Karin Slaughter: Fallen

“Agent!” She felt hands around her waist. The cop practically lifted her into the air.

“Let me go!” Faith jammed her elbow back so hard that he dropped her like a stone. She scrambled across the grass, crawling to the witness. The hostage. The murderer. The only person left who could tell her what the hell had happened to her mother.

She put her hands to the Mexican’s face, stared into his lifeless eyes. “Please tell me,” she pleaded, even though she knew it was too late. “Please.”

“Faith?” Detective Leo Donnelly, her old partner on the Atlanta force, stood on the other side of the fence. He was out of breath. His hands gripped the top of the chain link. The wind whipped open the jacket of his cheap brown suit. “Emma’s fine. We got a locksmith on the way.” His words came thick and slow, like molasses poured through a sieve. “Come on, kid. Emma needs her mom.”

Faith looked behind him. Cops were everywhere. Dark blue uniforms blurred as they swept the house, checked the yard. Through the windows, she followed Tactical’s progress from room to room, guns raised, voices calling “Clear” as they found nothing. Competing sirens filled the air. Police cruisers. Ambulances. A fire truck.

The call had gone out. Code 30. Officer needs emergency assistance.

Three men shot to death. Her baby locked in a shed. Her mother missing.

Faith sat back on her heels. She put her head in her shaking hands and willed herself not to cry.

CHAPTER TWO

SO, HE TELLS ME HE WAS CHANGING THE OIL IN HIS CAR, AND it was hot in the garage, so he took off his pants …”

“Uh-huh,” Sara Linton managed, trying to feign interest as she picked at her salad.

“And I say, ‘Lookit, bud, I’m a doctor. I’m not here to judge. You can be honest about …’ ”

Sara watched Dale Dugan’s mouth move, his voice mercifully blending in with the lunchtime noise of the pizza parlor. Soft music playing. People laughing. Plates sliding around the kitchen. His story was not particularly riveting, or even new. Sara was a pediatric attending doctor in the emergency department at Atlanta’s Grady Hospital. She’d had her own practice for twelve years before that, all the while working part-time as the county coroner for a small but active college town. There was not an implement, tool, household product, or glass figurine she had not at some point or another seen lodged inside a human body.

Still, Dale continued, “Then the nurse comes in with the X-ray.”

“Uh-oh,” she said, trying to inject some curiosity into her tone.

Dale smiled at her. There was some cheese lodged between his central and lateral incisors. Sara tried not to judge. Dale Dugan was a nice man. He wasn’t handsome, but he was okay-looking, with the sort of features many women found attractive once they learned he’d graduated from medical school. Sara was not as easily swayed. And she was starving, because she’d been told by the friend who’d set her up on this ridiculous blind date that she should order a salad instead of a pizza because it looked better.

“So, I hold up the X-ray and what do I see …”

Socket wrench , she thought, just before he finally reached the punch line.

“A socket wrench! Can you believe it?”

“No!” She forced a laugh that sounded like the sort of thing that came out of a windup toy.

“And he still kept saying he slipped.”

She tsked her tongue. “Quite a fall.”

“I know, right?” He smiled at her again before taking a healthy bite of pizza.

Sara chewed some lettuce. The digital clock over Dale’s head showed 2:12 and a handful of seconds. The red LED numbers were a painful reminder that she could be at home right now watching basketball and folding the mountain of laundry on her couch. Sara had made a game of not looking at the clock, seeing how long she could go before her self-control crumbled and she watched the blurring seconds tick by. Three minutes twenty-two seconds was her record. She took another bite of salad, vowing to beat it.

“So,” Dale said. “You went to Emory.”

She nodded. “You were at Duke?”

Predictably, he began what turned into a lengthy description of his academic achievements, including published journal articles and keynote speeches at various conferences. Again, Sara feigned attention, willing herself not to look at the clock, chewing lettuce as slowly as a cow in a pasture so that Dale would not feel compelled to ask her a question.

This was not Sara’s first blind date, nor, unfortunately, was it her least tedious. The problem today had started within the first six minutes, which Sara had marked by the clock. They had rushed through the preliminaries before their order had been called. Dale was divorced, no children, on good terms with his ex-wife, and played pickup basketball games at the hospital in his free time. Sara was from a small town in south Georgia. She had two greyhounds, and a cat who chose to live with her parents. Her husband had been killed four and a half years ago.

Usually, this last bit was a conversation stopper, but Dale had breezed over it as a minor detail. At first, Sara had given him points for not asking for details, and then she had decided that he was too self-absorbed to ask, and then she had chided herself for being so hard on the man.

“What did your husband do?”

He’d caught her with a mouthful of lettuce. She chewed, swallowed, then told him, “He was a police officer. The chief of police for the county.”

“That’s unusual.” Her expression must have been off, because he said, “I mean, unusual because he’s not a doctor. Wasn’t a doctor. Not white collar, I guess.”

“White collar?” She heard the accusatory tone in her voice but couldn’t stop herself. “My father’s a plumber. My sister and I worked with him for—”

“Whoa, whoa.” He held up his hands in surrender. “That came out wrong. I mean, there’s something noble about working with your hands, right?”

Sara didn’t know what kind of medicine Dr. Dale was practicing, but she tended to use her hands every day.

Oblivious, his voice took on a solemn tone. “I have a lot of respect for cops. And servicepeople. Soldiers, I mean.” He nervously wiped his mouth with his napkin. “Dangerous job. Is that how he died?”

She nodded, glancing at the clock. Three minutes nineteen seconds. She’d just missed her record.

He took his phone out of his pocket and looked at the display. “Sorry. I’m on call. I wanted to make sure there’s service.”

At least he hadn’t pretended the phone was on silent ring, though Sara was sure that was coming. “I’m sorry for being so defensive. It’s difficult to talk about.”

“I’m sorry for your loss.” His tone had a practiced cadence Sara recognized from the ER. “I’m sure it was hard.”

She bit at the tip of her tongue. Sara couldn’t think of a polite way to respond, and by the time she thought to change the subject to the weather, so much time had passed that the conversation felt even more awkward. Finally, she said, “Well, anyway. Why don’t we—”

“Excuse me,” he interrupted. “I need to go to the bathroom.”

He got up so quickly that his chair nearly fell over. Sara watched him scamper toward the back. Maybe it was her imagination, but she thought he hesitated in front of the fire exit.

“Idiot.” She dropped her fork onto her salad plate.

She checked the clock again for the time. It was two-fifteen. She could wrap this up by two-thirty if Dale ever came back from the toilet. Sara had walked here from her apartment, so there wouldn’t be that protracted, awful silence as Dale drove her home. The bill had been paid when they ordered the food at the cash register. It would take her fifteen minutes to walk home, giving her time to change out of her dress and into her sweat pants before the basketball game started. Sara felt her stomach rumble. Maybe she could pretend to leave, then backtrack and order a pizza.