Faith was ready to follow her out of the chapel, but Will had taken on the physical attributes of a block of cement.
Amanda told him, “If you agree to keep Sara out of it for the moment, I’ll get the White County coroner to bring her onto the most recent case.”
Will rubbed his jaw.
“Not five minutes ago you said that the way we find the perpetrator is by the way he kills. If Sara autopsied the first victim, then she might recognize the killer’s signature on the most recent one.”
“She’s a grown woman, not a divining rod.”
“And you both work for me. My case. My rules.” Amanda took her phone out of her pocket. She ended the discussion by showing him the top of her head. She was still typing as she left the chapel.
Will sat down on the pew. The wood creaked. He said, “Ninety percent of all the arguments I’ve ever had with Sara have been about me not telling her things.”
That seemed like a low ratio, but Faith didn’t quibble. “Look, I wouldn’t know how to be in a healthy relationship if Squidward painted me a picture, but this is one of those rare instances where I agree with Amanda. What exactly are you keeping from Sara? All we’ve got right now is a whole bunch of what the fuck?”
He started rubbing his jaw again. “You’re saying wait a few hours, see what we can dig up, but either way, tell her the truth tonight?”
The tonight part was new, but Faith asked him, “Do you really want Sara to spend the next six hours worrying about something that might not ever become a thing?”
Slowly, finally, Will started to nod.
Faith looked at her watch. “It’s almost noon. We’ll get lunch on the way to Macon.”
He nodded again, but asked, “What if this becomes a thing?”
Faith didn’t have an answer. Obviously, the worst part would be realizing that a serial killer had been operating for years without their knowledge. The second worst part was more personal. A wrongful conviction was the kind of scandal that had onions inside of onions. The media would peel back every layer. The corruption. The trial. The investigations. The hearings. The lawsuits. The condemnations. The inevitable podcasts and documentaries.
Will summed it up. “Sara’s going to watch her husband get murdered all over again.”
Jeffrey Tolliver took a left outside the college and drove up Main Street. He rolled down the window for some fresh air. Cold wind whistled through the car. The staticky patter of the police scanner offered a low undertone. He squinted at the early morning sun. Pete Wayne, the man who owned the diner, tipped his hat as Jeffrey drove by.
Spring was early this year. The dogwoods were already weaving a white curtain across the sidewalks. The women from the garden club had planted flowers in the planters along the road. There was a gazebo display outside the hardware store. A rack of clothes marked CLEARANCE was in front of the dress shop. Even the dark clouds in the distance couldn’t stop the street from looking picture-perfect.
Grant County had not taken its name from Ulysses S., the Northern general who had accepted Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, but Lemuel Pratt Grant, the man who in the late 1800s had extended the railroad from Atlanta, through South Georgia, and to the sea. The new lines had put cities like Heartsdale, Avondale and Madison on the map. The flat fields and rich soil had yielded some of the best corn, cotton and peanuts in the state. Businesses had sprung up to service the booming middle class.
With every boom there was a bust, and the first bust came with the Great Depression. The only way the three cities could survive was to band together. They had combined sanitation, fire services and the police department in order to save money. Economizing had kept them above water until another boom had arrived by way of an army base being erected in Madison. Then came another boom when Avondale was designated a maintenance hub for the Atlanta-Savannah rail line. A few years later, Heartsdale had managed to persuade the state to fund a community college at the end of Main Street.
All of this booming had happened well before Jeffrey’s time, but he was familiar with the political forces that had led to the current bust. He had watched it happen in his own small hometown over in Alabama. The BRAC Commission had closed the army base. Reaganomics trickled down into the railroad industry and the maintenance hub had dried up. Then there were trade deals and seemingly endless wars, then the world economy didn’t just tank, it had bypassed the toilet and gone straight into the sewer. Except for the college, which had evolved into a technological university specializing in agri-business, Heartsdale would’ve followed the same downward trend as every other rural American town.
You could call it either careful planning or dumb luck, but Grant Tech was the lifeblood of the county. The students kept the local businesses alive. The local businesses tolerated the students so long as they paid their bills. As chief of police, Jeffrey’s first directive from the mayor was to keep the school happy if he wanted to keep his job.
He doubted very much the school was going to be happy today. A body had been found in the woods. The girl was young, probably a student, and certainly dead. The officer on scene had told Jeffrey that it looked like an accident. The girl was dressed in running gear. She was lying flat on her back. She had likely stumbled on a tree root and smashed the back of her head against a rock.
This wasn’t the first time a student had died under Jeffrey’s tenure. Over three thousand kids were enrolled at the university. By virtue of statistics, a small number of them would die every year. Some by meningitis or pneumonia, some by suicide or overdose, some—mostly young men—by stupidity.
An accidental death in the woods was tragic, without doubt, but something about this particular death wasn’t sitting right with Jeffrey. He’d been running in that very same forest. He’d even tripped on a tree root more times than he cared to admit. That kind of fall could lead to several different injuries. A wrist fracture if you managed to catch yourself. A broken nose if you didn’t. You might hit your temple or bust up your shoulder if you fell sideways. There were a lot of ways to hurt yourself, but it was very unlikely you would flip around mid-fall and land flat on your back.
He took a sharp turn onto Frying Pan Road, the main artery into a neighborhood colloquially referred to as IHOP, because all of the streets were named after items you would find at an International House of Pancakes. Pancake Place. Belgian Waffle Way. Hashbrown Way.
Jeffrey saw the rolling lights of a police cruiser splashing the southwest corner of Omelet Road. He parked his Town Car at an angle across the street. Spectators stood on their front lawns. The sun was still low in the sky. Some were dressed for work. Some were wearing soiled uniforms from the night shift.
He told Brad Stephens, one of his junior officers, “Roll out the tape to keep these people back.”
“Yes, sir.” Brad excitedly fumbled with his keys to open the trunk. The kid was so new to the job that his mother still ironed his uniforms. He’d spent the last three months writing tickets and cleaning up after traffic accidents. This was Brad’s first case involving a fatality.
Jeffrey took in the scene as he made his way up the street. Older cars and trucks lined the road. IHOP was a working-class neighborhood, but to be frank, it was nicer than the one Jeffrey had grown up in. There were only a few boarded-up windows. The majority of the lawns were tidy. Lightbulbs still glowed in the floodlights. The paint was