“I know who this douche is.”
Will extended his hand. “I’ve heard a lot about you.”
Emma hiccupped. Zeke glowered. He didn’t shake Will’s hand.
Will tried for light conversation. “I’m glad that your mother’s okay.”
He kept glowering. Emma hiccupped again. Will felt bad for the man. As the owner of a Chihuahua, he knew the difficulties of acting tough while holding something impossibly tiny in your hand.
Jeremy saved them from their staring contest. “Hey, Will. Thanks for coming.”
Will shook his hand. He was a scrawny-looking kid, but he had a strong grip. “I hear your grandma’s doing better.”
“She’s tough.” He draped his arm around Faith’s shoulders. “Just like my mom.”
Emma hiccupped.
“Let’s go, Uncle Zeke.” Jeremy grabbed him by the elbow. “I told Grandma we’d move my bed downstairs so Mom can take care of her when she gets out of the hospital.”
Zeke took his time breaking eye contact. Emma’s continued hiccups probably had something to do with his decision to follow his nephew down the hall.
“Sorry,” Faith apologized. “He can be a bit of an asshole. I don’t know how it happened, but Emma loves him.”
Probably because she couldn’t understand a word he said.
Faith asked, “Do you want to go ahead and talk to Mom?”
“I was just here to check on you.”
“She’s already asked for you a couple of times. I think she wants to talk about it.”
“She can’t talk about it with you?”
“I’ve got the gist. There’s no reason for me to know the gory details.” She forced a smile onto her face. “Amanda told her that she promised you an hour.”
“I didn’t think that’d actually happen.”
“They’ve been best friends for forty years. They keep each other’s promises.” She patted his arm again and started to leave. “Thanks for coming.”
“Wait.” Will reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out the envelope that had come in the mail this morning. “I’ve never gotten a letter before. I mean, other than bills.”
She studied the sealed envelope. “You didn’t open it.”
Will didn’t need to. She would never know how much it meant to him that she’d known that he could read the letter. “Do you want me to open it?”
“Hell no.” She snatched it out of his hand. “It’s bad enough Zeke and Jeremy saw those videos I made. I had no idea I was such an ugly crier.”
Will couldn’t disagree.
“Anyway.” She looked down at her watch. “I need to take my insulin and eat something. I’ll be in the cafeteria if you need me.”
Will watched Faith walk down the hallway. She stopped in front of the elevator and looked back at him. While he was watching, she tore the letter in two, then tore it again. Will saluted her, then pushed open the door to Evelyn’s room. Almost every surface was covered with flowers of all kinds. Will felt his nose start to itch from the heavy perfume smell.
Evelyn Mitchell turned her head toward him. She was lying in bed. Her broken leg was elevated, Frankenstein bolts jutting out of a hard cast. Her hand rested on a foam wedge. Gauze was packed where her ring finger should’ve been. Tubes ran in and out of her body. The gash on her cheek was held together with white butterfly tape. She looked smaller than he remembered, but then, what she had been through was the sort of thing that could reduce a person.
Her lips were chapped and raw. She held her jaw still, talking with as little movement as possible. Her voice was stronger than he’d imagined it would be. “Agent Trent.”
“Captain Mitchell.”
She showed him the trigger for the morphine pump. “I’ve held off on this because I wanted to talk to you.”
“You don’t have to. I don’t want to cause you any more pain.”
“Then please sit down. It hurts my neck to look up at you.”
There was already a chair pulled up beside her bed. Will sat down. “I’m glad that you’re well.”
Her lips barely moved. “Well is a bit down the road. Let’s just say I’m hanging in there.”
“Beats the alternative.”
She said, “Mandy told me about your part in all of this.” Will assumed that had been a very short conversation. “Thank you for looking out for my daughter.”
“I think you get more credit for that than I do.”
Her eyes watered. He wasn’t sure whether it was from pain or the thought of losing Faith.
And then he remembered that she had lost another child, too. “I’m sorry for your loss.”
She swallowed with obvious difficulty. The skin on her neck was nearly black with bruises. Evelyn Mitchell had been forced twice now to choose between her family with Bill Mitchell and the son she’d had with Hector Ortiz. Both times, she had made the same decision. Though Caleb had made it pretty easy for her the last time.
She said, “He was a very troubled young man. I didn’t know how to make it better. He was so angry.”
“You don’t have to talk about it.”
A gravelly chuckle came from her throat. “No one wants me to talk about him. I think they’d rather he just disappear.” She indicated the cup of water on the table. “Could you—”
Will picked up the cup and angled the straw so that she could drink. She couldn’t lift her head. Gently, Will reached around and supported her.
She drank for almost a full minute before releasing the straw. “Thank you.”
Will sat back down. He stared at the bouquet of flowers on the table across from him. There was a business card attached to the white bow. He recognized the logo from the Atlanta Police Department.
Evelyn said, “Hector was a CI.” Confidential informant. “He snitched on his cousin. They were in this gang, and it had started as something small, a reason to break into cars and snatch purses so they could play video games, and then it got really mean really fast.”
“Los Texicanos.”
She nodded slowly. “Hector wanted out. He kept talking and I kept listening because it was good for my career.” She waved her good hand in the air. “And then one thing led to another.” Her eyes closed. “I was married to an insurance salesman. He was a very kind man and a very good father, but …” Breath stuttered through her lips as she sighed. “You know how it is when you’re out there in the street chasing down bad guys and your heart is pounding and you feel like you’ve got the whole world bucking between your legs, and then you go home and—what?—cook dinner? Iron shirts and give the kids a bath?”
“Were you in love with Hector?”
“No.” She was firm in her answer. “Never. And the strange thing is, I didn’t realize how much I was in love with Bill until I had hurt him so badly that I was going to lose him.”
“But he stayed with you.”
“On his terms,” she told him. “I was out of the negotiations by then. He met with Hector. They came to a gentleman’s agreement.”
“The bank account.”
She turned her gaze toward the ceiling. Slowly, her eyes closed. He thought she had fallen asleep until she started talking again. “Sandra and Paul had a lot of debt from helping her family back home. They couldn’t afford a child, even if they could’ve had one of their own. Part of the money in the account was from Hector. Part of it was from me. Ten percent of every paycheck I got went to Caleb. It was like tithing, only not for the church—but still for penance.” The corner of her mouth went up slightly in something like a smile. “Though I suppose that Sandra gave a lot of that money to the church every week. They were very religious. Catholic, but that didn’t bother me like it bothered Bill. I thought they would give him a strong moral foundation.” The sound of laughter came from her mouth. “So much for that.”
“Caleb found out about you when Sandra got sick?”
She looked at Will. “I got a call from her. She sounded like she was warning me, which didn’t make sense at the
time, so I ignored it. The first time I saw him as a grown man was at her funeral.” She shook her head at the memory. “God, he looked just like Zeke at that age. More handsome, if you want to know the truth. More angry, which was the problem.” Her head kept moving side to side. “I didn’t see how angry he was until it was too late. I had no idea.”
“Did you talk to Caleb at the funeral?”
“I tried to start a conversation, but he just walked away. A few weeks later I was cleaning the house and I noticed things were out of place. My office had been searched. He did a very good job. I wouldn’t have noticed if not for the fact that I was looking for a particular thing.” She explained, “I kept a lock of his baby hair hidden somewhere the children didn’t know about. I went to look for it, and it was gone. I should’ve known then. I should’ve realized how obsessed he was with me. How much he hated me.”
Evelyn stopped to catch her breath. Will could see that she was tired. But still, she continued. “I called Hector to meet. We’d been in touch since Sandra got sick. There wasn’t much time to catch up. We’d go to a Starbucks down by the airport so nobody would see us. It was the same as before—all that hiding. All that sneaking around so that my family wouldn’t find out.” She closed her eyes again. “Caleb was constantly in trouble. I tried everything with him—even offered to give him money so that he could go to college. Faith’s struggling to help Jeremy with his tuition, and here I was offering this boy a full ride. He just laughed in my face.” Her tone turned sharp, angry. “The next day, I got a call from an old friend in narcotics. They’d picked up Caleb with some serious weight on him. I had to get Mandy to pull some strings. She didn’t want to. She said he’d been given too many chances already. But I begged her.”
“Heroin?”
“Coke,” she corrected. “Heroin would’ve been beyond my reach, but the coke we could work with. They knocked it down because we agreed to send him to rehab.”
“You sent him to Healing Winds.”
“Hector lives a few miles from there. His cousin’s boy had been at the facility, Ricardo. And Chuck was there. Poor Chuck.” She stopped, swallowing to clear her throat. “He called me at the beginning of this year to make amends. He’s been sober for eight months now. I knew that he was doing some counseling work at Healing Winds, and I thought Caleb would be safe there.”
“Chuck shared his story with them.”
“Apparently, that’s one of the steps. He told them about the money. And of course, even though Chuck assured them that I had nothing to do with it, they didn’t believe him.”
“It was Chuck in the hospital that day. He was the cop who asked Sara whether or not the kid was going to make it.”
She nodded. “He saw what happened to me on the news and came down to see if he could help. He didn’t stop to realize that with his record, no one would want his help. I’ve asked Mandy to try to smooth things over with his parole officer. It was really me who got him into trouble. My guys have always stood up for me, even when it wasn’t in their best interest.”
“Do you think Caleb thought you were on the take like the rest of them?”
She was obviously surprised by the question. “No, Agent Trent. I really don’t think he did. He had this preconceived notion of me as cold and uncaring, the mother who never loved him. He said that the only thing he’d inherited from me was my black heart.”
Will remembered the song that had been playing when Faith pulled up to her mother’s house. “ ‘Back in Black.’ ”
“It was his theme song. He kept insisting I listen to the words, though who the hell knows what all that screeching is?”
“It’s about taking revenge on the people who’ve given up on you.”
“Ah.” She seemed relieved to finally understand. “He played it over and over again on my kitchen radio. And then Faith came and the music stopped. I was terrified. I don’t think I’ve ever held my breath for that long. But they didn’t want Faith. Not Caleb’s crew, at any rate. Benny Choo told them that he would handle everything. He kept Ricardo back with him. The H inside him was much too valuable, but he told the other boys to take me and leave, so they did.”
Will wanted to be sure about the sequence. “Caleb was there at the same time as Faith?”
“He looked at her out the window.” Evelyn’s voice trembled. “I have never been so frightened in my life. Not before that, anyway.”
Will was more than familiar with that kind of fear. “What happened before Faith came? You were making sandwiches, right?”
“I knew Faith would be late. Those sessions usually run long. There’s always some jackass in the first row who wants to show off.” She was silent for a moment, collecting her thoughts. “Hector came to get me at the grocery store. He knew my routines. That’s the sort of man he was. He paid attention when you told him something.” She was silent a moment, perhaps in honor of her former lover. “He’d gone to visit Caleb at rehab and been told that he’d checked himself out. They don’t lock them down. Caleb just walked out. We shouldn’t’ve been surprised. I had already made some calls and figured out that Ricardo was getting himself mixed up in things that were not going to be good for any of them.”
“Heroin.”
She let out a slow breath. “Hector and I put it together as I drove him back to the house. We knew that Ricardo was working at Julia’s shop, just like we knew that nothing good was going to come out of any of these boys getting together. Folie à plusieurs.”
Will had heard the phrase before. It referred to a psychological syndrome where a group of seemingly normal people developed a shared psychosis when they were together. The Manson Family. The Branch Davidians. There was always an unstable leader at the center of the sickness. Roger Ling had called it the head of the snake. A man like Roger Ling should know.
Evelyn said, “Part of me wanted Faith to come home early. I wanted her to meet Hector, so I would be forced into explaining.”
“Did Caleb kill Hector?”
“I think it must’ve been him. It was sneaky, and cowardly. I heard the gun—you don’t forget the sound a silencer makes once you’ve heard it before—and I looked out into the carport. The trunk was closed and there was no one there. I didn’t think twice. Maybe I had thought this was going to happen all along. I scooped up Emma and took her into the shed. I came back with my gun and there was a man in the laundry room. I shot him before he could open his mouth. And then I turned around and there was Caleb.”
“You struggled with him?”
“I couldn’t shoot him. He was unarmed. He was my son. But I got the better of him.” She looked down at her wounded hand. “I don’t think he was expecting me to be so aggressively opposed to his trying to cut off my finger.”
“He cut it off right then?” Will had assumed it was part of a later negotiation.
“One of the other boys sat on my back while Caleb cut it off. He used the bread knife. He sawed it back and forth like you’d do with a tree. I think he enjoyed hearing me scream.”
“How did you get the knife away from him?”
“I don’t really know. It’s one of those things that happens without your thinking about it. Actually, I don’t remember much of what came next, but I do recall that other boy falling on top of me, and the feel of that knife going into his stomach.” She exhaled sharply. “I ran into the carport to get Emma and get the hell out of there. And then I heard Caleb screaming. ‘Mama, Mama.’ ” She paused for another moment. “He sounded like he was hurt. I don’t know what made me go back inside. It was instinctual, like with the knife, but that was self-preservation, and this was self-destruction.” She obviously still struggled with the memory. “I was aware of it—how wrong it was. I remember thinking quite clearly as I ran past my car and back into the house that this was one of the stupidest things I would ever do in my life. And I was right. But I couldn’t stop myself. I heard him crying for me, and I just ran back inside.”
She paused again for breath. Will could
see that the angle of the sun had changed so that it was shining into her eyes. He got up and tilted down the blinds.
She breathed out an exhausted-sounding “Thank you.”
“Do you want to rest?”
“I want to finish this, and then I never want to talk about it again.”
That sounded exactly like the kind of thing Faith would say. Will knew better than to argue. He sat down in the chair, waiting for her to continue.
Evelyn didn’t start back immediately. For a full minute, she just lay there, her chest rising and falling as she breathed.
Finally, she said, “For about three years after he was born, around once a month, I’d tell Bill and the kids I had to go do paperwork at the office. Usually it was a Sunday while they were at church, because it was easier.” She coughed. Her voice was getting raspier. “But I’d really go to the park up the street, and I would sit on that bench by myself, or if it was raining, I would sit in my car, and I would just cry and cry. Not even Mandy knew about it. I’ve shared everything in my life with her, but not this.” She gave Will a meaningful look. “You don’t know how hard it was for her with Kenny. She couldn’t give him children, and he wanted a family. His own blood. He was very insistent about that. Telling her about how I longed for Caleb would’ve been cruel.”
Will felt a little squeamish hearing something so personal about his boss. He tried to get Evelyn back to the day she’d been abducted. “Caleb tricked you to get you back into the house. That’s why you didn’t take Emma and leave?”
She was silent long enough to let him know that she was aware he was changing the subject. “You can’t fool someone who doesn’t want to be fooled.”
Will wasn’t so sure about that, but he nodded anyway.
“I ran into the kitchen. There was Benny Choo. Of course it was Benny Choo. Carnage everywhere. He was in his element. We had a bit of a struggle, which he won, mostly because he had help. He wanted the money. Everybody wanted the money. The place was filled with angry men demanding money.”
“Except Caleb,” Will guessed.
“Except Caleb,” she confirmed. “He just sat on the couch eating sandwich meat right out of the bag, watching them run around and tear apart my house. I think he loved it. I think it was the most fun he had ever had in his life—watching me sitting there, scared to death, while his friends ran around like chickens with their heads cut off looking for something that he knew wasn’t there.”