[Georgia 03] Fallen

myself, or if it was raining, I would sit in my car, and I would just cry and cry. Not even Mandy knew about it. I’ve shared everything in my life with her, but not this.” She gave Will a meaningful look. “You don’t know how hard it was for her with Kenny. She couldn’t give him children, and he wanted a family. His own blood. He was very insistent about that. Telling her about how I longed for Caleb would’ve been cruel.”
    Will felt a little squeamish hearing something so personal about his boss. He tried to get Evelyn back to the day she’d been abducted. “Caleb tricked you to get you back into the house. That’s why you didn’t take Emma and leave?”
    She was silent long enough to let him know that she was aware he was changing the subject. “You can’t fool someone who doesn’t want to be fooled.”
    Will wasn’t so sure about that, but he nodded anyway.
    “I ran into the kitchen. There was Benny Choo. Of course it was Benny Choo. Carnage everywhere. He was in his element. We had a bit of a struggle, which he won, mostly because he had help. He wanted the money. Everybody wanted the money. The place was filled with angry men demanding money.”
    “Except Caleb,” Will guessed.
    “Except Caleb,” she confirmed. “He just sat on the couch eating sandwich meat right out of the bag, watching them run around and tear apart my house. I think he loved it. I think it was the most fun he had ever had in his life—watching me sitting there, scared to death, while his friends ran around like chickens with their heads cut off looking for something that he knew wasn’t there.”
    “What about the A on the bottom of the chair?”
    She gave a stuttered laugh. “That was an arrow. I assumed that the crime scene techs would find it. I wanted them to know that the main culprit was sitting on the couch. Caleb must’ve left hair, fiber, fingerprints.”
    Will wondered if Ahbidi Mittal’s team would’ve figured out the message. Will had certainly botched the job.
    She asked, “Tell me, did they really dig up my backyard?”
    Will realized she meant Caleb’s crew, not Ahbidi Mittal’s. “You told them the money was there?”
    She chuckled, probably thinking about the boys running around in the dark with shovels. “I thought it seemed plausible, inasmuch as it’s happened in the movies.”
    Will didn’t confess that he’d seen too many of those movies himself.
    Abruptly, Evelyn’s demeanor changed. She looked back at the ceiling. The tiles were stained brown. It wasn’t much of a view. Will recognized an avoidance technique when he saw one.
    She whispered, “I keep struggling with the fact that I killed my son.”
    “He was going to kill you. And Faith. He killed countless more people.”
    She kept staring at the tiles. “Mandy told me not to talk to you about the shooting.”
    Will knew that Caleb Espisito’s death was being reviewed by the police, but he assumed Evelyn would be cleared in a few days, just as Faith had been. “It was self-defense.”
    She let out a slow breath. “I think he wanted me to make a choice between the two of them. Between him and Faith.”
    Will didn’t confirm that he shared this opinion.
    “He could forgive his father. Hector had a nice life, but he never married and he never had another child. But when Caleb saw what I had—what I had struggled to build back with Bill and the children—he resented the hell out of it. He hated me so much.” Her eyes glistened with tears. “I remember one of the last things I told him before all of this happened was that holding on to that kind of grudge was like drinking poison and waiting for the other person to die.”
    Will guessed this was the kind of advice mothers gave their sons. Unfortunately, he’d had to learn that lesson the hard way. “Do you remember anything about where they kept you?”
    “It was a warehouse. Abandoned, I’m sure. I yelled enough to wake the dead.”
    “How many men were there?”
    “At the house? I think eight. There were only three at the warehouse, counting Caleb. Juan and David were their names. They tried not to use them, but they weren’t very sophisticated, if you get my meaning.”
    Juan Castillo had been shot outside of Julia Ling’s warehouse. David Herrera had been shot in cold blood right in front of Evelyn and Faith. Benny Choo, Hironobu Kwon, Hector Ortiz, Ricardo Ortiz. In all, eight people were dead now because of one man’s twenty-year grudge.
    Evelyn must