Will said, “I’m not saying Miranda is an upstanding citizen, but we wouldn’t know about any of this without her. She’s the one who fed the information to Gerald. Gerald sent them to Nesbitt. Nesbitt got us here.”
“Thanks for the summary of the last two days,” Faith said. “Miranda Newberry can’t even tell the truth about where she’s going for lunch. She set up a fake company with a fake name and a fake website and a legitimate bank account so she could cash checks. Do you really think Gerald Caterino is her only victim?”
Will didn’t have an answer this time.
“Cheaters gonna cheat,” Faith reminded him. “But, seriously, can we talk about the obvious? I’d be damned if I’d be eating at Wendy’s and wearing a dress the color of a clown’s fart if someone had given me a tax-free windfall of thirty grand.”
Will’s phone started ringing. He tapped the button.
Faith said, “It’s us. You’re on speaker.”
Amanda asked, “How far away are you from Zanger’s office?”
Faith guessed, “Five minutes?”
“Sara’s about the same from HQ. The Van Dornes got here early. Caroline has put them in the conference room. I want you both back here ASAP.”
Faith assumed they had decided to ask the parents for permission to exhume the body. She decided against pushing Amanda on the serial killer angle again. “We’re going to hit rush hour. I’m not sure how long it will take for us to get back.”
Will asked, “What about Brock’s files?
“Sara took a preliminary look-see. Everything is there. The coroner’s report. Sara’s original autopsy notes. The labs, photographs, even a video of the crime scene. The blood and urine screens came back negative but for cannabinoids. Truong was a student; that only goes to reason.” Amanda said, “This is from Sara: Rohypnol and GHB have short half-lives and undergo rapid metabolism, thus the toxicology results in and of themselves can’t exclude possible drugging. The symptoms could include one or all of the following: amnesia, loss of consciousness, a sense of euphoria, a sense of paranoia, and loss of muscle control, meaning legs and arms paralyzed. The effects can linger for eight to twelve hours.”
Will asked, “What about the blue Gatorade?”
“The lab confirmed a sugary substance consistent with a sports drink, blue in color, found in the stomach contents.” Amanda ordered, “Report back immediately after you speak with Zanger.”
“Wait,” Faith couldn’t let it go after all. “Are you going to ask anything about the serial killer spreadsheet?”
“I would only ask why not one of my highly trained investigators spotted these possible connections before a civilian posing as a porn detective stumbled across them.”
Faith took the dig, because it was clearly meant for her. “Do you realize how many cases I could find if I had sixty billion hours to waste in front of my computer?”
Will gave her the side-eye.
Amanda said, “The great thing about not learning from your mistakes, Faith, is that you get to keep making them until you do.”
Faith opened her mouth.
Will ended the call before she could get a word out.
He waited a beat, then told Faith, “You know Amanda is probably working this behind the scenes, right?”
Faith wasn’t going to get into a discussion about Amanda’s habit of playing hide-and-seek with information. She liked being the Great Wizard behind the curtain. Faith was tired of sitting in Dorothy’s basket.
Will said, “Amanda had a gut feeling about Masterson. That’s why she kept pushing on the ISP. She knows this is a serial. You have to trust that she has a plan. She’s trying to keep us reined in.”
“I guess this is the second day in a row I am going to have to tell a man that I am not a horse.”
Will stared ahead at the road. “Zanger was missing for thirty-six hours. What reason would she have for not filing a report?”
“Fear?” Faith asked, because that was the reason most women didn’t report attacks. She offered up the second one, “Maybe she was worried no one would believe her?”
“She had to go to the hospital. There was physical proof that she was injured.”
“Maybe she didn’t want to deal with it? Her divorce was seriously nasty. Her husband was banging strippers. The strippers talked. Then Callie’s ex-boyfriend came out with a story about her being an Adderall freak in college. All of this wasn’t just local gossip. It made it to the national news. And then, on top of everything else, she gets raped?” Faith had been spared that particular trauma, but she’d been a pregnant fifteen-year-old back when they still burned witches. She knew what it felt like to have everyone talking about you, judging you, dissecting you like a specimen under a microscope.
She told Will, “We don’t honestly know what happened to Callie Zanger in the woods. Look at the other side of the coin. She has a stressful, high-powered job, and in the middle of all of that, she’s going through a bad divorce where her most intimate details are being shared by strangers. Maybe she couldn’t take it anymore. She went into the woods to end it. Whatever she did didn’t work, so she changed her mind and walked out, and now she’s embarrassed.”
Will didn’t answer immediately. “Do you believe that’s what happened?”
Faith figured a woman like that would disappear into a Four Seasons spa before she walked into the woods. “No.”
“Me, neither.”
Faith tapped her phone over to Google Maps to make sure they were heading in the right direction. Will did not have satnav in his ancient Porsche 911. The car was nice inside, hand-restored by Will to its former glory, but unfortunately those glory days had been before cup holders and global warming. The air conditioner only went as low as warm.
“Here.” She pointed to the right. “Go down Crescent Avenue. The parking garage is accessed from the back of the building.”
Will put
