Read Online Genesis by Karin Slaughter - Free Book Online Page A

intact.
    Will pulled back the rest of the slats. There were four metal bolts
underneath the bed, one at each corner. A piece of rope was tied
through one bolt. Pink blood stained the cord. He felt the rope with
his fingers. It was wet. Something sharp scraped his thumb. Will
leaned in closer, straining to see what had scratched him. He picked
at the cord with his fingernails, prying out the object so he could examine
it more closely in the flashlight beam. Bile hit the back of his
throat when he saw what he was holding.
    "Hey!" Fierro bellowed. "Gomez? You coming up or what?"
    "Get a search team out here!" Will rasped.
    "What're you talkin—"
    Will looked at the piece of broken tooth in his hand. "There's another
victim!"

CHAPTER THREE
    F AITH SAT IN THE HOSPITAL CAFETERIA, THINKING SHE FELT THE same way she'd felt the night of her junior prom: unwanted, fat and
pregnant. She looked at the wiry Rockdale County detective sitting
across from her at the table. With his long nose and greasy hair hanging
down over his ears, Max Galloway had the surly yet perplexed
look of a Weimaraner. What's more, he was a poor sport. Every sentence
he uttered to Faith alluded to the GBI taking away his case, beginning
with his opening salvo when Faith asked to sit in on the
interview with two of the witnesses: "I bet that bitch you work for is
already primping her hair for the TV cameras."
    Faith had held her tongue, though she couldn't imagine Amanda
Wagner primping anything. Sharpening her claws, maybe, but her
hair was a structure that defied primping.
    "So," Galloway said to the two male witnesses. "You guys were
just driving around, didn't see nothing, and then there's the Buick
and the girl on the road?"
    Faith struggled not to roll her eyes. She had worked homicide in
the Atlanta Police Department for eight years before she had partnered
with Will Trent. She knew what it was like to be the detective
on the other side of that table, to have some arrogant jerk from the
GBI waltz in and tell you he could run your case better than you
could. She understood the anger and the frustration of being treated
like an ignorant hick who couldn't detect your way out of a paper
bag, but now that Faith herself was GBI, all she could think about
was the pleasure she would feel when she snatched this case right out
from under from this particularly galling ignorant hick.
    As for the paper bag, Max Galloway might as well have had one
over his head. He had been interviewing Rick Sigler and Jake
Berman, the two men who had come upon the car accident on Route
316, for at least half an hour and still hadn't noticed that both men
were gay as handbags.
    Galloway addressed Rick, the emergency medical technician who
had helped the woman on the scene. "You said your wife's a nurse?"
    Rick stared at his hands. He had a rose-gold wedding band
around his finger and the most beautiful, delicate hands Faith had
ever seen on a man. "She works nights at Crawford Long."
    Faith wondered how the woman would feel knowing that her
husband was out getting his knob polished while she was pulling the
late shift.
    Galloway asked, "What movie did y'all go see?"
    He'd asked the two men this same question at least three times,
only to be given the same answer. Faith was all for trying to trip up a
suspect, but you had to have more intelligence than a russet potato to
pull off that kind of thing—sadly, this was exactly the type of acumen
that Max Galloway did not possess. From where Faith was sitting,
it seemed like the two witnesses had just had the misfortune of
finding themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time. The only
positive aspect of their involvement was that the medic had been able
to take care of the victim until the ambulance arrived.
    Rick asked Faith, "Do you think she's going to be okay?"
    Faith assumed the woman was still in surgery. "I don't know," she
admitted. "You did everything you could to help her, though.