Amanda demanded, 'What've you got?'
The young woman closed the door and walked into the kitchen, looking almost contrite. 'Adam Humphrey was a student at Georgia Tech. He lives in Towers Hall on campus.'
Amanda pumped her fist in the air. 'This is your break.'
Will told Faith, 'Call campus security. Have them check the room.'
'I did,' she answered. 'The door was locked, but the room was empty. I've got a number to call when we get on campus. The dean wants to talk to legal before they give us access to the room, but he says that's just a formality.'
'Let me know if I need to find a judge.' Amanda glanced at her watch. 'It's coming on four o'clock now. I'm late for a closed door with the mayor. Call me the minute you have anything.'
Will crossed the room to leave. Then he realized that he still didn't have a car. He realized Amanda was still here, leaning against the counter, waiting for him to do exactly what she wanted.
Faith asked, 'Do you want me to go wait outside the Alexander house to see if the parents have anyone checking in on Kayla?'
Will thought about Adam Humphrey's dorm room, all the papers and notes that would have to be catalogued, all the drawers and shelves that would have to be searched.
He said, 'You're going to come to Tech with me.'
Her expression turned from surprised to cautious. 'I thought I was only doing scut work.'
'You are.' Will opened the door she'd just closed. 'Let's go.'
CHAPTER THREE
THE LITERATURE ON Faith's Mini Cooper claimed that the front seats could easily accommodate a passenger or driver over six feet tall. As with anything, a few extra inches made all the difference, and Faith had to admit that it brought her a small amount of pleasure watching the man who had helped force her mother off the job awkwardly trying to fold his long body into her car. Finally, Will moved the seat back so that it was almost touching the rear window and angled himself in. 'All right?' she asked.
He looked around the cab, his neatly parted, sandy blond hair brushing against the glass sunroof. She thought of a prairie dog poking its head outside its hole. He gave a small nod. 'Let's go.'
She let off the clutch as he reached around for the seat belt. For months, even the thought of this man's name could invoke the kind of deeply felt hatred that made Faith feel like she should vomit just to get the taste out of her mouth. Evelyn Mitchell hadn't shared many details of the internal investigation with her daughter, but Faith had seen the toll the relentless questioning had taken. Day by day, her strong, impervious mother had been whittled into an old woman.
Will Trent was a key factor in that transformation.
Being honest, there was plenty of blame to go around. Faith was a cop, and she knew all about the blue code of silence, but she also knew that it was the betrayal of Evelyn's own men-those greedy bastards who thought it was okay to steal so long as it was drug money-that had finally taken all the fight out of her mother. Still, Evelyn had refused to testify against any of her team. That the city had let her keep her pension was a miracle of sorts, but Faith knew that her mother had friends in high places. You didn't become a captain with the Atlanta Police Department by shunning politics. Evelyn was a master at knowing how the game worked.
For her part, Faith had always assumed Will Trent was some kind of bumbling, rat squad jerk-off who loved to put his thumb on good cops and grind them out of the force. She hadn't anticipated that Trent would be the clean-cut, lanky man crammed into the car beside her. Nor had she considered that he might actually know his way around the job. His reading of the crime scene, the way he had been right about Humphrey being a college student- something that Faith, of all people, should have picked up on-had not been the detecting of some Bureau pencil pusher.
Like it or not, she was stuck with him, and somewhere out there was a missing girl, and two sets of parents who were about to get the worst news of their lives. Faith would do everything she could to help solve this case because at the end of the day, that was all that really mattered. Still, she didn't offer to turn up the Mini's air- conditioning, though Will must have been sweating to death in that ridiculous three-piece suit, and she certainly didn't offer him an olive branch by opening up the conversation. As far as she was concerned, he could sit there with his knees around his ears and boil in his own sweat.
Faith signaled as she pulled out onto Peachtree Street and accelerated into the far right lane, only to come to a complete stop behind a dirt-encrusted pickup truck. They were officially caught up in the hurry-up-and-wait game that was Atlanta's afternoon rush-hour traffic, which started around two-thirty and tapered off at eight. Add in all the construction, and this meant that the five-mile trip to Georgia Tech, which was just across the interstate, would take approximately half an hour. Gone were the Starsky and Hutch days of being able to slap a siren on your roof and blow through traffic. This was Will Trent's case, and if he'd wanted to bypass rush hour, he should have commandeered a cruiser to take them to Tech instead of a bright red Mini with a peace sign on the bumper.
As they inched past the High Museum of Art and Atlanta Symphony Hall, Faith's mind kept going back to the crime scene. She had gotten to the Campano house about ten minutes behind Leo. Faith's mother had always said that the hardest scenes to come onto were the ones involving kids. Her advice was to forget your family, focus on the job and cry about it on your own time. Like every piece of good advice her mother had ever given her, Faith had pushed it aside. It wasn't until she'd walked into that house today that she had realized how true her mother's words had been.
Seeing Adam Humphrey's lifeless body, his sneakers the same brand and color as the ones Faith had bought her own son just the weekend before, had been a punch in the gut. She had stood in the foyer, the heat at her back, feeling as if all the air was gone from her lungs.
'Jeremy,' Leo had said, invoking her son. He wasn't offering sympathy. He wanted Faith to form some kind of miraculous mother bond with Abigail Campano and make the woman tell them what the hell had happened.
The Mini shook as a bus rumbled by. They were in a long line of traffic, waiting to take a right turn, when she noticed Will was sniffing his hand. Faith stared out the window as if this was some sort of normal human behavior.
He held out his sleeve. 'Does this smell like urine to you?'
She inhaled without thinking, the way you smell bad milk if someone holds it under your nose. 'Yes.'
He bumped his head against the roof as he leaned up to get his cell phone out of his back pocket. He dialed a number, waited a few seconds, then without preamble told the person at the end of the line, 'I think there's urine in the back of Emma's closet. I thought it might be from the dog bed, but I'm pretty sure it was fresh.' He nodded as if the other person could see him. 'I'll hold.'
Faith waited silently. Will's hand was on his knee, his fingers playing with the sharp crease in his pants. He was an average-looking man, probably a few years older than her, which would put him in his mid-thirties. Back at the crime scene, she had noticed a faint scar where his upper lip had been split open and stitched back together in a slightly crooked line. Now, with the late-afternoon sun coming in through the glass roof, she could see another scar jagging from his ear down his neck, following the jugular and disappearing into the collar of his shirt. Faith was no forensics expert, but she would have guessed that someone had come at him with a serrated knife.
Will put his hand up to his face, scratching his jaw, and Faith quickly looked back at the road.
'Good,' he said into the phone. 'Is there a way to compare it to the O-negative at the bottom of the stairs?' He paused, listening. 'Thank you. I appreciate the effort.'
Will snapped the phone closed and dropped it in his pocket. Faith waited for an explanation, but he seemed content to keep his thoughts to himself. Maybe he just saw her as his personal driver. Maybe he associated her too closely with Leo Donnelly's mistake. She could not fault him for painting her with the same brush. Faith had been at the scene, had stood by chewing the fat with the mother while all the clues at the scene were waiting to be put together. She was Leo's partner, not his underling. Everything he had missed, Faith had missed, too.
Still, curiosity began to nag at her, then anger started to take hold. She was a detective on the Atlanta police force, not a lackey. Because of her mother's rank, rumors had always followed every promotion Faith received, but
