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Candy put her hand to her mouth.
"Have you seen anyone hanging around the house? Anyone suspicious?"
"Of course not. I'd call the police."
Faith suppressed a snort. The ones who screamed about the pigs were always the ones who called the police for help at the first whiff of trouble.
Will asked, "Does Jackie have any family we can get in touch with?"
"Are you fucking blind?" Candy demanded. She jerked her head toward the refrigerator. Faith could see a list of names and phone numbers taped to the door that Will was leaning against. The words, "EMERGENCY NUMBERS" were typed in bold print at the top, less than six inches away from his face. "Christ, don't they teach you people to read?"
Will looked absolutely mortified, and Faith would have slapped the woman if she had been standing close enough. Instead, she said, "Ma'am, I'm going to need you to go downtown and make a formal statement."
Will caught her eye, shook his head, but Faith was so furious she struggled to keep her voice from shaking. "We'll get a cruiser to take you to City Hall East. It'll only take a few hours."
"Why?" the woman demanded. "Why do you need me to—"
Faith took out her cell phone and dialed her old partner at the Atlanta Police Department. Leo Donnelly owed her a favor—make that several favors—and she intended to use them to make this woman's life as difficult as possible.
Candy said, "I'll talk to you here. You don't need to take me downtown."
"Your friend Jackie is dead," Faith said, her anger making her tone sharp. "Either you're helping our investigation or you're obstructing it."
"Okay, okay," she said, holding up her hands in surrender. "What do you want to know?"
Faith glanced at Will, who was looking at his shoes. She pressed her thumb into the end button, disconnecting the call to Leo. She asked Candy, "When's the last time you saw Jackie?"
"Last weekend. She came over for some company."
"What kind of company?"
Candy equivocated, and Faith started to dial Leo's number again.
"All right," the woman groaned. "Jesus. We smoked some weed. She was freaked out about all this shit. She hadn't visited her mom in a while. None of us knew how bad it had gotten."
"None of us meaning who?"
"Me and a couple of the neighbors. We kept an eye on Gwen. She's an old woman. Her daughters live out of state."
They must have not kept too close an eye on her if they hadn't realized she was living in a firetrap. "Do you know the other daughter?"
"Joelyn," she answered, nodding toward the list on the fridge. "She doesn't visit. At least, she hasn't in the ten years I've lived here."
Faith glanced at Will again. He was staring somewhere over Candy's shoulder. She asked the woman, "The last time you saw Jackie was a week ago?"
"That's right."
"What about her car?"
"It was in the driveway until a couple of days ago."
"A couple as in two?"
"I guess it's closer to four or five. I've got a life. It's not like I track the comings and goings of the neighborhood."
Faith ignored the sarcasm. "Have you seen anyone suspicious hanging around?"
"I told you no."
"Who was the real estate agent?"
She named one of the top realtors in town, a man who advertised on every available bus stop in the city. "Jackie didn't even meet him. They handled it all on the phone. He had the house sold before the sign even went up in the yard. There's a developer who has a standing offer on all the lots, and he closes in ten days with cash."
Faith knew this was not uncommon. Her own poor house had been subject to many such offers over the years—none of them worth taking because then she wouldn't be able to afford a new house in her own neighborhood. "What about movers?"
"Look at all this shit." Candy slapped her hand against a crumbling pile of papers. "The last thing Jackie told me was that she was going to have one of those construction Dumpsters delivered."
Will cleared his throat. He wasn't looking at the wall anymore, but he wasn't exactly looking at the witness, either. "Why not just leave everything here?" he asked. "It's mostly trash. The builder is going to bulldoze it anyway."
Candy seemed appalled by the prospect. "This was her mother's house. She grew up here. Her childhood is buried under all this shit. You can't just throw that all away."
He took out his phone as if it had rung. Faith knew the vibration feature was broken. Amanda had nearly gutted him in a meeting last week when it had started ringing. Still, Will looked at the display, then said, "Excuse me." He left by the back door, using his foot to move a pile of magazines out of the way.
Candy asked, "What's his problem?"
"He's allergic to bitches," Faith quipped, though if that were true, Will would be covered in a head-to-toe rash after this morning. "How often did Jackie visit her mother?"
"I'm not her social secretary."
"Maybe if I take you downtown, it'll jog your memory."
"Jesus," she muttered. "Okay. Maybe a couple of times a year—if that."
"And you've never seen Joelyn, her sister, visit?"
"Nope."
"Did you spend much time with Jackie?"
"Not much. I wouldn't call us friends or anything."
"What about when you smoked together last week? Did she say anything about her life?"
"She told me the nursing home she sent her mom off to cost fifty grand a year."
Faith suppressed the urge to whistle. "There goes any profit from the house."
Candy didn't seem to think so. "Gwen's been failing for a while now. She won't last the year. Jackie said might as well get her something nice on her way out."
"Where's the home?"
"Sarasota."
Jackie Zabel lived on Florida's Panhandle, about five hours' drive away from Sarasota. Not too close and not too far. Faith said, "The doors weren't locked when we got here."
Candy shook her head. "Jackie lived in a gated community. She never locked her doors. One night, she left her keys in her car. I couldn't believe it when I saw them in the ignition. It was dumb luck that it wasn't stolen." She added ruefully, "But Jackie was always pretty lucky."
"Was she seeing anyone?"
Candy turned reticent again.
Faith waited her out.
Finally, the woman said, "She wasn't that nice, okay? I mean, she was fine to get stoned with, but she was kind of a bitch about things, and men wanted to fuck her, but they didn't want to talk to her afterward. You know what I mean?"
Faith wasn't in a position to judge. "What things was she a bitch about?"
"The best way to drive up from Florida. The right kind of gas to put in your car. The proper way to throw out the freaking trash." She indicated the cluttered kitchen. "That's why she was doing this all by herself. Jackie's loaded. She could afford to pay a crew to clean out this place in two days. She didn't trust anyone else to do it the right way. That's the only reason she's been staying here. She's a control freak."
