Fractured

Chapter One Will Trent stared out the window of the car as he listened to his boss yell into her cell phone. Not that Amanda Wagner ever really raised her voice, but she had a certain edge to her tone that had caused more than one of her agents to burst into tears and walk off an active investigationno mean feat considering the majority of her subordinates at the Georgia Bureau of Investigation were men. "We're at"she craned her neck, squinting at the street sign"the Prado and Seventeenth." Amanda paused. "Perhaps you could look up the information on your computer?" She shook her head, obviously not liking what she was hearing. Will tried, "Maybe we should keep driving around? We might find" Amanda covered her eyes with her hand. She whispered into the phone, "How long until the server is back up?" The answer caused her to breathe out a heavy, pronounced sigh. Will indicated the screen dominating the middle of the wood-lined dashboard. The Lexus had more bells and whistles than a clown's hat. "Don't you have GPS?" She dropped her hand, considering his question, then began fiddling with some knobs on the dashboard. The screen didn't change, but the air-conditioning whirred higher. Will chuckled, and she cut him off with a nasty look, suggesting, "Maybe while we're waiting for Caroline to find a street map, you can get the owner's manual out of the glove box and read the directions for me." Will tried the latch, but it was locked. He thought this pretty much summed up his relationship with Amanda Wagner. She often sent him the way of locked doors and expected him to find his way around them. Will liked a good puzzle as much as the next man, but just once, it would have been nice to have Amanda hand him the key. Or maybe not. Will had never been good at asking for helpespecially from someone like Amanda, who seemed to keep a running list in her head of people who owed her favors. He looked out the window as she berated her secretary for not keeping a street map on her person at all times. Will had been born and raised in Atlanta, but didn't often find himself in Ansley Park. He knew that it was one of the city's oldest and wealthiest neighborhoods, where over a century ago, lawyers, doctors and bankers had built their enviable estates so that future lawyers, doctors and bankers could live as they didsafely cloistered in the middle of one of the most violent metropolitan cities this side of the Mason-Dixon. The only thing that had changed over the years was that the black women pushing white babies in strollers were better compensated these days. With its twisting turns and roundabouts, Ansley seemed designed to confuse, if not discourage, visitors. Most of the streets were tree-lined, broad avenues with the houses tucked up on hills to better look down on the world. Densely forested parks with walking trails and swing sets were everywhere. Some of the walkways were still the original cobblestone. Though all the homes were architecturally different, there was a certain uniformity to their crisply painted exteriors and professionally landscaped lawns. Will guessed this was because even a fixer-upper started at the one million mark. Unlike his own Poncey-Highland neighborhood, which was less than six miles from here, there were no rainbow-colored houses or methadone clinics in Ansley. On the street, Will watched a jogger stop to stretch and surreptitiously check out Amanda's Lexus. According to the news this morning, there was a code-red smog alert in effect, advising people not to breathe the outside air unless they absolutely had to. No one seemed to beSlaughter, Karin is the author of 'Fractured' with ISBN 9780385341950 and ISBN 0385341954.