Genesis (10 page)

Sara opened the chart and checked the numbers. Last night, the
pulse oximeter on Anna's finger kept detecting low oxygen levels in
her blood. They seemed to have leveled out on their own this morning.
Sara was constantly humbled by the human body's ability to heal
itself. "Makes you feel superfluous, doesn't it?"

"Maybe doctors," Jill teased. "Nurses?"

"Good point." Sara stuck her hand into her lab coat pocket, feeling
the letter inside. She had changed into fresh scrubs after working
on Anna last night, automatically moving the letter to the pocket of
the clean coat. Maybe she should open it. Maybe she should sit down
and rip it open and get it over with once and for all.

Jill asked, "Something wrong?"

Sara shook her head. "No. Thanks for putting up with me last
night."

"You made my job a little easier," the nurse admitted. The ICU
was, as usual, packed to the rafters. "I'll call you if anything
changes." Jill put her hand to Anna's cheek, smiling down at the
woman. "Maybe our girl will wake up today."

"I'm sure she will." Sara didn't think Anna could hear her, but it
made her feel good to hear the words said.

The two cops stationed outside the room tipped their hats to Sara
as she left the room. She could feel their eyes follow her as she walked
down the hall—not because they thought she was attractive, but because
they knew she was a cop's widow. Sara had never discussed
Jeffrey with anyone at Grady, but there were enough cops in and out
of the ER every day that the news had spread. It quickly became
one of those known secrets that everyone talked about, just not in
front of Sara. She hadn't intended to become a tragic figure, but it
kept people from asking questions, so she did not complain.

The great mystery was why she had so easily talked about Jeffrey
with Faith Mitchell. Sara liked to think that Faith was just a really
good detective rather than admit what was probably closer to the
truth, which was that Sara was lonely. Her sister was living halfway
around the world, her parents were four hours and a lifetime away,
and Sara's days were filled with little more than work and whatever
was on television when she got home.

What's worse, she had a nagging suspicion that it wasn't Faith
she'd found enticing, but the case. Jeffrey had always used Sara as a
sounding board during his investigations, and she missed having that
part of her brain engaged.

Last night, for the first time in forever, the last thing on Sara's
mind before she fell asleep had not been Jeffrey, but Anna. Who had
abducted her? Why had she been chosen? What clues had been left on
her body that might explain the motivations of the animal who'd
hurt her? Talking to Faith in the cafeteria last night, Sara had finally
felt like her brain was doing something more useful than just keeping
her alive. And it was probably the last time she would feel that way
again for a very long while.

Sara rubbed her eyes, trying to wake herself up. She had known
that life without Jeffrey would be painful. What she wasn't prepared
for was that it would be so damn irrelevant.

She was almost to the elevators when her cell phone rang. She
turned on her heel, walking back toward Anna's room as she opened
the phone. "I'm on my way."

Mary Schroder said, "Sonny's about ten minutes out."

Sara stopped, her heart dropping in her chest at the nurse's words.
Sonny was Mary's husband, a patrolman who worked the early shift.
"Is he all right?"

"Sonny?" she asked. "Of course he is. Where are you?"

"I'm upstairs in the ICU." Sara changed course, heading back
toward the elevator. "What's going on?"

"Sonny got a call about a little boy abandoned at the City Foods
on Ponce de Leon. Six years old. Poor thing was left in the back of
the car for at least three hours."

Sara punched the button for the elevator. "Where's the mother?"

"Missing. Her purse is on the front seat, the keys are in the ignition
and there's blood on the ground beside the car."

Sara felt her heart speed back up. "Did the boy see anything?"

"He's too upset to talk, and Sonny's useless. He doesn't know how
to deal with kids that age. Are you on your way down?"

"I'm waiting for the elevator." Sara double-checked the time. "Is
Sonny sure about the three hours?"

"The store manager noticed the car when he came into work. He
said the mother was there earlier, freaking out because she couldn't
find her kid."

Sara jammed the button again, knowing full well the gesture was
useless. "Why did he take three hours to call it in?"

"Because people are assholes," Mary answered. "People are just
plain, goddamn assholes."

F
AITH'S RED MINI WAS PARKED IN HER DRIVEWAY WHEN SHE
woke up that morning. Amanda must have followed Will here, then
taken him home. He had probably thought he was doing Faith a favor,
but Faith still wanted to rake him over the coals. When Will had called
this morning to tell her that he would pick her up at their usual eight-thirty,
she had snapped a "Fine" that seemed to float over his head.

Her anger had evened out somewhat when Will had told her
what had happened last night—his idiotic foray into the cave, finding
the second victim, dealing with Amanda. The last part sounded particularly
challenging; Amanda never made things easy. Will had
sounded exhausted, and Faith's heart went out to him as he described
the woman hanging in the tree, but as soon as she got off the phone,
she was furious with him all over again.

What was he doing going down into that cave alone with no one
but that idiot Fierro topside? Why the hell hadn't he called Faith to
come help search for the second victim? Why in God's name did he
think he was doing her a favor by actively preventing her from doing
her job? Did he think she wasn't capable, wasn't good enough? Faith
wasn't some useless mascot. Her mother had been a cop. Faith had
worked her way up from patrol to homicide detective faster than
anyone else on the squad. She hadn't been picking daisies when
Will stumbled across her. She wasn't damn Watson to his Sherlock
Holmes.

Faith had forced herself to take a deep breath. She was just sane
enough to realize that her level of fury might be out of proportion. It
wasn't until she sat down at the kitchen table and measured her blood
sugar that she realized why. She was hovering around one-fifty again,
which, according to "Your Life With Diabetes," could make a person
nervous and irritable. It didn't help her nervousness and irritability
one whit when she tried to inject herself with the insulin pen.

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."

Will chuckled at this last bit.

"We're waiting on Rockdale County to fax over the crime-scene
reports and whatever witness statements they have. Other than that,
that's all I've got." Faith closed her notebook. "So, what did you do
this morning?"

He nodded toward the cup holder. "I got you some hot chocolate."

Faith stared longingly at the take-away cup, dying to lick off the
foamy puddle of whipped cream that had squirted through the slit in
the lid. She had lied to Sara Linton about her usual diet. The last time
Faith had jogged anywhere, she had been rushing from her car to the
front door of the Zesto's, hoping to get a milkshake before they
closed. Breakfast was usually a Pop-Tart and a Diet Coke, but this
morning, she had eaten a boiled egg and a piece of dry toast, the kind
of thing they served at the county jail. The sugar in the hot chocolate
would probably kill her, though, and she said, "No thanks," before
she could change her mind.

"You know," he began, "if you're trying to lose weight, I could—"

"Will," she interrupted. "I've been on a diet for the last eighteen
years of my life. If I want to let myself go, I'm going to let myself
go."

"I didn't say—"

"Besides, I've only gained five pounds," she lied. "It's not like I
need a Goodyear sign strapped to my ass."

Will glanced at the purse in her lap, his mouth drawn. Finally, he
said, "I'm sorry."

"Thank you."

"If you're not going to . . ." He let his words trail off, taking the
cup out of the holder. Faith turned on the radio so she wouldn't have
to listen to him swallow. The volume was low, and she heard the dull
murmur of news coming from the speakers. She pressed the buttons
until she found something soft and innocuous that wouldn't get on
her nerves.

She felt the seatbelt tense as Will slowed for a pedestrian darting
across the road. Faith had no excuse for snapping at him, and he
wasn't a stupid man—he obviously knew that something was wrong
but, as usual, didn't want to push. She felt a pang of guilt for keeping
secrets, but then again, Will wasn't exactly known for sharing. It had
only been by accident that she'd stumbled onto the realization that he
was dyslexic. At least, she thought it was dyslexia. There was certainly
some reading issue there, but God knew what it was. Faith had
figured out from watching him that Will could make out some words
on his own, but it took forever, and he was wrong more often than
not about the content. When she'd tried to ask him about the diagnosis,
Will had shut her down so tersely that Faith had felt her face flush
in embarrassment for asking the question in the first place.

She hated to admit that he was right to hide the problem. Faith
had worked on the force long enough to know that most police officers were
barely out of the primordial ooze. They tended to be a conservative
lot, and they didn't exactly embrace the unusual. Maybe
dealing with the most freakish elements society had to offer made
them reject any semblance of abnormality in their own ranks.
Whatever the reason, Faith knew that if word of Will's dyslexia got
out, there wasn't a cop around who would let it pass. He already had
trouble fitting in. This would make him a permanent outsider.

Will took a right on Moreland Avenue, and she wondered how he
knew which way to go. Directions were an issue for him, left and
right an insurmountable problem. Despite this, he was incredibly
adept at hiding his disability. For those times when his shockingly
good memory wouldn't suffice, he had a digital recorder that he kept
in his pocket the way that most cops kept a notebook. Sometimes he
slipped up and made a mistake, but most of the time, Faith found
herself in awe of his accomplishments. He had gotten through school
and then college with no one recognizing there was a problem.
Growing up in an orphanage hadn't exactly given him a good start in
life. His success was a lot to be proud of, which made the fact that he
had to hide his disability even more heartbreaking.

They were in the middle of Little Five Points, an eclectic part of
the city that blended seedy bars and fashionably overpriced boutiques,
when Will finally spoke. "You okay?"