Triptych (Will Trent #1) - Karin Slaughter Page 0,17

a Martian from space. His silence was annoying, and he exuded an air of superiority, like he knew more than he was saying and thought it was some kind of joke that they couldn’t figure it out.

Michael asked him, “You got anything to add to this?”

“It’s your case, Detective,” Trent answered. He told Angie, “Thank you for your assistance, ma’am,” flashing what might have been a smile on someone less patronizing.

Angie looked at Michael, then Trent, then back at Michael. She lifted an eyebrow, asking a question Michael couldn’t answer. “Whatever,” she muttered, holding up her hand in the universal sign of dismissal. She turned her back on both of them, and Michael was too pissed to admire the view this time.

He asked Trent, “What’s your fucking problem?”

Trent seemed surprised by his tone. “I’m sorry?”

“You gonna just stand there all day or are you here to get your hands dirty?”

“I told you—I’m just here to advise.”

“Well, I’ve got some advice for you, Mr. Here to Advise,” Michael said, his fists clenching so hard he could feel his fingernails digging into his palms. “Don’t fuck with me.”

Trent didn’t seem threatened by the warning, but considering Michael had to crane his neck up to give it, this didn’t come as a complete surprise.

“All right,” Trent said. Then, as if that had settled everything, he asked, “Would you mind going to the Homes again? I’d really like to see the crime scene.”

CHAPTER FIVE

Everything Will Trent said and did grated on Michael’s nerves, from his “of course,” when Michael said he would drive to the way he stared blankly out the car window as they traveled up North Avenue toward the Homes. The GBI agent reminded him of those geeky kids in high school, the ones who kept slide rules in their breast pockets and quoted obscure lines from Monty Python. No matter how many times he watched it, Michael still didn’t get Monty Python and he sure as shit didn’t get geeks like Trent. There was a reason these guys got the shit beaten out of them in school. There was a reason it was guys like Michael doing the beating.

Michael took a deep breath, then coughed, his lungs still pissed about the cigarette. He thought about Tim, how his son wasn’t normal, how this attracted abuse from other kids. There was already a group of bullies at Tim’s school who had given him some grief—stealing his hat, flattening his sandwich at the lunch table. The teachers tried to stop it, but they couldn’t be everywhere all the time and some of them weren’t real happy to begin with about Tim’s being mainstreamed into their classrooms. Maybe Will Trent was Michael’s karma playing out. He was being tested. Be nice to this freak and maybe Tim would get the same kind of pass.

“Oh,” Trent said, pulling a small tape recorder out of his jacket pocket. “I’ve got the nine-one-one call.” He pressed the play button before Michael could comment. A tinny, high-pitched voice bleated from the small speaker, You gotta come to building nine at the Homes. They’s a woman being raped pretty bad.

Michael drummed his fingers on the steering wheel as he waited for a red light to change. “Play it again.”

Trent did as he was told, and Michael strained his ears, trying to hear background noise, to figure out the tone and tenor of the voice. Something was off, but he couldn’t put his finger on it.

“ ‘Raped’,” Michael echoed. “Not ‘killed’.”

Trent added, “The caller doesn’t sound frightened.”

“No,” Michael agreed, accelerating as the light changed.

“I would think,” Trent began, “if I were a woman, that I would be frightened if I saw, or even heard, another woman being attacked.”

“Maybe not,” Michael contradicted. “Maybe if you lived in the Homes, you would’ve already seen your fill of this kind of violence.”

“If that were the case,” Trent said, “then why would I report it?” He tried to answer his own question. “Maybe I knew the woman?”

“If you knew her, then you’d sound more upset than that.” Michael indicated the recorder. The caller had sounded calm, like she was reporting the weather or the score from a particularly boring game.

“It took over thirty minutes for the unit to come.” Trent didn’t seem to be making a condemnation when he pointed out, “Grady has the slowest response time in the city.”

“Anybody watching the news would know that.”

“Or living in the Homes.”

“We’ve checked everybody in the building, did door-to-doors that night. Nobody’s popping up with a