Karin Slaughter - Skin Privilege

'Hold on.' The kid heaved a pitiful sigh so she'd know that he was doing her a favor. There was a click, then she had a dial tone.

Lena dialed the long-distance number, her hands still trembling. She stood to pace, glancing at the clock by the bed. It was past midnight.

The switchboard picked up, a recorded voice told her to listen to the message because it had recently changed. She pressed the zero key and nothing happened. She pressed it a couple of more times and the phone started to ring. After twenty-three rings, a polite-sounding man answered, 'Coastal State Prison.'

Lena looked down at the floor, saw the photograph at her feet.

'Hello?'

'This is Detective Lena Adams with the Grant County Police Department.' She gave her badge number, reciting it twice as he wrote it down. 'I need to arrange a meeting with one of your prisoners for first thing in the morning.' Her eyes were locked on the school photo of Evelyn again, the curly black hair, the warm smile on her perfect lips. 'It's urgent.'

Jeffrey tapped his fingers on the steering wheel as Sara sat beside him talking on her cell phone. Lena 's knife had not killed Boyd Gibson. Jeffrey had known deep in his gut that there was no way she had killed the man. Obviously, someone was trying to frame her for the murder. That somebody could very well be the reason Lena had left the hospital. She was a cop to her core. Lena would have taken one look at Jake Valentine and known the only way the sheriff could solve a crime is if somebody handed him the pieces. That was why she ran. She was out there trying to put together the pieces for him.

The only problem was explaining how the murderer had gotten Lena 's knife. She had carried the blade for a while now. There was no way she would give it up without a fight. Whoever had taken the knife off her might have injured Lena in the process. Was that why she'd hidden out at the school? Jeffrey should have followed Valentine and examined the blankets they'd found. If there was blood on them, then Lena might be in even more trouble than he'd suspected.

'Okay.' Sara had his notepad in her lap and she scribbled something down, saying, 'Right, okay,' into the phone. He guessed from the arrows she was scrawling that she was taking directions, and hoped she'd be able to decipher the words once they were on the road. Sara had the worst hand-writing of anyone he'd ever met.

'Thanks,' she finally said, closing the phone. She told Jeffrey, 'There's a Holiday Inn about forty minutes from here.'

Just the thought of the clean, reliable hotel chain made him smile. 'We're moving up in the world.'

'It's about time.' Sara put on her seat belt. I am so ready to get out of this place.'

He turned the ignition key and the engine purred to life. 'Tell me something,' he began, indicating the glowing satellite navigation screen on the dashboard. 'Does this thing have a memory on it?'

'Hank's address right?' She started to toggle through the options, looking for the address. Jeffrey shook his head as he watched her. She hated to use a cell phone, would barely touch a computer, and refused to do anything more complicated with the DVD player than press play, but somehow, she had figured out the navigation system well enough to breeze through the screens.

Jeffrey drove out of the lot and headed toward town. 'It's near the school,' he told her. 'You could walk there pretty easily.'

Sara found the directions. The tinny, woman's voice told him to prepare to take a right in three hundred feet. In Jeffrey's opinion, the engineers had made a big mistake when they chose the voice for a computer. Nothing annoyed a man more than hearing a woman tell him where to go.

Sara said, I have that map I bought at the convenience store somewhere in the suitcase. Downtown is just a big rectangle with a forest in the middle. I'd bet you good money there are all kinds of trails through there.'

Jeffrey loved the way her mind worked. 'Trails Lena could have used to get from the hospital to Hank's the night she escaped.'

'Or that she's been using over the last few days to get around without being seen.'

Jeffrey waited for the computer to finish telling him to bear left. 'You mind if we check that out after we get to Hank's?'

'Of course not.'

Jeffrey followed the prompts, driving past the town dump and the high school, one looking remarkably like the other. They saw the courthouse and the Elawah County Library, which both shared the same squat, 1950s feel as the other municipal buildings in town.

He took a left onto Corcoran Court and recognized where they were. He pointed to the satellite system, asking Sara, 'Can you turn that thing off?'

She pressed a button, toggled the dial, and the tinny voice stopped mid-sentence.

The silence was unbelievably welcome.

Jeffrey pulled up outside Hank's house. The cruiser he'd seen there the day before was gone. He guessed Valentine had called in the troops to search the school.

'This is it,' he told Sara.

'It's…' She didn't finish the thought. There weren't a whole lot of nice things you could say about the place. Hank's house was by far the biggest dump on the block.

'His car is gone,' Jeffrey told her.

She raised an eyebrow. 'Did you put out an APB?'

I left that to Jake.'

'Was the mailbox like that when you were here before?'

'Yes.' He saw that it was still duct-taped onto the post, the door hanging by a thread. 'Cherry bomb,' he said, knowing the signs.

When he'd been a kid, Jeffrey and two of his friends had cherry-bombed just about every mailbox in the neighborhood one Halloween. Unfortunately, they hadn't been smart enough to cover their tracks. The sheriff had simply knocked on the doors of the only three houses in the neighborhood that still had undamaged mailboxes in their front yards.

Jeffrey got out of the car and went around to open Sara's door.

She looked up at Hank's house as she got out, frowning. 'Do you think it was always like this?'

Jeffrey took in the weeds growing in the front yard, the patches of raw wood showing where the paint had chipped off. 'Looks like it.'

'It makes you wonder.'

'What's that?'

'If maybe somewhere,' she began, her voice troubled, 'the mother of our child is living like this.'

He hadn't been thinking about that; the adoption was an oasis to go to when things got too overwhelming. She was right, though. People from good homes and solid families usually didn't feel compelled to give up their children. That wasn't to say they were any better than poor people, but usually the well-off were able to pay somebody else to raise their kids if they didn't want to do it themselves.

'Oh, God.' Sara covered her mouth and nose with her hands. 'Do you smell that?'

Jeffrey nodded, not wanting to open his mouth for fear of something coming out. Unnecessarily, he put out his hand to stop her from going up the front steps.

'Is it a body?'

He hoped to hell not. 'Wait here.'

The smell got worse the closer he got to the house. Jeffrey stopped, seeing that the front door had been busted open and hastily repaired with duct tape. The tape looked new.

Jeffrey glanced at Sara. 'Stay there, all right?'

She nodded, and he raised his hand to knock on the door. The door shook from the impact, but the tape held. He knocked a little harder and guessed from the way the door moved that it had been taped from the inside as well.

After several knocks with no answer, he turned back to Sara. 'What do you think?'

'I think if I hadn't been standing here you would have busted down that door ten minutes ago.'

She was right. A good kick just under the knob sent the door flying. The jamb was busted out, the recess for the lock completely missing. Sharp metal edges jutted into the air like knives where the flashing had been ripped from the wood. Jeffrey drew his gun, giving Sara a nod to stay put before heading into the house.