Warren had been yelling out the colors of the folders.
*
THE HOMICIDE SQUAD room had not improved during Faith's three-day absence. Robertson's jockstrap still dangled from the top drawer of his desk. A blow-up doll marked as "evidence" during the last birthday party sat on top of the filing cabinet, her mouth still opened in a suggestive O even as the air slowly drained out of her once curvaceous body. Leo Donnelly's desk was cleared but for a famous old photograph of Farrah Fawcett that he had obviously cut out of a magazine. Over the years, the margins of the photo had been embellished with graffiti and artwork that was more suitable for a middle school boys' bathroom.
Adding to the overall masculine effect, the shift was changing, an event Faith always likened to a football locker room during half-time. The noise was deafening, the smells alarming. Someone had turned on the television that hung from the ceiling. Someone else was trying to find a station on the ancient radio. A burrito heated in the microwave, the odor of burned cheese wafting through the air. Baritone bellows filled the room as detectives tromped in and out, turning over cases, giving each other the business about whose dick was bigger, who would solve a case first, who was turning over a dog of an investigation that would never be solved. In short, the whole room was filling with testosterone the way a cloth diaper filled with shit.
Faith glanced at the television set as she recognized Amanda's voice saying, "...proud to announce that an arrest has been made in the Campano kidnapping."
Someone yelled, "Thanks to APD, you cunt."
There were more words tossed Amanda's way—bitch, snatch, whatever base and degrading terms other cops could conjure to denigrate a woman who would have them all pissing in their pants if she got them alone in a room for more than five minutes.
The handful of detectives closest to Faith's desk gave her curious glances—not because she was working the case, but because of the language. Faith shrugged, looking back at the television set, watching Amanda expertly handle the reporters. She could still feel their eyes on her, though.
This sort of testing took place almost on a daily basis. If Faith told them to shut up, she was a ballbuster who couldn't take a joke. If she ignored it, they took her silence for tacit approval. It didn't stop there. If she spurned their sexual advances, she was a lesbian. If she dated any of them, she would be labeled a whore. Faith couldn't win either way, and striking back in similar terms took up too much of her time. The pouting, the passive-aggressive whining—Faith had already raised one child, she wasn't ready to take on twenty more.
And yet, she had always loved working here, loved feeling like she was part of a brotherhood. This was why Will Trent did not act or talk like a cop. He didn't sit in a squad room. He didn't bullshit over beers with Charlie Reed and Hamish Patel. He was certainly part of a team, but working with him was like working in a bubble. There was never the hum of people in the background, the jostling of egos and assignments. His was a more focused way of doing the job, but it was so different from what Faith was used to that, now that she was back among her fellow detectives, she felt like she no longer belonged. She had to admit that for all Will's faults, at least he listened to what she had to say. It was nice to have a discussion with a colleague who didn't ask "What're you, on the rag?" every time she disagreed with him.
Faith looked back at the television. Amanda was nodding as a reporter asked about Westfield Academy, the arrest of Evan Bernard. She looked absolutely radiant, and Faith had to admit she was in her element on camera. The reporters were eating out of the palm of her hand. "Mr. Bernard is certainly a person of interest."
"You interested in this?" one of the detectives yelled. Faith did not have to glance over to know the man was probably cupping his genitals.
Amanda answered another question. "The suspect is a twenty-eight-year-old man with a storied past."
Off camera, a reporter asked, "Why aren't you releasing his name?"
"The arraignment in the morning will make it part of the public record," she said, sidestepping the obvious, which was that they were keeping Warren's name out of the press as long as they could in order to keep some helpful do-gooder from offering him legal advice. The fact that Lionel Petty had already submitted an I-Report to CNN.com of him and Warren Grier standing beside one of the copy machines at work would soon work against them.
Another reporter was obviously thinking the same thing as Faith. "What about the missing girl? Any leads on her whereabouts?"
"We believe it's only a matter of time before Emma Campano is found."
Faith noted that the woman did not say whether the girl would be found dead or alive. She felt a sudden pang of envy for Amanda and her position. Like Faith's mother, Amanda had worked her way to the top. If Faith had to put up with a little misogyny now and then, she could not imagine what it was like for her mother's generation.
Amanda had started in the secretarial pool, just like Evelyn Mitchell, back when the women officers had to wear below-the-knee wool skirts as they fetched coffee and typed up requisitions. Amanda had clawed her way to the top, only to have a bunch of idiots with primordial ooze dripping out of their noses heckle her as she broke one of the biggest cases the city had seen since Wayne Williams was spotted tossing a body into the Chattahoochee.
And where was Faith after all those years of progress and women's lib? She was still in the equivalent of the secretarial pool, she supposed. To be fair, she had volunteered for the task of cataloguing all the evidence Will had taken from Warren Grier's tiny abode. That was before she'd seen the piles of boxes they had taken from the boardinghouse and stacked around her desk. There were at least six of them, all filled to the top with papers. Warren was a pack rat, the kind of man who couldn't throw out a receipt or a movie ticket. He still had pay stubs from the copy center that went back almost ten years.
Faith touched her jaw, bruised and tender from where Warren's elbow had caught her. She had found an ancient Lean Cuisine in the back of the freezer in the break room. The bag was hard as a rock, but it felt good on her mouth. She hated getting hit. Not that anyone particularly enjoyed it, but Faith had learned a long time ago that puking was her natural response to pain. Holding a bag of frozen spaghetti and meatballs was not helping matters. A small price to pay considering what Emma Campano had probably gone through.
Will was escorting Warren Grier to the holding cells. There was only one question he had yet to get answered: Where was Emma? Even if the girl was still alive, time was running out. Faith thought about the conditions in which she might be kept: locked up in a room somewhere or, worse, shoved in the trunk of a car. Today, the temperature had hit one hundred before noon. The heat was unrelenting, even at night. Did Emma have water? Did she have food? How long before her supplies ran out? Death by dehydration took a week to ten days, but that was without a head wound and the broiling heat. Were they going to spend the next two weeks counting off the hours until Emma Campano could no longer draw breath?
"Hey, Mitchell. How's it working with that rat?" Robertson asked. He was sitting at his desk, leaning so far back in his chair that it looked like it might break.
"Fine," she told him, wondering why no one was giving Will credit for letting the Atlanta police duckwalk Evan Bernard out of Westfield Academy in front of the rolling cameras.