[Georgia 03] Fallen

angry he was until it was too late. I had no idea.”
    “Did you talk to Caleb at the funeral?”
    “I tried to start a conversation, but he just walked away. A few weeks later I was cleaning the house and I noticed things were out of place. My office had been searched. He did a very good job. I wouldn’t have noticed if not for the fact that I was looking for a particular thing.” She explained, “I kept a lock of his baby hair hidden somewhere the children didn’t know about. I went to look for it, and it was gone. I should’ve known then. I should’ve realized how obsessed he was with me. How much he hated me.”
    Evelyn stopped to catch her breath. Will could see that she was tired. But still, she continued. “I called Hector to meet. We’d been in touch since Sandra got sick. There wasn’t much time to catch up. We’d go to a Starbucks down by the airport so nobody would see us. It was the same as before—all that hiding. All that sneaking around so that my family wouldn’t find out.” She closed her eyes again. “Caleb was constantly in trouble. I tried everything with him—even offered to give him money so that he could go to college. Faith’s struggling to help Jeremy with his tuition, and here I was offering this boy a full ride. He just laughed in my face.” Her tone turned sharp, angry. “The next day, I got a call from an old friend in narcotics. They’d picked up Caleb with some serious weight on him. I had to get Mandy to pull some strings. She didn’t want to. She said he’d been given too many chances already. But I begged her.”
    “Heroin?”
    “Coke,” she corrected. “Heroin would’ve been beyond my reach, but the coke we could work with. They knocked it down because we agreed to send him to rehab.”
    “You sent him to Healing Winds.”
    “Hector lives a few miles from there. His cousin’s boy had been at the facility, Ricardo. And Chuck was there. Poor Chuck.” She stopped, swallowing to clear her throat. “He called me at the beginning of this year to make amends. He’s been sober for eight months now. I knew that he was doing some counseling work at Healing Winds, and I thought Caleb would be safe there.”
    “Chuck shared his story with them.”
    “Apparently, that’s one of the steps. He told them about the money. And of course, even though Chuck assured them that I had nothing to do with it, they didn’t believe him.”
    “It was Chuck in the hospital that day. He was the cop who asked Sara whether or not the kid was going to make it.”
    She nodded. “He saw what happened to me on the news and came down to see if he could help. He didn’t stop to realize that with his record, no one would want his help. I’ve asked Mandy to try to smooth things over with his parole officer. It was really me who got him into trouble. My guys have always stood up for me, even when it wasn’t in their best interest.”
    “Do you think Caleb thought you were on the take like the rest of them?”
    She was obviously surprised by the question. “No, Agent Trent. I really don’t think he did. He had this preconceived notion of me as cold and uncaring, the mother who never loved him. He said that the only thing he’d inherited from me was my black heart.”
    Will remembered the song that had been playing when Faith pulled up to her mother’s house. “ ‘Back in Black.’ ”
    “It was his theme song. He kept insisting I listen to the words, though who the hell knows what all that screeching is?”
    “It’s about taking revenge on the people who’ve given up on you.”
    “Ah.” She seemed relieved to finally understand. “He played it over and over again on my kitchen radio. And then Faith came and the music stopped. I was terrified. I don’t think I’ve ever held my breath for that long. But they didn’t want Faith. Not Caleb’s crew, at any rate. Benny Choo told them that he would handle everything. He kept Ricardo back with him. The H inside him was much too valuable, but he told the other boys to take me and leave, so they did.”
    Will wanted to be sure about the sequence. “Caleb was there at the same time as Faith?”
    “He looked at her out the window.” Evelyn’s voice trembled. “I have never been so frightened in my life. Not before that, anyway.”
    Will was more than familiar with that kind of fear. “What happened before Faith came? You were making sandwiches, right?”
    “I knew Faith would be late. Those sessions usually run long.