Genesis (22 page)

She dialed his number, but hung up the phone before the call
went through. Faith was bone tired, so exhausted that her vision was
blurring, and she wanted nothing more than a hot bath and a glass of
wine, neither of which was recommended for her current state. She
did not need to make matters worse by yelling at her son.

Her laptop was still on the table, but Faith didn't check her email.
Amanda had told her to report to her office by the end of the day to
talk about the fact that Faith had passed out in the parking lot at the
courthouse. Faith glanced at the clock on the kitchen stove. It was
well past the end of the business day, almost ten o'clock. Amanda was
probably at home draining the blood from the insects that had gotten
caught in her web.

Faith wondered if her day could get any worse, then decided it
was a mathematical improbability, considering the time. She had
spent the last five hours with Will, getting in and out of her car, ringing
doorbells, talking to whatever man, woman or child answered
the door—if they answered the door at all—looking for Jake
Berman. All told, there were twenty-three Jake Bermans scattered
around the metropolitan area. Faith and Will had talked to six of
them, ruled out twelve, and been unable to find the other five, who
were either not at home, not at work, or not answering the door.

If finding the man was easier, maybe Faith wouldn't be so worried
about him. Witnesses lied to the police all the time. They gave wrong
names, wrong phone numbers, wrong details. It was so common that
Faith seldom got annoyed when it happened. Jake Berman was
another story, though. Everyone left a paper trail. You could pull up
old cell phone records or past addresses and pretty soon, you were
staring your witness in the face, pretending like you hadn't wasted
half a day tracking them down.

Jake Berman didn't have a paper trail. He hadn't even filed a tax return
last year. At least, he hadn't filed one in the name of Jake
Berman—which in turn raised the specter of Pauline McGhee's
brother. Maybe Berman had changed his name just like Pauline
Seward. Maybe Faith had sat across the table from their killer in the
Grady Hospital cafeteria the first night this case had started.

Or maybe Jake Berman was a tax dodger who never used credit
cards or cell phones and Pauline McGhee had walked away from her life
because sometimes that's what women did—they just walked away.

Faith was beginning to understand how that option had its benefits.

In between knocking on doors, Will had telephoned Beulah,
Edna and Wallace O'Connor of Tennessee. Max Galloway had not
been lying about the elderly father. The man was in a home, and
Faith gathered from Will's part of the conversation that his mind was
none too sharp. The sisters were talkative, and obviously tried to be
helpful, but there was nothing more they could offer on the white
sedan they'd seen barreling down the road just miles from the crime
scene other than to say there was mud on the bumper.

Finding Rick Sigler, the focus of Jake Berman's Route 316 assignation,
had been only slightly more productive. Faith had made the
call, and the man had sounded as if he was going to have a heart attack
the second she'd identified herself. Rick was in his ambulance,
taking a patient to the hospital, scheduled for two more pick-ups.
Faith and Will were going to meet him at eight the following morning
when he got off work.

Faith stared at her laptop. She knew that she should put this in a
report so that Amanda had the information, though her boss seemed
quite capable of finding out things on her own. Still, Faith went
through the motions. She slid her computer across the table, opened
it, and hit the space bar to wake it up.

Instead of going into her email program, she launched the
browser. Faith's hands hovered over the keys, then her fingers started
to move of their own accord:
SARA LINTON GRANT COUNTY GEORGIA
.

Firefox shot back almost three thousand hits. Faith clicked on the
first link, which took her to a page on pediatric medicine that required
a username and password to access Sara's paper on ventricular
septal defects in malnourished infants. The second link was on something
equally as riveting, and Faith scrolled down to the bottom to
find an article about a shooting at a Buckhead bar where Sara had
been the attending on call at Grady.

Faith realized she was being stupid about this. A general search
was fine, but even the newspaper articles would tell only half the
story. In an officer-involved death, the GBI was always called in.
Faith could access actual case files through the agency's internal database.
She opened the program and did a general search. Again, Sara's
name was all over the place, case after case where she had testified in
her capacity as a coroner. Faith narrowed the scope of the search, taking
out expert testimony.

This time, only two matches came up. The first was a sexual assault
case that was over twenty years old. As with most browsers,
there was a short description of the contents underneath the link, a
few lines of text that gave you an idea of what the case was about.
Faith scanned the description, moving the mouse to the link without
actually clicking. Will's words came back to her, his valiant speech
about Sara Linton's privacy.

Maybe he was half right.

Faith clicked the second link, opening up the file on Jeffrey
Tolliver. This was a cop killing. The reports were lengthy, detailed,
the kind of narrative you wrote when you wanted to make sure that
every single word held up when you were cross-examined in court.
Faith read about the man's background, his years of service to the
law. There were hyperlinks connecting the cases he had worked,
some of which Faith was familiar with from the news, some she
knew about from shoptalk around the squad room.

She scrolled through page after page, reading about Tolliver's life,
gleaning the character of the man from the respectful way people described
him. Faith didn't stop until she got to the crime-scene photos.
Tolliver had been killed by a crude pipe bomb. Sara had been standing
right there, seen it all happen, watched him die. Faith braced herself,
opening up the autopsy files. The pictures were shocking, the
damage horrifying. Somehow, photographs from the scene had gotten
mixed in: Sara with her hands out so the camera could document
the blood spray. Sara's face, caught in close-up, dark blood smearing
her mouth, eyes looking as flat and lifeless as her husband's photos
from the morgue.

All the files listed the case as still open. No resolution was listed.
No arrest. No conviction. Strange, in a cop killing. What had
Amanda said about Coastal?

Faith opened up a new browser window. The GBI was responsible
for investigating all deaths that occurred on state property. She
did a search for deaths at Coastal State Prison in the last four years.
There were sixteen in all. Three were homicides—a skinny white supremacist
who was beaten to death in the rec room and two African-
Americans who were stabbed almost two hundred times between
them with the sharpened end of a plastic toothbrush. Faith skimmed
the other thirteen: eight suicides, five natural causes. She thought
about Amanda's words to Sara Linton:
We take care of our own.

Prison guards called it "paroling an inmate to Jesus." The death
would have to be quiet, unspectacular, and wholly believable. A cop
would know how to cover his tracks. Faith guessed one of the overdoses
or suicides was Tolliver's killer—a sad, pitiful death, but justice
nonetheless. She felt a lightness in her chest, a relief that the man had
been punished, a cop's widow spared a lengthy trial.

Faith closed the files, clicking through them one by one until they
were all gone, then opened up Firefox again. She entered Jeffrey
Tolliver's name behind Sara Linton's. Articles came up from the local
paper. The
Grant Observer
wasn't exactly in line for a Pulitzer. The
front page carried the daily lunch menu for the elementary school
and the biggest stories seemed to revolve around the exploits of the
high school football team.

Armed with the correct dates, it didn't take Faith long to find the
stories on Tolliver's murder. They dominated the paper for weeks.
She was surprised to see how handsome he was. There was a picture
of him with Sara at some kind of formal affair. He was in a tux. She
was in a slinky black dress. She looked radiant beside him, a totally
different person. Oddly, it was this picture that made Faith feel bad
about her clandestine investigation into Sara Linton's life. The doctor
looked so damn blissful in the photograph, like every single thing in
her life was complete. Faith looked at the date. The photo had been
taken two weeks before Tolliver's death.

On this last revelation, Faith closed down the computer, feeling
sad and slightly disgusted with herself. Will was right at least about
this—she should not have looked.

As penance for her sins, Faith took out her monitoring device.
Her blood sugar was on the high side, and she had to think for a second
about what she needed to do. Another needle, another shot. She
checked her bag. There were only three insulin pens left and she had
not made an appointment with Delia Wallace as she had promised.

Faith pulled up her skirt, exposing her bare thigh. She could still
see the needle mark where she had jabbed herself in the bathroom
around lunchtime. A small bruise ringed the injection site, and Faith
guessed she should try her luck on the other leg this time. Her hand
didn't shake as much as it usually did, and it only took to the count of
twenty-six for her to sink the needle into her thigh. She sat back in
her chair, waiting to feel better. At least a full minute passed, and
Faith felt worse.

Tomorrow,
she thought. She would make an appointment with
Delia Wallace first thing in the morning.

She pushed down her skirt as she stood. The kitchen was a mess,
dishes stacked in the sink, trash overflowing. Faith was not naturally
a tidy person, but her kitchen was generally spotless. She had been
called out to too many homicide scenes where women were found
sprawled on the floor of their filthy kitchens. The sight always triggered
a snap judgment in Faith, as if the woman deserved to be
beaten to death by her boyfriend, shot and killed by a stranger, because
she had left dirty dishes in her sink.

She wondered what Will thought when he came onto a crime
scene. She had been around countless dead bodies with the man, but
his face was always inscrutable. Will's first job in law enforcement
had been with the GBI. He had never been in uniform, never been
called out on a suspicious smell and found an old woman dead on her
couch, or worked patrol, stopping speeders, not knowing if it was
going to be a stupid teenager behind the wheel or a gang banger who
would put a gun in his face, pull the trigger, rather than have the
points on his license.

He was just so damn
passive
. Faith didn't understand it. Despite
the way Will carried himself, he was a big man. He ran every day,
rain or shine. He worked out with weights. He had apparently dug a
pond in his backyard. There was so much muscle under those suits he
wore that his body could have been carved from rock. And yet, there
he was this afternoon, sitting with Faith's purse in his lap while he
begged Max Galloway for information. If Faith had been in Will's
shoes, she would've backed the idiot against the wall and squeezed his
testicles until he sang out every detail he knew in high soprano.

But she wasn't Will, and Will wasn't going to do that. He was just
going to shake Galloway's hand and thank him for the professional
courtesy like some gigantic, half-witted patsy.

She searched the cabinet under the sink for dishwashing powder,
only to find an empty box. She left it in the cabinet and went to the
fridge to make a note on the grocery list. Faith had written the first
three letters of the word before she realized that the item was already
on the list. Twice.

"Damn," she whispered, putting her hand to her stomach. How
was she going to take care of a child when she could not even take
care of herself ? She loved Jeremy, adored everything about him, but
Faith had been waiting eighteen years for her life to start, and now
that it was here, she was looking at another eighteen-year wait. She
would be over fifty by then, eligible for movie discounts through the
AARP.

Did she want this? Could she actually do it? Faith couldn't ask her
mother to help again. Evelyn loved Jeremy, and she had never complained
about taking care of her grandson—not when Faith was
away at the police academy, or when she had to work double shifts
just to make ends meet—but there was no way that Faith could expect
her mother to help out like that again.

But then, who else was there?

Certainly not the baby's father. Victor Martinez was tall, dark,
handsome . . . and completely incapable of taking care of himself. He
was a dean at Georgia Tech, in charge of nearly twenty thousand students,
but he could not keep a clean pair of socks in his drawer to save
his life. They had dated for six months before he moved into Faith's
house, which had seemed romantic and impetuous until reality settled
in. Within a week, Faith was doing Victor's laundry, picking up
his dry-cleaning, fixing his meals, cleaning up his messes. It was like
raising Jeremy again, except at least with her son, she could punish
him for being lazy. The last straw had come when she had just finished
cleaning the sink and Victor had dropped a knife covered in
peanut butter on the draining board. If Faith had been wearing her
gun, she would have shot him.

He moved out the next morning.

Even with all that, Faith couldn't help but feel herself softening
toward Victor as she gathered up the drawstring on the trash. That
was one good difference between her son and her ex-lover: Victor
never had to be told six times to take out the trash. It was one of the
chores Faith most hated, and—ridiculously—she felt tears well into
her eyes as she thought about having to lift the bag and heft it down
the stairs, outside, to the garbage can.