"No. I wasn't so stupid that I didn't understand."
"Understand what?"
"Before, he never left bruises where people could see them. That's how I knew it was over. He kicked my face so hard that my cheekbone fractured." She put her hand to her cheek. "You can't tell, can you?"
Faith looked at the woman's pretty face, her perfect skin. "No."
"It's on the inside," she said, stroking her cheek the way she probably soothed her children. "Everything Evan did to me is still on the inside."
WILL WALKED THROUGH the parking lot behind the Copy Right, feeling time start to crush in on him. Evan Bernard would be out of jail this time tomorrow. His accomplice was no closer to being identified. There were no clues to follow up on, no breaks on the horizon. The forensic evidence was a wash. The DNA would take days to process. Amanda was ruthless in her focus. She worked cases to win them, cutting her losses when she felt the odds stacking against her. Unless the four o'clock ransom call revealed something earth-shattering, she would soon start pulling resources, assigning priorities to other cases.
They thought Emma was dead. Will could feel it in the way Faith looked at him, the careful words Amanda chose when she talked about the teenage girl. They had all given up on her-everyone but Will. He could not accept that the girl was gone. He would not accept anything less than bringing a living, breathing child back to Abigail Campano.
He pressed the button beside the door and was buzzed in immediately. As Will walked down the hallway to the Copy Right, he could hear the high-pitched whir of the machines working at full speed. The construction crew on the street added to the cacophony, hammer drills and concrete mixers providing a steady beat. Inside the store, the plate-glass windows facing Peachtree Street were vibrating from the activity.
"Hey, man!" Lionel Petty called. He was sitting behind the front counter, his head bent over a paper plate that contained a very large steak and French fries. Will recognized the logo on the paper sack beside him as that of the Steakery, a fast-food place specializing in large portions of dubiously inexpensive meat.
"You got my phone call!" Petty said, obviously excited. "The construction crew came back this morning. I was shocked, man. Somebody must've screwed up their orders." He looked closely at Will. "Damn, man, you got creamed."
"Yeah," Will said, stupidly touching his bruised nose.
The noise level died down a bit and Petty stood up to check the machines.
Will asked, "The contractors-is it the same crew?"
He stopped at one of the copiers and began loading in reams of paper. "Some of them look familiar. The foreman's been coming in and out of the garage with his big-ass truck. Warren's pissed about it, but there's nothing we can do because we don't technically own the lot."
Will thought about what the manager had told him, how most of their customers never came to the building. "Why does he care?"
"The trash, man-all that litter. It's a matter of respect." He closed the machine and pressed a button. The copier whirred back to life, adding a deep hum to the chorus of spinning wheels and shuffling paper. Loud beeping came from outside as a Bobcat front loader backed into position to move the steel plates off the road.
Petty sat down in front of his meal. "The dust gets dragged all over the carpet. It's so fine that we can't vacuum it up."
"What dust?"
Petty cut into the meat, grease and blood squirting onto the paper plate. "The concrete they use underground."
Will thought of the gray powder. He glanced back at the construction workers. The Bobcat rammed its front shovel into the edge of one of the steel plates, revealing a gaping hole in the road. "What does it look like?"
Petty cupped his hand to his ear. "What?"
Will didn't answer. The hand at Petty's ear held a cheap-looking knife. The handle was wood, the grommets holding it together a faded gold. The blade was jagged but sharp.
Will tried to swallow, his mouth suddenly going dry. The last time he had seen a knife like that, it was lying inches from Adam Humphrey's lifeless hand.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
FAITH STOOD OUTSIDE the conference room door in Victor's building. Behind the glass, she could hear the low murmur of male voices. Her mind was elsewhere-back in Evan Bernard's apartment where he kept his pink vibrator and handcuffs in his little-girl bedroom. Were these the same devices he had used on a teenage Mary Clark? What were some of the sadistic things he'd gotten up to with the girl? Mary wasn't telling, but the truth was written all over her face. He had damaged her deeply in ways the other woman could not articulate-would probably never be able to articulate. It made Faith sick just thinking about it, especially when she was certain that Mary was just one of many, many victims the schoolteacher had targeted over the years.
Faith had called the resource officer at Alonzo Crim High School as soon as she'd made her way out of Grant Park. There was no record of the alleged rape that had forced Evan Bernard to leave his position. Mary Clark could not remember the girl's name-or at least she claimed not to. No charges had been filed against Evan Bernard, so the local precinct had no records of an investigation. Of the hundred or so current faculty members, none had been around during the time Mary Clark was being sadistically abused. There were no witnesses, no evidence and no accomplices in sight.
Still, somewhere out there was another person who knew exactly where Emma Campano was. Will seemed to think there was a chance that the girl was still alive, but Faith held no such illusion. If the killer had a living victim, he would have recorded another proof of life for the second call. This was all well planned out. Bernard was the calm one, the one who remained in control. The Campano house told them that the killer, Emma's abductor, was not similarly gifted. Something must have gone horribly wrong.
Faith had ripped open the envelope her gas bill was supposed to be mailed in and used it to store the yearbook photos of Kayla Alexander and Evan Bernard. She opened it now and looked at Evan Bernard's school photo. He was a good-looking man. He could have easily dated women his own age. Without prior knowledge, Faith would have dated him in a heartbeat. A well-educated, articulate teacher who tutored kids with learning disabilities? There had probably been women lined up at his front door. And yet, he had chosen the young girls who didn't know any better.
Just being in the teacher's house this morning had made Faith feel filthy. His barely legal porn and the painting of the young woman on his bedroom wall all pointed to his sick obsession. She was just as furious as Will that he would easily make bail tomorrow. They needed more time to build a case against him, but right now, the only thing they had to go on was a missing hard drive and a fingerprint that did not belong to their only suspect. And still, there was a nagging question in the back of Faith's mind: was Bernard the key to all this, or was he just a disgusting distraction from the real murderer?
Faith could well understand what a forty-five-year-old man wanted with a seventeen-year-old girl, but could not fathom what had attracted Kayla Alexander to Evan Bernard. His hair was going gray. He had deep wrinkles around his mouth and eyes. He wore suit jackets with corduroy patches at the elbows and brown shoes with black pants. Worse, he had all the power in the relationship, and not just because of his job.
By virtue of the fact that Bernard had simply lived longer than Kayla, he was smarter than her. In the twenty-eight years that separated their ages, he'd had garnered more life experiences, gotten more relationships under his belt. It must have been so easy for him to seduce the willful child. Bernard was probably the only adult in her life who encouraged Kayla's bad behavior. He would have made her feel special, as if he was the one person who understood her. All he would have wanted in return was her life.