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

who would not keep his hands off Angie. She had cried wolf before. She wasn’t the kind of girl the police listened to. At fourteen, she already had a record. So Will had taken arazor blade and cut open his forearm in a six-inch line up from his wrist because he knew that an emergency room visit was the one thing they couldn’t ignore.
    This wasn’t the first or last time he had risked his life for Angie Polaski. It had taken Will years to break the hold she had over him. But was that hold really broken? Was he just understandably upset that someone he’d known for almost the entirety of his life was probably dead?
    Sara could not stop going back to the lipstick. That’s all she could focus on, because the additional violations the lipstick signified were too much to handle. Will knew that Angie was breaking into his house. He could lay down his life for her, but he couldn’t be bothered to protect Sara’s privacy.
    She shook her head. At least she knew where she fell on his list of priorities: right behind Betty.
    Sara put her phone back in her pocket. She unhooked her glasses from her collar. The lenses were smeared. The building was insufferably hot. Everything was covered in sweat. She found a tissue in her pocket and rubbed the lenses with purpose.
    She supposed one good thing about picking up Betty was that Will would eventually have to come by and get her. Which was ludicrous. Why had Sara given him so much power? She was a grown woman. She shouldn’t feel like she was waiting for some boy to check yes or no on a note that she had slipped inside his locker.
    Sara checked the lenses. She squinted at a smudge, about to curse herself for ruining another pair of glasses when she realized the smudge was not on the lens. It was on the unicorn behind it.
    She slid on her glasses. She took a closer look. The unicorn was life-sized, if you could assume a unicorn was the same sizeas a horse. His head was tilted slightly as he gazed down the stairs. The creature’s rainbow eye was about her shoulder height. Centered on the green and blue stripe in his iris was a hole that was around the size of a dime. Specks of gray concrete were chipped out, which is what she had taken for a smudge on her lens. Sara looked down at the ground. Concrete dust covered cigarette butts and crack pipes. The dust had fallen recently.
    ‘Charlie?’ she called.
    He poked his head out of one of the rooms. ‘Yes?’
    ‘Can you come over here with your camera and some tweezers?’
    ‘That’s the most interesting proposition I’ve had all week.’ He went back into the room and came out with his camera in one hand and a CSU kit in the other.
    Sara pointed to the unicorn’s eye. ‘Here.’
    Charlie shuddered. ‘Two things that have always freaked me out: unicorns and eyeballs.’ He took a magnifying glass from the kit and leaned in for a better look. ‘Oh, I see. Excellent catch.’
    Sara stood by while Charlie photographed the pierced eye, using a small metal ruler to capture scale. He did the same with the dust below the unicorn, then changed lenses to get a wider view. When he’d finally documented the creature, he handed Sara a pair of needle-nose tweezers. ‘You do the honors.’
    Sara was mindful that she could do a lot more harm than good if she didn’t take her time. She was also mindful that she had never lost a game of Operation. She rested the heel of her hand just below the unicorn’s eye. She opened the tweezers just wide enough to still clear the sides of the hole in the iris. Slowly she inserted the blades until she felt something solid. Instead of opening the tweezers, shenarrowed them, fairly certain that there would be something to grip. She was right. The tip of the blades caught the flattened rim of what turned out to be a hollow-point bullet.
    Charlie said, ‘They shoot unicorns, don’t they?’
    Sara smiled. ‘Thirty-eight special?’
    ‘Looks like it.’ Charlie told her, ‘The G43 was unfired. The clip and