Fractured by Karin Slaughter Page B

had her own designer bag and Visa card. She certainly had a cell phone somewhere.
    He sat back on his heels, feeling like he was missing something. Will had searched the room in a grid pattern, sectioning each piece, even digging his gloved fingers into the shag carpet under the bed and finding nothing more startling than a piece of Jolly Rancher watermelon candy that crinkled under his touch. He had checked under furniture and felt along the bottom of drawers. He'd flipped all the rugs over.
    Nothing.
    Where had Emma been while Kayla was being attacked? What had the girl been doing while her best friend was possibly being raped, certainly being beaten and murdered? Was Will looking at this the wrong way? Having often been on the receiving end of Paul's anger at the children's home, Will knew firsthand that the Campano blood ran pretty hot. Did that sort of thing skip a generation, or was it passed down directly? The mother had said that her daughter changed lately, that she had been acting out. Could she have been involved in Kayla's murder? Was Emma not a victim but a participant?
    He looked around the room again-the stuffed teddy bears, the stars on the ceiling. Will would certainly not be the first man who had been fooled by the stereotype of an angelic young woman, but the scenario that called for Emma being one of the bad guys didn't feel right.
    Suddenly, he realized what was missing. The walls were bare. Emma's room had obviously been professionally decorated, so where was the art, the photographs? He stood up and checked for nail holes where pictures had hung. He found five, as well as scratches where frames had scraped the paint. He also found several pieces of tape that on close inspection revealed torn pieces of the posters from the closet. He could easily imagine Abigail Campano being outraged to find a picture of a breast-augmented, genitalia-neutral Marilyn Manson marring this otherwise perfect girl's room. He could also see a teenage girl taking down all the framed art the decorator had chosen in retaliation.
    "Trent? When you have a minute?"
    Will stood, following the sound out into the hall.
    Charlie Reed, a crime-scene tech who had worked for Amanda almost as long as Will, was at the end of the hallway. Now that the body had been removed, the man was cleared to go about the careful cataloguing of blood and evidence. Dressed in the special white body suit to prevent cross-contamination of the scene, Charlie would spend the next several hours on his hands and knees going over every square inch of the scene. He was a good investigator but his resemblance to the cop in the Village People tended to put people off. Will made a point of specifically requesting Charlie on all his cases. He understood what it meant to be an outsider, and how sometimes it made you work even harder to prove people wrong.
    Charlie pulled down his mask, revealing a finely sculpted handlebar mustache. "This was under the body." He handed Will an evidence bag containing the broken, bloody guts of a cell phone. "There's a shoe print on the plastic that's similar to the print we found downstairs, but not the shoe we found on the second victim. I'd guess our abductor nailed it with his foot, then the girl fell on it."
    "Was there a transfer pattern on the body?"
    "The plastic cut open the skin on her back. Pete had to peel it off for me."
    Through the bag, Will made out the shattered phone. Still, he pressed his thumb on the green button and waited. There was no power to the device.
    "Switch out the SIM card in your phone," Charlie suggested.
    "Sprint," Will told him, recognizing the silk-screened logo on the back of the silver phone. The phone didn't use a SIM card. The only way to access any information stored on the device would be to have a technician hook it up to a computer and pray. Will said, "It must belong to either the kid downstairs, Kayla or somebody else."
    "I'll rush it through the lab once we get prints," Charlie offered,