He used his thumbnail to scrape out the blood. His skin was still pink. He shivered again from the cold. ‘She’s going to be alone.’

Amanda helped him into the jacket. ‘Wilbur, women like Angie are always going to be alone. No matter how many people surround them, they will always be alone.’

He knew that. He had seen it all of his life. Even when Angie was with him, she still held herself apart. ‘Do you think we have a case against her for letting Delilah die in the trunk of her car?’

‘With Jane Doe as our only witness? No security footage, no DNA, no incriminating fingerprints, no smoking gun, no corroborating testimony, no confession?’ Amanda laughed at the futility. ‘It’s Denny who’s going to suffer. I can keep him out of jail, but he’ll lose his job, his pension, his benefits.’

Will didn’t want to feel sorry for Collier, but he did. He knew too much what it felt like when Angie threw you to the wolves.

‘Let me get this.’ She tried to zip the jacket. She couldn’t get it closed past his chest. The bottom was too short. The waist hit him above his navel. ‘I’ll have to buy you another shirt before you go back out there. You look like a Filipino sex worker.’

She meant it as a parting shot, but he couldn’t let her go yet.

‘It’s never going to catch up with her, is it?’ He said, ‘The people she hurts. The damage she does.’

‘Trust me, Will. Life always makes you pay for your personality.’ Amanda gave him a rueful smile. ‘It catches up with her every single second of the day.’

Eleven Days Later—Saturday

FOURTEEN

Sara stood in her kitchen watching the noon news as she ate a bowl of ice cream. After eleven days of speculation, Ditmar Wittich was finally giving an interview. He sat with a scaled model of the scuttled All-Star Complex behind him, delivering a diatribe about how the project was still a good idea. He might as well have been speaking gibberish. The reporter clearly only cared about sentences that contained the words Rippy or Figaroa.

Wittich said, ‘The complex would bring thousands of jobs to the city.’

Sara muted the TV. Other than the German accent, she had no idea where Will got the Goldfinger reference. Wittich was much more of a Stromberg.

She dumped the rest of the ice cream into the sink. Probably not the best choice for lunch, but it beat daytime drinking. When she glanced back at the TV, the screen was split between Wittich and that video that was being called the Rippy Rampage. Sara wanted to look away, but she couldn’t. Hardly anyone in the world could. Someone at the GBI had leaked the file from Angie’s iPad. Amanda was on the warpath, which to Sara’s thinking meant she was probably the culprit.

Angie had been right that the video was damaging, though probably not for the reason she had assumed.

The film that Reuben Figaroa had made of himself and Marcus Rippy raping a drugged Keisha Miscavage had shattered internet viewing records. Unfortunately, all people could talk about was the last three seconds of footage when, off camera, a door is slammed open, a hand reaches out to swat Reuben’s iPhone away, and a woman screams the beginning of what is obviously the word motherfucker.

The blur of pink before the video goes black is almost lost to the naked eye, but slow down the frames and you can see the custom-crafted Italian leather stiletto kicking Keisha Miscavage’s head. The ostrich-skin shoe is dyed bright fuchsia. There is a gold R embroidered on the toe.

Will had recognized the shoe immediately. He had a thing for shoes. He remembered that LaDonna Rippy had worn the stilettos to the one and only interview her husband had submitted to during the rape investigation.

Marcus Rippy was freely giving interviews now. He’d turned on his wife, insisting that he and Reuben had just been having a little fun with Keisha Miscavage. The video backed him up. Keisha was drugged but showing no outward signs of injury before LaDonna entered the room. According to Marcus, it was LaDonna who had done the real damage.

So here was Will’s new case: LaDonna had beaten Keisha. LaDonna had choked her, punched her, strangled her over the course of five hours. LaDonna had left the bruises on Keisha’s back and legs and put her into a coma that had kept her in the hospital for a week.

The forensic evidence backed this up. LaDonna’s DNA had matched the sweat and saliva found on the victim’s body. Keisha’s DNA was found in the spots of blood on LaDonna’s pink shoes. The prosecution wasn’t open and shut—with the Rippys’ money, nothing was ever a sure thing—but there was also a documented pattern of behavior.

LaDonna Rippy was a jealous woman. Will had found three previous out-of-court settlements where victims had been paid for their silence. A woman in Las Vegas was still managing to tell her story despite LaDonna breaking her jaw and busting out her teeth. Another woman in South Carolina from fifteen years ago was shopping a tell-all book. There would be more, because there was always more. It seemed like Marcus Rippy’s wife was looking at serious prison time.

Whether or not Marcus was looking at the same was up to a jury to decide. The world could come up with all kinds of excuses when a man raped and beat a woman. Not so much when a woman was the one doing the damage.

Sara couldn’t let herself sink into this depressing quagmire again. She turned off the TV. She called up her song list and put on Dolly Parton. She kicked the vacuum into the kitchen. She rolled up her proverbial sleeves and started taking everything out of her cabinets so she could clean them.

This was back to her normal level of stress management, though Sara had spent plenty of time watching Buf f y on the couch and drinking way too much alcohol. Will had been tied up closing the Reuben Figaroa case and opening new ones against LaDonna and Marcus Rippy. His late nights and early mornings had him staying at his house so he wouldn’t deprive Sara of her sleep. They were depriving each other of much more than that. Yet another thing that was going wrong. Sara knew from her first marriage that the only sure-fire way to stop having sex was to stop having sex.

Not that sex would be any more than a temporary solution. There was still the larger issue of what had happened with Angie and Will and Will and Sara, and Sara couldn’t fix that on her own.

The phone rang. She bumped her head on a drawer. Sara let out some choice words as she reached for the phone on the counter.

‘It’s me,’ Tessa said. ‘I’m in a phone booth. We’ve got four minutes before my money runs out.’

Sara turned off the music. ‘Why are you calling from a phone booth?’

‘Because your precious niece dropped my cell phone down the hole in the outhouse.’

Sara covered her mouth to muffle the laughter.

‘Yeah, it’s really funny that my phone is encased in shit and I’m going to have to stick my hand down there and fish the fucking thing out.’ Tessa’s missionary work was more about helping people and less about watching her language. ‘I am literally in the middle of nowhere. I can’t just walk up to a Verizon store and buy a new one.’

‘Where is she now?’

‘Probably scribbling in my books and cutting up my clothes.’ Tessa sighed. ‘She’s with her father, who is making sure I don’t kill her. And don’t tell me I was just as bad when I was her age. I already got an earful from Mama.’