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"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."
He sounded so certain of himself that Will almost believed him.
WILL HAD TO WAIT until he was out of Jake Berman's neighborhood before his phone registered enough bars to make a call. Even then, service was spotty, and he had to pull over onto the side of the road just to get a call to go through. He dialed Faith's cell phone and listened to it ring. Her voicemail picked up, and he ended the call. Will checked the clock. 10:15. She was probably still with her doctor in Snellville.
Tom Coldfield hadn't mentioned that he had been at the crime scene—yet another person who had lied to them. Will was getting pretty sick and tired of people lying. He flipped open his phone and dialed information. They connected him to the tower at Charlie Brown Airport, where yet another operator told Will that Tom was taking a cigarette break. Will was in the process of leaving a message when the operator offered to give him Coldfield's cell phone number. A few minutes later, he was listening to Tom Coldfield yell over the sound of a jet engine.
"I'm glad you called, Agent Trent." His voice was just shy of a shout. "I left a message for your partner earlier, but I haven't heard back."
Will put his finger in his ear, as if that might help drown out the noise of a plane taking off on the other side of town. "Did you remember something?"
"Oh, nothing like that," Tom said. The roar subsided, and his voice went back to normal. "My folks and I were talking last night, wondering how your investigation was going."
There was a deafening rush of jet engine. Will waited it out, thinking this was crazy. "What time do you get off work?"
"About ten minutes, then I've got to pick up the kids from my mom's."
Will figured he would kill two birds with one stone. "Can you meet me at your parents' house?"
Tom waited for more engine noise to pass. "Sure. Shouldn't take me more than forty-five minutes to get there. Is something wrong?"
Will looked at the clock on the dash. "I'll see you in forty-five minutes."
He ended the call before Tom could ask any more questions. Unfortunately, he also ended it before he could get the Coldfields' address. Their retirement community shouldn't be too hard to find. Clairmont Road stretched from one side of DeKalb County to the other, but there was only one area where senior citizens flocked, and that was in the vicinity of the Atlanta Veteran's Administration hospital. Will put the car in gear, got back onto the road, and headed toward the interstate.
As Will drove, he debated about whether to call Amanda and tell her that Max Galloway had screwed them over again, but she would ask where Faith was, and Will did not want to remind their boss that Faith was having medical issues. Amanda hated weakness of any kind, and she was relentless where Will's disability was concerned. There was no telling what abuse she would visit on Faith for being diabetic. Will wasn't going to give her more ammunition.
He could, of course, call Caroline, who would in turn feed the information to Amanda. He cradled the phone in his hand, praying it would not come apart as he dialed in the number for Amanda's assistant.
Caroline made much use of her caller ID. "Hi, Will."
"Mind doing me another favor?"
"Sure."
"Judith Coldfield called 9-1-1 and two ambulances got to the scene before the Rockdale police did."
"That ain't right."
"No," Will agreed. It wasn't. The fact that Max Galloway had lied meant that instead of talking to a trained first responder about what he had recorded at the scene, Will was going to have to rely on the Coldfields to reconstruct what they had seen. "I need you to track down the timeline. I'm pretty sure Amanda's going to want to know what took them so long."
Caroline said, "You know Rockdale's where I'll call for the response times."
"Try Judith Coldfield's cell phone records." If Will could catch them in a lie, that would be yet another weapon Amanda could use against them. "Do you have her number?"
