Will looked over the top of the box, eyeing the contents. There were several plastic evidence bags, obviously taken from the scene of Allison Spooner’s death. A pair of white sneakers was in one. Streaks of mud went up the sides and stuck into the treads.
The ring and watch mentioned in Lena’s report were in the other bag. He studied the ring, which was cheap, the sort of thing you gave a girl when you were fifteen and spending fifty dollars on a piece of jewelry from the locked display at Walgreens was a big deal.
He held up the ring. “I gave my wife one of these when we were kids.”
Lena’s nasty look resembled the same one Angie had shown Will when he’d given her the ring.
He pulled another bag out of the box. There was a closed wallet inside. Will managed to pry it open through the plastic. He found a photo of an older woman beside a young girl and another photograph of an orange cat. There were some bills in the cash compartment. Allison Spooner’s student ID and driver’s license were tucked in the back sleeves.
Will looked at the girl’s picture. Faith had guessed right. Allison was very pretty. She also looked younger than her given age. Maybe it was her size. She seemed delicate, almost fragile. He flipped back to the photograph of the older woman, realizing now that the girl beside her was Allison Spooner. The picture had obviously been taken a few years ago. Allison looked like a teenager.
He asked Lena, “Is this all you found in the wallet?” He listed it out for her. “Two photos, forty bucks, the license, and student ID?”
She was staring at the open wallet in his hands. “Frank catalogued it.”
Not exactly an answer, but Will knew that he’d need to choose his battles. He saw there was one more evidence bag in the box. He guessed it contained the contents of Tommy Braham’s pockets. “Gum, thirty-eight cents, and a metal Monopoly game piece of a car.” He looked back up at Lena. “He didn’t have a wallet on him?”
“No.”
“Cell phone?”
“Is there one in the bag?”
Her combative answers were telling him more than she realized. Will asked, “What about his clothes and shoes? Any blood on them? Any stains?”
“Per protocol for a suicide in custody, Frank sent them to the lab. Your lab.”
“The Central GBI lab in Dry Branch?”
She nodded.
“What about the sheath?”
She seemed confused.
“In Tommy’s confession, he said he had a knife on him when he killed Allison. I imagine he had a sheath on his belt? A knife sheath?”
She shook her head. “He probably got rid of it.”
“He doesn’t mention in his confession what kind of knife he used.”
“No, he doesn’t.”
“Did you find any knives in the house where Tommy lived?”
“We can’t search his house without a warrant or permission from his father, who’s the owner of the property.”
Well, at least she knew the law. That she was choosing to follow it now was a bit of a mystery. “Are you assuming Tommy used the same knife to stab Detective Stephens that he used to kill Allison Spooner?”
Lena was silent for a few seconds. She had conducted enough interviews to recognize what a corner felt like when it was pressing against your back. “I’ve found in my career that it’s better not to make assumptions about what a suspect will and will not do.”
“That’s a valuable lesson for any officer,” he allowed. “Any reason why the Spooner evidence wasn’t sent to Central?”
She hesitated again. “I assume because the case is closed.”
“You’re sure about that?”
“Tommy ran from the police. He stabbed a police officer. He confessed to the crime. He killed himself because he couldn’t take the guilt. I’m not sure how you do it in Atlanta, but down here we generally stop throwing money at an investigation once it’s closed.”
Will rubbed the back of his neck. “I really wish you’d sit down. This is going to take a while and I don’t think I can keep looking up at you without getting a crick.”
“What’s going to take a while?”
“Detective Adams, perhaps you don’t comprehend the import of this investigation. I’m here to interview you about the death of a prisoner who was in your custody, in your jail, in your town. In addition to that, a young woman was murdered. A police officer was badly wounded. This isn’t going to be a quick chat over coffee and doughnuts, not least of all because I’ve been advised not to take any food from y’all that isn’t sealed in a container.” He smiled. She didn’t smile back. “Would you please sit down so we can talk to each other like rational people?” She still didn’t move, and Will took it a step further. “If you’d rather go to one of the interrogation rooms instead of being in your dead chief’s office, then I’d be more than happy to accommodate you.”
Her jaw tightened. They had a long, drawn-out staring match that Will nearly lost. Lena was hard to look at. Her pain and exhaustion showed on every line of her face. Her eyes were swollen, the whites shot through with red. Her hand was resting on the chair in front of her, yet still she swayed, as if her knees wanted to give out.
Finally, she said, “Yes.”
“Yes, what?”
“Yes, I think you’re the enemy.” Still, she pulled out the chair and sat down.
“I appreciate your candor.”
“Whatever.” She kept opening and closing her fist. He saw two flesh-colored Band-Aids wrapped around the palm of her hand. Her fingers looked swollen.
He asked, “That happen yesterday?”
She didn’t answer.
Will took a red folder out of his briefcase and left it unopened on the desk. Lena glanced down nervously. “Would you like a lawyer present?”
“Do I need one?”
“You should know better than to ask an investigator for legal advice, Detective. How about your union rep?”
She gave a short, sharp laugh. “We don’t have unions down here. We barely have uniforms.”
He should have remembered. “Do I need to remind you of your Miranda rights?”
“No.”
“Should I mention that lying to a state investigator during the course of an active investigation is a felony that can result in fines and imprisonment up to five years?”
“Didn’t you just do that?”
“I guess I did. Where was she stabbed?”
He’d caught her off guard. “What?”
“Allison Spooner. Where was she stabbed?”
“Here.” She put her hand to the back of her neck, her fingers resting a few inches from the spine.
“Was that the only wound?”
She opened her mouth, then closed it. Finally, she answered, “As you said, Frank noticed ligature marks around her wrist.”
“Did you notice them?”
“The body was in the water for a long time. I’m not sure what I saw except for the knife wound in the neck.”
The detail bothered him, mostly because it was the first point where Frank Wallace’s story didn’t dovetail with Lena’s. “Have you found Spooner’s car?”
“She doesn’t have one.”
“That strikes me as odd.”
“It’s a college town. Kids walk everywhere or drive their scooters.” Lena shrugged. “If they need to go somewhere, they can usually bum a ride.”
“Could Allison have a car without you knowing about it?”
“Not at the school. They’ll tow you if you take up two spaces. They’re really good about policing the campus. And, there aren’t a lot of places around town to ditch a car, either. I can put out a BOLO at the morning briefing if you want, but it’s a dead end. This isn’t Atlanta. If people see abandoned cars, they call the police.”
Will studied Lena, trying to read any deceit. “What about Allison’s boss at the diner? Have you talked to him?”
“Lionel Harris. Frank said he talked to him last night. He doesn’t know anything.”
> Either Frank had lied or Lena was making things up as she went along.
Will asked, “How does Mr. Harris look for the murder?”
“He’s got one leg and he’s older than Jesus.”
“I’ll take that as an unlikely.” Will opened the red folder. The photocopy of Tommy Braham’s confession was on top. He saw a flash of recognition in Lena’s eyes. “Take me through it.”
“Which part?”
He knew she was expecting him to get straight to the point—the stabbing, what went down outside the garage. He went the opposite direction, hoping to throw her off. “Let’s start with you bringing Tommy Braham into the station and work our way forward. Did he say anything in the car?”
“No.”
Will hadn’t yet seen the booking pictures or the crime scene photos Sara had taken of Tommy Braham in the cell, but he knew that a cop had been stabbed while two other able-bodied officers were at the scene. He hazarded a guess about what happened next. “What condition was Tommy in at this time?”
She stared at him blankly.
“Did he fall down a couple of times during the arrest?”
Again, she took her time. “You’ll have to ask Frank about that. I was tending to Brad.”
“You saw Tommy in the car. What kind of state was he in?”
Lena pulled a spiral-bound notebook out of her back pocket. She slowly flipped to the pages she wanted. Will saw the paper was taped back into the notebook and assumed these were the originals Sara had photocopied last night.
Lena cleared her throat. “I brought in the suspect, Thomas Adam Braham, at approximately eight-thirty yesterday morning.” Lena scrutinized him. “You’re not going to take notes?”
“Why, do you want to let me borrow your pen?”
Her composure cracked just a tiny bit, and Will saw what he had been looking for from the minute Lena walked into the room. No matter what she thought about Tommy Braham, she was upset about his death. Not upset because it might get her into trouble, but upset because he was a human being who had been in her care.
Will said, “I’ve already read your notes, Detective. Tell me the parts that aren’t on the pages.”
She started picking at the Band-Aid.
“Who did the death notifications?”
“I did.”
“On both Spooner and Braham?”
She nodded. “Elba, where Allison’s from, is a small town. The detective I talked to went to school with her. He says her mother died eight years ago. The father’s unknown. There’s an aunt, Sheila McGhee, but she’s not home much. She works for a crew that’s remodeling roach motels along the Panhandle. The detective’s going to try to track her down. I left a message on her answering machine, but she won’t hear it until she gets home or calls to check her messages.”
She was actually sounding like a detective now. Will asked, “No cell phone?”
“Not that I can find.”
“Was there an address book in Allison’s apartment?”
“We didn’t have time to do a search.” Her tone became clipped again. “A lot was going on yesterday. My partner was bleeding to death in the street.”
“I’d like to know when Ms. McGhee returns your call.”
She nodded.
“What about Tommy’s relations?”
“There’s just his dad, Gordon. I talked to him early this morning, told him what happened.”
“How did he take it?”
“No father wants to hear that his son’s confessed to murder.”
“How did he take the suicide?”
“About how you’d expect.” Lena looked down at her notes, though Will could tell she was buying time to collect herself. “Gordon’s driving up from Florida right now. I don’t know how long that’ll take. Seven, maybe eight hours.”
Will wondered where Frank Wallace was in all of this, and why the hardest parts of the case had fallen to Lena. He asked, “Did you know Allison Spooner?”
“Half the town did. She worked at the diner down the street.”
“Did you know her?”
“I never met her.”
“You don’t go to the diner?”
“Why does that matter?” She wasn’t looking for an answer. “Tommy laid it all out. You’ve got his confession right in front of you. He said that he wanted to have sex with her. She didn’t. So he killed her.”
“How long did it take for him to confess?”
“He dicked around for about an hour, then I got it out of him.”
“Did he offer an alibi? Initially, I mean.”
“He said he was at the vet. He’s got this dog, Pippy. She swallowed a sock or something. Tommy took her to the emergency vet over on Conford. The office staff can’t vouch for him being there the entire time.”
“Does he have a car?”
“A green Chevy Malibu. It’s at the shop. Tommy said the starter’s been acting up. He dropped the keys in the lockbox at Earnshaw’s yesterday morning.”
Will hadn’t been expecting that. “Earnshaw?”
“Sara’s uncle.”
“Is there security footage of the lot?”
“No, but I called the garage. The car is there.” She shrugged. “Tommy could’ve left it there after he killed Allison.”
“Have you searched the car?”
“I planned on doing that today.” Her tone indicated that Will was the major obstacle standing between her and doing her job.
Will didn’t back down. “How did Tommy know Allison?”
“She rented space from his dad—a converted garage apartment.” Lena looked at her watch.
“What was Tommy like?”
“Stupid,” she told him. “Slow in his thinking. I’m sure Sara’s already told you all about it.”
“According to Dr. Linton, Tommy’s IQ was around eighty. He wasn’t bright, but he held down a job at the bowling alley. He was a good kid. Good except for the trouble he’d been in lately.”
“I’d call murder a bit more than trouble.”
“I was referring to the incident reports.”
She hid her surprise well, but he could see the flicker of a question in her eyes.
“There are three reports detailing altercations over the last month. Mrs. Simms was kind enough to provide them.” She remained silent, so he asked, “You knew about them, right?”
Still, Lena didn’t respond. Will slid the incident reports across the desk so she could see them.
She skimmed the summaries. “Small problems. He obviously had a temper.”
“Who told you to arrest Tommy for Allison’s murder?”
“Frank—” She looked like she wanted to take back the word. “Frank and I discussed it. It was a joint decision.”
At least he knew what she looked like when she was lying. The bad news was that her lying face looked a lot like her honest one. “When did you first hear there was a body in the lake?”
“Brad called me around three yesterday morning. I woke everybody else up, started the investigation.”
“Have you talked to any of Allison’s teachers at school?”
“They’re all off for Thanksgiving break. I’ve got phone numbers for them, but I haven’t made any calls yet. Most of them are local. They’re not going anywhere. I was going to track them down this morning, but …” She held out her arms, indicating the space between them.
“What else were you going to track down?” He listed out her plans so far. “Talk to the teachers. Maybe talk to the office staff at the vet. Look at Tommy’s car. Try to track down Allison’s known associates. I guess you’d get that through the school, maybe Lionel Harris?”
She shrugged. “Maybe.”
“Were you planning on talking to Tommy again? Had he lived, I mean.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“I wanted to get his confession on tape. He was a compelling witness against himself.”
“But everything else made sense to you—his motivations, stabb
ing her in the neck?”
“There were things I wanted to clear up. Obviously, I wanted to find the murder weapon. I assume it’s in his garage somewhere. Or his car. He must have taken Allison to the lake. There would have been trace evidence. Stop me if any of this reminds you of something you might have read in a textbook when you were in GBI school.”
“That’s a good word to use for it—‘textbook.’ ” He pointed out, “Seems like a lot of work for a case you considered closed. Isn’t that what you told me a few minutes ago, that it was closed?”
She stared at him again. Will knew she was waiting for him to ask about the 911 call.
He said, “You must be tired.”
“I’m fine.”
“You’ve had a pretty tough couple of days.” He indicated her field notes. “You got Brad’s call around three a.m. yesterday. Suspected suicide. You went to the lake. Found Spooner was dead, possibly murdered. Went to Spooner’s house and your boss got hurt, your partner got stabbed. You arrested Tommy. Got his confession. I’m sure you were at the hospital all night.”
“What’s your point?”
“Was Tommy a malicious person?”
She didn’t equivocate. “No.”
“Did he show any anger during your interrogation?”
She was silent again, gathering her thoughts. “I don’t think he planned to hurt Brad. But he did stab him. And he killed Allison, so …”
“So?”
She crossed her arms again. “Look, we’re just going in circles here. What happened to Tommy was bad, but he confessed to killing Allison Spooner. He stabbed my partner. Frank was hurt.”
Will carefully weighed her words. She obviously believed Tommy was guilty of killing Allison Spooner. She got sketchier when she talked about Brad Stephens being stabbed and Frank Wallace getting cut.
Lena checked her watch again. “Are we finished here?”
She was very good at this, but she couldn’t keep it up forever. “The lake is behind the station, right?”
“Right.”
“Between the college and Lover’s Point.”
“Not exactly between.”
“Do you think I can borrow a jacket?”
“What?”
“A raincoat. Jacket. Whatever you have.” Will stood up from the desk. “I’d like for us to go for a walk.”
The Will Trent Series 7-Book Bundle Page 144
