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?”

Tags: Karin Slaughter Will Trent Mystery
Source: readsnovelonline.net