“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 kin
d, 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.
The Will Trent Series 7-Book Bundle Page 121