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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.
Faith pulled up her skirt, exposing her bare thigh. She could still see the needle mark where she had jabbed herself in the bathroom around lunchtime. A small bruise ringed the injection site, and Faith guessed she should try her luck on the other leg this time. Her hand didn't shake as much as it usually did, and it only took to the count of twenty-six for her to sink the needle into her thigh. She sat back in her chair, waiting to feel better. At least a full minute passed, and Faith felt worse.
Tomorrow, she thought. She would make an appointment with Delia Wallace first thing in the morning.
She pushed down her skirt as she stood. The kitchen was a mess, dishes stacked in the sink, trash overflowing. Faith was not naturally a tidy person, but her kitchen was generally spotless. She had been called out to too many homicide scenes where women were found sprawled on the floor of their filthy kitchens. The sight always triggered a snap judgment in Faith, as if the woman deserved to be beaten to death by her boyfriend, shot and killed by a stranger, because she had left dirty dishes in her sink.
She wondered what Will thought when he came onto a crime scene. She had been around countless dead bodies with the man, but his face was always inscrutable. Will's first job in law enforcement had been with the GBI. He had never been in uniform, never been called out on a suspicious smell and found an old woman dead on her couch, or worked patrol, stopping speeders, not knowing if it was going to be a stupid teenager behind the wheel or a gang banger who would put a gun in his face, pull the trigger, rather than have the points on his license.
He was just so damn passive. Faith didn't understand it. Despite the way Will carried himself, he was a big man. He ran every day, rain or shine. He worked out with weights. He had apparently dug a pond in his backyard. There was so much muscle under those suits he wore that his body could have been carved from rock. And yet, there he was this afternoon, sitting with Faith's purse in his lap while he begged Max Galloway for information. If Faith had been in Will's shoes, she would've backed the idiot against the wall and squeezed his testicles until he sang out every detail he knew in high soprano.
But she wasn't Will, and Will wasn't going to do that. He was just going to shake Galloway's hand and thank him for the professional courtesy like some gigantic, half-witted patsy.
She searched the cabinet under the sink for dishwashing powder, only to find an empty box. She left it in the cabinet and went to the fridge to make a note on the grocery list. Faith had written the first three letters of the word before she realized that the item was already on the list. Twice.
"Damn," she whispered, putting her hand to her stomach. How was she going to take care of a child when she could not even take care of herself ? She loved Jeremy, adored everything about him, but Faith had been waiting eighteen years for her life to start, and now that it was here, she was looking at another eighteen-year wait. She would be over fifty by then, eligible for movie discounts through the AARP.
Did she want this? Could she actually do it? Faith couldn't ask her mother to help again. Evelyn loved Jeremy, and she had never complained about taking care of her grandson—not when Faith was away at the police academy, or when she had to work double shifts just to make ends meet—but there was no way that Faith could expect her mother to help out like that again.
But then, who else was there?
Certainly not the baby's father. Victor Martinez was tall, dark, handsome . . . and completely incapable of taking care of himself. He was a dean at Georgia Tech, in charge of nearly twenty thousand students, but he could not keep a clean pair of socks in his drawer to save his life. They had dated for six months before he moved into Faith's house, which had seemed romantic and impetuous until reality settled in. Within a week, Faith was doing Victor's laundry, picking up his dry-cleaning, fixing his meals, cleaning up his messes. It was like raising Jeremy again, except at least with her son, she could punish him for being lazy. The last straw had come when she had just finished cleaning the sink and Victor had dropped a knife covered in peanut butter on the draining board. If Faith had been wearing her gun, she would have shot him.
He moved out the next morning.
Even with all that, Faith couldn't help but feel herself softening toward Victor as she gathered up the drawstring on the trash. That was one good difference between her son and her ex-lover: Victor never had to be told six times to take out the trash. It was one of the chores Faith most hated, and—ridiculously—she felt tears well into her eyes as she thought about having to lift the bag and heft it down the stairs, outside, to the garbage can.
There was a knock at the door; three sharp raps followed by the doorbell chime.
Faith wiped her eyes as she walked down the hall, her cheeks so wet that she had to use her sleeve. She still had her gun on her hip, so she didn't bother to check the peephole.
"This is a switch," Sam Lawson told her. "Women usually cry when I leave, not when I show up."
"What do you want, Sam? It's late."
"You gonna invite me in?" He wiggled his eyebrows. "You know you wanna."
Faith was too tired to argue, so she turned around, letting him follow her back to the kitchen. Sam Lawson was an itch she had really needed to scratch for a few years, but now she couldn't remember why she had bothered. He drank too much. He was married. He didn't like kids. He was convenient and he knew how to make an exit, which, as far as Faith was concerned, meant he left shortly after he had served his purpose.
Okay, now she remembered why she had bothered.
Sam took a glob of gum out of his mouth and dropped it into the trash. "I'm glad I saw you today. I need to tell you something."
Faith braced herself for bad news. "Okay."
"I'm sober now. Almost a year."
"You're here to make amends?"
