Undone (26 page)

The detective said, “Two women — sisters — and their father. They were on their way back from Florida, going home to Tennessee. Their car broke down on the side of the road about six miles from where the Buick hit our first victim. They saw a white sedan coming. One of the women tried to flag it down. It slowed but didn’t stop.”

“Could she see the driver?”

“Black, baseball cap, loud music thumping. She said she was kind of glad he didn’t stop.”

“Did they see a license plate?”

“Just three letters, alpha, foxtrot, charlie, which pulled up about three hundred thousand cars, sixteen thousand of them are white, half of them are registered in the immediate area.”

Faith wrote down the corresponding letters, A-F-C, thinking the license plate was a bust unless they just happened to stumble on the matching car. She flipped through Galloway’s notes, trying to find what else he was hiding.

Will said, “I’d like to talk to all three of them.”

“Too late,” Galloway said. “They went back to Tennessee this morning. The father’s an old guy, not doing too well. Sounded like they were taking him home to die. You could call them, maybe drive up there. I’m telling you, though, we got everything out of them that we could.”

Will asked, “Was there anything else at the scene?”

“Just what you read in the reports.”

“We haven’t gotten the reports yet.”

Galloway seemed almost contrite. “Sorry. The girl should’ve faxed them to you first thing. They’re probably buried on her desk somewhere.”

“We can get them before we leave,” Will offered. “Can you just run it down for me?”

“It’s what you’d expect. When the cruiser showed up, the guy who stopped, the paramedic, was working on the victim. Judith Coldfield was freaking out about her husband, worried he was having a heart attack. The ambulance came and took the victim away. The old man was better by then, so he waited for the second ambulance. That came a few minutes later. Our guys called in the detectives, started marking out the scene. The usual stuff. I’m being honest here. Nothing came up.”

“We’d like to talk to the cop who was first on the scene, get his impressions.”

“He’s fishing in Montana with his father-in-law right now.” Galloway shrugged. “I’m not giving y’all the runaround here. The guy’s had this vacation planned for a while.”

Faith had found a familiar name in Galloway’s notes. “What’s this about Jake Berman?” For Will’s benefit, she explained, “Rick Sigler and Jake Berman were the two men who stopped to help Anna.”

“Anna?” Galloway asked.

“That’s the name she gave at the hospital,” Will told him. “Rick Sigler was the off-duty EMT, right?”

“Right,” Galloway confirmed. “Their story about the movie seemed kind of sketchy to me.”

Faith made a noise of disgust, wondering how many dead ends this guy had to hit before he passed out from sheer stupidity.

“Anyway,” Galloway said, making a point of ignoring Faith. “I ran them both through the computer. Sigler’s clean, but Berman’s got a record.”

Faith felt her stomach drop. She’d spent two hours on the computer this morning and it had never occurred to her to check the men for a criminal history.

“Solicitation for lewd acts.” Galloway smiled at Faith’s stunned reaction. “Guy’s married with two kids. Got picked up for screwing another guy in a toilet stall at the Mall of Georgia six months ago. Some teenage kid walked in and found them heel to toe. Goddamn pervert. My wife shops at that mall.”

“Have you talked to Berman?” Will asked.

“He gave me a bogus number.” Galloway shot Faith another scathing look. “The address on his driver’s license is out of date, too, and nothing came up on a cross-match.”

She saw a hole in his story and pounced. “How do you know he has a wife and two kids?”

“It’s in the arrest report. He had them with him at the mall. They were waiting for him to come out of the bathroom.” Galloway’s lips twisted in disgust. “You want my advice, he’s the one you should be looking at.”

“The women were raped,” Faith said, tossing back his notebook. “Gay men don’t go after women. It’s sort of what makes them gay.”

“This bad guy strike you as the type of person who likes women?”

Faith didn’t answer him, mostly because he had a point.

Will asked, “What about Rick Sigler?”

Galloway took his time folding his notebook closed, sticking it into his pocket. “He came back clean. Been working as a paramedic for sixteen years. Guy went to Heritage High School right down the road from here.” His mouth twisted in disgust. “Played on the football team, if you can believe that.”

Will took his time getting to his last question. “What else are you holding back?”

Galloway looked him right in the eye. “That’s all I got, kemo sabe.”

Faith didn’t believe him, but Will seemed satisfied. He actually reached out and shook the man’s hand. “Thank you for your time, Detective.”

FAITH TURNED ON the lights as she walked into her kitchen, dropping her purse on the counter, sinking into the very same chair she’d started her day in. Her head was aching, her neck so tense that it hurt to turn her head. She picked up the phone to check her voicemail. Jeremy’s message was short and unusually sweet.
“Hi, Mom, just calling to see how you’re doing. I love you.”
Faith frowned, guessing he’d either made a bad grade on his chem test or needed money.

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 have been 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 him 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 pickups. 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.