Undone (30 page)

Faith pressed, “You’ve never been to church? Really?”

Will shut his mouth, thinking he had foolishly opened the wrong door.

Faith slowed the car as they pulled up to a light. She mumbled to herself, “I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone who’s never been to church.”

“Can we change the subject?”

“It’s just strange.”

Will stared blankly out the window, thinking he had been called strange at one point or another by every person he had ever met. The light changed, and the Mini rolled ahead. City Hall East was a five-minute drive from the park. This morning, it seemed to be taking hours.

Faith said, “Even if Sara’s right, she’s doing it again, trying to talk her way onto this case.”

“She’s a coroner. At least, she used to be. She helped Anna at the hospital. It’s normal for her to want to know what’s going on.”

“This is a murder investigation, not Big Brother,” Faith countered. “Does she know where you live?”

Will hadn’t considered the possibility, but he wasn’t as paranoid as Faith. “I don’t see how.”

“Maybe she followed you.”

Will laughed, then stopped when he realized she was being serious. “She lives right down the street. She was just running in the park with her dogs.”

“It’s just all very convenient.”

He shook his head, exasperated. He wasn’t going to let Faith use Sara Linton as a stand-in for her problems with him. “We’ve gotta get past this, Faith. I know you’re ticked at me about yesterday, but going into this interview, we’ve got to be working as a team.”

She accelerated as the light changed. “We
are
a team.”

For a team, they didn’t talk much the rest of the short trip. It wasn’t until they were at City Hall East, riding up on the elevator, that Faith finally spoke.

“Your tie is crooked.”

Will’s hand went to the knot. Sara Linton probably thought he was a slob. “Better?”

Faith was scrolling through her BlackBerry, even though there was no signal in the elevator. She glanced up and gave him a quick nod before turning her attention back to the device.

He was trying to think of something to say when the doors opened. Amanda was waiting outside the elevator, checking her email just like Faith, except on an iPhone. Will felt like an idiot to be empty-handed, the same way he’d felt when Sara Linton had shown up with her big, impressive dogs and he’d scooped Betty into his palm like a ball of yarn.

Amanda used her finger to scroll through emails, her voice taking on a distracted quality as she led them down the hall toward her office. “Catch me up.”

Faith ran down the list of things they didn’t know, which were innumerable, and the things they did know, which were practically nonexistent. All the while, Amanda read her emails, walking and pretending to listen to Faith tell her what Amanda had surely already read in their report.

Will wasn’t a fan of multitasking, mostly because it was more like half-tasking. It was humanly impossible to give two different things your complete attention. As if to prove this, Amanda looked up from her screen, asking, “What?”

Faith repeated, “Linton thinks there might be a biblical angle.”

Amanda stopped walking. She held the iPhone at her side, giving them her full attention. “Why?”

“Eleventh rib, eleven trash bags, Easter at the end of the week.”

Amanda used her iPhone again, talking as she punched the touch screen. “We’ve got Legal in for Joelyn Zabel. She’s brought her lawyer, so I asked for three of ours. We’ve got to play this as if the world is listening because I’m sure whatever we say to her will be spun back out to the public at large.” She looked at them both meaningfully. “I will do most of the talking. You ask your questions, but don’t extemporize.”

“We’re not going to get anything out of Zabel,” Will said. “Just with the lawyers, we’ve already got four people in the room. Add us and that’s seven, with her at the center of it all, knowing she’s going to have the cameras rolling as soon as she leaves the building. We need to take this down a notch.”

Amanda looked back at her iPhone. “And your brilliant idea for doing this is…?”

Will couldn’t think of one. All he could say was, “Maybe we could talk to her after her television interviews, catch her at her hotel without all the press and attention.”

Amanda did not do him the courtesy of looking up. “Maybe I’ll win the lottery. Maybe you’ll get a promotion. Do you see where these maybes are taking us?”

Frustration and lack of sleep caught up with him. “Then why are we here? Why aren’t you taking Zabel and letting us get on with doing something more useful than giving her source material for her book deal?”

Amanda finally looked up from her iPhone. She handed the device to Will. “I’m at a loss, Agent Trent. Why don’t you read this for me and let me know what you think?”

He felt his vision go sharp, and there was an odd, high-pitched ringing in his ears. The iPhone hung in the air like a well-baited hook. There were words on the screen. That much he could tell. Will tasted blood from biting the edge of his tongue. He reached to take the device, but Faith snatched it from Amanda before he could.

Her voice was terse as she read, “‘Eleven generally represents judgment or betrayal in the Bible… There were eleven commandments originally, but the Catholics combined the first two and the Protestants combined the last two in order to make it an even ten.’” She scrolled down. “‘The Philistines gave Delilah eleven hundred pieces of silver to bring down Samson. Jesus told eleven parables on the way to his death in Jerusalem.’” She paused again, scrolling. “‘The Catholic Church accepts eleven books as canonical in the Apocrypha.’”

Faith handed back the device to Amanda. “We could do this all day. Flight 11 on 9/11 hit one of the Twin Towers, which themselves looked like the number 11. Apollo 11 made the first moon landing. World War I ended on eleven-eleven. You should get an eleventh circle in hell for what you just did to Will.”

Amanda smiled, tucking the iPhone into her pocket, continuing down the hall. “Remember the rules, children.”

Will didn’t know if she meant the rules that put her in charge or the ones she’d given them about interviewing Joelyn Zabel. There was no time to reflect, however, because Amanda walked through the anteroom to her office and opened the door. She made introductions all around as she went behind her desk and took a seat. Her office was, of course, larger than any other in the building, closer to the size of the conference room on Will and Faith’s floor.

Joelyn Zabel and a man who could only be her lawyer were in the visitors’ seats opposite Amanda. There were two chairs beside Amanda’s desk, one each for Faith and Will, he supposed. The state lawyers were on a couch in the back of the room, three in a row, their black suits and muted silk ties giving them away. Joelyn Zabel’s lawyer was dressed in a blue the color of a shark, which seemed more than fitting, considering his smile reminded Will of the aquatic carnivore.

“Thank you for coming in,” Faith said, shaking the woman’s hand, then taking a seat.

Joelyn Zabel looked like a chubbier version of her sister. Not that she was fat, but she had a healthy curve to her hips whereas Jacquelyn had been boyishly thin. Will caught the scent of cigarette smoke as he shook her hand.

He said, “I’m so sorry about your loss.”

“Trent,” she noted. “You’re the one who found her.”

Will tried to keep eye contact, to not convey the gut-level guilt he still felt for not reaching the woman’s sister in time. All he could think to do was repeat himself. “I’m so sorry about your loss.”

“Yeah,” she snapped. “I got that.”

Will sat down beside Faith, and Amanda clapped her hands together like a kindergarten teacher getting the class’s attention. She rested her hand on top of a manila folder, which Will guessed contained the abridged autopsy summary. Pete had been instructed to leave off the information about the trash bags. Considering the Rockdale County force’s cozy relationship with the press, they were running thin on guilty knowledge to pin down any future suspect.

Amanda began, “Ms. Zabel, I take it you’ve had time to go over the report?”

The lawyer spoke. “I’ll need a copy of that for my files, Mandy.”

Amanda smiled an even sharkier smile than the lawyer had. “Of course, Chuck.”

“Great, so y’all know each other.” Joelyn crossed her arms, her shoulders bunching around her neck. “You want to explain to me what the hell you’re doing to find my sister’s killer?”

Amanda’s smile did not falter. “We’re doing everything we can to—”

“You find a suspect yet? I mean, shit, this guy’s a fucking
animal.”

Amanda didn’t answer, which Faith took as her cue to begin. “We agree with you. Whoever did this is an animal. That’s why we need to talk to you about your sister. We need to know about her life. Who her friends were. What her habits were.”

Joelyn’s eyes flashed down a minute, guilty. “I didn’t have much contact with her. We were both pretty busy. She lived in Florida.”

Faith tried to soften things up. “She lived on the Bay, right? Must’ve been nice down there. Good reason to sneak in a vacation with a family visit.”

“Well, yeah, it would’ve been, but the bitch never invited me.”

Her lawyer reached out, touching her arm as a gentle reminder. Will had watched Joelyn Zabel on every major channel, sobbing anew over the tragic death of her sister for each new reporter. He’d not seen one tear drop from her eyes, though she made all the motions of someone who was crying — sniffling, wiping her eyes, rocking back and forth. She wasn’t even doing that now. Apparently, she needed a camera rolling to feel her pain. Even more apparent, the lawyer wasn’t going to let her play anything other than the grieving family member.

Joelyn sniffed, still with no tears. “I loved my sister very much. My mother just moved into a nursing home. She’s got maybe six months left, and this happens to her daughter. The loss of a child is devastating.”

Faith tried to ease into more questions. “Do you have children?”

“Four.” She seemed proud.

“Jacquelyn didn’t have—”

“Fuck no. Three abortions before she was thirty. She was terrified of getting fat. Can you believe that? Her sole reason for flushing them down the toilet is her fucking weight. And then she gets in the shadow of forty, and suddenly she wants to be a mother.”

Faith hid her surprise well. “Was she trying to conceive?”

“Did you not hear me about the abortions? You can look that up. I’m not lying about that.”

Will always assumed that when people insisted they weren’t lying about a particular thing, that meant they were lying about something else. Finding out the what else would be the key to Joelyn Zabel. She didn’t strike him as a particularly caring person, and she would want to make sure her ten minutes of fame stretched out as long as possible.

Faith asked, “Was Jackie looking for a surrogate?”

Joelyn seemed to realize how important her words were. She suddenly had everyone’s rapt attention. She took her time answering. “Adoption.”

“Private? Public?”

“Who the fuck knows? She had a lot of money. She was used to buying what she wanted.” She was gripping the arms of her chair, and Will could see this was a subject she liked talking about. “That’s the real tragedy here — not being able to see her adopt some reject retard who ends up stealing from her or going schizophrenic on her ass.”

Will could feel Faith stiffen beside him. He took over the questioning. “When was the last time you talked to your sister?”

“About a month ago. She was waxing on about motherhood, like she understands the first thing about it. Talking about adopting some kid from China or Russia or something. You know, some of those kids turn out to be killers. They’re abused, just sick in the head. They’re never right.”

“We see that a lot.” Will shook his head sadly, like this was a common tragedy. “Was she making any progress? Do you know what agency she was working with?”

She turned reticent when pressed for details. “Jackie wasn’t into sharing. She was always phobic about her privacy.” She jerked her head toward the state lawyers, who were doing their best to blend in with the upholstery. “I know those tools sitting on the couch aren’t going to let you apologize, but you could at least acknowledge that you fucked up.”

Amanda jumped back in. “Ms. Zabel, the autopsy shows—”

Joelyn gave a belligerent half-shrug. “All it shows is what I already know: You dumbasses were standing around doing
nothing
while my sister died.”

“Perhaps you didn’t read the report carefully enough, Ms. Zabel.” Amanda’s voice was gentle sounding, the soothing sort of tone she’d used earlier in the hall before humiliating Will. “Your sister took her own life.”

“Only because y’all weren’t doing a damn thing to help her.”

“You realize that she was blind and deaf?” Amanda asked.

Will could tell from the way that Zabel’s eyes shifted to the lawyer that she had not, in fact, realized this.

Amanda removed another folder from the top drawer of her desk. She thumbed through it, and he could see color photos of Jacquelyn Zabel in the tree, in the morgue. Will found this particularly cruel, even for Amanda. No matter how horrible Joelyn Zabel was, she had still lost her sister in the worst way. He saw Faith shift in her seat and knew she was thinking the same thing.

Amanda took her time searching for the right page, which seemed to be buried among the worst of the photographs. Finally, she found the passage relating to the external examination of the body. “Second paragraph,” she said.

Joelyn hesitated before sitting on the edge of her seat. She was trying to get a better look at the photos the way some people slow down to look at a particularly terrible car accident. Finally, she sat back with the report. Will watched her eyes move back and forth as she read, but then they suddenly stopped tracking, and he knew that she wasn’t seeing anything at all.

Her throat worked as she swallowed. She stood up, mumbling “Excuse me” as she bolted from the room.

The air seemed to leave with her. Faith stared straight ahead. Amanda took her time stacking the photos into a neat pile.