She walked in a moment later, and, on her cell phone, she had the picture of the man. “Is this him?”
The owner frowned, looked at her phone, and his eyebrows shot up. “Yeah, it’s him all right. You know what? I see him around here every once in a while.”
“Any idea when you saw him last?”
“Sometime just after that last accident. He was swearing pretty heavily about it. I heard a lot about the efforts to get the traffic pattern changed, but he said that it didn’t go through.”
“I know. A lot of people are saying that. Thank you for your time.” She then turned and walked away.
*
“Is it him?”Rodney asked, as Kate got back in.
She nodded. “It is, but I need an address. Apparently he lives somewhere around this area.” She quickly mapped out the address from the driver’s license data. “I don’t know if it’s current or not, but maybe it’s time to find out.”
Rodney nodded, and, with the address entered into her phone, she quickly gave him directions on how to get there. When they pulled up to a small apartment building only about six stories high, she looked up at him. “That’s interesting. He lives close by, as if he can’t leave the area where his son died.”
“Think about it. If that happened to be his only child…”
“I don’t remember that from the case file, but it’s got to be hard for them to live right by the scene of the accident—but maybe it’s hard to leave it as well.”
“And it probably burns inside in a pretty ugly way,” he said quietly. They hopped out and then walked up to the address on the driver’s license. There was no answer, and she leaned on the doorbell a little bit harder.
Rodney turned toward her. “What do you think?”
“We might have to knock on a couple doors in the neighborhood and see if they know who lives here.”
Just then the door opened and a scraggly guy stood in front of her.
He glared at her. “What are you doing here?”
She recognized him as Bill, the ex-cop, the guy she’d seen at the pizza parlor. “Hi,” she said.
He just glared, but no fear was in his gaze. There was no sign of having been caught or anything.
“We want to talk to you.”
“That’s nice, but I don’t want to talk to you.”
“We can call you down to the station, if you don’t want to talk to us here.” Kate hardened the tone of her voice. “I guess, looking around this area, maybe you don’t want your neighbors to know that we have some questions for you.”
“I don’t give a fuck about my neighbors. I haven’t given a fuck about anything for a very long time.” She looked at him in surprise. He shrugged. “What’s to care about? I lost my son.”
“I’m sorry for your loss,” she murmured. “You didn’t mention that when we were talking.”
“I don’t tell everyone. Particularly not nosy cops. And nobody can get the government to change the goddamned traffic pattern.”
“Was he killed because of the traffic pattern?”
“He was, and a couple of the others were too, but not enough for the city to actually care.”
“What do you mean,care?” she said.
“As long as there’s enough justification for the city to not do it, they never will.”
“I see. So I guess you would do a lot in order to make that traffic pattern change.”
“A hell of a lot,” Bill said, with a nod. “But it’s not likely to happen.”