Broken (37 page)

“Mrs. Barnes!” The nurse jogged down the driveway with the coat. She was a big girl with broad shoulders and ample cleavage. She was out of breath when she finally caught up to the old woman. She wrapped the coat around her shoulders, saying, “You’ll catch your death out here.”

Lena approached the women. “Mrs. Barnes, this is Agent Trent from the Georgia Bureau of Investigation.”

Mrs. Barnes did everything but wrinkle her nose. “What do you want?”

Will felt like he was back in third grade and being yelled at for various schoolboy atrocities. “I’d like to talk to you about Allison and Tommy, if you have a minute.”

“It seems like you’ve already made up your mind about that.”

Will glanced back at her mailbox, remembering the street number from one of the incident reports. “Someone from your house called the police about Tommy’s dog barking. Your name wasn’t on the report.”

“That was me,” the nurse volunteered. “I look after Mrs. Barnes in the evenings. Usually I’m not here until seven, but she needed help with some chores and I didn’t have anything better to do.”

Will hadn’t realized how late in the day it was. He checked his cell phone and saw it was almost three o’clock. Faith had a little over an hour left before she went to the hospital. He asked the nurse, “You’re here every night?”

“Every night but Thursday, and I get the last Sunday of the month off.” Will had to slow down her words in his head to understand what she was saying. The woman had more of a twang than anyone Will had yet to meet in Grant County.

Lena took out her pen and notebook. She asked the nurse, “Can you tell me your name?”

“Darla Jackson.” She reached into her pocket and pulled out a business card. Her fingernails were bright red press-ons that complemented
her caked-on makeup. “I work out of the E-Med Building over on Highway 5.”

Lena pointed to the ancient Accord parked in front of the house. She already knew the answer, but she asked, “Is that yours?”

“Yes, ma’am. It ain’t much, but it’s paid for. I pay all my bills on time.” She gave them a meaningful look, and Will gathered that Mrs. Barnes didn’t know about the bad checks.

Lena handed Will the card. He looked down at it for a few seconds before asking Darla, “Why did you call the police about Tommy?”

She opened her mouth to answer, but Mrs. Barnes took over, directing her words toward Will. “That boy never did anybody any harm. He had the sweetest heart and the most gentle disposition.”

Will put his hands in his pockets, feeling like the cold was going to snap his fingers in two. He needed to find out more about Tommy’s sudden mood change in case Faith was right about the drugs he’d found in the kid’s medicine cabinet. “The incident report says that Tommy was yelling at someone. I take it that was you, Ms. Jackson?” The nurse nodded, and Will wondered why Darla’s name hadn’t been listed in the report. It seemed odd that the cop hadn’t recorded it along with all the other details. “Can you tell me what happened?”

“Well, first off, I didn’t know he was retarded,” she said, almost like an apology. “As a registered nurse, I try to be more compassionate with people of special needs, but that dog was just yapping its head off and Mrs. Barnes was trying to go to sleep—”

“I have terrible insomnia,” the old woman interjected.

“I guess I let my temper get the best of me. I went over there to tell him to quiet it down, and he told me he couldn’t and I said that I’d call the pound if he didn’t find a way and they’d make that dog real quiet. As in dead quiet.” She seemed embarrassed. “Next thing I know, I hear this loud noise. I look out the front window and it’s cracked. You can see I put some tape on it.” Will looked up at the house. The glass in the window had a crooked silver line of tape along the bottom. “That wasn’t in the report.”

Mrs. Barnes took over. “Lucky for us it was Carl Phillips they
sent. I taught him in the fifth grade.” She put her hand to her chest. “We all agreed it was best to handle this with Gordon when he got back from Florida.”

Will asked the nurse, “You’re here every night. Does that include Sunday night and last night?”

“Yes. I’ve been up with Mrs. Barnes for the last three days. Her new medication has been giving her an awful time with her insomnia.”

“It’s true,” the woman agreed. “I can’t even get my eyes to close.”

“Did you see anything happening over at the house? Cars coming and going? Did Tommy use his scooter for anything?”

“The bedroom’s at the back of the house,” Darla explained. “We were both back there all night on account of it’s close to the toilet.”

“Darla, please,” Mrs. Barnes warned. “There’s no need for them to hear about that.”

Lena asked, “Did either of you know Allison Spooner? She lived across the street in Tommy’s house.”

They both became more circumspect. Darla offered, “I saw her around.”

“Did you see her boyfriend?”

“Sometimes.”

“Did you know his name?”

Darla shook her head. “He was in and out a lot. I heard them screaming sometimes. Arguing. Struck me as the type of boy with a temper.”

In Will’s experience, teachers were pretty good at making accurate snap judgments of people. He asked, “What about you, Mrs. Barnes?”

“I saw him once or twice” was all she offered.

“Did you ever hear him fighting with Allison?”

She touched her fingers to her ear. “I don’t hear very well.”

Will thought she was being uncharacteristically polite, since she’d certainly heard the dog barking. Of course, not many people wanted to speak ill of the dead. He imagined Mrs. Barnes would’ve had plenty
to say about Allison Spooner last week. “Have you seen her car in the driveway recently?”

“Gordon asked her to park it in the street because it was leaking oil,” Mrs. Barnes said. “I haven’t seen it there in a while. At least not this weekend.”

“Me neither,” Darla confirmed.

“What about the boyfriend’s car? Did you notice what he was driving?”

Both women shook their heads. Again, Darla spoke. “I’m not good with those things. It was a station wagon. Green or blue. I know that’s not real helpful.”

He asked, “Did Allison ever have any friends come around? Men or women?”

Darla offered, “Just that boyfriend. He was a beady-eyed little thing.”

Will felt a drop of rain hit the top of his head. “Did you ever talk to him?”

“No, but I can spot a loser a mile away.” She gave a shockingly rough laugh. “I sure have dated plenty of ’em in my life.”

“The point is,” Mrs. Barnes interjected, “Tommy did not hurt that girl.” She glared at Lena. “And you know that.”

Lena said, “I do.”

That shut her up. She glanced back at the nurse. “I think I should go now.”

Will started, “Mrs. Barnes—”

She cut him off. “My son is a lawyer. Any more questions you have for me should be directed to him. Come, Darla. It’s time for my show.”

With that, she twisted the walker and began the slow climb back up her driveway. Darla shrugged an apology before she followed.

Will said, “I don’t think I’ve ever had an elderly woman in a walker lawyer up to me before.”

There was a buzzing in the air, like a bunch of cicadas decided to start singing at the same time. The rain didn’t fall so much as turn
into a light mist. Will blinked, feeling beads of water forming on his eyelashes.

Lena asked, “What now?”

“I guess that’s up to you.” Will looked at his phone again to check the time. Charlie would be here soon. “You can go back to the college with me or you can go look for a lawyer.”

She didn’t have to think about her answer. “My car or yours?”

T
HEY’D BARELY LEFT TAYLOR DRIVE WHEN THE SKY OPENED UP.
Visibility was short. Lena kept the speedometer just below thirty as she navigated the flooded streets. The cold was making her injured hand ache. She flexed her fingers, trying to get some blood circulating. There was definitely an infection. She felt hot and cold at the same time. A slow ache was building in the back of her head.

Still, she felt better than she’d felt in a long time. Not just because she’d taken responsibility for Tommy, but because she had found a way to get herself free one last time. And it
would
be the last time. Lena was going to do things the right way from now on. She wasn’t going to take shortcuts. She wasn’t going to take risks.

Frank couldn’t fault her for falling on her own sword, and if he did, then he could go screw himself. Will Trent had figured out everything that happened in the garage, but he couldn’t prove it without Lena and Lena wasn’t going to talk. That was her leverage over Frank. That was her ticket to freedom. If Frank wanted to drink himself to death, if he wanted to risk his life out on the street, then that was on him. She washed her hands of it.

The death of Tommy Braham was the only thing that still weighed on her. She needed to talk to a lawyer about how to handle things with the county, but she wasn’t going to fight them. She deserved to be punished. Tommy was her prisoner. Lena had just as good as handed him the means to take his life. Working the system, finding a loophole, was out of the question. Maybe Gordon Braham would sue her or maybe not. All Lena knew was that she was finished with this town. As much as she loved being a cop, as much as she craved the adrenaline rush, the feeling that she was doing a job that
hardly anybody else in the world wanted to do—or could do—she had to move on.

Will shifted in the seat beside her. He’d been standing in the rain half the day. His sweater was wet. His jeans had never really dried. You could say a lot of things about the man, but you couldn’t claim he wasn’t determined.

She asked, “When are we going to do this? My confession, I mean.”

“Why the rush?”

She shrugged. He wouldn’t understand. Lena was thirty-five years old and she was looking at having to start her life back over again from scratch in the worst job market since the Great Depression. She just wanted to get it over with. The not knowing was the hard part. She was getting out, but how much blood was she going to have to leave on the table?

He told her, “You can still work a deal.”

“You have to have something valuable to get a deal.”

“I think you do.”

She didn’t acknowledge the fact. They both knew taking down Frank would make her landing a lot softer. But Frank had leverage Will didn’t know about. For this to work, Lena had to keep her mouth closed. It was too late to back out now.

He said, “Tell me about the drug situation in town.”

The question surprised her. “There’s not much to say. Campus security handles most of the small infractions at the school—pot, a little coke, a tiny bit of meth.”

“What about in town?”

“Heartsdale is pretty upscale. Rich people are much better at hiding their addictions.” She slowed down as she came to the red light on Main Street. “Avondale is all right, about what you’d expect—mostly middle-class people, working moms smoking meth after they put the kids to bed. Madison is the sore spot. Very poor. High unemployment, one hundred percent federal lunch assistance for all the kids. We’ve got a couple of small gangs running meth. They tend to kill each other, not civilians. There’s not much money in the police
budget for setting up sting operations. We catch them when we can, but they’re like cockroaches. You take out one and there are ten more waiting to take their place.”

“Do you think Tommy might have been dealing drugs?”

Her laugh was genuine. “Are you kidding me?”

“No.”

“Absolutely not.” She shook her head, vehement. “If he was, Mrs. Barnes would’ve beat Nurse Darla to the phone. There were too many people in his life who were watching him too closely.”

“What about Allison? Could she have been using?”

Lena considered the question more seriously. “We haven’t uncovered anything that says drugs with her. She was barely getting by, living in a dump of a house. Her grades were good. She hadn’t missed a day of school. If she was selling drugs, she was doing a bad job, and if she was using drugs, she was holding on pretty well.”

“All good points.” He changed the subject. “It’s really convenient that Jason Howell died before we could question him.”

She stared up at the light, wondering if she should just run it. “I guess the killer was afraid he would talk.”

“Maybe.”

“Did Sara find anything?”

“Nothing remarkable.”

Lena glanced at Will. He was good at leaving things out.

He shrugged. “We’ll see what she finds in the autopsies.”

The light finally turned. Lena wrenched the wheel to the side. The back tires slipped as she pressed on the gas. “Listen, I know you’re sleeping with her.”

Will gave a surprised laugh. “All right.”

“It’s not a bad thing,” she allowed, even though it hurt her to admit it. “I knew Jeffrey. I worked with him most of my career. He wasn’t the kind of guy who went around sharing his feelings, but with Sara, everyone knew the score. He’d want her to find somebody. She’s not the type of person who’s good at being alone.”

He didn’t speak for a few seconds. “I guess that’s a nice thing for you to say.”

“Yeah, well, I’m not holding my breath for her to say anything nice about me.” Lena turned the windshield wipers on high as rain slammed into the car. “I’m sure she’s told you a lot of stories.”

“What would she tell me?”

“Nothing good.”

“Is she right?”

It was Lena’s turn to laugh. “You’re always asking questions that you already know the answer to.” Her cell phone started ringing, filling the car with the opening lines of Heart’s “Barracuda.” She checked the caller ID. Frank. Lena sent the call to voice mail.

Will asked, “Why does the school have your direct number to call when there’s a problem?”

“I know a lot of the guys on the security staff.”

“From when you worked there before?”

She was about to ask him how he’d found out about that, but Lena didn’t think she’d get much of an answer. “No, I know them from working as the liaison. The guys who were there when I was are all gone.”