“I was a farrier,” he shot back. “I put shoes on horses.”
“Still, you have a specialized knowledge of metal tooling.”
Finney muttered a curse. “You people are unbelievable. You know that?”
Amanda was leaning back in her chair. “I don’t recall from your commercials, Mr. Finney—do you have a subspecialty in immigration law?” She gave a cheery whistle, a pitch-perfect imitation of the jingle on Finney’s television commercials.
“You think you’re going to get away with a beat-down on a technicality? Look at this man.” Finney pointed to his client, and Faith had to concede the lawyer’s point. Simkov’s nose was twisted to the side where the cartilage had been shattered. His right eye was so swollen the lid wouldn’t open more than a slit. Even his ear was damaged; an angry row of stitches bisected the lobe where Will’s fist had split the skin in two.
Finney said, “Your officer beat the shit out of him, and you think that’s okay?” He didn’t expect an answer. “Otik Simkov fled a communist regime and came to this country to start his life all over again from scratch. You think what you’re doing to him now is what the Constitution is all about?”
Amanda had an answer for everything. “The Constitution is for innocent people.”
Finney snapped his briefcase closed. “I’m calling a press conference.”
“I’d be more than happy to tell them how Mr. Simkov made a whore suck him off before he’d let her go up to feed a dying six-month-old baby.” She leaned over the table. “Tell me, Mr. Simkov:
Did you give her a few extra minutes with the child if she swallowed?”
Finney took a second to regroup. “I’m not denying this man is an asshole, but even assholes have rights.”
Amanda gave Simkov an icy smile. “Only if they’re United States citizens.”
“Unbelievable, Amanda.” Finney seemed genuinely disgusted. “This is going to catch up with you one day. You know that, don’t you?”
Amanda was having some kind of staring contest with Simkov, blocking out everything else in the room.
Finney turned his attention to Faith. “Are you all right with this, Officer? Are you okay with your partner beating up a witness?”
Faith wasn’t at all okay with it, but now was not the time to equivocate. “It’s Special Agent, actually. ‘Officer’ is generally what you call patrolmen.”
“This is great. Atlanta’s the new Guantánamo Bay.” He turned back to Simkov. “Otik, don’t let them push you around. You have rights.”
Simkov was still staring at Amanda, as if he thought he could break her somehow. His eyes moved back and forth, reading her resistance. Finally, he gave a tight nod. “Okay. I drop my lawsuit. You make this other stuff go away.”
Finney didn’t want to hear it. “As your lawyer, I am advising you to—”
“You’re not his lawyer anymore,” Amanda interrupted. “Isn’t that right, Mr. Simkov?”
“Correct,” he agreed. He crossed his arms, staring straight ahead.
Finney muttered another curse. “This isn’t over.”
“I think it is,” Amanda told him. She picked up the stack of pages detailing the suit against the city.
Finney cursed her again, adding Faith for good measure, then left the room.
Amanda tossed the lawsuit into the trashcan. Faith listened to the noise the pages made as they fluttered through the air. She was glad that Will was not here, because as much as Faith’s conscience was bothering her over this, Will’s was nearly killing him. Finney was right. Will was getting away with a beat-down thanks to a technicality. If Faith hadn’t been in that hallway yesterday, she might be feeling differently right now.
She summoned the image of Balthazar Lindsey lying in the recycling bin a few feet from his mother’s penthouse apartment and all that came to mind were excuses for Will’s behavior.
“So,” Amanda said. “Shall we assume there’s honor among criminals, Mr. Simkov?”
Simkov nodded appreciatively. “You are a very hard woman.”
Amanda seemed pleased with the assessment, and Faith could see how thrilled she was to be back in an interrogation room again. It probably bored her to death sitting through organizational meetings and looking at budgets and flowcharts all day. No wonder terrorizing Will was her only hobby.
She said, “Tell me about the scam you had going on in the apartments.”
He gave an open-handed shrug. “These rich people are always traveling. Sometimes I rent out the space to someone. They go in. They do a little—” He made a screwing gesture with his hands. “Otik gets a little money. The maid’s in the next day. Everyone is happy.”
Amanda nodded, as if this was a perfectly understandable arrangement. “What happened with Anna Lindsey’s place?”
“I figure, why not cash out? That asshole Mr. Regus in 9A, he knew something was up. He don’t smoke. He come back from one of his business trips and there was a cigarette burn on his carpet. I saw it—barely there. No big deal. But Regus caused some problems.”
“And they fired you.”
“Two-week notice, good referral.” He shrugged again. “I already got another job lined up. Bunch of town houses over near the Phipps Plaza. Twenty-four-hour watch. Very classy place. Me and this other guy, we switch out. He takes days. I take the nights.”
“When did you first notice Anna Lindsey was missing?”
“Always at seven o’clock, she comes down with the baby. Then one day she’s not there. I check my message box where the tenants leave me things, mostly complaints—can’t get a window open, can’t figure out the television, stuff that’s not my job, right? Anyway, there’s a note from Ms. Lindsey saying she’s on vacation for two weeks. I figure she must have left. Usually, they tell me where they go, but maybe she thinks since I won’t be here when she’s back, it don’t matter.”
That jibed with what Anna Lindsey said. Amanda asked, “Is that how she usually communicated with you, through notes?”
He nodded. “She don’t like me. Says I’m sloppy.” His lip curled in disgust. “Made the building buy me a uniform so I look like a monkey. Made me say ‘yes, ma’am’ and ‘no, ma’am’ to her like I’m a child.”
That sounded like the kind of thing their victim profile trended toward.
Faith asked, “How did you know she was gone?”
“I don’t see her come downstairs. Usually, she go to the gym, she go to the store, she take the baby for walks. Wants help getting the stroller in and out of the elevator.” He shrugged. “I think, ‘She must be gone.’ ”
Amanda said, “So you assumed Ms. Lindsey would be gone for two weeks, which coincided nicely with the date your employment would terminate.”
“Easy peasy,” he agreed.
“Who did you call?”
“This pimp. The dead guy.” For the first time, Simkov seemed to lose a bit of his arrogance. “He’s not so bad. They call him Freddy. I don’t know his real name, but he was always honest with me. Not like some of the others. I tell him two hours, he stay two hours. He pay for the maid. That’s it. Some of the other guys, they get a little pushy—try to negotiate, don’t leave when they’re supposed to. I push back. I don’t call them when an apartment’s available. Freddy, he film a music video up there once. I watch for it on the TV, but I don’t see. Maybe he couldn’t find an agent. Music is a hard business.”
“The party at Anna Lindsey’s got out of hand.” Amanda stated the obvious.
“Yeah, out of hand,” he agreed. “Freddy’s a good guy. I don’t go up there to check on them. Every time I’m in the elevator, someone say, ‘Oh, Mr. Simkov, could you look at this in my apartment.’ ‘Could you water my plants?’ ‘Could you walk my dog?’ Not my job, but they trap you like that, what can you say? ‘Fuck off’? No, you can’t. So I stay at my desk, tell them I can’t do anything because my job is to watch the desk, not walk their puppy dogs. Right?”
Amanda said, “That apartment was a mess. It’s hard
to believe it got that bad in just a week.”
He shrugged. “These people. They got no respect for nothing. They shit in the corner like dogs. Me, I’m not surprised. They’re all fucking animals, do anything to get the drug in their arm.”
“What about the baby?” Amanda asked.
“The whore—Lola. I thought she was going up there to do some business. Freddy was there. Lola got a soft spot for him. I didn’t know he was dead. Or that they had trashed Ms. Lindsey’s place. Obviously.”
“How often was Lola going up there?”
“I don’t keep up with it. Couple times a day. I figure she get a bump every now and then.” He rubbed his hand under his nose, sniffing—the universal sign for snorting coke. “She not so bad. A good woman brought down by bad circumstance.”
Simkov didn’t seem to realize he was one of the bad circumstances. Faith asked, “Did you see anything unusual in the building over the last two weeks?”
He barely gave her a glance, asking Amanda, “Why is this girl asking me questions?”
Faith had been snubbed before, but she knew this guy needed to be on a short leash. “You want me to get my partner back in here to talk to you?”
He snorted, as if the thought of another beat-down was inconsequential, but he answered Faith’s question. “What do you mean, unusual? It’s Buckhead. Unusual is everywhere.”
Anna Lindsey’s penthouse had probably set her back three million dollars. The woman hardly lived in the ghetto. “Did you see any strangers loitering around?” Faith persisted.
He waved her off. “Strangers everywhere. This is a big city.”
Faith thought about their killer. He had to have access to the building in order to Taser Anna and take her away from the apartment. Simkov obviously wasn’t going to make this easy, so she tried to bluff him. “You know what I’m talking about, Otik. Don’t bullshit me or I’ll have my partner go back to work on your ugly face.”
He shrugged again, but there was something different about the gesture. Faith waited him out, and he finally said, “I go for a smoke sometimes behind the building.”
The fire escape that led to the roof was behind the building. “What did you see?”
“A car,” he said. “Silver, four-door.”
Faith tried to keep her reaction calm. Both the Coldfields and the family from Tennessee had seen a white sedan speeding away from the accident. It had been dusk. Maybe they had mistaken the silver car for white. “Did you get a license plate number?”
He shook his head. “I saw the ladder to the fire escape was unlatched. I went up to the roof.”
“On the ladder?”
“Elevator. I can’t climb that ladder. It’s twenty-three floors. I got a bad knee.”
“What did you see on the roof?”
“There was a soda can there. Someone used it for an ashtray. Lots of butts inside.”
“Where was it?”
“On the ledge of the roof, right by the ladder.”
“What did you do with it?”
“I kicked it off,” he said, giving another one of his shrugs. “Watched it hit the ground. It exploded like—” He put his hands together, then flung them apart. “Pretty spectacular.”
Faith had been behind that building, had searched it top to bottom. “We didn’t find any cigarette butts or a soda can behind the building.”
“That’s what I’m saying. Next day, it was all gone. Someone cleaned it up.”
“And the silver car?”
“Gone, too.”
“You’re sure you didn’t see any suspicious men hanging around the building?”
He blew out a puff of air. “No, lady. I told you. Just the root beer.”
“What root beer?”
“The soda can. It was Doc Peterson’s Root Beer.”
The same as they’d found in the basement of the house behind Olivia Tanner’s.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
—
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 th
e 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.
The Will Trent Series 5-Book Bundle Page 119