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 have 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.”