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"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'd 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 hook-ups 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 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 took away the victim 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.
