AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Faith let his words hang in the air, her brain trying to make sense of them. There was no way to make sense of it, though: what had been done to those women was not the product of a sound mind.
She asked, "Where's Jacquelyn Zabel's BMW?"
"Not in her driveway in Florida. And not at her mother's house."
"Did you put out an APB on the car?"
"In both Florida and Georgia." He reached around to the back seat and pulled out a handful of folders. They were all color-coded, and he thumbed through until he found the orange one, which he handed to Faith. She opened it to find a printout from the Florida Department of Motor Vehicles. Jacquelyn Alexandra Zabel's driver's license stared back at her, the picture showing a very attractive woman with long dark hair and brown eyes. "She's pretty," Faith said.
"So's Anna," Will provided. "Brown hair, brown eyes."
"Our guy has a type." Faith turned to the next page and read aloud from the woman's driving record, "Zabel's car is a 2008 red BMW 540i. Speeding ticket six months ago for going eighty in a fifty-five. Running a stop sign in a school zone last month. Failure to stop at a roadblock two weeks ago, refused to take a Breathalyzer, court date pending." She thumbed through the pages. "Her record was pretty clean until recently."
Will absently scratched his forearm as he waited for another light to change. "Maybe something happened."
"What about the notes Charlie found in the cave?"
"'I will not deny myself,'" he recalled, taking out the blue folder. "The pages are being fingerprinted. They're from a standard spiral notebook, written in pencil, probably by a woman."
Faith looked at the copy, the same sentence written over and over again like she'd done many times herself as punishment back in junior high school. "And the rib?"
He was still scratching his arm. "No sign of the rib in the cave or the immediate area."
"A souvenir?"
"Maybe," he said. "Jacquelyn didn't have any cuts on her body." He corrected, "I mean, any deep cuts like what Anna had where the rib was removed. Both of them looked like they'd been through the same kind of stuff, though."
"Torture." Faith tried to put herself in the mind of their perpetrator. "He keeps one woman on the top of the bed and one woman underneath. Maybe he trades them out—does one horrible thing to Anna, then swaps her out for Jacquelyn and does the horrible thing to her."
"Then trades them back," Will said. "So, maybe Jacquelyn heard what happened to Anna with the rib, knew what was coming, and chewed her way through the rope around her wrist."
"She must have found the penknife, or had it with her under the bed."
"Charlie examined the slats under the bed. He put them back together in sequence. The tip of a very sharp knife ran in the center of each slat where someone cut the rope from underneath the bed, head to foot."
Faith suppressed a shudder as she stated the obvious. "Jacquelyn was under the bed while Anna was being mutilated."
"And she was probably alive while we were searching the woods."
Faith opened her mouth to say something along the lines of "It's not your fault," but she knew the words were useless. She felt guilt herself for not being out there during the search. She could not imagine how Will was feeling, considering he'd been blundering around in the woods while the woman was dying.
Instead, she asked, "What's wrong with your arm?"
"What do you mean?"
"You keep scratching it."
He stopped the car and squinted up at the street signs.
"Hamilton," Faith read.
He checked his watch, a ploy he used for telling left from right. "Both victims were probably well-off," he said, taking a right onto Hamilton. "Anna was malnourished, but her hair was nice—the color, I mean—and she'd had a manicure recently. The polish on her nails was chipped, but it looked professionally done."
Faith didn't press him on how he knew a professional manicure from an amateur one. "These women weren't prostitutes. They had homes and probably jobs. It's unusual for a killer to choose victims who will be missed."
"Motive, means, opportunity," he listed, stating the foundation for any investigation. "Motive is sex and torture and maybe taking the rib."
"Means," Faith said, trying to think of ways the killer might have abducted his victims. "Maybe he rigs their cars to break down? He could be a mechanic."
"BMWs are equipped with driver assist. You just press a button and they're on the phone with you and they send out a tow truck."
"Nice," Faith said. The Mini was a poor man's BMW, which meant you had to use your own phone if you got stuck. "Jacquelyn's moving her mother's house. That means she probably contracted with a moving company or liquidation agent."
"She'd need a termite letter to sell the house," Will added. You couldn't get a mortgage on a house inmost of the South without first proving that termites weren't feasting on the foundation. "So, our bad guy could be an exterminator, a contractor, a mover . . ."
Faith got out a pen and started a list on the back of the orange folder. "Her real estate license wouldn't transfer up here, so she'd have to have an Atlanta agent to sell the house."
"Unless she did a for-sale-by-owner, in which case she could have had open houses, could've had strangers in and out all the time."
"Why didn't anyone notice she was missing?" Faith asked. "Sara said Anna was taken at least four days ago."
"Who's Sara?"
"Sara Linton," Faith said. He shrugged, and she studied him carefully. Will never forgot names. He never forgot anything. "The doctor from yesterday?"
"Is that her name?"
Faith resisted a "Come on."
He asked, "How would she know how long Anna was kept?"
"She used to be a coroner in some county way down south."
Will's eyebrows went up. He slowed to look at another sign. "A coroner? That's weird."
He was one to talk. "She was a coroner and a pediatrician."
Will mumbled as he tried to make out the sign. "I took her for a dancer."
"Woodland," Faith read. "A dancer? She's twenty feet tall."
"Dancers can be tall."
Faith clenched her teeth together so that she would not laugh out loud.
"Anyway." He didn't add anything else, using the word to indicate an end to that part of the conversation.
She studied his profile as he turned the wheel, the way he stared so intently at the road ahead. Will was an attractive man, arguably handsome, but he was about as self-aware as a snail. His wife, Angie Polaski, seemed to see beyond his quirks—among them his painful inability to conduct small talk and the anachronistic three-piece suits he insisted on wearing. In return, Will seemed to overlook the fact that Angie had slept with half the Atlanta police force, including—if graffiti in the ladies' toilet on the third floor was to be believed—a couple of women. They had met each other at the Atlanta Children's Home, and Faith supposed this was the connection that bound them together. They were both orphans, both abandoned by, presumably, crappy parents. As with everything in his personal life, Will did not share the details. Faith hadn't even known that he and Angie were officially married until Will showed up one morning wearing a wedding band.
