“Agent Mitchell said to tell you she’s sorry she couldn’t make it.”
Faith Mitchell was his partner, a onetime patient of Sara’s. She was currently on maternity leave, fairly close to her due date. “How is she holding up?”
“With her usual forbearance.” His smile indicated the opposite. “Excuse me for changing the subject so quickly, but how can I help you?”
“Did Amanda tell you anything?”
“She told me there was a suicide in custody and to get down here as fast as possible.”
“Did she tell you about …” Sara waited for him to fill in the blank. When he didn’t, she prompted, “My husband?”
“Is that relevant? I mean, to what’s going on today?”
Sara felt her throat tighten.
Will asked, “Dr. Linton?”
“I don’t know that it’s relevant,” she finally answered. “It’s just history. Everyone you meet in this town is going to know about it. They’re going to assume that you do, too.” She felt tears sting her eyes for the millionth time that day. “I’m sorry. I’ve been so angry for the last six hours that I haven’t really thought about what I’m dropping you in the middle of.”
He leaned up and pulled a handkerchief out of his back pocket. “There’s no need to apologize. I get dropped in the middle of stuff all the time.”
Aside from Jeffrey and her father, Will Trent was the only man Sara knew who still carried a handkerchief. She took the neatly folded white cloth he handed her.
Will repeated, “Dr. Linton?”
She wiped her eyes, apologizing again. “I’m sorry. I’ve been tearing up like this all day.”
“It’s always hard to go back.” He said this with such certainty that Sara found herself really looking at him for the first time since he’d gotten into the car. Will Trent was an attractive man, but not in a way that you would quickly notice. If anything, he seemed eager to blend in with his surroundings, to keep his head down and do his job. Months ago, he’d told Sara that he’d grown up in the Atlanta Children’s Home. His mother had been killed when he was an infant. These were big revelations, yet Sara felt like she knew nothing about him at all.
His head turned toward her and she looked away.
Will said, “Let’s try it this way: You tell me what you think I should know. If I have more questions, I’ll try to ask them as respectfully as I can.”
Sara cleared her throat several times, trying to find her voice. She was thinking about her own recovery after Jeffrey’s death, the year of her life she had lost to sleep and pills and misery. None of that mattered right now. What she needed to convey to Will was that Lena Adams had a long-standing pattern of risking other people’s lives, of sometimes getting people killed.
She said, “Lena Adams was responsible for my husband’s death.”
Will’s expression did not change. “How so?”
“She got mixed up with someone …” Sara cleared her throat again. “The man who killed my husband was Lena’s lover. Boyfriend. Whatever. They were together for several years.”
“They were together when your husband died?”
“No.” Sara shrugged. “I don’t know. He had this hold on her. He beat her. It’s possible that he raped her, but—” Sara stopped, not knowing how to tell Will not to feel sorry for Lena. “She goaded him. I know this sounds horrible, but it was like Lena wanted to be abused.”
He nodded, but she wondered if he really understood.
“They had this sick relationship where they brought out the worst in each other. She put up with it until it stopped being fun, then she called in my husband to clean up her mess and …” Sara stopped, not wanting to sound as desperate as she felt. “Lena painted a target on his back. It was never proven, but her ex-lover is the man who killed my husband.”
Will said, “Police officers have a responsibility to report abuse.”
Sara felt a spark of anger, thinking he was blaming Jeffrey for not stepping in. “She denied it was happening. You know how hard domestic violence is to prove when—”
“I know,” he interrupted. “I’m sorry my words were unclear. I meant to say that the onus was on Detective Adams. Even when the officer is herself the victim of abuse, by law, it’s her duty to report it.”
Sara tried to even out her breathing. She was getting so worked up about this that she must have seemed slightly crazy. “Lena’s a bad cop. She’s sloppy. She’s negligent. She’s the reason my husband is dead. She’s the reason Tommy is dead. She’s probably the reason Brad got stabbed in the street. She gets people into situations, puts them in the line of fire, then backs away and watches the carnage.”
“On purpose?”
Sara’s throat was so dry she could barely swallow. “Does it matter?”
“I suppose not,” he admitted. “I’m guessing Detective Adams was never charged with anything in your husband’s murder?”
“She’s never held accountable for anything. She always manages to slither back under her rock.”
He nodded, staring ahead at the rain-soaked windshield. Sara had turned off the engine. She had been cold before Will came, but now their combined body heat was warm enough to cloud the windows.
Sara chanced another look at Will, trying to guess what he was thinking. His face remained impassive. He was probably the hardest person to read that Sara had ever met in her life.
She finally said, “This all sounds like a witch hunt on my part, doesn’t it?”
He took his time answering. “A suspect killed himself while in police custody. The GBI is charged with investigating that.”
He was being too generous. “Nick Shelton is the Grant County field agent. I leapfrogged over about ten heads.”
“Agent Shelton wouldn’t have been allowed to conduct the investigation. He’s got a relationship with the local force. They would’ve sent me or somebody like me to look into this. I’ve worked in small towns before. Nobody feels bad about hating the pencil pusher from Atlanta.” He smiled, adding, “Of course, if you hadn’t called Dr. Wagner directly, it might’ve taken another day to get somebody down here.”
“I’m so sorry that I dragged you away this close to a holiday. Your wife must be furious.”
“My …?” He seemed puzzled for a second, as if he’d forgotten about the ring on his finger. He covered for it badly, saying, “She doesn’t mind.”
“Still, I’m sorry.”
“I’ll live.” He turned her back to the matter at hand. “Tell me what happened today.”
This time the words came much more easily—Julie’s phone call, the rumors about Brad’s stabbing, Frank’s plea for her help. She finished with finding Tommy in the cell, seeing the words he had scrawled on the wall. “They arrested him for Allison Spooner’s murder.”
Will’s eyebrows furrowed. “They charged Braham with murder?”
“Here’s the worst part.” She handed him the photocopy she’d made of Tommy’s confession.
Will seemed surprised. “They gave this to you?”
“I have a relationship—a past relationship.” She didn’t really know how to explain why Frank had let her bulldoze her way through. “I was the town coroner. I was married to the boss. They’re used to showing me evidence.”
Will patted his pockets. “I think my reading glasses are in my suitcase.”
She dug around in her purse and pulled out her own pair.
Will frowned at the glasses, but slid them on. He blinked several times as he scanned the page, asking, “Tommy is local?”
“Born and raised.”
“How old is he?”
Sara couldn’t keep the outrage out of her tone. “Nineteen.”
He looked up. “Nineteen?”
“Exactly,” she said. “I don’t know how they think he masterminded this. He can barely spell his own name.”
Will nodded as he turned back to the confession, his eyes going back and forth across the page. Finally, he looked at Sara. “Did he h
ave some kind of reading problem, like dyslexia?”
“Dyslexia is a language disorder. But, no, Tommy wasn’t dyslexic. His IQ was around eighty. Intellectually disabled people test out at seventy or below—what used to be called retarded. Dyslexia has nothing to do with IQ. Actually, I had a couple of kids with it who ran circles around me.”
He gave his half-grin. “I find that very hard to believe.”
She smiled back, thinking he didn’t know the first thing about her. “Don’t get hung up on a couple of spelling mistakes.”
“It’s more than a couple.”
“Think about it this way: I could sit across from a dyslexic all day and never know it. With Tommy, he could talk about baseball or football until the cows came home, but get him into more complex areas of thinking and he’d be completely lost. Concepts that required logic, or processing cause and effect, were incredibly difficult for him to grasp. You couldn’t talk a dyslexic into a false confession any more easily than you could talk someone who had green eyes or red hair into saying they did something they didn’t do. Tommy was incredibly gullible. He could be talked into anything.”
Will stared at her, not speaking for a moment. “You think Detective Adams elicited a false confession?”
“Yes, I do.”
“Do you think she’s criminally negligent?”
“I don’t know the legal threshold. I just know that her actions led to his death.”
He spoke carefully, and she finally realized that he was interviewing her. “Can you tell me how you reached that conclusion?”
“Other than the fact that he scrawled ‘Not me’ in his own blood before he died?”
“Other than that.”
“Tommy is—was—very suggestible. It goes hand in hand with his low IQ. He didn’t test low enough to be classified as severely disabled, but he had some of the same attributes: the desire to please, the innocence, the gullibility. What happened today—the note, the shoes, the botched cover-up. On the surface, it seems like the kind of thing a person who is slow or stupid might do, but it’s all too complicated for Tommy.” She tried to listen to herself from Will’s perspective. “I know this sounds like I’m hell-bent on going after Lena, and obviously I am, but that doesn’t mean that what I’m saying isn’t scientific fact. I had a hard time treating Tommy because he would always say he had whatever symptom I asked him about, whether it was a headache or a cough. If I put it into his head the right way, he would’ve told me he had the bubonic plague.”
“So you’re saying Lena should have recognized that Tommy was slow and …?”
“Not badgered him into killing himself, for one.”
“And two?”
“Sought proper medical care for him. He was obviously stricken. He wouldn’t stop crying. He wouldn’t talk to anybody …” Her voice trailed off as she saw the hole in her argument. Frank had called Sara for help.
Instead of pointing out the obvious, Will asked, “Isn’t the prisoner the responsibility of the booking officer?”
“Lena is the one who put him there. She didn’t frisk him—or at least didn’t frisk him well enough to find the ink cartridge he used to kill himself with. She didn’t alert the guards to keep a close eye on him. She just got the confession and walked away.” Sara could feel herself getting angrier by the second. “Who knows how she left him emotionally. She probably talked him into thinking his life wasn’t worth living. This is what she does over and over again. She creates these shitstorms and someone else always pays the price.”
Will stared out at the parking lot, his hands resting lightly on his knees. Though the hospital had closed, the electricity was still working. The parking lot lights flickered on. In their yellow glow, Sara could see the scar that ran down the side of Will’s face and into his collar. It was old, probably from his childhood. The first time she’d seen it, she’d thought maybe he’d ripped the skin sliding into first base or failing at some daring feat on a bicycle. That was before she’d found out that he’d grown up in an orphanage. Now, she wondered if there was more to the story.
Certainly, it wasn’t Will Trent’s only scar. Even in profile, she could see the spot between his nose and lip where someone or something had repeatedly busted the skin apart. Whoever had stitched the flesh back together hadn’t done a very good job. The scar was slightly jagged, giving his mouth an almost raffish quality.
Will exhaled a breath of air. When he finally spoke, he was all business. “They charged Tommy Braham with murder? Nothing else?”
“No, just murder.”
“Not attempted murder for Detective Stephens?” Will asked. Sara shook her head. “Wasn’t Chief Wallace also injured?”
Sara felt a blush work its way up her chest. She imagined Frank was calling it that even after the beating he gave Tommy in the middle of the street. “The arrest report said murder. Nothing else.”
“The way I see it is that I have two issues here. One is that a suspect killed himself while he was in Detective Adams’s custody, and two is that I’m not sure why she arrested Tommy Braham for murder based on his confession. And not just his confession, but any confession.”
“Meaning?”
“You don’t just arrest someone for murder based solely on their confession. There has to be corroborative evidence. The sixth amendment gives a defendant the right to confront his accuser. If you’re your own accuser and you recant your confession …” He shrugged. “It’s like a dog chasing its tail.”
Sara felt stupid for not making this connection hours ago. She had been the county medical examiner for almost fifteen years. The police didn’t necessarily need a cause of death to hold someone for suspicion of murder, but they needed the official finding that a murder had been committed before an arrest warrant was issued.
Will said, “They had plenty of reason to hold Braham without the murder charge: assault with a deadly weapon, attempted murder, assault on a police officer during the course of duty, assault during the course of arrest, evading arrest, trespassing. These are serious felonies. They could hold him on any combination for the next year and no one would complain.” He shook his head, as if he couldn’t grasp the logic. “I’ll need to get their reports.”
Sara turned around to the back seat and retrieved the copies she’d made. “I’ll have to wait for the drugstore to open in the morning so I can print the photographs.”
Will marveled at her access as he flipped through the pages. “Wow. All right.” He skimmed the pages as he talked. “I know you’re convinced Tommy didn’t kill this girl, but it’s my job to prove it one way or another.”
“Of course. I didn’t mean to …” Sara let her voice trail off. She had meant to influence him. That was the point of them being here. “You’re right. I know you have to be impartial.”
“I just need you to be prepared, Dr. Linton. If I find out Tommy did it, or can’t find solid proof that he didn’t, no one is going to care how he was treated in jail. They’re going to think your Detective Adams saved them a lot of their tax dollars by avoiding a trial.”
Sara felt her heart sink. He was right. She had seen people in this town make assumptions before that weren’t necessarily rooted in fact. They didn’t embrace nuance.
He gave her an alternate scenario. “On the other hand, if Tommy didn’t kill this girl, then there’s a murderer out there who’s either very lucky or very clever.”
Again, Sara hadn’t let herself think this far. She had been so concerned with Lena’s involvement that it hadn’t occurred to her that Tommy’s innocence would point to another killer.
Will asked, “What else did you find out?”
“According to Frank, both he and Lena saw marks on Spooner’s wrists that indicated she was tied up.”
Will made a skeptical noise. “That’s really hard to tell when a body’s been in the water that long.”
Sara did not revel in her feelings of vindication. “There’s a stab wound, or what they think is a stab wound, in her nec
k.”
“Is it possible that it was self-inflicted?”
“I haven’t seen it, but I can’t imagine anyone would kill themselves with a stab to the back of the neck. And there would’ve been a lot of blood, especially if her carotid was hit. We’re talking high velocity, up and back, like a hose turned on full blast. I would guess you’d find anywhere from four to five pints of blood at the scene.”
“What about Spooner’s suicide note?”
“ ‘I want it over,’ ” Sara recalled.
“That’s strange.” He closed the folder. “Is the local coroner any good?”
“Dan Brock. He’s a funeral director, not a doctor.”
“I’ll take that as a no.” Will stared at her. “If I transfer Spooner and Braham up to Atlanta, we lose another day.”
She was already a step ahead of him. “I talked to Brock. He’s happy to let me do the autopsies, but we’ll have to start after eleven so we don’t disturb anyone. He’s got a funeral tomorrow morning. He’s supposed to call me later with the exact time so we can coordinate the procedures.”
“Autopsies are done at the funeral home?”
She indicated the hospital. “We used to do them here, but the state cut funding and they couldn’t stay open.”
“Same story, different town.” He looked at his cell phone. “I guess I should go introduce myself to Chief Wallace.”
“Interim Chief,” she corrected, then, “Sorry, it doesn’t matter. Frank’s not at the station right now.”
“I’ve already left two messages for him about meeting up with me. Did he get called out?”
“He’s at the hospital with Brad. And Lena, I imagine.”
“I’m sure they’re taking some time to get their stories straight.”
“Will you go to the hospital?”
“They’re going to hate me enough without me trampling into the hospital room of an injured cop.”
Sara silently conceded the point. “So, what are you going to do now?”
“I want to go to the station and see where they were keeping Tommy. I’m sure they’ll have an extremely hostile patrolman there who’s going to tell me he just got on shift, doesn’t know anything, and Tommy killed himself because he was guilty.” He tapped the file. “I’ll talk to the other prisoners if they haven’t already let them go. I imagine Interim Chief Wallace won’t show up until the morning, which will give me some time to go over these files.” He leaned up to get his wallet out of his back pocket. “Here’s my business card. It’s got my cell number on the back.”
The Will Trent Series 5-Book Bundle Page 133