He asked her again, “Do you think Allison Spooner dropped out?”
She tried a new strategy. “I think that I’m not going to tell you something unless I know it’s the absolute truth.”
He gave one of his quick nods. “Fair enough.”
Lena waited for another question, another insinuation. Will just kept walking, his mouth closed. If he thought this new technique was going to break her, he was dead wrong. Lena had been dealing with silent disapproval her entire life. She had made an art out of ignoring it.
She tucked her head down against the cold. Her mind kept going back to her earlier conversation with Will. She had been so furious about him being in Jeffrey’s office that she hadn’t really paid attention to what he was saying at first. But then he had pulled out Allison’s wallet and she had seen that the third photograph was missing.
The picture showed Allison sitting beside a boy who had his arm around her waist. An older woman sat on her left, some distance between them. They were all on a bench outside the student center. Lena had stared at the photo long enough to remember the details. The boy was around Allison’s age. He had been wearing the hood of his sweatshirt pulled down low on his head but she could tell he had brown hair and eyes. A smattering of a goatee was on his weak chin. He was chubby the way most of the guys at Grant Tech tended to be, from too many days spent in classrooms and nights wasted in front of video games.
The woman in the photograph was obviously from the poor part of town. She was in her forties, maybe older. Past a certain age, it was difficult to tell with hard-looking women. The good news was that they stopped aging. The bad news was that they already looked ninety. Every line on her face said she was a smoker. Her bleached-blonde hair was so dry it looked more like straw.
Also missing from evidence was Tommy’s cell phone. Frank had handed it to Lena in the street. He’d found it in Tommy’s back pocket when he frisked him before putting him into the back of the squad car. She had sealed the phone in a plastic bag, written out the details, and logged it into evidence.
And at some point last night, both the photo from Allison’s wallet and Tommy’s phone had gone missing.
There was only one person who could’ve hidden the evidence, and that was Frank. Marla said he’d gone through her files. He had probably doctored the 911 transcript, too. But why? Both the picture and the call brought up the possibility of Allison having a boyfriend. Maybe Frank was trying to track down the kid before Will Trent found him. Frank had told Lena that they both should stick to the truth, or at least a close version of it. Why was he going behind her back and looking for another suspect?
Lena wiped her eyes with her hand. The wind was cutting, making her nose run, her eyes water. She had to carve out ten, fifteen minutes alone so she could think this through. Will’s presence made it impossible for her to do anything but worry about the next question that would come out of his mouth.
“Ready?” Will asked. They had reached the Porsche. The car was an older model than Lena thought. There was no remote to unlock the door. Will did the honors, then handed her the key.
Lena felt a new wave of nervousness wash over her. “What if I crash this thing?”
“I’d really appreciate it if you didn’t.” He reached in and tucked his briefcase behind the front seat.
Lena couldn’t move. This felt like a trap but she couldn’t see the reason.
“Is there a problem?” Will asked.
Lena gave in. She climbed into the bucket seat, which was more like a recliner. With her feet stretched toward the pedals, the back of her calves were only a few inches off the floorboard.
Will opened the passenger door. She asked, “You don’t have a car from the job?”
“My boss wanted me to get here as soon as possible.” He had to let the seat back before he got into the passenger’s side of the car. “It adjusts on the front,” he told Lena. She reached down and dragged herself closer to the steering wheel. Will’s legs were about ten feet longer than hers. Lena was practically pressed into the steering wheel by the time her feet found the clutch and gas.
For his part, Will couldn’t get his seat right. He pushed it to the end of the track, then cranked it down as low as it would go so his head wouldn’t hit the roof. Finally, he folded himself into the car like a piece of origami. She waited for him to buckle in, chancing a look at him. He was fairly average except for his height. He was lean, but his shoulders were broad, muscled, like he spent a lot of time at the gym. His nose had obviously been broken at some point in his life. Faint scars were on his face, the sort of damage you got from fighting with your fists.
No, he definitely was not Amanda Wagner’s second string.
“All right,” Will said, finally settling into the seat.
She reached toward the ignition, but there wasn’t one.
“It’s on the other side.”
She found the ignition on the left-hand side of the steering wheel.
Will explained, “It’s from Le Mans racing. So you can start the engine with one hand while you change the gears with the other.”
She was extremely right-handed and it took a few tries before she managed to get the key to turn. The engine roared to life. The seat vibrated underneath her. She could feel the clutch pushing back against the ball of her foot.
Will stopped her. “Can you give her a few minutes to warm up?”
Lena took her foot off the pedal. She stared across the street. He’d parked on the far side of the lot, the nose of the car facing out. She had a clear view to the children’s clinic across the way. Sara’s clinic. She wondered if he had parked here on purpose. He seemed to be very deliberate about everything he did. Or maybe her paranoia was such that she couldn’t watch his chest rise and fall without thinking it was part of some master plan to trip her up.
Will asked one of his random questions. “What do you think about the 911 call?”
She told him the truth. “It bothers me that it came from a blocked number.”
“She called in a fake suicide. Why?”
Lena shook her head. The caller was the last thing on her mind right now. “Tommy might have talked to her. She could be a co-worker. An accomplice. A jealous girlfriend.”
“Tommy didn’t strike me as a player.”
No, he hadn’t. During the interrogation, Lena had asked him to be explicit because she wasn’t sure he really knew what sex was.
Will asked, “Did Tommy say anything about dating anyone?”
She shook her head.
“We can ask around. At the very least, the girl who called in the fake suicide knew something wasn’t right. She was obviously laying down a foundation for Tommy’s defense.”
Lena’s head jerked around. “How so?”
“The phone call. She said Allison got into a fight with her boyfriend. That’s why she was worried she’d committed suicide. She didn’t say anything about Tommy.”
Lena felt every ounce of blood in her body freeze. Her hand gripped the steering wheel. Frank’s amended transcript didn’t mention a boyfriend. Will must have already contacted the call center in Eaton. So why had he asked Marla for the audio?
To set a trap. And Lena had just fallen right into it.
Will’s tone of voice was even. “Obviously, we’ll need to find the boyfriend. He’ll probably be able to lead us to the caller. Did Allison have any photographs in her apartment? Love letters? A computer?”
Photographs. Did he know about the missing picture? Lena’s throat felt so raw that she couldn’t swallow. She shook her head.
Will took his briefcase from behind the seat. He snapped open the locks. She could hear a high-pitched alarm in her ears. Her chest was tight. Her vision blurred. She wondered if this was what a panic attack felt like.
“Hmm,” Will mumbled, rifling through the case. “My reading glasses aren’t in here.” He held out the transcript. “Do you mind?”
Lena’s heart shook against her rib cage. Will held the paper in his hand, the
edge fluttering in the air blowing out from the heater.
Her voice was barely a whisper. “Why are you doing this?”
Fear saturated her every word. Will stared at her for a long while—so long that she felt as if her soul was being peeled away from her body. Finally, he gave one of his patented nods, as if he’d made a decision. He put the transcript back in his case and snapped the locks shut.
“Let’s go to Allison’s.”
Taylor Drive was less than ten minutes from the station, but the trip seemed to take hours. Lena felt so panicked that she slowed down a couple of times, thinking she was going to be sick. She needed to concentrate on Frank, to figure out how many nails he could put in her coffin, but she was thinking about Tommy Braham instead.
He had died on her watch. He was her prisoner. He was her responsibility. She hadn’t patted him down when she put him in the cells. She had assumed because he was slow that he was without guile. Who was the stupid one now? Lena thought the kid was capable of murder but considered him so harmless that she’d let him walk into a cell with a sharp object hidden on his person. Frank was right—she was lucky Tommy didn’t turn the weapon on someone else.
When had Tommy taken the ink cartridge out of her pen? He must have known when he did it that he was going to use it for something bad. By the time he finished writing his confession, Tommy was in tears. The Kleenex box was empty. Lena had left him alone for no more than half a minute to get more tissues. When she came back into the room, his hands were under the table. She had wiped his nose for him like he was a child. She had soothed him, rubbed his shoulder, told him everything was going to be okay. He seemed to believe her. He’d blown his nose, dried his eyes. She had thought at the time that Tommy had resolved himself to his fate, but maybe the fate he had decided on was a lot different from the one that Lena had imagined.
Was it sympathy for Tommy or her instinctual need for self-preservation that had kept Lena from getting rid of the letter opener he had used on Brad Stephens? Last night, she had thought about tossing it over one of the thousands of concrete bridges between here and Macon. But she hadn’t. It was still wrapped in its bag, buried under the spare tire in the trunk of her car. Lena hadn’t wanted it in the house. Now, she didn’t like that it was so close to the station. Frank had doctored paperwork. He’d broken the chain of custody. He’d tampered with evidence. She wouldn’t put it past the old man to rummage through her car.
Christ. What else was he capable of?
She took a right onto Taylor Drive. The rain had come in torrents last night, washing away the blood on the street. Still, she could see it in her mind’s eye. The way Brad had blinked away the rain. The way his skin had already started to turn gray by the time the helicopter landed.
Lena steered the car onto the far side of the road and stopped. “This is where Brad was stabbed.”
Will asked, “Where’s Spooner’s apartment?”
She pointed up the road. “Four houses, left-hand side.”
He stared straight down the street. “What’s the number?”
“Sixteen and a half.” Lena put the car into gear and rolled past the scene of Brad’s stabbing. “We got the address from the college. We came here to see if there was a roommate or landlord we could talk to.”
“Did you have a warrant to search the house?”
He had asked the question before. She gave him the same answer. “No. We didn’t come to search the house.”
She waited for him to ask something else, but Will was silent. Lena wondered if what she had told him was the truth. If Tommy hadn’t been in Allison’s apartment, they still would have found a way to get into the garage. Gordon Braham was out of town. Knowing Frank, he would’ve broken the lock and gone into Allison’s apartment anyway. He would have made some comment about how it was better to ask for forgiveness than permission. No one would have minded a simple breaking and entering when a young girl from the college had been murdered.
Will asked, “Did you canvass the neighbors?”
Lena stopped the car in front of the Braham house. “Patrol did. No one saw anything different from what happened.”
“And what exactly did happen?”
“Brad was stabbed.”
“Tell me from the beginning. You pulled up here …”
She tried to take a breath. Her lungs would only fill to half capacity. “We approached the garage—”
“No,” he interrupted. “Go back to the very beginning. You drove up to the scene. Then what?”
“Brad was already here.” She didn’t tell him about the pink umbrella or Frank’s screaming fit.
“You got out of the car?” Will prodded. He really was going to make her go through this step-by-step.
She opened her door. Rain splattered her face with lazy, fat drops. Will had gotten out of the car, too. She told him, “The rain had died down. Visibility was good.” She started up the driveway. Will was beside her with his briefcase in his hand. At the top of the hill, she could see that the garage was marked with yellow crime scene tape. Frank must have come back last night. Or maybe he had sent patrol to mark the space so it looked like they were taking this seriously. There was no telling anymore what he was doing or why.
Will opened his briefcase and pulled out a sheet of paper. “The search warrant came in while you were getting your coat.”
He handed the document to Lena. She saw it had been issued by a judge out of Atlanta.
He asked, “What next? I take it the garage door was closed when you approached?”
She nodded. “We were standing about here. All three of us. The lights were out. There weren’t any cars in the driveway or on the street.” She pointed to the scooter. Mud was caked around the plastic fenders. “The lock and chain appeared to be the same.” Lena stared at the scooter, feeling good about the debris lodged in the tires. Tommy could have gone to the woods on the scooter. They wouldn’t be able to find tracks, but the mud on the wheels would match the mud around the lake.
“Detective?”
Lena turned around. She had missed his question.
“Did you knock on the front door of the house?”
She glanced back at the house. The lights were still off. There was a small bouquet of flowers propped against the door. “No.”
Will leaned down and opened the garage’s metal door. The noise as it rolled up was deafening, a loud clanging that must have been heard by half the neighborhood. Lena saw the bed, the table, the scattered papers and magazines. There was a small pool of blood where Frank had fallen by the mouth of the entrance. Ice glazed the top. The cut in his arm was deeper than she thought. There was no way the letter opener had done the damage. Had he stabbed himself?
Will asked, “Is this how you found the garage?”
“Pretty much.” Lena crossed her arms over her chest. She could feel the cold seeping in through her jacket. She should have come back to the scene after getting Tommy’s confession and searched Allison’s things for more clues to back up Tommy’s story. It was too late for that now. The best thing Lena could do for herself was to start thinking like a detective instead of acting like a suspect. The murder weapon was probably in here. The scooter was a good lead. The stain by the bed was an even better one. Tommy could’ve hit Allison in the head, then taken her into the woods to kill her. Maybe his plan was to drown her by the lake. The girl had come to, and he’d stabbed her in the back of the neck. Tommy had lived in Grant County all his life. He’d probably been to the cove hundreds of times. He would know where the bottom dropped in the lake. He would know to take the body out deep so that she wouldn’t be easily found.
Lena exhaled. She could breathe now. This was making sense. Tommy had lied to her about how he’d killed Allison, but he had killed her.
Will cleared his throat. “Let’s go back a few steps. All three of you were standing here. The garage was closed. The house looked empty. Then what?”
Lena took a minute to regain her composure. She tol
d him about Brad seeing the masked intruder inside, the way he had circled the building before they fanned out to confront the suspect.
Will seemed to be only half listening as she laid out the events. He stood just under the garage door with his hands behind his back, scanning the contents of the room. Lena was telling him about Tommy refusing to lower the knife when she noticed that Will was focusing on the brown stain by the bed. He walked into the garage and knelt down for a better look. Beside him was the bucket of murky water she had seen yesterday. The crusty sponge was beside it.
He looked up at her. “Keep going.”
Lena had to think to find her place. “Tommy was behind that table.” She nodded to the table, which was crooked.
Will said, “That door isn’t exactly quiet when it rolls up. Did he already have the knife in his hand?”
Lena stopped, trying to remember what she’d said the first time Will asked her the question. He wanted to know if Tommy had a sheath on his belt where he kept a knife. He wanted to know if it was the same knife that had killed Allison Spooner.
She said, “When I saw him, he already had the knife in his hand. I don’t know where it came from. Maybe the table.” Of course it had come from the table. There was a partially opened envelope there, the kind of junk mail that contained coupons nobody used.
“What else did you notice?”
She indicated the bucket of brown water by the bed. “He’d been cleaning. I guess he hit her in the head or knocked her out here. He put her on the scooter and—”
“He didn’t mention cleaning up in his confession.”
No, he hadn’t. Lena hadn’t even thought to ask him about the bucket. All she had been thinking about was Brad, and how gray his skin had looked the last time she’d seen him. “Suspects lie. Tommy didn’t want to admit how he did it. He made up a story that painted him in a better light. It happens all the time.”
Will asked, “What happened next?”
Lena swallowed, fighting the image of Brad that kept popping into her head. “I approached the suspect from the right.”
Will had opened his briefcase on the bed. “Your right or his?”
The Will Trent Series 7-Book Bundle Page 147
