the recordings from the three months before and after Callie Zanger’s abduction.
He touched his finger under each word, checking for mistakes before uploading the request to the system. He sat back in his chair. The subpoena could take as long as four hours to get a judge’s approval. Then the lawyers would get involved. Another day might pass before the data was transferred. Streaming through over two thousand hours of video would take more eyes than Will had in his head.
He looked at the time. Amanda had called their meeting for seven sharp. He would ask her to put a rush on the subpoena. For now, he had eight minutes of peace before his day ramped up.
He allotted himself four minutes to worry.
First up was Faith. She had been gutted by the Callie Zanger interview. Will hadn’t been much better. The drive back to headquarters had been excruciating for both of them, Faith because she was trying not to cry, and Will because seeing Faith trying so hard not to cry had made him want to break things.
He craned his ear toward his open office door. Faith’s door was closed. She had arrived fifteen minutes ago. He could hear her poking around, but she hadn’t come by and he wasn’t sure she wanted to be bothered.
Will looked at the clock on his computer. One minute down.
He let his thoughts travel to the next woman he was worried about: Sara. The exhumation of Shay Van Dorne was not going to be easy. But that wasn’t all that was troubling him. They had both fallen asleep on the couch last night, Sara’s head like dead weight on his chest, but every time Will thought about the connection between them, his brain threw up the image of an extension cord lying two feet away from the socket.
Will couldn’t figure out a way to plug back in.
Sara had told him about the U-Store being across the street from the cemetery, and Will had believed her when she said that she hadn’t visited Jeffrey, but every time he found himself thinking about the Chief, he wanted to grab Sara, throw her over his shoulder, and lock her in a room like a caveman.
Or a serial killer.
Will picked at the Band-Aid Sara had wrapped around his knuckle. He had never thought of himself as the jealous type. Then again, Angie had never wholly belonged to him. She’d been screwing around since she was old enough to sneak out of a window. Will had been mildly irritated by her bad reputation, and furious about the syphilis, but he had found all kinds of ways to justify her non-monogamy. Angie had been damaged by so many men in her life. Sex was her way of stealing back some of that power. Will was the only man she had ever really loved. Or at least that’s what she had told him.
Being with Sara, knowing what love really felt like, had exposed the extent of her lie.
“Mornin’, hoss.” Nick sauntered into his office. “Meeting’s about to start.”
Will thought about punching him.
“Lookit, bud.” Nick sat down on the couch without being asked. “Can I be honest with you?”
Will turned his chair to face him. Usually, when someone asked if they could be honest, that meant they’d either been lying before or they were going to start lying now.
Nick said. “First time I heard you were hooking up with Sara, I gotta admit, I wanted to kill you so dead that even God wouldn’t look for your body.”
Will had never hooked up with Sara. “You could still try.”
“Nah, man, I can see where her heart is.”
Will didn’t know what to say, so he said nothing.
“You fuck it up, though …” Nick grinned like an angry clown. “Take a little advice from a dead man’s grave. Ain’t no woman on earth as good as the one you got right there in the palm of your hand.”
They locked eyes. Will ran through a few responses, but he figured throwing out a “no shit, hoss” was probably not going to keep this pissing contest at a draw.
He went with his old standard. He grunted, then nodded, then waited for Nick to leave.
Will’s eyes slid back to the time on his computer.
Nick had run up a one-minute deficit.
Faith’s office was on the way to the stairs. Will did the door-knock-walk-in thing to tell her it was time for the meeting. The words got caught in his throat.
Faith’s head was on the desk. Her face was buried