The Kept Woman (Will Trent 8) (11 page)

Will wiped the sweat off his palms. He wrapped his fingers around the handle. He tried to turn the latch. Rust kept it from moving. He put his shoulder into it, practically lifting the cabinet off the floor. There was a loud pop. The door squealed open.

Empty.

She might hide in a cabinet. Angie liked dark places. Places where she could see you but you couldn’t see her. The basement at the children’s home was her favorite retreat. Someone had
dragged a futon downstairs and laid it on the cold brick floor. Kids would smoke down there. Do other things. Mrs Flannigan, the lady who ran the home, couldn’t handle the stairs. Her knees were old. She carried a lot of weight. She had no idea what was going on down there. Or maybe she did. Maybe she understood that physical comforts were all they had to offer each other.

Will took out his handkerchief. He wiped the back of his neck.

He would never forget being down in the basement with Angie. His first time. He wasn’t shaking so much as vibrating with excitement and fear and dread that he would do it wrong or too soon or backward and she would laugh at him and he would have to kill himself.

Angie was three years older than Will. She’d done a lot of things with a lot of boys, some other things with a lot of men, not always her choice, but the fact was that she knew what she was doing and he did not.

Just the touch of her hands made him shiver. He was clumsy. He forgot things, like how to unbutton his own pants. At that point in his life, the only people who had ever touched Will were either hurting him or stitching him up. He couldn’t help himself. He started crying. Really crying. Not like the hot tears streaming down his face when his nose was broken or when he cut open his own arm with a straight razor.

Big, gulping, humiliating sobs.

Angie hadn’t laughed at him. She had held him. Her arms around his back. Her legs wrapped with his. Will hadn’t known what to do with his hands. He had never been held before. He had never been physically close to another human being. They had stayed in the basement for hours, Angie holding him, kissing him,
showing him what to do. She had promised to never let Will go, but the truth was that things between them were never the same. She could never look at him again without seeing him as broken.

The next time Will had felt that close to a woman was almost thirty years later.

‘Trent!’ Collier was at the end of the hall, bobbing like a Weeble Wobble. He winced as his fingers touched his ear. Blood streaked down the side of his face and neck.

Will returned his handkerchief to his pocket. He pushed open another door, searched another room.

Angie
, he kept thinking.
Where are you hiding?

There was no use calling for her, because he knew that she would not want to be found. Angie was a wild animal. She did not show weakness. She slinked away to lick her wounds in private. Will had always known that when her time came, she would go off somewhere and die on her own. The same as the woman who’d raised her.

Or at least tried to raise her.

Angie was not even ten years old when Deidre Polaski injected her final not-fatal-enough overdose of heroin. The woman had spent the next thirty-four years in a vegetative coma inside a state-run hospice facility. Angie had once told Will that she wasn’t sure which was worse: living with Deidre’s pimp or living at the children’s home.

‘Trent!’ Collier braced his hands against the wall. Spit drooled out of his mouth. ‘Jesus Christ. What the fuck did you hit me with, a sledgehammer?’

Will struggled against his guilt, forcing himself not to apologize. He pushed open the next door. He felt his stomach clench
as his eyes scanned what was left of the bathroom. The floor had rotted through. Broken toilets, sinks and pipes had crashed to the level below.

There was another metal storage cabinet on the other side of the hole. Doors closed. Could Angie be inside? Would she cling to the wall, edging her way to the other side of the room so she could close herself off and wait to die?

Collier said, ‘You’re not going in there.’ He stood behind Will, his hand covering his bloody ear. ‘No kidding, man. You’ll fall to your death.’

Will took out his handkerchief and handed it to him.

Collier hissed a curse as he put the cloth to his ear. ‘That cabinet’s a foot wide, dude. How thin is this chick?’

‘She could fit in there.’

‘Sitting down?’

Will imagined Angie sitting in the cabinet. Eyes closed. Listening.

Collier said, ‘Okay, this chick is hurt, all right? Real bad. She has all these other rooms to choose from, but this is the one she goes into, the one with the giant hole in it. How’s she even gonna get over there?’

He had a point. Angie wasn’t athletic. She hated sweat.

Will turned around. He went into the bathroom across the hall.

Again Collier watched him from the doorway, arms folded, leaning against the jamb. ‘They told me you were a stubborn prick.’

Will kicked open a stall door.

‘I guess you got your ass handed to you by the good doctor?’

‘Shut up.’ Will heard the echo of Sara saying the same two words a few hours ago. He’d never seen her that mad before.

Collier said, ‘What’s your secret, man? I mean, no offense, but Brad Pitt you ain’t.’

Will grabbed Collier’s shirt and moved him out of the way.

Angie wasn’t on this floor. Six more to go. Will headed toward the stairs and started the climb to the next level. Was he doing this the wrong way? Should he have started at the top floor instead of the bottom? Was there an attic in this place? A top-floor C-suite with a panoramic view?

Tactically, higher ground was always better. The office building was right across the street from Rippy’s club. Angie could’ve been watching the whole time. She would’ve seen the patrol car roll up, the fire department, the crime scene vans, the detectives, all of them spinning their wheels trying to figure out what the hell was happening while Angie was up on the tenth floor the entire time laughing her ass off.

Or bleeding to death.

Will passed the fifth floor, the sixth. He was winded by the time he saw a large
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painted at the top of the next landing. He stopped, hands on his knees so he could lean over to catch his breath. The heat was getting to him. Sweat dripped onto the floor. His lungs were screaming. His hamstrings were aching. Blood dribbled down the side of his shoe. The cuts on his knuckles had opened up again.

Was this a mistake?

Angie wouldn’t climb these stairs on a good day, let alone with a life-threatening injury. She hated exercise.

Will sat down on the stairs. He rubbed his face and shook the excess sweat off his hands. Was he sure that Angie was even in the building? Where was her car? Shouldn’t Will be trying to find
out where she was living instead of risking his life searching a condemned building?

And what about Sara?

‘Holy Mother of Christ.’ Collier had stopped a few flights down. He was panting like a locomotive. ‘I think I need stitches in my ear.’

Will leaned his head back against the wall. Had he lost Sara? Had Angie, with this final, violent act, managed to do what she couldn’t do for the last year?

Betty was his only saving grace. Early on in their relationship, Sara had kept volunteering to watch Betty while Will was working late. At first he thought it was because she wanted to know about his cases, but then he had slowly realized that she was using his dog to lure him over to her apartment. It had taken Will a long time to accept that a woman like Sara would want to be with him.

She wouldn’t have agreed to pick up Betty if she wanted to end things now.

Would she?

‘Trent.’ Collier was like a broken record. His feet scuffed the stairs as he made it to the landing below Will. ‘What’s the point of this, dude? You think she’s hiding under a typewriter?’

Will looked down at him. ‘Why are you here?’

‘It seemed like a good idea when I was outside. What’s your excuse?’ Collier seemed genuinely interested. ‘Dude, you know she’s not in here.’

Will looked up at the ceiling. Graffiti stared back.

Why was he here?

Maybe the better question was: where else would he be? There were no clues to follow. No leads to run down. He had no idea
where Angie was living. Where she was working. Why she was in Rippy’s building. How she had gotten herself tangled up in a rape case Will couldn’t make against a man he despised.

Well, maybe he knew the answer to the last one. Angie always inserted herself into Will’s business. She was stealth, like a cat tracking its prey then leaving the poor dead creature as a trophy on Will’s doorstep so that he had to figure out what to do with the body.

There were so many unmarked graves in Will’s past that he had lost count.

Collier said, ‘I called around about your wife.’ He leaned his shoulder against the wall. He crossed his arms again. The good news was the blood around his ear was drying. The bad news was that it had glued Will’s handkerchief to his skin.

‘And?’ Will said, though he could guess what Collier had found out. Angie slept around. Frequently and indiscriminately. She was the worst kind of cop. You couldn’t trust her to have your back. She was a loner. She had a death wish.

Collier was uncharacteristically diplomatic. ‘She sounds like she’s a real piece of work.’

Will couldn’t disagree with him.

‘I’ve known gals like that. They’re a lot of fun.’ Collier was still keeping his distance. He didn’t want to get hit again. ‘The thing is, they’ve always got people they can fall back on.’

Will had said the same thing to Sara, but it sounded shitty coming out of Collier’s mouth.

‘You really think she’d run across the street to this dump?’ Collier slid down the wall so he could sit. He was still out of breath. ‘Lookit, I never met the broad, but I’ve known plenty of
broads like her.’ He glanced up at Will, probably to make sure he wasn’t coming down the stairs. ‘No offense, bro, but they’ve always gotta backup plan. You know what I mean?’

Will knew what he meant. Angie always had a guy she could run to. That guy hadn’t always been Will. She had different men she used at different times in her life. When it wasn’t Will’s turn, he went to work, he retiled his bathroom, he restored his car, and he convinced himself the whole time that he wasn’t waiting for her to come back into his life. Dreading. Anticipating. Aching.

Collier said, ‘My take is, the shit went down last night, she’s injured, so she pulled out her phone—which we can’t find—and she called up a guy and he came rushing over to help.’

‘What if Harding was the guy?’

‘You think she only had one guy?’

Will took a deep breath. He held on to it for as long as he could.

Collier asked, ‘We leaving now?’

Will pushed himself up. Heat exhaustion put stars in his eyes. He steadied himself for a moment. He blinked away sweat. He turned around and resumed his climb up the stairs.

‘Jesus Christ,’ Collier muttered. The soles of his shoes hit the treads like sandpaper. ‘You ask me, you oughta be running back down these stairs and telling ol’ Red you’re fucking sorry.’

Collier was right. Will owed Sara an apology. He owed her more than that. But he had to keep moving forward, because taking a step back, letting himself think about what he was doing and why, was a thread he couldn’t let unravel.

Collier said, ‘That’s a good-lookin’ woman you got there.’

‘Shut up.’

‘I’m just sayin’, dude. Simple observation.’

Up ahead, Will saw a painted
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marking the next landing. He kept climbing. The heat intensified with every step. He braced his hand against the wall. He went through the list again: he didn’t know where Angie lived. He didn’t know where she worked. He didn’t know who her friends were. If she had friends. If she wanted friends. She had been the center of his existence for well over half of his life and he didn’t know a damn thing about her.

‘You got prime rib at home,’ Collier said. ‘You don’t run out to McDonald’s for a Happy Meal.’ He laughed. ‘I mean, not so prime rib ever finds out. ’Cause, shit, man, we all like a greasy cheeseburger every now and then, am I right?’

Will turned the corner at the
9
. He looked up to the next landing.

His heart stopped.

A woman’s foot.

Bare. Dirty.

Bloody cuts criss-crossed the soles.

‘Angie?’ He whispered the word, afraid to say it louder because she might disappear.

Collier asked, ‘What’d you say?’

Will stumbled up the stairs. He could barely carry his own weight. He was on his knees by the time he reached the landing.

Angie was lying face down on the floor. Long brown hair wild. Legs splayed. One arm underneath her, the other over her head. She was wearing a white dress he’d seen before. Cotton, see-through, which is why she wore the black bra underneath. The dress rode up her legs, showing matching black bikini underwear.

Blood radiated from beneath her still body, cresting in a halo over her head.

Will put his hand on her ankle. The skin was cold. He felt no pulse.

His head dropped down. He squeezed his eyes shut against the tears that came.

Collier was behind him. ‘I’ll call it in.’

‘Don’t.’ Will needed a minute. He couldn’t hear the call on the radio. He couldn’t take his hand from Angie’s leg. She was thinner than the last time he’d seen her—not Saturday, that was just a glimpse, but about sixteen months ago. It was the last time they were together. Deidre had finally died, all alone in the nursing home because Angie didn’t see her anymore. Will was on a case when it happened. He had driven back to Atlanta to be with Angie. Sara was in the picture by then, like a blur at the edge of the frame that might be something or nothing at all, depending on how things developed.

Will had told himself that he owed Angie one last chance, but she had known the minute she looked into his eyes that all that weight between them—that Pandora’s box of shared horrors that they both carried on their backs—had finally been lifted.

Will cleared his throat. ‘I want to see her face.’