Laughing, she threw a file folder at him as he closed the door.
She sat sorting photos in piles like a deck of cards and was still smiling when he came back in five minutes later.
Without looking up, she said, “I smell smoke! Cigarette smoke!”
When he didn’t answer with some retort, she glanced up.
One look at his face and her smile vanished.
He stood frozen at the door, looking at her square in the face.
“What? What happened?”
“Hailey, they found another body.”
She said nothing, just looked back down at the piles and piles of photos.
“It was off Stewart Avenue again. No robbery, same MO, possibly posed manual strangulation, stab wound lower back. Victim partially clothed, mouth and nose full of dirt.”
She swallowed hard, and nodded.
“They’re processing the scene now,” Fincher told her. “Body may be too decomposed to get a DNA match at this point. Looks like it went down sometime after midnight on Friday. No ID on the girl yet. In her twenties, though, they think. Should we head on over and make sure they don’t ruin the crime scene?”
Hailey couldn’t speak, the image of another horrific torture-murder scene creeping into her brain like green mold edging over bread in the fridge. Then there would ultimately be the discovery of the victim’s identity, the late-night visit to her family’s home to tell the next of kin.
What would they find this time? Kids waiting for Mom to come home? A family? Or would there be just another middle-aged or elderly woman rushing to answer their knock, peering through the screen door, wondering where her daughter had been the last few nights?
And the look on the women’s faces when Fincher flashed his badge…
They always knew at that point.
They knew their daughter was dead as soon as they saw the badge.
“Come on, Jezebel. Let’s go.”
Hailey stood and, still without a word, began packing up photos.
Fincher watched her from the door. His radio began crackling again. More news from the crime scene, no doubt. He didn’t answer, standing rooted at the doorway. Then he propped the door open with the chair he had been sitting in, and got down on his knees. Together, they packed their bags.
They left the jail in silence.
The sun was setting and the tall, slender lights lining Atlanta’s streets suddenly clicked on in front of them, lighting up the roadway as far as they could see.
He was out there, laughing, probably. Maybe he was going to work, maybe just coming home. Maybe he was at a movie with his wife or watching TV with his kids.
Or maybe he was cruising the strip at that very moment, stalking the next girl who would die with her neck mangled and twisted…the skin on her back ripped by vicious puncture wounds.
Then suddenly, Hailey was standing by the side of the highway, watching the taillights of the county cruiser disappear into the Atlanta night. Fincher faded into the traffic as the dream scene flickered in and out, and then faded out of her mind.
The real-life smell in the holding pen still assaulted her nostrils.
But then it all morphed into one heavy, cloying scent. A familiar scent.
Carnations.
Carnations not found in nature, but the kind that were over-treated in florist shops for maximum aroma value.
Everywhere she looked in the dream, carnations surrounded her, nauseating her with their sickly sweet smell.
Through the doorway was an open room and in that room were even more carnations: pale pink, yellow, white, blankets of them, arrangements of all shapes and sizes, sitting in vases on every possible stick of furniture.
Trapped, desperate for fresh air, Hailey looked for a doorway.
She found one and peered into the room and stepped in. Her eyes widened and her heart stopped.
The room whirled around her.
There was Will, lying dead and made up in heavy funeral home makeup to cover the bullet wounds to the side of his face.
His face. Asleep? No, dead. Will was dead.
The smell of carnations closed in on her, choking out the fresh air and suffocating her with a deadly overdose of funeral perfume. She gasped it in, sucking in the flowery smell as hard as she could for any trace of oxygen, but there was none-
“Dean!” Her name rang out.
No answer. Hailey’s head was still slumped on her shoulder, her eyes closed.
“Dean! Answer up! Hailey Dean!” A female bailiff barked her name at the entrance of holding. She was holding a clipboard in her left hand, staring down at the pages of a computer printout to make sure a Ms. Hailey Dean had not already left the cell.
“Hailey Dean…where are you?”
It took a moment for Hailey’s head to clear…to realize this wasn’t just more of a bad dream. The dream was over. She truly was in the bowels of a Manhattan holding cell.
Hailey rose from the bench, weak-kneed. A stabbing pain shot through her ribs as she spoke. “I’m Hailey Dean.”
“Let’s go. This ain’t no garden party, Missy. They want you upstairs an’ I got to take you.”
Hailey stepped carefully over several women sleeping it off on the filthy linoleum-tiled floor.
Making her way out through the others, it hit her that the smell no longer nauseated her.
She’d take a packed holding cell any day over the sick, sweet scent of death and funeral home carnations.
53
New York City
THE FEMALE WARDEN WAS TIGHT BEHIND HAILEY, LIGHTLY TOUCHING her shoulder as they walked single file down a worn, pale-beige institutional corridor.
“Left,” the warden called out, and Hailey turned into an interrogation room. She naturally and immediately took in the lay of the land. In lieu of a window, a long, wide, seamless mirror covered one of the walls.
Hailey was seated in a metal folding chair. She looked around. These four walls had seen it all, and it showed, in layer upon layer of semi-gloss paint jobs. Hours of interrogations, confessions, threats, denials, hushed whispers between lawyer and client, witnesses, victims…it all played out between these four walls.
Now it was Hailey’s turn…forced to match wits with some of the best homicide detectives in the business, skills honed by years of working the streets and solving the unsolvable.
But so are yours, she reminded herself.
She wasn’t shackled, so she got up and walked over to the two-way mirror. It covered the entire length of the interrogation room’s wall, from the chair rail up to the low-hung ceiling of industrial perforated squares. The detectives were undoubtedly leisurely kicked back in worn chairs on the other side. She decided to spoil their fun and chose a straight-back office chair, setting her back squarely against the mirror, keeping her face hidden from their view.
She looked straight ahead at the opposite wall, taking in the blank expanse covered in peeling beige paint. They’d be so disappointed they couldn’t watch her face as she sweated it out…no nail-biting, wringing of hands, fidgeting, let alone crying for them to enjoy. Nothing. Just the back of her head.
But forget the goons on the other side. How the hell was she going to get out of this mess?
Think…think…think…
Her mind kept churning over bits and pieces. It all had to be connected.
Crumpled up on the floor of Dana’s office with the carpet rough on her cheek while she took a manic beating from…whom? And why? Just before she had passed out, she was sure she’d heard a voice.
It was low and soft, almost a hiss…drifting out of the grayness closing in around her, familiar.
But as hard as she struggled, she couldn’t remember what it had said or place who it was. It remained just a voice-angry, evil, spit out close to her ear there on the carpet.
Reliving the night of the attack was getting her nowhere fast. She could worry about her aching ribs and the break-in later. She hadn’t even been able to process it all, much less to mourn the loss of two patients.