Triptych (Will Trent #1) - Karin Slaughter Page 0,127
making sense now. The first thing Aunt Lydia had done as his lawyer was sit John down and make him tell her everything about that night, everything that had happened. John had been terrified. He had told her the absolute truth, fuck whatever code of honor you were supposed to have about ratting out other kids. He told her about Michael tossing him the bag of what John thought was coke, about walking Mary Alice home and climbing through the window into her bedroom. He told her about the kiss, the way his brain had exploded like a rocket had gone off in his head. He told her about waking up the next morning lying in a pool of Mary Alice’s blood.
When John had finished telling her the story, Aunt Lydia had tears in her eyes. She took his hand—grabbed it, actually—so hard that it hurt.
“Don’t worry, John,” she had said. “I’ll take care of everything.”
And she did. The bitch certainly did.
Joyce was still looking at him, waiting. He could tell she was tired, maybe exhausted. Makeup couldn’t hide the dark circles under her eyes. Her shoulders were slumped in defeat. Still, John could not help but notice that she had stood here in her office talking to him for around thirty minutes without once yelling at him or accusing him of anything.
He asked, “Did they ever test the drugs? The white powder?”
“Of course. Lydia sent it to a private lab. Mom was on pins and needles for a week. They didn’t come up with anything unusual, though. It was cocaine and heroin.”
John felt a stabbing pain in his jaw. He had been clenching his teeth again.
“Johnny,” Joyce said, sounding tired. So tired. “Tell me.”
He closed his mother’s notebook, the last notebook she had used on his case, the last thing she had ever held in her hands that connected her to her son.
“Get Kathy back in here,” John said. “I think she needs to hear this, too.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
9:22 PM
Will sat in his office, trying not to twiddle his thumbs. He had paid a visit to Luther Morrison, Jasmine Allison’s…what? What did you call a thirty-year-old man who was having sex with a fourteen-year-old girl? Sick God damn bastard was what Will had decided on, and it had taken everything in him not to punch the animal in the face.
After that pleasant visit, Will had returned to City Hall East and caught up Amanda Wagner on the case. She hadn’t offered any staggering insight but neither had she taken him to task for not having a lot to say. Amanda could be demanding, but she knew a difficult case when she saw one.
The one thing she had told him was to not focus so much on the missing girl. Will’s case was the murder of Aleesha Monroe and how it connected to the other girls, not a runaway named Jasmine Allison. All he had was a ten-year-old boy’s story and a bad feeling, and while Amanda respected his gut instinct, she wasn’t about to waste time and resources based on either. She summed it up for him with her usual heartwarming pragmatism: the girl had a history of running away. She was dating a man who was twice her age. Her mother was in prison, her father was who knows where and most days, her grandmother couldn’t get out of a chair without assistance.
The only way this would be news is if she hadn’t run away.
The DeKalb cops hadn’t moved an inch on Cynthia Barrett’s case and they weren’t keen to share their notes with Will. The DNA obtained from the vaginal swab Pete had taken was too contaminated to test. Toxicology had not yet come back, but Will wasn’t holding his breath for a miraculous revelation.
As for Aleesha Monroe, Forensics had reported nothing more earth-shattering about her apartment than what Will had seen for himself: the place was remarkably clean. He’d even sent back the techs to test the spot he’d found in Monroe’s doorway the night Jasmine was reported missing. There had not been enough of a sample to determine anything other than the spot was human blood.
All Will had to follow now was the stack of papers Leo Donnelly had left on his desk. Will had counted out the pages so that he would know what was ahead of him. About sixty rap sheets, two or three pages each, all detailing the lurid crimes of the metro area’s recently released sex offenders.