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

to never let Will go, but the truth was that things between them were never the same. She could never look at him again without seeing him as broken.
    The next time Will had felt that close to a woman was almost thirty years later.
    ‘Trent!’ Collier was at the end of the hall, bobbing like a Weeble Wobble. He winced as his fingers touched his ear. Blood streaked down the side of his face and neck.
    Will returned his handkerchief to his pocket. He pushed open another door, searched another room.
    Angie , he kept thinking. Where are you hiding?
    There was no use calling for her, because he knew that she would not want to be found. Angie was a wild animal. She did not show weakness. She slinked away to lick her wounds in private. Will had always known that when her time came, she would go off somewhere and die on her own. The same as the woman who’d raised her.
    Or at least tried to raise her.
    Angie was not even ten years old when Deidre Polaski injected her final not-fatal-enough overdose of heroin. The woman had spent the next thirty-four years in a vegetative coma inside a state-run hospice facility. Angie had once told Will that she wasn’t sure which was worse: living with Deidre’s pimp or living at the children’s home.
    ‘Trent!’ Collier braced his hands against the wall. Spit drooled out of his mouth. ‘Jesus Christ. What the fuck did you hit me with, a sledgehammer?’
    Will struggled against his guilt, forcing himself not to apologize. He pushed open the next door. He felt his stomach clenchas his eyes scanned what was left of the bathroom. The floor had rotted through. Broken toilets, sinks and pipes had crashed to the level below.
    There was another metal storage cabinet on the other side of the hole. Doors closed. Could Angie be inside? Would she cling to the wall, edging her way to the other side of the room so she could close herself off and wait to die?
    Collier said, ‘You’re not going in there.’ He stood behind Will, his hand covering his bloody ear. ‘No kidding, man. You’ll fall to your death.’
    Will took out his handkerchief and handed it to him.
    Collier hissed a curse as he put the cloth to his ear. ‘That cabinet’s a foot wide, dude. How thin is this chick?’
    ‘She could fit in there.’
    ‘Sitting down?’
    Will imagined Angie sitting in the cabinet. Eyes closed. Listening.
    Collier said, ‘Okay, this chick is hurt, all right? Real bad. She has all these other rooms to choose from, but this is the one she goes into, the one with the giant hole in it. How’s she even gonna get over there?’
    He had a point. Angie wasn’t athletic. She hated sweat.
    Will turned around. He went into the bathroom across the hall.
    Again Collier watched him from the doorway, arms folded, leaning against the jamb. ‘They told me you were a stubborn prick.’
    Will kicked open a stall door.
    ‘I guess you got your ass handed to you by the good doctor?’
    ‘Shut up.’ Will heard the echo of Sara saying the same two words a few hours ago. He’d never seen her that mad before.
    Collier said, ‘What’s your secret, man? I mean, no offense, but Brad Pitt you ain’t.’
    Will grabbed Collier’s shirt and moved him out of the way.
    Angie wasn’t on this floor. Six more to go. Will headed toward the stairs and started the climb to the next level. Was he doing this the wrong way? Should he have started at the top floor instead of the bottom? Was there an attic in this place? A top-floor C-suite with a panoramic view?
    Tactically, higher ground was always better. The office building was right across the street from Rippy’s club. Angie could’ve been watching the whole time. She would’ve seen the patrol car roll up, the fire department, the crime scene vans, the detectives, all of them spinning their wheels trying to figure out what the hell was happening while Angie was up on the tenth floor the entire time laughing her ass off.
    Or bleeding to death.
    Will passed the fifth floor, the