Jeffrey, of course, was not Hank Norton. He persisted, 'You're sure?'
'Yeah.' Then, to prove it, she asked, 'What was that thing in the interview? Dr. Linton sounded surprised when the mother mentioned Lacey Patterson.'
'She was a patient of Sara's at the clinic,' Jeffrey told her. Then, almost to himself, he said, 'You know how Sara feels about her kids.'
Lena didn't, and she looked down at the file, not answering him. Mark Patterson's name was on the tab, and she flipped it open to see what he had been up to. The top sheet had his vitals on it, including his address. 'They live in Morningside?' she asked, referring to a shady part of Madison.
'I'm thinking it's that trailer park. The one with the green awning over the sign?'
'The Kudzu Arms,' Lena supplied. She and Brad had been called out to the Kudzu on several occasions over the course of the last few months. The hotter the weather, the hotter the tempers.
'Anyway,' Jeffrey said, moving things along. 'What's he got on his sheet?'
Lena thumbed through the pages. 'Two B and Es when he was ten, both of them at the Kudzu Arms. Most recently, he beat up his sister pretty bad. His father called us out, we got there, they wouldn't press charges.' She stopped reading, providing, ' 'We' means Deacon and Percy,' she supplied, referring to two beat cops. 'They pulled this one, not me and Brad.'
Jeffrey scratched his chin, seeming to think this through. 'I don't even remember when it happened.'
'Just after Thanksgiving,' Lena told him. 'Then, around Christmas time, Deacon and Percy were called back. It was the father again, and he asked for them specifically.' She skimmed the report Deacon had written. 'This time, charges were filed. They took him down to the pokey for a couple of days, Mark was supposed to take some anger management classes in exchange for time served.' She snorted a laugh. 'Buddy Conford was his lawyer.'
'Buddy's not that bad,' Jeffrey said.
Lena closed the file, giving him an incredulous look. 'He's a whore. He puts addicts and murderers back on the streets.'
'He's doing his job, just like we are.'
'His job screws our job,' Lena insisted.
Jeffrey shook his head. 'He's gunna be talking to you about the Weaver situation,' he told her. 'The shooting.'
Lena snorted a laugh. 'He's working for Dottie Weaver?'
'The city,' he told her. 'I guess he's doing it as a favor to the mayor.' Jeffrey shrugged. 'Anyway, work it out with him. Tell him what happened.'
'It was a clean shot,' Lena told him, because if there was one truth in her life right now, it was that Jeffrey had taken the only option given to him. She said, 'Brad will say the same thing.'
Jeffrey was quiet, and he seemed to drop the subject, but after a few minutes he pulled the car over to the side of the road. Lena felt a sense of deja vu, and her stomach lurched as she thought about being in the car with Hank that morning, and how she had embarrassed herself. There was no question in her mind now that Lena would not have the same problem with Jeffrey. She could be stronger around Jeffrey because he did not see her the way that Hank did. Hank still thought of Lena as a teenage girl because that was the only way he had ever really known her.
Lena waited as Jeffrey put the car in park and turned toward her. She felt the hair on the back of her neck rise, and thought she might be in trouble or something.
'Between you and me…' Jeffrey said, then stopped. He waited until she looked him in the eye and repeated himself. 'Between you and me,' he said.
'Yeah,' Lena nodded, not liking the serious tone in his voice. Her stomach sank in her gut as she realized he was going to say something about Sara.
He surprised her, saying instead, 'The shot.'
She nodded for him to continue.
'With Weaver,' he said, as if he needed to narrow it down. She could see how upset he was. For the first time, she understood what it meant to read someone like a book. She saw the kind of pain in his eyes that she would never expect to see in Jeffrey Tolliver.
'Tell me the truth,' he said, a begging quality to his voice. 'You were there. You saw what happened.'
'I did,' she agreed, feeling a startling need coming off of him.
'Tell me,' he said, begging more openly this time. Lena felt a kind of rush from his desperation. Jeffrey needed something from her. Jeffrey Tolliver, who had seen her naked, nailed down to the floor, bruised and bleeding, needed something from Lena.
She let the moment linger, savoring the power more than anything else. 'Yeah,' she finally said, though with little conviction.
He continued to stare, and she could see the doubt in his eyes. For a moment, she thought he might even tear up.
'It was a clean shot,' she told him. He kept staring straight at her, as if he could see into her. Lena knew that her tone wasn't confident, and that he had picked up on this. She knew, also, that she had not made it clear that she trusted his judgment. Her response had been purposefully ambiguous. Lena had no idea why she had done this, but she felt the thrill of it for a long while, even as Jeffrey put the car back into gear and drove down the road.
Grant County was made up of three cities: Heartsdale, Madison, and Avondale. Like Avondale, Madison was poorer than Heartsdale, and there were plenty of trailer parks around because it was cheap housing. This did not necessarily mean that the people occupying the trailers were cheap. There were some better parks with community centers and swimming pools and neighborhood watches, just as there were some that festered with domestic violence and drunken brawls. The Kudzu Arms fell into this second category. It was about as far from a neighborhood as a place could get without falling off the map. Trailers in various states of dilapidation fanned out from a single dirt road. Some of the residents had tried to plant gardens to no avail. Even without the drought, which had put all of Georgia on water restrictions, the heat would have killed the flowers. The heat was enough to kill people. The plants did not have a chance.
'Depressing,' Jeffrey noted, tapping his fingers on the steering wheel. It was a nervous habit she had never seen in him, and Lena felt the guilt come back like a strong undertow, pulling her the wrong way. She should have been more adamant about the shooting. She should have looked him right in the eye and told him the truth, that killing the teenager was the only thing he could have done. Lena could not think how to make it better. A thousand adamant yeses would never erase her initial reticence and the impact it had made. What had she been thinking?
Jeffrey asked, 'What's the address?'
Lena flipped the file open, tracing her finger to the address. 'Three- ten,' she said, looking up at the trailers. 'These are all twos.'
'Yeah,' Jeffrey agreed. He looked over his shoulder across the road from the park. 'There it is.'
Lena turned as he backed out of the park. A large mobile home, she guessed a doublewide, was on the other side of the road. Unlike the ones in the park across from it, this trailer looked more like a house. There was something like landscaping in the front yard, and a cinder block foundation covered the bottom portion. Someone had painted the concrete blocks black to offset the white trailer, and a large covered deck served as a front porch. To the side was a carport, and beside this was a large diesel semi.
'He's a truck driver?' Jeffrey asked.
Lena thumbed down to the proper space on the form. 'Long hauler,'
