Genesis (45 page)

"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.

"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. "Noma'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."