Broken (12 page)

Knox said, “Guess Sara didn’t sign in.”

“Have you known her long?”

“She looked after my kids until she left town. How long have you known her?”

Will noticed a subtle change in the man’s anger. “Not long.”

“Looked like you knew her plenty well, sitting in the car with her for an hour like that in front of the hospital.”

Will hoped he didn’t look as surprised as he felt. He had forgotten how insular and incestuous small towns could be. He pressed his luck. “She’s a lovely woman.”

Knox puffed out his chest. He was at least six inches shorter than Will, obviously trying to make up for it with bravado. “Jeffrey Tolliver was the finest man I ever worked with.”

“His reputation is well known in Atlanta. It was out of respect for him that my boss sent me down here to look after his people.”

Knox narrowed his eyes, and Will realized the patrolman could take his words in many different ways, not least of all as a sign that Will planned to go light on the investigation out of respect for Jeffrey Tolliver. This seemed to relax Knox, so Will did not correct him.

Knox said, “Sara just gets a little hot under the collar sometimes. Real emotional.”

Will would hardly describe Sara as someone ruled by her emotions. He didn’t trust his ability to pull off a cliché like “Women!” He simply nodded and shrugged at the same time, as if to say, “What are you gonna do?”

Knox kept staring at him, trying to make up his mind. “All right, then,” he finally said. He used a plastic card to open the last door. His keys were still in his hand, and he jangled them as he walked. “This’n’s a drunk sleeping it off. Came in about an hour ago.” He indicated the next cell. “Meth head. He’s coming down hard. Last time we tried to wake him, he near about knocked somebody’s teeth out.”

“What about door number three?” Will asked.

“Wife beater.”

“I am not!” came a muffled shout from behind the door.

Knox silently nodded to Will. “Third time he’s been locked up for it. She won’t testify—”

“Goddamn right!” the man screamed.

“He’s covered in his own puke, so I’m gonna have to hose him down if you wanna talk to him.”

“I hate to ask …” Will shrugged. “It might help expedite this so we can all get back to our lives. My wife’s gonna kill me if I’m not home for the holiday.”

“Know whatcha mean.” Knox motioned Will to the next cell. The door was open. “This is it.”

Tommy Braham’s blood had been cleaned up, but the red stain on the concrete floor told the story. His feet would have been toward the door, head back. Maybe he was lying on his side, arm out in front of him. Will guessed from the circumference of the stain that Tommy had not just stopped at one wrist. He had cut open both to make sure the job was done right.

Will stepped into the cell, feeling a slight sense of claustrophobia. He took in the cinder-block-lined walls, the metal bed frame with its thin mattress. The toilet and sink were built as one stainless steel unit. The bowl looked clean, but the smell of sewage was pungent. Beside the sink was a toothbrush, a metal cup, and a small tube of toothpaste like the kind you’d get at a hotel. Will wasn’t superstitious, but he was keenly aware that Tommy Braham had, in his misery, taken his life here less than eight hours ago. The feel of his death still lingered.

“‘Not me,’” Knox said.

Will turned around, wondering what he meant.

Knox nodded toward the faded wall. “That’s what he wrote. ‘Not me.’” He took on a knowing tone. “If it wasn’t you, buddy, then why’d you kill yourself?”

Will had never found it useful to ask dead men to explain their motivations, so he threw the question back to Knox. “Why do you think he kept insisting he didn’t kill Allison Spooner?”

“Told you.” Knox touched the side of his head. “Not right up here.”

“Crazy?”

“Nah, just stupider than shit.”

“Too stupid to know how to kill somebody?”

“Hell, I wish there was such a thing. Wouldn’t have to keep such a close eye on the wife during that time of month.” He gave a loud laugh, and Will forced himself to join in, pushing away thoughts of Tommy lying on the floor of this cell, slicing and slicing the ink cartridge across his wrist, trying to draw blood. How long
would it take before the flesh opened? Would the skin get hot from the friction? Would the metal ink cartridge start to get warm? How long would it take for enough blood to leave his body so that his heart stopped?

Will turned back to the faded letters on the wall. He didn’t want to break this new, if false, camaraderie with Knox. “Did you know Allison Spooner?”

“She worked at the diner. All of us knew her.”

“What was she like?”

“Good girl. Got the plates out fast. Didn’t stand around yapping too much.” He looked down at the floor, shaking his head. “She was good-lookin’, too. I guess that’s what caught Tommy’s eye. Poor thing. She probably thought he was harmless.”

“Did she have any friends? A boyfriend?”

“I guess it was just Tommy. Never saw anybody else around her.” He shrugged. “Not like I was paying attention. Wife don’t like it when my eye wanders.”

“Did you see Tommy at the diner a lot?”

Knox shook his head. Will could see his compliance was waning.

“Can I talk to the wife beater?”

“I didn’t touch her!” the prisoner screamed back, slamming his hand against the cell door.

“Thin walls,” Will noted. Knox was leaning against the door, arms crossed. His shirt pocket was bunched up, a silver pen clipped to the material. “Hey, can I borrow your pen?”

Knox touched the clip. “Sorry, this’n’s the only one I got.”

Will recognized the Cross logo. “Nice.”

“Chief Tolliver gave ’em to us the Christmas before he passed.”

“All of you?” Knox nodded. Will gave a low whistle. “That must’ve been expensive.”

“They sure ain’t cheap.”

“It takes a special cartridge, right? A metal one?”

Knox opened his mouth to respond, then caught himself.

Will asked, “Who else got one?”

Knox’s lip curled up in a sneer. “Fuck you.”

“That’s all right. I can ask Sara about it when I see her later.”

Knox stood up straight, blocking the door. “You better be careful, Agent Trent. Last guy who was in this cell didn’t end up too well.”

Will smiled. “I think I can take care of myself.”

“That a fact?”

Will forced a grin. “I hope so, because you seem to be threatening me.”

“You think?” Knox banged on the open cell door. “You hear that, Ronny? Mr. GBI here says I’m threatening him.”

“What’s that, Larry?” the wife beater shouted back. “I can’t hear nothing through these thick walls. Not a goddamn thing.”

WILL SAT IN
the interrogation room, trying to breathe through his mouth as he stared at the photocopied pages Sara had given him. Officer Knox had rescinded his offer to hose down the wife beater. Will had endured the man’s stench for twenty minutes before giving up on interrogating him. In Atlanta, Ronny Porter would have sung his way to freedom, giving Will any information he had in order to get out of jail. Small towns were different. Instead of trying to cop a plea, Porter had defended every officer in the building. He’d even waxed poetic on Marla Simms, who apparently used to be his Sunday school teacher.

Will spread out the files, trying to put them into some sort of order. Tommy Braham’s confession was handwritten, the copy dark from the yellow paper. He set that aside. The police report was like every form Will had ever handled at the GBI. Boxes provided space for dates, times, weather, and other details of the crime, to be written in by hand. The suicide note had caught the light from the copier, the letters blurring.

There were two other pages that were photocopies of notepaper from a small pad, the sort of thing most cops carried in their back pocket. Four sheets of the smaller paper had been lined up to fit on one copied page. In all, there were eight pages that had been torn
from the notepad. Will studied the positioning. He could see faint marks where the lined paper had been taped to a bigger sheet for copying. Instead of jagged edges at the top where the paper had been ripped from the spiral, there was a clean line as if someone had used scissors to cut them out. This he found strangest of all—not just because cops didn’t tend to be neat, but because he had never in his career known a police officer to tear pages out of their notebook.

The arrest warrant was the last page in the pile, but this part of the process, at least, was computerized. All the spaces were printed in a typewriter font. The suspect’s name was at the top, his address and home phone. Will found the lined box for Tommy’s employer. He leaned over the form, squinting his eyes as he held his finger under the tiny letters. His mouth moved as he tried to sound out the word. Will was tired from the monotonous drive. The letters mixed around. He blinked, wishing there was more light in the room.

Sara Linton had been right about one thing. She had sat across from Will for a solid hour and not realized that he was dyslexic.

His phone rang, the noise startling him in the small space. He recognized Faith Mitchell’s number. “Hey, partner.”

“You were going to call me when you got there.”

“Things have been busy,” he said, which was sort of the truth. Will had always been bad with directions, and there were parts of Heartsdale between Main Street and the interstate that weren’t on his GPS.

She asked, “How’s it going?”

“I’m being treated with the utmost respect and care.”

“I wouldn’t drink anything unless it’s in a sealed bottle.”

“Good advice.” He sat back in the chair. “How’re you holding up?”

“I’m about to kill somebody or myself,” she admitted. “They’re going to do the C-section tomorrow afternoon.” Faith was diabetic. Her doctors wanted to control the delivery so her health wasn’t jeopardized. She started to give Will the details of the procedure, but he dazed out after she used the word “uterus” the second time. He
studied his reflection in the two-way mirror, wondering if Mrs. Simms was right about his hair looking better now that he’d let it grow out.

Finally, Faith wound down her story. She asked, “What’s this fax you sent me?”

“Did you get all twelve pages?”

He could hear her counting the sheets. “I’ve got seventeen total. All from the same number.”

“Seventeen?” He scratched his jaw. “Are some of them duplicates?”

“Nope. Got a police report, xeroxed field notes—pages are cut out of the notebook, that’s weird. You don’t take pages out of your field book—and …” He assumed she was reading Tommy Braham’s confession. “Did you write this?”

“Very funny,” Will said. He hadn’t been able to make out the words when Sara had shown him the confession in the car, but even to Will, the looped, cartoonish shape of Tommy Braham’s handwriting seemed off. “What do you think?”

“I think this reads like one of Jeremy’s book reports when he was in first grade.”

Jeremy was her teenage son. “Tommy Braham is nineteen.”

“What is he, retarded?”

“You’re supposed to call it ‘intellectually disabled’ now.”

She made a snorting sound.

“Sara says his IQ was around eighty.”

Faith sounded suspicious, but she had been prickly the last time about Sara inserting herself into their case. “How does Sara happen to know his IQ?”

“She used to treat him at her clinic.”

“Did she apologize for dragging you below the gnat line on your vacation?”

“She doesn’t know it’s my vacation, but, yes, she apologized.”

Faith was quiet for a moment. “How’s she doing?”

He thought not of Sara, but of the scent she had left on his
handkerchief. She didn’t strike him as the type of woman who would wear perfume. Maybe it was one of those fancy soaps that women used to wash their faces.

“Will?”

He cleared his throat to cover for his silence. “She’s okay. She was very upset, but mostly I think she has a good reason.” He lowered his voice. “Something doesn’t feel right about any of this.”

“You think Tommy didn’t kill the girl?”

“I don’t know what I think yet.”

Faith went quiet; never a good sign. He had been partnered with her for over a year, and just when Will thought he was learning to read her moods, she had gotten pregnant and the whole thing went out of whack. “All right,” she said. “What else did Sara tell you?”

“Some stuff about the man who killed her husband.” Will knew that Faith had already gone behind Sara’s back to find out the details. She didn’t know about Lena Adams’s involvement, or the fact that Sara believed Lena was responsible for Tolliver’s death. Will stood up and walked into the hall, making sure Knox wasn’t there. Still, he kept his voice low as he relayed the story Sara had told him about her husband’s murder. When he finished, Faith let out a long breath of air.

“Sounds like Sara has a hard-on for this Adams woman.”

Will sat back down at the table. “That’s one way to put it.” He did not share the part of Sara’s story that had stuck out the most. The entire time she spoke, she had not once uttered Jeffrey Tolliver’s name. She had only referred to him as “my husband.”

Faith offered, “I think priority number one is tracking down this Julie Smith. She either saw the murder or heard about it. Do you have her cell phone number?”

“I’ll get it from Sara later.”

“Later?”

Will ignored the question. Faith would want an explanation for why he was having dinner at Sara’s house, and then she’d want a report on how it went. “Where does—did—Tommy Braham work?”

She shuffled through the pages. “Says here he was employed at the
bowling alley. Maybe that’s why he killed himself—to keep from having to spray Lysol in shoes all day.”

Will didn’t laugh at the joke. “They charged him with murder right off the bat. Not assault, not attempted murder, not resisting.”

“Where did they get murder? Am I missing the autopsy report? Lab reports? Forensic filings?”

Will laid it out for her. “Brad Stephens is stabbed. He’s airlifted to the hospital. The first thing Adams does is take Tommy Braham back to the station and get his confession for the Spooner girl’s murder.”