Karin Slaughter - The Kept Woman

She said, ‘I knew Harding’s father when I was a rookie. Senior was a beat cop who spent his money on whores and the dog track. Died of an aneurysm back in eighty-five. Left his son his gambling habit. Dale took a medical retirement that ran out two years ago. He cashed out his pension earlier this year.’

‘Why was he on medical leave?’

‘HIPAA,’ she said, referring to the law that, among other things, barred cops from making doctors tell them intimate details about their patients. ‘I’m working some back channels to get the information, but this isn’t good, Will. Harding was a bad cop, but he’s a dead cop, and his body is lying inside a building owned by a man we very publicly could not put away for rape.’

‘Do we know if Harding has any connection to Rippy?’

‘If only I had a detective who could figure that out.’ She turned on her heel and walked into the building. The electricity was still off. The interior was dank and cavernous, the dark tinted windows giving the space a ghostly cast. They both slipped on shoe protectors. Suddenly the generators roared to life. Xenon lights popped on, illuminating every square inch of the building. Will felt his retinas flinch in protest.

There was a cacophony of clicks as Maglites were turned off and stored. Will’s eyes adjusted to find exactly what he expected to find: trash, condoms and needles, an empty shopping cart, lawn chairs, soiled mattresses-for some reason, there were always soiled mattresses-and too many spent beer cans and broken liquor bottles to count. The walls were covered with multi-colored graffiti that went up at least as high as a person’s arm could reach with a can of spray paint. Will recognized some gang tags-Suernos, Bloods, Crips-but for the most part there were bubbled names with hearts, peace flags and a couple of gigantic, well-endowed unicorns with rainbow eyes. Typical raver art. The great thing about ecstasy was that it made you really happy until it stopped your heart from beating.

Ng’s description of the layout was fairly accurate. The building had an upstairs atrium that opened to the bottom floor like in a shopping mall. A temporary wooden railing ringed the balcony, but there were gaps where a less careful person might get into trouble. The main floor was huge, multi-tiered, with concrete half-walls designating private seating areas and a large open space for dancing. What was probably meant to be the bar arced around the back of the building. Two grand, curved staircases reached to the second floor, which was at least forty feet up. The concrete stairs hugging the walls gave the impression of a cobra’s fangs about to bite down on the dance floor.

An older woman wearing a yellow hard hat approached Amanda. She had another hard hat in her hand, which she gave to Amanda, who in turn gave it to Will, who in turn set it on the floor.

The woman offered no preamble. ‘Found in the parking lot: an empty clear plastic bag with a paper label insert. Said bag contained at one time a tan canvas tarp, missing from the scene. The tarp is Handy brand, three-feet-seven by five-feet-seven, widely available.’ She paused her tired drone to take a breath. ‘Also found: a slightly used roll of black duct tape, outer plastic wrap not yet located. Weather report indicates a deluge, this vicinity, thirty-six hours previous. The paper label on the tarp bag and the edges of the tape do not show exposure to said weather event.’

Amanda said, ‘Well, I suppose we have a window at least, sometime over the weekend.’

‘Canvas tarp,’ Will repeated. ‘That’s what painters use.’

‘Correct,’ the woman said. ‘No paint or painter’s tools have been located inside or outside the building.’ She continued, ‘The stairs: both sets are part of the scene and still being processed. Found so far: items from a woman’s purse, what looks like tissue. The guts kind, not Kleenex.’ She pointed to a scissor lift. ‘You’ll need to use that to go up. We’ve put out a call for an operator. He’s twenty-five minutes out.’

‘Are you shitting me?’ Collier had sneaked up on them. ‘We can’t use the stairs?’ He was warily eyeing the scissor lift, which was a hydraulic machine that lifted a platform straight into the air, kind of like a very shaky open-air elevator with nothing but a thin safety rail between you and certain death.

Amanda asked Will, ‘Do you know how to operate that thing?’

‘I can figure it out.’ The machine was already plugged in. Will found the key hidden inside the auxiliary battery box. He used the tip of the key to press the tiny reset button on the bottom. The scissor lift stuttered a quick up-and-down and they were in business.

Will grabbed the safety rail and climbed up the two steps by the motor. Amanda reached for his hand so she could follow. Her movements looked effortless, mostly because Will did all the lifting. She was light, less than the weight of a boxing heavy bag.

They both turned around and waited for Collier. He glanced at the fang-like stairs.

Amanda tapped her watch. ‘You’ve got two seconds, Detective Collier.’

Collier took a deep breath. He grabbed the yellow hard hat off the floor. He clamped it down on his head and scampered up the platform like a frightened baby monkey.

Will turned the key to start the motor. In truth, he had worked construction jobs during his college years and he could operate just about any machine on a work site. Still, he stuttered the platform a bit just for the pleasure of watching Collier white-knuckle the safety rail.

The motor made a grinding noise as they started their ascent. Sara was on the stairs helping one of the techs collect evidence. She was wearing khakis and a fitted navy-blue GBI T-shirt that flattered her in more ways than two. Her hair was still pulled back, but some of the strands had come loose. She’d put on her glasses. He liked the way she looked in her glasses.

Will had known Sara Linton for eighteen months, which was roughly seventeen months and twenty-six days longer than any other period of sustained happiness in his life. He practically lived at her apartment. Their dogs got along. He liked her sister. He understood her mother. He was scared of her father. She had officially joined the GBI two weeks ago. This was their first case together. He was embarrassed by how excited he was to see her.

Which is why Will made himself look away, because mooning over your girlfriend at a grisly crime scene was probably how serial killers got their start.

Or maybe he would just be a regular murderer, because Collier had decided to take his mind off his vertigo by staring at Sara’s ass while she bent over to help the tech.

Will shifted his weight again. The platform shook. Collier made a noise halfway between a gag and a yelp.

Amanda gave Will one of her rare smiles. ‘My first rollout was for a guy who fell off the top of a scaffolding. This was back before Hazmat and all those silly safety regulations. There wasn’t much for the coroner. We hosed his brains off the sidewalk and into the gutter.’

Collier leaned over so he could use his arm to wipe the sweat from his face and still hold on to the railing.

The lift shook of its own accord as Will stopped the platform a few inches below the concrete balcony. The wooden railing had been pulled away. Across from the opening, half-inch slabs of moldy four-by-sixteen drywall were stacked chest-high. The thick layer of dust on the buckets of joint compound indicated they had been there since construction stopped six months ago. Graffiti dripped lazily across everything-the floor, the walls, the construction materials-with two more ubiquitous rainbow-eyed unicorns standing sentry at the top of each stairway.

Heavy wooden doors lined what Will assumed were the VIP rooms. The custom-carved mahogany had been stained a rich espresso, probably at the factory, but the graffiti artists had done their best to black out the finish. Yellow numbered crime scene markers dotted the entire span of the balcony, from one set of stairs to the other. Several Tyvek-clad techs were photographing and collecting evidence. Some of the VIP rooms were being sprayed down with luminol, a chemical that made body fluids glow an otherworldly blue when exposed to a black light.