Still, she felt better than she’d felt in a long time. Not just because she’d taken responsibility for Tommy, but because she had found a way to get herself free one last time. And it would be the last time. Lena was going to do things the right way from now on. She wasn’t going to take shortcuts. She wasn’t going to take risks.
Frank couldn’t fault her for falling on her own sword, and if he did, then he could go screw himself. Will Trent had figured out everything that happened in the garage, but he couldn’t prove it without Lena and Lena wasn’t going to talk. That was her leverage over Frank. That was her ticket to freedom. If Frank wanted to drink himself to death, if he wanted to risk his life out on the street, then that was on him. She washed her hands of it.
The death of Tommy Braham was the only thing that still weighed on her. She needed to talk to a lawyer about how to handle things with the county, but she wasn’t going to fight them. She deserved to be punished. Tommy was her prisoner. Lena had just as good as handed him the means to take his life. Working the system, finding a loophole, was out of the question. Maybe Gordon Braham would sue her or maybe not. All Lena knew was that she was finished with this town. As much as she loved being a cop, as much as she craved the adrenaline rush, the feeling that she was doing a job that hardly anybody else in the world wanted to do—or could do—she had to move on.
Will shifted in the seat beside her. He’d been standing in the rain half the day. His sweater was wet. His jeans had never really dried. You could say a lot of things about the man, but you couldn’t claim he wasn’t determined.
She asked, “When are we going to do this? My confession, I mean.”
“Why the rush?”
She shrugged. He wouldn’t understand. Lena was thirty-five years old and she was looking at having to start her life back over again from scratch in the worst job market since the Great Depression. She just wanted to get it over with. The not knowing was the hard part. She was getting out, but how much blood was she going to have to leave on the table?
He told her, “You can still work a deal.”
“You have to have something valuable to get a deal.”
“I think you do.”
She didn’t acknowledge the fact. They both knew taking down Frank would make her landing a lot softer. But Frank had leverage Will didn’t know about. For this to work, Lena had to keep her mouth closed. It was too late to back out now.
He said, “Tell me about the drug situation in town.”
The question surprised her. “There’s not much to say. Campus security handles most of the small infractions at the school—pot, a little coke, a tiny bit of meth.”
“What about in town?”
“Heartsdale is pretty upscale. Rich people are much better at hiding their addictions.” She slowed down as she came to the red light on Main Street. “Avondale is all right, about what you’d expect—mostly middle-class people, working moms smoking meth after they put the kids to bed. Madison is the sore spot. Very poor. High unemployment, one hundred percent federal lunch assistance for all the kids. We’ve got a couple of small gangs running meth. They tend to kill each other, not civilians. There’s not much money in the police budget for setting up sting operations. We catch them when we can, but they’re like cockroaches. You take out one and there are ten more waiting to take their place.”
“Do you think Tommy might have been dealing drugs?”
Her laugh was genuine. “Are you kidding me?”
“No.”
“Absolutely not.” She shook her head, vehement. “If he was, Mrs. Barnes would’ve beat Nurse Darla to the phone. There were too many people in his life who were watching him too closely.”
“What about Allison? Could she have been using?”
Lena considered the question more seriously. “We haven’t uncovered anything that says drugs with her. She was barely getting by, living in a dump of a house. Her grades were good. She hadn’t missed a day of school. If she was selling drugs, she was doing a bad job, and if she was using drugs, she was holding on pretty well.”
“All good points.” He changed the subject. “It’s really convenient that Jason Howell died before we could question him.”
She stared up at the light, wondering if she should just run it. “I guess the killer was afraid he would talk.”
“Maybe.”
“Did Sara find anything?”
“Nothing remarkable.”
Lena glanced at Will. He was good at leaving things out.
He shrugged. “We’ll see what she finds in the autopsies.”
The light finally turned. Lena wrenched the wheel to the side. The back tires slipped as she pressed on the gas. “Listen, I know you’re sleeping with her.”
Will gave a surprised laugh. “All right.”
“It’s not a bad thing,” she allowed, even though it hurt her to admit it. “I knew Jeffrey. I worked with him most of my career. He wasn’t the kind of guy who went around sharing his feelings, but with Sara, everyone knew the score. He’d want her to find somebody. She’s not the type of person who’s good at being alone.”
He didn’t speak for a few seconds. “I guess that’s a nice thing for you to say.”
“Yeah, well, I’m not holding my breath for her to say anything nice about me.” Lena turned the windshield wipers on high as rain slammed into the car. “I’m sure she’s told you a lot of stories.”
“What would she tell me?”
“Nothing good.”
“Is she right?”
It was Lena’s turn to laugh. “You’re always asking questions that you already know the answer to.” Her cell phone started ringing, filling the car with the opening lines of Heart’s “Barracuda.” She checked the caller ID. Frank. Lena sent the call to voice mail.
Will asked, “Why does the school have your direct number to call when there’s a problem?”
“I know a lot of the guys on the security staff.”
“From when you worked there before?”
She was about to ask him how he’d found out about that, but Lena didn’t think she’d get much of an answer. “No, I know them from working as the liaison. The guys who were there when I was are all gone.”
“Frank sure does let a lot of the job fall to you.”
“I can handle it,” she said, but then realized that didn’t matter anymore. From now on, the only early morning phone calls that came to her house were going to be wrong numbers.
“What’s the security setup on campus? The same as when you were there?”
“It changed a lot after Virginia Tech.”
Will was familiar with the college massacre, the deadliest in American history.
She explained, “You know how institutions are—they’re reactive, not preventative. The bulk of the murders at Virginia Tech took place in the engineering building, so all the other schools tightened down security around their classrooms and labs.”
“The first victims were killed in their dorm.”
“It’s hard to police that. Students have to have key cards to get in and out, but it’s not a foolproof system. Look at what they did at Jason’s dorm. How stupid is that to cut a fire alarm?” Her phone started ringing again. Frank. Lena sent it to voice mail.
“Someone’s trying to get in touch with you.”
“You’re right.” Lena realized she was starting to talk like Will Trent. Maybe that wasn’t a bad thing considering he was running circles around her. She slowed the car to fifteen miles per hour as the rain rocked the car. Water flooded across the road, making the asphalt look rippled. The windshield wipers couldn’t keep up. She slowed the car to a stop, saying, “I can’t see in front of me. Do you want to drive?”
“I can’t do any better than you. Let’s wait it out and talk about our murderer.”
Lena put the car in park. She stared at the whiteness ahead. “Do you think we’re looking at a serial killer?”
“You have to have at least three victims on three diffe
rent occasions for it to qualify as a serial.”
Lena turned in her seat to face him. “So, we’ve got to wait for a third body?”
“I hope it doesn’t come to that.”
“What about your profile?”
“What about it?”
She tried to remember his earlier questions. “What took place? Two kids murdered, both with knives, both while they were alone. Why did it happen? The killer planned it out. He brought the knife. He knew the victims, probably knew Jason better than Allison because he was obviously furious when he killed him.”
Will continued, “He has a car. He knows the town, the topography of the lake and the placement of the cameras in the dorm. So, he’s someone who went to the school or goes to the school now.”
She shook her head, laughing at herself. “This is the problem with profiles. You could be talking about me.”
“It’s possible a woman committed these crimes.”
Lena gave him a tight smile. “I was with my boyfriend Jared last night and with you all day.”
“Thanks for the alibi,” Will told her. “But I’m being serious. Allison was small. A woman could have overpowered her. A woman could have floated her out into the lake, then chained her down with the cinder blocks.”
“You’re right,” she admitted. “Women like knives. It’s more personal.” Lena had carried a knife herself a few years ago.
Will asked, “Who are the women we’ve come up against on this case?”
She listed them out. “Julie Smith, whoever she is. Vanessa Livingston, the woman whose basement was flooded. Alexandra Coulter, one of Allison’s professors. Allison’s aunt Sheila, who hasn’t returned my calls yet. Mrs. Barnes from across the street. Darla the nurse with the long red nails.”
“Mrs. Barnes gives Darla a pretty tight alibi. She says she was up with her all night both nights.”
“Yeah, well, my uncle Hank says he never sleeps, but every time I stay over I hear him snoring like a freakin’ chainsaw.” Lena took out her notebook. Heat rushed through her body, but not from the infection in her hand. She kept her notebook angled away from Will as she thumbed past the 911 transcript, then quickly went to the page where she’d recorded Darla’s details. “The cell number of the 911 caller is a 912 area code. Darla’s is a 706.”
“Did her accent sound unusual to you?”
“Kind of trashy, but she’s obviously pulled herself up.”
“She didn’t sound Appalachian to you, did she?”
Lena stared at him openly. “She sounded like everyone I grew up with in south Georgia. Where are you getting Appalachia?”
“Do you know any women in town who moved down from the mountains in the last few years?”
She guessed this was another bit of information he was going to keep to himself. Two could play at that game. “Now that you mention it, we had some hillbillies a while back but they loaded up their truck and moved to Los Angeles.”
“Beverly Hills?” He chuckled appreciatively before throwing out one of his sudden subject changes. “You should have your hand looked at.”
Lena looked down at her injured palm. Her skin was sweating so badly that the Band-Aids were peeling off. “I’ll be all right.”
He told her, “I talked to Dr. Linton about gunshot wounds today.”
“You two kids know how to have fun.”
“She says the probability of an untreated gunshot wound getting infected is very high.”
No shit, she wanted to say. Instead, she told him, “Let’s go back to the profile.”
He hesitated long enough to let her know he wasn’t happy about letting someone else change the subject. “What’s the sequence of events?”
Lena tried to wrap her brain around the question. “We already went through what happened to Allison. With Jason, I guess the killer came into the dorm, moved the cameras, stabbed him, then left.”
“He covered Jason’s body with a blanket. He knew there would be a lot of blood.”
That was new. “Where was the blanket?”
“I found it in the bathroom at the end of the hallway.”
“You should check the drains, the—” She stopped herself. Will would know to do all of these things. He didn’t need her help. “There were four questions for the profile, right?”
“The last one is, you have to ask yourself who would have done these things in this order for these reasons.”
“Allison was killed before Jason. She could’ve been a warning that Jason didn’t heed.”
“Jason was holed up in his dorm room. We don’t even know if he heard about the murder.”
“So, the killer is antsy, worried that the message hasn’t gotten through.” A thought occurred to her. “The suicide note. The killer left it as a warning. ‘I want it over.’”
“Right,” he agreed, and she assumed he’d figured this out a while ago without telling her.
Still, she said, “It would make sense that the killer would be angry with Jason for not taking Allison’s death as a warning. He was stabbed at least eight or nine times. That speaks to a lot of anger.”
Will looked up at the sky. “Rain’s let up.”
Lena sat up in the seat, sliding the gear into drive. She rolled the car slowly forward. The road was still flooding. Streams of water gushed back toward Main Street. “Both Allison and Jason were students. They could be mixed up in something to do with the school.”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know. A grant. There’s all kinds of government money going in and out of there. Defense spending. The engineering school works on medical devices, nanotechnology. The polymer labs are testing all kinds of adhesives. We’re talking hundreds of millions of dollars.”
“Would a grad student have access to the money?”
She thought about it. “No. The doctoral candidates might, but the grad students basically do shitwork around the labs and the undergrads can’t wipe their own asses without getting permission. I used to date a guy who was in one of the master’s programs. They’re not involved in anything remotely interesting.”
They had reached Jason Howell’s dorm. There were two black vans parked outside. They each had the GBI logo on their doors and CRIME SCENE UNIT emblazoned in white on the sides. Despite herself, Lena felt excited, like a bloodhound who’d caught a scent. The sensation quickly faded. She had spent countless hours at this school studying for a degree that she would probably never get to use. At best, her education would go toward being one of those annoying people who point out everything they get wrong on CSI.
Will looked at his cell phone. “I need to make a quick call to my partner, if you don’t mind.”
“Sure.” Lena parked the car. The rain was still pounding down, and she bolted from the car and ran up the steps, holding down the hood of her jacket with both hands.
Marty was sitting inside reading a magazine. She knocked on the door. He jerked up his head, his glasses tilting on his nose. He buzzed her in with his card.
He said, “You look bad.”
Lena was taken aback by the comment. She ran her fingers through her hair, feeling a damp that hadn’t come from the rain. “It’s been a long day.”
“For you and me both.” Marty sat back on the bench. “I’ll be glad when it’s over.”
“Anything happening?”
“They got three men upstairs. Two more went over to the parking decks. The guy in charge, he’s got a handlebar mustache like he’s outta the circus. He found some car keys up in the room and drove around clicking the alarm until it went off.”
Lena nodded her approval, thinking the guy was pretty smart for a circus freak.
Marty admitted, “I never checked the parking decks. He was parked on the third level by the ramp.”
Lena gave him a pass. “I never checked the decks when all the kids were gone, either.”
“Uh-oh. Here he comes.” Marty reached over and pressed his key card against the pad.
Will pushed open
the door, stamping his feet on the floor. “Sorry,” he apologized. “Mr. Harris, thank you for giving us your time today. I’m sorry we’re taking you away from your family.”
“Demetrius told me to stay here as long as you need me.”
“Can you tell me who was on shift last night?”
“Demetrius. He’s my boss. We’ve been switching back and forth so we each get some time off for the holiday.” He put down the magazine. “He doesn’t remember anything, but he’ll be happy to talk to you whenever you want.”
Lena thought there were more important things for Will to work on right now. “Marty told me that one of your people found Jason’s car over in the deck. They’re looking at it now.”
Will smiled. She could almost feel his relief. “That’s good. Thank you, Mr. Harris.”
He offered, “Demetrius is at the office pulling all the security tapes for you. I can drive you over if you want.”
Will glanced at Lena. Staring at videotaped footage for hours on end hoping to find two seconds of a clue was the kind of mind-numbing work that could make you want to put a bullet in your head. Lena wanted to be at that car combing through the carpet fibers, looking for traces of blood or fingerprints, but there was no point.
She volunteered, “I’ll go look at the tapes if you want.”
“It’s not going to be fun.”
“I think I’ve had enough fun lately.”
LENA SAT IN the interrogation room at the police station where she had talked to Tommy Braham two days before. She had rolled in the television cart with the old VCR and newer digital equipment that they sometimes used to record interviews. The film from the campus security cameras was a combination of both—digital for the outside cameras and regular VCR tape for inside. Demetrius, the chief of security, had given her everything he had.
As far as Lena knew, she was the only person in the station right now except for Marla Simms, who never left her desk, and Carl Phillips, who was back in the cells working as booking officer for the night. Carl was a big guy who didn’t take a lot of crap off anybody, which was why Frank had stuck him with booking duty. Carl was incredibly honest. Frank was doing everything he could to keep the man away from Will Trent.
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