“I never wanted to get Lena involved in any of this,” Frank said. “She didn’t know nothing about any of it. It was all down to me.”
Will imagined Lena would say the same thing about Frank. As long as he lived, he would never understand the bond that held them together. “When did you figure out that Darla was involved?”
“When Lena—” He started coughing again. This time, there was so much blood that he had to spit into a tissue. “Jesus,” Frank groaned, wiping his mouth. “I’m sorry.”
Will fought to keep his stomach under control. “When did you figure it out?”
“When Lena told me there was another kid got killed the same way …” His voice trailed off again. “I couldn’t see Darla doing this. You’ll understand when you have kids. She was my baby. I used to walk the floor with her at night. I watched her grow from a little girl into …” Frank didn’t finish his words, though it was obvious what Darla had grown into.
“When’s the last time you saw her?”
“Last night,” he admitted. Then, instead of making Will ask the right questions, he volunteered, “We got into a fight. She said she had to leave town. She wanted more money.”
“Did you give it to her?”
He shook his head. “Maxine had a couple hundred bucks in her purse. They got into a fight. Pretty bad.” He indicated the oxygen tank, the rails on his bed. “By the time I got up, she had Maxie on the ground, beating her.” Frank pressed his thin lips together. “I never thought I’d live to see anything like that—a child wailing off on her own mother. My child. That wasn’t who I raised her to be. That wasn’t my kid.”
“What happened?”
“She stole the money. Took some out of my wallet, too. Maybe fifty bucks.”
“We found almost three hundred dollars on the body.”
He nodded, as if that’s what he expected. “I got a call from Brock this morning. Said she was pulled out downriver from the granite field.” He looked at Will as if he didn’t quite believe the information.
“That’s right. She was near the college.”
“He said I didn’t need to see her right now. Give him time to clean her up.” Frank’s breath caught. “How many times have you said that to a parent who wants to see their kid, only you know the kid’s been beaten, cut, fucked up six ways to Sunday?”
“A lot of times,” Will admitted. “But Brock’s right. You don’t want to remember her like this.”
Frank stared at the ceiling. “I don’t know if I want to remember her at all.”
Will let his words hang between them for a few seconds. “Is there anything else you want to tell me?”
Frank shook his head, and again, Will wasn’t sure whether or not to trust him. The man had been a detective for over thirty years. There was no way he hadn’t at least suspected his daughter was involved in these crimes. Even if Frank didn’t want to say it out loud, surely he knew deep down that his inaction had at the very least cost Tommy Braham and Jason Howell their lives.
Or maybe he didn’t know. Maybe Frank was so good at deceiving himself that he was certain he had done everything right.
“I should let you get some rest,” Will offered.
Frank’s eyes were closed, but he wasn’t asleep. “I used to take her hunting.” His voice was a raspy whisper. “It was the only time we got along.” He opened his eyes and stared at the ceiling. The only sound in the room was the quiet hiss of the oxygen tank beside his bed. “I taught her to never aim for the heart. There’s ribs and bone all around it. Bullet ricochets. You end up chasing the deer for miles waiting for him to die.” He put his hand to the side of his neck. “You go for the neck. Cut off the stuff that supplies the heart.” He rubbed the sagging skin. “That’s the clean kill. The most humane.”
Will had seen the crime scenes. There was nothing humane about the murders of Allison Spooner and Jason Howell. They had been terrified. They had been butchered.
“I’m dying,” Frank said. His words were no surprise. “I was diagnosed with cancer a few months ago.” He licked his chapped lips. “Maxine said she’d take care of me as long as I gave her my pension.” His breath caught in his chest. He gave a strained laugh. “I always thought I’d die alone.”
Will felt an overwhelming sadness at the man’s words. Frank Wallace was going to die alone. There might be people in the same room with him—his bitter ex-wife, a few blindly loyal colleagues—but men like Frank were destined to die the same way they had lived, with everyone at arm’s length.
Will knew this because he often viewed his own life and death through a similar lens. He didn’t have any childhood friends he’d kept in touch with. There were no relatives he could reach out to. Faith had the baby now. Eventually, she would find a man whose company she could tolerate. There might be another baby. She would probably find a desk job to take some of the stress out of her life. Will would recede from her life like a tide rolling back from the shore.
That left Angie, and Will had no great hope that she would be a comfort to him in his old age. She lived fast and hard, showing the same reckless disregard that had landed her mother in the coma ward at the state hospital for the last twenty-seven years. Marriage, if anything, had pushed them further apart. Will had always assumed that he would outlive Angie, that he would find himself alone at her graveside one day. This image always brought him great sadness tinged with a modicum of relief. Part of Will loved Angie more than life itself. Another part of him thought of her as a Pandora’s box that held his darkest secrets. If she were to die, she would take some of that darkness with her.
But she would also take part of his life.
Will asked Frank, “Do you need me to get you anything?”
He coughed again, a dry, hacking sound. “No,” he answered. “I’m fine on my own.”
“Take care of yourself.” Will made himself reach out and touch Frank’s shoulder before he left the room.
Sara was in the front yard with her greyhounds when Will pulled into the Linton driveway. The side of her face was bruised. The cut on her arm had needed stitches. Her hair was down, brushing across her shoulders.
She looked beautiful.
The dogs ran to greet him as he got out of the car. Sara had dressed them both in black fleece jackets to fight the cold. Will petted the excited animals as much as he could without falling over backward.
Sara clicked her tongue and they stopped accosting him. She asked, “I take it Frank wasn’t much help?”
Will shook his head, feeling a lump come into his throat. He used to be good at hiding his thoughts, but somehow Sara had cracked the code. “I don’t think he has long.”
“I heard.” She was obviously conflicted about the impending death of her longtime family friend. “I’m sorry that he’s sick, but I don’t know how I feel about him as a person after all of this.”
“Maybe he could’ve stopped it—for Jason, at least.” Will added, “Then again, people don’t see what they don’t want to see.”
“Denial doesn’t hold up as a good excuse. Darla could’ve killed me. She would’ve killed me if the bank hadn’t given out.”
Will didn’t look up because he didn’t want Sara to know what he was thinking. Instead, he leaned down to scratch Bob’s ear. “Frank’s ex-wife is with him. At least he’s not going to die alone.”
“Small comfort.”
“I think it is,” he countered. “Some people don’t get that. Some people just—” Will stopped himself before he started to sound like a blubbering child. “Anyway, I don’t think I’m ever going to find out what really happened this week.”
“Do you need to?”
“I don’t guess so. Nothing will bring Tommy back, but at least his name is clear. Darla’s not going to hurt anyone else. Frank’s in his own prison.”
“And Lena gets away clean yet again.”
She didn’t sound as bitter as she had before. “We’ll see.”
Sara laughed. “You want to make a be
t?”
Will tried to think of a clever wager, something that involved him taking her to dinner when they got back to Atlanta, but he was too slow.
She said, “Brock called this morning. He found Lena’s Toyota key in Darla’s front pocket. I guess she was planning on taking Lena’s car and leaving town.”
He remembered the Celica’s sliced tires. Someone at the station had given Lena a parting gift. “Darla must’ve seen you get out of your car and decided to upgrade her ride.” Will had always known that the killer was good at improvising. “Did Hare say what made him check the files for Tommy’s name?”
“He’d seen Tommy in the clinic a couple of times. It’s not unusual for kids that age to still go to their pediatrician, but Tommy was there a lot, at least once a week. Hare got curious after the suicide and checked the paperwork for Tommy’s name.” Sara pulled the leash as Billy tried to pee on the side of Will’s car. “He confirmed what Darla said. He was going to the ethics committee to report the protocol breach.”
“That’s good, right? He was doing the right thing.”
“I suppose, but he’s not going to stop running trials.” She gave a rueful laugh. “Let me correct that: he’s going to stop running trials out of my building, but he’s still going to keep running them.”
“Did you find out what he was testing?”
“An antidepressant. They’re going to try again next spring with a different dosage.”
“You’re kidding me.”
“It’s a billion-dollar business. One in every ten Americans is on antidepressants, even though placebo studies show a lot of them get absolutely no benefits whatsoever.” She nodded back at the house. “Hare’s inside, which is why I took the dogs for a two-hour walk in the freezing cold.”
“Your folks aren’t mad at him?”
She sighed heavily. “Oh, my mother will forgive him anything.”
“I guess that’s what families do.”
She seemed to think about what he said. “Yeah, they do.”
“I talked to Faith this morning.” She’d sent so many baby pictures to Will’s phone that the memory was almost full. “I’ve never heard her happy before. It’s weird.”
“Having a baby changes you,” Sara told him. “Obviously, that’s not something I’ve learned from personal experience, but I can see it with my sister.”
Bob leaned against his leg. Will reached down and scratched him. “I guess I—”
“I was raped.”
Will kept his mouth closed because he didn’t know what to say.
“In college,” she continued. “That’s why I can’t have children.” He’d never noticed how green her eyes were, almost emerald. “It took years for me to tell my husband. I was ashamed. I wanted to think it was behind me. That I was strong enough to get past it.”
“I don’t think anyone could ever say you’re not strong.”
“Well. I’ve had my bad days.” She let out Billy’s leash as he sniffed around the mailbox. They both stared at the dog as if he was far more fascinating than reality dictated.
Will cleared his throat. The moment was too awkward. It was also cold outside, and he guessed Sara didn’t want to stand in front of her parents’ house all day watching him struggle to come up with something meaningful to say. “I should start packing my stuff.”
“Why?”
“Well …” Will was tongue-tied, and painfully stupid. “The holiday. Your family. I’m sure you want to be with them.”
“My mother’s cooked enough for fifty. She’d be crushed if you didn’t stay.”
He couldn’t tell if the offer was genuine or if she was just being polite. “My front yard’s kind of a mess.”
“I’ll help you when we get back to Atlanta.” She smiled mischievously. “I’ll even show you how to use a backhoe.”
“I don’t want to impose.”
“Will, it’s not imposing.” She took his hand. He looked down, tracing his thumb along her fingers. Her skin was soft. He caught the scent of her soap. Just being close to her like this made him feel warm, like that empty place in his soul might have the chance of being filled one day. He opened his mouth to tell her that he wanted to stay, that he wanted nothing more than to get two thousand more questions from her mother and watch her sister’s sly smile as she glanced back and forth between them.
And then his cell phone chirped in his pocket.
She wrinkled her nose. “What’s that?”
“Probably another baby picture from Faith.”
She gave him that same flirty smile. “Let me see.”
Will felt incapable of denying Sara any request. He used his free hand to find his phone. He’d seen Emma Lee Mitchell from every conceivable angle, and he was sure she was a sweet baby, but at the moment she looked like an angry red raisin in a pink knit hat.
Sara flipped open the phone. Her smile quickly faded. “It’s a text.” She showed him the phone, then seemed to realize herself. She turned it back and read aloud, “ ‘Diedre finally died. Come home.’ ”
Will felt a sudden pang of grief. “Angie’s mother.” He looked down at her hand. She was still holding his hand.
“I’m sorry.”
Will hadn’t cried since he was sixteen, but he felt tears threatening to come. He struggled to speak. “She’s been on life support since I was a kid. I guess she finally …” His throat was so tight he could barely swallow. Angie claimed to hate her mother, but she had visited her at least once a month for the last twenty years. Will had gone with her many times. The experience was awful, heart wrenching. He had held Angie so many times while she sobbed. It was the only time she let her guard down. The only time she surrendered herself to Will.
He suddenly understood Lionel Harris’s words about the power of a shared history.
“Sara—”
She squeezed his hand. “You should go home.”
Will struggled to find the right words. He was torn between wanting to be with Sara and needing to be with Angie.
Sara leaned in close, pressing her lips to his cheek. The wind draped her hair across his face. She put her mouth to his ear and told him, “Go home to your wife.”
So he did.
EPILOGUE
Lena stood in the cemetery looking down at Jeffrey Tolliver’s headstone. It seemed stupid to put flowers on an empty grave, but the things inside that coffin were more tangible than a jar of ashes. Brad had contributed a paper target from his first qualifying round at the police academy. Frank had put in his citation book because Jeffrey was always yelling at him for being late with the reports. Lena had donated her gold shield. The one she carried up until three weeks ago was a duplicate. Dan Brock had slipped it in with the other items because they both knew there was no way she could do it herself.
All the businesses on Main Street were closed the day Jeffrey’s coffin was lowered into the ground. Jared hadn’t attended the funeral either. His resemblance to his father had been brought to his attention years before. He didn’t want to distract the mourners. He didn’t want to bring Sara that sort of pain.
He wanted to be in town, though. He wanted to feel close to his father, to see the place where Jeffrey had lived and loved. He’d met Lena outside the diner. She was sitting on the curb, thinking about all the things she had lost. At first, she’d thought Jared was Jeffrey. Of course she’d thought he was Jeffrey. He was more than a spitting image. He was a walking ghost.
Maybe part of Lena was drawn to him because of the resemblance. She had worshipped Jeffrey too much to ever consider anything romantic. He was her mentor. He was her hero. She had wanted to be the same kind of cop he was. The same kind of person. She hadn’t realized until he was gone that he was just a man.
“Why aren’t you at the funeral?” Jared had asked her.
And Lena had told him, “Because I’m the person who killed your father.”
Jared had spent two hours listening to Lena pour her heart out, then another two hours arguing about how i
t wasn’t really her fault. His youth made him passionate, a staunch defender of his quickly formed opinions. He had just signed up for the police academy. He hadn’t yet seen the horrors of the world. Hadn’t yet figured out that there was such a thing as a truly irredeemable person.
Was she irredeemable? Lena didn’t want to think so. She had a fresh start ahead of her. A clean slate on which to write the rest of her life. The police review board had returned a verdict of no fault in Tommy Braham’s suicide. Will Trent’s report was long on supposition and short on evidence, especially since Lena had never gotten around to taping that confession. Gordon Braham was moving to Florida to be closer to his wife’s people. He had filed a class-action lawsuit along with Jason Howell’s mother against Hareton Earnshaw and the drug company that had sponsored the trials. He’d signed a paper indemnifying the Grant County force in exchange for an undisclosed sum.
Lena had gone through two operations and a week in the hospital, but the damage to her hand was surprisingly limited considering the hell she’d gone through fighting off a nasty staph infection. Therapy was bringing movement back to her fingers. She was right-handed anyway. All her left hand needed to do was hold up her badge when she was making an arrest. And she would be making a lot of them soon. Gavin Wayne had called two days ago to let her know the job on the Macon force was still available. Lena had told him yes without a second thought.
She was a cop. It was in her blood. Her nerve had been tested. Her resolve had faltered. But she knew without any doubt that there was nothing else in the world that she wanted to do.
She leaned down and placed the flowers on Jeffrey’s grave. He was a cop, too. Not the same kind of cop as Lena, but different paths could still lead to the same destination. Jeffrey would understand that. He had always given her the benefit of the doubt.
Lena looked across the row of headstones lining the cemetery. She’d already put flowers on her sister’s headstone. Frank Wallace didn’t have a marker yet, but she had brought him some daisies because she knew he liked them. He’d left her some money in his will. Not a lot, but enough for Lena to sell her house at a loss and still pay off her mortgage. She had donated the rest to a nonprofit legal fund established to help cops who got on the wrong side of the law. Something told her Frank would’ve approved.
The Will Trent Series 7-Book Bundle Page 165
