Unseen (Will Trent / Atlanta Series)

corroborated everything DeShawn had told Will Trent about Big Whitey and Sid Waller. Basically, he’d thrown everybody under the bus, including himself. It wouldn’t be long before someone decided Dell should stop talking. Lena figured he was planning his own suicide. The fact was that Tony Dell had nothing to lose.
    The Atlanta police had caught up with Dell and Cayla Martin outside the international terminal at Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson Airport. Dell was obviously a psychopath, but he was also a survivor. He’d known the gig was up. He’d raised his hands and gotten out of the car.
    Cayla Martin wouldn’t go so easy. She’d jumped behind the wheel and tried to outrun the police. Unfortunately, she’d run in the wrong direction. Lena wondered what was going through the nurse’s mind when she saw the shuttle bus speeding straight toward her. According to the accident report, there were about two seconds between the time Martin tried to turn the wheel and the head-on collision. Lena knew what it felt like when you thought you were about to die. Two seconds was an eternity. Martin wasn’t wearing a seatbelt. Probably another second passed as she flew headfirst into the shuttle bus and snapped her neck on one of the seatbacks.
    Lena couldn’t help but think that the sweetest part of that story was not Martin’s brutal death, but the fact that Sara Linton’s sixty-five-thousand-dollar BMW had been turned into the world’s most expensive Rubik’s Cube.
    Laughter tickled Lena’s throat as she pushed herself up from the chair. She started pacing the room, forcing herself not to count off the steps because she already knew the space was twelve feetacross by ten feet deep. She looked up at the camera. She smiled, though she felt the snarl in her teeth. She wanted to get through the pile of paperwork on her desk. She wanted to check on Jared. She wanted to go home and do the things that made her feel like a normal person: clean the house top to bottom, do the laundry, tend to her garden in the front yard. Winter was just around the corner. Lena should probably pull out the petunias, but she didn’t have it in her to let anything die just now.
    She’d been to too many funerals lately.
    DeShawn Franklin’s body had been unceremoniously cremated at a facility outside of Macon. Other than the mortician, Lena was the only person in attendance. His sister didn’t want her children there. His ex-wife wouldn’t speak his name and his current wife wouldn’t show her face in public. Jared hadn’t wanted Lena to go, but he didn’t try to stop her, either. She had made a lot of mistakes in her life. She figured DeShawn had tried to do right at the end. He’d turned on that recorder on his phone. Lena didn’t know everything that the recording had captured—nobody at the station did—but apparently, DeShawn had given Will Trent enough evidence to bring down Big Whitey’s organization. That detail alone earned DeShawn one pair of clear eyes watching him go to his maker.
    Eric Haigh’s interment had been markedly different. The state had cleared him just before the burial yesterday morning, so he’d been given a proper send-off with officers in dress uniforms and a full police escort. Lena guessed she wasn’t the only cop there thinking that the last funeral they’d all attended was Chuck Gray’s. Lonnie’s son had died of leukemia three months ago. Lena had cried at Chuck’s ceremony—not because she liked Chuck, who was the kind of spoiled asshole you’d expect of the chief’s son—but because she’d felt so bad for Lonnie Gray.
    She imagined Lonnie was feeling very sorry for himself right now. He had an excellent law firm fighting the charges against him, but as smart as Lonnie was, he’d made one enormousmistake. Lena figured it was arrogance that had brought him down. Lonnie never considered the possibility that the GBI would seize his home computer. Even without the murders, kidnappings, and trafficking, the state had found enough child porn on the chief’s hard drive to send him away for a hundred years.
    Stupid, sick bastard.
    Last month, Lena had run a 10K with Lonnie. They were raising money for leukemia research. Lonnie had thirty years on her, but he’d beaten her to the finish line. Lena relished the thought of his strong heart ticking away as he marked off prison time for the rest of his miserable life. She hoped some big, nasty con did to Lonnie Gray exactly what he’d done to