Karin Slaughter - Fallen

Maybe she wasn’t really interested in Will Trent at all. Maybe Angie Trent was partly right. Sara had liked being married to a cop, but not for the kinky reasons Angie had implied. The black-and-white nature of law enforcement appealed to Sara on a deep level. Her parents had raised her to help people, and you couldn’t get much more helpful than being a police officer. There was also a part of her brain that was drawn to the puzzle-solving aspects of a criminal investigation. She had loved talking to Jeffrey about his cases. Working in the morgue as the county coroner, finding clues, giving him information that she knew would help him with his job, had made her feel useful.

Sara groaned. As if being a doctor wasn’t a useful thing. Maybe Angie Trent was right about the perversion. Next, Sara would start trying to imagine Will in a uniform.

She shifted her two greyhounds off her lap so that she could stand. Billy yawned. Bob rolled onto his back to get more comfortable. She glanced around her apartment. An antsiness took over. She felt overwhelmed by the desire to change something—anything—so that she felt more in control of her life.

She started with the couches, siding them at an angle from the television while the dogs looked down at the floor passing underneath them. The coffee table was too big for the new arrangement, so she shifted everything again, only to find that that didn’t work, either. By the time she finished rolling up the rug and muscling everything back into its original place, she was sweating.

There was dust on the top of the picture frame over the console table. Sara got the furniture polish out and started dusting again. There was a lot of space to cover. The building she lived in was a converted milk-processing factory. Red brick walls supported twenty-foot ceilings. All the mechanical workings were exposed. The interior doors were distressed wood with barn door hardware. It was the sort of industrial loft you expected to find in New York City, though Sara had paid considerably less than the ten million dollars such a place would fetch in Manhattan.

No one thought the space suited her, which was what had drawn Sara to the apartment in the first place. When she’d first moved to Atlanta, she’d wanted something completely different from her homey bungalow back home. She was thinking lately that she’d gone overboard. The open plan felt almost cavernous. The kitchen, with its stainless steel everything and black granite tops, had been very expensive and very useless to someone like Sara, who had been known to burn soup. All the furniture was too modern. The dining room table, carved from a single piece of wood and large enough to seat twelve, was a ridiculous luxury considering she only used it to sort mail and hold the pizza box while she paid the delivery guy.

Sara put away the furniture polish. Dust wasn’t the problem. She should move. She should find a small house in one of the more settled Atlanta neighborhoods and get rid of the low-lying leather couches and glass coffee tables. She should have fluffy couches and wide chairs you could snuggle into for reading. She should have a kitchen with a farmhouse sink and a cheery view to the backyard through the wide-open windows.

She should live somewhere like Will’s house.

The television caught her eye. The logo for the evening news scrolled onto the screen. A serious-looking reporter stood in front of the Georgia Diagnostic and Classification Prison. Most insiders referred to it as the D&C, fully mindful of the play on words for Georgia’s death row. Sara had seen the story of the two murdered men earlier and thought then what she thought now: here was yet another reason not to be involved with Will Trent.

He was working on Evelyn Mitchell’s case. He had probably been nowhere near that prison today, but the minute Sara saw the story about a murdered officer, her heart had jumped into her throat. Even after they’d given the man’s name as well as that of the dead inmate, her heart would not calm. Thanks to Jeffrey, Sara knew how it felt when the phone unexpectedly rang in the middle of the night. She remembered how every news story, every snippet of gossip, caused something inside of her to clench in fear that he would be going out on another case, putting his life in danger. It was a form of post-traumatic stress disorder. Sara hadn’t realized until her husband was gone that she’d been living in dread for all those years.

The intercom buzzed. Billy gave a halfhearted growl, but neither dog got off the couch. Sara pressed the speaker button. “Yes?”

Will said, “Hi, I’m sorry I—”

Sara buzzed him in. She grabbed his keys off the counter and propped open the front door. She wouldn’t invite him in. She wouldn’t let him apologize for what Angie had said, because Angie Trent had every right to speak her mind, and what’s more, she’d made some very good points. Sara would just tell Will that it was nice knowing him and good luck working things out with his wife.

If he ever got here. The elevator was taking its sweet time. She watched the digital readout show the car moving from the fourth floor down to the lobby. It took another forever for the numbers to start ascending. She whispered them aloud, “Three, four, five,” and then finally the bell dinged for six.

The doors slid back. Will peered out behind a pyramid of two cardboard file boxes, a white Styrofoam carton, and a Krispy Kreme doughnut bag. The greyhounds, who only seemed to notice Sara around suppertime, ran out into the hall to greet him.

Sara mumbled a curse.

“Sorry I’m so late.” He turned his body so that Bob wouldn’t knock him over.

Sara grabbed both dogs by their collars, holding the door open with her foot so that Will could come in. He slid the boxes onto her dining room table and immediately started petting the dogs. They licked him like a long-lost friend, their tails wagging, nails scratching against the wood floor. Sara’s resolve, which had been so strong only seconds before, started to crack.

Will looked up. “Were you in bed?”

She had dressed appropriately for her mood in an old pair of sweat pants and a Grant County Rebels football jersey. Her hair was pulled back so tightly that she could feel it tugging the skin on her neck. “Here are your keys.”

“Thanks.” Will brushed the dog hair off his chest. He was still wearing the same black T-shirt from that afternoon. “Whoa.” He pulled back Bob, who was making a play for the Krispy Kremes.

“Is that blood?” There was a dark, dried stain on the right-hand sleeve of his shirt. Instinctively, Sara reached for his arm.

Will took a step back. “It’s nothing.” He pulled down the cuff. “There was an incident at the prison today.”

Sara got that familiar, tight feeling in her chest. “You were there.”

“I couldn’t do anything to help him. Maybe you …” His words trailed off. “The staff doctor said it was a mortal wound. There was a lot of blood.” He clamped his hand around his wrist. “I should’ve changed shirts when I got home, but I’ve got a lot of work to do, and my house is kind of upside down right now.”

He had been home. Without reason, Sara had let herself think for just a moment that he hadn’t seen his wife. “We should talk about what happened.”

“Uh …” He seemed to purposefully miss her point. “Not much to say. He’s dead. He wasn’t a particularly good guy, but I’m sure it’ll be hard on his family.”

Sara stared at him. There was no guile on his face. Maybe Angie hadn’t told Will about the confrontation. Or maybe she had, and Will was doing his best to ignore it. Either way, he was hiding something. But suddenly, after spending the last few hours working herself into a frenzy, Sara didn’t care. She didn’t want to talk about it. She didn’t want to analyze it. The only thing she was certain of was that she did not want him to leave.