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Her hands were steady as she turned the dial for what she hoped was the correct units, but her leg started shaking as she tried to stick herself with the needle, so that she looked like a dog who was enjoying a particularly good scratch. There had to be some part of her unconscious brain that kept her hand hovering frozen over her shaking thigh, unable to willfully inflict pain on herself. It was probably somewhere near that damaged region that made it impossible for Faith to enter into a long-term relationship with a man.
"Screw it," she had said, almost like a sneeze, jamming the pen down, pressing the button. The needle burned like hellfire, even though the literature on the device claimed it was virtually pain-free. Maybe after sticking yourself six zillion times a week, a needle jamming into your leg or your abdomen felt relatively painless, but Faith wasn't to that point yet and she couldn't imagine herself ever being there. She was sweating so badly by the time she pulled out the needle that her underarms were sticky.
She spent the next hour dividing her time between the phone and the Internet, reaching out to various governmental organizations to get the investigation moving while scaring the ever-loving shit out of herself by investigoogling type 2 diabetes on her laptop computer. The first ten minutes were spent on hold with the Atlanta Police Department while she looked for an alternate diagnosis in case Sara Linton was wrong. That proved to be a pipe dream, and by the time Faith was on hold with the GBI's Atlanta lab, she had stumbled upon her first diabetic blog. She found another, then another—thousands of people letting loose about the travails of living with a chronic disease.
Faith read about pumps and monitors and diabetic retinopathy and poor circulation and loss of libido and all the other wonderful things diabetes could bring into your life. There were miracle cures and device reviews and one nut who claimed that diabetes was a government plot to extract billions of dollars from the unsuspecting public in order to wage the war for oil.
As Faith waded through the conspiracy pages, she was ready to believe anything that might get her out of having to live the rest of her life under constant measurement. A lifetime of following every fad diet Cosmo could spit out had taught her to count carbs and calories, but the thought of turning into a human pincushion was almost too much to bear. Thoroughly depressed—and on hold with Equifax—she had quickly clicked back to the pharmaceutical pages with their images of smiling, healthy diabetics riding bicycles and doing yoga and playing with puppies, kittens, small children, kites, sometimes a combination of all four. Surely, the woman swinging around the adorable toddler wasn't suffering from vaginal dryness.
Surely, after spending all morning on the telephone, Faith could have called the doctor's office and scheduled an appointment for later this afternoon. She had the number Sara had scribbled down at her elbow—of course she'd done a search on Delia Wallace, checking to see if she'd been sued for malpractice or had a history of drunk driving. Faith knew every detail of the doctor's education as well as her driving record, but still could not make the call.
Faith knew she was looking at desk time because of the pregnancy. Amanda had dated Faith's uncle Ted until the relationship had petered out around the time Faith had entered junior high. Boss Amanda was very different from Aunt Amanda. She was going to make Faith's life miserable in the way that only a woman can make another woman miserable for doing the things that most women do. That sort of living hell Faith was prepared for, but would Faith be allowed to return to her job even though she had diabetes?
Could she go out in the field, carry a gun and round up the bad guys if her blood sugar was out of whack? Exercise could lead to a precipitous drop. What if she was chasing a suspect and fainted? Emotional moments could stress her blood sugar as well. What if she was interviewing a witness and didn't realize she was acting crazy until internal affairs was called in? And what about Will? Could she be trusted to have his back? For all her complaints about her partner, Faith had a deep devotion to the man. She was at times his navigator, his buffer against the world and his big sister. How could she protect Will if she couldn't protect herself?
Maybe she wouldn't even have a choice in the matter.
Faith stared at her computer screen, contemplating doing another search to see what the standard policy was for diabetics in law enforcement. Were they shoved behind desks until they atrophied or quit? Were they fired? Her hands went to the laptop, her fingers resting on the keyboard. As with the insulin pen, her brain froze her muscles, not letting herself press the keys. She tapped her finger lightly on the "H" in a nervous tick, feeling the flop sweat come back. When the phone rang, she nearly jumped out of her skin.
"Good morning," Will said. "I'm outside when you're ready."
Faith shut down the laptop. She gathered up the notes she had taken from her phone calls, loaded her diabetes paraphernalia into her purse and walked out the front door without a look back.
Will was in an unmarked black Dodge Charger, what they called a G-ride, slang for government issued car. This particular beauty had a key scratch cutting along the panel over the back tire and a large antenna mounted on a spring so the scanner could pick up all signals within a hundred-mile area. A blind three-year-old would've been able to tell it was a cop car.
She opened the door and Will said, "I've got Jacquelyn Zabel's Atlanta address."
He meant the second victim, the woman who had been hanging facedown in the tree.
Faith got in the car and buckled her seatbelt. "How?"
"The Walton Beach sheriff called me back this morning. They checked with her neighbors down there. Apparently, her mother just went into a retirement home and Jacquelyn was up here packing up the house to sell it."
"Where's the house?"
"Inman Park. Charlie's going to meet us there. I've reached out to the Atlanta police for some feet on the ground. They say they can give me two patrols for a couple of hours." He reversed the car down the driveway, glancing at Faith. "You look better. Did you get some sleep?"
Faith didn't answer his question. She pulled out her notebook, going through the list of things she had accomplished on the phone this morning. "I had the splinters of wood that were taken from underneath Anna's fingernails transferred to our lab. I sent a tech to fingerprint her at the hospital first thing. I put out a statewide APB for any missing women matching Anna's age and description—they're going to try to send over a sketch artist for a drawing. Her face is pretty bruised. I'm not sure anyone would recognize her from a photograph."
She flipped to the next page, skimming her notes. "I checked the NCIC and VICAP for comparable cases—the FBI isn't tracking anything similar, but I put our details into the database just in case something hits." She went to the next page. "I put an alert on Jacquelyn Zabel's credit cards so we'll know if someone tries to use them. I called the morgue; the autopsy is scheduled to start around eleven. I put in a call to the Coldfields—the man and wife in the Buick that hit Anna. They said we could come by and talk to them at the shelter where Judith volunteers, even though they've already told that nice Detective Galloway everything they know, and speaking of that prick, I woke up Jeremy at school this morning and made him leave a message on Galloway's voicemail saying he was from the IRS and needed to talk to him about some irregularities."
