Genesis (11 page)

"I was just thinking," Faith began, though she didn't share her actual
thoughts. "What do we know about the victims?"

"Both of them have dark hair. Both are fit, attractive. We think
the woman at the hospital's name is Anna. The license says the one
hanging in the tree is Jacquelyn Zabel."

"What about fingerprints?"

"There was a latent on the pocketknife that belongs to Zabel. The
print on her license came back unknown—it doesn't match Zabel
and there's no match on the computer."

"We should compare it to Anna's fingerprints and see if she's the
one who made it. If Anna touched the license, then that puts both
Anna and Jacquelyn Zabel in the cave together."

"Good idea."

Faith felt like she was pulling teeth, though she couldn't blame
Will for being gun-shy, considering how mercurial her mood was
lately. "Have you found out anything else about Zabel?"

He shrugged, as if there wasn't much, but reeled off, "Jacquelyn
Zabel is thirty-eight, unmarried, no children. The Florida Law
Enforcement Bureau is giving us an assist—they're going to go
through her place, do a phone dump, try to find next of kin other
than the mother who was living in Atlanta. The sheriff says no one in
town knows Zabel that well. She has one sort-of friend next door
who's been watering her plants but doesn't know anything about her.
There's been an ongoing feud with some of the other neighbors
about people leaving out their trashcans on the street. The sheriff
said Zabel's made a few nuisance complaints in the past six months
over loud noises from pool parties and cars being parked in front of
her house."

Faith bit back the urge to ask him why he hadn't told her all this in
the first place. "Has the sheriff ever met Zabel?"

"He said he took a couple of the nuisance calls himself and didn't
find her to be a very pleasant person."

"You mean, he said she was a bitch," Faith clarified. For a cop,
Will had a surprisingly clean vocabulary. "What did she do for a living?"

"Real estate. The market's been off, but she looks pretty set—
house on the beach, BMW, a boat at the marina."

"Wasn't the battery you found in the cave for marine use?"

"I had the sheriff check her boat. The battery's still there."

"It was worth a shot," Faith mumbled, thinking they were still
grasping at straws.

"Charlie says the battery we found in the cave is at least ten years
old. All the numbers are worn off. He's going to see if he can get
some more information on it, but chances are it's a wash. You can
pick up those things at yard sales." Will shrugged, adding, "The only
thing it tells us is that the guy knew what he was going to do with it."

"Why is that?"

"A car battery is designed to deliver a short, large current like you
need to crank your car. Once the car starts, the alternator takes over,
and the battery isn't needed again until the next time you need to
start the engine. A marine battery like from the cave is what's called
a deep cycle battery, meaning it gives a steady current over a long
period of time. You'd ruin a car battery pretty quickly if you tried to
use it the way our guy was. The marine battery would last for
hours."

Faith let his words hang in the air, her brain trying to make sense
of them. There was no way to make sense of it, though: what had
been done to those women was not the product of a sound mind.

She asked, "Where's Jacquelyn Zabel's BMW?"

"Not in her driveway in Florida. And not at her mother's house."

"Did you put out an APB on the car?"

"In both Florida and Georgia." He reached around to the back
seat and pulled out a handful of folders. They were all color-coded,
and he thumbed through until he found the orange one, which he
handed to Faith. She opened it to find a printout from the Florida
Department of Motor Vehicles. Jacquelyn Alexandra Zabel's driver's
license stared back at her, the picture showing a very attractive
woman with long dark hair and brown eyes. "She's pretty," Faith
said.

"So's Anna," Will provided. "Brown hair, brown eyes."

"Our guy has a type." Faith turned to the next page and read
aloud from the woman's driving record, "Zabel's car is a 2008 red
BMW 540i. Speeding ticket six months ago for going eighty in a
fifty-five. Running a stop sign in a school zone last month. Failure to
stop at a roadblock two weeks ago, refused to take a Breathalyzer,
court date pending." She thumbed through the pages. "Her record
was pretty clean until recently."

Will absently scratched his forearm as he waited for another light
to change. "Maybe something happened."

"What about the notes Charlie found in the cave?"

"'I will not deny myself,'" he recalled, taking out the blue folder.
"The pages are being fingerprinted. They're from a standard spiral
notebook, written in pencil, probably by a woman."

Faith looked at the copy, the same sentence written over and over
again like she'd done many times herself as punishment back in junior
high school. "And the rib?"

He was still scratching his arm. "No sign of the rib in the cave or
the immediate area."

"A souvenir?"

"Maybe," he said. "Jacquelyn didn't have any cuts on her body."
He corrected, "I mean, any deep cuts like what Anna had where the
rib was removed. Both of them looked like they'd been through the
same kind of stuff, though."

"Torture." Faith tried to put herself in the mind of their perpetrator.
"He keeps one woman on the top of the bed and one woman
underneath. Maybe he trades them out—does one horrible thing to
Anna, then swaps her out for Jacquelyn and does the horrible thing
to her."

"Then trades them back," Will said. "So, maybe Jacquelyn heard
what happened to Anna with the rib, knew what was coming, and
chewed her way through the rope around her wrist."

"She must have found the penknife, or had it with her under the
bed."

"Charlie examined the slats under the bed. He put them back together
in sequence. The tip of a very sharp knife ran in the center of
each slat where someone cut the rope from underneath the bed, head
to foot."

Faith suppressed a shudder as she stated the obvious. "Jacquelyn
was under the bed while Anna was being mutilated."

"And she was probably alive while we were searching the woods."

Faith opened her mouth to say something along the lines of "It's
not your fault," but she knew the words were useless. She felt guilt
herself for not being out there during the search. She could not
imagine how Will was feeling, considering he'd been blundering
around in the woods while the woman was dying.

Instead, she asked, "What's wrong with your arm?"

"What do you mean?"

"You keep scratching it."

He stopped the car and squinted up at the street signs.

"Hamilton," Faith read.

He checked his watch, a ploy he used for telling left from right.
"Both victims were probably well-off," he said, taking a right onto
Hamilton. "Anna was malnourished, but her hair was nice—the
color, I mean—and she'd had a manicure recently. The polish on her
nails was chipped, but it looked professionally done."

Faith didn't press him on how he knew a professional manicure
from an amateur one. "These women weren't prostitutes. They had
homes and probably jobs. It's unusual for a killer to choose victims
who will be missed."

"Motive, means, opportunity," he listed, stating the foundation for
any investigation. "Motive is sex and torture and maybe taking the rib."

"Means," Faith said, trying to think of ways the killer might have
abducted his victims. "Maybe he rigs their cars to break down? He
could be a mechanic."

"BMWs are equipped with driver assist. You just press a button
and they're on the phone with you and they send out a tow truck."

"Nice," Faith said. The Mini was a poor man's BMW, which
meant you had to use your own phone if you got stuck. "Jacquelyn's
moving her mother's house. That means she probably contracted
with a moving company or liquidation agent."

"She'd need a termite letter to sell the house," Will added. You
couldn't get a mortgage on a house inmost of the South without first
proving that termites weren't feasting on the foundation. "So, our
bad guy could be an exterminator, a contractor, a mover . . ."

Faith got out a pen and started a list on the back of the orange
folder. "Her real estate license wouldn't transfer up here, so she'd
have to have an Atlanta agent to sell the house."

"Unless she did a for-sale-by-owner, in which case she could have
had open houses, could've had strangers in and out all the time."

"Why didn't anyone notice she was missing?" Faith asked. "Sara
said Anna was taken at least four days ago."

"Who's Sara?"

"Sara Linton," Faith said. He shrugged, and she studied him carefully.
Will never forgot names. He never forgot anything. "The doctor
from yesterday?"

"Is that her name?"

Faith resisted a "Come on."

He asked, "How would she know how long Anna was kept?"

"She used to be a coroner in some county way down south."

Will's eyebrows went up. He slowed to look at another sign. "A
coroner? That's weird."

He was one to talk. "She was a coroner
and
a pediatrician."

Will mumbled as he tried to make out the sign. "I took her for a
dancer."

"Woodland," Faith read. "A dancer? She's twenty feet tall."

"Dancers can be tall."

Faith clenched her teeth together so that she would not laugh out
loud.

"Anyway." He didn't add anything else, using the word to indicate
an end to that part of the conversation.

She studied his profile as he turned the wheel, the way he stared so
intently at the road ahead. Will was an attractive man, arguably
handsome, but he was about as self-aware as a snail. His wife, Angie
Polaski, seemed to see beyond his quirks—among them his painful
inability to conduct small talk and the anachronistic three-piece suits
he insisted on wearing. In return, Will seemed to overlook the fact
that Angie had slept with half the Atlanta police force, including—if
graffiti in the ladies' toilet on the third floor was to be believed—a
couple of women. They had met each other at the Atlanta Children's
Home, and Faith supposed this was the connection that bound them
together. They were both orphans, both abandoned by, presumably,
crappy parents. As with everything in his personal life, Will did not
share the details. Faith hadn't even known that he and Angie were officially
married until Will showed up one morning wearing a wedding
band.

And she had never known Will to even give a passing glance to
another woman until now.

"This is it," he said, taking a right down a narrow, tree-lined
street. She saw the white crime-scene van parked in front of a very
small house. Charlie Reed and two of his assistants were already going
through the trash on the side of the road. Whoever had taken out
the trash was the neatest person in the world. There were boxes
stacked up on the curb, three rows of two, each labeled with the contents.
Beside these were a bunch of large black garbage bags lined up
like a row of sentries. On the other side of the mailbox were a precisely
aligned mattress and box spring, and a couple of pieces of furniture
that the local trash trollers hadn't spotted yet. Behind Charlie's
van were two empty Atlanta Police cruisers, and Faith assumed the
patrolmen Will had requested were already canvassing the neighborhood.

Faith said, "Her husband was a cop. Sounds like he was killed in
the line of duty. I hope they fried the bastard."

"Whose husband?"

He knew damn well who she was talking about "Sara Linton's.
The dancing doctor."

Will put the car in park and cut the engine. "I asked Charlie to
hold off on processing the house." He took two pairs of latex gloves
out of his jacket pocket and handed one to Faith. "My guess is that
it's packed up for the move, but you never know."

Faith got out of the car. Charlie would have to close off the house
as a crime scene as soon as he started collecting evidence. Letting Will
and Faith check it out first meant that they wouldn't have to wait for
everything to be processed before they started following up on clues.

"Hey there," Charlie called, tossing them an almost cheery wave.
"Got here just in time." He indicated the bags. "Goodwill was about
to cart it off when we pulled up."

"What've you got?"

He showed them the tags on the bags where the contents had been
neatly labeled. "Clothes, mostly. Kitchen items, old blenders, that
sort of thing." He flashed a smile. "Beats the hell out of that hole in
the ground."

Will asked, "When do you think we'll have the analysis back from
the cave?"

"Amanda put a rush on it. There was a lot of shit down there, literally
and figuratively. We prioritized the pieces we thought might
be more important. You know that DNA from the fluids will take
forty-eight hours. Fingerprints are run through the computer as
they're developed. If there's something earth-shattering down there,
we'll know by tomorrow morning at the latest." He mimed holding
a telephone receiver to his ear. "You'll be the first call."

Will indicated the garbage bags. "Find anything useful?"

Charlie handed him a packet of mail. Will snapped off the rubber
band and looked at each envelope before handing it to Faith.
"Postmark's recent," he noticed. He could easily read numbers, if not
words, which was one of the many useful tools he used to conceal his
problem. He was also good at recognizing company logos. "Gas bill,
electric, cable . . ."

Faith read the name of the addressee, "Gwendolyn Zabel. That's a
lovely old name."

"Like Faith," Charlie said, and she was a little surprised to hear
him utter something so personal. He hastily covered for it, saying,
"And she lived in a lovely old house."