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Will asked, "How many letters is thinspiration?"
"Too many," she said, " 'Thinspo' is seven." She tried this, to no avail.
Will asked, "What's her screen name?"
Faith read the name in the box above the password. "A-T-L thin." She realized spelling wouldn't help him. "It's shorthand for 'Atlanta Thin.'" She entered in the screen name. "No dice. Oh." Faith mentally kicked herself. "Felix's birthday." She opened up the calendar program and did a search for "birthday." Only two hits came up, one for Pauline and one for her son. "Twelve-eight-oh-three." The screen stayed stagnant. "Nope, didn't work."
He nodded, absently scratching his arm. "Safes have six-digit combinations, right?"
"Couldn't hurt to try it." Faith waited, but Will did not move. "One-two-oh-eight-oh-three," she repeated, knowing he was perfectly capable of processing numbers. Still, he didn't move, and finally, she felt something in her brain click. "Oh. I'm sorry."
"Don't apologize. It's my fault."
"It's mine." She stood up and went to the safe, spinning the dial to the right, locking onto the twelve, then going left two turns and dialing in eight. It wasn't the numbers Will couldn't manage. It was the left and right.
Faith dialed in the last number, and was slightly disappointed it had been so easy when she heard the instant thunk of the last tumbler falling into place. She opened the safe and saw a spiral-bound notebook, the sort of thing every schoolkid had, and a single piece of laser paper. She skimmed the page. It was a printed-out email dealing with measuring an elevator so a couch could fit in it, something Faith had never considered had to be done, even though the first refrigerator she'd bought had been too big to fit through the kitchen door. "Work stuff," she told Will, taking out the notebook.
She flipped open the cover to the first page. The hair on back of her neck went up, and Faith suppressed a shudder as she realized what she was seeing. Neat cursive lined the page, over and over again, the same line. Faith flipped to the next page, then the next. The words had been traced so hard in places that the pen ripped the paper. She was not one to believe in the supernatural, but the anger she felt coming out of the notebook was palpable.
"It's the same, right?" Will had probably recognized the spacing of the lines, the same short sentence repeatedly written, covering the notebook like a sadistic form of art.
I will not deny myself . . . I will not deny myself . . . I will not deny myself . . .
"The same," Faith confirmed. "This connects Pauline to the cave, to Jackie Zabel and Anna."
"It's in pen," Will said. "The pages in the cave were in pencil."
"It's the same sentence, though. I will not deny myself. Pauline wrote this on her own, not because she had to. No one made her do it. As far as we know, she was never in that cave." Faith thumbed through the pages, making sure it was the same to the end of the notebook. "Jackie Zabel was thin. Not like the girls in the videos, but very thin."
"Joelyn Zabel said her sister weighed the same weight when she died as she did in high school."
"You think she had an eating disorder?"
"I think she had a lot of the same attributes that Pauline has— likes to be in control, likes to keep secrets." He added, "Pete thought Jackie was malnourished, but maybe she was starving herself already."
"What about Anna? Is she thin?"
"Same thing. You could see her . . ." he put his hand to his collarbone. "We thought it was part of the torture—starving them. But, those girls in the videos, they do that on purpose, right? These videos are like pornography for anorexics."
Faith nodded, feeling a rush as she made the next connection. "Maybe they all met on the Internet." She went back to the password box overlaying the Pro-Anna chat room and entered Felix's birthday in every combination she could think of—leaving out the zeroes, adding them back in, doing the full date, reversing the numbers. "It could be that Pauline was assigned a password she couldn't change."
"Or maybe what's in that chat room is more valuable to her than what's on the rest of the computer and in the safe."
"This is a connection, Will. If all the women had eating disorders, then we finally have something that links them all."
"And a chat room we can't get into, and family that isn't being exactly helpful."
"What about Pauline McGhee's brother? She told Felix that he was a bad man." She turned away from the computer, giving Will her full attention. "Maybe we should go back to Felix and see if he remembers anything else."
Will seemed dubious. "He's only six years old, Faith. He's bereft about losing his mom. I don't think we can get anything else out of him."
They both jumped when the phone on the desk rang. Faith reached for it without thinking, saying, "Pauline McGhee's office."
"Hello." Morgan Hollister sounded none too pleased.
Faith asked, "Did you find Jacquelyn Zabel in your books?"
"'Fraid not, Detective, but—funny thing—I've got a call for you on line two."
Faith shrugged at Will as she pressed the lighted button. "Faith Mitchell."
Leo Donnelly went straight into a tirade. "Didn't occur with you to check with me before barging in on my case?"
Faith's mouth filled with apologies, but Leo didn't give her time to get them out.
"I got a call from my boss who got a call from your butt-boy Hollister asking why the state was pawing through McGhee's office when we'd already been through everything this morning." He was breathing hard. "My boss, Faith. He's wanting to know why I can't do my job on this thing. You know how that makes me look?"
"It's connected," Faith said. "We found a connection between Pauline McGhee and our other victims."
"I'm real fucking happy for you, Mitchell. Meanwhile, my balls are in a vise because you couldn't take two seconds to stop and give me a heads-up."
"Leo, I'm so sorry—"
"Save it," he snapped. "I should hold this back from you, but I'm not that kind of guy."
"Hold what back?"
"We've got another missing person."
Faith felt her heart do a double beat. "Another missing woman?" she repeated, for Will's benefit. "Does she match our profile?"
"Mid-thirties, dark hair, brown eyes. She works at some fancy bank in Buckhead where you gotta be filthy rich just to walk in the door. No friends. Everybody says she's a major bitch."
Faith nodded at Will. Another victim, another clock ticking down. "What's her name? Where does she live?"
"Olivia Tanner." He shot out the name and address so fast that she had to ask him to repeat it. "She's in Virginia Highland."
Faith scribbled the street address on the back of her hand.
He said, "You owe me for this."
"Leo, I'm so sorry I—"
He didn't let her finish. "If I were you, Mitchell, I'd watch myself. Except for the successful part, you're looking a hell of a lot like that profile lately."
