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this?”
    “S-s-s-ara?” The woman on the other end could barely speak.
    Sara put her hand to her eyes, relief washing over her body. “Yes?”
    “It’s … it’s … I’m sorry, I …”
    “Nell?” Sara quickly put together the pieces, recognizing thevoice of her husband’s high school sweetheart. He’d had a child with Darnell Long, but not much else.
    “Nell?” Sara repeated. “Are you okay?”
    “It’s Jared!” the woman wailed. “Oh, God!”
    Sara leaned back against the wall. Jared, her stepson. Sara had only met him a few times. He was a police officer, just as his father had been.
    “I didn’t—” Nell’s voice caught. “I should’ve—”
    “Nell, please. Tell me what—”
    “I should’ve listened to you!” she cried. “She’s got him … oh, God …”
    “Listened about—” Sara stopped. She knew exactly who Nell was talking about.
    Lena Adams.
    Sara’s husband had trained Lena fresh out of the academy, had taken her under his wing and promoted her to detective.
    And in return for Jeffrey Tolliver’s trust, Lena Adams had gotten him killed.
    Nell sobbed, “Oh, God, Sara! Please!”
    “Nell,” Sara managed, her breath catching around the word. “Tell me. Tell me what happened.”
    The woman was too hysterical to comply. “Why didn’t I listen to you? Why didn’t I forbid it? Why didn’t I …” Her words dissolved into a heart-wrenching moan.
    Sara forced air into her lungs. She could feel her chest shaking, her hands shaking. Her whole body vibrated with dread. “Nell, please. Just tell me what happened.”

3.
    W ill Trent stood in his boss’s office on the top floor of City Hall East, looking out at the city. Atlanta was just waking up, the sun sparkling between the skyscrapers, commuters in BMWs and Audis honking their horns. Across the street, dozens of men were lined up outside the Home Depot shopping center. Will watched as, one after another, trucks pulled up and taillights glowed red. Hands shot out, fingers pointed, and two, three, sometimes four men at a time would jump into the back of the truck to begin the day’s work.
    Will could’ve had that life. There hadn’t been much career advice at the Atlanta Children’s Home. When Will turned eighteen, they’d given him a hundred dollars and a map to the homeless shelter. He’d spent the next several months jumping in and out of trucks, working construction or whatever jobs he could find. Will had been very lucky that the right kind of people had intervened. Otherwise, he never would’ve become an agent with the GBI. He wouldn’t have his house or his car or his life.
    He wouldn’t have Sara.
    Will turned away from the windows. He took in Amanda Wagner’s office, which hadn’t been altered much in the almost fifteen years that he’d worked for her. The location had moved a few times and the electronics had gotten sleeker as she worked her way up to deputy director of the GBI, but Amanda always decoratedthe same. Same photos on the wall. Same Oriental rug under her behemoth desk. Even her chair was the same squeaky old wood and leather contraption that looked like it belonged to George Bailey’s nemesis in
It’s a Wonderful Life
.
    The flat-panel TV was one of her few concessions to modernity. Will found the remote and checked all the Atlanta news channels to see if they had picked up on what had happened in Macon last night. Less than a two-hour drive from the state capital, Macon was a fairly significant city, with more than 150,000 residents and a thriving university system. Because it was geographically at the heart of the state, the city served as a compromise for people who found Atlanta too busy and smaller towns too slow. In many ways, Macon was a better representation of Georgia than Atlanta. Art museums sat alongside junk stores. A handful of respected tech colleges were blocks away from expensive private schools that taught creationism. The visitors’ bureau touted both the Tubman