‘I’ve got everybody in the state looking for Delilah Palmer.’
Will had forgotten about Dale Harding’s wife or daughter or both. Palmer was a young prostitute with a drug problem. She had grown up in the system. The only parent she’d ever known had exploited her. She could’ve been Angie twenty years ago, except that Angie had managed to pull herself out. Or at least make it seem that way. Will wasn’t so sure she had managed to escape anything.
Sara’s hand pressed against the small of his back. ‘You okay?’
Will walked toward the car. The smell grew more pungent as he got closer. You didn’t need a bloodhound to know that something bad had happened here. He stopped at the crime scene tape. The trunk of Angie’s car was lined with a scratchy charcoal-colored carpet that he’d gotten from a roll at Pep Boys. He had leaned over the trunk for hours lining up the seams, gluing it in place.
Amanda shined a police-issue Maglite into the trunk. There was a dark stain in the carpet, just a little off from the center. The only thing in the trunk was a red plastic bottle of transmission fluid.
Will knelt down. He examined the pavement under the car. The transmission was leaking. The car was probably his now. He would have to fix it before he sold it.
‘Will?’ Sara put her hand on his shoulder. She knelt beside him. ‘Look at me.’
He looked at her.
‘I think we should go. There’s nothing here.’
Will stood up, but he didn’t go. He went to the driver’s side of the car. The door was wide open. A half-empty bottle of tequila was in the footwell. A joint was in the ashtray. Candy wrappers. Gum. Angie had a sweet tooth.
He asked Amanda, ‘It was like this when the uni rolled up?’
She nodded.
The open door would act like a flag to whoever drove by, which meant the car was left to be found sooner rather than later. Will took the flashlight from Amanda. He shined the light into the car. The interior was light gray. The shift for the manual transmission jutted out from the floor between the seats. He saw blood on the steering wheel. Blood on the driver’s seat. Blood on the white circle on top of the black shifter knob. It was an 8-ball. Angie had picked it out of a magazine. This was before the internet. Will had gone to three different stores to find an adapter so it would screw onto the stick.
He turned the flashlight, examining the back seat. More blood, almost black from baking in the sun all day. There was a smear near the door handle. Too small for a handprint. Maybe a closed fist punching out. Maybe a desperate last move to get away. Someone had lain bleeding in the back seat. Someone had lain bleeding in the trunk. Someone had been bleeding or covered in blood when they drove the car away.
He asked Amanda, ‘Two bodies and the driver?’
Amanda had obviously considered this. ‘She could’ve been moved from the back seat to the trunk.’
‘Still bleeding?’ he asked, meaning still alive.
‘Gravity,’ Sara said. ‘If there was a chest wound, and she was on her side, depending on how she was positioned, you might expect that amount of blood to seep out post mortem.’
‘She,’ Will said. ‘What about Delilah Palmer?’
‘I had someone at Grady run down her blood type. She had an admit for an OD last year. She’s O-positive. Angie was B-negative.’ Amanda’s hand was on his arm. She had tried to let him work this out on his own, leaving Charlie in his van, calling off Collier and Ng, but now she was going to give him the truth. ‘Wilbur, I know this is hard to hear, but everything points toward Angie.’ She laid it out for him. ‘Angie’s blood type was all over the crime scene. We found her purse, her gun. This is her car. Charlie already typed the blood for me. The back seat, the trunk and the front seat are all B-negative. We’ve got the DNA on rush, but given the rarity of the blood type, the likelihood that it’s not Angie is slim to none. And it’s a hell of a lot of blood, Will. Too much blood for her to walk away.’
Will mulled over her words. The stain in the trunk was in the area you would expect from a chest wound. Arterial spray was found on the walls of the room where Dale Harding died. Arteries were in the heart. The heart was in the chest.
Will tried to play out a likely scenario. Angie in the back seat, bleeding to death. The driver some guy she’d called because she always had a guy she could call. He would be desperately trying to get her help, and then he would realize that it was too late. And then he would put her in the trunk because he couldn’t drive around the city with a dead woman in the back seat of the car. And then he would wait until sundown and drive the car here.
‘The manager is on the way.’ Faith came walking down a lighted path. An open spiral notebook was in her hand. She looked at Will, then looked at him again.
Amanda said, ‘And?’
Faith referenced her notes. ‘Inside, we’ve got Ray Belcamino, twenty-year-old male Caucasian, no record. Mortuary student at Gupton-Jones. He clocked into work at approximately five fifteen for a five-thirty shift. His call-in sheet has him three times off the premises, once to Piedmont Hospital at six forty-three, another to the Sunrise Nursing home at seven oh two, and a third, a false alarm, at eight twenty-two.’ She looked up. ‘Apparently it’s a thing for interns to call in fake deaths to prank each other.’
‘Of course it is,’ Amanda said.
‘All three times, Belcamino used the commercial entrance near the chapel, behind the fence. There’s a service elevator that goes down to the basement. He can’t see the parking lot over the fence. He drove in from the west each time, so he didn’t pass the parking lot and he didn’t see the car.’
Amanda asked, ‘Closed-circuit cameras?’
‘Six, but they’re all trained on the doors and windows, not the parking lot.’
Will asked, ‘Did you check the Dumpster?’
‘First thing. Nothing.’
He asked, ‘Were any of the doors tampered with?’
‘No, and there’s an alarm system. Every door and window is wired.’
‘How is the elevator accessed?’
‘There’s a keypad.’
Will asked, ‘Can the keypad be seen from behind the fence?’
‘Yeah. And it turns off the alarm, too.’
Amanda asked, ‘Where are you going with this?’
‘Why bring a car that has a dead body in a trunk to a funeral home?’
They all looked back at the building.
Faith said, ‘I’ll go. Wait here.’
Will didn’t wait. He didn’t run, either, but his stride was twice as long as Faith’s. He reached the chapel before she did. He opened the door before she did. He passed the pews and walked onto the stage and found the door that led to the back half of the funeral home before she did.
Behind the scenes was scuffed and utilitarian. Drop ceiling, peeling linoleum. There was a long hallway running the entire back of the building. Two massive elevator doors stood sentry at one end. Will knew that there was likely an identical set of elevator doors to the outside and that this was where the bodies were transported down to the basement. He headed toward the elevator, assuming there would be stairs. Faith was right behind him. She was jogging to catch up, so Will started jogging so that she couldn’t.
The metal stairs were old and jangly. His footsteps jarred the railing. At the bottom, there was a landing with a swinging door. Will pushed through to a small office, more like a vestibule. There was another set of double doors behind a wooden desk, and at the desk sat a young man who could only be Ray Belcamino.
The kid jumped up. His iPad clattered to the floor.
Will tried the double doors. Locked. No windows. ‘How many bodies do you have in here?’
Belcamino’s eyes darted to Faith as she came through the swinging door
She was out of breath. ‘I need your logs. We have to match each body to a name.’
The kid looked panicked. ‘Is one missing?’
Will wanted to grab him by the collar. ‘We need a body count.’