Triptych (Will Trent #1) - Karin Slaughter Page 0,80

window. She pressed her hand to his shoulder as she walked past him.

“Dr. Wagner.”

She sat behind her desk, saying, “Sorry I’m late,” the same automatic and meaningless way people say, “excuse me” when they bump into you.

He watched as she reviewed her phone messages, showing him the top of her carefully coiffed salt-and-pepper hair. Amanda was probably in her mid-fifties, a small woman, maybe five-three on a good day. Her attitude filled the room, and she walked with a swagger that rivaled a bullfighter’s. She wore a simple diamond ring on her wedding finger, though Will knew she wasn’t currently married. She had no children, or perhaps she had eaten them when they were young. Amanda was extremely private with her personal life—a luxury she didn’t afford others. Will thought of her time away from work the way he used to think of his schoolteachers crawling into their caves under the school building at night, lulling themselves to sleep with dreams of torturing their students the next day. Will imagined Amanda getting ready for work in the mornings; shaving her chest, tucking her tail, slipping her cloven hooves into her dainty size-six pumps.

“I suppose I should call you Dr. Trent now?” she said, not looking up from her messages.

Will had made himself busy during his mountain exile, knowing without a doubt that Amanda would eventually pull him from the Ep-worth office and put him back under her thumb. The correspondence school in Florida let him do the work online at his own pace, and the state recognized the criminology degree despite its dubious origins.

He told her the truth. “I was trying to make my pay grade too rich for your budget.”

“You don’t say,” she said, taking out a gold fountain pen and making a note on one of the messages.

Will glanced at the scar on his hand where Amanda had shot him with a nail gun. He told her, “Nice pen.”

She raised an eyebrow, sitting back in her chair. Almost a full minute passed before she asked, “Where is Two Egg, Florida, exactly?”

He fought a smile. He had chosen the school primarily for its ridiculous location. “I believe it’s near the picturesque Withlacoochee River, ma’am.”

She obviously didn’t believe a word he was saying. “Of course it is.”

Will was silent, a lobster being appraised in the tank.

She capped the gold fountain pen and placed it perpendicular to the blotter. “You’re not taping this, are you?”

“Not today, ma’am.” Will had a hard enough time reading typewritten documents, but his own handwriting was the kind of backward scrawl you’d find on the walls at the local kindergarten. Amanda was prone to giving out long lists of tasks. The only way Will could keep up with them was to record her so that he could take his time transcribing her words onto the computer. Two years ago, she had caught him red-handed in a meeting. Amanda hadn’t liked being taped without her permission and of course she had assumed Will was doing it for nefarious reasons. He would be damned if he told her about his reading problem, and even if he’d been inclined, Amanda had transferred him to the North Pole before he could get his snowshoes on.

“All right,” she said. “Tell me about your case.”

Will gave her a briefing on what little he had. He ran through the case files of the three girls he had found, said he believed two of them were connected. He told her he had read about Aleesha Monroe, the slain prostitute, on the GBIs daily report that highlighted crimes around the state. Following protocol, he had asked Lieutenant Ted Greer to be let in on the case and been assigned to Michael Ormewood, the lead detective. When he got to the part about Ormewood’s dead neighbor, Amanda stopped him.

“The tongue was bitten off?”

“I’m not certain how it was removed,” Will told her. “Perhaps if I had known you were going to be late this morning, I could have taken the time to discuss this with the coroner so that I would be better informed for this briefing.”

“Don’t whine, Dr. Trent. It doesn’t suit you.” Her tone was soft, conciliatory, but he could tell from her smile that he had been given a point in her scorebook. That he was even playing the game meant she had already won.

Amanda went back to the case. “The tongues weren’t taken from the scene in the previous crimes?”

“No, ma’am,” Will told her. “The first girl’s tongue wasn’t completely severed. The