The Kept Woman (Will Trent 8) by Karin Slaughter Page B

his arms. He looked somewhere over Amanda’s head. ‘Outside my house. Parked on the street.’ He paused, and Sara hoped he was remembering what she had done to him before he left, because it was never going to happen again. ‘I was heading out for a run, and I saw her car. It’s a Chevy Monte Carlo SS, eighty-eight, black with—’
    ‘Red stripes. I’ve already put out a five-state APB.’ Amanda asked Will the question that was burning in Sara’s mind. ‘Why was she at your house?’
    He shook his head. ‘I don’t know. She saw me and she got back into her car and—’
    ‘She didn’t speak to you?’
    ‘No.’
    ‘She didn’t go inside?’
    ‘No.’ He caught himself. ‘Not that I know of. But she lets herself in sometimes.’
    Sara looked down at the evidence bags Faith had left on the ground.
    The lipstick.
    Sisley rose cashmere with a scratch down the side of the case. There was no manufacturing defect. This was Sara’s lipstick. She had left it at Will’s last month. In his bathroom. On the sink basin. They had gone out to dinner, and when she had looked for it later, it was nowhere to be found.
    In Angie’s purse. In her hand. Between her fingers. On her mouth.
    Sara felt nauseated.
    Amanda asked Will, ‘Do you know why she was parked outside your house?’
    He shook his head. ‘No.’
    Sara struggled to find her voice. ‘Did she leave a note on my car?’
    ‘No,’ Will said, but how could Sara trust him? They had gone to breakfast after his run. They had spent the day on the couch together and ordered pizza and fooled around and he’d had a million opportunities to tell her that the woman he had spent a year trying to locate had been parked outside his house that very morning. It’s not like Sara would have been angry. Irritated, maybe, but not at Will. She never blamed him for Angie’s bullshit. He knew that because Angie had caused problems for both of them countless times before.
    Which meant that the only reason for Will to hide the visit was because there was more to the story. Like that Angie had been inside his house. Like that she had stolen Sara’s lipstick. What else was Sara missing? Some hair combs. A bottle of perfume. Sara had blamed herself for misplacing things between her apartment and Will’s house, never once considering that Angie was stealing from her.
    And that Will knew.
    Amanda said, ‘Walk me through it. You come out your front door. You see Angie inside her parked car.’
    ‘Standing beside it.’ Will spoke carefully, as if he needed to think before he answered. ‘She saw me, knew that I’d seen her, but she got into her car and—’ He glanced down at the evidence bags. The Chevy ignition key. The old kind that might fit an ’88 Monte Carlo.
    He said, ‘I ran after the car, but she drove off.’
    Sara tried to block out the image of Will chasing Angie down the street.
    Amanda turned to Sara. ‘What note were you asking about?’
    She shrugged, like it was nothing, but it was everything. ‘Sometimes she leaves notes on my car. They say what you’d expect.’
    ‘Recently?’
    ‘The last one was three weeks ago.’ Sara was working her last shift as a pediatrician at Grady Hospital. A four-year-old had mistaken a bag of crystal meth for candy. The boy was in full cardiac arrest when the paramedics brought him in. She had tried for hours to save him. Nothing had worked. And then she had gone out to her car and found the words FUCKING WHORE written in dark eyeliner on her windshield.
    There was no question the missive was from Will’s wife. Angie had a disjointed cursive with F s that looked like J s and E s that resembled backward 3 s. The two letters appeared in just about every note she’d ever left, starting a year ago, the morning after the first night Will had spent at Sara’s apartment.
    Amanda asked Will, ‘Angie never left notes for you?’
    Will rubbed the side of his jaw. ‘She wouldn’t do that.’
    Sara looked down at the ground. He