Broken

by Karin Slaughter

  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 have 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 br
eak 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 her 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.

  Jason went back into his room. He opened the window to let in some air. The rain had slacked off, but the sky hadn’t given up the sun in days. He checked his bedside clock, unsure whether it was morning or night. Midnight was only a few minutes away. A stiff wind was blowing, but he had been holed up inside for so long that he welcomed fresh air, even if it was cold enough to make his breath appear as a cloud in front of his face. Outside, he could see the empty student parking lot. In the distance, a dog barked.

  He sat back down at his desk. He stared at the lamp by his laptop. The neck was broken. The shade dangled from two wires, hanging its head as if in shame. The light cast weird shadows in the room. He had never liked the dark. It made him feel vulnerable and lonely. It made him think about things he didn’t want to think about.

  Thanksgiving was a few days away. Last week, Jason had made the usual call to his mother, but she wasn’t interested in seeing him. She never was. Jason was from his mother’s first marriage, to a man who’d gone out for beer one day and never come back. Her second husband made it clear from the start that Jason wasn’t his son. They had three daughters who barely knew Jason existed. He wasn’t invited to family get-togethers. He didn’t get invitations to weddings or holidays. His mother’s only connection to him was through the U.S. Postal Service. She mailed a check for twenty-five dollars every birthday and Christmas.

  Allison was supposed to make things different. They were supposed to spend all of their holidays together. They were supposed to create their own family. That’s what they’d done for the last year and eleven months. They went to movies or ate Chinese food while the rest of the planet was holed up with relatives they didn’t like, eating food they didn’t enjoy. That was their thing—they were two against the world, filled with combined glee because they had each other. Jason had never known what it was like to be inside something good. He was always on the outside, his face pressed against the glass. Allison had given him that, and now she had taken it away.

  He didn’t even know if she was still in town. She might have gone home to visit her aunt. Maybe she had run off with another guy. Allison was attractive. She could do a hell of a lot better than Jason. He wouldn’t be surprised if she was screwing some new guy right now.

  A new guy.

  The thought cut him like a knife. Their legs and arms entangled, her long hair draped across another guy’s chest. Probably it was a hairy chest, the kind of chest that men had, not a concave, pasty white chest that hadn’t changed since junior high school. This new guy would have balls the size of grapefruits. He would pick Allison up in his arms and take her like a beast whenever he wanted.

  How could she be with another guy? Jason knew from the first time they kissed that he was going to marry her. He’d given her that ring with the promise that as soon as all of this was over, he’d buy her a better one. A real one. Had Allison forgotten that? Could she really be that cruel?

  Jason chewed at his tongue, rolling it around with his front teeth until he tasted blood. He stood up and started pacing again. The broken lamp traced his movements in an eerie shadow that swung back and forth across the wall. Six paces one way. Six paces back. The shadow hesitated, stopped and started, clinging to Jason like a bad dream. He raised his hands, hunched his shoulders, and the shadow grew into a monster.

  Jason dropped his hands, thinking he was going to freak himself out if he didn’t stop this.

  If he could just get through Thanksgiving, all of this would be over. He and Allison would be rich, or at least not as poor. Tommy would be able to buy enough equipment to start his own gardening business. Allison would be able to quit her job at the diner and concentrate on school. Jason would … What would Jason do?

  He would buy Allison that ring. He would block that other guy and his stupid hairy chest from his mind, and he and Allison would go on and live their lives together. They could get married. Have children. They’d both be scientists, doctors. They could buy a new house, new cars, leave the air-conditioning on sixty all summer if they wanted to. The last three months would be a distant memory, something they would talk about in ten, fifteen years when it was all behind them. They would be at a dinner party. Allison would’ve had a little too much to drink. Talk would turn to wild college days, and her eyes would sparkle in the candlelight as she looked at Jason, a smile tugging at her lips.

  “Oh, we can top that,” she would say, and proceed to shock them all with the crazy mess they had gotten themselves into over the last few weeks.

  That’s what it would end up being—a party story, like the one Jason told about the first time his papa took him duck hunting and Jason had accidentally maimed two decoys.

  He needed to finish his paper for that to happen. He c
ouldn’t just settle for a degree now. He had to be the best, the top in his class, because Allison didn’t say it, but she liked having nice things. She liked the idea of being able to go into a store and buy whatever she wanted. She hated having to balance her checkbook down to the last penny every month. Jason wasn’t going to be the kind of husband who asked how much a pair of shoes cost or why she needed another black dress. He was going to be the kind of husband who made so much money that Allison could fill ten closets with designer clothes and there would still be money left over to go to Cancún or St. Croix or wherever it was filthy rich people went on their private jets for the holidays.

  Jason rested his fingers on the keys but did not type. He felt feverish. Guilt had always been a problem for him. There was no punishment that anyone could mete out that was worse than the distress brought on by Jason’s own disappointment in himself. And he should be disappointed. He should be feeling horrified by what he had done. He should have protected Allison from all of this, told her that no matter how much money was involved, it wasn’t worth it. He’d endangered her. He’d gotten Tommy mixed up in it, too, because Tommy was stupid enough to go along with anything as long as you pushed him in the right direction. Jason was responsible for both of them. He was supposed to protect his friends, not push them into oncoming traffic. Were their lives really worth so little? Was that what it boiled down to at the end of the day, twenty-something years of life for less money than what a janitor brought home?

  “No,” he said, the sound of his voice drowned out by the howling rain. He couldn’t let all of them get dragged down into this. Allison was wrong. Jason had balls. He had balls enough to do the right thing.

  Instead of working on his paper, he opened his Internet browser. A quick search brought him to the right place. He found the contact information buried in the site map. Jason clicked on the icon to write new mail, but changed his mind. He didn’t want this traced back to him. It was the coward’s way out, but Jason would rather be an honest coward than a jailed whistle-blower. There was no denying his culpability in all of this—extortion, fraud, who knew what else. The feds would be involved. This might even count as attempted murder.