He barely gave her a glance, asking Amanda, "Why is this girl asking me questions?"
Faith had been snubbed before, but she knew this guy needed to be on a short leash. "You want me to get my partner back in here to talk to you?"
He snorted, as if the thought of another beat down was inconsequential, but he answered Faith's question. "What do you mean, unusual? It's Buckhead. Unusual is everywhere."
Anna Lindsey's penthouse had probably set her back three million dollars. The woman hardly lived in the ghetto. "Did you see any strangers loitering around?" Faith persisted.
He waved her off. "Strangers everywhere. This is a big city."
Faith thought about their killer. He had to have access to the building in order to Taser Anna and take her away from the apartment. Simkov obviously wasn't going to make this easy, so she tried to bluff him. "You know what I'm talking about, Otik. Don't bullshit me or I'll have my partner go back to work on your ugly face."
He shrugged again, but there was something different about the gesture. Faith waited him out, and he finally said, "I go for a smoke sometimes behind the building."
The fire escape that led to the roof was behind the building. "What did you see?"
"A car," he said. "Silver, four door."
Faith tried to keep her reaction calm. Both the Coldfields and the family from Tennessee had seen a white sedan speeding away from the accident. It had been dusk. Maybe they had mistaken the silver car for white. "Did you get a license plate number?"
He shook his head. "I saw the ladder to the fire escape was unlatched. I went up to the roof."
"On the ladder?"
"Elevator. I can't climb that ladder. It's twenty-three floors. I gotta bad knee."
"What did you see on the roof ?"
"There was a soda can there. Someone used it for an ashtray. Lots of butts inside."
"Where was it?"
"On the ledge of the roof, right by the ladder."
"What did you do with it?"
"I kicked it off," he said, giving another one of his shrugs. "Watched it hit the ground. It exploded like—" He put his hands together, then flung them apart. "Pretty spectacular."
Faith had been behind that building, had searched it top to bottom. "We didn't find any cigarette butts or a soda can behind the building."
"That's what I'm saying. Next day, it was all gone. Someone cleaned it up."
"And the silver car?"
"Gone too."
"You're sure you didn't see any suspicious men hanging around the building?"
He blew out a puff of air. "No, lady. I told you. Just the root beer."
"What root beer?"
"The soda can. It was Doc Peterson's Root Beer."
The same as they'd found in the basement of the house behind Olivia Tanner's.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
AS WILL DROVE TO JAKE BERMAN'S HOUSE IN COWETA County, he debated with himself the level of fury Faith would feel when she found out that he had tricked her. He wasn't sure which would make her angrier: the outright lie he had told her on the phone about Sam finding the wrong Jake Berman or the fact that Will was going down south to talk to the man on his own. There was no way she would've kept her doctor's appointment if Will had told her that the real Jake Berman was alive and well and living on Lester Drive. She would have insisted on coming along, and Will wouldn't have been able to come up with a good excuse for her not to, other than that she was pregnant and diabetic and had enough on her plate without having to put herself at risk by interviewing a witness who could very well be a suspect.
That would have gone over really well with Faith. Like a lead football over the Mississippi.
Will had gotten Caroline, Amanda's assistant, to cross-reference Jake Berman with the address on Lester Drive. With that key piece of information, they had opened up Berman's background fairly easily. The mortgage was in his wife's name, as were all of the credit cards, the cable bill and the utilities. Lydia Berman was a schoolteacher. Jake Berman had drawn his full lot of unemployment and still not found a job. He had declared bankruptcy eighteen months ago. He'd walked away from around half a million dollars in debt. The reason behind his being hard to find might have been as simple as a desire to elude creditors. Considering he'd been arrested a few months ago for public indecency, it made sense that Berman would want to keep a low profile.
Then again, it would also all make sense if Berman was their suspect.
The Porsche wasn't comfortable for long distances, and Will's back was aching by the time he reached Lester Drive. Traffic had been worse then usual, an overturned tractor-trailer jackknifed across the interstate bringing everything to a standstill for almost a full hour. Will hadn't wanted to be alone with his thoughts. He had listened to every station on the dial by the time he crossed into Coweta County.
Will pulled up beside an unmarked Chevy Caprice at the mouth of Lester Drive. A lawnmower was sticking out of the back of the trunk. The man behind the wheel was dressed in overalls, a thick gold chain hanging around his neck. Will recognized Nick Shelton, the regional field agent for District 23.
"How they hangin'?" Nick asked, turning down the bluegrass blaring from the radio. Will had met the agent a few times before. He was so country his neck glowed red, but he was a solid investigator, and he knew how to do his job.
Will asked, "Is Berman still in the house?"
"Unless he sneaked out the back," Nick answered. "Don't worry. He struck me as the lazy type."
"Did you talk to him?"
"Posed as a landscaper looking for work." Nick handed him a business card. "I told him it'd be a hundred bucks a month, and he said he could take care of his own damn lawn, thank you very much." He snorted a laugh. "This from a guy who's still in his pajamas at ten o'clock in the morning."
Will looked at the card, seeing a drawing of a lawnmower and some flowers. He said, "Nice."
"The fake phone number comes in handy with the ladies." Nick chuckled again. "I got a good look at ol' Jakey while he was lecturing me on competitive pricing. He's definitely your guy."
"Did you get into the house?"
"He wasn't that stupid." Nick asked, "You want me to stick around?"
Will thought about the situation, the fact that, if he had given her the chance, Faith would have been right: Don't go into an unknown situation without backup. "If you don't mind. Just hang back here and make sure I don't get my head blown off."
They both laughed a little louder than the words called for, probably because Will wasn't really joking.
He rolled up his window and drove down the road. Just to make things easier, Caroline had called Berman before Will had left the office. She had posed as an operator for the local cable television company. Berman had assured her he would be home to let in the technician who was doing a general upgrade so that their service wouldn't be interrupted. There were a lot of tricks you could use to make sure people were home. The cable ruse was the best. People would go without a lot of things, but they would put their lives on hold for days at a time in order to wait for the cable company to show up.