Karin Slaughter - Faithless

“Look at this.” Lena was standing at the closet, pointing to the clothes neatly hanging on the rod. “Same as Abby’s. Remember? Her closet was like this. I swear, you could’ve put a ruler to it. They were the same width apart.” She indicated the shoes. “Same here, too.”

“Cole must have put them back,” Jeffrey provided, loosening his tie so that he could breathe. “He came in on her when she was packing to leave town.”

“Old habits die hard.” Lena reached into the back of the closet, pulling out a pink suitcase. “This doesn’t look like his,” she said, setting the plastic case on the bed and opening it.

Jeffrey’s brain told his feet to move so that he could go over, but they refused. He had actually stepped back, almost to the door.

Lena didn’t seem to notice. She was pulling at the lining of the suitcase, trying to see if anything was hidden. She unzipped the outer pocket. “Bingo.”

“What is it?”

She turned the case upside down and shook it. A brown wallet dropped out onto the bed. Touching only the edges, she opened it and read, “Charles Wesley Donner.”

Jeffrey tugged at his tie again. Even with the window open, the room was turning into a sauna. “Anything else?”

Lena used the tips of her fingers to slip something out of the lining. “A bus ticket to Savannah,” she told him. “Dated four days before she went missing.”

“Is there a name on it?”

“Abigail Bennett.”

“Hold on to that.”

Lena tucked the ticket into her pocket as she walked over to the bureau. She opened the top drawer. “Just like Abby’s,” she said. “The underwear’s all folded the same way hers was.” She opened the next drawer, then the next. “Socks, shirts, everything. Looks identical.”

Jeffrey pressed his back against the wall, his gut clenching. He was having trouble catching his breath. “Cole said she was going to leave with Chip.”

Lena went to the kitchen cabinets, and Jeffrey told her, “Don’t touch anything,” sounding like a panicked woman.

She gave him a look, walking back across the room. She stood in front of the poster, hands on her hips. A large set of hands was pictured cradling a cross. Fire radiated out from the cross like bolts of lightning. She smoothed her hand over the poster like she was brushing something off it.

“What is it?” Jeffrey managed, not wanting to see for himself.

“Hold on.” Lena picked at the corner of the poster, trying not to rip the taped edge. Slowly, she peeled back the paper. The wall behind it had been cut out, several shelves nailed into the studs.

Jeffrey forced himself to take a step forward. There were Baggies on the shelves. He could’ve guessed what was in them, but Lena brought them over anyway.

“Look,” she said, handing him one of the clear bags. He recognized the contents, but the more interesting part was the fact that there was a label on it with someone’s name.

He asked, “Who’s Gerald?”

“Who’s Bailey?” She handed him another bag, then another. “Who’s Kat? Who’s Barbara?”

Jeffrey held the bags, thinking he was holding a couple thousand dollars’ worth of dope.

Lena said, “Some of these names sound familiar.”

“How so?”

“The people from the farm that we interviewed.” Lena went back to the cutout. “Meth, coke, weed. He’s got a little bit of everything here.”

Jeffrey looked at the body without thinking, then found himself unable to look away.

Lena suggested, “He was giving Chip drugs. Maybe he was giving these other people drugs, too?”

“The snake tempted Eve,” Jeffrey said, quoting Connolly.

Footsteps echoed behind him, and he turned to see Sara walking up the stairs.

“I’m sorry it took so long,” she told him, though she had gotten there in record time. “What happened?”

He stepped out onto the landing, telling Lena, “Cover that up,” meaning the poster. He slipped the Baggies into his pocket so he could process them without having to wait for Ed Pelham to take his sweet time. He told Sara, “Thanks for coming.”

“It’s fine,” she told him.

Lena joined him on the landing. He told her, “Go get Two-Bit,” knowing there was nothing else they would find. He had put off bringing in the Catoogah County sheriff long enough.

Sara took his hand as soon as Lena had left.

Jeffrey told her, “He was just sitting there drinking coffee.”

She looked into the room, then back at him. “Did you have any?”

He swallowed, feeling like he had glass in his throat. That was probably how it had started for Cole, a feeling in his throat. He had started coughing, then gagging, then the pain had ripped him nearly in two.

“Jeffrey?”

He could only shake his head.

Sara kept holding his hand. “You’re cold,” she told him.

“I’m a little upset.”

“You saw the whole thing?”

He nodded. “I just stood there, Sara. I just stood there watching him die.”

“There was nothing you could do,” she told him.

“Maybe there was-”

“It killed him too quickly,” she said. When he did not respond, she put her arms around him, holding him. She whispered, “It’s okay,” into his neck.

Jeffrey let his eyes close again, resting his head on her shoulder. Sara smelled like soap and lavender lotion and shampoo and everything clean. He inhaled deeply, needing her scent to wash away the death he had been breathing for the last thirty minutes.

“I have to talk to Terri Stanley,” he said. “The cyanide is the key. Lena didn’t-”

“Let’s go,” she interrupted.

He didn’t move at first. “Do you want to see-”

“I’ve seen enough,” she told him, tugging his hand to get him moving. “There’s nothing I can do right now. He’s a biohazard. Everything in there is.” She added, “You shouldn’t have even been in there. Did Lena touch anything?”

“There was a poster,” he said, then: “He had drugs hidden behind it.”

“He was using?”

“I don’t think so,” he answered. “He was offering them to other people, seeing if they would take it.”

The Catoogah County sheriff’s sedan pulled up, dust swirling in a cloud behind it. Jeffrey couldn’t see how the man had gotten here so quickly. Lena hadn’t even had time to drive to the sheriff’s office.

“What the hell is going on here?” Pelham demanded, jumping out of the car so fast he didn’t even bother to shut the door.

“There’s been a murder,” Jeffrey told him.

“And you just happened to be here?”

“Did you speak to my detective?”

“I passed her on the road and she waved me down. You better be goddamn glad I was already out this way.”

Jeffrey didn’t have the strength to tell him where he could stick his threat. He walked toward Sara’s car, wanting to get as far away from Cole Connolly as he could.

Pelham demanded, “You wanna tell me what the fuck you’re doing in my jurisdiction without clearing it with me first?”

“Leaving,” Jeffrey told him, as if that wasn’t obvious.

“You don’t walk away from me,” Pelham ordered. “Get the hell back here.”

“You gonna arrest me?” Jeffrey asked, opening the car door.

Sara was right behind him. She told Pelham, “Ed, you might want to call in the GBI for this one.”

He puffed his chest out like an otter. “We can handle our own crime scenes, thank you very much.”

“I know you can,” she assured him, employing that sweetly polite tone she used when she was about to cut someone in two. “But as I suspect the man upstairs has been poisoned with cyanide, and as it only takes a concentration of three hundred parts per million of air to kill a human being, I would suggest you call in someone who might be better equipped to handle hazardous crime scenes.”