Broken (Will Trent 4)

Sara Linton had been right about one thing. She had sat across from Will for a solid hour and not realized that he was dyslexic.

His phone rang, the noise startling him in the small space. He recognized Faith Mitchell’s number. “Hey, partner.”

“You were going to call me when you got there.”

“Things have been busy,” he said, which was sort of the truth. Will had always been bad with directions, and there were parts of Heartsdale between Main Street and the interstate that weren’t on his GPS.

She asked, “How’s it going?”

“I’m being treated with the utmost respect and care.”

“I wouldn’t drink anything unless it’s in a sealed bottle.”

“Good advice.” He sat back in the chair. “How’re you holding up?”

“I’m about to kill somebody or myself,” she admitted. “They’re going to do the C-section tomorrow afternoon.” Faith was diabetic. Her doctors wanted to control the delivery so her health wasn’t jeopardized. She started to give Will the details of the procedure, but he dazed out after she used the word “uterus” the second time. He studied his reflection in the two-way mirror, wondering if Mrs. Simms was right about his hair looking better now that he’d let it grow out.

Finally, Faith wound down her story. She asked, “What’s this fax you sent me?”

“Did you get all twelve pages?”

He could hear her counting the sheets. “I’ve got seventeen total. All from the same number.”

“Seventeen?” He scratched his jaw. “Are some of them duplicates?”

“Nope. Got a police report, xeroxed field notes—pages are cut out of the notebook, that’s weird. You don’t take pages out of your field book—and …” He assumed she was reading Tommy Braham’s confession. “Did you write this?”

“Very funny,” Will said. He hadn’t been able to make out the words when Sara had shown him the confession in the car, but even to Will, the looped, cartoonish shape of Tommy Braham’s handwriting seemed off. “What do you think?”

“I think this reads like one of Jeremy’s book reports when he was in first grade.”

Jeremy was her teenage son. “Tommy Braham is nineteen.”

“What is he, retarded?”

“You’re supposed to call it ‘intellectually disabled’ now.”

She made a snorting sound.

“Sara says his IQ was around eighty.”

Faith sounded suspicious, but she had been prickly the last time about Sara inserting herself into their case. “How does Sara happen to know his IQ?”

“She used to treat him at her clinic.”

“Did she apologize for dragging you below the gnat line on your vacation?”

“She doesn’t know it’s my vacation, but, yes, she apologized.”

Faith was quiet for a moment. “How’s she doing?”

He thought not of Sara, but of the scent she had left on his handkerchief. She didn’t strike him as the type of woman who would wear perfume. Maybe it was one of those fancy soaps that women used to wash their faces.

“Will?”

He cleared his throat to cover for his silence. “She’s okay. She was very upset, but mostly I think she has a good reason.” He lowered his voice. “Something doesn’t feel right about any of this.”

“You think Tommy didn’t kill the girl?”

“I don’t know what I think yet.”

Faith went quiet; never a good sign. He had been partnered with her for over a year, and just when Will thought he was learning to read her moods, she had gotten pregnant and the whole thing went out of whack. “All right,” she said. “What else did Sara tell you?”

“Some stuff about the man who killed her husband.” Will knew that Faith had already gone behind Sara’s back to find out the details. She didn’t know about Lena Adams’s involvement, or the fact that Sara believed Lena was responsible for Tolliver’s death. Will stood up and walked into the hall, making sure Knox wasn’t there. Still, he kept his voice low as he relayed the story Sara had told him about her husband’s murder. When he finished, Faith let out a long breath of air.

“Sounds like Sara has a hard-on for this Adams woman.”

Will sat back down at the table. “That’s one way to put it.” He did not share the part of Sara’s story that had stuck out the most. The entire time she spoke, she had not once uttered Jeffrey Tolliver’s name. She had only referred to him as “my husband.”

Faith offered, “I think priority number one is tracking down this Julie Smith. She either saw the murder or heard about it. Do you have her cell phone number?”

“I’ll get it from Sara later.”

“Later?”

Will ignored the question. Faith would want an explanation for why he was having dinner at Sara’s house, and then she’d want a report on how it went. “Where does—did—Tommy Braham work?”

She shuffled through the pages. “Says here he was employed at the bowling alley. Maybe that’s why he killed himself—to keep from having to spray Lysol in shoes all day.”

Will didn’t laugh at the joke. “They charged him with murder right off the bat. Not assault, not attempted murder, not resisting.”

“Where did they get murder? Am I missing the autopsy report? Lab reports? Forensic filings?”

Will laid it out for her. “Brad Stephens is stabbed. He’s airlifted to the hospital. The first thing Adams does is take Tommy Braham back to the station and get his confession for the Spooner girl’s murder.”

“She didn’t go to the hospital with her partner?”

“I’m assuming the chief did. He’s been a no-show.”

“Did Braham have a lawyer present?” Faith answered her own question. “No lawyer would let him make this confession.”

“A murder charge resonates more than assault. It could be political—get the town behind them so no one cares that a killer has killed himself.” Will had told Sara the same thing. If Tommy Braham was Allison Spooner’s murderer, then people would assume justice had already been served.

Faith said, “This confession is strange. He’s got details out the wazoo until the murder. Then, it’s taken care of in three lines. ‘I got mad. I had a knife on me. I stabbed her once in the neck.’ Not much of an explanation.” She added, “And there would be a boatload of blood from something like this. Remember that case where the woman’s throat was slit?”

Will cringed at the memory. Blood had sprayed everywhere—the walls, ceiling, floor. It was like walking into a paint booth. “Allison Spooner was stabbed in the back of the neck. Maybe that’s different?”

“That brings up another good point. One stab wound doesn’t sound mad. That sounds very controlled to me.”

“Detective Adams was probably in a hurry to get back to the hospital. Maybe she was planning a follow-up interview. Maybe Chief Wallace was going to have a go at Tommy later.”

“That’s not how you do it. If a suspect is talking, especially confessing, you get every detail.”