High Noon

placing the palms of her hands on her desk, leaned forward.
    “And, oh yes, Sergeant Meeks, we’ll be honest. I can’t think of many things I’d like more. But for now? I’m going to suggest that instead of you coming in here and throwing your weight around my office, or trying to make me shiver with tossing around your fishing and golf buddies, you consider getting your son some professional help. Because you know what? That anger management? It doesn’t seem to be doing him much good.”
    “If you think you’re going to lay this murder charge on him—”
    “I do not think any such thing. He’s cleared of that. And by clearing him—a person known, without question, to have an unhealthy dislike of me—we can now focus on other leads and avenues in the matter of the murder of Roy Squire. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m on my way to do just that.”
    “You didn’t have to drag him out of his own home in cuffs.”
    He sounded tired now, she noted. She felt the same damn way. Anger was energizing, but when it started to drip away with fatigue, it could easily form into bitterness.
    “No, and he wouldn’t have been if he hadn’t called Detective Alberta a fucking cunt among other pleasantries, and taken a swing at Detective Sykes while threatening to beat him bloody. He swung at Alberta, too, and those officers were forced to subdue him.
    “I believe your son is twenty-seven years old? I hope to God in twenty years’ time my daughter’s woman enough to stand up for herself, and doesn’t need her mama to do it for her.”
    Phoebe wrenched open the door. “Don’t you come around here anymore to rattle your saber at me. You go right on to IAB, or the chief, the mayor or the damn governor of Georgia. But don’t you come here again to push your face into mine over your pathetic offspring.”
    She swung out into the squad room. “Detective Sykes? Would you come with me now?”
    “Yes, ma’am.” Sykes pushed back from his desk, didn’t bother to disguise the snarky grin as he looked over at Sergeant Meeks. Then he strolled out in Phoebe’s wake.
     
    She started with the oldest case first. She’d been Special Agent Mac Namara then. Still fresh from Quantico. She wouldn’t meet Roy for another few weeks, she remembered.
    A pretty day, late fall, a breeze stirring the air.
    Her hair had been longer then, hadn’t it? Yes, past her shoulders in those days, and she’d habitually pulled it back into a twist or knot because she’d thought it looked more official. More professional.
    And because it made her feel sexy at the end of the day to pull out the pins and let it fall free.
    Ava was still in the suburbs. Carter in high school and gangly with a growth spurt. And Mama’s world shrunk down to a square of about six blocks, but no one talked about it then.
    “Botched kidnapping. Woman walked out of a hospital nursery down in Biloxi with a newborn baby girl. Posed as a nurse. She brought the baby here, to Savannah, to pass it off as her own. This was a surprise to her husband, who believed she’d gone south to visit her sister for a few days. She told him that she’d found the baby, abandoned, that it was a sign from God, as she hadn’t been able to conceive in their eight years of marriage, despite spending several thousand dollars on fertility treatments.”
    “He buy that?”
    “He did not. But he loved her.”
    She sat at a light. Over the hum of the car’s AC, she heard the clip-clop as a mounted cop turned into the park.
    “He’d also seen the news reports on this stolen baby girl, and put it together. He tried to talk to his wife—Brenda Anne Falk, age thirty-four. She wouldn’t listen. Couldn’t he see how that baby had her eyes? He called her sister, whom she had never seen on that trip south, and her parents, who were frightened and concerned. Then, not knowing what else to do, he tried to take the baby away from her.”
    Phoebe stopped in front of a tidy office building. And continued when Sykes joined her on the sidewalk. “She got her husband’s thirty-two revolver, pointed it at his head and told him to put her baby down, that it was time for her nap.”
    “Off the tracks.”
    “Well off.” Inside the building, Phoebe pushed the button on the elevator. “He was afraid the baby could be hurt, so he put her down, tried to reason with his wife, who proceeded to shoot him.”
    “Off the tracks and over the cliff.”
    “Yes. Fortunately, she hit the meat of his bicep