The Berman home was a one-story ranch spread out over a large lot. The house looked lived-in, but not in a good way. The grass was overgrown and weeds tangled the flowerbeds. The green Camry in the driveway was filthy. Mud caked the tires and there was a sheen of filth on the car that looked like it had been there for quite a while. There were two baby seats in back and the requisite Cheerios stuck to the windshield. Two yellow, diamond-shaped signs were hanging from the side window, probably reading Baby on Board. Will pressed his hand to the hood of the car. The engine was cold. He looked at the time on his phone. It was coming up on ten o’clock. Faith would probably be at her doctor’s by now.
Will knocked on the door and waited. He thought about Faith again, how furious she would be, especially if Will was about to come face-to-face with the killer. Though it looked as if he wasn’t going to come face-to-face with anyone. No one answered the door. He knocked on the door again. When that didn’t work, he stepped back from the house and looked up at the windows. All the shades were open. Some lights were on. Maybe Berman was in the shower. Or maybe he was fully aware that the police were trying to talk to him. Nick’s hayseed landscaper act was pretty impressive, but he’d been sitting at the end of the road for about an hour. In a neighborhood this small, phones had probably been ringing off the hook.
Will tried the front door, but it was locked. He walked around the house, peering in the windows. There was a light at the end of the hallway. He was going to the next window when he heard a noise inside like a door slamming shut. Will put his hand to the gun on his belt, feeling all the hair on the back of his neck stand up. Something wasn’t right, and Will was keenly aware that Nick Shelton was sitting in his car listening to the radio right now.
There was the unmistakable sound of a window banging shut. Will jogged around to the back of the house in time to see a man darting through the backyard. Jake Berman was wearing pajama pants with no shirt, but he’d managed to put on his sneakers. He glanced over his shoulder as he ran past an elaborate swing set, toward the chain-link fence that separated the property from the neighbor on the opposite side.
“Crap,” Will mumbled, bolting after him. Will was a good runner, but Berman was fast—his arms pumping, legs moving in a blur.
“Police!” Will yelled, misjudging the height of the fence so badly that his foot caught. He fell to the ground and scrambled up as quickly as he could. He saw Berman go down a side yard, past another house and toward the street. Will did the same, taking advantage of the angle, shortening the distance as he chased Berman across the road.
There was a screech of wheels as Nick Shelton’s Caprice pulled up. Berman dodged the car, slamming his hand on the hood as he made his way toward another backyard.
“Dammit,” Will cursed. “Police! Stop!”
Berman kept going, but he was a sprinter, not a marathoner. If Will was good at anything, it was endurance. He caught his second wind as Jake Berman slowed, trying to open the wooden gate to a neighbor’s backyard. He glanced over his shoulder, saw Will, then took off again. Berman was too winded, though, and Will could tell from the slow way his legs were moving that the man was about to give up. Still, Will wasn’t going to take any chances. When he got close enough, he lunged, bringing Berman down in a heavy tackle that knocked the wind out of both of them.
“Dumbass!” Nick Shelton yelled, kicking Berman in the side.
Considering his run-in with the doorman at Anna’s building yesterday, Will would’ve thought he’d be more gentle in his approach, but his heart was beating so hard in his chest that he felt nauseated. Worse, adrenaline was pumping all kinds of bad thoughts into his head.
Nick kicked Berman again. “Never run from the law, motherfucker.”
“I didn’t know you were cops—”
“Shut up.” Will started to put the cuffs on him, but Berman squirmed, trying to get away. Nick raised his foot again, but Will drove his knee into Berman’s back so hard that he could feel the ribs bend. “Stop it.”
“I didn’t do anything!”
“Is that why you ran?”
“I was going for a run,” he screamed. “I always run this time of day.”
Nick asked, “In your pj’s?”
“Fuck off.”
“It’s a felony to lie to the police.” Will stood, yanking up Berman with him. “Five years in prison. Plenty of men’s bathrooms in jail.”
Berman’s face turned white. Some of his neighbors had congregated. They didn’t look happy—or, Will noticed, particularly supportive.
“It’s all right,” Berman told them. “Just a misunderstanding.”
Nick said, “A misunderstanding by this dumbass who thinks he can run away from the police.”
Will wasn’t worried about appearances. He jerked Berman’s hands high, making him bend over as he walked him back across the street.
“My lawyer is going to hear about this.”
Nick said, “Be sure to tell him how you ran away like a scared little schoolgirl.”
Will pushed Berman into the road. He asked Nick, “Mind calling this in?”
“You want the cavalry?”
“I want a police car screeching up to his house with lights and sirens blaring so everyone in the neighborhood knows it’s there.”
Nick gave him a salute as he trotted off toward his car.
Berman said, “You’re making a mistake.”
“Your mistake was fleeing the scene of a crime.”
“What?” He turned around, a look of genuine surprise on his face. “What crime?”
“Route 316.”
He still looked confused. “That’s what this is about?”
Either the man was delivering an Oscar-worthy performance or he was completely clueless. “You witnessed a car accident four days ago on 316. A woman was hit by a car. You talked to my partner.”
“I didn’t leave that girl alone. The ambulance was there. I told that cop at the hospital everything I saw.”
“You gave a false phone number and address.”
“I was just—” He glanced around, and Will wondered if he was going to bolt again. “Get me out of here,” Berman pleaded. “Just take me to the police station, okay? Take me to the station, give me my phone call, and we’ll work all of this out.”
Will turned him around, keeping a hand on his shoulder in case the man decided to try his luck again. Every step, Will could feel his temper getting more and more riled up. Berman was looking more and more like a pathetic, weaselly excuse for a human being. They had wasted the last two days looking for the asshole, and then the idiot had made Will chase him across half the neighborhood.
Berman turned around. “Why don’t you take off these cuffs so I can—”
Will spun him back around so hard that he had to catch Berman before he fell flat on his face. The nearest neighbor was standing in her open front doorway, watching them. Like the other women, she didn’t look exactly displeased to see the man being led away in handcuffs.
Will asked, “Do they hate you because you’re gay? Or because you’re sponging off your wife?”
Berman spun around again. “Where the fuck do you get off—”
Will pushed him back around so hard that this time he lost his balance. “It’s ten o’clock and you’re still in your pajamas.” He marched Berman through the tall grass in his yard. “You don’t have a lawn-mower?”
“We can’t afford a gardener.”
“Where are your kids?”
“Day care.” He tried to turn around again. “What business is this of yours?”
Will shoved him again, forcing him go up the driveway. He hated the guy for so many reasons, not least of which because he had a wife and kids who probably cared about him a great deal and he couldn’t even cut the grass or wash the car for them.
Berman demanded, “Where are you taking me? I said take me to the police station.”
Will kept quiet, shoving him up the driveway, yanking up his arms whenever he slowed
or tried to turn around.
“If I’m under arrest, then you have to take me to jail.”
They walked to the back of the house, Berman protesting the entire way. He was a man who was used to being listened to, and it seemed to irk him more to be ignored than to be pushed around, so Will kept silent as he shoved him toward the patio.
Will tried the back door, but it was locked. He looked at Berman, whose smug look seemed to indicate he thought he was getting the upper hand. The window the man had sneaked out had guillotined closed. He slid it back open, the cheap springs clanging.
Berman said, “Don’t worry. I’ll wait for you.”
Will wondered where Nick Shelton was. He was probably in front of the house, thinking he was doing Will a favor by giving him time alone with the suspect.
“Right,” Will muttered, loosening one side of the cuffs and clamping Berman to the barbecue grill. He lifted himself up and angled his body through the open window. Will found himself in the kitchen, which was decorated in a goose theme: geese on the wallpaper border, geese on the towels, geese on the carpet under the kitchen table.
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.
The Will Trent Series 7-Book Bundle Page 120
