than usual. She had even put on lipstick.
If Will had noticed these things when Sara had first walked into his office, maybe he wouldn’t have had to tell her that Angie’s idea of a good time was antagonizing him into fucking the shit out of her.
“I’ll see you there.” Sara stroked his face one more time before leaving.
Will stared at the back of the door long enough that the blood on his desk congealed. He gathered his notes. Out of habit, he reached for his jacket off the back of his chair. He tried to re-center his thoughts on the case. Lena Adams. Gerald, Beckey and Heath Caterino. He was going to have to talk about them. In front of other people. People who knew him. Some of whom knew about his reading issue.
Amanda never asked Will to lead briefings. She usually let Faith take the lead because Faith loved taking the lead. He didn’t know if Amanda was punishing him for not dressing professionally or if she was calling on him the way his teachers used to call on him because they thought they were helping Will come out of his shell when in fact what they were doing was exposing him to his worst nightmare.
He looked for Faith in the hall. Then in her office. He found her in the kitchen getting a cup of coffee.
He said, “Sorry about that.”
“About what?”
Which was how they were going to leave it.
Will followed Faith into the squad room. She sat at one of the desks in the front row. Will felt like he needed to recalibrate his opinion of what they could talk about. Not that they had talked about anything last night. When he’d knocked on Faith’s door, she hadn’t asked him what the hell he was doing there. She had fed him a gallon of ice cream and beat his ass up and down Vice City until midnight.
“’Sup?” Charlie Reed took a seat beside Faith. Rasheed was next. He came in carrying two cups of coffee that apparently were not meant to be shared. Gary Quintana, Sara’s assistant, joined them on the front row, all lined up like teacher’s pets.
Will leaned his back against the wall. He was not a teacher’s pet.
“Mornin’, bud.” Nick Shelton clapped Will on the shoulder as he passed by, doing that weird grip-pat thing again. His jeans were so tight that Will imagined he had to lie down on the floor to tug them on. Nick sat a few chairs away from Charlie. He opened up his tooled-leather briefcase that looked like it had been stolen from Patsy Cline.
“Hey.” Sara winked at him as she entered the room. Will watched her walk to the front row. She had pinned up her hair. He studied the graceful curve of her neck as she sat beside Faith. Sara gave her a one-armed hug that Faith seemed happy to return, a woman’s version of a fist bump to smooth things over.
Will guessed he should sit down, if only to avoid Amanda’s further ire. He took the desk in the row behind Sara, off to the side so he could see her profile. She was reading her notes. Her fingers absently twirled her hair.
He made himself look at something other than Sara.
The briefing room was a typical government rectangle with frayed carpet and a drop-ceiling that had dropped too many times. The floor-to-ceiling windows overlooked the parking lot. Water stains spotted the tiles. The desks were mostly squeaky or broken or both. The overhead projector was a relic that Amanda would not let go of. The television was the tube kind with a portable VCR the size of a wooden pallet. The only indication that they were living in the twenty-first century came from the four Smart Boards at the front of the room. The interactive displays could be hooked up to computers, tablets, even phones.
Will recognized Faith’s handiwork. She had projected Gerald Caterino’s murder closet across the four panels. Every photograph, printout, police report and notation that had been recorded on her phone was blown up onto the boards.
He still had no idea how Faith had figured out that Heath Caterino was Beckey’s child. The saliva on the back of Daryl Nesbitt’s prison envelope had proven Faith’s hypothesis. Gerald had shown them the DNA test results from the strip-mall lab that specialized in forcing men to pay child support. All of the genetic markers excluded Daryl Nesbitt from paternity. He was not Heath’s father, which meant he