‘Jo disappeared Sunday night. For all intents and purposes, it’s now Tuesday morning. We’ll assume the husband doesn’t scrub toilets. Did Miss Lindsay take over the cleaning?’
‘I don’t see how. She could barely lean down with her cane. But you’re right that something is going on with Anthony. I kept pressing her buttons on the kid, and she would’ve cracked if Laslo hadn’t been there.’ Faith said, ‘We can call the school. They’ll give out truancy information. I’m assuming he’s at E. Rivers. It’s basically a publicly funded private school for rich white kids.’
‘It’s too early. No one will be there until six.’
Faith yawned reflexively at the mention of the late hour.
Amanda said, ‘I want to talk to that Jane Doe that Will found in the building. She must have seen something. Where did she get all that coke?’
Faith was still yawning. Too much information was coming at her too fast. Her brain felt like a spinning top. ‘Figaroa seemed unequivocal about the identification from the photo. How could he be sure? Her head is the size of a watermelon. Someone beat the shit out of her.’
‘Here’s another problem.’ Amanda pointed to the clock on the radio. ‘We got there at one in the morning. They were all awake, dressed. Kilpatrick was there in a suit. Reuben was in a suit. Laslo was there. The mother-in-law still had her pearls on. All the lights were on in the house. They were staying up for a reason.’
Faith said, ‘Kilpatrick didn’t know that Jo was dead.’
‘No,’ Amanda said. ‘He was shocked when I told him. You can’t fake that.’
‘Figaroa was in a knee brace. But he had that bump on his head. Someone took a heavy swing at him.’
‘Jo?’
Faith laughed, but only out of desperation. ‘Angie? Delilah? Virginia Souza?’
‘The AK by the front door looks retrofitted for automatic.’
‘The AR by the back door has a slide fire. That’s one hundred rounds in seven seconds.’ Faith shook her head, trying to clear it. ‘What the hell is going on in that house?’
‘Concentrate. Kilpatrick is a fixer. Laslo is a fixer. What problems were they there to fix?’
‘If we’re buying that Kilpatrick didn’t know Jo was dead, then that’s not the problem they were fixing.’ Faith reminded her, ‘Miss Lindsay was at Kilpatrick’s on Monday afternoon. That’s when she saw Will. She was upset about something.’
‘Her daughter was arrested for possession of drugs.’
‘Yeah, last Thursday. Jo was out of jail by Saturday. Her mother was at Kilpatrick’s with a new problem. A Monday problem. An after-Harding-was-killed problem. An after-her-daughter-disappeared-but-we’re-saying-she’s-in-rehab problem.’ Faith thought of another red flag. ‘She went to Kilpatrick, not Reuben.’
‘That phone call Reuben got a few minutes ago. That was strange.’
‘It seemed like they were all waiting for a call, even Miss Lindsay. The minute the phone rang, she stuck her head out of the kitchen to find out what was happening.’ Faith turned to Amanda. ‘If the call wasn’t about Jo, then the only thing I can think of that would upset Miss Lindsay that much is Anthony.’
‘Put it together, Faith. Reuben Figaroa went to Kilpatrick’s office Monday morning. Next, they both met with his lawyer. Reuben spent the rest of the day visiting three different banks, and now they’re all at the house, early in the morning, fully dressed, waiting for a phone call. What does that tell you?’
‘Ransom,’ Faith said. ‘Angie kidnapped her grandson.’
ELEVEN
Will paced outside Jane Doe’s hospital room while her doctors did their morning rounds. He stuck his hands in his pockets as he paced. He felt weirdly exhilarated, almost giddy, even though he hadn’t slept last night. He was thinking more clearly now than he had in the last thirty-six hours. Obviously Angie thought she could wind him up with her mind games, but all she had done was laser-focus his desire to bring her down.
And he was going to bring her down hard, because he knew exactly what she’d been doing.
‘Will?’ Faith said. ‘What are you doing here?’
He didn’t stop to explain himself. Everything that had been knocking around his head for the last seven hours exploded out of his mouth. ‘I looked back at my notes from the Rippy rape investigation. Reuben Figaroa was Rippy’s main alibi at the party, and Jo Figaroa was her husband’s main alibi. Angie knew this. She also figured out that Jo was a junkie, and junkies are really easy to control. She manipulated Jo into blackmailing her husband. If Jo broke Reuben’s alibi, then that broke Rippy’s alibi, and the whole thing came crumbling down. But instead of caving in and paying them off, Reuben went to Kilpatrick. Kilpatrick put Harding on to solving the problem. Harding called the cops in to bust Jo, and when that didn’t shut her up, he solved it by killing her.’ He felt himself smiling, because all the clues had been there right from the beginning. ‘Angie called me to clean up the mess, because that’s what she does.’
Faith didn’t say anything for a few seconds. Finally she asked, ‘How would Angie know about the witness statements?’
‘They were in my files at home. She must’ve seen them. I know she saw them.’ He realized he was talking too fast and too loud. He slowed himself down. ‘She mixed up the witness statements. She knows my system, the color coding, and she mixed them up to let me know that she’d seen them.’
‘Where’s Sara?’
‘Downstairs, watching the autopsy.’ He gripped Faith’s arms. ‘Listen to me. Angie lost her leverage when Jo died. She’s trying to get us—’
‘We think Angie kidnapped her grandson.’
Will felt his grip loosen on her arms.
‘He wasn’t at school yesterday. He didn’t show up this morning.’
Will scanned her eyes, trying to understand where this was coming from. ‘He could have a cold, or—’
‘Come over here.’ She led him to the chairs across from the nurses’ station. She made him sit down, but she stood in front of him, stood over him really, and told him what she and Amanda had found.
Will’s earlier elation over cracking the case started to dissipate the moment she mentioned Miss Lindsay poking her head out when the phone rang. By the time she had finished recapping the last few hours, Will was leaned over in the chair, his hands clasped between his knees, completely deflated.
Everything she said made perfect sense. The lawyers and bankers made sense. The expectation around the phone call made sense. Angie getting her daughter murdered and still trying to pull some cash out of it made sense.
What was wrong with him? How had he loved such a despicable person?
Faith said, ‘You could be right about the blackmail plan going sideways, only when Harding took out Jo—’
‘Angie saw Anthony as the perfect stand-in.’ Will rubbed his face with his hands. Survival of the fittest. Angie always kept moving forward. She didn’t worry about consequences because she never stuck around long enough to deal with them.
He said, ‘I hit Collier.’
‘I figured that out. I wish you’d hit him harder.’ She covered a large yawn with the back of her hand. ‘We’re going to have to rework Collier’s side of the case. He lied about Virginia Souza’s death by OD. She’s alive and kicking as of last week. We’ve got footage of her at the jail posting a cash bail on an eighteen-year-old picked up for solicitation. Delilah Palmer is still our only solid lead. She could be a victim. She could be a perpetrator. Either way, the first person she’d go to for help is her pimp. We need to find Souza. If she really is the mama in charge, then she’ll know who Delilah’s pimp is. We get the pimp, we get Delilah.’