptly ripped away when he was informed by the pastor that he no longer had the moral authority to be a deacon. Her mother had taken off work to be with her—whether forced or voluntary, Evelyn still would not say.

  What Faith did remember was that she and her mother were both trapped at home every day, eating junk food that made them fat and watching soap operas that made them cry. For her part, Evelyn bore Faith’s shame like a hermit. She wouldn’t leave the house unless she had to. She woke every Monday morning at the crack of dawn to go to the grocery store across town so that she wouldn’t run into anyone she knew. She refused to sit in the backyard with Faith even when the air conditioning broke and the living room turned into a kiln. The only exercise she took was a walk around the neighborhood, but that only happened late at night or early morning before the sun came up.

  Mrs. Levy from next door left them cookies on the doorstep, but she never came in. Occasionally, someone would leave religious tracts in the mailbox that Evelyn burned in the fireplace. Their only visitor the entire time was Amanda, who didn’t have the option of dropping off her de facto sister-in-law’s social calendar. She would sit in the kitchen with Evelyn and talk in a low voice that Faith couldn’t hear. After Amanda left, Evelyn would go into the bathroom and cry.

  It was no wonder that one day Zeke came home from school not with a busted lip but with a copy of his enlistment papers. He had five more months to go until graduation. His ROTC service and SAT scores had already lined up a full ride to Rutgers. But he took his GED and entered the pre-med program almost a full year ahead of schedule.

  Jeremy was eight years old the first time he met his
uncle Zeke. They had circled each other like cats until a game of basketball had smoothed things over. Still, Faith knew her son and she recognized his reticence toward a man he felt wasn’t treating his mother right. Unfortunately, he’d had a lot of opportunity over the years to hone this particular emotion.

  Zeke dropped his chair back onto the floor, but still did not look at her.

  Faith chewed the nutrition bar slowly, forcing herself to eat despite the nausea that gripped her stomach. She looked out the sliding door and saw the kitchen table, Zeke’s posture, straight as a board, reflected back. There was a glow of red beyond the glass. One of the detectives was smoking.

  The phone rang, and they both jumped. Faith scrambled to answer the cordless just as the detectives came in from the backyard.

  “No news,” Will told her. “I was just checking in.”

  Faith waved away the cops. She took the phone with her into the living room, asking Will, “Where are you?”

  “I just got home. There was a jackknifed trailer on 675. It took three hours to clear.”

  “Why were you down there?”

  “The D&C.”

  Faith felt her stomach lurch.

  Will didn’t bother with small talk. He told her about his prison visit, Boyd Spivey’s murder. Faith put her hand to her chest. When she was younger, Boyd had been a frequent guest at family dinners and backyard barbecues. He’d taught Jeremy how to ride a bike. And then he’d flirted so openly with Faith that Bill Mitchell suggested the man find an alternative way to spend his weekends. “Do they know who did it?”

  “The security camera happened to be out in that one section. They’ve got the place in lockdown. All the cells are being tossed. The warden’s not hopeful they’ll find much of anything.”

  “There was outside help.” A guard must have been bribed. No inmate would have the time it took to disable a camera mounted inside a prison corridor.

  “They’re talking to the staff, but the lawyers are already on scene. These guys aren’t your everyday suspects.”

  “Is Amanda all right?” Faith shook her head at her stupidity. “Of course she’s all right.”