Will put the phone back on the hook. “I’ll have Faith do a trace tomorrow. My bet is that it was a throwaway phone. Do you remember anything else about Julie? Anything she said?”
“I could tell that she was calling from a bathroom,” Sara told him. “She said that Tommy had texted her that he was in jail. Maybe you can get the transcript from his phone?”
“Faith can do that, too,” he offered. “What about Julie’s voice? Did she sound young? Old?”
“She sounded really young and really country.”
“Country how?”
Sara smiled. “Not like me. At least I hope not. She sounded more like the wrong side of the tracks. She used the word ‘you’uns.’ ”
“That’s mountain talk.”
“Is it? I’m not up on dialects.”
“I had an assignment in Blue Ridge a while back,” he explained. “Do you hear that word around here much?”
She shook her head. “Not really. Not that I can remember.”
“All right, so we’ve got someone young, probably a transplant from north Georgia or Appalachia. She told you that she was Tommy’s friend. We’ll dump his phone line and see if they’ve ever called each other.”
“Julie Smith,” Sara said, wondering why it had never occurred to her that the girl might be using an alias.
“Maybe the phone taps will give us something.”
Sara indicated the photocopies she’d made. “Were these helpful?”
“Not in the way you’re thinking.” He thumbed through the pages. “I asked the station secretary, Mrs. Simms, to fax these to Faith. Can you look at them for me?”
Sara glanced through the pages. There were handwritten numbers at the top. She stopped on the eleventh page. Someone had written the number twelve in the corner. The two was backward. “Did you number these?”
“Yes,” he said. “When I got them back from Mrs. Simms, one of the pages was missing. Page eleven. The page right after Detective Adams’s field report.”
Sara thumbed back to the second page. The two was written the correct way. She checked the third and fifth page. Both numbers were facing the correct direction. The pen had been pressed so hard that the paper felt embossed.
He asked, “Can you remember what’s missing?”
Sara went through them again, concentrating on the content instead of the numbering. “The 911 transcript.”
“You’re sure?”
“There was another page from Lena’s notebook. It was taped on the sheet of paper by itself. She wrote down the contents of the 911 call.”
“Can you remember what it said?”
“I know that it was a woman’s voice. I can’t really remember the rest.”
“Did they trace the number she called from?”
“I didn’t see anything indicating they had.” She shook her head. “Why can’t I remember what else it said?”
“We can get it from the call center.”
“Unless they managed to lose it.”
“It’s no big deal,” he told her. “You got the file from Frank, right?”
“From Carl Phillips.”
“The booking officer?”
“Yes. Did you talk to him tonight?”
“He’s gone on vacation with his family. No idea when he’ll be back. No phone. No cell. No way to get in touch with him.”
Sara felt her mouth drop open.
“I doubt he’s really gone. They’re probably keeping him away from me. He might even be at the station tomorrow, hiding in plain sight.”
“He’s the only African American on the force.”
Will laughed. “Thanks for the tip. That narrows things down considerably.”
“I can’t believe they’re doing this.”
“Cops don’t like to be questioned. They circle their wagons, even if they know it’s wrong.”
She wondered if Jeffrey had ever done anything like this. If he had, it was only because he wanted to be the one to clean out his own house. He would never let someone come in and do his job for him.
Will asked, “Where did you make the copies?”
“At the front of the room.”
“The copier that’s on the table by the coffeemaker?”
“That’s right.”
“Did you get some coffee?”
“I didn’t want to dawdle.” Everyone had been staring at her like she was a monster. Sara’s only goal had been to make the copies and get out of there as soon as possible.
“So, you’re standing by the copier waiting for the pages to come out. That looked like an old machine. Does it make a noise?”
She nodded, wondering where this was going.
“Like a whirring or a clunking?”
“Both,” she answered, and she could hear the sound in her head.
“How much coffee was left in the pot? Did anyone come up?”
She shook her head. “No. The pot was full.” The machine was older than the copier. She could smell the grounds burning.
“Did anyone talk to you?”
“No. No one would even look at—” She saw herself standing by the copier. The machine was old, the kind you had to feed the pages into one at a time. She had read the file to keep from staring aimlessly at the wall. “Oh.”
“What do you remember?”
“I skimmed the 911 transcript while I was waiting for the copier to warm up.”
“What did it say?”
She could see herself standing back in the station reading the files. “The woman called it a possible suicide. She said she was worried her friend had done something.” Sara narrowed her eyes, trying to force the memory to come. “She was worried Allison was going to kill herself because she’d gotten into a fight with her boyfriend.”
“Did she say where she thought Allison was?”
“Lover’s Point,” she recalled. “That’s what town people call it. It’s the cove where Allison was found.”
“What’s it like?”
“A cove.” Sara shrugged. “It’s romantic if you’re out for a walk, but not in the pouring rain and cold.”
“Is it secluded?”
“Yes.”
“So, according to this caller, Allison got into a fight with her boyfriend. The caller was worried Allison was suicidal. The caller also knew she was going to be at Lover’s Point.”
“It was probably Julie Smith. Is that what you’re thinking?”
“Maybe, but why? The caller wanted to bring attention to Allison’s murder. Julie Smith was trying to help Tommy Braham get away with murder. They seem to have opposite goals.” He paused. “Faith is trying to track her down, but we’re going to need more than a disconnected number to find her.”
“Frank and Lena are probably thinking the same thing,” Sara guessed. “That’s why they hid the transcript. They either don’t want you to talk to her or they want to talk to her first.”
Will scratched his cheek. “Maybe.” He was obviously considering another option. For her part, Sara could not get past Marla Simms hiding information in a formal investigation. The old woman had worked at the station longer than anyone could remember.
Will sat up on the couch. He thumbed through the pages on the coffee table. “Mrs. Simms took it upon herself to send some extra information. I had Agent Mitchell scan these in so I could print them out.” He found what he was looking for and handed it to Sara. She recognized the form, a two-page incident report. Patrolmen filled out dozens of these a week to notate cases where they had been called in but no arrest had been made. They were useful to have in case something bad happened later, sort of like a progress report on a person or an area of town.
Will said, “These are incident reports documenting Tommy’s run-ins with the law.” He indicated the pages in Sara’s hands. “This one talks about a girl he got into a screaming match with at the roller rink.”
She saw there was a yellow dot in the corner of the report.
He asked, “Did you ever know Tommy to hav
e a temper?”
“Never.” Sara checked through the other incident reports. There were two more, each two stapled pages, each with a dot from a colored marker in the corner. One was red. The other was green.
She looked back up at Will. “Tommy was pretty even-keeled. Kids like that tend to be very sweet.”
“Because of their mental state?”
Sara stared at him, thinking back on their conversation in the car. “Yes. He was slow. Very gullible.”
Much like Sara.
She handed a different report back to Will, showing it to him upside down. She pointed to the middle of the page where Carl Phillips had described the incident. “Did you read this part?”
She watched Will’s eyes go to the red dot. “The barking dog. Tommy started screaming at his neighbor. The woman called the cops.”
“Right.” She took the third report and handed it to him in the right direction. “Then there’s this.”
Again, his eyes went not to the words, but to the colored dot. “Loud music reported a few days ago. Tommy yelled at the officer.”
She was silent, waiting for him to send out another feeler.
He took his time, finally asking, “What are you thinking?”
She was thinking he was incredibly clever. Sara looked at the folders, the markers. He color-coded everything. His penmanship was awkward, like a child’s. He’d written the number two backward, but not with any consistency. He couldn’t tell whether a page was upside down or not. Sara might not have even noticed under different circumstances. Hell, she hadn’t noticed the last time she’d spent time with him. He’d been in her home. She had watched him work and never realized there was a problem.
He joked, “Is this some kind of test?”
“No.” She couldn’t do this to him. Not like this. Maybe not ever. “I was looking at the dates.” She shuffled through the forms to give herself something to do. “All the incidents happened within the last few weeks. Something must have set him off. Tommy didn’t have a temper until recently.”
“I’ll see what I can find.” He took back the pages and stacked them on the table. He was nervous, and he was not stupid. He had spent a lifetime looking for cues, searching for tells and ticks, so that he could keep his secret hidden.
Sara put her hand on his arm. “Will—”
He stood up, moving out of her reach. “Thank you, Dr. Linton.”
Sara stood, too. She fumbled for something to say. “I’m sorry I couldn’t help more.”
“You’ve been great.” He walked to the door and held it open for her. “Please thank your mother for her hospitality.”
Sara left before she was pushed out. She got to the bottom of the steps and turned around, but Will had already gone inside.
“Good Lord,” Sara mumbled as she walked across the wet grass. She’d actually managed to make Will feel more uncomfortable than her mother had.
The distant sound of a car came from up the road. Sara watched a police cruiser roll by. This time, the cop behind the wheel did not tip his hat at her. In fact, he seemed to glare at her.
Will had warned her this would happen, that the town would turn against her. Sara hadn’t thought the time would come so quickly. She laughed at herself, the circumstances, as she crossed the driveway and went into the house. Will might have trouble reading the words on a page, but he was pretty damn good at reading people.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Jason Howell paced back and forth across his tiny dorm room, the shuffling of his feet blending with the shushing of the rain outside his window. Papers were strewn across the floor. His desk was cluttered with open books and empty Red Bull cans. His ancient laptop made a sound like an exhausted sigh as it went to sleep. He needed to be working, but his brain was spinning in his head. Nothing could hold his attention for more than a few minutes—not the broken lamp on his desk or the emails flooding his inbox and certainly not the paper he was supposed to be working on.
Jason rested his palm just below the keyboard on the laptop. The plastic was hot to the touch. The fan that cooled the motherboard had started clicking a few weeks ago, around the same time he’d nearly gotten a third-degree burn on his legs from keeping the computer on his lap. He guessed there was something bad happening between the battery and the charger plugged into the wall. Even now there was a slight tinge of burning plastic in the air. Jason grabbed the plug but stopped short of yanking it out of the socket. He chewed the tip of his tongue as he stared at the snaking electrical cord in his hand. Did he want the machine to overheat? A dead laptop was a life-altering catastrophe. Maybe his work would be lost, his footnotes and research and the last year of his life melting into one giant lump of stinking plastic.
And then what?
He didn’t have any friends left. Everyone in the dorm avoided him when he walked down the hall. Nobody talked to him in class or asked to borrow his notes. He hadn’t been out for a drink in months. Except for his professors, Jason couldn’t recall one meaningful conversation he’d had with anyone since before Easter break.
Anyone but Allison, but that didn’t count. They weren’t really talking lately. All they did was end up screaming at each other about the stupidest things—who was supposed to order the pizza, who forgot to shut the door. Even the sex was bad. Confrontational. Mechanical. Disappointing.
Jason couldn’t blame Allison if she hated him right now. He couldn’t do anything right. His paper was a mess. His grades had started to slip. He was running out of money from his grandfather’s trust. Papa had left him twelve thousand dollars to supplement Jason’s scholarships and loans for school. At the time, the number had seemed enormous. Now that Jason was a year into his graduate program, it seemed like a pittance. And that pittance was getting smaller every day.
No wonder he was so depressed he barely had the strength to raise his head.
What he really wanted was Allison. No, scratch that—he wanted the Allison he had known for one year and eleven months. The one who smiled when she saw him. The one who didn’t burst into tears every five minutes and yell at him for being a bastard when Jason asked her why she was sad.
“Because of you,” she would say, and who wanted to hear that? Who wanted to be blamed for somebody else’s misery when you were knee-deep in your own?
And Jason was miserable. It radiated off him like the heat lamp over the french fries at McDonald’s. He’d lost track of the last time he’d showered. He couldn’t sleep. Nothing could make his brain shut down long enough for rest. As soon as he lay down, his eyelids started going up and down like a lazy yo-yo. Darkness tended to bring it all fresh into his mind, and before long that monster weight of loneliness started pressing on his chest so that he felt like he couldn’t breathe.
Not that Allison cared. He could be dead right now for all she knew. He hadn’t seen another human being since the dorm cleared out for Thanksgiving break three days ago. Even the library had closed early on Sunday, the last stragglers clawing at the steps as the staff finally locked the doors. Jason had watched them go from his window, wondering if they were going to be alone, if they had anyone to spend their holiday with.
Except for the constant hum of the Cartoon Network and Jason’s occasional mumblings to himself, the place was completely silent. Even the janitor hadn’t shown his face in days. Jason probably wasn’t supposed to be in the building. The heat had been turned off when the last students left. He was sleeping in his warmest clothes, holed up under his winter coat. And the one person who was supposed to care about this evidently didn’t give a shit.
Allison Spooner. How had he fallen in love with a girl who had such a stupid name?
She had called him like crazy for days, and then yesterday—nothing. Jason had watched his phone light up each time with her caller ID and each time he hadn’t answered it. Her messages were all the same: “Hey, call me.” Would it kill her to say something else? Would it kill her to say that she missed him? He had conversations in his head where he asked h
er these questions and she said, “You know what? You’re right. I should be a better girlfriend.”
Conversations. More like fantasies.
For three days, all the phone did was ring. He started to worry that Allison’s caller ID would get etched into the screen on his phone. He’d watched the bars for the battery indicator disappear one by one. With each bar, he told himself he would answer the phone if she called before the next one disappeared. Then it would blink off with no call and he’d say the next one. Then the next one. Finally, the phone had turned itself off while he was sleeping. Jason had panicked as he searched for the charger. He’d plugged it into the wall and—nothing.
Her silence was loud and clear. You didn’t give up on somebody like that if you loved them. You kept calling. You left messages that said something more deep and personal than “Hey, call me.” You apologized. You didn’t send a stupid IM every twenty minutes saying “where r u?” You banged on their door and yelled at the top of your lungs for them to please, please see you.
Why had she given up on him?
Because he didn’t have any balls. That’s what she had told him the last time they talked. Jason wasn’t man enough to do what needed to be done. He wasn’t man enough to take care of her. Maybe she was right. He was afraid. Every time they talked about what they were going to do, he felt like his intestines were squeezing up on him. He wished that he had never talked to that asshole from town. He wished that he could take it all back—everything they had done over the past two weeks. Allison acted like she was fine with it, but he knew she was afraid, too. It wasn’t too late. They could back out of this. They could pretend like it didn’t happen. If only Allison would see that there was no good way out. Why was Jason the only person in this whole damn mess who seemed to be cursed with a conscience?
Suddenly, there was a noise outside. He threw open the door and went into the hallway. Jason stood in the dark, glancing around like a madman. No one was there. No one was watching him. He was just being paranoid. Considering the number of Red Bulls he’d chugged and the two bags of Cheetos that were sitting like a brick in his stomach, it was no wonder he was feeling wired.
The Will Trent Series 7-Book Bundle Page 140