Will told Faith, "Keep them both right here," as he headed down the stairs.
Leo was standing in the front doorway, talking to one of the uniformed patrolmen. He asked Will, "What's going on?"
"Don't wait for Pete," he ordered, stepping over the body. "I need an ID on this guy right now." He found Abigail Campano's shoes in the parlor under the coffee table. The tread was a court zigzag, not a waffle pattern. Except for a couple of scuff marks on the toes, there wasn't a trace of blood on them.
In the foyer, Leo was taking a pair of latex gloves from his pocket. "The nosey neighbor across the street says she saw a car parked in the driveway a couple of hours ago. Could be yellow, could be white. Could be four doors, could be two."
Will checked the dead man's sneakers. Waffle pattern, dried blood caked in the tread. He said, "Give me those." Leo handed him the gloves and Will put them on. "You got your pictures, right?"
"Yeah. What's going on?"
Carefully, Will peeled up the dead man's T-shirt. The material was still soaking wet where it had bunched up at the waist, and it left an odd, pinkish hue on the exposed skin.
Leo asked, "You wanna tell me what you're doing?"
There was so much blood that it was hard to see anything. Will gently pressed the abdomen, and a narrow slit opened up in the flesh, black liquid oozing out.
"Shit," Leo hissed. "Did the mother stab him?"
"No." Will saw how it must have happened. The young man kneeling beside the body upstairs, a knife plunged into his chest. He would have pulled out the knife, arterial blood spraying over the dead girl's body. The man would've tried to stand, staggering to get help even as his lung collapsed. That's when Abigail Campano had appeared at the top of the stairs. She saw the man who had killed her daughter. He saw the woman who could possibly save them all.
Leo looked up the stairs, then back at the dead kid, finally understanding. "Shit."
Will snapped off the gloves, trying not to think about all the lost time. He went to the bloody bare footprint, saw that the weight had been on the ball of the foot when it was made. There was a small cluster of blood droplets on the bottom stair—six of them.
Will talked it out for Leo's benefit as much as his own. "Emma was unconscious. The killer carried her over his shoulder." Will narrowed his eyes, putting the pieces together. "He stopped here at the bottom of the stairs to catch his breath. Her head and arms were hanging down his back. The blood drops on the bottom tread are almost perfectly round, which means they fell straight down." Will pointed to the footprint. "He shifted her weight forward. Her foot touched the floor—that's why it's facing up the stairs instead of toward the door. After carrying her down the stairs, he had to readjust the body so that he could carry her out the front door."
Leo tried to cover himself. "The mother's story held up. There was no way I could—"
"It doesn't matter." Will glanced up. Abigail and Paul Campano were staring over the railing, watching, disbelieving. "Does Kayla have a car?"
Abigail spoke hesitantly. "She drives a white Prius."
Will took out his phone and hit the speed dial. He told Leo, "Try to nail down the old lady on the car—show her a photo array if you have to. Check all 9-1-1 calls coming out of the area in the last five hours. Get your guys to recanvass the neighborhood. There were a lot of joggers out earlier who are probably back home by now. I'll notify highway patrol; there's an on-ramp to the interstate less than a mile from here." Will put the phone to his ear just as Amanda picked up. He didn't waste time with pleasantries. "I need a team here. It looks like we've got a kidnapping."
CHAPTER TWO
EMMA CAMPANO'S BEDROOM was almost as big as Will's entire house. He hadn't had his own room as a kid. He hadn't really had his own anything until he turned eighteen and the Atlanta Children's Home gave him a pat on the back and a check from the state. His first apartment was a box, but it was his box. Will could still remember what it felt like to leave his toothbrush and shampoo in the bathroom without having to worry someone else would swipe them-or worse. Even to this day, there was a certain joy he felt from opening the refrigerator and knowing that he could eat anything he wanted.
He wondered if Paul got a similar feeling when he walked through his multimillion-dollar home. Did his chest puff out with pride when he saw the dainty antique chairs and the obviously expensive canvases that hung on the walls? When he locked the front door at night, did he still get that sense of relief that no one had managed to take it all away from him? There was no arguing that the man had made a good life for his family. With the pool out back and the screening room in the basement, you'd never guess he had spent his early years perfecting the role of a juvenile delinquent.
Paul had never been quick, but he was street smart and even as a kid, he knew how to make a dollar. Abigail was obviously the brains in the family. She was right behind Will in figuring out what had really happened that morning in the Campano home. Will had never in his life seen someone so stricken with horror as when the woman realized that she had probably killed an innocent man— worse, an innocent man who might have been trying to help her daughter. She'd become hysterical. A doctor had been called to sedate her.
Typical Paul, he was working the angles before his wife's head hit the pillow. He'd taken out his cell phone and made two calls: one to his attorney and one to his influential father-in-law, Hoyt Bentley. Ten short minutes later, Will's own cell phone had started ringing. Once again, the governor had contacted the director of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, who had pressed Amanda, and she in turn had pressed Will.
"Don't fuck this up," Amanda had told him in her usual supportive way.
The procedure in kidnapping cases was simple: have a cop with the family at all times and have the family by the phone for the ransom call. Even as the doctor stuck a needle in her arm, Abigail Campano had still refused to leave her home. There was a guest suite in the carriage house. After making sure the apartment was not part of the crime scene, Will had sent the parents there along with Hamish Patel, a GBI hostage negotiator. Paul had bristled about being assigned a babysitter, which meant he either had something to hide or thought he could control the situation without the police getting in his way.
Knowing the way Paul worked, it was probably a little of both. He had been so uncooperative during questioning that Will was actually looking forward to the lawyer showing up so the man could tell his client it was okay to give a straight answer. Or maybe Hamish Patel could work some of his magic. The hostage negotiator had been trained by Amanda Wagner when she'd led the GBI's rapid extraction team. He could pretty much talk the fleas off a dog.
Again following procedure, Will had put out an APB on Kayla Alexander's white Prius and issued a Levi's Call, Georgia's version of the Amber Alert, for Emma Campano. This meant that all the highway message boards in Atlanta as well as radios and television sets in Georgia would carry some sort of warning asking folks to come forward if they saw the car or the girl. Will had also set up traces on all the family telephones and cell phones, but he doubted there was a ransom call coming any time soon.
His gut told him that whoever had taken Emma Campano didn't want her for money. One look at Kayla Alexander told that story. The young woman had been beaten and raped by a sadist who had probably enjoyed every minute of it. There was only one reason to take a hostage from the scene, and it wasn't for cash. All Will could do at this moment was hope that he found something— anything—that pointed the way to the man before he killed again.