“What about door number three?” Will asked.
“Wife beater.”
“I am not!” came a muffled shout from behind the door.
Knox silently nodded to Will. “Third time he’s been locked up for it. She won’t testify—”
“Goddamn right!” the man screamed.
“He’s covered in his own puke, so I’m gonna have to hose him down if you wanna talk to him.”
“I hate to ask …” Will shrugged. “It might help expedite this so we can all get back to our lives. My wife’s gonna kill me if I’m not home for the holiday.”
“Know whatcha mean.” Knox motioned Will to the next cell. The door was open. “This is it.”
Tommy Braham’s blood had been cleaned up, but the red stain on the concrete floor told the story. His feet would have been toward the door, head back. Maybe he was lying on his side, arm out in front of him. Will guessed from the circumference of the stain that Tommy had not just stopped at one wrist. He had cut open both to make sure the job was done right.
Will stepped into the cell, feeling a slight sense of claustrophobia. He took in the cinder-block-lined walls, the metal bed frame with its thin mattress. The toilet and sink were built as one stainless steel unit. The bowl looked clean, but the smell of sewage was pungent. Beside the sink was a toothbrush, a metal cup, and a small tube of toothpaste like the kind you’d get at a hotel. Will wasn’t superstitious, but he was keenly aware that Tommy Braham had, in his misery, taken his life here less than eight hours ago. The feel of his death still lingered.
“ ‘Not me,’ ” Knox said.
Will turned around, wondering what he meant.
Knox nodded toward the faded wall. “That’s what he wrote. ‘Not me.’ ” He took on a knowing tone. “If it wasn’t you, buddy, then why’d you kill yourself?”
Will had never found it useful to ask dead men to explain their motivations, so he threw the question back to Knox. “Why do you think he kept insisting he didn’t kill Allison Spooner?”
“Told you.” Knox touched the side of his head. “Not right up here.”
“Crazy?”
“Nah, just stupider than shit.”
“Too stupid to know how to kill somebody?”
“Hell, I wish there was such a thing. Wouldn’t have to keep such a close eye on the wife during that time of month.” He gave a loud laugh, and Will forced himself to join in, pushing away thoughts of Tommy lying on the floor of this cell, slicing and slicing the ink cartridge across his wrist, trying to draw blood. How long would it take before the flesh opened? Would the skin get hot from the friction? Would the metal ink cartridge start to get warm? How long would it take for enough blood to leave his body so that his heart stopped?
Will turned back to the faded letters on the wall. He didn’t want to break this new, if false, camaraderie with Knox. “Did you know Allison Spooner?”
“She worked at the diner. All of us knew her.”
“What was she like?”
“Good girl. Got the plates out fast. Didn’t stand around yapping too much.” He looked down at the floor, shaking his head. “She was good-lookin’, too. I guess that’s what caught Tommy’s eye. Poor thing. She probably thought he was harmless.”
“Did she have any friends? A boyfriend?”
“I guess it was just Tommy. Never saw anybody else around her.” He shrugged. “Not like I was paying attention. Wife don’t like it when my eye wanders.”
“Did you see Tommy at the diner a lot?”
Knox shook his head. Will could see his compliance was waning.
“Can I talk to the wife beater?”
“I didn’t touch her!” the prisoner screamed back, slamming his hand against the cell door.
“Thin walls,” Will noted. Knox was leaning against the door, arms crossed. His shirt pocket was bunched up, a silver pen clipped to the material. “Hey, can I borrow your pen?”
Knox touched the clip. “Sorry, this’n’s the only one I got.”
Will recognized the Cross logo. “Nice.”
“Chief Tolliver gave ’em to us the Christmas before he passed.”
“All of you?” Knox nodded. Will gave a low whistle. “That must’ve been expensive.”
“They sure ain’t cheap.”
“It takes a special cartridge, right? A metal one?”
Knox opened his mouth to respond, then caught himself.
Will asked, “Who else got one?”
Knox’s lip curled up in a sneer. “Fuck you.”
“That’s all right. I can ask Sara about it when I see her later.”
Knox stood up straight, blocking the door. “You better be careful, Agent Trent. Last guy who was in this cell didn’t end up too well.”
Will smiled. “I think I can take care of myself.”
“That a fact?”
Will forced a grin. “I hope so, because you seem to be threatening me.”
“You think?” Knox banged on the open cell door. “You hear that, Ronny? Mr. GBI here says I’m threatening him.”
“What’s that, Larry?” the wife beater shouted back. “I can’t hear nothing through these thick walls. Not a goddamn thing.”
Will sat in the interrogation room, trying to breathe through his mouth as he stared at the photocopied pages Sara had given him. Officer Knox had rescinded his offer to hose down the wife beater. Will had endured the man’s stench for twenty minutes before giving up on interrogating him. In Atlanta, Ronny Porter would have sung his way to freedom, giving Will any information he had in order to get out of jail. Small towns were different. Instead of trying to cop a plea, Porter had defended every officer in the building. He’d even waxed poetic on Marla Simms, who apparently used to be his Sunday school teacher.
Will spread out the files, trying to put them into some sort of order. Tommy Braham’s confession was handwritten, the copy dark from the yellow paper. He set that aside. The police report was like every form Will had ever handled at the GBI. Boxes provided space for dates, times, weather, and other details of the crime, to be written in by hand. The suicide note had caught the light from the copier, the letters blurring.
There were two other pages that were photocopies of notepaper from a small pad, the sort of thing most cops carried in their back pocket. Four sheets of the smaller paper had been lined up to fit on one copied page. In all, there were eight pages that had been torn from the notepad. Will studied the positioning. He could see faint marks where the lined paper had been taped to a bigger sheet for copying. Instead of jagged edges at the top where the paper had been ripped from the spiral, there was a clean line as if someone had used scissors to cut them out. This he found strangest of all—not just because cops didn’t tend to be neat, but because he had never in his career known a police officer to tear pages out of their notebook.
The arrest warrant was the last page in the pile, but this part of the process, at least, was computerized. All the spaces were printed in a typewriter font. The suspect’s name was at the top, his address and home phone. Will found the lined box for Tommy’s employer. He leaned over the form, squinting his eyes as he held his finger under the tiny letters. His mouth moved as he tried to sound out the word. Will was tired from the monotonous drive. The letters mixed around. He blinked, wishing there was more light in the room.
Sara Linton had been right about one thing. She had sat across from Will for a solid hour and not realized that he was dyslexic.
His phone rang, the noise startling him in the small space. He recognized Faith Mitchell’s number. “Hey, partner.”
“You were going to call me when you got there.”
“Things have been busy,” he said, which was sort of the truth. Will had always been bad with directions, and there were parts of Heartsdale between Main Street and the interstate that weren’t on his GPS.
She asked, “How’s it going?”
“I’m being treated with the utmost respect and care.”
“I wouldn
’t drink anything unless it’s in a sealed bottle.”
“Good advice.” He sat back in the chair. “How’re you holding up?”
“I’m about to kill somebody or myself,” she admitted. “They’re going to do the C-section tomorrow afternoon.” Faith was diabetic. Her doctors wanted to control the delivery so her health wasn’t jeopardized. She started to give Will the details of the procedure, but he dazed out after she used the word “uterus” the second time. He studied his reflection in the two-way mirror, wondering if Mrs. Simms was right about his hair looking better now that he’d let it grow out.
Finally, Faith wound down her story. She asked, “What’s this fax you sent me?”
“Did you get all twelve pages?”
He could hear her counting the sheets. “I’ve got seventeen total. All from the same number.”
“Seventeen?” He scratched his jaw. “Are some of them duplicates?”
“Nope. Got a police report, xeroxed field notes—pages are cut out of the notebook, that’s weird. You don’t take pages out of your field book—and …” He assumed she was reading Tommy Braham’s confession. “Did you write this?”
“Very funny,” Will said. He hadn’t been able to make out the words when Sara had shown him the confession in the car, but even to Will, the looped, cartoonish shape of Tommy Braham’s handwriting seemed off. “What do you think?”
“I think this reads like one of Jeremy’s book reports when he was in first grade.”
Jeremy was her teenage son. “Tommy Braham is nineteen.”
“What is he, retarded?”
“You’re supposed to call it ‘intellectually disabled’ now.”
She made a snorting sound.
“Sara says his IQ was around eighty.”
Faith sounded suspicious, but she had been prickly the last time about Sara inserting herself into their case. “How does Sara happen to know his IQ?”
“She used to treat him at her clinic.”
“Did she apologize for dragging you below the gnat line on your vacation?”
“She doesn’t know it’s my vacation, but, yes, she apologized.”
Faith was quiet for a moment. “How’s she doing?”
He thought not of Sara, but of the scent she had left on his handkerchief. She didn’t strike him as the type of woman who would wear perfume. Maybe it was one of those fancy soaps that women used to wash their faces.
“Will?”
He cleared his throat to cover for his silence. “She’s okay. She was very upset, but mostly I think she has a good reason.” He lowered his voice. “Something doesn’t feel right about any of this.”
“You think Tommy didn’t kill the girl?”
“I don’t know what I think yet.”
Faith went quiet; never a good sign. He had been partnered with her for over a year, and just when Will thought he was learning to read her moods, she had gotten pregnant and the whole thing went out of whack. “All right,” she said. “What else did Sara tell you?”
“Some stuff about the man who killed her husband.” Will knew that Faith had already gone behind Sara’s back to find out the details. She didn’t know about Lena Adams’s involvement, or the fact that Sara believed Lena was responsible for Tolliver’s death. Will stood up and walked into the hall, making sure Knox wasn’t there. Still, he kept his voice low as he relayed the story Sara had told him about her husband’s murder. When he finished, Faith let out a long breath of air.
“Sounds like Sara has a hard-on for this Adams woman.”
Will sat back down at the table. “That’s one way to put it.” He did not share the part of Sara’s story that had stuck out the most. The entire time she spoke, she had not once uttered Jeffrey Tolliver’s name. She had only referred to him as “my husband.”
Faith offered, “I think priority number one is tracking down this Julie Smith. She either saw the murder or heard about it. Do you have her cell phone number?”
“I’ll get it from Sara later.”
“Later?”
Will ignored the question. Faith would want an explanation for why he was having dinner at Sara’s house, and then she’d want a report on how it went. “Where does—did—Tommy Braham work?”
She shuffled through the pages. “Says here he was employed at the bowling alley. Maybe that’s why he killed himself—to keep from having to spray Lysol in shoes all day.”
Will didn’t laugh at the joke. “They charged him with murder right off the bat. Not assault, not attempted murder, not resisting.”
“Where did they get murder? Am I missing the autopsy report? Lab reports? Forensic filings?”
Will laid it out for her. “Brad Stephens is stabbed. He’s airlifted to the hospital. The first thing Adams does is take Tommy Braham back to the station and get his confession for the Spooner girl’s murder.”
“She didn’t go to the hospital with her partner?”
“I’m assuming the chief did. He’s been a no-show.”
“Did Braham have a lawyer present?” Faith answered her own question. “No lawyer would let him make this confession.”
“A murder charge resonates more than assault. It could be political—get the town behind them so no one cares that a killer has killed himself.” Will had told Sara the same thing. If Tommy Braham was Allison Spooner’s murderer, then people would assume justice had already been served.
Faith said, “This confession is strange. He’s got details out the wazoo until the murder. Then, it’s taken care of in three lines. ‘I got mad. I had a knife on me. I stabbed her once in the neck.’ Not much of an explanation.” She added, “And there would be a boatload of blood from something like this. Remember that case where the woman’s throat was slit?”
Will cringed at the memory. Blood had sprayed everywhere—the walls, ceiling, floor. It was like walking into a paint booth. “Allison Spooner was stabbed in the back of the neck. Maybe that’s different?”
“That brings up another good point. One stab wound doesn’t sound mad. That sounds very controlled to me.”
“Detective Adams was probably in a hurry to get back to the hospital. Maybe she was planning a follow-up interview. Maybe Chief Wallace was going to have a go at Tommy later.”
“That’s not how you do it. If a suspect is talking, especially confessing, you get every detail.”
“They haven’t shown much of an aptitude for policing so far. Sara thinks Adams is sloppy, that she plays it too loose. From what I’m seeing with the Spooner investigation, she’s right about that.”
“Is she pretty?”
For a moment, Will thought she was asking about Sara. “I haven’t seen a picture yet, but the cop I spoke with said she was good-looking.”
“Young girl, college aged. The press is going to be all over this, especially if she’s pretty.”
“Probably,” he acknowledged. Yet another motive for putting Allison Spooner’s murderer behind bars as quickly as possible. “The girl worked at the local diner. I gather a lot of the cops in the station knew her.”
“That could explain why they made such a quick arrest.”
“It could,” he agreed. “But, if Sara is right and Tommy didn’t kill the girl, then we’ve still got a murderer out there.”
“When is the autopsy?”
“Tomorrow.” Will didn’t tell her that Sara had volunteered to do the procedure.
“It all seems very convenient,” Faith pointed out. “Dead girl found in the morning, murderer arrested before noon, found dead in his cell before suppertime.”
“If Brad Stephens doesn’t make it, they’re probably not going to let Tommy Braham be buried in the city limits.”
“When are you going to the hospital?”
“I hadn’t planned on it.”
“Will, a cop is in the hospital. If you’re within a hundred miles, you go see him. You hang around and comfort his wife or his mother. You give blood. It’s what cops do.”
Will chewed his lip
. He hated hospitals. He had never understood why it was necessary to hang around them unless you had to.
“Isn’t Brad Stephens a potential witness, too?”
Will laughed. Unless Stephens was a Boy Scout, he doubted the man would help shed any light on what happened yesterday. “I’m sure he’ll be as courteous as he is forthcoming.”
“You still have to go through the motions.” She paused before continuing. “And since I’m being a cop, let me state the obvious: Tommy killed himself for the same reason he ran when they confronted him in the garage. He was guilty.”
“Or he wasn’t, and he knew no one would believe him.”
“You sound like a defense lawyer,” Faith noted. “What about the rest of this stuff? It looks like the first few pages of a novel.”
“What do you mean?”
“The handwritten notes from Spooner’s crime scene. ‘Found on the shore approximately thirty yards from the tide line and twelve feet from a large oak is a pair of white Nike Sport tennis shoes, sized women’s eight. Inside the left, resting on the sole, which is blue with the word “Sport” emblazoned where the heel rests, is a yellow-gold ring.…’ I mean, come on. This isn’t War and Peace. It’s a field report.”
“Did you get the suicide note?”
“ ‘I want it over.’ ” She had the same reaction as Will. “Not exactly the ‘goodbye cruel world’ you’d expect. And the paper is torn from a larger sheet. That’s strange, right? You’re going to write a suicide note and you tear it from another sheet of paper?”
“What else did you get? You said there were seventeen pages.”
“Incident reports.” She read aloud, “Police were called to Skatey’s roller rink on Old Highway 5 at approximately twenty-one hundred hours …” Her voice trailed off as she skimmed the words. “All right. Last week, Tommy got into a fight with a girl whose name they didn’t bother to get. He wouldn’t stop shouting. He was asked to leave. He refused. The police came and told him to leave. He left. No one arrested.” Faith was quiet again. “The second report involves a barking dog at the residence from five days ago. The last one is about loud music. This was two days ago. There’s a note on the last page where the cop who took the report makes a reminder to follow up with Tommy’s father when he gets back in town.”
The Will Trent Series 7-Book Bundle Page 135