Broken (3 page)

Sixty percent of the lake’s eighty-mile shoreline was owned by the State Forestry Division. The most popular spot by far was this one, what the locals called Lover’s Point. Campers were allowed to stake tents. Teenagers came here to party, often leaving behind empty beer bottles and used condoms. Occasionally, there would be a call about a fire someone had let get out of control, and once, a rabid bear had been reported, only to turn out to be an elderly chocolate Labrador who had wondered away from his owners’ campsite.

And bodies were occasionally found here, too. Once, a girl had been buried alive. Several men, predictably teenagers, had drowned performing various acts of stupidity. Last summer, a child had broken her neck diving into the shallow waters of the cove.

The two divers paused, letting the water drip off the body before resuming their task. Finally, nods went around and they dragged the young woman onto the shore. The cinder blocks left a deep furrow in the sandy ground. It was six-thirty in the morning, and the moon seemed to wink at the sun as it began its slow climb over the horizon. The ambulance doors swung open. The EMTs cursed at the bitter cold as they rolled out the gurney. One of them had a pair of bolt cutters hefted over his shoulder. He slammed his hand on the hood of the coroner’s van, and Dan Brock startled, comically flailing his arms in the air. He gave the EMT a stern look, but stayed where he was. Lena couldn’t blame him for not wanting to rush into the rain. The victim wasn’t going anywhere except the morgue. There was no need for lights and sirens.

Lena walked closer to the body, carefully folding the evidence bag containing the suicide note into her jacket pocket and taking out a pen and her spiral-bound notebook. Crooking her umbrella between her neck and shoulder, she wrote the time, date, weather, number of EMTs, number of divers, number of cars and cops, what the terrain was like, noted the solemnity of the scene, the absence of spectators—all the details that would need to be typed exactly into the report.

The victim was around Lena’s height, five-four, but she was built much smaller. Her wrists were delicate, like a bird’s. The fingernails were uneven, bitten down to the quick. She had black hair and extremely white skin. She was probably in her early twenties. Her open eyes were clouded like cotton. Her mouth was closed. The lips looked ragged, as if she chewed them out of nervous habit. Or maybe a fish had gotten hungry.

Her body was lighter without the drag of the water, and it only took three of the divers to heft her onto the waiting gurney. Muck from the bottom of the lake covered her head to toe. Water dripped from her clothes—blue jeans, a black fleece shirt, white socks, no sneakers, an unzipped, dark blue warm-up jacket with a Nike logo on the front. The gurney shifted, and her head turned away from Lena.

Lena stopped writing. “Wait a minute,” she called, knowing something was wrong. She put her notebook in her pocket as she took a step closer to the body. She had seen a flash of light at the back of the girl’s neck—something silver, maybe a necklace. Pondweed draped across the victim’s throat and shoulders like a shroud. Lena used the tip of her pen to push away the slippery green tendrils. Something was moving beneath the skin, rippling the flesh the same way the rain rippled the tide.

The divers noticed the undulations, too. They all bent down for a better look. The skin fluttered like something out of a horror movie.

One of them asked, “What the—”

“Jesus!” Lena jumped back quickly as a small minnow slithered out from a slit in the girl’s neck.

The divers laughed the way men do when they don’t want to
admit they’ve just soiled themselves. For her part, Lena put her hand to her chest, hoping no one noticed that her heart had practically exploded. She took a gulp of air. The minnow was floundering in the mud. One of the men picked it up and tossed it back into the lake. The dive captain made the inevitable joke about something being fishy.

Lena shot him a hard look before leaning down toward the body. The slit where the fish had come out was at the back of the neck, just to the right of the spine. She guessed the wound was an inch wide, tops. The open flesh was puckered from the water, but at one point the injury had been clean, precise—the kind of incision that was made by a very sharp knife.

“Somebody go wake up Brock,” she said.

This wasn’t a suicide investigation anymore.

F
RANK WALLACE NEVER SMOKED IN HIS COUNTY-ISSUED LINCOLN
Town Car, but the cloth seats had absorbed the fug of nicotine that seeped from every pore in his body. He reminded Lena of Pig Pen from the Peanuts comic strip. No matter how clean he was or how often he changed his clothes, the stench followed him like a dust cloud.

“What’s wrong?” he demanded, not even giving her time to shut the car door.

Lena shucked her wet parka onto the floorboard. Earlier, she had thrown on a jacket with two shirts underneath to help fight the cold. Still, even with the heat blasting, her teeth were chattering. It was as if her body had stored up all the chill while she was standing outside in the rain and only let it out now that she was safely sheltered.

She held her hands up to the vent. “God, it’s freezing.”

“What’s wrong?” Frank repeated. He made a show of pulling back his black leather glove so he could see his watch.

Lena shivered involuntarily. She couldn’t keep the excitement out of her voice. No cop would ever admit it to a civilian, but murders were the most exciting cases to work. Lena was so pumped through with adrenaline that she was surprised the cold was getting to her. Through chattering teeth, she told him, “It’s not a suicide.”

Frank looked even more annoyed. “Brock agree with you?”

Brock had gone back to sleep in his van while he waited for the chains to be cut, which they both knew because they could see his back molars from where they were sitting. “Brock wouldn’t know his ass from a hole in the ground,” Lena shot back. She rubbed her arms to coax some warmth back into her body.

Frank took out his flask and handed it to her. She took a quick sip, the whisky burning its way down her throat and into her stomach. Frank took a hefty drink of his own before returning the flask to his coat pocket.

She told him, “There’s a knife wound in the neck.”

“Brock’s?”

Lena gave him a withering glance. “The dead girl.” She leaned down and searched her parka for the wallet she had found in the pocket of the woman’s jacket.

Frank said, “Could be self-inflicted.”

“Not possible.” She put her hand to the back of her neck. “Blade went in about here. The killer was standing behind her. Probably took her by surprise.”

Frank grumbled, “You get that from one of your textbooks?”

Lena held her tongue, something she wasn’t used to doing. Frank had been interim police chief for the last four years. Everything that happened in the three cities that comprised Grant County fell under his purview. Madison and Avondale carried the usual drug problems and domestic violence, but Heartsdale was supposed to be easy. The college was here, and the affluent residents were vocal about crime.

Even without that, complicated cases had the tendency to turn Frank into an asshole. Actually, life in general could turn him into an asshole. His coffee going cold. The engine in his car not catching on the first try. The ink running dry in his pen. Frank hadn’t always been like this. He’d certainly leaned toward grumpy for as long as Lena had known him, but his attitude lately was tinged with an underlying fury that seemed ready to boil to the surface. Anything could set him off. In the blink of an eye he’d turn from being manageably irritated to downright mean.

At least in this particular matter Frank’s reluctance made sense. After thirty-five years of policing, a murder case was the last thing he wanted on his plate. Lena knew that he was sick of the job, sick of the people it brought him into contact with. He had lost two of his closest friends in the last six years. The only lake he wanted to be sitting
in front of right now was in sunny Florida. He should’ve had a fishing pole and a beer in his hands, not a dead kid’s wallet.

“Looks fake,” Frank said, opening the wallet. Lena agreed. The leather was too shiny. The Prada logo was plastic.

“Allison Judith Spooner,” Lena told him, watching Frank try to peel apart the soaked plastic picture sleeves. “Twenty-one. Driver’s license is from Elba, Alabama. Her student ID’s in the back.”

“College.” Frank breathed out the word with something like despair. It was bad enough Allison Spooner had been found on or near state property. Add to that the fact that she was an out-of-state kid attending Grant Tech, and the case just got twenty times more political.

He asked, “Where’d you find the wallet?”

“In her jacket pocket. I guess she didn’t have a purse. Or maybe whoever killed her wanted us to know her identity.”

He was looking at the girl’s driver’s license photo.

“What is it?”

“Looks like that little waitress who works at the diner.”

The Grant Diner was on the opposite end of Main Street from the police station. Most of the force ate there for lunch. Lena stayed away from the place. She usually brown-bagged it, or, more often than not, didn’t eat.

She asked, “Did you know her?”

He shook his head and shrugged at the same time. “She was good-looking.”

Frank was right. Not many people had a flattering driver’s license photo, but Allison Spooner had been luckier than most. Her white teeth showed in a big smile. Her hair was pulled back off her face, revealing high cheekbones. There was merriment in her eyes, as if someone had just made a joke. This was all in sharp contrast to the body they had pulled out of the lake. Death had erased her vibrancy.

Frank said, “I didn’t know she was a student.”

“They usually don’t work in town,” Lena allowed. Grant Tech’s students tended to work on campus or not at all. They didn’t mix with the town and the town did its best not to mix with them.

Frank pointed out, “The school’s closed this week for Thanksgiving break. Why isn’t she home with her family?”

Lena didn’t have the answer. “There’s forty bucks in the wallet, so this wasn’t a robbery.”

Frank checked the money compartment anyway, his thick, gloved fingers finding the twenty and two tens glued together with lake water. “She could’ve been lonely. Decided to take the knife and end it herself.”

“She’d have to be a contortionist,” Lena insisted. “You’ll see when Brock gets her on the table. She was stabbed from behind.”

He gave a bone-weary sigh. “What about the chain and cinder blocks?”

“We can try Mann’s Hardware in town. Maybe the killer bought them there.”

He tried again. “You’re sure about the knife wound?”

She nodded.

Frank kept staring at the license photo. “Does she have a car?”

“If she does, it’s not in the vicinity.” Lena pressed the point. “Unless she carried forty pounds’ worth of cinder blocks and some chains through the woods …”

Frank finally closed the wallet and handed it back to her. “Why is it every Monday just gets shittier and shittier?”

Lena couldn’t answer him. Last week wasn’t that much better. A young mother and her daughter had been taken by a flash flood. The whole town was still reeling from the loss. There was no telling what they’d make of a pretty, young college girl being murdered.

She told Frank, “Brad’s trying to track down somebody from the college who can get into the registrar’s office and give us Spooner’s local address.” Brad Stephens had finally worked his way up from patrol to the rank of detective, but his new job didn’t have him doing much more than his old one did. He was still running errands.

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.”