“It’s this way,” Frank said, as if she had not been in the station a thousand times. He used his plastic badge to open the large steel door that led to the cells. A blast of hot air met them.
Frank noticed her discomfort. “Furnace is acting up.”
Sara took off her jacket as she followed him through the door. When she was a child, the local school had sent kids on field trips to the jail as a way of scaring them away from a life of crime. The Mayberry motif of open cells with steel bars had changed over long ago. There were six steel doors on either side of a long hallway. Each had a wire-mesh glass window and a slot at the bottom through which food trays could be passed. Sara kept her focus straight ahead as she followed Frank, though out of the corner of her eye, she could see men standing at their cell doors, watching her progress.
Frank took out his keys. “I guess he stopped crying.”
She wiped away a bead of sweat that had rolled down her temple. “Did you tell him I was coming?”
He shook his head, not stating the obvious: he hadn’t been sure that Sara would show up.
He found the right key and glanced through the window to make sure Tommy wasn’t going to be any trouble. “Oh, shit,” he muttered, dropping the keys. “Oh, Christ.”
“Frank?”
He snatched up the keys off the floor, uttering more curses. “Christ,” he murmured, sliding the key into the lock, turning back the bolt. He opened the door and Sara saw the reason for his panic. She dropped her coat, the bottle of pills she’d shoved in the pocket before she left the house making a rattling sound as they hit the concrete.
Tommy Braham lay on the floor of his cell. He was on his side, both arms reaching out to the bed in front of him. His head was turned at an awkward angle as he stared blankly up at the ceiling. His lips were parted. Sara recognized him now, the man he had become not much different from the little boy he’d once been. He’d brought her a dandelion once, and turned the color of a turnip when she’d kissed his forehead.
She went to him, pressing her fingers to his neck, doing a cursory check for a pulse. He had obviously been beaten—his nose broken, his eye blackened—but that was not the reason for his death. Both his wrists were cut open, the wounds gaping, flesh and sinew exposed to the stale air. There seemed to be more blood on the floor than there was inside of his body. The smell was sickly sweet, like a butcher’s shop.
“Tommy,” she whispered, stroking his cheek. “I remember you.”
Sara closed his eyelids with her fingers. His skin was still warm, almost hot. She had driven too slowly getting here. She shouldn’t have used the restroom before leaving the house. She should have listened to Julie Smith. She should have agreed to come without a fight. She should have remembered this sweet little boy who’d brought her a weed he’d picked from the tall grass growing outside the clinic.
Frank bent down and used a pencil to drag a thin, cylindrical object out of the blood.
Sara said, “It’s an ink cartridge from a ballpoint pen.”
“He must have used it to …”
Sara looked at Tommy’s wrists again. Blue lines of ink crossed the pale skin. She had been the coroner for Grant County before she’d left for Atlanta, and she knew what a repetitive injury looked like. Tommy had scraped and scraped with the metal ink cartridge, digging into his flesh until he found a way to open a vein. And then he had done the same thing to his other wrist.
“Shit.” Frank was staring over her shoulder.
She turned around. On the wall, written in his own blood, Tommy had scrawled the words Not me.
Sara closed her eyes, not wanting to see any of this, not wanting to be here. “Did he try to recant?”
Frank said, “They all do.” He hesitated, then added, “He wrote out a confession. He had guilty knowledge of the crime.”
Sara recognized the term “guilty knowledge.” It was used to describe details that only the police and the criminal knew. She opened her eyes. “Is that why he was crying? He wanted to take back his confession?”
Frank gave a tight nod. “Yeah, he wanted to take it back. But they all—”
“Did he ask for a lawyer?”
“No.”
“How did he get the pen?”
Frank shrugged, but he wasn’t stupid. He could guess what had happened.
“He was Lena’s prisoner. Did she give him the pen?”
“Of course not.” Frank stood up, walked to the cell door. “Not on purpose.”
Sara touched Tommy’s shoulder before standing. “Lena was supposed to frisk him before she put him in the cell.”
“He could’ve hidden it in—”
“I’m assuming she gave him the pen to write his confession.” Sara felt a deep, dark hate burning in the pit of her stomach. She had been back in town for less than an hour and already she was in the middle of yet another one of Lena’s epic screwups. “How long did she interrogate him?”
Frank shook his head again, like she had it all wrong. “Couple’a three hours. Not that long.”
Sara pointed to the words Tommy had written in his own blood. “ ‘Not me,’ ” she read. “He says he didn’t do it.”
“They all say they didn’t do it.” Frank’s tone told her his patience was running thin. “Look, honey, just go home. I’m sorry about all this, but …” He paused, his mind working. “I gotta call the state, start the paperwork, get Lena back in …” He rubbed his face with his hands. “Christ, what a nightmare.”
Sara picked her coat up off the floor. “Where is his confession? I want to see it.”
Frank dropped his hands. He seemed stuck in place. Finally, he relented, leading her toward the door at the opposite end of the hall. The fluorescent lights of the squad room were harsh, almost blinding, compared to the dark cells. Sara blinked to help her eyes adjust. There was a group of uniformed patrolmen standing by the coffeemaker. Marla was at her desk. They all stared at her with the same macabre curiosity they had shown four years ago: How awful, how tragic, how long before I can get on the phone and tell somebody I saw her?
Sara ignored them because she did not know what else to do. Her skin felt hot, and she found herself looking down at her hands so that she would not see Jeffrey’s office. She wondered if they had left everything as it was: his Auburn memorabilia, his shooting trophies and family photographs. Sweat rolled down her back. The room was so stifling that she thought she might be sick.
Frank stopped at his desk. “Allison Spooner is the girl he killed. Tommy tried to make it look like a suicide—wrote a note, stuck Spooner’s watch and ring in her shoes. He would’ve gotten away with it but Le—” He stopped. “Allison was stabbed in the neck.”
“Has an autopsy been performed?”
“Not yet.”
“How do you know the stab wasn’t self-inflicted?”
“It looked—”
“How deep did it penetrate? What was the trajectory of the blade? Was there water in her lungs?”
Frank talked over her, an air of desperation to his voice. “She had ligature marks around her wrists.”
Sara stared at him. She had always known Frank to be an honorable man, yet she would have sworn on a stack of Bibles that he was lying through his teeth. “Brock confirmed this?”
He hesitated before shaking his head and shrugging at the same time.
Sara could feel herself getting angrier. She knew somewhere in the back of her mind that her anger was unreasonable, that it was coming from that dark place she had ignored for so many years, but there was no stopping it now—even if she wanted to. “Was the body weighted down in the water?”
“She had two cinder blocks chained to her waist.”
“If she floated with both hands hanging down, livor mortis could have settled into her wrists, or her hands could have rested at an angle on the bottom of the lake, making it look to the untrained eye as if she’d been tied up.”
Frank looked away. “I saw them, Sara. She was tied up.” He opened a
file on his desk and handed her a piece of yellow legal paper. The top was torn where it had been ripped away from the pad. Both sides were filled. “He copped to everything.”
Sara’s hands shook as she read Tommy Braham’s confession. He wrote in the exaggerated cursive of an elementary school student. His sentence construction was just as immature: Pippy is my dog. She was sick. She ate a sock. She needed a picture took of her insides. I called my dad. He is in Florida. Sara turned the page over and found the meat of the narrative. Allison had spurned a sexual advance. Tommy had snapped. He’d stabbed her and taken her to the lake to help cover his crime.
She looked at both sides of the paper. Two pages. Tommy had ended his life in less than two pages. Sara doubted he’d understood half of it. The only time he’d used a comma was right before a big word. These, he printed in block letters, and she could see small dots where he had pressed the pen under each letter to make sure he’d spelled it correctly.
Sara could barely speak. “She coached him.”
“It’s a confession, Sara. Most cons have to be told what to write.”
“He doesn’t even understand what he’s saying.” She skimmed the letter, reading, “ ‘I punched Allison to subdude.’ ” She stared at Frank, disbelieving. “Tommy’s IQ is barely above eighty. You think he masterminded this fake suicide? He’s less than one standard deviation from being classified as mentally disabled.”
“You got that from reading two paragraphs?”
“I got that from treating him,” Sara snapped. It had all come flooding back to her as she read the confession: Gordon Braham’s face when Sara suggested his son might be developing too slowly for his age, the tests Tommy had endured, Gordon’s devastation when Sara told him his son would never mature past a certain level. “Tommy was slow, Frank. He didn’t know how to count change. It took him two months to learn how to tie his shoes.”
Frank stared back at her, exhaustion seeping from every pore. “He stabbed Brad, Sara. He cut me in the arm. He ran from the scene.”
Her hands started shaking. Her body surged with anger. “Did you think to ask Tommy why?” she demanded. “Or were you too busy beating his face to a pulp?”
Frank glanced back at the officers by the coffee machine. “Keep your voice down.”
Sara was not going to be silenced. “Where was Lena when all this happened?”
“She was there.”
“I bet she was. I bet she was right there pulling everybody’s strings. ‘The victim was tied up. She must have been murdered. Let’s go to her apartment. Let’s get everybody around me hurt while I walk away without so much as a scratch.’ ” Sara could feel her heart shaking in her chest. “How many people does Lena have to get injured—killed—before somebody stops her?”
“Sara—” Frank rubbed his hands over his face. “We found Tommy in the garage with—”
“His father owns the property. He had every right to be in that garage. Did you? Did you have a warrant?”
“We didn’t need a warrant.”
“Have the laws changed since Jeffrey was alive?” Frank winced at the name. “Did Lena identify herself as a cop or just start waving her gun around?”
Frank didn’t answer her question, which was answer enough. “It was a tense situation. We did everything by the book.”
“Does Tommy’s handwriting match the suicide note?”
Frank blanched, and she realized he hadn’t asked the question himself. “He probably forged it, made it look like the girl’s.”
“He didn’t have the intelligence to forge anything. He was slow. Is that not getting through to you? There’s no way in hell Tommy could’ve done any of this. He wasn’t mentally capable of plotting out a trip to the store, let alone a fake suicide. Are you being willfully blind? Or just covering for Lena like you always do?”
“Mind your tone,” Frank warned.
“This is going to catch her.” Sara held up the confession like a trophy. The shaking in her hands had gotten worse. She felt hot and cold at the same time. “Lena tricked him into writing this. All Tommy wanted to do was please people. She pushed him into a confession and then she pushed him into taking his own life.”
“Now, hold on—”
“She’s going to lose her badge for this. She should go to prison.”
“Sounds to me like you care a hell of a lot more about some punk kid than a cop who’s fighting for his life.”
He could have slapped her face and the shock would have been less. “You think I don’t care about a cop?”
Frank sighed heavily. “Listen, Sweetpea. Just calm down, okay?”
“Don’t you dare tell me to calm down. I’ve been calm for the last four years.” She took her cell phone out of her back pocket and scrolled through the contacts, looking for the right number.
Frank sounded scared. “What are you going to do?”
Sara listened to the phone ring at the Georgia Bureau of Investigation’s headquarters in Atlanta. A secretary answered. She told the woman, “This is Sara Linton calling for Amanda Wagner.”
CHAPTER FOUR
Sara sat in her car in the hospital parking lot, staring out at Main Street. The facility had stopped accepting patients a year ago, but the building had looked abandoned long before that. Weeds sprouted in the ambulance bay. Windows on the upper floors were broken. The metal door that used to be propped open for smokers was bolted shut with a steel bar.
Guilt about Tommy Braham still weighed heavily on her—not just because she hadn’t remembered him, but because in the space of a few seconds, she had taken his death and used it as a launching pad for her own revenge fantasy against Lena Adams. Sara realized now that she should have just let it play out on its own instead of inserting herself into the middle. A suicide in police custody automatically triggered an investigation by the state. Frank would have followed the chain of command, calling in Nick Shelton, Grant County’s local field agent for the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. Nick would have talked to all the officers and witnesses involved. He was a good cop. In the end, he would have come to the same conclusion as Sara: that Lena had been negligent.
Unfortunately, Sara hadn’t been patient enough to trust the process. She had unilaterally decided to be town coroner again, elbowing poor Dan Brock out of the way, taking her own photographs of the scene, doing sketches of Tommy’s cell, before she allowed the body to be removed. She’d made copies of every sheet of paper she could find in the station house that referred to Tommy Braham. Even with all of this, calling Amanda Wagner, a deputy director with the GBI, was the worst of her transgressions. It was like swinging a sledgehammer at a thumbtack.
“Stupid,” she whispered, leaning her head into the steering wheel. She should be home right now looking at the marble tile her father had installed in the master bathroom, not waiting for someone straight from GBI headquarters to show up so she could unduly influence an investigation.
She leaned back against the seat, checking the clock on the dashboard. Special Agent Will Trent was almost an hour late, but she had no way of calling him. The trip from Atlanta was four hours—less if you knew you could flash your badge and talk your way out of a speeding ticket. She looked at the clock again, waiting out the flicker of 5:42 changing to 5:43.
Sara had no idea what she was going to say to him. She had talked to Will Trent probably a half dozen times while he worked a case involving one of Sara’s patients at Grady’s ER. She had shamelessly inserted herself into the investigation then, much as she was doing now. Will would probably start to wonder if she was some kind of crime scene voyeur. At the very least, he would question her obsession with Lena Adams. He would probably think that she was crazy.
“Oh, Jeffrey,” Sara whispered. What would he think of the mess she was getting herself into? What would he say about how awful being back in his adoptive town, the town he loved, made her feel? Everyone was so careful around her, so respectful. She should be grateful, but on some level, her skin crawled when
she saw the pity in their eyes.
She was so damn tired of being tragic.
The roar of an engine announced Will Trent’s arrival. He was in a beautiful old Porsche, black on black. Even in the rain, the machine looked like an animal ready to pounce.
He took his time getting out of the car, snapping the faceplate off the radio, removing the GPS receiver from the dash, and locking them both in the glove compartment. He lived in Atlanta, where you bolted your front door even if you were just going out to get your mail. Sara knew he could leave the Porsche sitting in the parking lot with the doors wide open and the worst thing that might happen is someone would come along and close them for him.
Will smiled at her as he locked the door. Sara had only ever seen him in three-piece suits, so she was surprised to find him dressed in a black sweater and jeans. He was tall, at least six-three, with a lean runner’s body and an easy gait. His sandy blond hair had grown out, no longer the military cut he’d sported when they first met. Initially, Sara had taken Will Trent for an accountant or lawyer. Even now, she had a hard time reconciling the man with the job. He didn’t walk with a cop’s swagger. He didn’t have that world-weary stare that let you know he carried a gun on his hip. Still, he was an excellent investigator, and suspects underestimated him at their own peril.
This was one of the reasons that Sara was glad that Amanda Wagner had sent Will Trent. Lena would hate him on sight. He was too soft-spoken, too accommodating—at least on first blush. She wouldn’t know what she was getting herself into until it was too late.
Will opened the car door and got in.
Sara said, “I thought you’d gotten lost.”
He gave her a half-grin as he adjusted the seat so his head wasn’t hitting the roof. “I apologize. I actually did get lost.” He looked at her face, obviously trying to get a read off her. “How are you doing, Dr. Linton?”
“I’m …” Sara let out a long sigh. She didn’t know him very well, which, oddly, made it easier for her to be honest. “Not so great, Agent Trent.”
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