Karin Slaughter - A Faint Cold Fear

“Which way did he go?”

Lena took her time, looking up to find the sun. “West, probably toward the highway.”

“Black? White?”

“White,” she said, then added a flippant, “maybe.”

“Maybe?” Jeffrey demanded, aware that he was fueling the fire but incapable of stopping himself.

“I told you,” she said, defensive. “He turned and ran. What was I going to do, ask him to slow down so I could ascertain his ethnicity?”

Jeffrey paused a moment, trying to hold back his temper. “What was he wearing?”

“Something dark.”

“A coat? Jeans?”

“Jeans, maybe a coat. I don’t know. It was dark.”

“Long coat, short coat?”

“A jacket . . . I think.”

“Did he have a weapon?”

“I couldn’t see.”

“What color was his hair?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know?”

“I think he was wearing a hat.”

“You think he was?” Suddenly, all the helplessness that had been building up since he had seen Tessa lying near death exploded out of him. “Jesus Christ, Lena, how long were you a cop?”

Lena stared at him with the kind of burning hatred he was used to seeing in suspects he interrogated.

He demanded, “You chase a fucking suspect, and you can’t even tell me if he was wearing a hat or not? What the fuck were you doing out there, picking daisies?”

Lena kept staring up at him, her jaw working as she held back what she wanted to say.

“It’s a damn good thing he didn’t go after you,” Jeffrey said. “We’d be looking at two girls on that chopper instead of one.”

She snapped, “I can take care of myself.”

“You think that little knife on your ankle’s gonna protect you?” He was disgusted by the surprised look on her face, mostly because he had taught Lena better than that. Jeffrey had seen her ankle sheath when she’d slid on her ass down the riverbank.

He said, “I should run you in for carrying concealed.”

She continued to stare, her hatred palpable.

“You better check that look,” he warned her.

Lena’s teeth were so tightly clenched that her words were hard to make out. “I don’t work for you anymore, asshole .”

Something inside Jeffrey was very close to snapping. His vision sharpened, everything coming into startling focus.

“Chief,” Frank said, putting his hand on Jeffrey’s shoulder. Jeffrey backed down, knowing he was acting insane. He saw his bloody clothes on the ground, Tessa’s blood. Everything rushed in on him in that moment: The tears on Sara’s face making tracks on her bloodstained cheek. Tessa’s arm, limp, dangling off the stretcher as they lifted her.

Jeffrey turned away so they could not see his expression, picking up his badge, polishing it with the tail of his undershirt, trying to buy himself time to calm down.

Brad Stephens chose that moment to walk up, twirling his hat in his hand. He asked, “What’s going on, Chief?”

Anger made Jeffrey’s throat tight. “I told you to walk Schaffer to her dorm.”

“She ran into a couple of friends,” Brad said, turning pale. “She wanted to go with them.” His clear blue eyes were wide with fright, and he stuttered, “I-I-I figured she’d be better off with them. They’re with her house. Keyes House. I didn’t think—”

“All right,” Jeffrey interrupted, knowing that taking out his anger on Brad would only make him feel worse. He told Frank, “Get some of our people on the highway. Tell them we’re looking for someone walking. Anyone walking. Maybe in a jacket, maybe not.” He did not look at Lena on this last part, though she must have known a description would make all the difference.

Frank said, “The units should be here soon.”

Jeffrey nodded. “I want a grid search from this area up to the last point where Lena saw the attacker. We’re looking for a knife. Anything that doesn’t belong.”

“He had something in his hand,” Lena said, like she was offering up a prize. “A white bag.”

Brad Stephens gasped, then blushed when everyone looked at him.

Jeffrey asked, “What is it?”

Brad spoke with a mixture of apprehension and apology. “I saw Tessa picking up some stuff on the way up the hill,” he said.

“What kind of stuff?”

“Trash and things, I guess. She had a plastic bag, like the kind they give out at the Pig.” He meant the Piggly Wiggly, the town’s grocery store. Thousands of people shopped there every week.

Jeffrey forced himself not to speak for a few seconds. He thought about the piece of plastic he had found in Tessa’s hand. The scrap very well could have been the torn handle of a plastic grocery bag.

Jeffrey asked Brad, “Tessa found the bag on the hill?” noticing for the first time how much trash littered the area. The college grounds crew spent most of their energy maintaining the land closest to the college. They had probably not cleaned up out here all year.

“Yes, sir,” Brad said. “She just kind of picked it up and started putting some stuff in it while she walked up the hill.”

“What stuff?” Jeffrey asked.

Brad stuttered again, something that happened only when he was nervous. “T-trash, I reckon. Wrappers and cans and stuff.”

Jeffrey tried to moderate his tone with Brad, mostly because for some reason the stutter made his own anger boil back up. “You didn’t think to go up there and ask her what she was doing?”

“You told me to stay with the witness,” Brad reminded him. Another blush crept up his pasty cheeks. “And I . . . uh . . . didn’t want to interfere with what she was doing up there. You know, p-p-personal stuff.”

Jeffrey told Matt, “Put that out on the radio. Dark clothes, maybe carrying a white bag.”

“You think he stole the trash?” Lena asked, skeptical.

Matt cupped his cell phone to his ear and walked a few feet away to carry out Jeffrey’s orders. Frank was looking down at Lena, but there was no telling what he was thinking.

Jeffrey saw Chuck taking his time walking up the hill. When the other man stopped and bent to the ground, Jeffrey tensed, but Chuck was only tying his shoe.

When Chuck reached them, he said, “I was staying with the body. Securing the scene.”

Lena ignored him, asking Jeffrey, “You think this is connected?”

Jeffrey could tell from Frank’s expression that, with all that had happened, he was only now considering the question. The old cop would have gotten to it eventually, but Lena was leaps and bounds ahead of the more senior officers on the squad. Her quick mind was the thing Jeffrey missed most now that she was gone.

Lena repeated, “There’s got to be some kind of connection.”

Jeffrey shut her out, and not just because Chuck was taking all of this in. Lena had chosen to stop being a cop seven months ago. She was not part of Jeffrey’s team anymore.

He told Frank, “Let me see the suicide note.”

“It was under a rock at the end of the bridge,” Frank said. He reached into his back pocket and pulled out a folded sheet of notebook paper. Jeffrey did not have it in him to reprimand Frank for not putting the note in an evidence bag. Both of their hands were bloody enough to stain the page.

Jeffrey glanced at it, his eyes not really focusing.

Chuck put his hand to his chin in a thinking pose. “You still think he took a swan dive on his own?”

“Yeah,” Jeffrey said, staring at the college security guard. Chuck was a walking sieve where secrets were concerned. Jeffrey had heard him gossip about enough people to know that the man could not be trusted.

Frank backed up Jeffrey, explaining, “A killer would have stabbed him, not pushed him off the bridge. They don’t change their MOs like that.”