Genesis (28 page)

"Faith?" Will had said something she'd missed.

She put the photograph back on Pauline's desk before she started
bawling like a baby. "Yeah?"

"I said, what do you want to bet Jacquelyn Zabel's house in
Florida was neat like this?"

Faith cleared her throat, trying to shift her focus. "The room she
was using in her mother's house was extremely orderly. I thought it
was something she did because the rest of the house was so messy—
you know, calm in the storm. Maybe it's because she's a neat freak."

"Type A personality." Will walked around the desk, opening
drawers. Faith looked at what he'd found—a row of colored pencils
side by side in a plastic tray. Extra Post-it notes in a squared stack. He
opened the next drawer and found a large binder, which he pulled
out and put on the desk. He thumbed through the pages, and Faith
saw room sketches, swatches, clippings of furniture photos.

Faith booted up the computer while he looked through the other
drawers. She was pretty sure they would find nothing here, but,
oddly, it felt as if what they were doing was helping the case. She was
clicking with Will again, feeling more like his partner and less like an
adversary. That had to be a good thing.

"Look at this." Will had opened the bottom drawer on the left
side. It was a mess—the equivalent of a kitchen junk drawer. Papers
were wadded up, and at the bottom were several empty bags of
potato chips.

Faith said, "At least we know she's human."

"It's weird," he said. "Everything's so neat except this one drawer."

Faith picked up a balled piece of paper and smoothed it against the
desk. There was a list on it, items checked off as they had probably
been completed: grocery store; get lamp fixed for Powell living
room; contact Jordan about couch swatches. She took out another
balled piece of paper, finding much the same.

Will asked, "Maybe she wadded them up once she finished doing
what she needed to do?"

Faith squinted at the list, blurring her eyes, trying to see it the
way Will would. He was so damn good at fooling people into thinking
he could read that sometimes Faith forgot he even had a problem.

Will searched the bookcase, taking down a magazine box from
one of the middle shelves. "What's this?" He pulled down another
box, then another. Faith could see the dial of a safe.

Will tried the handle, but there was no luck. He ran his fingers
along the seam. "It's concreted into the wall."

"You want to go ask your buddy Morgan for the combination?"

"I'd bet some serious money he doesn't know it."

Faith didn't take the bet. Like Jacquelyn Zabel, Pauline McGhee
seemed to enjoy keeping secrets.

Will said, "Check the computer first, then I'll go look for him."

Faith looked at the monitor. There was a box asking for a password.

Will saw it, too. "Try 'Felix'."

She did, and miraculously, it worked. She made a mental note to
change her password from "Jeremy" at home as she clicked open the
email program. Faith skimmed the messages as Will went back to the
bookshelves. She found the usual correspondence from people working
in an office, but nothing personal that would point to a friend or
confidant. Faith sat back in the chair and opened the browser, hoping
to find an email service in the history. There was no Gmail or Yahoo,
but she discovered several websites.

Randomly, she clicked on one, and a YouTube page came up. She
checked the sound as the video loaded. A guitar squeaked through
the speakers on the bottom of a monitor, and the words,
"I am
happy,"
came up, then,
"I am smiling."

Will stood behind her. She read the words as they faded into the
black.
"I am feeling. I am living. I am dying."

The guitar turned angrier with each word, and a photograph
came up of a young girl in a cheerleading outfit. The shorts were low
on her hips, the top barely enough to cover her breasts. She was so
thin that Faith could count her ribs.

"Jesus," she mumbled. Another picture faded in, this one of an
African-American girl. She was balled up on a bed, her back to the
camera. Her skin was stretched, her vertebrae and ribs pronounced
enough to show each individual piece of bone pressing against the
thin flesh. Her shoulder blade stuck out like a knife.

"Is this some kind of relief site?" Will asked. "Money for AIDS?"

Faith shook her head as the next picture came up—a model standing
in front of a cityscape, her legs and arms as thin as sticks. Another
girl came up; a woman actually. Her clavicle jutted out with painful
sharpness. The skin across her shoulders looked like wet paper covering
the sinew underneath.

Faith clicked on the browser history button. She pulled up another
video. There was different music, but the same sort of intro.
She read aloud,
"Eat to live. Don't live to eat."
The words faded into a
photo of a girl who was so painfully thin that she was hard to look at.
Faith opened another page, then another.
"The only freedom left is the
freedom to starve yourself,"
she read.
"Thin is beautiful. Fat is ugly."
She
looked at the top of the screen, the video category. "Thinspo. I've
never heard of it."

"I don't understand. These girls look like they're starving, but
they've got TVs in their rooms, they're wearing nice clothes."

Faith clicked on another link. "Thinspiration," she said. "Good
Lord, I can't believe this. They're emaciated."

"Is there a news group or something?"

Faith looked back at the history. She skimmed the list, finding
more videos, but nothing that looked like a chat room. She scrolled
to the next page and hit pay dirt. "Atlanta-Pro-Anna-dot-com," she
read. "It's a pro-anorexia site." Faith clicked on the link, but all that
came up was another screen asking for a password. She tried "Felix"
again, but it didn't work. She read the fine print. "It's asking for a six
digit password and Felix is only five letters." She typed in variations
on his name, saying them aloud for Will's benefit. "Zero-Felix, one-
Felix, Felix-zero . . ."

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."

She heard a soft
click,
which in some ways was worse than him
slamming down the receiver in her ear.

OLIVIA TANNER LIVED
in one of those deceptively small-looking
Midtown bungalows that from the street appeared to be around a
thousand square feet but ended up having six bedrooms and five and
a half baths, with a price tag running slightly north of a million dollars.
After being in Pauline McGhee's office, seeing the missing
woman's psyche laid bare, Faith looked at Olivia Tanner's house differently
than she would have otherwise. The flower garden was
beautiful, but all the plants were lined up in uniform rows. The outside
of the house was crisply painted, the gutters in a graceful line
along the eves. Based on Faith's knowledge of the neighborhood, the
bungalow was probably thirty years older than her own lowly ranch
house, but comparatively speaking, it looked brand new.