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 an
d 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.”
“Initiative,” Frank mocked. “That kid’s gonna get his head shot off one day.”
Lena had known Brad for over ten years. Frank had known him even longer. They both still saw him as a goofy young boy, a teenager who looked out of place with his gun belt tightened high on his waist. Brad had put in his years in uniform and passed the right tests to garner his gold detective shield, but Lena had done this job long enough to know that there was a difference between a paperwork promotion and a street promotion. She could only hope that in a small town like Heartsdale, Brad’s lack of street smarts wouldn’t matter. He was good at filling out reports and talking to witnesses, but even after ten years behind the wheel of a squad car, he still tended to see the good in people instead of the bad.
Lena had been on the job less than a week when she’d realized that there was no such thing as a truly good person.
Herself included.
She didn’t want to waste time worrying about Brad right now. She flipped through the photographs in Allison Spooner’s wallet as Frank made his way through the forest. There was a picture of an orange tabby cat lying in a ray of sunshine, and a candid snapshot that showed Allison with a woman Lena assumed was her mother. The third photo showed Allison sitting on a park bench. On her right was a man who looked a few years younger than she was. He was wearing a baseball cap pulled down low and had his hands tucked deep into the pockets of his baggy pants. On Allison’s left was an older woman with stringy blond hair and heavy makeup. Her jeans were skintight. There was a hardness to her eyes. She could have been thirty or three hundred. All three of them sat close together. The boy had his arm around Allison Spooner’s shoulders.
Lena showed Frank the picture. He asked, “Family?”
She studied the photo, concentrating on the background. “Looks like this was taken on campus.” She showed Frank. “See the white building in the back? I think that’s the student center.”
“That girl don’t look like a college student to me.”
He meant the older blonde. “She looks local.” She had the unmistakably trashy, bleach-blond air of a town-bred girl. Fake wallet aside, Allison Spooner appeared to be several rungs up on the social ladder. It didn’t jibe that the two would be friends. “Maybe Spooner had a drug problem?” Lena guessed. Nothing crossed class lines like methamphetamine.
They’d finally made it to the main road. The back wheels of the car gave one final spin in the mud as Frank pulled onto asphalt. “Who called it in?”
Lena shook her head. “The 911 call was made from a cell phone. The number was blocked. Female voice, but she wouldn’t leave her name.”
“What’d she say?”
Lena carefully thumbed back through her notebook so the damp pages would not tear. She found the transcription and read aloud, “ ‘Female voice: My friend has been missing since this afternoon. I think she killed herself. 911 Operator: What makes you think she killed herself? Female voice: She got into a fight last night with her boyfriend. She said she was going to drown herself up by Lover’s Point.’ The operator tried to keep her on the line, but she hung up after that.”
Frank was quiet. She saw his throat work. His shoulders were slumped so low that he looked like a gangbanger holding on to the steering wheel. He’d been fighting the possibility that this was a murder since Lena got into the car.
She asked, “What do you think?”
“Lover’s Point,” Frank repeated. “Only a townie would call it that.”
Lena held the notebook in front of the heating vents, trying to dry the pages. “The boyfriend is probably the kid in the picture.”
Frank didn’t pick up on her train of thought. “So, the 911 call came in, and Brad drove out to the lake and found what?”
“The note was under one of the shoes. Allison’s ring and watch were inside.” Lena bent down again to the plastic evidence bags buried in the deep pockets of her parka. She shifted through the victim’s belongings and found the note, which she showed to Frank. “ ‘I want it over.’ ”
He stared at the writing so long she was worried he wasn’t minding the road.
“Frank?”
One of the wheels grazed the edge of the asphalt. Frank jerked the steering wheel. Lena held on to the dash. She knew better than to say anything about his driving. Frank wasn’t the type of man who liked to be corrected, especially by a woman. Especially by Lena.
She said, “Strange note for a suicide. Even a fake suicide.”
“Short and to the point.” Frank kept one hand on the wheel as he searched his coat pocket. He slid on his reading glasses and stared at the smeared ink. “She didn’t sign it.”
Lena checked the road. He was riding the white line again. “No.”
Frank glanced up and steered back toward the center line. “Does this look like a woman’s handwriting to you?”
Lena hadn’t considered the possibility. She studied the single sentence, which was written in a wide, round print. “It looks neat, but I couldn’t say if a man or woman wrote it. We could get a handwriting expert. Allison’s a student, so there are probably notes she took from classes or essays and tests. I’m sure we could find something to compare it with.”
Frank didn’t address any of her suggestions. Instead, he said, “I remember when my daughter was her age.” He cleared his throat a few times. “She used to draw circles over her i’s instead of dots. I wonder if she still does that.”
Lena kept quiet. She had worked with Frank her entire career, but she didn’t know much about his personal life beyond what most everyone else in town knew. He had two children by his first wife, but that was many wives ago. They’d moved out of town. He didn’t seem to have contact with any of them. The subject of his family was one he never broached, and right now Lena was too cold and too wired to start sharing.
She put the focus back on the case. “So, someone stabbed Allison in the neck, chained her to some cinder blocks, threw her in the lake, then decided to make it look like a suicide.” Lena shook her head at the stupidity. “Another criminal mastermind.”
Frank gave a snort of agreement. She could tell his mind was on other things. He took off his glasses and stared at the road ahead.
She didn’t want to, but she asked, “What’s going on?”
“Nothing.”
“How many years have I been riding with you, Frank?”
He made another grunting noise, but he relented easily enough. “Mayor’s been trying to track me down.”
Lena felt a lump rise in her throat. Clem Waters, the mayor of Heartsdale, had been trying for some time to make Frank’s job as interim chief a more permanent position.
Frank said, “I don’t really want the job, but there’s nobody else lining up to take it.”
“No,” she agreed. No one wanted the job, not least of all because they would n
ever in a million years match the man who’d held it before.
“Benefits are good,” Frank said. “Nice retirement package. Better health care, pension.”
She managed to swallow. “That’s good, Frank. Jeffrey would want you to take it.”
“He’d want me to retire before I have a heart attack chasing some junkie across the campus quad.” Frank took out his flask and offered it to Lena. She shook her head and watched him take a long pull, one eye on the road as he tilted back his head. Lena’s focus stayed on his hand. There was a slight tremor to it. His hands had been shaking a lot lately, especially in the morning.
Without warning, the rain’s steady beat turned into a harsh staccato. The noise echoed in the car, filling up the space. Lena pressed her tongue to the roof of her mouth. She should tell Frank now that she wanted to resign, that there was a job in Macon waiting for her if she could bring herself to make the leap. She had moved to Grant County to be near her sister, but her sister had died almost a decade ago. Her uncle, her only living relative, had retired to the Florida Panhandle. Her best friend had taken a job at a library up North. Her boyfriend lived two hours away. There was nothing keeping Lena here except inertia and loyalty to a man who had been dead for four years and probably hadn’t thought she was a good cop anyway.
Frank used his knees to hold the steering wheel steady as he screwed the cap back on the flask. “I won’t take it unless you say it’s okay.”
She turned her head in surprise. “Frank—”
“I mean it,” he interrupted. “If it’s not okay with you, then I’ll tell the mayor to shove it up his ass.” He gave a harsh chuckle that rattled the phlegm in his chest. “Might let you come along to see the look on the little prick’s face.”
She made herself say, “You should take the job.”
“I don’t know, Lee. I’m gettin’ so damn old. Children are all grown up. Wives have moved on. Most days, I wonder why I even get out of bed.” He gave another raspy chuckle. “Might find me in the lake one day with my watch in my shoes. But for real.”
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