Broken (36 page)

Lena slipped on a latex glove before trying the last room. Her hand went up to her gun again as she pushed open the door. Again, there were no surprises. “This must be Allison’s.”

The room was cleaner than the rest of the house, which wasn’t saying much. Allison Spooner hadn’t been the neatest woman on the planet, but at least she managed to keep her clothes off the floor. And there were a lot of them. Shirts, blouses, pants, and dresses were packed so tightly into the closet that the rod bowed in the middle. Clothes hangers were hooked on the curtain rod and the trim over the closet door. More clothes were draped over an old rocking chair.

“I guess she liked clothes,” Will said.

Lena picked up a pair of jeans in a pile by the door. “Seven brand. These aren’t cheap. I wonder where she got the money.”

Will could hazard a guess. The clothes he’d worn as a kid generally came from a communal pile. There was no guarantee you’d find a good fit, let alone a style you liked. “She probably had hand-me-downs all
her life. First time away from home, making her own money. Maybe it was important to her to have nice things.”

“Or maybe she was shoplifting.” Lena tossed the jeans back onto the pile. She continued the search, lifting the mattress, sliding her hand between clothes, picking up shoes and putting them back in place. Will stood in the doorway, watching Lena move around the room. She seemed more sure of herself. He wanted to know what had changed. Confession was good for the soul, but her newfound attitude couldn’t be solely traced back to her revelation about Tommy. The Lena he’d left this morning was ready to burst into tears at any moment. The one thing she was sure about was Tommy’s guilt. Something else had been weighing her down, but now it was gone.

Her certainty was making him suspicious.

“What about that?” Will pointed to the bedside table. The drawer was cracked open. Lena used her gloved hand to open it the rest of the way. There was a pad of paper, a pencil, and a flashlight inside.

“You ever read Nancy Drew?” he asked, but she was ahead of him. Lena used the pencil to shade the paper on the pad.

She showed it to Will. “No secret note.”

“It was worth a try.”

“We can toss this place, but nothing’s jumping out at me.”

“No pink book bag.”

She stared at him. “Someone told you Allison had a pink book bag?”

“Someone told me she had a car, too.”

“A rusted red Dodge Daytona?” she guessed. She must have heard about the BOLO Faith put on the car this morning.

“Let’s try the bathroom,” he suggested.

He followed her up the hallway. Again, Will let her conduct the search. Lena opened the medicine cabinet. There was the usual array of lady things: feminine aids, a bottle of perfume, some Tylenol and other pain relievers as well as a brush. Lena opened the packet of birth control pills. Less than a third of the pills remained. “She was current.”

He looked at the prescription label on the birth control. The logo at the top was unfamiliar. “Is this a local pharmacy?”

“School dispensary.”

“How about the prescribing doctor?”

She checked the name and shook her head. “No idea. Probably from her hometown.” Lena opened the cabinet under the sink. “Toilet paper. Tampons. Pads.” She checked inside the boxes. “Nothing that shouldn’t be here.”

Will stared at the open medicine cabinet. Something was off. There were two shelves and space at the bottom of the cabinet that served as a third. The middle shelf seemed devoted to medication. The birth control packet had been wedged in between the Motrin and Advil bottles, which were shoved to the far end of the shelf close to the hinge. The Tylenol was on the opposite side, also shoved to the end. He studied the gap, wondering if there was another bottle that was missing.

“What is it?” Lena asked.

“You should get your hand looked at.”

She flexed her fingers. The Band-Aids were looking ragged. “I’m fine.”

“It looks infected. You don’t want it getting into your bloodstream.”

She stood up from the cabinet. “The only doctor in town rents space at the children’s clinic. Hare Earnshaw.”

“Sara’s cousin.”

“He wouldn’t exactly welcome me as a patient.”

“Who do you normally see?”

“That’s not really any of your business.” She pulled back the cheap mini-blind on the window. “There’s a car parked in Mrs. Barnes’s driveway.”

“Wait for me outside.”

“Why do you—” She stopped herself. “All right.”

Will walked behind her down the hall. When he stopped outside Allison’s room, Lena turned. She didn’t say anything, but continued down the stairs. Will didn’t think there was anything of note in the girl’s room. Lena had done a thorough search. What struck Will the
most was what was missing: There was no laptop. No schoolbooks. No notebooks. No pink backpack. No sign that a college student was living here except for the enormous amount of clothing. Had someone taken Allison’s school things? More than likely, they were in her Dodge Daytona, whereabouts unknown.

Will heard the front door open and close. He looked out the window and saw Lena heading down the driveway toward the cruiser. She was on her cell phone. He knew she wasn’t calling Frank. Maybe she was looking for a lawyer.

He had more pressing things to think about right now. Will went to the bathroom and used the camera on his cell phone to take a picture of the medicine cabinet. Next, he went downstairs to Tommy Braham’s bathroom. Will stepped over the towels and underwear to get to the medicine cabinet. He opened the mirrored door. An orange plastic pill bottle was the only thing inside. Will leaned in. The words on the label were small. The light was bad. And he was dyslexic.

He used his phone to take another picture. This time, he sent the image to Faith with three question marks in the message.

Sara had kept his handkerchief again. Will looked around for something to use so his fingerprints wouldn’t get on the bottle. Tommy’s underwear and dirty sock were not an option. Will rolled off some toilet paper from the roll stuck on the back of the toilet and used it to pick up the bottle. The cap wasn’t securely screwed down. He opened the top and saw a handful of clear capsules with white powder inside. Will shook one into his hand. There was no writing on the side, no pharmaceutical logo or maker’s mark.

In movies, cops always tasted the white powders they found. Will wondered why drug dealers didn’t leave piles of rat poison lying around just for this particular reason. He put the bottle on the edge of the sink so he could photograph the capsule in his hand. Then he took a closer shot of the prescription label and sent both images to Faith.

As a rule, Will stayed away from doctors. He couldn’t read them his insurance information when he called to make an appointment.
He couldn’t fill out their forms while he was sitting in the waiting room. One time, Angie had been kind enough to give him syphilis and he’d had to take a regimen of pills four times a day for two weeks. Consequently, Will knew what a prescription label looked like. There was always an official logo from the pharmacy at the top. The doctor’s name and date were listed, the Rx number, the patient’s name, the dosage information, the warning stickers.

This label seemed to have none of those things. It wasn’t even the proper size—he’d guess it was half the usual height and shorter in length. There were plenty of numbers typed across the top, but the rest of the information was written in by hand. A cursive hand, which meant Will didn’t know if he was staring at heroin or acetaminophen.

His phone rang. Faith asked, “What the hell is that?”

“I found it in Tommy’s medicine cabinet.”

“‘Seven-nine-nine-three-two-six-five-three,’” she read. “‘Tommy, do not take any of these’ is written across the middle in cursive. Exclamation point at the end. The ‘do not’ is underlined.”

Will said a silent prayer of thanks that he hadn’t tasted the white powder. “Is the handwriting feminine?”

“Looks like it. Big and loopy. Slanted to the right, so she’s right-handed.”

“Why would Tommy have a bottle of pills that said don’t take them?”

“What about the three letters at the bottom? Looks like ‘H-O-C’ or ‘H-C-C’ …?”

Will stared at the fine print in the corner of the label. The words were so blurry that his head started to ache. “I have no idea. The last photo is as tight as I can get. I’m going to get Nick to take it to the lab with the other stuff. Anything on Jason Howell?”

“He’s worse than Allison, if that’s possible. No phone. No street address, just a PO box at the school. He’s got four thousand dollars in a savings account out of a bank in West Virginia.”

“That’s interesting.”

“Not as much as you’d think. The amount’s been going down slowly over the last four years. I’d guess it’s some kind of college fund.” She told him, “He also has a car registered in his name. Ninety-nine Saturn SW. Green. I already put out a BOLO.”

That was at least something. “I’ll check at the school to see if it’s there. How are the background checks going on all the students who lived in Jason’s dorm?”

“Slow and boring. None of these kids even have parking tickets. My mother had gotten me out of a DUI and a shoplifting charge by the time I was that age.” She laughed. “Please promise me you won’t remind me of that when my children get into trouble.”

Will was too shocked to promise anything. “Did you track down the 911 audio?”

“They said they’d email it to me but it hasn’t shown up yet.” Her breath was short, and he guessed she was walking through the house. “Let me do a computer search for those initials on the pill bottle.”

“I’ll ask Gordon if his son was taking any medication.”

“Are you sure you should do that?”

“Meaning?”

“What if Tommy was selling illegal drugs?”

Will had a hard time imagining Tommy Braham as a drug kingpin. Still, he admitted, “Tommy knew everybody in town. He was always walking the streets. It’d be a perfect cover.”

“What does the dad do for a living?”

“I think he’s a lineman for Georgia Power.”

“How are they living?”

Will glanced around the crappy kitchen. “Not very well. Gordon’s truck is about ten years old. Tommy was living in a garage without a toilet. They were renting out a room to help make ends meet. The house must have been really nice thirty years ago, but they haven’t done much to keep it that way.”

“When I did the sweep on Tommy, I found a checking account at the local bank. His balance was thirty-one dollars and sixty-eight cents. Did you say the dad was in Florida?”

He saw where she was going with this. Florida was the beginning of a major drug corridor that went from the Keys up into Georgia and on to New England and Canada. “This doesn’t strike me as a drug thing.”

“That knife wound to the neck sounds gang to me.”

Will couldn’t deny she was right.

Faith asked, “What else do you have?”

“Detective Adams has seen fit to accept her part in Tommy Braham’s suicide.”

For once, Faith didn’t have a quick comeback.

“She said that Tommy didn’t kill Allison, and it’s her fault he managed to kill himself in custody, and that she’ll take all the blame.”

Faith made a thinking noise. “What’s she hiding?”

“What
isn’t
she hiding?” Will countered. “She’s lied and covered up so much that it’d be like pulling a piece of string on a ball of yarn.” He went into the kitchen, hoping to find a plastic bag. “Allison had a lot of nice clothes.”

“What was she studying in college?”

“Chemistry.”

“How do you manage to dress yourself in the morning?” Faith sounded frustrated by his slowness. “Chemistry? Synthesizing chemicals to produce more complex products, like turning pseudoephedrine into methamphetamine?”

Will found a box of Ziplocs in the last drawer he checked. “If Allison was cooking meth, or shooting it, she was being careful about it. She didn’t have any needle marks. There aren’t any pipes or drug paraphernalia around the house or in the garage. Sara will do a tox screen as part of the autopsy, but I’m not buying it.”

“And Tommy?”

“I’ll have to call Sara.” He waited for her to say something snarky about his using Sara’s name too many times.

Miraculously, Faith let the opportunity pass. “There’s no H-O-C or H-C-C in Grant County. I’ll try the number at the top of the label. Eight digits. Too long for a zip code, too short for zip-plus-four. One
digit too many for a phone number. One too little for Social Security. Let me plug it in and see if I get anything.” Will sealed the pill bottle in the plastic bag as he waited for the results.

Faith groaned. “My God, does every single search have to turn up porn?”

“It’s God’s gift to us.”

“I’d rather have a live-in nanny,” she countered. “I’m not finding anything. I can make some phone calls around the state. You know how some of the yokels are slow to enter their case files into the network. I’m just waiting around for Mama to come pick me up and take me to the hospital.”

“I’d appreciate anything you feel like doing.”

“If I watch one more home-remodeling show, I’m going to come down there and hope someone puts a knife in the back of my neck. And I’ve got the worst gas. I feel like—”

“Well, I should go now. Thanks again for your help.” Will closed his phone to end the call. He locked up the house and put the pill bottle in his Porsche.

Lena was still on the phone, but she got off when she saw Will. “Honda belongs to a Darla Jackson. She’s on parole for kiting some checks two years ago. She’s already paid it off. The charge will roll off her sheet in January.”

“Did you talk to her?”

Lena glanced over his shoulder. “I think we’re about to get our chance.”

He turned around. An elderly woman was making her way down the driveway of the house across the street. She leaned heavily on a walker with a wire basket on the front. Bright yellow tennis balls were stuck on the back legs. The front door to her house opened, and a woman dressed in a pink nurse’s uniform called, “Mrs. Barnes! You forgot your coat!”

The old woman didn’t seem concerned, though she was wearing nothing more than a thin housedress and slippers. The wind was blowing so hard that the hem kicked up as she navigated the steep
drive. Fortunately, the rubber soles of her terry cloth slippers kept her from sliding down the concrete.