Triptych

himself-that he had trouble with left and right, and God knows it got worse when he was tired, but even he had opened enough locks to know which direction to turn a key in order to open it. He slid the key back into the lock and tried the other way, hearing the bolt click again. This time, the door opened.

The apartment still had that same feel to it, like something bad had happened. He stood in the doorway with only the light from the hall illuminating the room. Will saw a drop of blood on the floor and knelt beside it. Without thinking, he put his fingers to the drop to check whether or not it was dry.

His fingers came back clean, but Will hadn’t noticed the drop the first time he had come into the apartment. He flipped on the lights, thinking about the lock. This morning, Jasmine and Cedric had been making a racket when Will was locking the door. Michael and Will had run down the stairs at full speed. Maybe Will hadn’t locked the door all the way. He’d certainly been in a hurry.

But Will remembered locking that door, hearing the bolt catch.

He checked the apartment, making sure nothing was missing. Because of his reading problem, Will doubted he had a photographic memory, but he could memorize scenes. He remembered where things went and he knew when they were out of place.

Still, something was off. The room just felt different.

The junk drawer looked the same, the ring of keys still tucked into the corner under a couple of store receipts. Will checked through them until he found a smaller key like the one Cedric had. Every cop who came into this building had to pass those mailboxes. Will had, too, though, and he hadn’t asked if Monroe had any mail. Then again, Will wasn’t the lead detective on the case. With Michael on leave, the inimitable Leo Donnelly was now in charge.

Will made sure to lock the door, checking it twice before heading back down the stairs. As with every other surface in the Homes, the mailboxes were sprayed with graffiti, and Will identified Aleesha’s by the obscene drawing that pointed up to it. He slid in the key and turned the lock with some difficulty. He found the problem when the door swung open. The small compartment was packed with mail. Will took out the envelopes in clumps, noting the colors and the bright logos adorning the outsides. There was a plain white envelope in with the rest. A bulge was in the bottom corner, and he felt it with his fingers, guessing something metal was inside. From the shape, he thought it might be a cross. Someone had addressed the envelope by hand in a looping cursive that Will could not begin to decipher.

He looked at his watch, really looked at it like he never did, until he could make out the time. It was almost midnight. Angie would probably be getting home from work soon.

Will sat on Angie’s front porch, the hard concrete making his bottom numb. He had no idea where she was and his cell phone battery had finally died, so he wasn’t even sure of the time.

He had put the phone to good use before it had quit on him, calling a contact at the Atlanta police, making sure the report on Jasmine Allison wasn’t filed away like the thousands of other missing persons reports the city collected each year. They had put out an APB on Jasmine, and Luther Morrison had found a highly annoyed cop knocking at his front door. The patrolman had searched the house and discovered an underage girl there, but it wasn’t the underage girl they were looking for.

Will had a bad feeling about Jasmine’s disappearance. According to Cedric, Jasmine had seen something, talked to someone who was connected to the murder. That made her either valuable or expendable, depending on who you talked to, but as far as the city of Atlanta was concerned, Will’s bad feeling didn’t warrant an all-out manhunt.

This train of thought had persuaded Will to break down and call Michael Ormewood to find out if the girl had said anything to him before she’d escaped up the stairs. Michael could have been the last person to see her. Unfortunately, the detective either wasn’t home or wasn’t picking up the phone.

Angie’s black Monte Carlo SS pulled into her driveway. The engine sounded like it was running on gravel, and he couldn’t help but wince at the knocking that continued when she turned off the ignition. Will had spent a year restoring that car for her. Nights, weekends, a whole vacation. He had been on a mission to give her something nice, prove that he could build something with his hands without being told by a stupid manual that bolt A matches with nut C. The fresh oil stains on the driveway were like a kick in the face.

Angie threw open the car door and demanded, “What the fuck are you doing here?”

He couldn’t help but notice that she was dressed for work. The way she sat in the car gave him and everyone else on this side of the street a clear view right up her short skirt.

Will asked, “What did you do to the car?”

“Drove it.” She got out and slammed the door so hard the car shook.

“There’s oil all over the driveway.”

“You don’t say.”

“Did you even get it serviced?”

“Where would I do that?”

“There are ten billion garages around here. You can’t throw a rock without hitting one.”

“If I was going to throw a rock, it’d be at your head, you stupid shit.” She pushed him away from the front door so that she could open it. “I’m tired and I’m pissed off and I just want to get to bed.” She tossed him a look over her shoulder, like she was just waiting for him to say something about joining her.

He said, “I need to talk to you.”

“Will, why didn’t you use your key?” She didn’t have to crane her neck to look at him and he realized she was still wearing her high heels. She said, “You still have your key. Why did you sit out here in the cold?”

He smelled alcohol on her breath. “Have you been drinking?”

She sighed, giving him another whiff of what had to be whiskey. “Come in,” she said, shoving her key into the lock. “My neighbors get enough of a show with me flashing my cootch every time I get out of the fucking car.”

Will followed her inside and closed the door behind him.

She kicked off the stilettos by the couch and slid into a pair of pink flip-flops. Angie hated going barefoot.

“You don’t need to be here.” She flipped on the hall lights, talking and undressing as she walked toward the bedroom. “I’ve had the shittiest day of my life. All the girls are freaked out about Aleesha and they just kept fucking crying all night, as if my day wasn’t bad enough already.” He saw her naked back, the slope down her spine that disappeared into her pink panties, right before she slammed her bedroom door. “Three o’clock, I got a call from Lieutenant Canton,” she continued, her voice muffled through the door. “He made me come in early and work with that fucker Ormewood all afternoon to find some stupid files from back when he was in Vice.”

Will remembered that Michael had said he’d go through the files, but he was surprised the man had followed through, considering the state he was in the last time Will had seen him.

“I had to spend two hours sitting in this God damn skirt”-he heard something thump against the wall and assumed it was the skirt-“with that asshole breathing down my neck, joking with me like he was my best fucking friend.”

Will had used his key about an hour earlier to put Aleesha Monroe’s mail on the coffee table so he didn’t have to hold it all night. He sat down on the couch now and went through it, stacking the letters into neat piles for Angie.

“I swear to God, Will,” Angie began, coming back up the hallway. “Some days I look at those girls and think they get better treatment from their pimps than I do from these cocksuckers I have to work with.”

The flip-flops slapped against her heels as she walked into the kitchen. He heard the refrigerator door open, then ice hitting a glass. She opened a bottle and poured something, then slammed the refrigerator again. Seconds later, she sat on the couch beside him, kicked off the shoes, and took a healthy swig from the glass.

Will couldn’t help it. His spine straightened like a Catholic schoolgirl’s. “Are you going to drink that in front of me?”

She pushed her bare foot against his leg, saying, “Just until you start to look pretty.”

“Don’t do that.”

“Don’t do what?” she teased, nudging him again.

He turned to look at her, which was exactly what she had been waiting for. Angie was lying back on the couch, her foot still pressed against his leg. She had put on a short black robe and nothing else. The belt was tied loosely around her waist and he could see a tuft of hair between the folds.

Will felt his throat tighten. His mouth was so full of saliva that he pressed his lips together to keep from drooling.