Lena offered, “Once the scene is cleared, I’ll work on the death notification.”
“Alabama’s on central time.” Frank looked at his watch. “It’ll probably be better to call the parents direct instead of waking up the Elba P.D. this early in the morning.”
Lena checked her own watch. They were coming up on seven o’clock, which meant it was almost six in Alabama. If Elba was anything like Grant County, the detectives were on call during the night, but not expected to be at their desks until eight in the morning. Normally at this time of the day, Lena would be just getting out of bed and fumbling with the coffeemaker. “I’ll put in a courtesy call when we get back to the station.”
The car went quiet except for the brushing sound of rain against steel. A bolt of lightning, thin and mean, sparked in the sky. Lena instinctively flinched, but Frank just stared ahead at the lake. The divers weren’t worried about the lightning. They were taking turns with the bolt cutters, trying to disentangle the dead girl from the two cinder blocks.
Frank’s phone rang, a high-pitched warble that sounded like a bird sitting somewhere in the rain forest. He answered it with a gruff “Yeah.” He listened for a few seconds, then asked, “What about the parents?” Frank grumbled a string of curses under his breath. “Then go back inside and find out.” He snapped his phone shut. “Jackass.”
Lena gathered Brad had forgotten to get the parents’ information. “Where does Spooner live?”
“Taylor Drive. Number sixteen and a half. Brad’s gonna meet us there if he manages to get his head out of his ass.” He put the engine in gear and slung his arm over the seat behind Lena as he backed up the car. The forest was dense and wet. Lena braced her palm against the dashboard as Frank slowly made his way back to the road.
“Sixteen and a half must mean she’s in a garage apartment,” Lena noted. Many of the local residents had converted their garages or empty toolsheds into the semblance of a living space so that they could charge exorbitant rent to the college students. Most students were so desperate to live off campus that they didn’t ask too many questions.
Frank said, “Gordon Braham’s the landlord.”
“Brad found that out?”
They hit a bump that made Frank’s teeth clamp together. “His mother told him.”
“Well.” Lena searched her mind for something positive to say about Brad. “Shows initiative that he found out who owns the house and the garage.”
“Initiative,” Frank mocked. “That kid’s gonna get his head shot off one day.”
Lena had known Brad for over ten years. Frank had known him even longer. They both still saw him as a goofy young boy, a teenager who looked out of place with his gun belt tightened high on his waist. Brad had put in his years in uniform and passed the right tests to garner his gold detective shield, but Lena had done this job long enough to know that there was a difference between a paperwork promotion and a street promotion. She could only hope that in a small town like Heartsdale, Brad’s lack of street smarts wouldn’t matter. He was good at filling out reports and talking to witnesses, but even after ten years behind the wheel of a squad car, he still tended to see the good in people instead of the bad.
Lena had been on the job less than a week when she’d realized that there was no such thing as a truly good person.
Herself included.
She didn’t want to waste time worrying about Brad right now. She flipped through the photographs in Allison Spooner’s wallet as Frank made his way through the forest. There was a picture of an orange tabby cat lying in a ray of sunshine, and a candid snapshot that showed Allison with a woman Lena assumed was her mother. The third photo showed Allison sitting on a park bench. On her right was a man who looked a few years younger than she was. He was wearing a baseball cap pulled down low and had his hands tucked deep into the pockets of his baggy pants. On Allison’s left was an older woman with stringy blond hair and heavy makeup. Her jeans were skintight. There was a hardness to her eyes. She could have been thirty or three hundred. All three of them sat close together. The boy had his arm around Allison Spooner’s shoulders.
Lena showed Frank the picture. He asked, “Family?”
She studied the photo, concentrating on the background. “Looks like this was taken on campus.” She showed Frank. “See the white building in the back? I think that’s the student center.”
“That girl don’t look like a college student to me.”
He meant the older blonde. “She looks local.” She had the unmistakably trashy, bleach-blond air of a town-bred girl. Fake wallet aside, Allison Spooner appeared to be several rungs up on the social ladder. It didn’t jibe that the two would be friends. “Maybe Spooner had a drug problem?” Lena guessed. Nothing crossed class lines like methamphetamine.
They’d finally made it to the main road. The back wheels of the car gave one final spin in the mud as Frank pulled onto asphalt. “Who called it in?”
Lena shook her head. “The 911 call was made from a cell phone. The number was blocked. Female voice, but she wouldn’t leave her name.”
“What’d she say?”
Lena carefully thumbed back through her notebook so the damp pages would not tear. She found the transcription and read aloud, “‘Female voice: My friend has been missing since this afternoon. I think she killed herself. 911 Operator: What makes you think she killed herself? Female voice: She got into a fight last night with her boyfriend. She said she was going to drown herself up by Lover’s Point.’ The operator tried to keep her on the line, but she hung up after that.”
Frank was quiet. She saw his throat work. His shoulders were slumped so low that he looked like a gangbanger holding on to the steering wheel. He’d been fighting the possibility that this was a murder since Lena got into the car.
She asked, “What do you think?”
“Lover’s Point,” Frank repeated. “Only a townie would call it that.”
Lena held the notebook in front of the heating vents, trying to dry the pages. “The boyfriend is probably the kid in the picture.”
Frank didn’t pick up on her train of thought. “So, the 911 call came in, and Brad drove out to the lake and found what?”
“The note was under one of the shoes. Allison’s ring and watch were inside.” Lena bent down again to the plastic evidence bags buried in the deep pockets of her parka. She shifted through the victim’s belongings and found the note, which she showed to Frank. “‘I want it over.’”
He stared at the writing so long she was worried he wasn’t minding the road.
“Frank?”
One of the wheels grazed the edge of the asphalt. Frank jerked the steering wheel. Lena held on to the dash. She knew better than to say anything about his driving. Frank wasn’t the type of man who liked to be corrected, especially by a woman. Especially by Lena.
She said, “Strange note for a suicide. Even a fake suicide.”
“Short and to the point.” Frank kept one hand on the wheel as he searched his coat pocket. He slid on his reading glasses and stared at the smeared ink. “She didn’t sign it.”
Lena checked the road. He was riding the white line again. “No.”
Frank glanced up and steered back toward the center line. “Does this look like a woman’s handwriting to you?”
Lena hadn’t considered the possibility. She studied the single sentence, which was written in a wide, round print. “It looks neat, but I couldn’t say if a man or woman wrote it. We could get a handwriting expert. Allison’s a student, so there are probably notes she took from classes or essays and tests. I’m sure we could find something to compare it with.”
Frank didn’t address any of her suggestions. Instead, he said, “I remember when my daughter was her age.” He cleared his throat a few times. “She used to draw circles over her i’s instead of dots. I wonder if she still does that.”
Lena kept quiet. She had worked with Frank her entire career, but she didn’t know much about his personal life beyond w
hat most everyone else in town knew. He had two children by his first wife, but that was many wives ago. They’d moved out of town. He didn’t seem to have contact with any of them. The subject of his family was one he never broached, and right now Lena was too cold and too wired to start sharing.
She put the focus back on the case. “So, someone stabbed Allison in the neck, chained her to some cinder blocks, threw her in the lake, then decided to make it look like a suicide.” Lena shook her head at the stupidity. “Another criminal mastermind.”
Frank gave a snort of agreement. She could tell his mind was on other things. He took off his glasses and stared at the road ahead.
She didn’t want to, but she asked, “What’s going on?”
“Nothing.”
“How many years have I been riding with you, Frank?”
He made another grunting noise, but he relented easily enough. “Mayor’s been trying to track me down.”
Lena felt a lump rise in her throat. Clem Waters, the mayor of Heartsdale, had been trying for some time to make Frank’s job as interim chief a more permanent position.
Frank said, “I don’t really want the job, but there’s nobody else lining up to take it.”
“No,” she agreed. No one wanted the job, not least of all because they would never in a million years match the man who’d held it before.
“Benefits are good,” Frank said. “Nice retirement package. Better health care, pension.”
She managed to swallow. “That’s good, Frank. Jeffrey would want you to take it.”
“He’d want me to retire before I have a heart attack chasing some junkie across the campus quad.” Frank took out his flask and offered it to Lena. She shook her head and watched him take a long pull, one eye on the road as he tilted back his head. Lena’s focus stayed on his hand. There was a slight tremor to it. His hands had been shaking a lot lately, especially in the morning.
Without warning, the rain’s steady beat turned into a harsh staccato. The noise echoed in the car, filling up the space. Lena pressed her tongue to the roof of her mouth. She should tell Frank now that she wanted to resign, that there was a job in Macon waiting for her if she could bring herself to make the leap. She had moved to Grant County to be near her sister, but her sister had died almost a decade ago. Her uncle, her only living relative, had retired to the Florida Panhandle. Her best friend had taken a job at a library up North. Her boyfriend lived two hours away. There was nothing keeping Lena here except inertia and loyalty to a man who had been dead for four years and probably hadn’t thought she was a good cop anyway.
Frank used his knees to hold the steering wheel steady as he screwed the cap back on the flask. “I won’t take it unless you say it’s okay.”
She turned her head in surprise. “Frank—”
“I mean it,” he interrupted. “If it’s not okay with you, then I’ll tell the mayor to shove it up his ass.” He gave a harsh chuckle that rattled the phlegm in his chest. “Might let you come along to see the look on the little prick’s face.”
She made herself say, “You should take the job.”
“I don’t know, Lee. I’m gettin’ so damn old. Children are all grown up. Wives have moved on. Most days, I wonder why I even get out of bed.” He gave another raspy chuckle. “Might find me in the lake one day with my watch in my shoes. But for real.”
She didn’t want to hear the tiredness in his voice. Frank had been on the job twenty years longer than Lena, but she could feel the weariness in his tone like it was her own. This was why she had been spending every free minute of her time taking classes at the college, trying to get a bachelor’s degree in forensic science so she could work on the crime scene investigation end instead of enforcement.
Lena could handle the early morning calls that yanked her from sleep. She could handle the carnage and the dead bodies and the misery that death brought to each and every moment of your life. What she could not take anymore was being on the front lines. There was too much responsibility. There was too much risk. You could make one mistake and it could cost a life—not your own, but another person’s. You could end up getting someone’s son killed. Someone’s husband. Someone’s friend. You found out fairly quickly that another person dying on your watch was far worse than the specter of your own death.
Frank said, “Listen, I need to tell you something.”
Lena glanced at him, wondering at his sudden openness. His shoulders had slumped even more and his knuckles were white from gripping the steering wheel. She ran through the catalogue of things she might be in trouble for at work, but what came out of his mouth took her breath away. “Sara Linton’s back in town.”
Lena tasted whisky and bile in the back of her throat. For a brief, panicked moment, she thought she was going to throw up. Lena could not face Sara. The accusations. The guilt. Even the thought of driving down her street was too much. Lena always took the long way to work, bypassing Sara’s house, bypassing the misery that churned up every time she thought of the place.
Frank kept his voice low. “I heard it in town, so I gave her dad a call. He said she was driving down for Thanksgiving today.” He cleared his throat. “I wouldn’t’a told you, but I’ve stepped up patrols outside their house. You’d see it on the call sheet and wonder—so, now you know.”
Lena tried to swallow the sour taste in her mouth. It felt like glass going down her throat. “Okay,” she managed. “Thanks.”
Frank took a sharp turn onto Taylor Road, blowing through a stop sign. Lena grabbed the side of the door to brace herself, but the movement was automatic. Her mind was caught up in how to ask Frank for time off during the middle of a case. She would take the week and drive over to Macon, maybe scope out some apartments until the holiday was past and Sara was back in Atlanta where she belonged.
“Look at this dumbass,” Frank mumbled as he slowed the car.
Brad Stephens was standing outside his parked patrol car. He was wearing a tan suit pressed to within an inch of its life. His white shirt almost glowed against the blue striped tie that his mama had probably laid out for him with the rest of his clothes this morning. What was obviously bothering Frank was the umbrella in Brad’s hand. It was bright pink except for the Mary Kay logo stitched in yellow.
“Go easy on him,” Lena tried, but Frank was already getting out of the car. He wrestled with his own umbrella—a large black canopy that he’d gotten from Brock at the funeral home—and stomped over to Brad. Lena waited in the car, watching Frank berate the young detective. She knew what it felt like to be on the other end of Frank’s tirades. He had been her trainer when she first entered patrol, then her partner when she made detective. If not for Frank, Lena would’ve washed out of the job the first week. The fact that he didn’t think women belonged on the force made her damned determined to prove him otherwise.
And Jeffrey had been her buffer. Lena had come to the realization some time ago that she had a tendency to be mirror to whoever was in front of her. When Jeffrey was in charge, they did everything the right way—or at least as right as they could. He was a solid cop, the kind of man who had the trust of the community because his character came through in everything he did. That was why the mayor had hired him in the first place. Clem wanted to break the old ways, to pull Grant County into the twenty-first century. Ben Carver, the outgoing chief of police, was as crooked as a stick in water. Frank had been his right-hand man and just as jagged. Under Jeffrey, Frank had changed his ways. They all had. Or at least they had as long as Jeffrey was alive.
Within the first week of Frank being put in charge, things had started to slip. It was slow at first, and hard to spot. A Breathalyzer result had gone missing, freeing one of Frank’s hunting buddies from a DUI. An unusually careful pot dealer at the college was suddenly caught with a huge stash in the trunk of his car. Tickets disappeared. Cash was missing from the evidence locker. Requisitions turned iffy. The service contract for the county cars went to a garage Frank had part ownership in.
She would end up being one of those asshole private detectives who were always putting their noses where they didn’t belong.
“Adams!” Frank slammed his hand on the hood of the car. Water splashed up like a dog shaking itself. He was finished yelling at Brad and was spoiling for someone else to rip into.
Lena took the dripping wet parka off the floor and put it on, tightening the strings on the hood so her hair wouldn’t get soaked. She caught a look at herself in the rearview mirror. Her hair had started to twist into curls. The rain had brought out her Irish Catholic father’s roots and managed to suppress her Mexican grandmother’s.
“Adams!” Frank yelled again.
By the time she got out of the car, he was concentrating another tirade on Brad, yelling at him about how he was wearing his gun holster too low on his belt.
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