—
As Will drove to Jake Berman’s house in Coweta County, he debated with himself the level of fury Faith would feel when she found out that he had tricked her. He wasn’t sure which would make her angrier: the outright lie he had told her on the phone about Sam finding the wrong Jake Berman or the fact that Will was going down south to talk to the man on his own. There was no way she would’ve kept her doctor’s appointment if Will had told her that the real Jake Berman was alive and well and living on Lester Drive. She would have insisted on coming along, and Will wouldn’t have been able to come up with a good excuse for her not to, other than that she was pregnant and diabetic and had enough on her plate without having to put herself at risk by interviewing a witness who could very well be a suspect.
That would have gone over really well with Faith. Like a lead football over the Mississippi.
Will had gotten Caroline, Amanda’s assistant, to cross-reference Jake Berman with the address on Lester Drive. With that key piece of information, they had opened up Berman’s background fairly easily. The mortgage was in his wife’s name, as were all of the credit cards, the cable bill and the utilities. Lydia Berman was a schoolteacher. Jake Berman had drawn his full lot of unemployment and still not found a job. He had declared bankruptcy eighteen months ago. He’d walked away from around half a million dollars in debt. The reason behind his being hard to find might have been as simple as a desire to elude creditors. Considering he’d been arrested a few months ago for public indecency, it made sense that Berman would want to keep a low profile.
Then again, it would also all make sense if Berman was their suspect.
The Porsche wasn’t comfortable for long distances, and Will’s back was aching by the time he reached Lester Drive. Traffic had been worse than usual, an overturned tractor-trailer jackknifed across the interstate bringing everything to a standstill for almost a full hour. Will hadn’t wanted to be alone with his thoughts. He had listened to every station on the dial by the time he crossed into Coweta County.
Will pulled up beside an unmarked Chevy Caprice at the mouth of Lester Drive. A lawnmower was sticking out of the back of the trunk. The man behind the wheel was dressed in overalls, a thick gold chain hanging around his neck. Will recognized Nick Shelton, the regional field agent for District 23.
“How they hangin’?” Nick asked, turning down the bluegrass blaring from the radio. Will had met the agent a few times before. He was so country his neck glowed red, but he was a solid investigator, and he knew how to do his job.
Will asked, “Is Berman still in the house?”
“Unless he sneaked out the back,” Nick answered. “Don’t worry. He struck me as the lazy type.”
“Did you talk to him?”
“Posed as a landscaper looking for work.” Nick handed him a business card. “I told him it’d be a hundred bucks a month, and he said he could take care of his own damn lawn, thank you very much.” He snorted a laugh. “This from a guy who’s still in his pajamas at ten o’clock in the morning.”
Will looked at the card, seeing a drawing of a lawnmower and some flowers. He said, “Nice.”
“The fake phone number comes in handy with the ladies.” Nick chuckled again. “I got a good look at ol’ Jakey while he was lecturing me on competitive pricing. He’s definitely your guy.”
“Did you get into the house?”
“He wasn’t that stupid.” Nick asked, “You want me to stick around?”
Will thought about the situation, the fact that if he had given her the chance, Faith would have been right: Don’t go into an unknown situation without backup. “If you don’t mind. Just hang back here and make sure I don’t get my head blown off.”
They both laughed a little louder than the words called for, probably because Will wasn’t really joking.
He rolled up his window and drove down the road. Just to make things easier, Caroline had called Berman before Will had left the office. She had posed as an operator for the local cable television company. Berman had assured her he would be home to let in the technician who was doing a general upgrade so that their service wouldn’t be interrupted. There were a lot of tricks you could use to make sure people were home. The cable ruse was the best. People would go without a lot of things, but they would put their lives on hold for days at a time in order to wait for the cable company to show up.
Will checked the numbers on the mailbox, making sure they matched the note Sam Lawson had given Faith. Courtesy of MapQuest, which printed large arrows on their directions, and a couple of stops at some convenience stores, Will had managed to navigate his way through the rural town with only a few wrong turns.
Still, he checked the number with the mailbox a third time before getting out of the car. He saw the heart Sam had drawn around the address, and wondered again why a man who was not the father of Faith’s child would do such a thing. Will had only met the reporter once, but he didn’t like him. Victor was all right. Will had talked to him on the phone a couple of times and sat by him during an incredibly tedious awards ceremony that Amanda had insisted her team attend, mostly because she wanted to make sure someone clapped when her name was called. Victor had wanted to talk about sports, but not football and baseball, which were the only two sports Will paid attention to. Hockey was for Yankees and soccer was for Europeans. He wasn’t quite sure how Victor had gotten interested in both, but it made for pretty dull conversation. Whatever Faith had seen in the guy, Will had been glad a few months ago when he started to notice that Victor’s car wasn’t in Faith’s driveway when he went to pick her up for court days.
Of course, Will was not one to judge about relationships. His whole body was still sore from being with Angie last night. It was not a good sore—it was the kind of sore that made you want to crawl up into bed and sleep for a week. Will knew from experience it wouldn’t matter, because as soon as he started putting one foot in front of the other, rebuilding some semblance of a life, Angie would return and he’d be back in that same place again. It was the pattern of his life. Nothing was ever going to change it.
The Berman home was a one-story ranch spread out over a large lot. The house looked lived-in, but not in a good way. The grass was overgrown and weeds tangled the flowerbeds. The green Camry in the driveway was filthy. Mud caked the tires and there was a sheen of filth on the car that looked like it had been there for quite a while. There were two baby seats in back and the requisite Cheerios stuck to the windshield. Two yellow, diamond-shaped signs were hanging from the side window, probably reading Baby on Board. Will pressed his hand to the hood of the car. The engine was cold. He looked at the time on his phone. It was coming up on ten o’clock. Faith would probably be at her doctor’s by now.
Will knocked on the door and waited. He thought about Faith again, how furious she would be, especially if Will was about to come face-to-face with the killer. Though it looked as if he wasn’t going to come face-to-face with anyone. No one answered the door. He knocked on the door again. When that didn’t work, he stepped back from the house and looked up at the windows. All the shades were open. Some lights were on. Maybe Berman was in the shower. Or maybe he was fully aware that the police were trying to talk to him. Nick’s hayseed landscaper act was pretty impressive, but he’d been sitting at the end of the road for about an hour. In a neighborhood this small, phones had probably been ringing off the hook.
Will tried the front door, but it was locked. He walked around the house, peering in the windows. There was a light at the end of the hallway. He was going to the next window when he heard a noise inside like a door slamming shut. Will put his hand to the gun on his belt, feeling all the hair on the back of his neck stand up. Something wasn’t right, and Will was keenly aware that Nick Shelton was sitting in his car listening to the radio right now.
There was the unmistakable sound of a window banging shut. Will jogged around to the back of the house in time to see a man darting through the backyard. Jake Berman was wearing pajama pants with no shirt, but he’d managed to put on his sneakers. He glanced over his shoulder as he ran past an elaborate swing set, toward the chain-link fence that separated the property from the neighbor on the opposite side.
“Crap,” Will mumbled, bolting after him. Will was a good runner, but Berman was fast—his arms pumping, legs moving in a blur.
“Police!” Will yelled, misjudging the height of the fence so badly that his foot caught. He fell to the ground and scrambled up as quickly as he could. He saw Berman go down a side yard, past another house and toward the street. Will did the same, taking advantage of the angle, shortening the distance as he chased Berman across the road.
There was a screech of wheels as Nick Shelton’s Caprice pulled up. Berman dodged the car, slamming his hand on the hood as he made his way toward another backyard.
“Dammit,” Will cursed. “Police! Stop!”
Berman kept going, but he was a sprinter, not a marathoner. If Will was good at anything, it was endurance. He caught his second wind as Jake Berman slowed, trying to open the wooden gate to a neighbor’s backyard. He glanced over his shoulder, saw Will, then took off again. Berman was too winded, though, and Will could tell from the slow way his legs were moving that the man was about to give up. Still, Will wasn’t going to take any chances. When he got close enough, he lunged, bringing Berman down in a heavy tackle that knocked the wind out of both of them.
“Dumbass!” Nick Shelton yelled, kicking Berman in the side.
Considering his run-in with the doorman at Anna’s building yesterday, Will would’ve thought he’d be more gentle in his approach, but his heart was beating so hard in his chest that he felt nauseated. Worse, adrenaline was pumping all kinds of bad thoughts into his head.
Nick kicked Berman again. “Never run from the law, motherfucker.”
“I didn’t know you were cops—”
“Shut up.” Will started to put the cuffs on him, but Berman squirmed, trying to get away. Nick raised his foot again, but Will drove his knee into Berman’s back so hard that he could feel the ribs bend. “Stop it.”
“I didn’t do anything!”
“Is that why you ran?”
“I was going for a run,” he screamed. “I always run this time of day.”
Nick asked, “In your pj’s?”
“Fuck off.”
“It’s a felony to lie to the police.” Will stood, yanking up Berman with him. “Five years in prison. Plenty of men’s bathrooms in jail.”
Berman’s face turned white. Some of his neighbors had congregated. They didn’t look happy—or, Will noticed, particularly supportive.
“It’s all right,” Berman told them. “Just a misunderstanding.”
Nick said, “A misunderstanding by this dumbass who thinks he can run away from the police.”
Will wasn’t worried about appearances. He jerked Berman’s hands high, making him bend over as he walked him back across the street.
“My lawyer is going to hear about this.”
Nick said, “Be sure to tell him how you ran away like a scared little schoolgirl.”
Will pushed Berman into the road. He asked Nick, “Mind calling this in?”
“You want the cavalry?”
“I want a police car screeching up to his house with lights and sirens blaring so everyone in the neighborhood knows it’s there.”
Nick gave him a salute as he trotted off toward his car.
Berman said, “You’re making a mistake.”
“Your mistake was fleeing the scene of a crime.”
“What?” He turned around, a look of genuine surprise on his face. “What crime?”
“Route 316.”
He still looked confused. “That’s what this is about?”
Either the man was delivering an Oscar-worthy performance or he was completely clueless. “You witnessed a car accident four days ago on 316. A woman was hit by a car. You talked to my partner.”
“I didn’t leave that girl alone. The ambulance was there. I told that cop at the hospital everything I saw.”
“You gave a false phone number and address.”
“I was just—” He glanced around, and Will wondered if he was going to bolt again. “Get me out of here,” Berman pleaded. “Just take me to the police station, okay? Take me to the station, give me my phone call, and we’ll work all of this out.”
Will turned him around, keeping a hand on his shoulder in case the man decided to try his luck again. Every step, Will could feel his temper getting more and more riled up. Berman was looking more and more like a pathetic, weaselly excuse for a human being. They had wasted the last two days looking for the asshole, and then the idiot had made Will chase him across half the neighborhood.
Berman turned around. “Why don’t you take off these cuffs so I can—”
Will spun him back around so hard that he had to catch Berman before he fell flat on his face. The nearest neighbor was standing in her open front doorway, watching them. Like the other women, she didn’t look exactly displeased to see the man being led away in handcuffs.
Will asked, “Do they hate you because you’re gay? Or because you’re sponging off your wife?”
Berman spun around again. “Where the fuck do you get off—”
Will pushed him back around so hard that this time he lost his balance. “It’s ten o’clock and you’re still in your pajamas.” He marched Berman through the tall grass in his yard. “You don’t have a lawn-mower?”
“Where are your kids?”
“Day care.” He tried to turn around again. “What business is this of yours?”
Will shoved him again, forcing him go up the driveway. He hated the guy for so many reasons, not least of which because he had a wife and kids who probably cared about him a great deal and he couldn’t even cut the grass or wash the car for them.
Berman demanded, “Where are you taking me? I said take me to the police station.”
Will kept quiet, shoving him up the driveway, yanking up his arms whenever he slowed or tried to turn around.
“If I’m under arrest, then you have to take me to jail.”
They walked to the back of the house, Berman protesting the entire way. He was a man who was used to being listened to, and it seemed to irk him more to be ignored than to be pushed around, so Will kept silent as he shoved him toward the patio.
Will tried the back door, but it was locked. He looked at Berman, whose smug look seemed to indicate he thought he was getting the upper hand. The window the man had sneaked out had guillotined closed. He slid it back open, the cheap springs clanging.
Berman said, “Don’t worry. I’ll wait for you.”
Will wondered where Nick Shelton was. He was probably in front of the house, thinking he was doing Will a favor by giving him time alone with the suspect.
“Right,” Will muttered, loosening one side of the cuffs and clamping Berman to the barbecue grill. He lifted himself up and angled his body through the open window. Will found himself in the kitchen, which was decorated in a goose theme: geese on the wallpaper border, geese on the towels, geese on the carpet under the kitchen table.
He looked back out the window. Berman was there, smoothing down his pajamas like he was trying them on at Macy’s.
Will did a quick check of the house, finding only what he expected: a children’s room with bunk beds, a large master and attached bath, a kitchen, a family room and a study with one book on the shelves. Will couldn’t read the title, but he recognized Donald Trump’s picture on the jacket and assumed it was a get-rich-quick scheme. Obviously, Jake Berman hadn’t taken the man’s advice. Though, considering Berman had lost his job and declared bankruptcy, maybe he had.
There was no basement, and the garage was empty but for three boxes that seemed to contain the contents of Jake Berman’s old office: a stapler, a nice desk set, lots of papers with charts and graphs on them. Will opened the sliding glass door to the patio and found Berman sitting under the grill, his arm dangling over his head.
“You have no right to search my house.”
“You were fleeing your residence. That’s all the cause I needed.”
Berman seemed to buy the explanation, which sounded reasonable even to Will’s ears, though he knew it was highly illegal.
Will dragged around a chair from the table set and sat down. The air was still chilly, and the sweat he’d generated from chasing after Berman was drying in the cold.
“This isn’t fair,” Berman said. “I want your badge number and your name and—”
“You want the real one or you want me to make up something, like you did?”
Berman had the sense not to answer.
“Why did you run, Jake? Where were you going to go in your pajamas?”
“I didn’t think that far,” he grumbled. “I just don’t want to deal with this right now. I’ve got a lot on my plate.”
“You’ve got two choices here: Either you tell me what happened that night or I take you to jail in your pajamas.” To make the threat clear, Will added, “And I don’t mean the Coweta Country Club. I’ll stroll you straight into the Atlanta Pen, and I won’t let you change.” He pointed to Berman’s chest, which was heaving up and down from panic and anger. The man obviously spent time on his body. He was cut, his abs well defined, his shoulders broad and muscled. “You’ll find all those pull-ups at the gym didn’t go to waste.”
“Is that what this is about? You’re some kind of homophobic jerk?”
“I don’t care who you’re blowing in the toilet.” This much was true, though Will kept an edge to his voice to imply the opposite. Everybody had a button, and Berman’s was his sexual orientation. At the moment, Will’s seemed to be that the cheating prick chained to the Grillmaster 2000 was screwing around on his wife and expecting her to just suck it up and be a good spouse. The Oprah-esque irony was not lost on Will.
He said, “The guys down at the pen love it when new meat comes along.”
“Fuck you.”
“Oh, they will. They’ll fuck you in places you didn’t know could be fucked.”
“Go to hell.”
Will let him sulk for a few seconds, trying to get his own emotions under control. He concentrated on how much time they had pissed away looking for this pathetic idiot when they could’ve been following real clues. Will listed it out for him. “Resisting arrest, lying to the police, wasting police time, obstructing an investigation. You could get ten years for this, Jake, and that’s if the judge likes you, which is doubtful considering you’ve got a record and you present like an arrogant asshole.”
Berman seemed to finally realize that he was in trouble. “I’ve got kids.” There was a pleading sound to his voice. “My sons.”
“Yeah, I read about them in your arrest report when they picked you up at the Mall of Georgia.”
Berman looked down at the concrete patio. “What do you want?”
“I want the truth.”
“I don’t know what the truth is anymore.”
He was obviously feeling sorry for himself again. Will wanted to kick him in the face, but he knew that would accomplish nothing. “You need to understand I’m not your therapist, Jake. I don’t care about your crisis of conscience, or that you have kids or that you’re cheating on your wife—”
“I love her!” he said, for the first time showing an emotion other than self-pity. “I love my wife.”
Will pulled back on the pressure, trying to get his temper under control. He could be mad or he could get information. Only one of them was the reason he was here.
Berman said, “I used to be somebody. I used to have a job. I used to go to work every day.” He looked up at the house. “I used to live somewhere nice. I drove a Mercedes.”
“You were a builder?” Will asked, though he’d been told as much when Caroline had found Berman’s tax returns.
“High-rises,” he said. “The bottom dropped out of the market. I was lucky to walk away with the clothes on my back.”
“Is that why you put everything in your wife’s name?”
He gave a slow nod. “I was ruined. We moved here from Montgomery a year ago. It was supposed to be a fresh start, but …” He shrugged, as if it was pointless to continue.
Will had thought his accent was a little deeper than most. “Is that where you’re originally from—Alabama?”
“Met my wife there. Both of us went to Alabama.” He meant the state university. “Lydia was an English major. It was more like a hobby until I lost my job. Now she’s teaching at school and I’m with the kids all day.” He stared out at the play set, the swings stirring in the wind. “I used to travel a lot,” he said. “That’s how I got it out of my system. I’d travel around, and I’d do what I needed to do, and then I’d come home and be with my wife and go to church, and that’s how it worked for almost ten years.”
“You were arrested six months ago.”
“I told Lydia it was a mistake. All those queers from Atlanta trolling the mall, trying to pick up straight men. The cops were clamping down. They thought I was one because … I don’t know what I told her. Because I had a nice haircut. She wanted to believe me, so she did.”
Will guessed he’d be forgiven for his sympathies leaning more toward the spouse who was being lied to and cheated on. “Tell me what happened on 316.”
“We saw the accident, people in the road. I should’ve been more helpful. The other man—I don’t even know his name. He had medical training. He was trying to help the woman who’d been hit by the car. I was just standing there in the street trying to think of a lie to tell my wife. I don’t think she’d believe me if it happened again, no matter what I came up with.”
“How did you meet him?”
“I was supposed to be at the bar watching a game. I saw him go into the theater. He was a nice-looking guy, alone. I knew why he was there.” He gave a heavy sigh. “I followed him into the bathroom. We decided to go somewhere else for more privacy.”
Jake Berman was no neophyte, and Will didn’t ask him why he had driven forty minutes away from his home in order to watch a game at a bar. Coweta might have been rural, but Will had passed at least three sports bars as he headed off the interstate, and there were even more downtown.
Will warned him, “You have to know that it was dangerous getting into a car with a stranger like that.”
“I guess I’ve been lonely,” the man admitted. “I wanted to be with somebody. You know, be myself with somebody. He said we could go in his car, maybe find a place out in the woods to be together for more than a few minutes in the toilet.” He gave a harsh laugh. “The smell of urine is not a big aphrodisiac for me, believe it or not.” He looked Will in the eye. “Does it make you sick to hear about this?”
“No,” Will answered truthfully. He had listened to countless witnesses tell stories of meaningless hookups and mindless sex. It really didn’t matter if it was a man or a woman or both. The emotions were similar, and Will’s goal was always the same: get the information he needed to break the case.
Jake obviously knew Will wasn’t going to give him much more rope. He said, “We were driving down the road, and the guy I was with—”
“Rick.”
“Rick. Right.” He looked as if he wished he didn’t know the man’s name. “Rick was driving. He had his pants unbuttoned.” Jake colored again. “He pushed me away. He said there was something on the road ahead. He started to slow down, and I saw what looked like a bad accident.” He paused, measuring his words, his culpability. “I told him to keep driving, but he said he was a paramedic, that he couldn’t leave the scene of an accident. I guess that’s some kind of code or something.” He paused again, and Will guessed he was forcing himself to remember what had happened.
Will told him, “Take your time.”
Jake nodded, giving it a few seconds. “Rick got out of the car, and I stayed inside. There was this old couple standing in the street. The man was clutching his chest. I kept sitting there in the car, just staring like it was all a movie being played out. The older woman got on the phone—I guess to call an ambulance. It was weird, because she kept her hand to her mouth, like this.” He cupped his hand over his mouth the way Judith Coldfield did when she smiled. “It was like she was telling a secret, but there was no one around to hear, so …” He shrugged.
“Did you get out of the car?”
“Yeah,” he answered. “I finally moved. I could hear the ambulance coming. I went to the old guy. I think his name was Henry?” Will nodded. “Yeah, Henry. He was in bad shape. I think both of them were in shock. Judith’s hands were shaking like crazy. The other guy, Rick, he was working on the naked woman. I didn’t see much of her. It was hard to see, you know? Hard to look at her, I mean. I remember when their son got there, he just stared at her, like, ‘Oh, Jesus.’ ”
“Wait a minute,” Will said. “Judith Coldfield’s son was at the scene?”
“Yeah.”
Will went back through his interview with the Coldfields, wondering why Tom would leave out such an important detail. There had been plenty of opportunity for the man to speak up, even with his domineering mother in the room. “What time did the son get there?”
“About five minutes before the ambulance.”
Will felt ridiculous for repeating everything Berman said, but he had to be clear. “Tom Coldfield got to the scene before the ambulance arrived?”
“He was there before the cops. They didn’t even show up until after the ambulances had left. No one was there. It was brutal. We had, like, twenty minutes with that girl just dying in the road, and no one came to help her.”
Will felt a piece of the puzzle click into place—not the one they needed for the case, but the one that explained why Max Galloway had been so openly hostile about sharing information. The detective must have known that the ambulance had taken the victim away before the police arrived. Faith had been right all along. There was a reason Rockdale wasn’t faxing over the initial responder’s report, and that reason was because they were covering their asses. Slow police response times were the sort of thing local news stations built their feature stories on. This was the last straw as far as Will was concerned. He would have Galloway’s detective shield by the end of the day. There was no telling what other evidence had been hidden or, worse, compromised.
“Hey,” Berman said. “You wanna hear this or not?”
Will realized he had been too caught up in his own thoughts. He picked up the narrative. “So, Tom Coldfield showed up,” he said. “Then the ambulances came?”
“Just one at first. They put the woman in first, the one who’d been hit by the car. Henry said he would wait because he wanted to go with his wife, and there wasn’t room for all of them in one ambulance. There was kind of an argument about it, but Rick said, ‘Go, just go,’ because he knew the woman was in a bad way. He gave me the keys to his car and got into the ambulance so he could keep working on her.”
“How long before the next ambulance arrived?”
“About ten, maybe fifteen minutes later.”
Will did the math in his head. Almost forty-five minutes had elapsed in the story, and the police still hadn’t shown up. “Then what?”
“They loaded up Henry and Judith. The son followed them, and I was left in the road.”
“And the police still weren’t there?”
“I heard the sirens right after the last ambulance left. The car was there—the one the Coldfields had been driving. The scene of the crime, right?” He looked back at the play set in the yard, as if he could visualize his children playing in the sun. “I thought about taking Rick’s car back to the theater. They wouldn’t know me, right? I mean, you wouldn’t have any way of identifying me if I hadn’t gone to the hospital and given my name.”
Will shrugged, but it was true. If not for the fact that Jake Berman had given them his real name, Will wouldn’t be sitting here right now.
Jake continued, “So, I got in the car and headed back toward the theater.”
“Toward the police cars?”
“They were coming in the opposite direction.”
“What changed your mind?”
He shrugged, and tears came into his eyes. “I was tired of running, I guess. Running away from … everything.” He put his free hand to his eyes. “Rick told me they were taking her to Grady, so I got on the interstate and went to Grady.”
His courage had apparently run out shortly afterward, but Will did not point this out to the man.
Berman asked, “Is the old man okay?”
“He’s fine.”
“I heard on the news that the woman’s all right.”
“She’s healing,” Will told him. “What happened to her will always be with her, though. She won’t be able to run away from it.”
He wiped his eyes with the back of his hand. “Some kind of lesson for me, right?” His self-pity had returned. “Not that you care, right?”
“You know what I don’t like about you?”
“Please enlighten me.”
“You’re cheating on your wife. I don’t care who with—it’s cheating. If you want to be with someone else, then be with them, but let your wife go. Let her have a life. Let her have someone who really loves her and understands her and wants to be with her.”
The man shook his head sadly. “You don’t understand.”
Will guessed that Jake Berman was beyond lessons. He stood from the table and uncuffed him from the grill. “Be careful about getting into cars with strangers.”
“I’m finished with that. I mean it. Never again.”
He sounded so certain of himself that Will almost believed him.
WILL HAD TO WAIT until he was out of Jake Berman’s neighborhood before his phone registered enough bars to make a call. Even then, service was spotty, and he had to pull over onto the side of the road just to get a call to go through. He dialed Faith’s cell phone and listened to it ring. Her voicemail picked up, and he ended the call. Will checked the clock. 10:15. She was probably still with her doctor in Snellville.
Tom Coldfield hadn’t mentioned that he had been at the crime scene—yet another person who had lied to them. Will was getting pretty sick and tired of people lying. He flipped open his phone and dialed information. They connected him to the tower at Charlie Brown Airport, where yet another operator told Will that Tom was taking a cigarette break. Will was in the process of leaving a message when the operator offered to give him Coldfield’s cell phone number. A few minutes later, he was listening to Tom Coldfield yell over the sound of a jet engine.
“I’m glad you called, Agent Trent.” His voice was just shy of a shout. “I left a message for your partner earlier, but I haven’t heard back.”
Will put his finger in his ear, as if that might help drown out the noise of a plane taking off on the other side of town. “Did you remember something?”
“Oh, nothing like that,” Tom said. The roar subsided, and his voice went back to normal. “My folks and I were talking last night, wondering how your investigation was going.”
There was a deafening rush of jet engine. Will waited it out, thinking this was crazy. “What time do you get off work?”
“About ten minutes, then I’ve got to pick up the kids from my mom’s.”
Will figured he would kill two birds with one stone. “Can you meet me at your parents’ house?”
Tom waited for more engine noise to pass. “Sure. Shouldn’t take me more than forty-five minutes to get there. Is something wrong?”
Will looked at the clock on the dash. “I’ll see you in forty-five minutes.”
He ended the call before Tom could ask any more questions. Unfortunately, he also ended it before he could get the Coldfields’ address. Their retirement community shouldn’t be too hard to find. Clairmont Road stretched from one side of DeKalb County to the other, but there was only one area where senior citizens flocked, and that was in the vicinity of the Atlanta Veterans Administration hospital. Will put the car in gear, got back onto the road, and headed toward the interstate.
As Will drove, he debated about whether to call Amanda and tell her that Max Galloway had screwed them over again, but she would ask where Faith was, and Will did not want to remind their boss that Faith was having medical issues. Amanda hated weakness of any kind, and she was relentless where Will’s disability was concerned. There was no telling what abuse she would visit on Faith for being diabetic. Will wasn’t going to give her more ammunition.
He could, of course, call Caroline, who would in turn feed the information to Amanda. He cradled the phone in his hand, praying it would not come apart as he dialed in the number for Amanda’s assistant.
Caroline made much use of her caller ID. “Hi, Will.”
“Mind doing me another favor?”
“Sure.”
“Judith Coldfield called 9-1-1 and two ambulances got to the scene before the Rockdale police did.”
“That ain’t right.”
“No,” Will agreed. It wasn’t. The fact that Max Galloway had lied meant that instead of talking to a trained first responder about what he had recorded at the scene, Will was going to have to rely on the Coldfields to reconstruct what they had seen. “I need you to track down the timeline. I’m pretty sure Amanda’s going to want to know what took them so long.”
Caroline said, “You know Rockdale’s where I’ll call for the response times.”
“Try Judith Coldfield’s cell phone records.” If Will could catch them in a lie, that would be yet another weapon Amanda could use against them. “Do you have her number?”
“Four-oh-four—”
“Hold on,” Will said, thinking it would be useful to have Judith’s number. He drove with his fingertips as he took out the digital recorder he kept in his pocket and turned it on. “Go ahead.”
Caroline gave him Judith Coldfield’s cell number. Will clicked off the recorder and put the phone back to his ear to thank her. He used to have a system for keeping up with witnesses’ and suspects’ personal information, but Faith had gradually taken over everything to do with paperwork, so that Will was lost without her. With the next case, he would have to correct that. He didn’t like the idea of being so dependent on her—especially since she was pregnant. She’d probably be out at least a week when the baby came.
He tried Judith’s cell, which only got him as far as her voicemail. He left a message for her, then called Faith again and told her that he was on his way to the Coldfields’. Hopefully, she would call him back and give him their address on Clairmont Road. He didn’t want to call Caroline again because she would wonder why an agent didn’t have all this written down somewhere. Besides, his cell phone had started making a clicking noise in his ear. He would have to do something to fix it soon. Will gently placed it on the passenger’s seat. There was only one string and a quickly degrading piece of duct tape holding it together now.
Will kept the radio low as he headed into the city. Instead of going through the downtown connector, he jumped on I-85. Traffic on the Clairmont exit was backed up more than usual, so he took the long way, skirting around DeKalb Peachtree Airport, driving through neighborhoods that were so culturally diverse even Faith wouldn’t be able to read some of the signs out in front of the businesses.
After fighting more traffic, he finally found himself in the right area. He turned into the first gated community across from the VA hospital, knowing the best way to go about this would be the methodical one. The guard at the gate was polite, but the Coldfields weren’t on his residents’ list. The next place yielded the same negative result, but when Will got to the third compound, the nicest one of them all, he hit pay dirt.
“Henry and Judith.” The man at the gate smiled, as if they were old friends. “I think Hank’s out on the links, but Judith should be home.”
Will waited while the guard made a phone call to get him buzzed in. He looked around the well-kept grounds, feeling a pang of envy. Will didn’t have children and he had no family to speak of. His retirement was something that worried him, and he had been saving a nest egg since his first paycheck. He wasn’t a risk taker, so he hadn’t lost much in the stock market. T-bills and municipal bonds were where most of his hard-earned cash went. He was terrified of ending up some lonely old guy in a sad, state-run nursing home. The Coldfields were living the sort of retirement Will was hoping for—a friendly security guard at the gate, nicely kept gardens, a senior center where you could play cards or shuffleboard.
Of course, knowing how things worked, Angie would get some terrible, wasting disease that lasted just long enough to suck away all his retirement money before she died.
“You’re in, young man!” The guard was smiling, his straight white teeth showing beneath a bushy gray mustache. “Go left right out of the gate, then take another left, then right, and you’ll be on Taylor Drive. They’re 1693.”
“Thanks,” Will said, understanding only the street name and the numbers. The man had made a hand gesture indicating which way Will should go first, so he went through the gate and turned the car in that direction. After that, it was anyone’s guess.
“Crap,” Will mumbled, obeying the ten-mile-per-hour speed limit as he circled the large lake in the middle of the property. The houses were one-story cottages that all looked the same: weathered shingles, single-car garages and various assortments of concrete ducks and bunnies spotting the trimmed lawns.
There were old people out walking, and when they waved at him, he waved back, he supposed to convey the impression that he knew where he was going. Which was not the case. He stopped the car in front of an elderly woman who was dressed in a lilac wind suit. She had ski poles in her hands as if she were Nordic skiing.
“Good morning,” Will said. “I’m looking for sixteen-ninety-three Taylor Drive.”
“Oh, Henry and Judith!” the skier exclaimed. “Are you their son?”
He shook his head. “No, ma’am.” He didn’t want to alarm anyone, so he said, “I’m just a friend of theirs.”
“This is a very nice car, isn’t it?”
“Thank you, ma’am.”
“I bet I couldn’t get myself into there,” she said. “Maybe even if I got in, I couldn’t get out!”
He laughed with her to be polite, scratching this particular community off the list of places to which he’d want to retire.
She said, “Do you work with Judith at the homeless shelter?”
Will hadn’t been questioned so much since he had trained for interrogations at the GBI academy. “Yes, ma’am,” he lied.
“Got this at their little thrift store,” she said, indicating the wind suit. “Looks brand-new, doesn’t it?”
“It’s lovely,” Will assured her, though the color was nothing like what you would find in nature.
“Tell Judith I’ve got some more knickknacks I can give her if she wants to send the truck by.” She gave a knowing look. “At my age, I find I don’t need so many things.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Well.” The woman nodded, pleased. “Just go up here to the right.” He watched the way her hand curved. “Then Taylor Drive is on the left.”
“Thank you.” He put the car in gear, but she stopped him.
“You know, it would’ve been easier next time if, right when you left the gate, you took a left, then an immediate left, then—”
“Thank you,” Will repeated, rolling the car along. His brain was going to explode if he talked to another person in this place. He kept the Porsche inching along, hoping he was going in the right direction. His phone rang, and he nearly wept with relief when he saw it was Faith.
Carefully, he opened the broken phone and held it to his ear. “How was your doctor’s appointment?”
“Fine,” she said. “Listen, I just talked to Tom Coldfield—”
“About meeting him? So did I.”
“Jake Berman’s going to have to wait.”
Will felt his chest tighten. “I already talked to Jake Berman.”
She was quiet—too quiet.
“Faith, I’m sorry. I just thought it would be better if I …” Will didn’t know how to finish the sentence. His grip on his cell phone slipped, bringing a crackling static onto the line. He waited for it to die down, then repeated, “I’m sorry.”
She took a painfully long time letting the ax fall. When she finally spoke, her tone was clipped, like her words were getting strangled in her throat. “I don’t treat you differently because of your disability.”
She was wrong, actually, but he knew this was not the time to point that out. “Berman told me that Tom Coldfield was at the crime scene.” She wasn’t yelling at him, so he continued, “I guess Judith called him because Henry was having a heart attack. Tom followed them to the hospital in his car. The cops didn’t show up until everyone was already gone.”
She seemed to be debating between screaming at him and being a cop. As usual, her cop side won out. “That’s why Galloway was jerking us around. He was covering Rockdale County’s ass.” She moved on to the next problem. “And Tom Coldfield didn’t tell us he was at the scene.”
Will paused for some more static. “I know.”
“He’s early thirties, closer to my age. Pauline’s brother was older, right?”
Will wanted to talk to her about this in person rather than through his cracked phone. “Where are you?”
“I’m right outside the Coldfields’.”
“Good,” he told her, surprised she had gotten there so fast. “I’m right around the corner. I’ll be there in two minutes.”
Will ended the call and dropped the phone on the seat beside him. Another wire had slipped out between the clamshells. This one was red, which was not a good sign. He glanced at his rearview mirror. The skier was making her way toward him. She was coming up fast, and Will pushed the car up to fifteen miles per hour so he could get away from her.
The street signs were larger than normal, the letters a crisp white on black, which was a horrible combination for Will. He turned as soon as he could, not bothering to try to read the first letter on the sign. Faith’s Mini would stand out like a beacon among the Cadillacs and Buicks the retired folks seemed to favor.
Will got to the end of the street, but there was no Mini. He turned down the next street, and nearly smacked into the skier. She made a motion with her hand, indicating he should roll down the window.
He put on a pleasant smile. “Yes, ma’am?”
“Right there,” she said, pointing to the cottage on the corner. This particular model had a lawn jockey outside, its white face freshly painted. Two large cardboard boxes were by the mailbox, each labeled in black marker. “I guess you’re not taking those back in this tiny car of yours.”
“No, ma’am.”
“Judith said her son was going to bring the truck later on today.” She glanced up at the sky. “Better not be too late.”
“I’m sure it won’t be long,” Will told the skier. She didn’t seem as keen to continue the conversation this time. She tossed him a wave as she continued her walk down the street.
Will looked at the boxes in front of Judith and Henry Coldfield’s house, reminded of the trash Jacquelyn Zabel had set outside her mother’s place. Though the cardboard boxes and black trash bags Jackie had put on the curb weren’t meant to be trash. Charlie Reed had said he’d shooed off a Goodwill truck just before Will and Faith had arrived. Had he meant Goodwill specifically, or was he using the word as a catchall, the way people always called plastic bandages Band-Aids and tissues Kleenexes?
All along, they had been looking for a physical link between the women, one thing that tied them all together. Had Will just stumbled onto it?
The front door to the house opened and Judith came out, walking cautiously as she tried to navigate her way down the two porch stairs with a large box in her hands. Will got out of the car and rushed over, catching the box before she dropped it.
“Thank you,” she told him. She was out of breath, her cheeks flushed. “I’ve been trying to get this stuff out all morning and Henry’s been no help whatsoever.” She walked toward the curb. “Just put it here by the others. Tom’s supposed to be by later to pick them up.”
Will set the box down on the ground. “How long have you volunteered at the shelter?”
“Oh …” She seemed to think about it as she walked back toward the house. “I don’t know. Since we moved here. I guess that’s a couple of years now. Goodness, how time flies.”
“Faith and I saw a brochure the other day when we were at the shelter. It had a list of corporate sponsors on it.”
“They want to get their money’s worth. They’re not being charitable because it’s the right thing to do. It’s public relations for them.”
“There was a logo for a bank on the one we saw.” Even now, he recalled the image of the four-point deer at the bottom of the pamphlet.
“Oh, yes. Buckhead Holdings. They donate the most money, which, between you and me, isn’t nearly enough.”
Will felt a bead of sweat roll down his back. Olivia Tanner was the community relations director for Buckhead Holdings. “What about a law firm?” he asked. “Does anyone do pro bono work for the shelter?”
Judith opened the front door. “There are a couple of firms who help out. We’re a women’s only shelter, you know. Lots of the women need help filing divorce papers, getting restraining orders. Some of them are in trouble with the law. It’s all very sad.”
“Bandle and Brinks?” Will asked, giving her the name of Anna Lindsey’s law firm.
“Yes,” Judith said, smiling. “They help out quite a lot.”
“Do you know a woman named Anna Lindsey?”
She shook her head as she went into the house. “Was she staying in the shelter? I’m ashamed to say there are so many that I often don’t have the time to speak to them individually.”
Will followed her inside, glancing around. The layout was exactly as he would have guessed from the street. There was a large living room that looked onto a screen porch and the lake. The kitchen was on the side of the house that had the garage, and the other side held the bedrooms. All the doors leading off the hallway were closed. The startling thing was that it looked as if an Easter egg had exploded inside the house. Decorations were everywhere. There were bunnies in pastel suits sitting on every available surface. Baskets with plastic eggs lying in silky green grass were scattered along the floor.
Will said, “Easter.”
Judith beamed. “It’s my second favorite time of the year.”
Will loosened his tie, feeling a sweat come all over him. “Why is that?”
“The Resurrection. The rebirth of our Lord. The cleansing of all our sins. Forgiveness is a powerful, transformative gift. I see that at the shelter every day. Those poor, broken women. They want redemption. They don’t realize it’s not something that can just be given. Forgiveness has to be earned.”
“Do they all earn it?”
“Considering your job, I think you know the answer to that better than I do.”
“Some women aren’t worthy?”
She stopped smiling. “People like to think that we’ve moved on from biblical times, but we still live in a society where women are cast out, don’t we?”
“Like trash?”
“That’s a bit harsh, but we all make our choices.”
Will felt more beads of sweat roll down his back. “Have you always loved Easter?”
She straightened a bow tie on one of the rabbits. “I suppose part of it’s because Henry’s work only gave him off Easter and Christmas. It was always such a special time for us. Don’t you love being with family?”
“Not at the moment.” She turned her watch around on her wrist. “He’s always late. He loses track of time so easily. We were supposed to go to the community center after Tom picked up the kids.”
“Does Henry work at the shelter?”
“Oh, no.” She gave a small laugh as she walked into her kitchen. “Henry’s much too busy enjoying his retirement. Tom’s good about helping out, though. He complains, but he’s a good boy.”
Will remembered Tom had been trying to fix a lawnmower when they’d found him at the charity shop. “Does he mostly work in the store?”
“Lord, no, he hates working in the store.”
“So, what does he do?”
She picked up a sponge and wiped the counter. “A little bit of everything.”
“Like what?”
She stopped wiping. “If a woman needs legal help, he tracks down one of the lawyers, or if one of the kids makes a spill, he grabs a mop.” She smiled proudly. “I told you, he’s a good boy.”
“Sounds like it,” Will agreed. “What else does he do?”
“Oh, this and that.” She paused, thinking it through. “He coordinates the donations. He’s very good on the phone. If it sounds like he’s talking to someone who might give a bit more, he’ll drive the truck over to pick up their stuff, and nine times out of ten, he comes back with a nice check in addition. I think he likes getting out and talking to people. All he does at the airport is stare at blips on a screen all day. Would you like some iced water? Lemonade?”
“No, thank you,” he answered. “What about Jacquelyn Zabel? Have you heard her name before?”
“That strikes a bell, but I’m not sure why. It’s a very unusual name.”
“How about Pauline McGhee? Or maybe Pauline Seward?”
She smiled, putting her hand over her mouth. “No.”
Will forced himself to slow things down. The first rule of interviewing was to be calm, because it was hard to spot whether or not someone else was tense when you were tense yourself. Judith had gone still when he’d asked the last question, so he repeated it. “Pauline McGhee or Pauline Seward?”
She shook her head. “No.”
“How often does Tom pick up donations?”
Judith’s voice took on a falsely cheerful tone. “You know, I’m not sure. I’ve got my calendar in here somewhere. I usually mark the dates.” She opened one of the kitchen drawers and started to rummage around. She was visibly nervous, and he knew she had opened the drawer to give herself something to do other than look him in the eye. She chattered on, telling Will, “Tom is so good about giving his time. He’s very involved in the youth group at his church. The whole family volunteers at the soup kitchen once a month.”
Will didn’t let her get sidetracked. “Does he go out alone to pick up donations?”
“Unless there’s a couch or something large.” She closed the drawer and opened another. “I have no idea where my calendar is. All those years I wanted my husband home with me, and now he drives me crazy putting things up where they don’t belong.”
Will glanced out the front window, wondering what was keeping Faith. “The children are here?”
She opened another drawer. “Napping in the back.”
“Tom said he would meet me here. Why didn’t he tell us he was at the crime scene where your car hit Anna Lindsey?”
“What?” She looked momentarily confused, but told him, “Well, I called Tom to come see Henry. I thought he was having a heart attack, that Tom would want to be there, that—”
“But Tom didn’t tell us he was there,” Will repeated. “And neither did you.”
“It didn’t …” She waved her hand, dismissing it. “He wanted to be with his father.”
“These women who were abducted were cautious women. They wouldn’t open the door to just anybody. It would have to have been someone they trusted. Somebody they knew was coming.”
She stopped looking for the calendar. Her face showed her thoughts as clear as a picture: She knew something was horribly wrong.
Will asked, “Where is your son, Mrs. Coldfield?”
Tears welled into her eyes. “Why are you asking all these questions about Tom?”
“He was supposed to meet me here.”
Her voice was almost a whisper. “He said he had to go home. I don’t understand …”
Will realized something then—something Faith had said on the phone. She’d already talked to Tom Coldfield. The reason she wasn’t here yet was because Tom had sent her to the wrong house.
Will made his voice deadly serious. “Mrs. Coldfield, I need to know where Tom is right now.”
She put her hand to her mouth, tears spilling from her eyes.
There was a phone on the wall. Will snatched the receiver off the hook. He dialed in Faith’s cell phone number, but his finger didn’t make it to the last digit. There was a searing pain in his back, the worst muscle spasm he’d ever had in his life. Will put his hand to his shoulder, his fingers feeling for a knot, but all he felt was cold, sharp metal. He looked down to find the bloody tip of what had to be a very large knife sticking out of his chest.