Undone by Karin Slaughter Read Free Book Online

whole thing would fall apart in his hand.
    “Will Trent.”
    “It’s Lola, baby.”
    He felt his brow furrow. Her voice had the phlegmy rasp of a two-pack-a-day smoker. “Who?”
    “You’re Angie’s brother, right?”
    “Husband,” he corrected. “Who is this?”
    “This is Lola. I’m one’a her girls.”
    Angie was freelancing for several private detective firms now, but she had been a vice cop for over a decade. Will occasionally got calls from some of the women she had walked the streets with. They all wanted help, and they all ended up right back in jail, where they used the pay phone to call him. “What do you want?”
    “You don’t gotta be all abrupt on me, baby.”
    “Listen, I haven’t talked to Angie in eight months.” Coincidentally, their relationship had become unhinged around the same time as the phone. “I can’t help you.”
    “I’m innocent.” Lola laughed at the joke, then coughed, then coughed some more. “I got picked up with an unknown white substance I was just holding for a friend.”
    These girls knew the law better than most cops, and they were especially careful on the pay phone in the jail.
    “Get a lawyer,” Will advised, speeding up to pass a car in front of him. Lightning cracked the sky, illuminating the road. “I can’t help you.”
    “I got information to exchange.”
    “Then tell that to your lawyer.” His phone beeped, and he recognized his boss’s number. “I have to go.” He clicked over before the woman could say anything else. “Will Trent.”
    Amanda Wagner inhaled, and Will braced himself for a barrage of words. “What the hell are you doing leaving your partner at the hospital and going on some fool’s errand for a case that we have no jurisdiction over and haven’t been invited to attend — in a county, I might add, where we don’t exactly have a good relationship?”
    “We’ll get asked to help,” he assured her.
    “Your woman’s intuition is not impressing me tonight, Will.”
    “The longer we let the locals play this out, the colder the trail is going to get. This isn’t our abductor’s first time, Amanda. This wasn’t an exhibition game.”
    “Rockdale has this covered,” she said, referring to the county that had police jurisdiction over the area where the car accident had occurred. “They know what they’re doing.”
    “Are they stopping cars and looking for stolen vehicles?”
    “They’re not completely stupid.”
    “Yes, they are,” he insisted. “This wasn’t a dump job. She was held in the area and she managed to escape.”
    Amanda was silent for a moment, probably clearing the smoke coming out of her ears. Overhead, a flash of lightning slashed the sky, and the ensuing thunder made it hard for Will to hear what Amanda finally said.
    “What?” he asked.
    She curtly repeated, “What’s the status of the victim?”
    Will didn’t think about Anna. Instead, he recalled the look in Sara Linton’s eyes when they rolled the patient up to surgery. “It doesn’t look good for her.”
    Amanda gave another, heavier sigh. “Run it down for me.”
    Will gave her the highlights, the way the woman had looked, the torture. “She must have walked out of the woods. There’s got to be a house somewhere, a shack or something. She didn’t look like she’d been out in the elements. Somebody kept her for a while, starved her, raped her, abused her.”
    “You think some hillbilly snatched her?”
    “I think she was kidnapped,” he replied. “She had a good haircut, her teeth were bleached white. No track marks. No signs of neglect. There were two small plastic surgery scars on her back, probably from lipo.”
    “So, not a homeless woman and not a prostitute.”
    “Her wrists and ankles were bleeding from being bound. Some of the wounds on her body were healing, others were fresh. She was thin — too thin. This took place over more than a few days — maybe a week, two weeks, tops.”
    Amanda cursed under her breath.