Undone (31 page)

The lawyer said, “Not nice, Mandy.”

“Them’s the breaks, Chuck.”

Will stood. “I’m going to stretch my legs.”

He left the room before anyone could respond. Caroline, Amanda’s secretary, was at her desk. Will lifted his chin, and she whispered, “In the bathroom.”

Will walked down the hall, hands in his pockets. He stopped in front of the women’s — room door, pressing it open with his foot. He leaned in. Joelyn Zabel stood in front of the mirror. She had a lighted cigarette in her hand, and she startled when she saw Will.

“You can’t be in here,” she snapped, holding up her fist like she expected some kind of fight.

“No smoking is allowed in the building.” Will walked into the room and put his back against the closed door, keeping his hands in his pockets.

“What are you doing in here?”

“I wanted to make sure you were okay.”

She took a hard hit off the cigarette. “By barging into the ladies’ room? This is off-limits, okay? It’s not allowed.”

Will glanced around. He had never been in a women’s restroom before. There was a comfortable-looking couch with flowers in a vase on the table beside it. The air had the scent of perfume, the paper dispensers were stocked and there was no water splashed around the basin so that you got the front of your pants wet when you washed your hands. It was no wonder women spent so much time in this place.

“Hello?” Joelyn asked. “Crazy man? Get out of the ladies’ room.”

“What aren’t you telling me?”

“I told you everything I know.”

He shook his head. “Cameras aren’t rolling in here. No lawyers, no audience. Tell me what you’re not telling me.”

“Fuck off.”

He felt the door being gently pressed against his back, then close just as quickly. He said, “You didn’t like your sister.”

“No shit, Sherlock.” Her hand shook as she took another hit of smoke into her lungs.

“What did she do to you?”

“She was a bitch.”

The same could be said for Joelyn, but Will kept that to himself “Was there any specific way this manifested itself toward you, or is that just a general statement?”

She stared at him. “What the hell does that mean?”

“It means that I don’t care what you’re going to do after you leave here. Sue the state. Don’t sue the state. Sue me personally. I don’t care. Whoever killed your sister probably has someone else — some woman who’s being tortured and raped right now as we speak — and your keeping something from me is just as good as saying that what’s happening to this other woman is okay.”

“Don’t put that on me.”

“Then tell me what you’re hiding.”

“I’m not hiding anything.” She turned from the mirror, wiping under her eyes with her fingers so she wouldn’t smudge her makeup. “It’s Jackie who was hiding things.”

Will kept silent.

“She was always secretive, always acting like she was better than me.”

He nodded, like he got it.

“She got all the attention, all the boyfriends.” She shook her head, turning to face Will. She leaned against the counter, hand beside the sink. “My weight went up and down when I was a kid. Jackie used to tease me about being beached whenever we’d go to lay out.”

“You’ve obviously outgrown that problem.”

She shook off the compliment, disbelieving. “Everything always came so easy to her. Money, men, success. People liked her.”

“Not really,” Will disagreed. “None of her neighbors seem too shaken up that she’s missing. They didn’t even notice until the cops knocked on their doors. I got the feeling they were relieved she’s gone.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“Your mother’s neighbor, Candy, doesn’t seem too broken up about it, either.”

She was obviously unconvinced. “No, Jackie said Candy was like a toy poodle nipping at her heels, always wanting to hang out with her.”

“That’s not true,” Will said. “Candy wasn’t very fond of her. I’d even say she was less fond of your sister than you are.”

She finished the cigarette, then went into one of the stalls to flush it down the toilet. Will could see her processing this new information about her sister, liking it. Joelyn went back to the sink, leaned against the counter again. “She was always a liar. Lied about little things, things that didn’t even matter.”

“Like what?”

“Like, that she was going to the store when she was going to the library. Like that she was dating one guy when she was really dating another one.”

“Seems kind of devious.”

“She was. That’s a perfect word for her — ‘devious.’ She drove our mother nuts.”

“Did she get into much trouble?”

Joelyn snorted a laugh. “Jackie was always the teacher’s pet, always sucking up to the right people. She had them all fooled.”

“Not all of them,” Will pointed out. “You said she drove your mother nuts. Your mom must’ve known what was going on.”

“She did. Spent all kinds of money trying to get Jackie help. It ruined my fucking childhood. Everything was always
about Jackie
— how
she
was feeling, what
she
was out doing, whether
she
was happy. Nobody worried whether or not
I
was happy.”

“Tell me about this adoption thing. What agency was she talking to?”

Joelyn looked down, guilt flashing in her eyes.

Will kept his tone neutral. “This is why I’m asking: If Jackie was trying to adopt a child, we’re going to have to go to Florida and find the agency. If there’s an overseas connection, we might have to go to Russia or China to see if their operations are legitimate. If Jackie was trying to contract with a surrogate at home, we’ll have to talk to every woman who might have spoken to her. We’ll have to dig into every agency down there until we find something, anything, that connects to your sister, because she met a very bad person who tortured and raped her for at least a week, and if we can find out how your sister met her abductor, then maybe we can find out who that man is.” He let her consider his words for a few seconds. “Will we find a connection through an adoption agency, Joelyn?”

She looked down at her hands, not answering. Will counted the tiles on the wall behind her head. He was at thirty-six when she finally spoke. “I just said that — the stuff about getting a kid. Jackie was talking about it, but she wasn’t going to do it. She liked the idea of being a mother, but she knew she would never be able to pull it off.”

“Are you sure about that?”

“It’s like when people are around well trained dogs, you know? They want a dog, but they want
that
dog, not a new one they’d have to work with and train on their own.”

“Did she like your kids?”

Joelyn cleared her throat. “She never met them.”

Will gave the woman some time. “She was picked up on a DUI before she died.”

Joelyn was surprised. “Really?”

“Was she much of a drinker?”

She shook her head vehemently. “Jackie didn’t like being out of control.”

“The neighbor, Candy, says they smoked some grass together.”

Her lips parted in surprise. She shook her head again. “I don’t buy it. Jackie never did shit like that. She liked it when other people drank too much, got out of hand, but she never did it herself. You’re talking about a woman who’s weighed the same weight since she was sixteen years old. Her ass was so tight it squeaked when she walked.” She thought about it some more, shook her head again. “No, not Jackie.”

“Why was she cleaning out your mother’s house? Why not pay someone else to do the dirty work?”

“She didn’t trust anybody else. She always had the right way to do things, and whoever you were, you were always doing it wrong.”

That, at least, jibed with what Candy said. Everything else was a completely different picture, which made sense considering that Joelyn was not particularly close to her sister. He asked, “Does the number eleven mean anything to you?”

She furrowed her brow. “Not a damn thing.”

“What about the words ‘I will not deny myself?”

She shook her head again. “But it’s funny… As rich as she was, Jackie denied herself all the time.”

“Denied herself what?”

“Food. Alcohol. Fun.” She gave a rueful laugh. “Friends. Family. Love.” Her eyes filled with tears — the first real tears Will had seen her cry. He pushed away from the door and left, finding Faith waiting in the hallway for him.

“Anything?” she asked.

“She lied about the adoption thing. At least she said she did.”

“We can check it out with Candy.” Faith took out her phone and flipped it open. She talked to Will as she dialed. “We were supposed to meet Rick Sigler at the hospital ten minutes ago. I called him to postpone, but he didn’t pick up.”

“What about his friend, Jake Berman?”

“I put some uniforms on it first thing. They’re supposed to call if they find him.”

“You think it’s odd that we can’t track him down?”

“Not yet, but talk to me at the end of the day if we still can’t find him.” She put the phone to her ear, and Will listened as she left a message for Candy Smith to return her call. Faith closed the phone and gripped it in her hand. Will felt dread well up inside him, wondering what she was going to say next — something about Amanda, a diatribe against Sara Linton, or Will himself. Thankfully, it was about the case.

She said, “I think Pauline McGhee is part of this.”

“Why?”

“It’s just gut. I can’t explain it, but it’s too coincidental.”

“McGhee is still Leo’s case. We’ve got no jurisdiction over it, no reason to ask him for a piece of it.” Still, Will had to ask, “You think you can nuance him?”

She shook her head. “I don’t want to make trouble for Leo.”

“He’s supposed to call you, right? When he tracks down Pauline’s parents in Michigan?”

“That’s what he said he’d do.”

They stood at the elevator, both quiet.

Will said, “I think we need to go to Pauline’s work.”

“I think you’re right.”

FAITH PACED THE LOBBY OF XAC HOMAGE, THE RIDICULOUSLY named design firm that employed Pauline McGhee. The offices took up the thirtieth floor of Symphony Tower, an architecturally awkward skyscraper that loomed over the corner of Peachtree and Fourteenth Street like a large speculum. Faith shuddered at the image, thinking about what she had read in Jacquelyn Zabel’s autopsy report.

In keeping with the pretentiousness of their name, Xac Homage’s window-lined lobby was furnished with low-to-the-floor couches that were impossible to sit in without either clenching every muscle in your ass or just falling back into a slouch that you would need help getting out of. Faith would’ve gone for the slouch if she hadn’t been wearing a skirt that was prone to riding up even when she wasn’t sitting like a gangster’s whore in a rap video.

She was hungry but didn’t know what to eat. She was running out of insulin and she still wasn’t sure she was calculating the dosages correctly. She hadn’t made an appointment with the doctor Sara had recommended. Her feet were swollen and her back was killing her and she wanted to beat her head against the wall because she could not stop thinking about Sam Lawson no matter how hard she tried.

And she had a sneaking suspicion from the way Will kept giving her sidelong glances that she was acting like a raving lunatic.

“God,” Faith mumbled, pressing her forehead into the clean glass that lined the lobby. Why did she keep making so many mistakes? She wasn’t a stupid person. Or maybe she was. Maybe all these years she had been fooling herself, and she was, in fact, one of the stupidest people on earth.

She looked down at the cars inching along Peachtree Street, ants scurrying across the black asphalt. Last month at her dentist’s office, Faith had read a magazine article that posited that women were genetically wired to become clingy with the men they had sex with for at least three weeks after the event because that’s how long it took for the body to figure out whether or not it was pregnant. She had laughed at the time, because Faith had never felt clingy with men. At least not after Jeremy’s father, who had literally left the state after Faith had told him she was pregnant.

And yet, here she was checking her phone and her email every ten minutes, wanting to talk to Sam, wanting to see how he was doing and find out whether or not he was mad at her — as if what had happened was her fault. As if he had been such a magnificent lover that she couldn’t get enough of him. She was already pregnant; it couldn’t be her genetic wiring that was causing her to act like a silly schoolgirl. Or maybe it was. Maybe she was just a victim of her own hormones.

Or maybe she shouldn’t be getting her science from
Ladies’ Home Journal
.

Faith turned her head, watching Will in the elevator alcove. He was on his cell phone, holding it with both hands so it wouldn’t fall apart. She couldn’t be mad at him anymore. He had been good with Joelyn Zabel. She had to admit that. His approach to the job was different than hers, and sometimes that worked for them and sometimes that worked against them. Faith shook her head. She couldn’t dwell on these differences right now — not when her entire life was on the edge of a gigantic cliff, and the ground would not stop shaking.

Will finished his call and walked toward her. He glanced at the empty desk where the secretary had been. The woman had left to get Morgan Hollister at least ten minutes ago. Faith had images of the pair of them furiously shredding files, though it was more likely that the woman, a bottle blonde who seemed to have trouble processing even the smallest request, had simply forgotten about them and was on her cell phone in the bathroom.

Faith asked, “Who were you talking to?”

“Amanda,” he told her, taking a couple of candies out of the bowl on the coffee table. “She called to apologize.”

Faith laughed at the joke, and he joined her.

Will took some more candy, offering the bowl to Faith. She shook her head, and he continued, “She’s doing another press conference this afternoon. Joelyn Zabel’s dropping her lawsuit against the city.”

“What prompted that?”

“Her lawyer realized they didn’t have a case. Don’t worry, she’s going to be on the cover of some magazine next week, and the week after she’s going to be threatening to sue us again because we haven’t found her sister’s killer.”