Faithless by Karin Slaughter Read Free Book Online Page A

picked up the phone.
    “Sara?” Jeffrey asked.
    “Yeah,” she told him, switching off the machine. “Sorry.”
    “We haven’t found anything,” he said, and she could hear the frustration in his voice.
    “No missing persons?”
    “There was a girl a few weeks back,” he told her. “But she turned up at her grandmother’s yesterday. Hold on.” She heard him mumble something, then come back on the line. “I’ll call you right back.”
    The phone clicked before Sara could respond. She sat back in her chair, looking down at her desk, noticing the neat stacks of papers and memos. All of her pens were in a cup and the phone was perfectly aligned with the edge of the metal desk. Carlos, her assistant, worked full-time at the morgue but he had whole days when there was nothing for him to do but twiddle his thumbs and wait for someone to die. He had obviously kept himself busy straightening her office. Sara traced a scratch along the top of the Formica, thinking she had never noticed the faux wood laminate in all the years she had worked here.
    She thought about the wood used to build the box that held the girl. The lumber looked new, and the screen mesh covering the pipe had obviously been wrapped around the top in order to keep debris from blocking the air supply. Someone was keeping the girl there, holding her there, for his own sick purposes. Was her abductor somewhere right now thinking about her trapped in the box, getting some sort of sexual thrill from the power he thought he held over her? Had he already gotten his satisfaction, simply by leaving her there to die?
    Sara startled as the phone rang. She picked it up, asking, “Jeffrey?”
    “Just a minute.” He covered the phone as he spoke to someone, and Sara waited until he asked her, “How old do you think she is?”
    Sara did not like guessing, but she said, “Anywhere from sixteen to nineteen. It’s hard to tell at this stage.”
    He relayed this information to someone in the field, then asked Sara, “You think somebody made her put on those clothes?”
    “I don’t know,” she answered, wondering where he was going with this.
    “The bottom of her socks are clean.”
    “He could have taken away her shoes after she got in the box,” Sara suggested. Then, realizing his true concern, she added, “I’ll have to get her on the table before I can tell if she was sexually assaulted.”
    “Maybe he was waiting for that,” Jeffrey hypothesized, and they were both quiet for a moment as they considered this. “It’s pouring down rain here,” he said. “We’re trying to dig out the box, see if we can find anything on it.”
    “The lumber looked new.”
    “There’s mold growing on the side,” he told her. “Maybe buried like that, it wouldn’t weather as quickly.”
    “It’s pressure treated?”
    “Yeah,” he said. “The joints are all mitered. Whoever built this didn’t just throw it together. It took some skill.” He paused a moment, but she didn’t hear him talking to anyone. Finally, he said, “She looks like a kid, Sara.”
    “I know.”
    “Somebody’s missing her,” he said. “She didn’t just run away.”
    Sara was silent. She had seen too many secrets revealed during an autopsy to make a snap judgment about the girl. There could be any number of circumstances that had brought her to that dark place in the woods.
    “We put out a wire,” Jeffrey said. “Statewide.”
    “You think she was transported?” Sara asked, surprised. For some reason, she had assumed the girl was local.
    “It’s a public forest,” he said. “We get all kinds of people in and out of here.”
    “That spot, though…” Sara let her voice trail off, wondering if there was a night last week when she had looked out her window, darkness obscuring the girl and her abductor as he buried her alive across the lake.
    “He would want to check on her,” Jeffrey said, echoing Sara’s earlier thoughts about the girl’s abductor. “We’re asking