Undone (51 page)

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 bunk beds, a large master and attached bath, a kitchen, a 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 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 hookups 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 had 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 had taken the victim away
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?”

“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.”