The Kept Woman

  “Will?” Her teasing tone was gone. “You okay, baby? Take a breath.”

  Take a breath.

  Sara had said the same thing to him downstairs. Except this time, he wasn’t having a panic attack. He was filled with a blinding, uncontrollable rage. “You fucking bitch.”

  She laughed. “That’s more like it.”

  Rippy’s club. Angie’s purse. Her gun. Her car. Her blood. And now the body in the funeral home with her wedding ring.

  She had set him up. She had gotten herself into trouble, and whatever way she’d managed to claw her way out had presented an opportunity for her to fuck with his head.

  He said it again, “You fucking bitch.”

  She laughed at him again.

  Will would’ve punched her in the throat if she were standing in front of him. He would find her. He would do whatever it took to track her down and strangle the life out of her worthless body.

  The chapel door opened. Faith walked in.

  Will took in gulps of air, trying to swallow down his fury. His outrage. His resentment.

  Faith opened her mouth to ask him what was wrong.

  He motioned for her to be quiet, saying into the phone, “Angie, why did you do this to me?”

  Faith’s jaw dropped. She froze in place.

  “Why?” Will demanded. “You faked that scene at Rippy’s club. You made me think you were dead. You made me think it was your body in the basement. Why?”

  Angie was silent, though she’d had an entire day to contemplate her answer.

  “Angie—” Will’s voice cracked. He felt raw, desperate to hear an explanation. “Tell me, God dammit. Why did you put me through this? Why?”

  Angie drew out a long, exasperated sigh. “Why do I do anything?” She rattled off some familiar answers. “I’m a fucking bitch. I want to ruin your life. I make you miserable. I don’t know what you look like when you’re in love because you’ve never been in love with me.”

  Will turned away from Faith, afraid to show her how much he could hate somebody. “That’s not good enough.”

  “It’ll have to do for now.”

  He couldn’t handle this. He was going to crack, end up dead on the floor, if he let himself feel all the things that were boiling up inside of him. He tried to think like an agent, not a human being who had just been skull fucked by a psychopath. “Whose body is in the basement?”

  “Not yet,” Angie said. “First, tell me what it felt like when you thought I was dead.”

  Will forced his fingers not to crush the phone. “What do you think it felt like?”

  “I want you to tell me.” She waited for him to speak. “Tell me how you felt, and I’ll tell you who’s in the basement.”

  “I can find out myself,” he said. “We’re running her prints right now.”

  “Too bad her finger pads are cracked open.”

  “We can get DNA.”

  “She won’t be in the system.” Angie said, “You’ve been working this case. Other cases, too. What if I told you I could break everything wide open right now, only all you have to do is tell me how you feel?”

  “I don’t want your help.”

  “Sure you do. Remember how I helped you the last time? I know you were grateful then.”

  Will couldn’t have that conversation in front of Faith. “Did you kill Dale Harding?”

  “Why would I confess to murder now?”

  Will felt exhaustion pulling at him like a sickness. “Now, as in not like the other times?”

  “Careful, baby.”

  He covered his face with his hand. This wasn’t happening. She had hurt other people like this, but never him. He couldn’t stop asking, “Why? Why did you do this?”

  “I wanted you to know what it would feel like to really lose me.” She was silent for a few beats. “I saw you today. Don’t ask me where. The look on your face when you thought that I was really dead. I bet you wouldn’t miss Sara that way.”

  “Don’t say her name.”

  “Sara,” Angie repeated, because she would not be told what to do. “I saw you, Will. I know that look. I saw it when you were a kid. I saw it last year. I know who you are. I know you better than anybody else on earth.”

  The letter. She was quoting from her own letter. “Who’s in the basement?”

  “Does it matter?”

  Will didn’t know what mattered. Nothing mattered. Why had she done this to him? He had only ever loved her. Taken care of her. Made sure she was safe. She had never done that for him. Not now. Not ever.

  She asked, “Has Faith managed to get a ping on me yet?”

  Will turned around. Faith was on her phone, probably requesting a trace.

  “Josephine Figaroa,” Angie said.

  “What?”

  “The girl in the basement. Josephine Figaroa. My daughter. Your daughter. Our child, together.” She paused. “Dead.”

  Will felt his mouth open. His heart was shaking so hard that he had to sit down. A child. Their child. Their baby. “Angie.” He said. “Angie.”

  There was no response. She’d ended the call.

  He put his hand to his mouth. His breath was cold against his palm. Angie had killed him from the inside, slicing into his heart with a surgeon’s precision. A child. A daughter. His fucked-up genes inside of her.

  And now she was dead.

  Faith knelt beside him. “Will?”

  He couldn’t speak. He could only think about a little girl sitting at the back of a classroom struggling to follow what the teacher said because her stupid father couldn’t teach her how to read.

  She would have ended up trapped in the system, the same as Will. Abandoned, the same as Will.

  How could Angie be so cruel?

  “Will,” Faith repeated. “What did she say?”

  “Josephine Figaroa.” He had to force the name out. “In the basement. Angie’s daughter. Josephine Figaroa. That’s her name.”

  “The basketball player’s wife?” Faith rubbed his back. “We’ll deal with that in a minute. Do you need me to get Sara?”

  “No,” he said, but Sara was already coming through the door behind them. Amanda was with her. They both looked worried.

  And then Faith told them about Angie’s phone call, and they looked furious.

  “What?” Sara demanded. “What?” She couldn’t stop saying the word.

  Amanda gripped the side of the podium. She spoke through gritted teeth. “Did you run a trace?”

  Faith said, “We couldn’t lock in. She must’ve timed it.”

  “God dammit.” Amanda looked down at the floor. She took a shallow breath. When she looked back up, her game face was on. “Did we get a phone number?”

  “It’s blocked, but we can pull it on—“

  “I’m on it.” Amanda started working her BlackBerry. “Was Charlie able to match the fingerprints?”

  “No,” Faith said. “Her finger pads were too—”

  “Cracked,” Will said. “Angie knew that. She said the DNA won’t be in the system.”

  Sara said, “Angie’s blood type was at the scene.” She kept shaking her head, completely baffled. “Her purse. Her gun. I don’t understand. Why would she do this?”

  Faith asked, “Would Angie’s daughter have the same blood type?”

  Sara didn’t answer. She was shell-shocked, the same as she’d been this morning.

  “Daughter?” Amanda asked.

  Will couldn’t answer.

  Amanda asked, “In the interest of futility, did Angie mention why she did all of this?”

  “She’s a monster,” Will said, the same words that people had been saying about her for over thirty years. At the children’s home. At foster homes. At the police station. Will never argued them down, but he never believed them, either. They didn’t know Angie. They didn’t know the hell she had been through. They didn’t know that sometimes the pain was so bad that the only thing that made you feel better was lashing out at other people.


  She had never lashed out at Will before. Not like this.

  “If it really is Josephine Figaroa, we’ll have fresh prints in the system.” Faith said, “She was arrested last Thursday. She had Oxy in her car. I saw it on the news.”

  Amanda asked, “Angie said this woman is her daughter?”

  “Yes.” Will couldn’t tell them that Josephine was his daughter, too. He had to get some clarity. He needed time to think. Angie had lied about so many things. Why should he trust her now?

  “Figaroa,” Amanda said. “Why does that name sound familiar?”

  “Her husband is Reuben Figaroa. He’s a basketball player.”

  “Marcus Rippy.” Amanda spat out the name like a bad taste in her mouth. “This entire day has been a giant circle leading directly back to him.”

  Will stood up. “The patrol car can access footage from the street cameras.”

  He didn’t wait for a response. He jogged up the aisle. He was outside and in the parking lot by the time they exited the building. Will pulled open the cruiser’s passenger-side door and got into the car. The uni gave a startled bark.

  Will pointed to the laptop mounted on the dash. “I need the footage from every camera in the area.”

  “I was just pulling that up for your boss.” The uni punched some keys. “These are the ones you want to see. I got two different angles, one from the street that runs in front of the funeral home, one that runs along the back.”

  Faith opened the back door and slid into the car.

  Amanda knelt beside Will. She told the uni, “Dunlop, tell me you found something.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” Dunlop pointed to the screen. “This is right after the funeral van left at eight-twenty-two.”

  The prank call for a bogus body pickup. Not a joke from another mortuary student, but a ruse to get Belcamino out of the building.

  “This is where the car first comes in.” Dunlop turned the laptop around. Will saw the street corner, the rear entrance to the service alley. The night vision was fuzzy. The streetlights weren’t helping. At 8:24.32, Angie’s black Monte Carlo SS turned into the alley that ran behind the funeral home. The driver’s face was a blob. A flash of blond hair under a black hoodie. The car disappeared from the camera’s view as it rolled up the paved alley.

  Will hit the arrow key, fast-forwarding the video to pick up the car again. Six minutes passed before the Monte Carlo drove back down the service alley and turned onto the street.

  Faith said, “She went to the back door where the elevator is. She came back out. Six minutes is enough time to put a body in the freezer.”

  Dunlop reached over and tapped some keys. “It picks up again here on the front street view.”

  The Monte Carlo turned into the lot, using the entrance that was fifteen feet away from where they were. Angie’s car glided into the handicapped parking space. The driver got out. The roof of the car was about four and a half feet off the ground. The woman was around five-eight, close to Angie’s height. She was overweight, not like Angie, or maybe she had bulked up her clothes. The long-sleeved hoodie must have been sweltering, but she kept the hood on, head down, hands deep in her pockets as she walked up the street.

  Faith asked, “Is it Angie?”

  Will shook his head. He was out of the identifying-Angie business.

  “Could be Delilah Palmer,” Faith guessed. “Blonde hair, but Delilah changed her hair a lot.”

  Amanda said, “Dunlop, where do you pick her up next?”

  “Nowhere. She’s either lucky or she knows the cameras.” He tapped another few keys. He fast-forwarded and reversed through several different street angles before giving up. “She could’ve walked under the bridge, jumped into a car on the interstate. Headed up to Tech. Downtown. There are lots of blind spots where she could’a parked another car or had somebody waiting for her. Hell—” He shrugged. “She could’ve jumped on a bus.”

  “Check the buses,” Will said, because that sounded like something Angie would do. Or maybe not. He was the last person who could predict her behavior.

  Amanda’s knees popped as she stood up. “Tell me about this Josephine Figaroa.”

  “Basketball wife.” Faith got out of the car. “Oxy. That’s all I know.”

  Will said, “The husband. Reuben ‘Fig’ Figaroa, one of Marcus Rippy’s alibi witnesses for the night of the rape. He’s a power forward. Very physical. Rebounds well on defense. Kip Kilpatrick’s client.”

  “This hole just keeps getting deeper,” Amanda said.

  “Here’s her DL.” Faith showed them her phone. She had pulled up Josephine Figaroa’s driver’s license.

  Will studied the photo. Dark hair. Thin and tall. Almond-shaped eyes. Olive skin. She looked like Angie from twenty years ago.

  Did she look like Will? Did she have his height? Did she have his problems?

  Amanda said, “Inasmuch as you can tell anything, the photo resembles the woman in the basement.”

  Faith said, “She’s a carbon copy of Angie.”

  Will said nothing.

  “You two.” Amanda waved over Collier and his partner. They had been so quiet that Will had forgotten they were there. “Ng. Take off those stupid sunglasses. I put you on missing person reports. Josephine Figaroa. Did she come up?”

  “Fig’s wife?” His face was small without the glasses. “No, she wasn’t in any of my searches. I would recognize the name.”

  Amanda told Faith, “You’ll come with me to talk to the husband. See if we can get an ID, figure out whether or not the wife is missing in the first place. I don’t trust Angie as far as I can throw her, and believe me, if she was here, I would throw her.”

  Collier said, “The wife’s a pill popper. She did a two-day stint in the Fulton lockup. Got out Saturday. Supposed to be going to rehab this morning.”

  “And now she’s at a funeral home with knife wounds in her chest.” Amanda tucked her hands into her hips. “I don’t trust any of this. Angie’s misdirecting us for a reason. She’s buying time so she can make her play.”

  “What’s the play?” Collier asked. “This is a lot of dead bodies for a game.”

  Amanda said, “It’s only a game to her.”

  “Josephine has a kid.” Faith held up her phone again. “I found the husband’s Facebook page. Anthony. Six years old.”

  Anthony. Jo Figaroa’s son. Angie’s daughter. Will’s grandson?

  The picture showed a small boy with a furtive smile.

  “Look at the shape of his eyes,” Faith said. “Those are some strong genes.”

  Were they Will’s genes, too?

  1989. Angie was stuck in a group home with over a dozen other kids.

  Except for that time when she wasn’t.

  Faith said, “There’s not a missing six-year-old white boy on the wire. We’d know about it immediately.”

  Ng said, “That’s for damn sure.”

  “Collier,” Amanda said. “What’s your progress on locating Delilah Palmer?”

  “I was gonna tell you before. We found her rental car abandoned in Lakewood. Wiped clean.”

  “Dammit, Collier!” Faith slammed her hand on the trunk of the cruiser. “You found her car? I have to hear about your God damn gas station hot dogs but you can’t text me when—”

  Will realized that Sara had disappeared.

  He scanned the front of the building, the lawn, the parking lot. He walked toward the street. She was behind her BMW, leaning against the bumper, staring into the distance. The overhead light put a halo around her. Her expression was unreadable. He didn’t know if she was upset or concerned or afraid or furious.

  They were ending the day exactly the same way they had started it.

  Will walked away from the noise and the screaming and maybe even his job, because he didn’t care about any of them anymore.

  He told Sara, “Let’s go home.”

  She gave him the keys. He opened the passenger door for her, then walked around the front and got behind th
e wheel. He was backing out of the space when she took his hand. Will felt his heart lift in his chest. This wasn’t the Xanax. Sara’s presence soothed him. Earlier tonight, she had been willing to walk away from him—not to hurt him, but because she only ever wanted what was best for him.

  He said, “I don’t think I can talk about any of this right now.”

  She squeezed his hand. “Then we won’t.”

  Tuesday

  Chapter Ten

  Faith paged through her notebook as Amanda drove them to Reuben Figaroa’s house. Her columns were hardly worth reviewing. Will had been right when he’d told her there wasn’t a case to be built. Faith saw what he had seen: a bunch of arrows, a bunch of unanswered questions. Nothing added up, even when you threw in the name Josephine Figaroa. The dead woman was just another arrow that indirectly led back to Marcus Rippy.

  Maybe she should try to link them to Angie.

  Her eyes started to blur. She looked up, blinking to clear her vision. The streets of Buckhead were deserted. It was almost one in the morning. Faith had been dead asleep in front of the television when Amanda had called her to the funeral home. She could barely recall dropping Emma off at her mother’s house. She was so exhausted that her brain hurt, but this was the job. There was no such thing as a reasonable hour to notify a man that his wife was dead.

  Not that Faith was absolutely certain that the woman at the funeral home was Jo Figaroa. She certainly could be the woman in the driver’s license photo, but Angie’s involvement skewed everything. Faith’s policy toward liars was to always discount everything they said, no matter how much sense their story made. It wasn’t easy. The human brain had an annoying need to give people the benefit of the doubt. Especially people you cared about.

  For instance, Faith was trusting Will when he said that Angie hadn’t told him anything else important, even though he had spent a hell of a lot of time on the phone with her just to be told a victim’s name.

  Amanda said, “Your mother used to pin her notes up on the wall so that we could see all the moving pieces.”

  Faith smiled. The pinholes were still there. “Do you think that Jo Figaroa is Angie’s daughter?”

  “Yes.”