The uncomfortable silence was back. He played with his wedding ring, twisting it around his finger. She wondered if he was thinking about his wife. Sara had met the woman once at the hospital. Angie Trent was one of those vivacious, life-of-the-party types who never left the house without her makeup on. Her nails were perfect. Her skirt was tight. Her legs would have given the Pope second thoughts. She was about as different from Sara as a ripe peach was from a Popsicle stick.
Will clasped his hands together between his knees. “Thank you for dinner. Or, thank your mother. I haven’t eaten like that in …” He chuckled, rubbing his stomach. “Well, I’m not sure I’ve ever eaten like that in my life.”
“I’m so sorry she questioned you like that.”
“It’s no bother. I’m sorry for imposing.”
“It’s my fault for bringing you down here.”
“I’m sorry the hotel was closed.”
Sara cut to the chase, afraid they would spend the rest of the night trading inconsequential apologies. “What questions did you have for me?”
He paused another few seconds, staring openly. “The first one is kind of delicate.”
She tightened her arms around her waist. “All right.”
“When Chief Wallace called you earlier today to come help Tommy …” He let his voice trail off. “Do you always keep diazepam on you? That’s Valium, right?”
Sara couldn’t look him in the eye. She stared down at the coffee table. Will had obviously been working here. His laptop was closed, but the light was pulsing. Cables connected the machine to the portable printer on the floor. An unopened packet of colored folders was beside it. A wooden ruler was on top alongside a pack of colored markers. There was a stapler, paper clips, rubber bands.
“Dr. Linton?”
“Will.” She tried to keep her voice steady. “Don’t you think it’s time you started calling me Sara?”
He acquiesced. “Sara.” When she didn’t speak, he pressed. “Do you always have Valium with you?”
“No,” she admitted. She felt such shame that she could only look at the table in front of her. “They were for me. For this trip. In case …” She shrugged the rest of her answer away. How could she explain to this man why she would need to drug herself through a family holiday?
He asked, “Did Chief Wallace know that you had the Valium?”
She tried to think back on their conversation. “No. I volunteered to bring it.”
“You said you had some in your kit?”
“I didn’t want to tell him they were for—”
“It’s all right,” he stopped her. “I’m really sorry that I had to ask such a personal question. I’m just trying to figure out how it happened. Chief Wallace called you to help, but how would he know that you’d be able to?”
Sara looked up at him. Will stared back, unblinking. There was no judgment in his gaze, no pity. Sara couldn’t remember the last time someone had looked at her and really seen her. Certainly not since she’d gotten into town this morning.
She told him, “Frank thought I could talk to Tommy. Talk him down, I guess.”
“Have you helped prisoners in the jail before?”
“Not really. I mean, I got called in a couple of times when there was an overdose. Once, someone had a burst appendix. I transferred them all to the hospital. I didn’t really treat them at the jail. Not medically.”
“And on the phone with Chief Wallace—”
“I’m sorry,” Sara apologized. “Could you call him Frank? It’s just—”
“You don’t have to explain,” he assured her. “On the phone before, when you said that you didn’t really remember Tommy Braham, that there was no connection with him. Did you feel like Frank was trying to push you into coming to the station?”
Sara finally saw where this was going. “You think he called me after the fact. That Tommy was already dead.” She remembered Frank looking through the cell door window. He had dropped his keys on the floor. Had that all been an act?
“As you know, time of death isn’t an exact science,” Will said. “If he called you right after he found Tommy—”
“The body was still warm,” she remembered. “But the temperature inside the cells was hot. Frank said the furnace was acting up.”
“Had you ever known it to act up before?”
She shook her head. “I haven’t stepped foot in that station in over four years.”
“The temperature was normal when I was there tonight.”
Sara sat back on the couch. These were people who had worked with Jeffrey. People she had trusted all of her life. If Frank Wallace thought Sara was going to cover something up, he was sadly mistaken. “Do you think they killed him?” She answered her own question. “I saw the blue ink from the pen. I can’t imagine they held Tommy down and scraped it across his wrists. There are easier ways to kill someone and make it look like a suicide.”
“Hanging,” he suggested. “Eighty percent of custodial suicides are achieved by hanging. Prison inmates are seven times more likely to kill themselves than the general population. Tommy fits just about every part of the profile.” Will listed it out for her. “He was unusually remorseful. He wouldn’t stop crying. He wasn’t married. He was between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five. This was his first offense. He had a strong parent or guardian at home who would be angry or disappointed to learn of his incarceration.”
She admitted, “Tommy was all of those things. But why would Frank postpone finding the body?”
“You’re well respected here. A prisoner killed himself in police custody. If you say there’s nothing hinky about it, then people will believe you.”
Sara couldn’t argue with him. Dan Brock was a mortician, not a doctor. If people got it into their heads that Tommy had been killed at the jail, then Brock would be hard-pressed to disprove the rumor.
“The cartridge from the pen that Tommy used,” Will began. “Tonight, Officer Knox told me that your husband gave them all pens for Christmas one year. That’s a very thoughtful thing to do.”
“Not exactly,” Sara said before she could catch herself. “I mean, he was busy, so he asked me to …” She waved her hand, dismissing her words. She had been so annoyed with Jeffrey for asking her to track down the pens, as if her life was less busy than his. She passed this off by telling Will, “I’m sure there are things you ask your wife to do for you when you’re tied up.”
He smiled. “Do you remember where you got the pens?”
Sara felt another wave of shame crashing down. “I asked Nelly, my office manager at the clinic, to find them online. I didn’t have time to …” She shook her head, feeling like a heel. “I might be able to find the credit card receipt if it’s important. This was over five years ago.”
“How many did you get?”
“Twenty-five, I think? Everyone on the force got one.”
“That’s a lot of money.”
“Yes,” she acknowledged. Jeffrey hadn’t given her a budget, and Sara’s idea of an expensive gift had a higher price tag than Jeffrey’s. It all seemed so silly now. Why had they wasted days being angry at each other? Why had it mattered so much?
Will surprised her, saying, “Your accent is different down here.”
She laughed, taken off guard. “Do I sound country?”
“Your mother has a beautiful accent.”
“Cultured,” Sara said. Except for tonight, she had always loved the sound of her mother’s voice.
He surprised her again. “You’ve kind of been dragged into the middle of this case, but in a lot of ways, you’ve put yourself there on your own.”
She felt a blush brought on by his candor.
His expression was soft, understanding. She wondered if it was genuine or if he was using one of his interviewing techniques. “I know this sounds forward, but I’m assuming you had me meet you at the hospital in plain view of Main Street for a reason.”
Sara laughed again, this time at herself, the situat
ion. “It wasn’t that calculated. It must seem that way now.”
“I’m staying at your house. People are going to see my car parked on the street. I know how small towns work. They’re going to think something’s going on between us.”
“But there’s not. You’re married and I’m—”
His smile was more of a wince. “The truth isn’t much help in these types of situations. You must know that.”
Sara looked back at his office supplies. He had separated the rubber bands by color. Even the paper clips were turned in the same direction.
Will said, “Something is going on here. I’m not sure if it’s what you think, but something’s not right at that station house.”
“What is it?”
“I don’t know yet, but you need to prepare yourself for some bad reactions.” He spoke carefully. “Cases like this, where the police get questioned. They don’t like that. Part of the reason they’re good at their jobs is because they think they’re right about everything.”
“I’m a doctor. Trust me, it’s not just cops who feel that way.”
“I want you to be prepared, because when we get to the end of this, whether I find out Tommy was guilty, or Detective Adams screwed up, or if I find out nothing was wrong at all, people are going to hate you for bringing me down here.”
“They’ve hated me before.”
“They’re going to say you’re dragging your husband’s memory through the mud.”
“They don’t know anything about him. They have no idea.”
“They’ll fill in the blanks themselves. It’s going to get a lot harder than it is now.” He turned his body toward her. “I’m going to make it harder. I’m going to do some things on purpose to get them mad enough to show their hand. Are you going to be okay with that?”
“What if I say no?”
“Then I’ll find another way to do it that doesn’t upset you.”
She could see that his offer was genuine, and felt guilty for questioning his motives before. “This isn’t my home anymore. I’m leaving in three days no matter what happens. Do what you have to do.”
“And your family?”
“My family supports me.” Sara wasn’t certain about a lot of things these days, but this, at least, was true. “They may not agree with me, but they support me.”
“All right.” He looked relieved, as if he’d gotten the hard part out of the way. “I need to get Julie Smith’s phone number from you.”
Sara had anticipated the request. She took a sheet of folded paper out of her pocket and handed it to Will.
He pointed to the Princess phone beside the couch. “Is this the same line as the house?”
She nodded.
“I wanted to make sure the caller ID was the same.” He picked up the phone and stared at the rotary dial.
Sara rolled her eyes. “My parents don’t exactly embrace technology.”
He started spinning the dial, but the rotary slipped out from under his finger in the middle of the number.
“Let me,” she offered, taking the phone before he could protest. She spun the dial, the motion coming back to her more quickly than she wanted to admit.
Will put the receiver to his ear just as an automated squawk blared down the line. He held the phone between them so they both could hear the recorded voice advising the caller that the line he was trying to reach had been disconnected.
Will put the phone back on the hook. “I’ll have Faith do a trace tomorrow. My bet is that it was a throwaway phone. Do you remember anything else about Julie? Anything she said?”
“I could tell that she was calling from a bathroom,” Sara told him. “She said that Tommy had texted her that he was in jail. Maybe you can get the transcript from his phone?”
“Faith can do that, too,” he offered. “What about Julie’s voice? Did she sound young? Old?”
“She sounded really young and really country.”
“Country how?”
Sara smiled. “Not like me. At least I hope not. She sounded more like the wrong side of the tracks. She used the word ‘you’uns.’”
“That’s mountain talk.”
“Is it? I’m not up on dialects.”
“I had an assignment in Blue Ridge a while back,” he explained. “Do you hear that word around here much?”
She shook her head. “Not really. Not that I can remember.”
“All right, so we’ve got someone young, probably a transplant from north Georgia or Appalachia. She told you that she was Tommy’s friend. We’ll dump his phone line and see if they’ve ever called each other.”
“Julie Smith,” Sara said, wondering why it had never occurred to her that the girl might be using an alias.
“Maybe the phone taps will give us something.”
Sara indicated the photocopies she’d made. “Were these helpful?”
“Not in the way you’re thinking.” He thumbed through the pages. “I asked the station secretary, Mrs. Simms, to fax these to Faith. Can you look at them for me?”
Sara glanced through the pages. There were handwritten numbers at the top. She stopped on the eleventh page. Someone had written the number twelve in the corner. The two was backward. “Did you number these?”
“Yes,” he said. “When I got them back from Mrs. Simms, one of the pages was missing. Page eleven. The page right after Detective Adams’s field report.”
Sara thumbed back to the second page. The two was written the correct way. She checked the third and fifth page. Both numbers were facing the correct direction. The pen had been pressed so hard that the paper felt embossed.
He asked, “Can you remember what’s missing?”
Sara went through them again, concentrating on the content instead of the numbering. “The 911 transcript.”
“You’re sure?”
“There was another page from Lena’s notebook. It was taped on the sheet of paper by itself. She wrote down the contents of the 911 call.”
“Can you remember what it said?”
“I know that it was a woman’s voice. I can’t really remember the rest.”
“Did they trace the number she called from?”
“I didn’t see anything indicating they had.” She shook her head. “Why can’t I remember what else it said?”
“We can get it from the call center.”
“Unless they managed to lose it.”
“It’s no big deal,” he told her. “You got the file from Frank, right?”
“From Carl Phillips.”
“The booking officer?”
“Yes. Did you talk to him tonight?”
“He’s gone on vacation with his family. No idea when he’ll be back. No phone. No cell. No way to get in touch with him.”
Sara felt her mouth drop open.
“I doubt he’s really gone. They’re probably keeping him away from me. He might even be at the station tomorrow, hiding in plain sight.”
“He’s the only African American on the force.”
Will laughed. “Thanks for the tip. That narrows things down considerably.”
“I can’t believe they’re doing this.”
“Cops don’t like to be questioned. They circle their wagons, even if they know it’s wrong.”
She wondered if Jeffrey had ever done anything like this. If he had, it was only because he wanted to be the one to clean out his own house. He would never let someone come in and do his job for him.
Will asked, “Where did you make the copies?”
“At the front of the room.”
“The copier that’s on the table by the coffeemaker?”
“That’s right.”
“Did you get some coffee?”
“I didn’t want to dawdle.” Everyone had been staring at her like she was a monster. Sara’s only goal had been to make the copies and get out of there as soon as possible.
“So, you’re standing by the copier waiting for the pages to come out. That looked like an old machine. Do
es it make a noise?”
She nodded, wondering where this was going.
“Like a whirring or a clunking?”
“Both,” she answered, and she could hear the sound in her head.
“How much coffee was left in the pot? Did anyone come up?”
She shook her head. “No. The pot was full.” The machine was older than the copier. She could smell the grounds burning.
“Did anyone talk to you?”
“No. No one would even look at—” She saw herself standing by the copier. The machine was old, the kind you had to feed the pages into one at a time. She had read the file to keep from staring aimlessly at the wall. “Oh.”
“What do you remember?”
“I skimmed the 911 transcript while I was waiting for the copier to warm up.”
“What did it say?”
She could see herself standing back in the station reading the files. “The woman called it a possible suicide. She said she was worried her friend had done something.” Sara narrowed her eyes, trying to force the memory to come. “She was worried Allison was going to kill herself because she’d gotten into a fight with her boyfriend.”
“Did she say where she thought Allison was?”
“Lover’s Point,” she recalled. “That’s what town people call it. It’s the cove where Allison was found.”
“What’s it like?”
“A cove.” Sara shrugged. “It’s romantic if you’re out for a walk, but not in the pouring rain and cold.”
“Is it secluded?”
“Yes.”
“So, according to this caller, Allison got into a fight with her boyfriend. The caller was worried Allison was suicidal. The caller also knew she was going to be at Lover’s Point.”
“It was probably Julie Smith. Is that what you’re thinking?”
“Maybe, but why? The caller wanted to bring attention to Allison’s murder. Julie Smith was trying to help Tommy Braham get away with murder. They seem to have opposite goals.” He paused. “Faith is trying to track her down, but we’re going to need more than a disconnected number to find her.”
“Frank and Lena are probably thinking the same thing,” Sara guessed. “That’s why they hid the transcript. They either don’t want you to talk to her or they want to talk to her first.”
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