Not that Faith was absolutely certain that the woman at the funeral home was Jo Figaroa. She certainly could be the woman in the driver’s license photo, but Angie’s involvement skewed everything. Faith’s policy toward liars was to always discount everything they said, no matter how much sense their story made. It wasn’t easy. The human brain had an annoying need to give people the benefit of the doubt. Especially people you cared about.
For instance, Faith was trusting Will when he said that Angie hadn’t told him anything else important, even though he had spent a hell of a lot of time on the phone with her just to be told a victim’s name.
Amanda said, ‘Your mother used to pin her notes up on the wall so that we could see all the moving pieces.’
Faith smiled. The pinholes were still there. ‘Do you think that Jo Figaroa is Angie’s daughter?’
‘Yes.’
‘Who’s the father?’ She didn’t get an answer, so she suggested the obvious one. ‘Will?’
‘I’m not so sure about that.’ Amanda slowed the car. She pulled over to the side of the road. She put the gear in park. She turned to Faith. ‘Tell me what you know about Denny.’
‘Denny?’ Faith shook her head. ‘Who’s Denny?’
‘Short for Holden,’ Amanda explained. ‘Though Denny is two syllables. Holden is two syllables. I suppose that means it’s not short, just less pretentious.’
Faith was too tired for semantics. ‘Let’s just stick with Collier.’
‘Start from the beginning. What did he do? How did he present himself?’
Faith had to pause for a moment so that she could put together her day. It seemed like an eternity had passed since she’d picked up Will at the animal clinic this morning, which was technically yesterday morning because it was past midnight.
She told Amanda about the first meeting with Collier and Ng outside Rippy’s club, the interminable amount of time she’d spent with him at Dale Harding’s, the texts that told her nothing, the tedious observations about his personal life, the constant sexual innuendo, the reluctance to carry on an adult conversation about the case.
‘I don’t trust him,’ Faith admitted. ‘He keeps pushing this Mexican heroin cartel angle. He didn’t tell me about finding Delilah’s car, but he told me about every useless whore he talked to in Lakewood.’
Amanda confirmed, ‘Ng said that they were handling a domestic call when they got routed to the nightclub?’
Faith strained to recall his exact words. ‘He said it was pretty violent, which means they were probably at the hospital. Grady is close to Rippy’s club, about a ten-minute drive at that time of morning. It would make sense for them to take the call.’
‘The nine-one-one came in at five AM,’ Amanda reminded her. ‘Would you volunteer to investigate a dead body at a warehouse at the end of your shift?’
Faith shrugged. ‘Dead cop. The unis recognized Harding. You’d push your shift for a cop.’
‘True,’ Amanda agreed. ‘What else is bothering you about him?’
Faith struggled to articulate her gut feeling. ‘He keeps showing up. He was with Will when he found the Jane Doe in the office building. He drove him home. He was there tonight at the funeral home. What was he doing there?’
‘Collier and Ng are our APD liaisons. They’re working parts of the case. It makes sense that he’d get the call about the car.’
‘I guess.’ Faith tried to pluck out the obvious answer. ‘Maybe Collier’s just an idiot who keeps falling up. His dad was on the job. He’s obviously got some juice.’
Amanda said, ‘Milton Collier was on the job for two years. He took a fifty-one off a twenty-four, lost two fingers before he could call a sixty-three.’
Faith accessed her arcane knowledge of ten-codes from Amanda’s soup-can-and-string days. Collier’s dad had been stabbed by a crazy person and lost some fingers before backup arrived. She asked Amanda, ‘And?’
‘Milton clocked out on a medical disability. The wife was a schoolteacher. They made ends meet by taking in foster kids. Dozens at a time. Collier was one of them. Eventually they adopted him.’
‘Huh,’ Faith said, because Collier had overshared just about everything, down to his twisted nut sack in high school, but he hadn’t mentioned that he’d been in the system the same as Delilah Palmer.
The same as Angie, too.
Faith asked, ‘Were Collier and Angie ever in the same home together, like when she was sixteen years old and pregnant?’
‘That’s an interesting question, isn’t it?’ Amanda didn’t give the answer, but Faith knew she would find out. Amanda asked, ‘What else did Angie say on the phone call with Will?’
‘It was brief,’ she lied, because the call had lasted just under three minutes. ‘I’m sure she spent some time taunting him.’
‘Why is that, do you think?’
‘Because she’s a terrible human being.’
Amanda gave her a sharp look. ‘She’s cunning is what she is. Look at our day. Angie had us running around in circles. East Atlanta. Lakewood. North Atlanta. Will was all over midtown. You were stuck at Harding’s. I was at Kilpatrick’s. What’s more, Angie has knocked Will out of the equation, which shows brilliant strategy. Will knows her intimately. He could be our best ally in helping us figure out what Angie is really up to, but she has rendered him completely useless. You saw how he was in the basement.’
Faith had seen how broken Will had been, and what’s more, she hadn’t been able to take it. He had been making a weird whooping sound, like he couldn’t catch his breath. Faith ran from the room so that he wouldn’t see her crying.
She asked Amanda, ‘You think Angie’s fucking with him so that he won’t figure out what she’s really up to?’
‘If I were teaching a class on mind games, that play would be part of my curriculum.’
God knew Amanda could play some mind games. ‘Okay, Angie’s screwing with him. To what end?’
‘She’s buying time.’
‘For what?’
‘That’s the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question, isn’t it? What exactly is Angie Polaski up to?’
Faith didn’t think she would ever find the answer. She was so tired and so stressed out that she doubted she could tie her own shoes right now, let alone figure out why Angie Polaski did the awful things she did.
Amanda said, ‘Walk me through it.’
Reluctantly, Faith looked down at her notes again. ‘Harding is murdered Sunday night. Angie stages the scene to make it look like she, Angie, was murdered, but it’s actually Jo Figaroa, who probably shares her mother, Angie’s, rare blood type, B-negative.’
‘Hm.’ For once, Amanda hadn’t been ahead of her. ‘Do you think Angie murdered Jo?’
Faith wasn’t sure. ‘She’s a monster, but I can’t see her killing her own child.’
‘Neither can I, but Harding could have killed Jo, then Angie killed Harding. Or tried to, with the doorknob.’ Amanda asked, ‘What happened next?’
‘Angie takes the body out of the club. She torches Dale’s car, which sounds like something Angie would do if she was pissed off, and she’d be pissed off if Dale killed her kid.’ Faith couldn’t even contemplate a real-life scenario with her own children. There would be salt in the ground for a thousand years. ‘The nine-one-one comes in Monday morning at five. Then Monday night, Angie hands us Jo’s body at the funeral home and calls Will to torture him.’
‘Sara puts Josephine’s time of death around noon to one.’
‘That’s un-Sara-like specificity.’ Faith scribbled the time in the margins. She realized, ‘If Josephine died between noon and one, that means Angie had her in the trunk of her car until she left the body at the funeral home just before eight thirty PM.’
‘There was a lot of blood in the back seat, all type B-negative, and a little blood in the trunk that Sara says could have been left post mortem from the chest wound.’
Faith shivered at the coldness it would take to drive around with your own child bleeding to death in the back of your car.