Chapter 24

Tuesday afternoon, Karla sat at her office desk reviewing a deposition transcript for the Westward case when her phone rang. The caller ID showed an Atlanta number she didn’t recognize.

“Karla Silva.”

“Ms. Silva, this is Detective James Harris with the Atlanta Police Department, Zone 5. I’m calling about the Jalen Moss shooting investigation.”

Karla sat up straighter, setting down her pen. “Yes, Detective. What can I do for you?”

“We’ve taken a suspect into custody this morning. He matches the physical description Mr. Moss provided at the hospital, and he was picked up after being identified through some of the camera footage we’d been combing through. We’d like to bring Mr. Moss in to see if he can confirm a recognition.”

Karla’s pulse picked up. “You have someone in custody?”

“Yes, ma’am. He’s been here since about nine this morning. I want to be straight with you, though. He hasn’t said a single word since we brought him in. Not his name, not a request for a lawyer, nothing. He’s just been sitting in the interview room staring at the wall.”

Karla frowned. “Not even his name?”

“Not even his name. We have what we think is his ID from when he was picked up, but we’re not confirming anything until Mr. Moss has had a chance to look at him. If he recognizes him as the shooter, that gives us a lot more to work with.”

Karla pressed her fingers to her temple, thinking. “When do you want him there?”

“As soon as he can make it. I know he’s still recovering, so we’re not trying to rush him, but the sooner we can get this part of the process done, the sooner we can start pressing this guy for who sent him.”

“Understood. I’ll call him right now and we’ll head over together. I’m his attorney for adjacent matters, and I’d like to be present when he makes the identification.”

“That’s fine, Ms. Silva. We’ll be expecting you both. Just have someone at the front desk page me when you arrive.”

“We’ll be there within the hour.”

She ended the call and stared at the phone for a moment, her heart hammering against her ribs. They had someone. They actually had someone. After three weeks of waiting, of police protection, of Chris’s PIs circling the women like vultures, of Jalen jumping at unexpected sounds in his apartment, they finally had someone.

She picked the phone back up and dialed Jalen.

He answered on the second ring. “Hey, baby.”

“Jalen.” Her voice was steadier than she felt. “Detective Harris from APD just called. They have a suspect in custody. They want you to come down and look at him.”

There was a long silence on the other end of the line.

“They got him?” Jalen finally said, his voice quiet.

“They got someone. They want you to confirm whether it’s him. They picked him up this morning. He hasn’t said a word since they brought him in.”

Jalen exhaled slowly. “Damn. Okay. Yeah. I’m getting my keys—”

“No,” Karla cut in. “Stay where you are. I’m coming to pick you up. We’re going together.”

“Karla, you’ve got cases to work on. I can drive myself, I’m fine to—”

“Jalen.” Her voice was sharper than she intended. She softened it. “Please. Just wait for me. I want to be there with you when you do this. I don’t want you walking into that station alone.”

A pause. Then, quieter, “Okay. I’ll wait.”

“I’ll be there in twenty minutes.”

“Karla.”

“Yeah?”

“Thank you.”

She closed her eyes briefly. “Drink some water. Take whatever pain medication you’re supposed to take. I don’t want you sitting in a police station for two hours getting stiff.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

She hung up, grabbed her purse and her keys, and was out the door of her office in under two minutes.

Karla picked Jalen up from his apartment at 1:47 PM. The Doraville officer in the cruiser outside his building gave her a nod as she pulled in, and she returned it with a small wave. Jalen came down a few minutes later, walking carefully, one hand pressed lightly against the side of his abdomen as he made his way to her car.

He eased himself into the passenger seat with a quiet hiss of pain, then leaned back against the headrest and closed his eyes for a moment.

“You good?” Karla asked, watching him.

“Yeah. Just the getting in and out of cars part still sucks.”

She reached over and squeezed his thigh. He covered her hand with his and held it there as she pulled out of the parking lot and headed toward the highway.

For the first several minutes of the drive, neither of them spoke. The afternoon traffic on I-85 South was its usual mid-day mess, and Karla focused on weaving through it while Jalen stared out the passenger window.

“You think it’s him?” Jalen finally asked. “One of Chris’s people?”

Karla glanced over at him, then back at the road. “I don’t know. The detective wouldn’t say much. Just that the guy isn’t talking and that they need you to look at him.”

Jalen nodded slowly. “If it is Chris’s guy, that’s huge. That means we can finally start tying it back to him.”

“Maybe. We’d still need to prove the connection. Just having the shooter doesn’t automatically give us Chris.”

“But it’s a start.”

“Yeah,” Karla said quietly. “It’s a start.”

The highways merged into I-75-85 South, heading into downtown. The skyline rose ahead of them, glass towers catching the afternoon sun.

“You nervous?” she asked after another stretch of silence.

Jalen exhaled. “I don’t know what I am. I’ve been carrying this around for three weeks. Wondering. Trying to figure out who it could’ve been. Part of me just wants to look at him and know. Even if I don’t get the why yet, I want the who.”

Karla nodded. “I get that.”

“You?” he asked.

“Me what?”

“You nervous?”

She gripped the steering wheel a little tighter. “I’m scared for you. I don’t want this to mess with you. Seeing the person who tried to kill you ... that’s not nothing.”

Jalen reached over and laid his hand on her belly, his fingers spreading gently over the curve where their child was growing. “Hey. I’m okay. Whatever I see in there, I’m going to be okay.”

Karla blinked back the sudden burn behind her eyes and nodded without looking at him. “Yeah. I know.”

They didn’t speak again until she took the exit for downtown.

The Atlanta Police Department Zone 5 precinct sat on a stretch of downtown that buzzed with afternoon foot traffic. There were office workers grabbing late lunches, MARTA buses sighing to a stop at the corner.

Karla parked in the visitor lot and helped Jalen out of the car. He waved off her offered arm with a small smile and walked under his own power toward the front entrance, though she could see the careful way he was holding his torso.

Inside, the precinct lobby was busy. Phones rang. Officers moved through the space with paperwork. A woman in the corner was crying quietly into her sleeve while a man Karla assumed was her husband patted her shoulder.

Karla approached the front desk. “I’m Karla Silva. We’re here to see Detective Harris. He’s expecting us.”

The desk officer picked up the phone, said a few words into it, and then nodded at her. “He’ll be right out.”

Karla and Jalen sat down in the lobby’s plastic chairs. Jalen lowered himself with the slow care that had become his standard movement over the past three weeks. Karla noticed and reached over to take his hand.

A minute later, a door opened behind the front desk and two men came through.

Karla recognized one of them immediately. Officer Grayson, the officer who had given the women the update at the hospital. He was in plainclothes today, his badge clipped to his belt. The other man, taller and older, with a salt-and-pepper goatee and tired eyes, had to be Detective Harris.

“Mr. Moss. Ms. Silva.” Harris extended his hand. Karla shook it first, then Jalen. “Thanks for coming down on short notice. You remember Officer Grayson.”

“Of course,” Jalen said. “Good to see you again.”

Grayson nodded. “Good to see you on your feet, sir.”

Harris glanced between them. “Mr. Moss, before we go back, I want to walk you through what’s going to happen. We’re going to take you to an observation room with a one-way mirror. The suspect is in the interview room on the other side. He can’t see you. He can’t hear you. All you have to do is take a look and tell us whether you recognize him as the man who shot you. Take as much time as you need. There’s no wrong answer. If you’re not sure, that’s okay too. We just want your honest reaction.”

Jalen nodded. “Got it.”

“You doing alright physically?” Harris asked, his eyes flicking to where Jalen’s hand was resting against his side. “You need a minute before we head back?”

“I’m good. Let’s do it.”

“Alright. Follow me.”

Harris led them through the door behind the front desk, with Grayson bringing up the rear. They walked down a hallway lined with framed photos of past chiefs, past a bullpen of detectives working at desks, and turned into a quieter corridor.

Harris stopped at a door marked OBSERVATION 2 and held it open.

The room beyond was small, dim, and crowded. A long counter ran along one wall, and above it, a large pane of glass looked into a brightly lit interview room.

There were two chairs in front of the glass, but Karla didn’t sit. Neither did Jalen.

Karla stepped up to the window first. Her stomach tightened at what she saw.

On the other side of the glass, a man sat alone at a metal table. He looked to be in his late twenties, possibly about the same age as Jalen and Karla. He was clean-cut with light brown hair, neatly trimmed. He had on a blue button-down shirt that looked like it belonged in an office, not a precinct interview room. His hands were folded on the table in front of him, and his fingers were laced together so tightly the knuckles were white. His eyes were fixed on a point on the wall directly across from him, and his expression was completely blank.

He didn’t look like a hitman. He didn’t look like someone Chris Westward would hire. He looked like a guy who worked in middle management at an insurance company.

Jalen stepped up beside her.

She felt him go still the moment he saw the man through the glass.

Harris had been speaking from somewhere behind them, something about procedure, but Karla had stopped listening. She was watching Jalen.

His face had gone slack. His eyes were wide, fixed on the man on the other side of the glass, and they weren’t moving. He wasn’t blinking. He looked like someone who had just been told a piece of information so impossible that his brain hadn’t yet finished processing it.

“Jalen?” Karla said quietly.

He didn’t respond. His eyes stayed locked on the figure through the window.

Harris, behind them, asked the question more directly. “Mr. Moss. Do you recognize this individual?”

Jalen didn’t answer.

Karla touched his arm. His skin was cool through the fabric of his shirt. “Jalen. Baby. Do you know who that is?”

A long beat passed. Through the glass, the suspect continued to stare at the wall, unmoving.

Jalen swallowed. When he finally spoke, his voice was so low Karla almost didn’t catch it.

“That’s Greg Dalton.”

Karla turned to Jalen slowly, her brow furrowing. “Who?”

“Greg Dalton,” Jalen repeated, still staring through the glass. “He’s Sydney’s ex.”

Karla’s mouth opened slightly, then closed. The implications hit her in stages, and Jalen could see her working through the assumption that this was Chris’s man falling away, replaced by a context that none of them had been considering.

Detective Harris was watching Jalen carefully now. “Mr. Moss, I need you to step into the hallway with me for a minute.”

Jalen nodded without taking his eyes off the man behind the glass. Karla touched his arm gently, and he finally turned away. Officer Grayson stayed in the observation room as Harris led Jalen and Karla back into the corridor.

Harris closed the door behind them and turned to face Jalen with his pen out and a small notepad open.

“Greg Dalton. Tell me everything you know about him and how you know him.”

Jalen exhaled slowly. He glanced at Karla, then back at Harris.

“He was Sydney Swanson’s boyfriend before I knew her. Sydney is—Sydney is one of the mothers of my children. She’s pregnant. I met her at a party about seven or eight months ago. She was there with Greg. He was her boyfriend at the time.”

Harris was writing quickly. “Go on.”

“Sydney and I connected at the party. She later told me that she broke up with Greg about a week or so later. I never acyually met Greg directly. I saw him from a distance at the party, but I never spoke to him or interacted with him in any way.”

“Then how would he know who you are to make an attempt on your life?” Harris asked.

Jalen rubbed the back of his neck. “I don’t know for sure. Sydney told me that when she broke up with him, she never told him about me specifically. But...” He paused, working through it. “If he was paying attention at all, he probably saw us together at the party. And if he’s been following her since the breakup...” He didn’t finish the sentence.

Harris nodded slowly. “When was the last time you saw any sign of him? Anyone watching you, following you?”

“I never seen him around. I never noticed anyone other than the surveillance from a separate situation.”

“Separate situation?”

Karla stepped in. “There’s an unrelated matter involving my divorce client, Megan Westward, whose ex-husband has been having her and Mr. Moss followed by private investigators. That’s a different threat entirely, and we’d been operating under the assumption that Mr. Westward was likely behind the shooting. Clearly that assumption was wrong.”

Harris’s eyes flicked between them. “I see. Well, this changes the picture significantly. Mr. Moss, do you know if Sydney had any contact with Greg after the breakup? Any sense of how he reacted?”

“She said he didn’t take it well, but she hasn’t mentioned him in months. As far as she knows, she hasn’t heard from him since they ended things.”

Harris nodded. “Alright. Here’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to go back in there and tell Mr. Dalton that we have a positive identification. I’m going to mention Sydney’s name and your relationship to her. If he’s been silent because he didn’t know how we found him, learning that we know exactly who he is and why he did this might break him. He’s not a hardened criminal. He’s a sales guy who snapped. Those guys usually talk once they realize the game is up.”