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.”
Grant County—Tuesday
3
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
