Genesis (44 page)

"We can't afford a gardener."

"Where are your kids?"

"Day care." He tried to turn around again. "What business is this
of yours?"

Will shoved him again, forcing him go up the driveway. He hated
the guy for so many reasons, not least of which because he had a wife
and kids who probably cared about him a great deal and he couldn't
even cut the grass or wash the car for them.

Berman demanded, "Where are you taking me? I said take me to
the police station."

Will kept quiet, shoving him up the driveway, yanking up his
arms whenever he slowed or tried to turn around.

"If I'm under arrest, then you have to take me to jail."

They walked to the back of the house, Berman protesting the entire
way. He was a man who was used to being listened to, and it
seemed to irk him more to be ignored than to be pushed around, so
Will kept silent as he shoved him toward the patio.

Will tried the back door, but it was locked. He looked at Berman,
whose smug look seemed to indicate he thought he was getting the
upper hand. The window the man had sneaked out had guillotined
closed. He slid it back open, the cheap springs clanging.

Berman said, "Don't worry. I'll wait for you."

Will wondered where Nick Shelton was. He was probably in
front of the house, thinking he was doing Will a favor by giving him
time alone with the suspect.

"Right," Will muttered, loosening one side of the cuffs and
clamping Berman to the barbecue grill. He lifted himself up and angled
his body through the open window. Will found himself in the
kitchen, which was decorated in a goose theme: geese on the wallpaper
border, geese on the towels, geese on the carpet under the
kitchen table.

He looked back out the window. Berman was there, smoothing
down his pajamas like he was trying them on at Macy's.

Will did a quick check of the house, finding only what he expected:
a children's room with bunkbeds, a large master and attached
bath, kitchen, family room and a study with one book on the shelves.
Will couldn't read the title, but he recognized Donald Trump's picture
on the jacket and assumed it was a get-rich-quick scheme.
Obviously, Jake Berman hadn't taken the man's advice. Though,
considering Berman had lost his job and declared bankruptcy, maybe
he had.

There was no basement, and the garage was empty but for three
boxes that seemed to contain the contents of Jake Berman's old office:
a stapler, a nice desk set, lots of papers with charts and graphs on
them. Will opened the sliding glass door to the patio and found
Berman sitting under the grill, his arm dangling over his head.

"You have no right to search my house."

"You were fleeing your residence. That's all the cause I needed."

Berman seemed to buy the explanation, which sounded reasonable
even to Will's ears, though he knew it was highly illegal.

Will dragged around a chair from the table set and sat down. The
air was still chilly, and the sweat he'd generated from chasing after
Berman was drying in the cold.

"This isn't fair," Berman said. "I want your badge number and
your name and—"

"You want the real one or you want me to make up something,
like you did?"

Berman had the sense not to answer.

"Why did you run, Jake? Where were you going to go in your pajamas?"

"I didn't think that far," he grumbled. "I just don't want to deal
with this right now. I've got a lot on my plate."

"You've got two choices here: either you tell me what happened
that night or I take you to jail in your pajamas." To make the threat
clear, Will added, "And I don't mean the Coweta Country Club. I'll
stroll you straight into the Atlanta Pen, and I won't let you change."
He pointed to Berman's chest, which was heaving up and down from
panic and anger. The man obviously spent time on his body. He was
cut, his abs well defined, his shoulders broad and muscled. "You'll
find all those pull-ups at the gym didn't go to waste."

"Is that what this is about? You're some kind of homophobic
jerk?"

"I don't care who you're blowing in the toilet." This much was
true, though Will kept an edge to his voice to imply the opposite.
Everybody had a button, and Berman's was his sexual orientation. At
the moment, Will's seemed to be that the cheating prick chained to
the Grillmaster 2000 was screwing around on his wife and expecting
her to just suck it up and be a good spouse. The Oprah-esque irony
was not lost on Will.

He said, "The guys down at the pen love it when new meat comes
along."

"Fuck you."

"Oh, they will. They'll fuck you in places you didn't know could
be fucked."

"Go to hell."

Will let him sulk for a few seconds, trying to get his own emotions
under control. He concentrated on how much time they had
pissed away looking for this pathetic idiot when they could've been
following real clues. Will listed it out for him. "Resisting arrest, lying
to the police, wasting police time, obstructing an investigation.
You could get ten years for this, Jake, and that's if the judge likes you,
which is doubtful considering you've got a record and you present
like an arrogant asshole."

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?"