down.’
‘You work the dead, we’ll find the living.’ Amanda turned to Will and Faith. ‘We’ve got a clock ticking. Our number one goal is to locate this woman, get her medical help, then find out what the hell she was doing here in the first place.’
Collier asked, ‘What about BackDoorMan.com? Does that bring in Rippy?’
‘That’ll be Harding’s kink,’ Will said. ‘Rippy has a definite type.’
Faith supplied, ‘Dark hair, smart mouth, killer body.’
Collier said, ‘His wife is a blonde.’
Faith rolled her eyes. ‘I’m a blonde. She’s a bottle.’
‘You can discuss hair color after we find the woman.’ Amanda told Collier, ‘Get that partner of yours to run missing personsreports submitted within the last forty-eight hours. Women, young, Rippy’s type.’ Collier nodded, but she wasn’t finished. ‘I need at least ten uniforms to check both warehouses and the office building. Call in a structural engineer on the building; it looks iffy. I want feet, not just eyeballs, on every single floor, every nook and cranny, no stone unturned. Our victim-slash-murderer could be bleeding out or hiding right under our noses. None of us wants to read that headline in the paper tomorrow morning.’
She turned to Faith. ‘Go to Harding’s place of residence. I’ll have the warrant signed by the time you get there. Harding called himself a private investigator. It makes sense that he was investigating a woman, possibly for Rippy. She could be another victim or she could’ve been blackmailing him for money, or both. Harding will have a file, photographs, notes, hopefully a home address for the girl.’
She pointed to Will. ‘Go with her. Harding can’t be living in luxury. There will be liquor stores, check-cashers, strip joints in his neighborhood. They’ll probably sell burner phones. Cross the IMEIs with any security footage to see if we can pin a phone number to Harding, then cross-reference the numbers against any that are linked to Kip Kilpatrick or Marcus Rippy.’
There was a chorus of ‘Yes, ma’am’s,’ all around.
Will heard metal scraping concrete. The scissor lift had brought Charlie Reed to the second floor. He had a grim look on his face as he approached them.
Amanda said, ‘Spit it out, Charlie. We’re already against the clock.’
Charlie fidgeted with his cell phone. ‘I got back the info on the Glock 43.’
‘And?’
Charlie kept his gaze glued to Amanda. ‘Maybe we should—’
‘I said spit it out.’
He took a deep breath. ‘It’s registered to Angie Polaski.’
Will felt a sudden tightness in his chest. He tasted acid on his tongue.
Dark hair. Smart mouth. Killer body.
There was a burning sensation on the side of his face. People staring at him. Waiting for his reaction. A bead of sweat rolled into his eye. He looked up at the ceiling because he didn’t trust himself to look at anything else.
It was Collier who finally broke the silence with a question. ‘What am I missing here?’ No one answered, so he asked, ‘Who’s Angie Polaski?’
Sara had to clear her throat before she could speak. ‘Angie Polaski is Will’s wife.’
TWO
Sara watched Will brace his hand against the wall to steady himself. She should do something—comfort him, tell him it was going to be all right—but she just stood there struggling against the usual spark of rage that accompanied any mention of his erratic, hateful wife.
Angie Polaski had been flitting in and out of Will’s life like a mosquito since he was eleven years old. They had grown up together at the Atlanta Children’s Home, both surviving abuse, neglect, abandonment, torture. Not all of this had come at the hands of the system. Of all the pains visited down upon Will during his adolescence, nothing compared to the torments Angie had put him through. Still kept putting him through, because it made a cruel kind of sense that they were all assembled here in this building with a pool of blood congealing