She dropped her phone into the cupholder.
“I need more than newspaper articles on these dead women. Were they on dating apps? What’s their social media presence? Did they work in offices or at home? I need case files, coroner’s reports, photographs, witness statements, scene of crime drawings, toxicology reports. All I’ve got is that eight women were found in the woods, and Amanda is right about the woods. Look out the window. How could someone die in Georgia and not be in the woods?”
Will had been looking out the window for almost an hour. He wasn’t as convinced as Faith. Someone was seeing a pattern with these bodies. That someone had devoted the last eight years of his or her life to tracking them. You didn’t do that unless you were obsessed. Will felt in his gut that finding the root of that obsession would answer a lot of their questions.
He said, “If we reach out to all the different jurisdictions, someone is going to talk. You said it yourself. Cops are bitchy little gossips. Do we want it getting out that we’re looking at a possible serial?”
Faith was saved answering by her phone dinging. Then dinging again. She groaned as she read the text. “Amanda wants you to use your relationship with Sara to make a connection with Lena.”
Will felt his eyebrows furrow. Sara blamed Lena for Jeffrey’s murder. The only way she connected to Lena was with a baseball bat.
“He’s a pedophile, right?” Faith was back to Daryl Nesbitt. “I mean, part of me says, yeah, Nick, go ahead and beat the shit out of him. Then another part of me says, he still has rights. We took an oath to the Constitution, not to whatever feels right. And Nesbitt’s still a human being. And he was probably abused as a kid, so there’s that.”
Will let her last sentence roll around a compartment in his brain.
“Not that there’s a causality between child abuse and turning into a pedophile,” Faith said, probably remembering who she was talking to. “I mean, for one, the world would be full of pedophiles if childhood abuse was the root cause. And for two, any pedophile who’s talking to a researcher is probably going to be in prison, and the majority of the prison population had shitty childhoods. It’s kind of prerequisite to incarceration unless you’re a psychopath.” She reversed herself again. “But you can’t discount stupidity. I’ve arrested a lot of idiots from good homes.”
Will stared longingly at the radio.
Her phone went into rapid-fire dinging.
“Amanda says the coroner’s preliminary exam of Alexandra McAllister points to accidental death. Sara hasn’t found anything so far that disproves that. She’s still looking, but that seems perfunctory.” Faith looked up from her phone. “When has Sara ever done anything that was perfunctory?”
Will could think of a few times, but he wasn’t going to share. “If McAllister wasn’t murdered, then maybe the newspaper articles are random and this is a wild goose chase.”
“We still have Nesbitt’s allegations against Lena, which we both know are probably true because she’s a dirty cop and she does dirty cop things to frame people.”
Will stared at the open road. He could feel the swirl of another Lena vortex, which put Faith’s dogshit metaphor on more solid ground.
Another ding from Faith’s phone. “And, Amanda and I are riding the same wavelength. She says, ‘Gloves off with Lena.’”
Another ding. “All caps. ‘I WANT HER NOTEBOOKS.’ Yeah, der.”
Another ding. “‘Try to get something useful to leverage Nesbitt.’”
Another ding. “‘Ask Will if he has a game plan.’”
Faith groaned again. “Okay, Boomer, that’s enough from you.” She turned the phone to silent before slotting it back into the cupholder. “Is this killing you inside or what?”
The GPS announced the exit. Will slowed the car as he pulled into the far lane.
Faith let a few seconds pass before asking, “Are you not answering my question?”
Will’s jaw felt tight. So did his stomach. And every other organ in his body. If there had been a way to talk to Faith, then give her amnesia, he would’ve gladly spilled his guts. “You’re going to have to narrow it down.”
His request didn’t buy as much time as he’d hoped. Faith went right to the sore spot. “The Jeffrey part. I was just thinking how I would feel if the woman I loved was suddenly having to deal with the ghost of her previous husband, and it would be killing me. Like, for-real-dead killing me.”
He shrugged his shoulder. The GPS told him to take the next turn. He coasted toward the ramp. He could see a fork at the top.
Faith said, “I figured there’s a reason you’re not asking Sara to marry you, right?”
Will waited for the GPS to tell him what to do next.
“First rule of Cop Club: don’t ask a question if you won’t like the answer.” Faith turned off the sound on the GPS. She knew left and right weren’t easy for Will. She pointed down the road. “That way.”
Will went that way.
“For what it’s worth, Sara really loves you,” Faith said. “She calls you my love and it doesn’t even sound corny. She lights up when she sees you. Even this morning. She’s standing in the middle of an actual violent crime scene, and she sees you and she smiles like Rose the first time she sees Jack on the Titanic.”
Will frowned.
“Okay, Jack dies, but you get what I mean. Go this way.” She pointed at the next turn. “How about Duke and—what’s her name, from The Notebook? Crap, never mind, they both die at the end.” She pointed toward the next turn. “Ghost. Nope. Patrick Swayze was murdered. The Fault in Our Stars. Bright Star. Love Story—well, you have to admit, she should’ve died for her bad acting. Oh—Princess Bride. Westley was only mostly dead. Turn up here.”
“As you wish.”
Faith pointed to a mailbox in the distance. “My side of the road. Three-forty-nine.”
Will parked on the street in front of the
