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Faith felt her mouth open in surprise. The doctor had said it the same way you might confide a hidden acrobatic talent or youthful indiscretion. "Where?"
"Grant County. It's about four hours from here."
"Never heard of it."
"It's well below the gnat line," Sara admitted. She leaned her arms on the table, a wistful tone to her voice when she revealed, "I took the job so that I could buy out my partner in our pediatric practice. At least I thought I did. The truth was that I was bored. You can only give so many vaccinations and stick so many Band-Aids on skinned knees before your mind starts to go."
"I can imagine," Faith mumbled, though, she was wondering which was more alarming: that the doctor who had just diagnosed her with diabetes was a pediatrician or that she was a coroner.
"I'm glad you're on this case," Sara said. "Your partner is . . ."
"Strange?"
Sara gave her an odd look. "I was going to say 'intense.' "
"He's pretty driven," Faith agreed, thinking this was the first time since she'd met Will Trent that anyone's first impression of him had been so complimentary. He usually took awhile to grow on you, like cataracts or shingles.
"He seemed very compassionate." Sara held up her hand to stop any protest. "Not that cops aren't compassionate, but they usually don't show it."
Faith could only nod. Will seldom showed any emotions, but she knew that torture victims cut him close to the bone. "He's a good cop."
Sara looked down at her tray. "You can have this if you want. I'm not really hungry."
"I didn't think you came in here to eat."
She blushed, caught.
"It's all right," Faith assured her. "But, if you're still offering the Coldfields' information . . ."
"Of course."
Faith dug out one of her business cards. "My cell number is on the back."
"Right." She read the number, a determined set to her mouth, and Faith saw that not only did Sara know she was breaking the law, she obviously didn't care. "Another thing—" Sara seemed to be debating whether or not to speak. "Her eyes. The whites showed petechia, but there weren't any visible signs of strangulation. Her pupils wouldn't focus. It could be from the trauma or something neurological, but I'm not sure she could see anything."
"That might explain why she walked out in the middle of the road."
"Considering what she's been through . . ." Sara didn't finish the sentence, but Faith knew exactly what she meant. You didn't have to be a doctor to understand that a woman who'd been through that kind of hell might deliberately walk into the path of a speeding car.
Sara tucked Faith's business card into her coat pocket. "I'll call you in a few minutes."
Faith watched her leave, wondering how in the hell Sara Linton had ended up working at Grady Hospital. Sara couldn't be more than forty, but the emergency room was a young person's game, the sort of place you ran screaming from before you hit your thirties.
She checked her phone again. All six bars were lit, meaning the signal was bright and clear. She tried to give Will the benefit of the doubt. Maybe his phone had fallen apart again. Then again, every cop on the scene would have a cell phone, so maybe he really was an asshole.
It did occur to Faith as she got up from the table and made her way to the parking lot that she could call Will herself, but there was a reason Faith was pregnant and unmarried for the second time in less than twenty years, and it wasn't because she was good at communicating with the men in her life.
CHAPTER FOUR
WILL STOOD AT THE MOUTH OF THE CAVE, LOWERING DOWN a set of lights on a rope so that Charlie Reed would have something better than a flashlight to help him collect evidence. Will was soaked to the bone, even though the rain had stopped half an hour ago. As dawn approached, the air had turned chillier, but he would rather stand on the deck of the Titanic than go down into that hole again.
The lights hit the bottom and he saw a pair of hands pull them into the cavern. Will scratched his arms. His white shirt showed pindrops of blood where the rats had clawed their way over him, and he was wondering if itching was a sign of rabies. It was the kind of question he would normally ask Faith, but he didn't want to bother her. She had looked awful when he'd left the hospital, and there was nothing she could do here but stand in the rain alongside him. He would catch her up on the case in the morning, after she'd had a good night's sleep. This case wasn't going to be solved in an hour. At least one of them should be well rested as they headed into the investigation.
A helicopter whirred overhead, the chopping sound vibrating in his ears. They were doing infrared sweeps, looking for the second victim. The search teams had been out for hours, carefully combing the area within a two-mile radius. Barry Fielding had shown up with his search dogs, and the animals had gone crazy for the first half hour, then lost the scent. Uniformed patrolmen from Rockdale County were doing grid searches, looking for more underground caves, more clues that might indicate the other woman had escaped.
Maybe she hadn't managed to escape. Maybe her attacker had found her before she could reach help. Maybe she had died days or even weeks ago. Or maybe she had never existed in the first place. As the search wore on, Will was getting the impression that the cops were turning against him. Some of them didn't think there was a second victim at all. Some of them thought Will was keeping them out in the freezing cold rain for no reason other than he was too stupid to see that he was wrong.
There was one person who could clarify this, but she was still in surgery back at Grady Hospital, fighting for her life. The first thing you normally did in an abduction or murder case was put the victim's life under a microscope. Other than assuming her name was Anna, they knew nothing about the woman. In the morning, Will would pull all the missing persons reports in the area, but those were bound to be in the hundreds, and that was excluding the city of Atlanta, where on average, two people a day went missing. If the woman came from a different state, the paperwork would increase exponentially. Over a quarter of a million missing persons cases were reported to the FBI every year. Compounding the problem, the cases were seldom updated if the missing were found.
If Anna wasn't awake by morning, Will would send over a fingerprint technician to card her. It was a scattershot way of trying to find her identity. Unless she had committed an arrestable crime, her fingerprints would not be on file. Still, more than one case cracked open based on following procedure. Will had learned a long time ago that a slim chance was still a chance.
The ladder at the mouth of the cavern shook and Will steadied it as Charlie Reed made his way up. The clouds had passed with the rain, letting through some of the moonlight. Though the deluge had passed, there was the occasional drop, sounding like a cat smacking its lips. Everything in the forest had a strange, bluish hue to it, and there was enough light now that Will didn't need his flashlight to see Charlie. The crime-scene tech's hand reached out, slapping a large evidence bag on the ground at Will's feet as he climbed to the surface.
"Shit," Charlie cursed. His white clean suit was caked in mud. He unzipped it as soon as he was topside, and Will could see that he was sweating so badly his t-shirt was stuck to his chest.
