He looked away, staring at the bare mattress across from him. 'I don't fit in here. Everybody's smarter than me. Everybody's already picking fraternities and hanging out. Even Tommy.'
Faith was not stupid enough to offer Jeremy as his new best friend. She told Gabe, 'It's hard to adjust to a new school. You'll figure it out eventually.'
'I really don't think I will,' he said, sounding so sure of himself that Faith could almost hear an alarm going off in her head. She had been so concerned about the information Gabe had withheld that she had lost sight of the fact that he was just a teenager who had been thrown into a very bad situation.
'Gabe,' Faith began, 'what's going on with you?'
'I just need to get some rest.'
She knew then that he wasn't talking about sleep. He had not called her to help Adam, he had called to help himself-and her response had been to push him around like a suspect she was interrogating. She made her voice softer. 'What are you thinking about doing?'
'I don't know,' he answered, but he still would not make eye contact with her. 'Sometimes, I just think that the world would be a better place if I was just…gone. You know?'
'Have you tried anything before?' She glanced at his wrists. There were scratch marks that she hadn't noticed before, thin red streaks where the skin had been broken but not punctured. 'Maybe tried to hurt yourself?'
'I just want to get away from here. I want to go…'
'Home?' she suggested.
He shook his head. 'There's nothing there for me. My mom died of cancer six years ago. My dad and me…' He shook his head.
Faith told him, 'I want to help you, Gabe, but you need to be honest with me.'
He picked at a tear in his jeans. She saw that his fingernails were chewed to the quick. The cuticles were ragged and torn.
'Did Adam buy a gun?'
He kept picking at his jeans. He shrugged his shoulders, and she still did not know whether to believe him.
She suggested, 'Why don't I call your father?'
His eyes widened. 'No. Don't do that. Please.'
'I can't just leave you alone, Gabe.'
His eyes filled with tears again. His lips trembled. There was such desperation in his manner that she felt like he had reached into her chest and grabbed her heart with his fist. She could have kicked herself for letting it get to this point.
She repeated, 'I'm not going to leave you alone.'
'I'll be okay.'
Faith felt caught in an untenable position. Gabe was obviously a troubled young man, but he could not be her problem right now. She needed to get the threatening notes to the lab to see if there were any usable fingerprints on them. There was a student in Ireland who had sold his car to Adam-a car that had probably been used to transport Emma Campano from the Copy Right. There were two sets of parents who would identify their dead children tonight. There was a mother and a father on the other side of Atlanta waiting to find out whether or not their daughter was still alive.
Faith took out her cell phone and scrolled through her recent calls.
Gabe asked, 'Are you going to arrest me?'
'No.' Faith pressed the send button on the phone. 'I'm going to get you some help, and then I have to go do my job.' She didn't add that she was going to search every item in his room, including the computer he'd let Adam borrow, before she left campus.
Gabe sat back against the bed, an air of resignation about him. He stared at the mattress opposite. Faith resisted the impulse to reach out and tuck a stray strand of hair behind his ear. Pimples dotted his chin. She could see stubble on his cheek where he had missed a spot shaving. He was still just a child-a child who was very lost and needed help.
Victor Martinez's secretary answered on the second ring. 'Student Services.'
'This is Detective Mitchell,' she told the woman. 'I need to speak to the dean immediately.'
CHAPTER TEN
WILL STOOD BEHIND Gail and Simon Humphrey as they waited in front of the viewing window. The setup was the sort that was always shown on television and in movies: a simple curtain hung on the other side of the glass. Will would press a button, and the drape would be slowly drawn back, revealing the cleaned-up victim. The sheet would be tucked up to the chin in order to cover the baseball stitches holding together the Y-incision. Cue the mother slumping against her husband.
But the camera couldn't capture everything. The pungent smell of the morgue. The distant whine of the giant freezers where they stored the bodies. The way the floor seemed to suck at the soles of your shoes as you walked toward that window. The heaviness of your arm as you reached out to push that button.
The curtain pulled back. Both parents stood, silent, probably numb. Simon was the first to move. He reached out and pressed his hand against the glass. Will wondered if he was remembering what it felt like to hold his son's hand. Was that the sort of thing fathers did? At the park, out in public, fathers and sons were always playing ball or tossing Frisbees, the only contact between them a rustle of the hair or a punch on the arm. This seemed to be how dads taught their boys to be men, but there had to be a point, maybe early on, when they were able to hold their hands. One tiny one engulfed by one big one. Adam would have needed help crossing the street. In a crowd, you wouldn't want him to wander off.
Yes, Will decided. Simon Humphrey had held his son's hands.
Gail turned to Will. She wasn't crying, but he sensed a familiar reserve, a kindred spirit. She would be at the hotel later tonight, maybe in the shower or sitting on the bed while her husband went for a walk, and then she would allow this moment to crash over her. She would be back in front of that window, looking at her dead son. She would collapse. She would feel her spirit leaving her body and know it might never return.
For now, she said, 'Thank you, Agent Trent,' and shook his hand.
He led them down the hallway, asking them about the hotel where they would stay, giving them advice on where to have supper. He was aware of how foolish the small talk sounded, but Will also knew that the distraction would help them make it through the building, to give them the strength they needed to leave their child in this cold, dark place.
They had rented a car at the airport, and Will went with them as far as the garage. Through the glass panel in the door, he watched Gail Humphrey stumble. Her husband caught her arm and she shrugged him off. He tried again and she slapped at him, yelling, until he wrapped his arms around her to make her stop.
Will turned away, feeling like an intruder. He took the stairs up the six flights to his office. At half past eight, everyone but the skeleton crew had already gone home for the day. The lights were out, but he would have known his way even without the faint glow of the emergency exit signs. Will had a corner office, which would have been impressive if it hadn't been this particular corner. Between the Home Depot across the street and the old Ford Factory next door that had been turned into apartment buildings, there wasn't much to look at. Sometimes, he convinced himself that the abandoned railroad tracks with their weeds and discarded hypodermic needles offered something of a parklike view, but daydreaming only worked during the day.
Will turned on his desk lamp and sat down. He hated nighttime on days like this, where there was nothing he could do but catch up on paperwork while he waited for other people to bring him information. There was an expert in Tennessee who specialized in detecting fingerprints on paper. Paper was tricky and you only got a couple of tries developing prints before the process ruined the evidence. The man was driving down first thing in the morning to look at the notes. The recording of the ransom call was being hand-delivered to the University of Georgia's audiology lab, but the professor had warned them it would take many hours to isolate the sounds. Charlie was working late at the lab trying to process all the evidence they had collected. Tips from the hotline were
