Sara Ambrusko saw him on the evening news. Fredric Tokars was a junior prosecutor assisting in a murder trial β the gruesome slaying of an Atlanta attorney by his lover. She recognized him as a fellow Yankee in this Southern city, someone from her hometown high school, someone who had grown up in the same comfortable, white-bread suburb of Buffalo, N. At the time, she was marketing director for the lively northside club elan.
She was 31, outgoing and youthful, her blond hair falling below her shoulders just as it had in high school. Despite the grim tableau on the television screen, the familiarity of the lean, hawkfaced man brought back memories of her childhood β a sheltered, warm, less-hectic life where her father, a doctor, had been a man everyone could depend on. On impulse, Sara called him.
She was willing to exchange the church wedding she would have preferred for a simple civil ceremony because she thought she had finally succeeded in re-creating the normalcy of her childhood: a good man, the promise of children and a home in the suburbs. But before Sara and her second husband could celebrate their eighth anniversary, she was dead, the victim of a brutal November murder that her two sons witnessed.
But in death her name would become as well-known in Atlanta as that of a rock star, her personal tragedy one that would move Atlantans to tears and make them wonder whether, if she had not placed that phone call to Fred Tokars eight years earlier, she would still be alive.
Sara had been a Florida elementary school teacher before coming to Atlanta β a move prompted by her marriage to an Atlanta health club owner she met on the beach. He was tall and slender, with a sensitive rather than a handsome face. He wore tortoiseshell glasses and combed his unruly, light brown hair behind protruding ears.
