Chapter 3
The problem with being a detective on forced medical-slash-admin leave was that your brain didn’t go on leave with you.
Haven knew this before she'd been sent home. She knew it the way she knew she drank too much coffee and couldn't watch television without also doing something else with her hands. She was not a person built for stillness. She’d tried stillness when she’d gotten home from the hospital.
She’d really tried, but stillness and she had looked at each other across the apartment for approximately forty minutes.
The term non-compatible had been batted around about a thousand times before she’d opened her laptop and started working, and she and stillness had not spoken since.
Her body, to be fair, had big opinions about the arrangement.
The headaches were the worst. Not really constant, but more like a silent business partner who showed up unannounced several times a day to remind you of its stake in the operation.
She'd learned quickly to recognize the warning signs.
The pressure building behind her right eye and the way the laptop screen would start to feel too bright were the biggest flags.
She had a system figured out when those two red flags started to flap.
Close the laptop, lie flat for twenty minutes in a dark room, drink water, feel personally attacked by the whole situation, and then get back up.
She’d done this four times today already, and it was only two in the afternoon.
The rib issue … well, she'd mostly made her peace with. It hurt when she breathed deep, it hurt when she laughed, and it hurt when she reached for anything above her shoulder, which meant it hurt at unpredictable times and intervals, but that pain she could deal with—or at least schedule her movements around it. The headaches had their own timing and agenda, and they didn’t bother to share that information. The bastards.
She had, in four days of unofficial work from her kitchen table, accomplished exactly and precisely one hundred percent of … nothing.
Not nothing-nothing. She'd built a canvas of sorts. Unsolved assaults on women in Davidson County going back three years, cross-referenced with Shelby Bottoms access points, the time of day, and victim profiles. She had a list, but most of the list had explanations.
Two entries didn't sit right with her. She pulled the pad of paper toward her again and flipped to the right page.
Both attacks were more than eighteen months old.
Both were written up as attempted robberies, and both had occurred within half a mile of the greenway's east trailhead.
She'd tried to pull the full incident reports but had hit the massive brick wall that admin leave built around a cop.
Being on leave throttled her database access because she had no active case number to run queries under.
Basically having no case number meant you had no key to fit in the lock opening the information gates.
The polite but firm system message in the middle of the screen was basically a badge check dressed up in software form.
No matter how you dressed it up … it sucked.
She needed someone inside to pull those reports for her. That meant she’d call in a favor from Delvecchio.
Delvecchio, her partner of four years, was a man who’d eaten half her lunch on at least sixty separate occasions and called it a tax.
“Haven. You’re on admin leave. You’ve got a concussion.”
“I know that, Del, that’s why I’m asking you to get this information for me.”
“I’m not doing that. Mike will have my ass. I can’t handle a reprimand.”
“Then don’t get caught.”
“Haven, I have kids, a family. I’m sorry, but I’m not jeopardizing my paycheck to go romping through cases that aren’t ours.”
“Del …” She knew he was right, but she needed that information.
“Haven, you’re practically part of my family. You know I’d do anything for you, except risk having an unpaid vacation. Can’t do it.”
“Fine.” She hung up without saying goodbye. Bitchy? Yep, but … she’d blame it on the trolls, hammers, and the need to do something.
She sighed and opened her laptop. There was another way in.
Slower, uglier, built out of public records requests and news archives and the obsessive cross-referencing that her brain did at two in the morning when the trolls and sledgehammers had receded into a dull echo.
It wasn't as good as the database, but it was something.
* * *
On day five, she found Mark Webb.
She found him from a neighborhood forum post and a Parks and Recreation complaint filed months ago by a woman who ran Shelby Bottoms regularly and had twice noticed the same man lingering near the east trailhead at odd hours. No follow-up on the complaint. Filed and forgotten.
She spent six hours on Mark Webb.
He was real. He existed. He had a DUI from four years ago, a prior for public intoxication, and he lived twelve blocks from the greenway.
He had no verifiable employment. He fit the profile she was building if you squinted at him the right way and wanted him to fit, which she'd been careful not to do.
She approached it the way she'd approach any suspect.
She built the case for him first, then built the case against him, then looked at what was left.
What was left was that he was a specific kind of pathetic that was different from dangerous.
He lingered near the trailhead in the mornings because there was a coffee cart that set up near the parking lot on weekdays.
There was also a woman who owned the cart who he found attractive.
She'd confirmed this with the coffee cart operator, a woman named Bette who knew him by name and said he was harmless, had a crush on her, and was a bad tipper.
Haven put her phone down. She carefully placed her head in her hands and groaned.
She’d spent six long, tedious hours on a dud of a dude with a crush and who was also a bad tipper.
She closed the laptop, lay flat for twenty minutes, once again feeling personally attacked by the whole situation, got over herself, and got back up.
* * *
Day six … she was running out of angles.
She'd mapped everything she could map without proper access. She'd reconstructed the attack from memory eleven more times, and each reconstruction gave her the same thing. A controlled, prepared, and practiced attack. Someone who’d done this before. Someone who’d stood in that specific dark section of the trail and waited and known exactly how long he had before the camera angle in the parking lot changed and exactly how far he needed to go.
She sat at the kitchen table with the notepad, and a mug of coffee going cold beside her, and looked at what she had.
It wasn’t enough. She had a face she couldn't describe well enough to be useful.
A smell she couldn't identify. A gesture or a mannerism?
That deliberate turn of her wrist, that look at her hand that she couldn't explain.
Two old incident reports she couldn't access, and a bad tipper who was not her guy.
She needed the incident reports.
She needed database access.
She needed, honestly, to not be sitting at her kitchen table on day six of admin leave with a headache and a cracked rib and the growing conviction that something was sitting right in front of her that she couldn't see.
But she wasn’t going to stop. She wasn’t on speaking terms with stillness anymore, and no, she wasn’t sorry she kicked that bastard to the curb. She refilled her coffee and opened the laptop again. No one could ever say she wasn’t persistent.
* * *
A news alert came through at 4:47 p.m. She almost didn't read it. She'd turned off most notifications because the constant buzz was its own headache contributor, but she'd kept the local news alerts running because she was a cop, and she couldn't not. The headline was two words and a location.
Body found. Shelby Bottoms.
She had the television on before she finished standing up.
Angela Porter. Thirty years old. Found this morning by a Parks and Recreation employee doing trail maintenance near the greenway's west connector path.
Police were investigating. No further details were available at this time.
A photograph filled the right side of the screen.
A woman with a bright smile at what looked like a birthday party, someone's arm cut off by the frame beside her.
Haven stood in the middle of her living room and watched the segment twice. Then she sat down slowly on the couch.
Dear God … could it be?
Haven shook almost uncontrollably. Could it be that he’d been there before Angela Porter?
Could it be that he'd been on that trail already, working it, and she’d come along in her running shoes and her planned three miles, and she’d been…
what? An interruption. An anomaly. Something that broke the pattern.
Could it be that he'd killed Angela Porter after he’d attacked her? That he'd come back to the trail and finished what he’d failed to do with her?
The robbery angle collapsed completely and finally, and she felt it go. She'd known it wasn't a robbery since she was sitting on the ground at 6:29 a.m. with the dispatch operator in her ear. But knowing privately and knowing with a body on the same trail system days later were different things.
She picked up her phone and called her sergeant.
Voicemail.
She called Delvecchio.
“I need you to watch the 4:47 news alert,” she said when he answered.
A pause. She heard him pull up something on a screen. Another pause, longer.
“Shit,” he said.
“Yeah.”
“Haven—”
“I know. I know. I just need you to go pull those two incident reports I asked you about, the ones from eighteen months ago near the east trailhead, and I need you to tell me if the victim profiles match Angela Porter … and me.”
Silence.
“Del.”
“You're going to make my life very difficult,” he said.
“I'm going to make your life very difficult if you don't.”
She heard him exhale. Heard keys. “Give me twenty minutes.”
She sat on the couch and waited. The news moved on to a segment about a road construction project on I-24. She muted it and watched the anchor talk without sound and thought about Angela Porter's photograph. The birthday party. The cut-off arm of whoever had been standing next to her.
Her phone buzzed. Delvecchio.
“Both female,” he said. “Both solo, early morning. Both on or adjacent to the greenway. But they were robbed and not hit over the head.”
She exhaled.
Del cleared his throat. “I just got Reyes’ upload.”
A longer pause. “Haven.”
“Tell me.”
“Head trauma, Blunt force.” She heard paper moving. “One other thing.”
“What?”
“She has a missing fingernail. Right index. Reyes thinks someone cut it off.”
She looked at her right hand. The four intact nails. The one missing snapped off in the asphalt when she'd gone down. The chip on the middle finger where she'd caught his sleeve.
Her hand.
He'd turned it over and looked.
“Del,” she said. Her voice came out steady.
She was proud of it. “I need you to go find every unsolved assault and homicide involving women on isolated trails or parking lots in this region for the last three years, and I need you to check every single autopsy report for a missing right index fingernail.”
“Haven, that's—”
“I know what it is.” It was homicide’s job, not theirs, but this was personal in a way that neither of them could deny. “Do it anyway. Please.” She paused. “And find Mike. Tell him I need him to call me. It’s important.”
She hung up.
The muted news anchor was talking about the weather now. Sunny through the weekend. She watched him point at the forecast map and thought about Angela Porter's family. Who was calling them right now?
She thought about the man on the trail. His gloved hands. His pale eyes. The way he'd looked at her nails like a man confirming a box was checked.
She didn't know yet what she had. A hunch, a pattern … something.
She picked up her notepad and wrote Angela Porter's name at the top of a fresh page and underlined it once. Then she went back and underlined it again.
Then she sat in the quiet apartment and waited for Delvecchio to call back. Her coffee went cold again.