Unseen (19 page)

“Hiding what?”

“Exactly.”

Lena watched Paul’s fingers as he tried to free her shirt from the zipper. She thought about the little blue jacket she’d ordered online. Jared’s family loved Auburn football to the point of making it a religion. Lena had yelled at him for painting the nursery, but she couldn’t resist going online last week and ordering a baby-sized Auburn hoodie from Tiger Rags.

The jacket was on back order. She wondered when it would be delivered. What day in the near future would she go home and find a tiny jacket waiting for little arms that would never exist?

“Lee?” Paul asked. “Where’d you go?”

She shook her head. “It’s too late to switch out Eric. He’s just gonna have to man up.”

He finally freed the zipper. “You’re the boss.”

The word grated; it had started taking on mocking undertones. “Lucky me,” she muttered. Technically, their lieutenant was supposed to be the boss, but a particularly aggressive form of leukemia had taken him out of the equation and Denise Branson had yet to find a suitable replacement. At first, Lena had been happy to fill the role, but now she was seeing the downside of her new responsibilities.

Paul said, “Shit, look smart.” He puffed out his chest and pressed his back to the wall as he stood at attention.

Lena didn’t have to ask why. Lonnie Gray was talking on his cell phone as he walked down the hallway. He ended the call when he saw Paul and Lena. There was no preamble. He asked, “Status?”

Lena provided, “We’re doing run-throughs. No mistakes this time. We’re gonna nail Waller.”

Gray’s voice was stern. “That’s exactly what needs to happen, Detective.”

“Yes, sir,” she said, knowing he wasn’t kidding around. Lena had seen more than one detective leave the Macon PD before he was planning to because he’d disappointed the chief. “You have my word that the entire team is at one hundred percent.”

Paul added, “You can count on us, sir,” sounding like a third-grader bringing an apple to his teacher.

“Good.” Gray headed back down the hallway, but not before giving Paul a curt nod. Lena could practically hear Vickery’s ball sac quiver. She felt the same respect toward Gray, but she hoped she didn’t look like she was creaming her pants every time the chief was around.

As soon as Gray was gone, Paul clapped his hands together. “You heard the chief. Let’s rock this bad boy.”

He preceded Lena down the hall toward the shop. Paul was obviously pumped, and not just because of the chief. He walked on the balls of his feet in that weird way that made him look a little effeminate. Lena knew Paul had served two tours in Afghanistan before a piece of shrapnel got lodged in his arm. Physical therapy had brought him back to one hundred percent, but being home had made him lose his taste for war.

Paul still relished a good fight, though—one of the many characteristics they both shared. At first, Lena thought their matched temperaments made for a good partnership, but she was beginning to see that maybe a differing opinion would offer a better balance.

Part of the reason Lena had respected Jeffrey Tolliver so much was that he’d always told Lena when he thought she was wrong.

Paul kicked open the door to the shop. The sound of metal hitting metal reverberated through the hangar-like building. The shop was where they brought seized automobiles and boats so they could take them apart and look for drugs or contraband. They also used it to do routine maintenance on the squad cars, which was why three cruisers were hanging on lifts.

The mechanics had cleared out a large space for Lena’s team to work. The footprint of the shooting-gallery house was thirty-five by sixty, and even in the large building, space was at a premium. They were using the log sergeant’s duty desk as their workspace, which had infuriated the sergeant, but orders were orders. Lena was surprised Denise Branson hadn’t taken the space away from them. She was pissed enough at Lena to strike out, and Branson didn’t get to the rank of major without knowing how to punish people.

DeShawn Franklin, Mitch Cabello, and Keith McVale stood around the duty desk. Lena took the lead ahead of Paul. She lengthened her stride so that he wouldn’t pass her. Back in Grant
County, Lena had been the only female detective on an all-male force. She knew the rules when she signed up. Every second of the day, she had to fight to keep her place in the pecking order.

“Hey, boss.” Mitch looked up from the diagram they had gotten from the tax assessor’s office. “You gotta cold?”

Lena knew what she probably looked like: red-rimmed eyes, bloodshot from crying. She wiped under her nose with the back of her hand. “Yeah. Jared gave it to me.”

“I bet he gave it to you.” DeShawn made a grunting sound that invited a chorus of porn music from the team.

“Shut up, assholes. I just ran into Chief Gray in the hall. He made it clear we’d better come back here with Waller or keep on driving out of town.” She gave DeShawn a pointed look. “That means you, too, golden boy.”

Mitch made a “rut-roh” sound straight out of a Scooby-Doo cartoon, though they all knew DeShawn was one of Gray’s favorites.

Lena looked around the shop. The mechanics had gone to lunch and the duty sergeant was probably sulking in his car. The B-Team had worked surveillance last night. Lena told them they could come in late. During the raid, they were assigned to guarding the perimeter, so they didn’t need to run the inside drills like the rest of them.

Still, someone was missing.

She asked, “Where’s Eric?”

DeShawn provided, “Shitting out lunch from the sound of it.”

Lena glanced at Paul, whose face tended to show every single thought that crossed his mind. He was still worried about Eric. Maybe he had a right to be. To mangle the old saying, Eric’s stomach was the window to his soul.

DeShawn asked, “Something wrong, boss?”

Lena tried to summon up her old self. “Yeah, I gotta bunch of little girls on my team.”

They greeted this with the expected howls and finger pointing.

Lena ignored them. She looked down at the concrete floor
where they had taped off the house. The diagram was to exact scale. Den, two bedrooms, bathroom, dining room, kitchen. They could pace off the steps here so that it came as second nature when they were doing the raid in real time. The only unknown was the basement.

Thumb latch. Deadbolt. Slide lock. There was no telling how the door would be secured, though they had wasted plenty of time considering the options.

The biggest issue was the four guys, maybe five, who were usually in the house. Sometimes a couple of junkies stayed the night, but that tended to be after a weekend of partying. Traffic started flowing around seven-thirty in the morning—either kids on their way to school or adults on their way to work. Two or three hours later, the moms came in their SUVs, seeking a bump to get them through their daily chores. Lunchtime traffic was unreliable, but rush hour started at four-thirty and didn’t slow down until after three in the morning.

This was when Sid Waller showed up. Like clockwork, he took the northbound exit onto Allman Road, hung a left onto Redding Street, then slowly drove his Corvette down the rutted gravel driveway to the shooting gallery.

Waller usually stayed at the house for three hours. No one knew what he did while he was there. It was too dangerous to send in the snitches at that time of day. They were usually passed out by then, anyway. Paul thought Waller was sampling the product. DeShawn thought he was banging some girls. Denise Branson thought he was counting all the money.

Lena prayed to God he was doing all three, and that by the time they made their way into that dark, dank basement, Sid Waller was too stoned, too fucked, and too scared to do anything but watch helplessly as Lena ratcheted the cuffs around his wrists.

She looked up. They were all waiting on her. DeShawn was staring at his hands like he was trying to decide whether or not he needed a manicure. Mitch and Keith were mumbling to each other
because the two of them couldn’t shut up if you held a gun to their heads. Paul’s face said it all. He was like a puppy, bouncing around on his feet, about to wet himself with anticipation.

The door creaked open. Eric Haigh gave a sheepish smile as he walked into the shop. Paul was right. There was something off about the man. He seemed too hesitant, which became enormously clear as he joined the rest of the team around the desk. They were all ready to go. Eric looked like the only place he wanted to go was back out the door he’d just walked in.

Well, they all had shit going on in their lives.

“All right, ladies.” Lena clapped her hands together. “Decision’s been made. We’re hitting this place at oh-dark-thirty tomorrow morning.”

S
ara sat in the passenger’s seat of Nell’s truck watching the Macon landscape scroll by. Atlanta was a city filled with beautiful gardens and trees, but there was something about being surrounded by a forest that made Sara feel at home. Like Macon, Grant County was a college town, located in a part of the state that still moved at a slower speed. Just seeing the trees made Sara feel like her lungs were working again. The vulture on her shoulder had temporarily left its perch. She felt more like herself.

Maybe it wasn’t entirely the scenery that had brought her this sense of calm. While Nell was shopping for cleaning supplies, Sara had frantically poured her heart out in a long email to her sister. Tessa’s response had been just as long, but instead of filling the message with clichés about soldiering on or enjoying sweet revenge, she’d made lists: Ten things she loved about Will Trent. Three of the stupidest jokes their father had ever told. Eight new words that Tessa had said around Izzie, Sara’s niece, that would probably end up sending Tessa to hell. Six reasons no one would ever be able to make biscuits as good as their grandmother’s. Five things that their mother did that they both swore they would never, ever do, but that they were now doing almost every single day of their lives.

The only direct acknowledgment to Sara’s situation came in the postscript:

Please don’t start listening to Dolly Parton again
.

Nell said, “I do that all the time.”

Sara was pulled from her thoughts. “What’s that?”

“Remember something about Jeffrey and smile.” Nell smiled, too. “He loved being in the woods. Used to go hiking all the time when he was in high school.”

Sara opened her mouth to correct her, then thought better of it.

“It’s all right,” Nell said. “You save whatever story you just thought of for Jared when he wakes up. We’ll all smile about it then.”

Sara nodded. This was a familiar refrain that Nell had started the minute they’d left the hospital. She needed to get some clean pajamas for when Jared woke up. She needed to make sure the house was clean for when Jared woke up. Sara didn’t begrudge Nell the goal. She could tell it was the only thing keeping her going.

Nell’s cell phone beeped. She was using the GPS to find Lena and Jared’s house. “I guess it’s down here,” she murmured, taking a lazy, right-hand turn.

Sara pressed her lips together. Nell drove like an old woman, never exceeding the speed limit, slowing to let over every car that even looked as if it might want to merge. Occasionally, she would stop the truck in order to read a sign or remark on a pedestrian. She was still stuck in small-town time, where rushing was considered rude and you didn’t beep your horn unless a dog was in the road.

Nell took in the houses lining the street. “Not too bad,” she commented, which was the most positive thing she’d said about Macon since they got into the truck. “I guess they got all the plans from the same magazine.”

Sara followed her gaze. There was a uniformity to the subdivision, but the houses weren’t overbuilt for the lots or stuffed with
extra bedrooms that no one would ever use. People kept their lawns tended. There were minivans in the driveways. American flags hung from porch posts. The street looked exactly like the kind where you’d expect to find two police officers living.

Nell didn’t need her GPS anymore. She parked near a white GBI crime scene van. Charlie Reed stood at the open back doors. A younger man handed him plastic crates that Charlie packed carefully into the cargo area. Sara recognized the sealed evidence bags from her medical examiner days. The past started to creep up again, especially when she noticed the two cops standing around a cruiser parked at the end of the street.

“Well,” Nell said. She was looking up at the house with some trepidation.

Sara guessed the woman had been expecting something closer to a witch’s cottage, not the quaint, single-story clapboard house at the top of a steep hill. The structure was shotgun style, deeper than it was wide, with the front door planted squarely in the middle. Instead of an American flag on the front porch, there was an orange and blue banner with the logo of Auburn University.

Nell seemed to approve of the flag. She said, “At least he’s still standing where he’s from.”

Sara made some mumbling noises that might be interpreted as encouragement. Maybe it wasn’t Nell, but Sara who was having a hard time thinking about Lena living in this house. The lawn was a dark carpet of green. There were some leggy petunias planted around the mailbox. Monkey grass splashed over the front walk. The front door was painted red. More petunias spilled from wooden planters on the porch. Sara couldn’t imagine Lena tending flowers, let alone sitting down and taking notes from a book on feng shui.

“You coming?” Nell asked.

Sara pushed open the door. The air felt chilly compared to the stuffy cab of the truck. The police officers at the end of the street
stared with open curiosity. Sara waved. She got two nods in return.

Nell told Sara, “I’m’ll call Possum and see if he checked in with the nurse yet.” She flipped open her phone and dialed the number. Her hand went to her hip. She looked up at the house as she waited for Possum to answer.

Sara hoped Nell was reconsidering her plans. The first thirty minutes of their drive had been spent discussing the realities of what cleaning the crime scene would entail. Sara hadn’t held back toward the end. She’d been fairly brutal, which only seemed to galvanize Nell’s resolve.