The Kept Woman

“Who’s the father?” She didn’t get an answer, so she suggested the obvious one. “Will?”

  “I’m not so sure about that.” Amanda slowed the car. She pulled over to the side of the road. She put the gear in park. She turned to Faith. “Tell me what you know about Denny.”

  “Denny?” Faith shook her head. “Who’s Denny?”

  “Short for Holden,” Amanda explained. “Though, Denny is two syllables. Holden is two syllables. I suppose that means it’s not short, just less pretentious.”

  Faith was too tired for semantics. “Let’s just stick with Collier.”

  “Start from the beginning. What did he do? How did he present himself?”

  Faith had to pause for a moment so that she could put together her day. It seemed like an eternity had passed since she’d picked up Will at the animal clinic this morning, which was technically yesterday morning because it was past midnight.

  She told Amanda about the first meeting with Collier and Ng outside Rippy’s club, the interminable amount of time she’d spent with him at Dale Harding’s, the texts that told her nothing, the tedious observations about his personal life, the constant sexual innuendo, the reluctance to carry on an adult conversation about the case.

  “I don’t trust him,” Faith admitted. “He keeps pushing this Mexican heroin cartel angle. He didn’t tell me about finding Delilah’s car, but he told me about every useless whore he talked to in Lakewood.”

  Amanda confirmed, “Ng said that they were handling a domestic call when they got routed to the nightclub?”

  Faith strained to recall his exact words. “He said it was pretty violent, which means they were probably at the hospital. Grady is close to Rippy’s club, about a ten-minute drive at that time of morning. It would make sense for them to take the call.”

  “The 9-1-1 came in at five a.m.,” Amanda reminded her. “Would you volunteer to investigate a dead body at a warehouse at the end of your shift?”

  Faith shrugged. “Dead cop. The unis recognized Harding. You’d push your shift for a cop.”

  “True,” Amanda agreed. “What else is bothering you about him?”

  Faith struggled to articulate her gut feeling. “He keeps showing up. He was with Will when he found the Jane Doe in the office building. He drove him home. He was there tonight at the funeral home. What was he doing there?”

  “Collier and Ng are our APD liaisons. They’re working parts of the case. It makes sense that he’d get the call about the car.”

  “I guess.” Faith tried to pluck out the obvious answer. “Maybe Collier’s just an idiot who keeps falling up. His dad was on the job. He’s obviously got some juice.”

  Amanda said, “Milton Collier was on the job for two years. He took a fifty-one off a twenty-four, lost two fingers before he could call a sixty-three.”

  Faith accessed her arcane knowledge of ten-codes from Amanda’s soup-can-and-string days. Collier’s dad had been stabbed by a crazy person and lost some fingers before backup arrived. She asked Amanda, “And?”

  “Milton clocked out on a medical disability. The wife was a schoolteacher. They made ends meet by taking in foster kids. Dozens at a time. Collier was one of them. Eventually, they adopted him.”

  “Huh,” Faith said, because Collier had overshared just about everything, down to his twisted nut sac in high school, but he hadn’t mentioned that he’d been in the system the same as Delilah Palmer.

  The same as Angie, too.

  Faith asked, “Were Collier and Angie ever in the same home together, like when she was sixteen years old and pregnant?”

  “That’s an interesting question, isn’t it?” Amanda didn’t give the answer, but Faith knew she would find out. Amanda asked, “What else did Angie say on the phone call with Will?”

  “It was brief,” she lied, because the call had lasted just under three minutes. “I’m sure she spent some time taunting him.”

  “Why is that, do you think?”

  “Because she’s a terrible human being.”

  Amanda gave her a sharp look. “She’s cunning is what she is. Look at our day. Angie had us running around in circles. East Atlanta. Lakewood. North Atlanta. Will was all over Midtown. You were stuck at Harding’s. I was at Kilpatrick’s. What’s more, Angie has knocked Will out of the equation, which shows brilliant strategy. Will knows her intimately. He could be our best ally in helping us figure out what Angie is really up to, but she has rendered him completely useless. You saw how he was in the basement.”

  Faith had seen how broken Will had been, and what’s more, she hadn’t been able to take it. He had been making a weird whooping sound, like he couldn’t catch his breath. Faith ran from the room so that he wouldn’t see her crying.

  She asked Amanda, “You think Angie’s fucking with him so that he won’t figure out what she’s really up to?”

  “If I were teaching a class on mind games, that play would be part of my curriculum.”

  God knew Amanda could play some mind games. “Okay, Angie’s screwing with him. To what end?”

  “She’s buying time.”

  “For what?”

  “That’s the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question, isn’t it? What exactly is Angie Polaski up to?”

  Faith didn’t think she would ever find the answer. She was so tired and so stressed-out that she doubted she could tie her own shoes right now, let alone figure out why Angie Polaski did the awful things she did.

  Amanda said, “Walk me through it.”

  Reluctantly, Faith looked down at her notes again. “Harding is murdered Sunday night. Angie stages the scene to make it look like she, Angie, was murdered, but it’s actually Jo Figaroa, who probably shares her mother, Angie’s, rare blood type, B-negative.”

  “Hm.” For once, Amanda hadn’t been ahead of her. “Do you think Angie murdered Jo?”

  Faith wasn’t sure. “She’s a monster, but I can’t see her killing her own child.”

  “Neither can I, but Harding could have killed Jo, then Angie killed Harding. Or tried to with the doorknob.” Amanda asked, “What happened next?”

  “Angie takes the body out of the club. She torches Dale’s car, which sounds like something Angie would do if she was pissed off, and she’d be pissed off if Dale killed her kid.” Faith couldn’t even contemplate a real-life scenario with her own children. There would be salt in the ground for a thousand years. “The 9-1-1 comes in Monday morning at five. Then Monday night, Angie hands us Jo’s body at the funeral home and calls Will to torture him.”

  “Sara puts Josephine’s time of death around noon to one.”

  “That’s un-Sara-like specificity.” Faith scribbled the time in the margins. She realized, “If Josephine died between noon and one, that means Angie had her in the trunk of her car until she left the body at the funeral home just before eight-thirty p.m.”

  “There was a lot of blood in the backseat, all type B-negative, and a little blood in the trunk that Sara says could have been left postmortem from the chest wound.”

  Faith shivered at the coldness it would take to drive around with your own child bleeding to death in the back of your car.

  “It’s a timing issue,” Amanda said. “Angie is dragging out the clock. That’s why she waited so long to get rid of the body.”

  “Or something changed in her plan,” Faith guessed, but she really had no idea. She saw Amanda’s earlier logic, because Will was the one person who could probably figure out what Angie was thinking. He knew her motivations. He knew what she was capable of. But it wasn’t just Will she was fucking with. “Angie’s worked murder cases before. She knows what it’s like. All the blood and violence freaks you out no matter how many times you’ve seen it. You’re panicked you’re going to miss something. You can’t turn off your brain. You can’t sleep, even when there’s time. Throw in the emotional angle, and she’s basically put us in Gitmo.”

  Amanda said, “I’ll say what I said this morning: we’re missing something big.”

&nb
sp; “Maybe Reuben Figaroa can offer an explanation.” She closed her notebook. All of the sense was gone. Her notes looked like one of Emma’s coloring projects. “I’ll never get back to sleep after this. I could use one of your Xanax.” She looked up at Amanda. “What are you doing carrying around Xanax, anyway?”

  “Just a little trick from the old days.” Amanda turned back to the steering wheel. “You have a suspect who’s too jumpy to talk, you crush half a pill into his coffee. He gets a little loosey-goosey and you have him sign on the dotted line.”

  “I can think of sixteen different ways that’s illegal.”

  “Only sixteen?” Amanda chuckled as she pulled back onto the road. “Talk to your mother. She’s the one who came up with it.”

  Faith could see her mother doing this in the seventies, but she couldn’t see Amanda doing it now, which meant that she’d dodged another question. Pressing her was not a mountain Faith was prepared to climb. “How are we going to approach Reuben? Is this a death notification or an interrogation? His wife has been missing since at least Sunday night. He hasn’t filed a report.”

  “We should handle this just as we would handle any suspicious death of a spouse.” Amanda reminded her, “The husband is the first suspect. More women are murdered by their intimate partners than by any other group.”

  “Why do you think I stopped dating?”

  The comment was meant as a joke, but Amanda cut her a side-look. “Don’t let this job turn you off men, Faith.”

  Faith studied Amanda. This was the second time in as many days that she had tried to give her dating advice. “Where is this coming from?”

  “Experience,” Amanda said. “Take it from a woman who has been doing this job for a very long time. It’s simple statistics. Men commit the most violent crimes. Everyone knows that, but not everyone sees it played out in the real world every single day like you and I do. Remind yourself that Will is a good man. At least when he’s not being pigheaded. Charlie Reed is exceptional—not that you should repeat that. Your thing with Emma’s father didn’t work out, but he’s still a good guy. Your father was a saint. Your brother can be an ass, but he would do anything for you. Jeremy is perfect in every way. Your uncle Kenny is—”

  “A cheater and a womanizer?”

  “Don’t miss the forest for the trees, Faith. Kenny adores you. He’s still a good person. It just didn’t work out for us. But there’s someone out there who could work out for you. Don’t let the job tell you otherwise.” She tapped her foot on the brake. “What was the street number?”

  Faith hadn’t realized they were already on Cherokee Drive. She pointed to a large stone mailbox a few houses down from the country club. “There.”

  Amanda turned into the driveway. An enormous black gate blocked her progress. She pressed the button on the security keypad. She waved at the security camera discreetly mounted in the tall bushes that blocked the view of the house from the road.

  The Figaroas obviously valued their privacy. Faith guessed there was enough front yard for a football field. Still, she could make out the glimmer of lights on the bottom floor. “They’re already awake. Do you think the press got wind of this?”

  “If they did, we have a small pool of suspects who could’ve leaked the news.”

  Collier again. He was the proverbial bad penny. If he knew Angie, did that mean he knew Dale Harding? And if Harding and Angie were the types of cops that Holden Collier kept company with, what did that say about Collier?

  Faith was a big believer in guilt by association.

  She asked Amanda, “Have you ever heard of a woman named Virginia Souza?”

  Amanda shook her head.

  “Collier mentioned her before.” Faith found her phone in her pocket. She read back through his texts, looking for the woman’s name. “Virginia Souza. Collier tracked her down because she worked Delilah’s corner, so they probably had the same pimp. Family said she OD’d six months ago, but that’s from Collier and I don’t trust Collier because he’s a lying liar.”

  “You sound so much like your mother sometimes.”

  “I wish I could tell whether or not that was a compliment.” Faith searched the state database for Virginia Souza’s rap sheet. “Here we go. Fifty-seven years old, which is a bit long in the tooth for a whore. Prostitution times a thousand, going back to the late seventies. Child endangerment. Child neglect. Accessory to the exploitation of a child. None of which Collier mentioned.” Faith felt a cramp in her thumb as she paged through the woman’s sordid criminal history. “Several drunk and disorderlies. Shoplifting. No drug violations, which is odd, since the family said she OD’d six months ago. Or Collier said the family said she OD’d six months ago. Two assaults, both on minors—Collier told me about those. Suspect in the kidnapping of a minor. Suspect in another exploitation. She really has a thing for kids. Known aliases: Souz, Souzie, Ginny, Gin, Mama.”

  “Mama in charge,” Amanda said, using the colloquialism for a pimp’s right-hand woman. “She’s a bottom girl.”

  “Makes sense, considering her age and her sheet. All these assaults on kids, that could be her doing the pimp’s job, keeping the stable in line.”

  “What is taking these people so long?” Amanda pressed the buzzer on the gate a second time, keeping her finger down long enough to make it clear she wasn’t going to go away. “Do you have a phone number?”

  Faith was about to look when the gates started to open.

  “Finally,” Amanda said.

  The driveway curved to the left, leading them toward a detached six-car garage at the rear corner of the house. Amanda pulled into the motor court, parking beside a Tesla SUV. Striping had turned the pavement into a miniature basketball court with a goal set low enough to indicate Reuben Figaroa had built out the space for his six-year-old son.

  “Kip Kilpatrick,” Amanda said.

  Faith saw the agent standing in an open doorway. His suit was so shiny that it caught the security lights. He had a bottle of bright red sports drink in his hands that he tossed back and forth as he watched the car pull up. Will had underestimated the man’s doucheness. Faith could smell it coming off him like damp in a basement.

  Amanda said, “Here we go.”

  They both got out of the car. Amanda walked toward Kilpatrick. Faith glanced through the windows in the garage doors. Two Ferraris, a Porsche, and in the last bay a charcoal gray Range Rover, the same type of vehicle that was registered to Jo Figaroa.

  Amanda said, “Mr. Kilpatrick, what a pleasure to see you twice in the same day.”

  He looked at his watch. “It’s technically two days. Any particular reason you’re out this late visiting another client of mine?”

  “Why don’t we discuss that inside with Mr. Figaroa?”

  “Why don’t we discuss that outside with me?”

  “I find it odd that you’re even here, Mr. Kilpatrick. Are you making a late house call?”

  “You’ve got five seconds to either explain why you’re here or to get off Mr. Figaroa’s property.”

  Amanda paused a moment to let some of the power shift. “I’m looking for Josephine Figaroa, actually. She seems to be missing.”

  “She’s in rehab,” he said. “Left this morning. Packed her into the car myself.”

  “Can you tell me the name of the facility?”

  “No.”

  “Can you tell me when she’ll return?”

  “Nope.”

  Amanda seldom hit walls, but Faith could see that she had found herself flat against Kilpatrick’s denials. She finally laid down the truth. “Two hours ago, a body was found that was identified as Josephine Figaroa.”

  Kilpatrick dropped the bottle, which exploded against the pavement. Red liquid splashed all over the ground, his feet, his pants. He didn’t move. He barely registered the mess. He was genuinely astonished.

  Amanda said, “We need Mr. Figaroa to positively ID the body.”

  “What?” Kilpatrick started shaking his head. “How d
id—what?”

  “Do you need a minute?”

  He looked at the ground, noticed the spilled drink. “Are you sure?” He shook his head, and Faith could practically hear him coaching himself into putting his lawyer face back on. “I can do the ID. Where should I meet you?”

  “We have a photo, but it’s—”

  “Show me.”

  Amanda already had her BlackBerry out. She showed him the picture she had taken of the woman’s face.

  Kilpatick flinched. “Jesus Christ. What happened to her?”

  “That’s what we’re here to find out.”

  “Christ.” He wiped his mouth with his sleeve. “Christ.”

  A shadow passed over the doorway, impossibly ominous, like a monster in a storybook.

  Reuben Figaroa came outside, careful not to get his shoes wet. He wore a badly wrinkled gray suit with a blue shirt and black tie. Shaved head. Dark mustache and goatee. He was shockingly tall, his head nearly brushing the doorframe. He also had a paddle holster with a striker fired Sig Sauer P320 clipped to his black leather belt. He wore the gun to the front and looked more than capable of using it.

  Amanda said, “Mr. Figaroa, could we please speak with you?”

  Reuben held out his hand, which was three times the size of Amanda’s. “Let me see the picture.”

  “No, man,” Kilpatrick warned. “You don’t want to see that. Trust me.”

  Amanda gave Reuben her BlackBerry. The phone looked as small as a pack of gum in his enormous hand. He held the screen close to his face, head tilted as he studied the image. Faith was used to Will’s height, but comparatively, Reuben was a giant. Everything about him was bigger, stronger, more threatening. He had only said five words to them, but Faith felt every part of her being telling her that this man was not to be trusted. He was looking directly at a photograph of his dead wife, yet his face showed absolutely no emotion.

  Amanda asked, “Is that your wife, Josephine Figaroa?”

  “Jo. Yes, it’s her.” He handed the phone back to Amanda. He seemed positive about the ID, but his affect remained as flat as his tone of voice. “Please come in.”

  Amanda could not hide her surprise at the invitation. She glanced back at Faith before entering the house. Kip Kilpatrick indicated he would take up the rear. He wasn’t being a gentleman. He wanted to keep an eye on her. Fine by Faith. She made sure he saw her clock the Ruger AR-556 propped up against the door. The rifle had every bell and whistle. Magazine grip. Flash suppressor. Rear-folding battle sight. Laser. Thirty-round magazine.