Faith sat in an uncomfortable plastic chair across from the nurses’ station inside the Grady Hospital ICU. There were armed guards at either end of the hall. The ward was full. Grady was Atlanta’s only public hospital, a level one trauma center that saw most of the bad cases the city had to offer. At any given time, at least a quarter of the patients were handcuffed to their beds.
She glanced up at the whiteboard behind the desk. Olivia, the head nurse, was updating the status of one of the patients. Grady admitted a lot of Jane Does, but Faith only cared about her potential witness, Jane Doe 2. She was still marked critical. The junkie’s surgery had taken four hours longer than planned. They’d had to rebuild her nose and throat. So much blood had been replaced that they’d basically put her into rapid detox from the coke. And now she was pumped full of morphine. She would be out of it for at least another hour, minimum.
At least Faith hadn’t let her time go to waste. She had tackled Dale Harding’s financial documents and phone records. Not that the task got her anywhere closer to a solution, let alone a clue to follow. Harding’s phone calls were all for pizza or Chinese delivery, so he must have used a burner phone for business. As for his bank records, it didn’t take a forensic accountant to understand the figures. Harding kept less than one hundred dollars in his checking account, a number that hadn’t fluctuated much over the last six months, because he had used a gold MasterCard to charge everything, from his gorditas at Taco Bell to the support hose that kept the circulation going in his legs. The cumulative balance on the card for the last six months was forty-six thousand and change. Harding had stopped making payments on the bill. Faith assumed this was by design. He’d stopped dialysis, basically signing his own death warrant. He’d obviously planned to screw as many people as he could on his way out.
The question was, had one of those people been Delilah Palmer? Faith couldn’t stop thinking about the porn photos, the dead look in the girl’s eyes. Even back to ten years old, Delilah seemed to show the resignation that it was her fate to be used by every man who crossed her path. Not just any man, but Dale Harding. A cop. A father. The one person she should have been able to trust, and he kept nasty photos of her in his attic and married her because—why?
Delilah had to be the key to both Harding’s and Angie’s murders. Faith didn’t buy Collier’s feminist theory that the girl was behind their deaths. Harding had always taken care of Delilah. She would have known that he didn’t have much time left. Why kill the guy when she could just wait a few days and dance on his grave?
Faith could think of a lot of people who would want Angie Polaski dead, so she kept the focus on Dale Harding. He was a gambler. He took risks. He had likely taken a final risk before his death, something with a big payout, which meant that Delilah, his legal wife, would be the beneficiary. Unless there was something illegal about the payout. That made more sense. And it also explained why Delilah’s life would be in jeopardy.
And Faith had put that imbecile Collier in charge of finding her.
She scrolled through the sixteen different texts Collier had sent her since she’d left him at the Mesa Arms. If he was overtalkative in person, he was a freaking bible in the printed word. He peppered his texts with so much useless information about the weather, the songs on the radio and his dietary habits that Faith felt the need to distill the information into bullet points before her head exploded.
She reached into her cargo pants pocket and found her spiral notebook and pen. She flipped to a fresh page. At the top, she wrote four headers: PALMER, HARDING, POLASKI, RIPPY.
She tapped her pen on the blank columns underneath the names. Connections. That’s what she needed to see. Delilah was married to Dale Harding, possibly his daughter. Harding worked for Rippy. According to the briefing Faith had gotten from Amanda, Angie worked for Kip Kilpatrick, which meant she really worked for Rippy.
Faith tapped the pen again. Angie probably knew Harding from way back. Bad cops stuck together. They told themselves they were outsiders because they were the only ones who could get the job done, but the truth was that good cops wanted nothing to do with them.
Faith turned to the next page and wrote QUESTIONS at the top.
Why did Angie and Harding meet at Rippy’s club?
What does Delilah know?
Who would want to kill Harding?
Who would want to kill Angie?
If Harding and Angie knew each other from before, it made sense that one would tap the other for a job with Kip Kilpatrick. Harding had moved into the Mesa Arms six months ago, so Faith could reasonably assume that’s when he’d started working for Kilpatrick. Angie’s bank account had big checks coming in four months ago, so that meant she had worked for Kilpatrick at least four months.
Faith flipped back to the first page.
All of the arrows pointed to Marcus Rippy.
Her phone buzzed. Another lengthy text came in from Collier. Faith skimmed the lines for meaning, skipping over a report about the indigestion he’d gotten from a gas station hot dog. On Saturday, the day before the murder, Delilah Palmer had rented a black Ford Fusion from a Hertz location on Howell Mill Road. No security footage existed of the transaction. She had used her Visa card. Collier had put out a BOLO on the rental car. He’d also reiterated his heroin-mule theory, pointing out that dealers rented cars because they knew that their own rides would be seized by the cops if they were caught dealing out of them.
Again Faith tapped her pen against the notebook. She didn’t buy Collier’s drug angle. He was a hammer looking for a nail.
Delilah had rented the car Saturday, not Sunday or Monday, which implied that she had lined it up before Harding was murdered. Which could also imply that she knew ahead of time that Harding was in jeopardy and that she might need an escape. But she had used her own license and credit card to book the car. Delilah had been on the streets for years. She was too savvy to use her own name for a getaway.
Faith’s phone vibrated again. Another text, blissfully short.
GIRLZ SAY SOUZA OD’D 6 MOS AGO. DEAD END. DEAD, GET IT?
Faith had to scroll back through her texts to remind herself who Souza was. She found the pertinent missive time-stamped two hours ago. According to some of Collier’s sources in zone six, Virginia Souza was another whore for whom Harding had called in a handful of favors. She worked Delilah’s street corner. She was fairly violent, considering she had been twice charged with assault against a minor. Faith wondered if that minor had been Delilah Palmer.
She looked at the text again. Collier’s sign-off was to say that he was going to talk to the younger whores, who might know something or someone who could point him toward Delilah Palmer’s whereabouts. Or he was talking to young whores because he was Collier. He had signed off with a series of eggplant emojis that, going by Jeremy’s Facebook page, were a standin for a bunch of penises.
Faith returned to her notebook. Lots of arrows connecting back to Rippy. Lots of questions. No answers. She should’ve let Collier rot here at the hospital while she tracked down Delilah Palmer. That was the problem with murder cases. You never knew which lead would take you to the solution and which one would sink you into a black hole. Faith was getting the feeling that she had given Collier the good lead. She was going to throw herself off the roof of this building if he ended up lucking into their bad guy.
Her phone vibrated again. She didn’t want to read another dissertation from Collier’s awesome gumshoe file, but ignorance was a luxury she did not have. She looked at the screen. CALL FROM WANTANABE, B.
Faith stood up and walked down the hall for privacy. ‘Mitchell.’
‘Is this Special Agent Faith Mitchell?’ a woman asked.