The Kept Woman Page 8

  “He’s O-positive, the most common blood type for Caucasians, but the important part is this makes Harding a definite rule-out for the footprint and the spatter on the stairs.” She handed him another kit. “Let’s try the sample of blood from the room where Harding died.”

  There was a loud knock on the door. Both Sara and Gary jumped at the noise.

  “Good Lord God.” Charlie held up his camera as he climbed into the van and slid down to the floor. “I thought I was going to burst into flames inside that room.” He closed his eyes and breathed the cold air for a few seconds.

  Gary started the next kit. Sara handed Charlie a paper towel to wipe his face. He was soaked through with sweat. They would need to get some fans in the building before they continued. It was August. Even tonight when the sun set, the temperature would only dip a few degrees.

  “Okay.” Charlie tossed the paper towel into the trash can. “I’ve been activating the luminol inside the other rooms.”

  Sara nodded. Luminol was activated by a black light that made the enzymes in blood glow an ethereal blue. The reaction lasted for a few seconds, and only happened once, which was why it was important to have a camera to record the process.

  She asked Charlie, “Anything good?”

  “Oh, yeah. I’ve got it right here.” Charlie switched on the LED on the back of the camera and started toggling through the pictures. “By the way, I found some blood spray on the unicorn, which could mean the bullet went through somebody.”

  “A lot of spray or a little spray?”

  “More like a sneeze.”

  “That’s not enough to test with the EldonCard. We’ll have to go with DNA.” For Gary’s sake, she added, “There’s no time stamp on blood. Could be some raver sneezed out some blood three months ago.”

  Charlie said, “Nobody knows the trouble that unicorn has seen.” His thumb worked the scroll on the camera. Rorschachs of bright blue spatters and splatters flashed across the LED.

  “Dr. Linton?” Gary held up the card he’d just processed. “More B-negative.”

  Charlie asked him, “By any chance, did you take a sample from the second room from the left stair?”

  “Yes, sir.” Gary checked the vials. “I found some blood on the floor, back right corner. And I triple checked the label before I went to the next one, just like you said.”

  “Good boy.” Charlie said, “Type it for me, please.”

  Gary waited for Sara to give him the nod to proceed.

  She asked Charlie, “What’s going on? Did you find something?”

  “Oh, I found something.”

  Sara wasn’t one for cliffhangers, but she let Charlie have his fun. For the most part, forensic work was the least glamorous part of policing. It wasn’t like on television, where impeccably dressed, beautiful crime scene techs plucked clues from thin air, waved around guns, interrogated the bad guys, then carted them off to jail. Fifty percent of Charlie’s job was paperwork and the remaining fifty percent had his eye to either a camera or a microscope. He had probably found an unusual pattern of spatter on a ceiling or the forensic Holy Grail: a viable fingerprint left in fresh blood.

  “There it is.” Charlie sounded triumphant. He held out the camera so that Sara could see for herself.

  The display showed the familiar chemiluminescence—bright, glowing blue against the dark, graffitied background, almost like an X-ray. Instead of an unusual blood pattern or a clear fingerprint, there were two words written in blood: help me.

  “Dr. Linton?” Gary had finished the test card. “It says B-negative, just like the other two.”

  Charlie verified, “Gary, you’re sure that blood was taken from the second room, which is where I found this note?”

  “Yes, sir. Positive. Triple positive.”

  “Sara?” Charlie waited. “Did you get Angie’s blood type from Amanda yet?”

  She couldn’t find it in herself to answer. Her eyes would not leave the glowing image on the camera. She stared at the two words, absorbing the familiar disjointed cursive like radiation into her brain.

  Both of the E’s were written like backward threes.

  Amanda opened the back door. She held out her hand for Charlie to help her into the van. Gary stood to offer his chair. Amanda took in his tattoos and gold chain and scowled. “Young man, wait for me outside.”

  Gary quickly followed orders, gently clicking the door shut behind him.

  Amanda sat in the vacated chair. She told Sara, “Will is searching the office building across the street.” Her tone was accusatory, as if Sara could have stopped him. “The structural engineer said the whole damn thing is about to fall down, but Will wouldn’t listen. I can’t send anyone in after him without risking a lawsuit if the building collapses.”

  Sara handed Amanda the camera.

  “What’s this?” Amanda looked down at the screen. She stared at the words for a good long while. “You recognize the handwriting?”

  Sara nodded. She had gotten so many nasty notes over the last year that she knew Angie’s handwriting almost better than her own.

  Amanda said, “For now, let’s make sure this message goes no further than the three of us. Will doesn’t need anything else to set him off.”

  Charlie said, “Yes, ma’am.”

  Sara found she couldn’t answer.

  Amanda said, “Records finally sent me Angie’s file.” She let the camera rest in her lap. Her shoulders slumped. She seemed suddenly tired, older than her sixty-four years. “Please tell me that none of the blood you found is B-negative.”

  Chapter Three

  The front doors to the office building had been chained shut, but the junkies had pulled the boards off a window. The door to the basement and the doors to the elevator shafts were a different beast. The metal had been welded to the jamb. This hadn’t put a damper on the party. The lobby was riddled with broken glass and pieces of steel from fractured desks and chairs. The building was old enough to be built from wood and not concrete. It was a wonder the thing hadn’t burned down. Fires had been started on the asbestos tile floors and the smoke had blackened the asbestos tiled ceilings. Urine stained the walls. Everything of any value had been broken or carted off long ago. Even the copper wires had been stripped out of the walls.

  The structure was ten stories, almost perfectly square. Will gathered that each of the floors was divided into twenty offices, ten on each side, with a long, open cubicle area down the center and two bathrooms at the back. The layout was less like a maze and more like an Escher drawing. Some of the rooms had makeshift stairs built from stacked crates and desks that led to rotted holes in the ceilings. These wobbly stairs led to locked doors or smaller rooms on different floors that needed to be searched after he finished the one below. Will felt like a pinball banging from one side of the building to the other, up some creaky, stacked crates, down some shifting, stacked desks, prying open cabinets and lifting downed bookcases and kicking over piles of paperwork that had been left to rot for decades.

  Angie.

  He had to find Angie.

  Amanda had wasted almost an hour of Will’s life, making him wait outside the governor’s office while she briefed the man on what little they had so far in the Dale Harding murder investigation. Will had spent the time convincing himself that she was right. He couldn’t look for Angie. He couldn’t be the one to find her. The press would latch onto the story and Will wouldn’t just see the end of his career, he would probably see the inside of a prison cell. He could ruin Amanda’s life in the process. Faith’s. Sara’s. The damage would be irreparable.

  Unless he found Angie alive. Unless she was able to tell the story of what had really happened inside Rippy’s club.

  That was when Will had walked outside the state capitol and hailed a cab.

  Forty minutes had passed since then. If Sara was right, if Angie only had a few more hours, then he might be too late.

  But he couldn’t stop looking.

  Will pushed open t
he last door to the last office on the third floor. There were no boards on the windows. Sunlight drenched the small room. Will pushed a desk away from the wall. A rat darted out. Will jumped back. His foot went through a rotted floorboard. He felt the skin along the back of his calf rip open like a zipper. He quickly wrenched his leg out of the hole, praying a stray needle or piece of broken glass hadn’t infected him. His pants were torn. Blood streamed into his shoe. Nothing he could do about either right now.

  A set of stairs was at the end of the hall. The concrete treads ran up the structure like a spine, broken windows on every other landing shooting blinding light into his eyes. Will grabbed the handrail and swung himself up to the next flight. His knee almost buckled on the landing. His leg might be hurt worse than he’d originally thought. He could feel blood pooling into the heel of his shoe. His sock made a squishing noise as he climbed to the next floor.

  “Hey.” Collier was waiting for him. The yellow hard hat was back on his head. He was leaning against the doorjamb. His arms were crossed over his chest. “End of the line, buddy. You gotta get outta here.”

  Will said, “Move.”

  “Your boss lady shit a brick when I told her you were here. I literally watched it pinch out between her legs.” Collier grinned. “Guess she’ll pinch out another one when she finds out I’m in here, too.”

  Collier didn’t move, so Will shoved him aside.

  “Come on, bro. This place ain’t safe.” Collier had to jog to keep up with Will’s longer stride. “I’m in charge of the search teams. If you fall through the floor and break your neck, that’s on my record.”

  “I already fell through the floor.” Will strode up the hallway. He entered the first office. Dingy carpet. Broken chairs. Rusted metal desk.

  Collier followed him, standing in the doorway, watching Will search the room. “What’s your deal, bro?”

  Will saw the edge of a mattress. Newspapers covered the surface. He could make out a shape underneath. He used his foot to kick away the papers, breath caught in his chest until he saw that the shape was a blanket, not Angie.

  Collier said, “This is some crazy shit, man.”

  Will turned around. Collier was still blocking the doorway.

  Will asked, “Where’s your partner?”

  “Ng’s ball-deep in missing persons reports, plus he’s waiting for our domestic from last night to get out of surgery. He won’t see sunshine for days.”

  “Why don’t you go help him?”

  “’Cause I’m helping you.”

  “No, you’re not.” Will towered over him. “Move, or I’ll move you.”

  “Is this about before with your girlfriend? Mistress? Whatever?” Collier smirked. “Lookit, dude, you should’a told me you were seeing her. Handle it like a man.”

  “You’re right.” Will reared back his fist and punched him in the side of the head—not just for Sara, but for being an asshole and being in the way.

  Collier’s hands went up a second too late. The blow was harder than Will intended, or maybe Collier was just one of those guys who couldn’t take a punch. His eyes rolled back in his head. His mouth fished open. He dropped like a sack of shit thrown from wherever it is you throw sacks of shit from, knocked out cold before he hit the floor.

  Will experienced five seconds of sheer bliss before he came back to his senses. He looked down at his hand, startled by his own sudden act of violence. He flexed his fingers. The skin had broken over two of his knuckles. Trickles of blood slid down his wrist. For a moment, he found himself wondering if the hand had acted of its own accord, some kind of possession he couldn’t control. This wasn’t him. He didn’t just haul off and punch people, even people like Collier, who deserved it.

  This was Angie’s real power over Will: she brought out the very worst in him.

  Will untucked his shirt. He wiped the blood off his hand. He tucked the shirt back in. He leaned down. He grabbed Collier by the shoulders and propped him up in the doorway. Then he walked across the hall and continued searching for Angie.

  Another office. Another desk. Another overturned bookshelf. A shopping cart with an old IBM Selectric. He turned around. There was a metal cabinet by the door. Every other office seemed to have one. Six feet tall. Three feet wide. Eighteen inches deep. Unlike the others, the doors were closed.

  Will wiped the sweat off his palms. He wrapped his fingers around the handle. He tried to turn the latch. Rust kept it from moving. He put his shoulder into it, practically lifting the cabinet off the floor. There was a loud pop. The door squealed open.

  Empty.

  She might hide in a cabinet. Angie liked dark places. Places where she could see you but you couldn’t see her. The basement at the Children’s Home was her favorite retreat. Someone had dragged a futon downstairs and laid it on the cold brick floor. Kids would smoke down there. Do other things. Mrs. Flannigan, the lady who ran the home, couldn’t handle the stairs. Her knees were old. She carried a lot of weight. She had no idea what was going on down there. Or maybe she did. Maybe she understood that physical comforts were all they had to offer each other.

  Will took out his handkerchief. He wiped the back of his neck.

  He would never forget being down in the basement with Angie. His first time. He wasn’t shaking so much as vibrating with excitement and fear and dread that he would do it wrong or too soon or backward and she would laugh at him and he would have to kill himself.

  Angie was three years older than Will. She’d done a lot of things with a lot of boys, some other things with a lot of men, not always her choice, but the fact was that she knew what she was doing and he did not.

  Just the touch of her hands made him shiver. He was clumsy. He forgot things, like how to unbutton his own pants. At that point in his life, the only people who had ever touched Will were either hurting him or stitching him up. He couldn’t help himself. He started crying. Really crying. Not like the hot tears streaming down his face when his nose was broken or when he cut open his own arm with a straight razor.

  Big, gulping, humiliating sobs.

  Angie hadn’t laughed at him. She had held him. Her arms around his back. Her legs wrapped with his. Will hadn’t known what to do with his hands. He had never been held before. He had never been physically close to another human being. They had stayed in the basement for hours, Angie holding him, kissing him, showing him what to do. She had promised to never let Will go, but the truth was that things between them were never the same. She could never look at him again without seeing him as broken.

  The next time Will had felt that close to a woman was almost thirty years later.

  “Trent!” Collier was at the end of the hall, bobbing like a Weeble Wobble. He winced as his fingers touched his ear. Blood streaked down the side of his face and neck.

  Will returned his handkerchief to his pocket. He pushed open another door, searched another room.

  Angie, he kept thinking. Where are you hiding?

  There was no use calling for her because he knew that she would not want to be found. Angie was a wild animal. She did not show weakness. She slinked away to lick her wounds in private. Will had always known that when her time came, she would go off somewhere and die on her own. The same as the woman who’d raised her.

  Or at least tried to raise her.

  Angie was just a kid when Deidre Polaski injected her final not-fatal-enough overdose of heroin. The woman had spent the next thirty-four years in a vegetative coma inside a state-run hospice facility. Angie had once told Will that she wasn’t sure which was worse: living with Deidre’s pimp or living at the Children’s Home.

  “Trent!” Collier braced his hands against the wall. Spit drooled out of his mouth. “Jesus Christ. What the fuck did you hit me with, a sledgehammer?”

  Will struggled against his guilt, forcing himself not to apologize. He pushed open the next door. He felt his stomach clench as his eyes scanned what was left of the bathroom. The floor had rotted through. Broken toilets, sinks
, and pipes had crashed to the level below.

  There was another metal storage cabinet on the other side of the hole. Doors closed. Could Angie be inside? Would she cling to the wall, edging her way to the other side of the room so she could close herself off and wait to die?

  Collier said, “You’re not going in there.” He stood behind Will, his hand covering his bloody ear. “No kidding, man. You’ll fall to your death.”

  Will took out his handkerchief and handed it to him.

  Collier hissed a curse as he put the cloth to his ear. “That cabinet’s a foot wide, dude. How thin is this chick?”

  “She could fit in there.”

  “Sitting down?”

  Will imagined Angie sitting in the cabinet. Eyes closed. Listening.

  Collier said, “Okay, this chick is hurt, all right? Real bad. She has all these other rooms to choose from, but this is the one she goes into, the one with the giant hole in it. How’s she even gonna get over there?”

  He had a point. Angie wasn’t athletic. She hated sweat.

  Will turned around. He went into the bathroom across the hall.

  Again, Collier watched him from the doorway, arms folded, leaning against the jamb. “They told me you were a stubborn prick.”

  Will kicked open a stall door.

  “I guess you got your ass handed to you by the good doctor?”

  “Shut up.” Will heard the echo of Sara saying the same two words a few hours ago. He’d never seen her that mad before.

  Collier said, “What’s your secret, man? I mean, no offense, but Brad Pitt you ain’t.”

  Will grabbed Collier’s shirt and moved him out of the way.

  Angie wasn’t on this floor. Six more to go. Will headed toward the stairs and started the climb to the next level. Was he doing this the wrong way? Should he have started at the top floor instead of the bottom? Was there an attic in this place? A top-floor C-Suite with a panoramic view?