Did Daryl have access to a dark-colored van? Was he in the vicinity of the college over the last two days? Jeffrey would need cell phone records. Credit-card statements. Arrest record. Social media.
“Over here.” Frank pulled him down the hall. Something was wrong.
Jeffrey tried to shut down the list in his head, telling Frank, “I already got Daryl’s—”
“The dean just called,” Frank said. “Another student is missing.”
Atlanta
22
“Ugh.” Faith looked up from her phone, giving herself a break from reading so she didn’t get car sick.
Will was driving while she searched police reports, newspaper articles, and social media to pull together a profile of Callie Zanger. Faith had gone into the task thinking that she would prove that Miranda Newberry and her eighty-tab, color-coded spreadsheet was wrong, but everything so far pointed to a victim who had somehow managed to get away.
Will asked, “Well?”
“First off, Callie Zanger is freaking beautiful.”
Will pulled his eyes away from the road to look at the photo on Faith’s phone. He didn’t say anything, but he didn’t have to. Zanger was gorgeous. Long, thick hair, perfect button-nose, a chin that could cut diamonds. She probably got up at four every morning to do Pilates and update her vision board.
Faith’s vision board was a tattered photograph of her sleeping.
She gave Will the summary. “Zanger is a named partner at a white-shoe law firm called Guthrie, Hodges and Zanger. Divorced. No children. She specializes in tax litigation. Forty-one years old. Lives in a six-million-dollar penthouse at One Museum across from the High. Was reported missing two years ago, March twenty-eighth.”
“Early morning?” Will asked.
“Probably. She missed a mandatory Wednesday morning meeting. Apparently, she’s a real Type A, never misses a meeting, so everybody freaked. Called the hospitals, the cops, went by her place, checked her gym. Her BMW was in the garage. Zanger’s mother, Veronica Houston-Bailey, was at the downtown Atlanta precinct by noon with her family lawyer, which is why I’m assuming APD didn’t tell her to come back in twenty-four hours.”
“Houston-Bailey of Houston-Bailey Realtors?”
“That’s the one.” The firm was by far the largest commercial real estate company in Atlanta. “For what it’s worth, I agree with APD moving fast on this. High-powered, politically connected, female attorneys don’t just disappear like that. Especially when they’re in the middle of a very nasty, zillion-dollar divorce that’s in the papers and on the news every day.”
“Did APD go at the husband?”
“Rod Zanger, and yes, they went at him like a pack of velociraptors. Rod claimed he had no idea where she was, why she was missing, all the usual. But he couldn’t account for his whereabouts the Wednesday morning she disappeared. No receipts, no phone records, no alibi witnesses. He said he was home in their Buckhead mansion with a cold. On the maid’s day off. And the gardener’s. APD were really looking at him hard.”
“Was her car garaged at work?”
“In her space at One Museum, conveniently located in a blind spot the security cameras didn’t cover. She walked to work sometimes if the weather was good. But, her purse and phone were found locked in the trunk.”
“That sounds familiar.”
“Almost like a pattern.” She asked, “Do you remember the divorce? It was pretty big, a reverse Cinderella story. They met at Duke Law School. Rod was the poor cowboy from Wyoming. Callie was the wealthy Southern debutante who swept him off his feet. The papers called him a kept man.”
Will shook his head, because he only read car magazines and magazines about cars.
Faith had gotten a text. She held up her phone in front of her face instead of the other way around. Jeremy was still begging for her help.
She swiped away the request, telling Will, “Here’s where it gets interesting. Thirty-six hours after Zanger was reported missing, she was found wandering along Cascade Road in the middle of the night. Dazed and confused. Blood was pouring from a head wound. Her clothes were torn. She was covered in mud. Her shoes were missing. At the hospital, they treated her for a severe concussion and exposure.”
“What kind of head wound?” he asked. “Hammer-shaped?”
“The police report doesn’t specify and the newspaper stories are annoyingly vague. But Zanger was taken to Grady, and Sara used to work there, so …?”
“You want her to violate patient privacy?”
Faith pivoted away from that pipe dream. “Zanger signed herself out of the hospital the next morning. According to the papers, there’s no record of her being admitted to any other metro hospitals. According to APD, she refused to file an official statement or to even submit to an informal interview. She wouldn’t talk to anybody. The husband wouldn’t talk. The mother sure as shit wouldn’t talk. So the investigation was dropped and the divorce settlement was put under seal and the newspapers had nothing else to report and here we are two years later.”
Will asked, “How did Zanger get from Cascade Road to the hospital?”
“Older couple driving their grandbaby around trying to get her to fall asleep. Which only works on grandbabies, by the way. Not on your own children.”
“There’s a lot of wooded areas near Cascade.”
“I want to get a giant satellite map of the state so I can put Xs on where the women lived, where they were found, and the last known location where they were seen alive.”
“I bet Miranda has a map.”
Faith bristled, which was probably why he’d brought it up. “Riddle me this, Batman: if Dirk Masterson was so sure that she was hunting a serial killer, then why didn’t she go to the police?”
“Because she knew that exactly what’s going to happen would happen?”
Faith looked at her phone, responding to Jeremy’s text with more attention than was warranted. Will had advocated for letting Miranda and Gerald Caterino work out a legally
