Triptych (Will Trent 1)

8:48 PM

Betty’s toenails clicked along the road as Will took her for her evening walk. He had tried to take the dog running their first day together, but ended up having to carry her most of the way. It had unnerved him the way she had adapted to the up and down jogging of her body, tongue lolling out, back legs tucked neatly into the palm of Will’s hand, body pressed close to his chest as he tried to ignore the strange looks people were giving him.

Poncey-Highlands was a middle-of-the-road kind of neighborhood with its mixture of struggling artists, gay men and the occasional homeless person. From his back porch, Will could see the Carter Center, which housed President Carter’s library, and Piedmont Park was a short jog away. On the weekends, Ponce de Leon took him straight up to Stone Mountain Park, where he rode his bike, hiked the trails or just sat back and enjoyed the sunrise as it peered over the largest chunk of exposed granite in North America.

As beautiful as the north Georgia mountains had been, Will had missed the familiarity of home, knowing instinctively where everything was, the areas that were safe, the restaurants that looked shady on the outside but had the best food and service in the city. He loved the diversity, the fact that there was a Mennonite church across from a rainbow-colored hippie commune at the end of his street. The way the homeless people went through your trash and yelled at you if there wasn’t anything good inside. Atlanta had always been his town, and if Amanda Wagner knew how happy he was to be back, she would have jerked him up to the hills faster than he could say, “chicken-fried steak.”

“Hiya.” A passing jogger flirted, his cut chest glistening in the evening moonlight. Having lived in a city with a large gay population for his entire life, Will had learned to take these casual passes as flattering rather than a challenge to his manhood. Of course, walking a six-pound dog on a hot pink leash (it was the only one he could find that was long enough) was asking for attention no matter where you lived.

Will smiled to himself at the thought of how ridiculous he must look, but his smile didn’t last long as his brain returned to the topic that had been plaguing his thoughts for most of the day.

He was stalled in the case and the more he thought about it, the more his initial bad feelings about Michael Ormewood were amplified. The detective came off as an okay guy when he was right in front of you, but closer examination showed some flaws, the biggest being that he had used his job to force women to have sex with him. That was the one detail Will could not get past. Prostitutes weren’t walking the streets for the great sex and stimulating conversation. They took money, and Will guessed you could construe that as consent, but there hadn’t been any money exchanged when Michael had done it. He had used the power the badge gave him to control the women. That was rape in Will’s mind.

Yet Will was having a hard time thinking of the guy he’d spent most of the last two days with as a rapist. Father, husband, seemingly a well-respected cop, sure. But rapist? There were definitely two sides to the man, and the more Will thought about it, the less he was certain about either one of them.

Working with the GBI, most of Will’s time was consumed with chasing down horrendous criminals, but if his stint in the mountains had taught him one thing, it was that people were very seldom either really good or really bad. In Blue Ridge, where poverty and plant closings and a strike at the local mine had practically crippled the small mountain community, the line between right and wrong had been blurred. Will had learned a lot up there, not just about human nature but about himself.

Region eight of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation was the largest district in the state, serving fourteen counties and stretching all the way to the Tennessee as well as North Carolina state line. The men Will met at the northwest Georgia field office were pretty callous about the locals, as if they were above the people they were meant to be serving. Will’s chief was called “Yip” Gomez for reasons Will had never been able to determine, and the man had jokingly told Will the first time they met to give up on trying to enjoy any of the local talent. “I’ve already had all the ladies who still have their own teeth,” he had laughed. “Slim pickin’s, my boy. Slim pickin’s.”

Will’s face must have betrayed his thoughts—Angie always said he had more estrogen than was good for him—because Yip had given Will every crap assignment in the district after that. He’d been totally excluded from the sting operation that resulted in the biggest bust in the office’s history. Working with the locals, Yip had helped break up a cockfighting enterprise that reached into three different states and twelve counties. The case had implicated a neighboring town’s mayor, who’d had his own La-Z-Boy ringside so he wouldn’t miss any of the action. Even though the tip-off had come from a bunch of angry wives who were pissed off at their husbands for gambling away their paychecks, that still did not take away from the glory of the sting operation. Yip and the boys had celebrated at the Blue Havana on 515 that night while Will had been stuck in his car, casing an abandoned chicken farm that had reportedly been turned into a meth lab. Not that he wanted to drink with these men, but the point was he hadn’t been invited.

Though he was always left out of the more glamorous busts, Will liked to think that what he did up in the mountains was important work. Meth was a nasty drug. It turned people into subhumans, made them leave their kids on the side of the road, open their legs for anything that would get them high. Will had seen plenty of lives ruined by meth well before he got to Blue Ridge. He didn’t need a primer to help him want to break apart every lab in his jurisdiction. The work was dangerous. The so-called chemists who made the compound were taking their lives into their own hands. A single spark could ignite the whole building. Dust from the manufacturing process could clog up your lungs like Play-Doh. Haz Mat had to be called in to clear the area before Will could go in and collect any evidence. The cleanup on these labs alone was bankrupting the local police and sheriff’s departments and the state wasn’t about to lend a helping hand.

Will sometimes thought that for a certain type of mountain dweller, meth was the new moonshine, a product they trafficked in to keep their kids clothed and fed. He had a hard time reconciling the junkies he saw on the streets of Atlanta with some of the everyday people brewing meth up in the hills. Not that Will was saying they were angels. Some of them were awful, just plain trash doing whatever they could to finance their habit. Others weren’t so black and white. Will would see them in the grocery store or at the local pizza place or coming out of church with their kids on Sundays. They generally didn’t partake of the product. It was a job for them, a way—to some, the only way they saw—to make money. People were dying, lives were being ruined, but that wasn’t their business.

Will didn’t know how they could section things off so neatly, but in Michael Ormewood, he saw the same tendency. The detective did his job—by all accounts he did it well—but then there was this other part of him that made him hurt the very people he was supposed to be helping.

Betty made some business under a bush and Will leaned down, using a baggie to scoop it up. He dropped the bag into a trashcan as he made his way back toward the house. Will caught himself glancing into his neighbor’s windows as he passed, wondering when the old woman would be back. As if she sensed his thoughts, Betty pulled at her leash, tugging him toward the driveway.