This was a bare-bones description, even for Trey, who did not tend toward the flowery. He was speaking cop talk, the spare, just-the-facts-ma’am language of law enforcement reports everywhere. Who, where, and when sprinkled with the appropriate wiggle words when necessary. An “alleged” here, a “presumptive” there.
I kept my tone nonchalant. “Finn said he took some of Jessica’s jewelry.”
“He did, along with cash from the master bedroom upstairs. He may have taken other items, but there was no proof.”
“But they didn’t think you stole anything, did they?”
“I was never accused of theft, only of aiding and abetting the contamination of the scene to cover up Macklin’s crime. OPS investigated, and I was absolved. Regardless, the chain of custody was tainted. The evidence was ruled inadmissible. The charges against Talbot were dropped.”
“But you’re convinced he did it.”
“I am. Regardless of what Macklin did, the evidence implicated Talbot beyond a reasonable doubt. That scene was staged to look like one of the recent burglaries, which I am certain was the reason Macklin decided to take the jewelry. But he didn’t stage it. Someone else did. Before he arrived. He simply took advantage of that for his own purposes.”
“And you think that someone was Nick Talbot.”
“I do.”
“Finn said he had an alibi.”
“The woman he was having an affair with. Addison Canright. Her testimony was always suspect, and we could have broken it in court. If he’d been indicted.”
I looked at him. Underneath the clipped, no-nonsense diction, he was haunted. Not once had his index finger stopped its relentless tap-tap-tapping.
“Why?” I said.
“Why what?”
“Why is this hitting you so hard?”
He shook his head, stared down at his lap. “It’s complicated.”
“Because there’s something you’re not telling me.”
He hesitated, then nodded. I got a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach.
“Something serious?”
Two seconds’ consideration, then another nod.
“What is it?”
He didn’t reply, not at first. He was doing some complicated emotional algebra, I could tell. I could almost see the flowchart in his head, decisions branching into choices, choices stagnating into dead ends. Finally, he found his answer.
He motioned for me to put on my seat belt. “It will be easier if I show you.”
Chapter Six
Before Westview was a neighborhood, it was a battleground. In 1864, over three thousand soldiers died in what would be memorialized as the Battle of Ezra Church, a defeat for the Confederacy. This was how I knew Westview, as a piece of Civil War trivia. Trey knew it as home.
He’d grown up here in the eighties, in a sturdy square house with thick porch posts and a low sloping roof. The neighborhood was in decline then, hit hard with the rising drug crime of that era and devastated further as its residents abandoned it for the suburbs. Now in the uncertain first lurches of revitalization, it felt scrappy and optimistic, its citizens not yet priced out of their own history. Trey still owned the basement of his former residence, but the ground floor served as the parish house for St. Anthony’s Catholic Church, an arrangement his mother had specified in her will.
He pulled around back next to the basement door as the first twilight settled around us, dampening and softening the world beyond. He had recently unlocked his whole past for me, literally. He’d given me the key to this basement where he’d stored all the artifacts of his life before the accident. Too much for him to go through at once, he’d said. And, as it had turned out, too much for me too. It felt like occupied territory in that basement, a psychological terrain with no map, only myths and rumors and veiled legends. I’d been taking it slowly.
“Why are we here?” I said.
“To find my files from the Talbot case.”
“Atlanta PD let you keep them?”
Trey tapped his finger on the steering wheel. “Not exactly.”
“Oh. I see.”
He got out of the car, keys in hand. I followed him inside. He clicked on a floor lamp, and it cast a dim glow around the room. What had once been an efficiency apartment was now storage space: a bar table with two wooden stools upended on top, a hunter green velour sofa, a bookshelf filled with photo albums, and many paper boxes stacked against the walls.
I closed the door behind me, shutting out the last of the sunlight. Above us I could hear footsteps—the church’s secretary, going about her duties.
“Are you going to explain why you have contraband files in your basement?” I said.
“They’re not contraband.”
“So they’re public?”
“Not technically. They’re…complicated.”
I thought about that one for a second. “Fine. Any idea where to start looking?”
He pointed. A filing cabinet stood in the corner, slate gray and thick with dust. It was an exact match of the one Trey had in his present apartment, the one I knew to be fireproof, waterproof, impact proof, and ridiculously expensive.
He looked around the room. “I need to find the globe.”
“Globe?”
“Yes. That’s where the keys to the cabinet are.” He held up his hands and measured an imaginary circle. “About this big. If I remember correctly. It’s been a long time.”
We gave the room another once-over. Trey seemed hesitant about wading in. Going through the things from his life before the accident was like performing an archaeological dig on his own existence. There would be surprises. I sympathized. Given the state of my own personal history, I completely understood.
I started with a box helpfully labeled DESK STUFF. Garrity’s handiwork, no doubt. He’d been the one who packed up most of Trey’s things while he was in the hospital. I ignored the dust and pulled off the lid, revealing Trey’s personal effects from the police station: a stapler with his name written on top in permanent marker, APD coffee cups filled with ballpoint pens, business cards. Another box labeled JOB STUFF contained employment records, which we set aside to take back to his apartment, along with
