Broken (22 page)

“She seemed a little more stressed than usual. She asked me a couple of times could she study when we were slow. Don’t get me wrong—I’m an easy man to work for so long as you do your job. I let her crack open her books when we weren’t busy. I made sure she had a hot meal before she went home.”

“Do you know what kind of car she drove?”

“Old Dodge Daytona with Alabama plates. You remember those? Based on the Chrysler G platform. Front-wheel drive, kind of low to the ground.”

“Four door?”

“Hatchback. The pistons were blown. She kept the trunk tied down with a bungee cord. I think it’s a ’92, ’93.” He tapped his head. “Mind ain’t as good as it used to be.”

“What color?”

“Red, you could say. Mostly it’s primer and rust. Spits out smoke from the tailpipe every time she cranks it.”

“Where did she park?”

“Behind the diner. I checked this morning. It’s not there.”

“Did she ever walk home from work?”

“Sometimes when the weather was good, but it ain’t been good in
a long while, and she wasn’t making her way home.” He pointed behind them. “The lake’s back there. Behind the station. Behind the diner.” He pointed across the street. “When she walked home, she always went that way, out the front door.”

“Do you know Gordon Braham?”

“I believe he works for the power company. He also dates the woman who works at the five and dime across from the diner. They come in for lunch every couple’a three days.”

“You seem to know a lot about people.”

“This is a small town, Mr. Trent. Everybody knows a lot about everybody else. That’s why we live here. Cheaper than cable TV.”

“Who do you think killed Allison?”

Lionel didn’t seem surprised by the question, but he gave the expected answer. “Police say it was Tommy Braham.”

“What do you say?”

He looked at his watch. “I say I’d better go fire up the grill before the breakfast crowd comes in.” He put his hand on the door, but Will stopped him.

“Mr. Harris, if you think somebody—”

“I don’t know what to think,” he admitted. “If Tommy didn’t do it, then why’d he stab Brad? And why’d he kill himself?”

“You don’t think he did it.” Will wasn’t asking a question.

Lionel gave another weary sigh. “I guess I’m a bit like old Chief Carver. There’s good people and there’s bad people. Allison was good. Tommy was good. Good people can do bad things, but not that bad.”

He started to leave again.

“Can I ask you—” Will waited for him to turn back around. “Why did you come to talk to me?”

“Because I knew Frank wouldn’t be knocking on my door. Not that I’ve been able to tell you much, but I wanted to say something on the girl’s behalf. She ain’t got nobody speaking up for her right now. It’s all about Tommy and why’d he do it, not about Allison and what a good girl she was.”

“Why do you think Chief Wallace wouldn’t want to talk to you?”

“Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.”

Will knew he didn’t mean Jeffrey Tolliver. “Ben Carver?”

“Frank and Ben—they were cut from the same cloth. White cloth, if you catch my drift.”

“I think I do.”

Lionel still had his hand on the door handle. “When I got back to town after Daddy died, I saw a lot of people had changed. On the outside, I’m talking—not on the inside. You gotta go through a special kind of hell or a special kind of love to change who you are inside. Outside’s a whole different story.” He rubbed his beard, probably thinking about the gray in it. “Now, Miss Sara, she got prettier. Her daddy Mr. Eddie got more hair sprouting out of his eyebrows. My sister got older and fatter, which ain’t never a good combination for a woman.”

“And Frank?”

“He got careful,” Lionel said. “I may not be living in Colored Town anymore, but I still remember what it feels like to have that man’s foot on my neck.” He pulled the handle on the door. “You get you a heat gun and work it just the tiniest little bit around that leather on your glove box and you’ll be able to get that kink out.” He picked up his leg so he could get out of the car. “Just a tiny bit, though. Too much heat, and you’ll burn a hole right through.” He stared his meaning into Will. “Not too much heat, son.”

“I appreciate your advice.”

Lionel struggled to get out of the Porsche, finally gripping the roof and pulling himself up. He steadied himself on the cane and held out his hand, giving Will a gymnast’s finish and a “tah-dah,” before gently closing the door.

Will watched Lionel lean heavily on the cane as he made his way up the street. He stopped in front of the hardware store to talk to a man who was sweeping debris from the sidewalk. The rain had died down, and they seemed to be taking their time. Will imagined they
were talking about Allison Spooner and Tommy Braham. In a place as small as Grant County, there wouldn’t be anything else to occupy people’s minds.

An old Cadillac pulled into the parking lot. Even from a distance, the gospel music hummed in Will’s ears. Marla Simms parked her car as far from Will’s as she could. She checked her makeup in the mirror, arranged her glasses—did all of the things that made it obvious she was ignoring him—before getting out of the car.

He walked across the lot to meet her, putting as much cheer into his voice as he could manage. “Good morning, Mrs. Simms.”

She tossed him a wary look. “No one’s here yet.”

“I see that.” He held up his briefcase. “I thought I’d go ahead and get set up. If you wouldn’t mind bringing me the evidence from the lake and anything collected from Tommy Braham’s person?”

Marla didn’t bother to acknowledge him as she threw back the bolt on the door. She turned on the lights and walked into the lobby. Again, she leaned over the gate and buzzed herself through. Will caught the door before it latched closed.

“Cold in here,” Will said. “Something wrong with the furnace?”

“The furnace is fine,” she said defensively.

“Is it new?”

“Do I look like I work for the furnace company?”

“Mrs. Simms, I’d be lying if I didn’t say that you look like you know everything that goes on in this station, if not the entire town.”

She made a grumbling noise as she took the carafe from the coffeemaker.

“Did you know Tommy Braham?”

“Yes.”

“What was he like?”

“Slow.”

“What about Allison Spooner?”

“Not slow.”

Will smiled. “I should thank you, Mrs. Simms, for those incident
reports you sent to my partner last night. It shows an interesting pattern with Tommy. He’d had some trouble with his temper lately. Is that what you wanted me to know?”

She gave him a look over her glasses, but her mouth stayed closed as she walked to the back of the room. Will watched her push open the heavy steel door. She’d left him alone in the dark.

He went to the fax machine and checked under the table, giving Marla Simms the benefit of the doubt. There were no loose pages underneath, no 911 transcript that had fallen through the cracks. He opened the copier and saw the glass staring back at him. Something sticky was in the center. Will used his thumbnail to pry off the substance, which would transfer to every copy made on the machine. He held it up to the light. Glue, maybe? Gum?

He flicked it into the trashcan. None of the copies Sara had made for him yesterday showed a mark. Maybe someone else had used the machine after her and unwittingly transferred the gum onto the glass.

The office on the side of the squad room was empty, just as he’d thought. Will tried the knob. The door was unlocked. He went in and opened the blinds, giving him a nice view of the desks where the detectives sat. There were nail holes in the walls. In the slim ray of light coming through the outside window, he could see the shadows where photographs had once been. The desk was empty but for a telephone. All the drawers were cleaned out. The chair squeaked when he sat down.

If he was the betting type, Will would have put ten bucks on this being Jeffrey Tolliver’s old office.

He opened his briefcase and set out his files. Finally, the overhead lights flickered on. Will saw Marla through the glass in the wall. She stared at him, mouth open. With her tight bun and dirty glasses, she looked like one of those beady old ladies from a Gary Larson comic strip. Will plastered a smile on his face, tossed her a wave. Marla gripped the handle of the carafe so hard he could almost feel her desire to smash the glass into his face.

Will reached into his pocket and found his digital recorder. Every
cop in the world kept a spiral notebook in which to record details of their investigations. Will did not have that luxury, but he’d learned to compensate.

He checked the window for Marla before putting the recorder to his ear and pressing play. The volume was low, and he heard Faith’s voice reading Tommy Braham’s confession. Will had not wasted the entire night worrying about his schoolgirl crush on Sara Linton. He’d prepared himself for the day by reading every single word in the reports and listening to Tommy Braham’s confession over and over again until he had memorized almost every word. He listened to the whole thing again in the office, the cadence of Faith’s voice so familiar that he could have spoken along with her.

Her tone was dispassionate, offering no inflection. “‘I was in Allison’s apartment. This was last night. I don’t know what time. Pippy, my dog, was sick. It was after I took her to the doctor. Allison said she would have sex with me. We started to have sex. She changed her mind. I got mad. I had a knife on me. I stabbed her once in the neck. I took the extra chain and lock and drove her to the lake. I wrote the note so people would think she had killed herself. Allison was sad. I thought that would be reason enough.’”

There were murmurs in the squad room. Will glanced up to find a couple of uniformed cops staring at him in disbelief. One of them started toward the office, probably to confront him, but his partner stopped him.

Will leaned back in the chair, hearing the squeak again. He took out his cell phone and called Faith. She picked up on the fourth ring. Her hello was more like a grunt.

“Did I wake you up?”

“It’s seven-thirty in the morning. Of course you woke me up.”

“I can call back.”

“Just gimme a minute.” He heard her moving around. She yawned so loudly that Will felt his own jaw twitching to open. “I pulled up some info on Lena Adams.”

“And?”

She yawned again. “Let me get to my laptop.”

Will couldn’t stop his own yawn. “I’m sorry I got you out of bed.”

“You’ve got me until four this afternoon. That’s when I meet my doctor at the hospital.”

Will started talking so she wouldn’t explain the procedure again. “That’s great, Faith. I guess your mom is driving you. She must be excited. What about your brother? Have you called him?”

“You can shut up now. I’m at my computer.” He heard keys being tapped. “Salena Marie Adams,” Faith said, probably reading from the woman’s personnel file. “Detective first grade. Thirty-five years old. Five-four and a hundred and twenty pounds.” Faith mumbled a curse. “God, that’s enough to make me hate her right there.”

“What about her history?”

“She was raped.”

Will was taken aback by her abruptness. He’d been expecting date of birth, maybe some commendations. Sara had said that she suspected Lena had been raped by her ex-boyfriend, but he’d been under the impression no formal charges had been filed. He asked Faith, “How do you know that?”

“The case came up when I cross-referenced her file. You really should Google more.”

“When did it happen?”

“Ten years ago.” He heard her fingers pecking the keyboard. “Her file is pretty clean. She’s worked some interesting cases. You remember that south Georgia pedophile ring awhile back? She and Tolliver broke it open.”

“Does she have any black marks?”

“Small-town forces don’t air their dirty laundry on paper,” Faith reminded him. “She took some time off the job six years ago. She worked security at the college less than a year, then went back on the job. That’s all I’ve got on her. Have you found anything else?”

“I had an interesting conversation with the man who runs the diner this morning.”

“What did he say?”

“Not a whole lot. Allison was a good kid. Hard worker. He didn’t know much about her personal life.”

“Do you think he killed her?”

“He’s sixty-something years old with a fake leg.”

“A real fake leg?”

Will thought about Lionel knocking on the prosthesis, the hollow sound. “I’ll see if I can confirm it, but he was putting on quite an act if the leg is real.”

“You never know with those small towns. Ed Gein was a babysitter.”

Faith was never one to miss an opportunity to compare a kindly old man to one of the twentieth century’s most notorious serial killers.

She said, “Spooner’s background check didn’t offer much, either. She’s got a bank account with eighteen dollars and change. She must be a cash-and-carry gal. The only checks she’s written in the last six months are to the college and the campus bookstore. The statements are delivered to the Taylor Drive address. Other than that, she’s got no credit cards. No utilities in her name. No credit history. No cell phone on record. No car.”

“The old guy at the diner says she drove a Dodge Daytona with Alabama plates.”

“It must be registered in someone else’s name. Do you think the locals know about it?”

“I don’t know. My source also says that Allison had a pink book bag she kept in the car when she was working.”

“Hold on a second.” Faith was obviously doing something on her computer. “All right, I’m not finding any BOLOs for the car coming out of Grant County or any towns in the vicinity.” If Frank Wallace knew about Allison’s car, he would have posted a “be on the lookout” to all neighboring counties.

Will said, “Maybe they already know where the car is but they don’t want me to find it.”

“I’m posting a BOLO around the state right now. Your chief will have to tell his boys to look for it during their briefing this morning.”

“It’s an old car. Allison’s lived here a couple of years without changing the plates.”

“College town. Wouldn’t be odd to have cars with out-of-state tags. The only reason not to register a car is because it’s not insured,” Faith pointed out. “I’d buy that. This girl was living on the margins. She barely made a blip on the radar.”