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Faith held open the door and Sara rolled out the bassinet. The hum of the hallway buzzed in her ears until Faith shut the door. She sat on the stool by the counter and lifted her skirt, looking for a spot that wasn't already black and blue from the needles. The diabetes pamphlet had said to move the injection sites around, so Faith checked her stomach, where she found a pristine roll of white fat that she pinched between her thumb and forefinger.
She held the insulin pen a few inches from her belly but didn't inject herself. Somewhere behind all those Pop-Tarts was a tiny baby with tiny hands and feet and a mouth and eyes—breathing every breath she took, peeing every ten minutes when she ran to the bathroom. Sara's words had brought things home for Faith, but holding Balthazar Lindsey had awakened something in Faith that she had never felt in her life. As much as she had loved Jeremy, his birth was hardly a celebration. Fifteen was not an appropriate age for baby showers, and even the nurses at the hospital had looked at her with pity.
This time would be different, though. Faith was old enough so that it was acceptable for her to be a mother. She could walk through the mall with her baby on her hip without worrying people would assume she was her own child's older sister. She could take him to the pediatrician and sign all his forms without getting her mother to cosign. She could tell his teachers to go screw themselves during PTA meetings without worrying about being sent to the principal's office herself. Hell, she could drive now.
She could do it right this time. She could be a good mother from start to finish. Well, maybe not start. Faith catalogued all the things she had done to her baby just this week: ignored him, denied his existence, passed out in a garage, contemplated abortion, exposed him to whatever Sam Lawson was carrying, fallen off a porch step, and risked both their lives trying to stop Will from pounding a Russian doorman's head into the fine, looped carpet lining the penthouse hallway at Beeston Place.
And here they were now, mother and child in the Grady ICU, and she was about to poke a needle somewhere near his head.
The door opened.
"What the hell are you doing?" Amanda demanded. She figured it out for herself quickly enough. "Oh, for the love of God. When were you going to tell me about this?"
Faith rolled her shirt back down, thinking it was a little late for modesty. "Right after I told you I'm pregnant."
Amanda tried to slam the door but the hydraulic hinge wouldn't let her. "Goddamm it, Faith. You're never going to get ahead with a baby."
Her hackles were raised. "I got this far with one."
"You were a kid in uniform making sixteen thousand dollars a year. You're thirty-three now."
Faith tried, "I guess this means you won't be throwing me a baby shower."
Her look would have cut glass. "Does your mother know?"
"I thought I'd let her enjoy her vacation."
Amanda slapped her palm to her forehead, which would've been comical if not for the fact that she held Faith's life in her hands. "A dyslexic half-wit with a temper problem and a fertile, fat diabetic who lacks a rudimentary understanding of birth control." She jabbed her finger in Faith's face. "I hope you like that pairing, young lady, because you're going to be stuck with Will Trent forever now."
Faith tried to ignore the "fat" part, which, honestly, hurt the most. "I can think of worse things than being partnered with Will Trent for the rest of my life."
"You'd just better be damned glad the security cameras didn't catch his little tantrum."
"Will's a good cop, Amanda. He wouldn't still be working for you if you didn't believe that."
"Well—" She cut herself off. "Maybe when he's not putting his abandonment issues on full display."
"Is he all right?"
"He'll live," Amanda replied, not sounding too convinced. "I sent him to track down that prostitute. Lola."
"She's not in jail?"
"There was a pretty big score in the apartment—heroin, meth, coke. Angie Polaski managed to get Lola kicked for being an informant." Amanda shrugged. She couldn't always control the Atlanta police department.
"Do you think it's a good idea to have Will looking for Lola, considering how angry he was about that baby being left alone?"
The old Amanda was back—the one who couldn't be questioned. "We've got two missing women and a serial killer who knows what to do with them. There has to be some movement on this case before it gets away from us. The clock is ticking, Faith. He could be watching his next victim right now."
"I was supposed to meet with Rick Sigler today—the paramedic who worked on Anna."
"I sent someone around to Sigler's house an hour ago. His wife was there with him. He adamantly denied knowing anyone named Jake Berman. He barely admitted he was on the road that night."
Faith could not think of a worse way to question the man. "He's gay. The wife doesn't know."
"They never do," Amanda countered. "At any rate, he wasn't interested in talking, and we don't have enough right now to drag him down to the station."
"I'm not sure he's a suspect."
"Everyone is a suspect as far as I'm concerned. I read the autopsy report. I've seen what was done to Anna. Our bad guy likes to experiment. He's going to keep doing this until we stop him."
Faith had been running on adrenaline for the past few hours, and she felt it spark up again at Amanda's words. "Do you want me to watch Sigler?"
"I've got Leo Donnelly parked outside his house right now. Something tells me you don't want to be trapped in a car with him all night."
"No, ma'am," Faith answered, and not just because Leo was a chain smoker. He would probably blame Faith for putting him on Amanda's shit list. He would be right.
"Someone needs to go to Michigan to find the files on Pauline Seward's family. The warrant's being expedited, but apparently nothing past fifteen years is on the computers. We need to find someone from her past and we need to find them fast—the parents, hopefully the brother, if it's not our mysterious Mr. Berman. For obvious reasons, I can't send Will to read through the files."
Faith put the insulin pen down on the counter. "I'll do it."
"Do you have this diabetes thing under control?" Faith's expression must've been answer enough. "I'll send one of my agents who can actually do their job." She waved her hand, dismissing any objections Faith might have. "Let's just move on from that until it bites us in the ass again, shall we?"
"I'm sorry about this." Faith had apologized more in the last fifteen minutes than she had in her entire life.
Amanda shook her head, indicating she wasn't willing to discuss the stupidity of the situation. "The doorman's asked for a lawyer. We're scheduled to talk to them first thing in the morning."
"You arrested him?"
"Detained. He's obviously foreign-born. The Patriot Act gives us twenty-four hours to hold him while we check his immigration status. Hopefully, we can turn his apartment upside down and find something more concrete to hammer him with."
Faith wasn't one to argue with the true course of justice.
