[Georgia 03] Fallen

gray. Most days, Amanda seemed to have more energy than all the men on her team. Now, she looked tired, and Will could see the worry lines around her eyes were more pronounced.
    She said, “Tell me about Spivey.”
    Will tried to click his brain back over to his old case against Captain Evelyn Mitchell’s team. Boyd Spivey was the former lead detective on the narcotics squad who was currently biding his time on death row. Will had talked to the man only once before Spivey’s lawyers advised him to keep his mouth shut. “I don’t find it hard to believe he beat someone to death with his fists. He was a big guy, taller than me, carried about fifty more pounds, all of it muscle.”
    “Gym rat?”
    “I’d guess steroids gave him a boost.”
    “How did that work for him?”
    “They made him uncontrollably angry,” Will recalled. “He’s not as smart as he thinks, but I wasn’t able to get him to confess, so maybe I’m not either.”
    “You still sent him to prison.”
    “He sent himself to prison. His house in the city was paid for. His house at the lake was paid for. All three of his kids were in private school. His wife worked ten hours a week and drove a top-of-the-line Mercedes. His mistress drove a BMW. He kept his brand new Porsche 911 parked in her driveway.”
    “Men and their cars,” she mumbled. “He doesn’t sound very smart to me.”
    “He didn’t think anyone would ask questions.”
    “Generally, they don’t.”
    “Spivey was good at keeping his mouth shut.”
    “As I recall, all of them were.”
    She was right. In a corruption case, the usual strategy was to find the weakest member and persuade him or her to turn on his or her fellow conspirators in exchange for a lighter sentence. The six detectives belonging to Evelyn Mitchell’s narcotics squad had proven immune to this strategy. None of them would turn on the other, and all of them routinely insisted that Captain Mitchell had nothing to do with their alleged crimes. They went out of their way to protect their boss. It was both admirable and incredibly frustrating.
    Will said, “Spivey worked on Evelyn’s squad for twelve years—longer than any of them.”
    “She trusted him.”
    “Yes,” Will agreed. “Two peas in a pod.”
    Amanda cut him a sharp look. “Careful.”
    Will felt his jaw tighten so hard that the bone ached. He didn’t see how ignoring the most important part of this case was going to get them anywhere. Amanda knew as well as Will that her friend was guilty as hell. Evelyn hadn’t lived large, but like Spivey, she’d been stupid in her own way.
    Faith’s father had been an insurance broker, solidly middle class with the usual kinds of debts that people had: car payments, mortgage, credit cards. Yet, during Will’s investigation, he’d found an out-of-state bank account in Bill Mitchell’s name. At the time, the man had been dead for six years. Though the account balance always hovered around ten thousand dollars, the activity showed monthly deposits since his death that totaled up to almost sixty thousand dollars. It was clearly a shell account, the kind of thing prosecutors called a smoking gun. With Bill dead, Evelyn was the only signatory. Money was taken out and deposited with her ATM card at an Atlanta branch of the bank. Her dead husband wasn’t the one who was keeping the activities spread apart and the deposits shy of the limit that would throw up a red flag at Homeland Security.
    As far as Will knew, Evelyn Mitchell had never been asked about the account. He’d figured it would come out during her trial, but her trial had never happened. There had been a press conference announcing her retirement, and that was the end of the story.
    Until now.
    Amanda flipped down the visor to block the sun. Clipped to the underside were a couple of yellow claim tickets that looked like they were from a dry cleaner. The sun wasn’t doing her any favors. She didn’t look tired anymore. She looked haggard.
    She said, “Something’s bothering you.”
    He resisted uttering the biggest “duh” ever vocalized in the history of the world.
    “Not that,” she said, as if she could read his mind. “Faith didn’t call you for help because she knew that she was going to do the wrong thing.”
    Will looked out the window.
    “You would’ve made her wait for backup.”
    He hated the relief her words brought.
    “She’s always been headstrong.”
    He felt the need to say, “She didn’t do the wrong