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'd 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 hook-ups 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 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 took away the victim 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 Veteran's 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 Peachtree-Dekalb 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.
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