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Will realized that he had been using "she," when the victim had a name. Anna, close to Angie, the name of Will's wife. Like Angie, the woman had dark hair, dark eyes. Her skin tone was olive and she had a mole on the back of her calf just down from her knee, the same as Angie. Will wondered if this was something olive-skinned women tended to have, a mole on the back of their leg. Maybe this was some kind of marker that came in the genetic kit along with dark hair and eyes. He bet that doctor would know.
He remembered Sara Linton's words as she examined the torn skin, the fingernail scratches around the gaping hole in the victim's side. "She must have been awake when the rib was removed."
Will shuddered at the thought. He had seen the work of many sadists over his law enforcement career, but nothing as sick as this.
His cell phone rang, and Will struggled to get his hand into his pocket without knocking the steering wheel and sending the Mini into the ditch by the road. Carefully, he opened the phone. The plastic clamshell had been cracked apart months ago, but he'd managed to put the pieces back together with Super Glue, duct tape and five strips of twine that acted as a hinge. Still, he had to be careful or the whole thing would fall apart in his hand.
"Will Trent."
"It's Lola, baby."
He felt his brow furrow. Her voice had the phlegmy rasp of a two-pack-an-hour smoker. "Who?"
"You're Angie's brother, right?"
"Husband," he corrected. "Who is this?"
"This is Lola. I'm one'a her girls."
Angie was freelancing for several private detective firms now, but she had been a vice cop for over a decade. Will occasionally got calls from some of the women she had walked the streets with. They all wanted help, and they all ended up right back in jail, where they used the pay phone to call him. "What do you want?"
"You don't gotta be all abrupt on me, baby."
"Listen, I haven't talked to Angie in eight months." Coincidentally, their relationship had become unhinged around the same time as the phone. "I can't help you."
"I'm innocent." Lola laughed at the joke, then coughed, then coughed some more. "I got picked up with an unknown white substance I was just holding for a friend."
These girls knew the law better than most cops, and they were especially careful on the pay phone in the jail.
"Get a lawyer," Will advised, speeding up to pass a car in front of him. Lightning cracked the sky, illuminating the road. "I can't help you."
"I got information to exchange."
"Then tell that to your lawyer." His phone beeped, and he recognized his boss's number. "I have to go." He clicked over before the woman could say anything else. "Will Trent."
Amanda Wagner inhaled, and Will braced himself for a barrage of words. "What the hell are you doing leaving your partner at the hospital and going on some fool's errand for a case that we have no jurisdiction over and haven't been invited to attend—in a county, I might add, where we don't exactly have a good relationship?"
"We'll get asked to help," he assured her.
"Your woman's intuition is not impressing me tonight, Will."
"The longer we let the locals play this out, the colder the trail is going to get. This isn't our abductor's first time, Amanda. This wasn't an exhibition game."
"Rockdale has this covered," she said, referring to the county that had police jurisdiction over the area where the car accident occurred. "They know what they're doing."
"Are they stopping cars and looking for stolen vehicles?"
"They're not completely stupid."
"Yes, they are," he insisted. "This wasn't a dump job. She was held in the area and she managed to escape."
Amanda was silent for a moment, probably clearing the smoke coming out of her ears. Overhead, a flash of lightning slashed the sky, and the ensuing thunder made it hard for Will to hear what Amanda finally said.
"What?" he asked.
She curtly repeated, "What's the status of the victim?"
Will didn't think about Anna. Instead, he recalled the look in Sara Linton's eyes when they rolled the patient up to surgery. "It doesn't look good for her."
Amanda gave another, heavier sigh. "Run it down for me."
Will gave her the highlights, the way the woman had looked, the torture. "She must have walked out of the woods. There's got to be a house somewhere, a shack or something. She didn't look like she'd been out in the elements. Somebody kept her for a while, starved her, raped her, abused her."
"You think some hillbilly snatched her?"
"I think she was kidnapped," he replied. "She had a good haircut, her teeth were bleached white. No track marks. No signs of neglect. There were two small plastic surgery scars on her back, probably from lipo."
"So, not a homeless woman and not a prostitute."
"Her wrists and ankles were bleeding from being bound. Some of the wounds on her body were healing, others were fresh. She was thin—too thin. This took place over amore than a few days—maybe a week, two weeks, tops."
Amanda cursed under her breath. The red tape was getting pretty thick. The Georgia Bureau of Investigation was to the state what the Federal Bureau of Investigation was to the country. The GBI coordinated with local law enforcement when crimes crossed over county lines, keeping the focus on the case rather than territorial disputes. The state had eight crime labs as well as hundreds of crime-scene techs and special agents on duty, all ready to serve whoever asked for help. The catch was that the request for help had to be formally made. There were ways to make sure it came, but favors had to be played, and for reasons not discussed in polite company, Amanda had lost her heat in Rockdale County a few months ago during a case involving an unstable father who abducted and murdered his own children.
Will tried again. "Amanda—"
"Let me make some calls."
"Can the first one be to Barry Fielding?" he asked, referring to the canine expert for the GBI. "I'm not even sure the locals know what they're dealing with. They haven't seen the victim or talked to the witnesses. Their detective wasn't even at the hospital when I left." She didn't respond, so he prodded some more. "Barry lives in Rockdale County."
A heavier sigh than the first two came down the line. Finally, she said, "All right. Just try not to piss off anyone more than usual. Report back to me when you've got something to move on." Amanda ended the call.
Will closed the cell phone and tucked it into his jacket pocket just as the rumble of thunder filled the air. Lightning lit up the sky again, and he slowed the Mini, his knees pressing into the plastic dashboard. His plan had been to drive straight up Route 316 until he found the accident site, then beg his way onto the scene. Stupidly, he had not anticipated a roadblock. Two Rockdale County police cruisers were parked nose to nose, closing both lanes, and two beefy uniformed officers stood in front of each. About fifty feet ahead, giant xenon work lights illuminated a Buick with a crumpled front end. Crime-scene techs were all over, doing the painstaking work of collecting every piece of dirt, rock and glass so they could take it back to the lab for analysis.
