The Will Trent Series 5-Book Bundle Page 51

  “Mostly to see who’s at the door and to keep out the homeless people. We don’t keep a lot of cash here, but the junkies don’t need a lot, you know? Twenty bucks is a score for them.”

  “Is it just you and Lionel?”

  “There’s a girl who works mornings. Monique. She’s seven to noon. We use a courier for deliveries. They’re in and out all day.” He leaned his hand on the counter. “Sandy and Frieda should be in soon. They work the evening shift.”

  “Who uses the offices upstairs?”

  “There used to be some lawyers, but they cleared out maybe a year ago?” He was asking Petty, and the other man nodded confirmation. “They were immigration lawyers. I think they were running some kind of scam.”

  “Lots of shifty people,” Petty provided.

  “Here.” Warren dug a set of keys out of his pants pocket and handed them to Petty. “Take them to my office. I stopped the tapes when your guys got here. The one on the top is from today. It hasn’t been rewound yet, so you can probably find the time frame you need pretty easily.” He apologized to Will. “I’m sorry, but I’ve got to get this machine back up. Just holler if you have any problems and I’ll come back and help you.”

  “Thank you,” Will told him. “Can I ask—have you noticed someone using the parking garage a lot lately? Maybe not the Prius, but another car?”

  Warren shook his head as he walked back to the machine. “I’m usually chained to the store. The only time I go back through that door is usually when it’s time to go home.”

  Will stopped him before he ducked into the copier. “Have you seen any suspicious characters in the area?”

  Warren shrugged. “This is Peachtree Street. It’s kind of hard not to.”

  Petty said, “I keep a lookout, you know?” He motioned for them to follow him to the back of the store. “It’s not just like with the car. I called the cops on some homeless people who were crashing in the alley.”

  Amanda asked, “When was this?”

  “Year, maybe two years ago?”

  Will waited for her to say something sarcastic, but she held her tongue.

  He asked Petty, “Have you ever seen the Prius parked back there before?”

  He shook his head.

  “What about any other cars?” Will pressed. “Is there one in particular that you’ve seen back there a lot?”

  “Not that I remember, but I’m usually inside to catch the phones.”

  “What about your cigarette breaks?”

  “Stupid, huh?” He blushed slightly. “I quit, like, two years ago, but then I met this girl at the Yacht Club a couple of days ago, and she smokes like freakin’ Cruella de Vil. I picked it back up like—” He snapped his fingers.

  The Euclid Avenue Yacht Club was a dive in Little Five Points. It was just the kind of place you expected to find a twenty-something-year-old copy store worker with the ambition of a snail.

  Will asked, “What about the construction workers outside?”

  “They’ve been there off and on for about six months. At first, they were trying to use the garage during lunch. You know, for shade and all. But Warren got mad because they were leaving all kinds of trash back there—cigarette butts, coffee cups, all kinds of shit. He had a talk with the foreman, all cool about it, just, like, ‘show some common courtesy, man. Put litter in its place.’ The next day, we get here, and there’s fucking steel plates all over the road and they haven’t been back since.”

  “When was this?”

  “A week ago? I don’t remember. Warren will know.”

  “Did you have any other trouble with them before this?”

  “Nah, they weren’t on the job long enough to give a shit. They come and go all the time, usually different crews, different bosses.” Petty stopped in front of a closed door. He kept talking as he slipped the key into the lock. “I don’t want you to think I’m some kind of greedy bastard asking about a reward.”

  “Of course not,” Will said, glancing around the office. The space was small but well organized, with what must have been thousands of CDs neatly stacked on metal shelves from floor to ceiling. A battered chair sat beside a metal desk, papers stacked on the top. The time clock ticked loudly. A shelf on the opposite wall held a tiny black-and-white television. Hooked up to the front jacks was an array of cables leading to two VCRs.

  Petty said, “It’s pretty crappy. Warren’s right about the tapes being recorded over. I’ve been working here seven years and he’s bought new ones maybe twice.”

  “What about all these CDs?”

  “Customer files, artwork and stuff,” he explained, tracing his fingers along the multicolored jewel cases. “Most of the projects are e-mailed now, but sometimes, we get repeats and have to pull them.”

  Will stared at the television, spotting the top of Charlie’s head as he cut a patch of material from the passenger seat of the Prius. Two tapes were beside the set, numbers labeling them one and two. Will checked one of the VCRs, which looked pretty straightforward. The big button was always play. The smaller ones on either side would be rewind and fast-forward.

  He told Petty, “I think we’ve got this.”

  “I can—”

  “Thank you,” Amanda said, practically pushing him out the door.

  Will went to work, sliding the top tape into the player. The television screen blinked, and the image of the parking garage came up.

  Amanda said, “They turned it off two hours ago.”

  “I can see that,” he mumbled, holding down the rewind key, watching the date and time code count backward. Will stopped the tape and hit rewind again, knowing the machine would go faster without having to show the image. The VCR whirred. The clock ticked.

  “Try now,” Amanda told him.

  Will pressed the play button, and the garage flipped back up again. They saw the Prius again, parked in the same space. The time code read 1:24:33.

  “Close,” she said. Because of her husband’s 9-1-1 call, they knew Abigail Campano had arrived at her home sometime around twelve-thirty.

  Will kept the VCR in play mode and held down the rewind button with his thumb. The scene was pretty static, just the Prius and the empty garage. The quality of the tape was exactly as you would expect, and Will doubted he would have guessed the car’s make from the film alone. Because the camera was angled more toward the door, the parking garage was only captured in a pie-shaped section. Everything on the tape played in reverse, so when the Prius backed out at 12:21:03, that meant that the car had actually arrived at that time. This was good information to have, but what really caught their attention was the second car the Prius had been blocking from the camera’s eye.

  “What make is that?” Amanda asked.

  The grainy film showed the generic front side panel and partial front wheel of a red or blue or black sedan pulling into a parking space. Will could see part of the windshield, the slope of the hood, a side blinker light, but nothing more. Toyota? Ford? Chevy?

  He finally admitted, “I can’t tell.”

  “So,” Amanda said, “we know that the Prius entered the garage at 12:21. Go back to when the second car first showed up.”

  Will did as he was told, going back almost an hour, stopping at eleven-fifteen that morning. He pressed play, and the footage slowly played out. The dark-colored car pulled into the space. The image of the driver revealed nothing more than that he was of average build. As he got out of the car, you could see that he had dark hair and wore a dark shirt and jeans. Having the benefit of comparison, Will surmised this was Adam Humphrey. Adam closed the car door, then tossed something—the keys?—across the roof of the car to the passenger, who was out of the camera’s eye but for a hand and the upper part of a forearm as the second person caught the keys. The passenger wore no watch. There were no tattoos or other identifying marks. Both driver and passenger left the scene, and Will fast-forwarded the tape until Kayla Alexander’s car showed up.

  To Will’s relief, the events unfolded chron
ologically now. At exactly 12:21:44, the white Prius parked beside the sedan, blocking the camera’s view of the second sedan. The driver got out of the passenger’s side door of the Prius, away from the angle of the camera, and opened the trunk. The second sedan’s trunk popped open briefly, putting it into the frame. It closed a few seconds later. There was a blur that looked like the top of the abductor’s head as he crouched around the sedan, getting in on the passenger’s side. There was nothing else on camera after that. They had to assume that the sedan had pulled away.

  Will took his hand off the VCR.

  Amanda leaned her hip on the desk. “He knew the sedan was here. He knew to change cars because we would be looking for the Prius.”

  “We’ve been looking for the wrong car all afternoon.”

  Amanda said, “Let’s have Charlie send the tape to Quantico,” meaning the FBI lab in Virginia. “I’m sure they have an expert on front car panels.”

  Will ejected the tape from the machine. The TV flickered and showed the Prius again. Charlie was on his knees, combing through the driver’s-side floorboard. The time stamp read 20:41:52.

  Amanda saw it, too. “We’ve lost another thirty minutes.”

  Amanda was uncharacteristically silent when she dropped Will off at city hall. As he walked toward his car, she had only said, “We’ll have more information to go on tomorrow.” Forensics, she meant. The lab was working overtime to process materials. Amanda knew Will had done everything he could. They both knew that was not enough.

  Will drove aimlessly down North Avenue, so caught up in his thoughts that he missed his turn. He lived less than five minutes from City Hall East, but lately, he’d found himself wishing the distance were greater. He had lived alone since he was eighteen years old, and was used to having a lot of time to himself. Coming home to Angie was a big adjustment. Especially on a night like tonight, when Will was so caught up in a case that his head hurt, he craved time alone to just sit and think.

  He tried to come up with anything positive that had been achieved today. Kayla Alexander’s parents had been reached. Because of the time difference in New Zealand, they would lose a whole day in the air. Still, Leo Donnelly had managed to do one thing right, after all. Well, two, if you counted his sudden medical leave. Will guessed scheduling emergency surgery to have your prostate removed was better than facing Amanda Wagner, though both procedures ran the risk of castration.

  Will parked on the street because Angie’s Monte Carlo was blocking the driveway. The trashcan was still on the curb, so he dragged it up to the garage. The motion lights came on, blinding him. Will held up his hand to block the light as he unlocked the front door.

  “Hey,” Angie said. She was lying on the couch in front of the television, wearing a pair of cotton boxer shorts and a tank top. She didn’t take her eyes off the set as Will let his gaze travel along her bare leg. He felt the urge to climb onto the couch and go to sleep beside her, or maybe something else. That wasn’t how their relationship worked, though. Angie had never been the nurturing type and Will was pathologically incapable of asking for anything he needed. The first time they had met at the children’s home, she had smacked him on the side of the head and told him to stop gawking. Will was eight and Angie was eleven. Their relationship hadn’t changed much since then.

  He dropped his keys onto the table by the door, unwittingly doing a catalogue of the things she had moved or disturbed today while he was gone. Her purse was on the pinball machine, lady crap spilling onto the glass. Her shoes were under the piano bench alongside the pair from yesterday and the day before. The flowers on the deck had been chewed, but Will couldn’t really blame her for that. Betty, his dog, had developed a passion for daisies lately. They were all finding their own passive-aggressive ways to act out against the newness of the situation.

  He asked, “Are they still running the Levi Alert?”

  Angie muted the television and finally turned her attention to him. “Yeah. Any leads?”

  He shook his head, taking off his gun and putting it by his keys. “How’d you know it was my case?”

  “I made a phone call.”

  Will wondered why she hadn’t just called him directly. He was too tired to pursue it, though. “Anything good on TV?”

  “The Man with Three Wives.”

  “What’s it about?”

  “Ship building.”

  Will felt something close to panic as he realized the dog hadn’t greeted him at the door. “Did you accidentally lock Betty in the closet again?” Angie wasn’t a fan of the Chihuahua, and though Will had only taken in the little thing because no one else would, he felt very protective of her. “Angie?”

  She smiled innocently, which ratcheted up his alarm. He still wasn’t sure the closet incident had been accidental.

  He whistled, calling, “Betty?” Her little bat-head poked out from the kitchen doorway, and he felt a wave of relief as her tiny nails clip-clopped across the hardwood floor. “That wasn’t funny,” he told Angie, sitting down in the chair.

  The day caught up with him quickly. All the muscles in his body felt like they were melting. There was nothing he could do right now, but he felt guilty for being home, sitting in his chair, while the killer was out there. The digital clock on the cable box said 1:33. Will hadn’t realized how late it was, and the knowledge brought on something like a slow ache. When Betty jumped into his lap, he could barely move to pet her.

  Angie said, “I wish you knew how ridiculous you look with that thing on your knee.”

  He stared at the coffee table, the fingerprints on the polished wood. There was an empty glass of wine beside an open bag of Doritos. His stomach rumbled at the sight of the chips, but he was too tired to reach down and get one. “You didn’t tighten the lid on the garbage last night,” he told her. “A dog or something got into it. Trash was all over the yard this morning.”

  “You should’ve woken me up.”

  “It’s no big deal.” He paused, letting her know that it was. “Aren’t you going to ask me about Paul?”

  “That soon?” she asked. “I was at least going to give you time to settle.”

  When Paul had first come to the children’s home, Will had idolized him. He was everything Will wasn’t: charming, popular, circumcised. It all seemed to come so naturally to him—even Angie. Though honestly, Angie was easy for everybody. Well, everybody at that point but Will. He still didn’t know why Paul had hated him so much. It took about a week of tension before the older boy started openly picking on him, then another week before Paul started using his fists.

  Will told Angie, “He’s still calling me Trashcan.”

  “You were found in a trashcan.”

  “That was a long time ago.”

  She shrugged, like it was easy. “Start calling him cocksucker.”

  “That’d be a little cruel considering what his daughter probably went through.” Will amended, “Is still going through.”

  They both stared silently at the television. A diet pill commercial was on—the befores and afters. It seemed like everybody wanted to change something about their lives. He wished there was a pill he could take that would get Emma back. No matter who her father was, the girl was still just an innocent child. Even Paul didn’t deserve to lose his daughter. No one did.

  Will glanced at Angie, then back at the TV. “What kind of parents do you think we’d be?”

  She nearly choked on her own tongue. “Where the hell did that come from?”

  “I dunno.” He stroked Betty’s head, picking at her ears. “I was just wondering.”

  Angie’s mouth worked as she dealt with the shock. “Wondering what, whether he’d be a drug addict like my mother or a psychopath like your father?”

  Will shrugged.

  She sat up on the couch. “What would we tell him about how we met? Just give him a copy of Flowers in the Attic and hope for the best?”

  He shrugged again, tugging at Betty’s ears. “Assuming he can read.”
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  Angie didn’t laugh. “What are we going to tell him about why we got married? Normal kids ask about that kind of shit all the time, Will. Did you know that?”

  “Is there a book about a daddy giving a mommy an ultimatum after she gives him syphilis?”

  Will looked up when she did not answer. The corner of Angie’s lip curled into a smile. “That’s actually the next movie after this one.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Meryl Streep plays the mother.”

  “Some of her best work has been with syphilis.” He felt Angie staring at him and kept his attention on Betty, scratching her head until her back foot started to thump.

  Angie smoothly steered the subject back to something easier. “What’s Paul’s wife look like?”

  “Pretty,” he said, jerking back his hand as Betty gave him a nip. “Actually, she’s beautiful.”

  “I’d bet you my left one he’s cheating on her.”

  Will shook his head. “She’s the whole package. Tall, blond, smart, classy.”

  Her eyebrow went up, but they both knew Will’s type leaned more toward gutter-mouthed brunettes with the self-destructive habit of saying exactly what was on their minds. Natalie Maines in a wig would be a concern. Abigail Campano was nothing more than a curiosity.

  “Be that as it may,” Angie said, “men don’t cheat on their wives because they aren’t pretty or smart or sexy enough. They cheat because they want an uncomplicated fuck, or because they’re bored, or because their wives don’t put up with their bullshit anymore.”

  Betty jumped onto the floor and shook herself out. “I’ll keep that in mind.”

  “Do that.” Angie used her foot to block Betty from getting on the couch. He could easily see her doing the same thing with a toddler. Will stared at Angie’s toenails, which were painted a bright red. He couldn’t imagine her sitting around with a little girl getting a pedicure. Of course, three months ago, he couldn’t imagine Angie ever settling down, either.

  When she’d called him to say that he had to go to the free clinic to get tested, he’d been so furious he’d thrown the telephone through a kitchen window. There had been a lot of fighting after that—something Will hated and Angie fed off of. For almost thirty years, they had followed this pattern. Angie would cheat on him, he would send her away, she would come back a few weeks or months later and it would all start over again.