Triptych (34 page)

A young girl came into the bathroom, saw Angie and quickly left. Well, that was a real spirit booster. Angie looked at her reflection, the heavy makeup, the white vinyl crotch-dusting skirt and the hot pink haltertop that barely hid her breasts. No wonder people were scared of her.

She went into the hallway, glancing back toward the doors of the emergency room. Tank held both Gina’s hands in his as he talked to her. Angie couldn’t hear what he was saying, but she could guess. Suddenly, Gina started crying, and the man wrapped his arms around her. Angie watched them for a moment, feeling like an intruder but unable to look away.

A therapist had once told Angie that she looked for men who would abuse her because that was all she had ever known. This same therapist had also suggested that the reason Angie kept hurting Will was because she wanted to make him angry, to bring him to the point where he finally hauled off and hit her; then, Angie could finally open herself up to him. Then, she could really love him.

Of course, Angie had lied to the therapist about her relationships, about Will. She wasn’t about to tell a complete stranger the truth. Hell, she had told so many lies by now that she wouldn’t know the truth if it bit her on the ass.

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

11:31 am

Will sat at his desk, listening to his recording of Angie reading the letter Monroe had written to her mother. He’d heard it enough times by now that he knew it by heart, but he wanted to hear her voice, catch her inflections. Sometimes, he’d look at the letter while he listened to the words, trying to follow along. Angie hated reading aloud and her tone showed it. Will thought if he could read as well as she could he would read out loud all of the time.

He slipped the headphones out of his ears and went back to the diagram he had been drawing in his mind. Will saw things in images, like a storyboard for a movie. Jasmine Allison’s face came to mind. She was still missing. The Atlanta PD was looking, but Will wasn’t certain they were taking this as seriously as he needed them to. Even if they did, where would they look? There were a million places you could stash a little girl-a million more if she didn’t need to breathe while you were doing it.

Aleesha Monroe’s mother wasn’t home; he had called several times that morning until the maid had finally picked up and told him Ms. Monroe wasn’t expected back until noon. Will had put in a call to DeKalb and found out that there was nothing new on the Cynthia Barrett case. He had even sent a forensic team back to the Homes to go over the pay phone. There were only seven quarters in the coin box, and none of them had usable prints.

No leads, no clues to follow up on. All he had was the letter and the slim hope that Miriam Monroe would know something.

Leo Donnelly knocked on Will’s office door as he opened it. “Hey, man.”

Will slid the recorder and headphones into his desk drawer. “What’s going on?”

“You got a minute?”

“Sure.”

Leo closed the door and sat in the chair beside Will’s desk. He looked around the room, obviously nervous. “Nice place you got here.”

Will glanced around, wondering if the detective was being sarcastic. The office was so small that Will had pushed one side of the desk up against the wall so that he didn’t have to climb over it to get out.

Leo rubbed his palms on his cheap trousers as he stared out the window. The man seemed to be in a state of shock.

Will repeated, “What’s going on?”

“I just talked with Greer. He’s my lou, right?”

“Yeah.” Will had met the lieutenant on Monday when he’d asked to be let in on the Monroe case.

Leo’s tone was still incredulous. “He just got a courtesy call from DeKalb PD. Gina filed a restraining order on Mike.”

“Gina Ormewood?” Will sat up in his chair. “What did she list as cause?”

“Her broken face.” Leo propped his elbow on the desk and leaned his head in his hand. “Greer didn’t see the pictures or nothing, but the cop who took the report said she was pretty banged up.”

The detective was obviously shaken. Will had guessed that except for Michael, Leo didn’t have many friends in the squad. Even if he was close to some of them, you didn’t rat out your friends. That still did not explain why he’d come to Will.

Leo rubbed his chin with his thumb. “My old man used to haul off on my ma. Used to watch it when I was a kid.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“I thought I knew the guy,” Leo said, meaning Ormewood. “This is out of left field, you know? At first, I thought maybe the bitch was making it up, but then I called Michael and…” His voice trailed off. “He tried to laugh it off, said it was a big misunderstanding, that she was withdrawing the order, had just made it up to get back at him for working so much.” Leo’s mouth twisted to the side, like the explanation still didn’t sit right with him. The man had been a cop for much longer than Will and he had probably heard that same excuse from many an abusive husband.

Leo continued, “Then I started pushing him about it, asking what was going on. Gina’s a good girl, you know? Smart as a whip. I don’t see her putting his nuts in a vice just for shits and giggles.” Leo glanced at Will, then back out the window. “He told me to mind my own fucking business.”

Leo had obviously taken that as an admission of guilt. Will took it as proof that Michael was answering his phone only when the caller ID told him it was somebody he wanted to talk to.

“Anyway,” Leo turned back to Will, his knees banging the desk. He cursed a few times before saying, “I thought I’d come in and catch you up on the Monroe case.”

“Anything new?”

“Her pimp was shot this morning.”

“Baby G?”

“Two in the gut, one in the head. Doctors say it’s just a matter of time before he’s gone. No brain activity.”

“They catch the doer?”

“Two of his cousins, both of them fifteen. G’s grandmother saw the whole thing from her front window.” Leo gave a half-shrug of his shoulder. “Not that she’s saying shit. Both of’em confessed, though, so it’s not like we need her. Still, you’d think she’d be a little more upset that her grandson is dead.”

Will thought of Cedric. “Did anyone else get hurt?”

“No, this was a gang thing. They said G dissed ‘em the other day, didn’t give them respect.” Leo rubbed his chin again. “Shit, since when did they start handing out respect without you having to do anything to earn it?”

“You’re sure this isn’t related to Monroe?”

“Doesn’t seem to be,” Leo said. “They’re sharing a lawyer, some pro-bono fucker from Buckhead who gets his jollies helping the poor. Both of’em will be out in ten years, tops.”

“Maybe,” Will said, thinking Leo was more than likely right. “Did you get that memo I sent around about Jasmine Allison?”

“Missing black girl?” he confirmed. “Stick a blonde wig on her, maybe she’ll get in the papers.”

Will didn’t acknowledge the sarcasm. He had thought of something else. “Can you pull the list of recently released sex offenders for me?”

“How recent?”

Four months ago, fifteen-year-old Julie Cooper had been brutally raped, her tongue bitten in two. There was no telling how long her attacker had been operating under the radar. He told Leo, “Let’s go back at least eight months.”

“Just Atlanta or metro area, too?”

“Metro,” Will said, knowing that he’d just tripled the work.

“They don’t exactly keep that list up-to-date,” Leo pointed out. “I’ll have to do some cross-checking, mark off the ones that went back in, moved away, whatever.”

“I appreciate it.” Will felt the need to add, “I know this is a needle in a haystack, but we don’t have much more to go on.”

“I’m with you, man.” Leo stood up. “Shouldn’t take more than a day or so to get them together. You want me to leave them on your desk?”

“That’d be great.”

“I’ll take the first half,” Leo offered. “We’re working this together, right?”

“Right,” Will echoed, though he didn’t exactly count Donnelly as an ally.

Will took out his cell phone as Leo shut the door. He dialed Angie’s number, listened to the rings as he waited for her to answer.

She must have recognized his number on the caller ID. “What’s up?”

“Why would Michael’s wife file a restraining order against him?”

She exhaled slowly, taking her time with the answer. “Because he beats her.”

Will felt as if he had been beaten himself.

She asked, “You there?”

He didn’t think he could form the words. “Did he hit you, Angie?”

“What you should be asking is how long they’ve been married.”

“Did he ever hit you?”

“No, Will. He never hit me.”

“Are you lying to me?”

Her laugh was that strange, disaffected laugh she gave when she needed to distance herself from something. “Why would I lie to you, baby?”

“Aleesha’s pimp got shot this morning.”

“It wasn’t me.”

“Can you be serious for just one minute?”

“What do you want me to say, Will?”

“There’s a missing girl,” he told her. “Her name is Jasmine Allison. She lives three floors down from Aleesha’s place. Sunday night, somebody paid her twenty bucks to make a phone call to the police to report that Aleesha was being attacked. Now, she’s missing.”

Angie’s tone changed. “When was she last seen?”

“Yesterday afternoon.”

“Do you have any leads?”

“None.”

“How old is she?”

“Fourteen.”

Angie let out a soft breath. “Is anyone downtown taking this seriously?”

“Yeah, they’re bending over backward to help the GBI.”

She tried to take up for them. “They’ve got a lot of work to do down there.”

“I’m not saying they don’t.”

“Has she run away before?”

“Twice.”

“It’s not something I’d put at the top of my roster if I was working in missing persons. Teenage girls run away all the time. We both know that. They’ve probably got hotter cases right now.”

“Her home situation’s not that bad.”

“People run away for other reasons.” Angie would know. She’d run away so many times that even Will had lost count.

He looked at the copy he’d made of the letter Aleesha had written to her mother. She’d used pencil on lined paper, so the reproduction wasn’t that good. He tried to pick out some words but his eyes couldn’t focus. Aleesha had probably run away from home, too.

Angie offered, “I’ll talk to some people I know downtown and see if I can light a fire under them. They might take it better from me than some cocksucker from the GBI.”

“Thank you.”

Will closed the phone and looked at the display.

It was time to pay Aleesha Monroe’s mother a visit.

Will seldom drove his car to work unless he knew that he would be on his own that day. Most of the time, he took his motorcycle in so that whoever he was partnered with had to drive. Unless he was going to one of his usual haunts-the grocery store, the local Cuban restaurant, the movies-putting him behind the wheel of a car was an invitation to get lost. He could read street signs eventually, but only at the expense of the other cars behind him. Maps, with their tiny print that skipped across the page, might as well have been written in Swahili and when he got frustrated, which tended to happen when the horns started blaring, Will quickly forgot how to tell left from right.

Driving to Miriam Monroe’s house was an exercise in patience. Will ignored the angry stares and nasty shouts as he slowly made his way up DeKalb Avenue. The Monroes lived in Decatur near Agnes Scott College, a pricey little area with old Victorians and the sorts of houses most people could only dream about. Fortunately, the neighborhood wasn’t large and with a little trial and error, he would find her house before the sun went down.

Will tapped his foot on the brake as he followed the fork across the railroad tracks and onto College Avenue. He tried not to take it personally when a skinny old woman in a powder blue Cadillac sped past him, her fist shaking in the air.

With great effort, Will had managed to push Angie from his mind. He needed to work the case from the beginning to see if there was anything he had missed. There had to be some detail, some clue, that he just wasn’t picking up on.

Thirty-two Paisley Avenue was a grand old home with a wraparound porch and a massive weeping willow draping its branches across the front yard. The house was sandblasted brick on the bottom and darkly painted shingles along the top. The tile roof was covered with pine needles, and Will imagined with the large number of trees in the yard, the Monroes had a constant battle on their hands just keeping the gutters clean.

He parked his car on the street and double-checked the mailbox, making out the name MONROE in bold black letters. Still, he checked the street number against the address from the envelope.

The doorbell was the old-fashioned kind that was an actual bell mounted to the center of the heavy front door. Will twisted the bow-tie piece of metal and could hear the shrill ring echoing in the house.

Footsteps clicked on tile; a woman’s as well as a dog’s.

“Hello?”

Will assumed a wary eye was pressed to the peephole in the door. This was a nice neighborhood, but they were still close enough to Atlanta to make the residents careful about opening their doors to strangers.

“I’m Agent Will Trent with the Georgia Bureau of Investigation,” Will said, holding up his identification. “I’m looking for Miriam Monroe.”

There was a hesitation, maybe a sigh, then the bolt was turned and the door opened.

Miriam Monroe looked just like her daughter. At least, her daughter would have looked like this had she lived a different life. Where Aleesha had been malnourished, almost skeletal, her mother was a robust woman, with long curly hair and an open way about her that seemed to invite people in. There was a glow in her cheeks, a sparkle in her eyes, and even though her mouth was pursed as she stared at Will, her expression guarded as she waited for him to speak, he could tell that she was the sort of woman who sought out the positive in life.

He looked down at the black poodle standing at her feet, then back up at the woman. “I’ve come about your daughter.”