Lena’s head jerked around. “How so?”
“The phone call. She said Allison got into a fight with her boyfriend. That’s why she was worried she’d committed suicide. She didn’t say anything about Tommy.”
Lena felt every ounce of blood in her body freeze. Her hand gripped the steering wheel. Frank’s amended transcript didn’t mention a boyfriend. Will must have already contacted the call center in Eaton. So why had he asked Marla for the audio?
To set a trap. And Lena had just fallen right into it.
Will’s tone of voice was even. “Obviously, we’ll need to find the boyfriend. He’ll probably be able to lead us to the caller. Did Allison have any photographs in her apartment? Love letters? A computer?”
Photographs. Did he know about the missing picture? Lena’s throat felt so raw that she couldn’t swallow. She shook her head.
Will took his briefcase from behind the seat. He snapped open the locks. She could hear a high-pitched alarm in her ears. Her chest was tight. Her vision blurred. She wondered if this was what a panic attack felt like.
“Hmm,” Will mumbled, rifling through the case. “My reading glasses aren’t in here.” He held out the transcript. “Do you mind?”
Lena’s heart shook against her rib cage. Will held the paper in his hand, the edge fluttering in the air blowing out from the heater.
Her voice was barely a whisper. “Why are you doing this?”
Fear saturated her every word. Will stared at her for a long while—so long that she felt as if her soul was being peeled away from her body. Finally, he gave one of his patented nods, as if he’d made a decision. He put the transcript back in his case and snapped the locks shut.
“Let’s go to Allison’s.”
TAYLOR DRIVE WAS less than ten minutes from the station, but the trip seemed to take hours. Lena felt so panicked that she slowed down a couple of times, thinking she was going to be sick. She needed to concentrate on Frank, to figure out how many nails he could put in her coffin, but she was thinking about Tommy Braham instead.
He had died on her watch. He was her prisoner. He was her responsibility. She hadn’t patted him down when she put him in the cells. She had assumed because he was slow that he was without guile. Who was the stupid one now? Lena thought the kid was capable of murder but considered him so harmless that she’d let him walk into a cell with a sharp object hidden on his person. Frank was right—she was lucky Tommy didn’t turn the weapon on someone else.
When had Tommy taken the ink cartridge out of her pen? He must have known when he did it that he was going to use it for something bad. By the time he finished writing his confession, Tommy was in tears. The Kleenex box was empty. Lena had left him alone for no more than half a minute to get more tissues. When she came back into the room, his hands were under the table. She had wiped his nose for him like he was a child. She had soothed him, rubbed his shoulder, told him everything was going to be okay. He seemed to believe her. He’d blown his nose, dried his eyes. She had thought at the time that Tommy had resolved himself to his fate, but maybe the fate he had decided on was a lot different from the one that Lena had imagined.
Was it sympathy for Tommy or her instinctual need for self-preservation that had kept Lena from getting rid of the letter opener he had used on Brad Stephens? Last night, she had thought about tossing it over one of the thousands of concrete bridges between here and Macon. But she hadn’t. It was still wrapped in its bag, buried under the spare tire in the trunk of her car. Lena hadn’t wanted it in the house. Now, she didn’t like that it was so close to the station. Frank had doctored paperwork. He’d broken the chain of custody. He’d tampered with evidence. She wouldn’t put it past the old man to rummage through her car.
Christ. What else was he capable of?
She took a right onto Taylor Drive. The rain had come in torrents last night, washing away the blood on the street. Still, she could see it in her mind’s eye. The way Brad had blinked away the rain. The way his skin had already started to turn gray by the time the helicopter landed.
Lena steered the car onto the far side of the road and stopped. “This is where Brad was stabbed.”
Will asked, “Where’s Spooner’s apartment?”
She pointed up the road. “Four houses, left-hand side.”
He stared straight down the street. “What’s the number?”
“Sixteen and a half.” Lena put the car into gear and rolled past the scene of Brad’s stabbing. “We got the address from the college. We came here to see if there was a roommate or landlord we could talk to.”
“Did you have a warrant to search the house?”
He had asked the question before. She gave him the same answer. “No. We didn’t come to search the house.”
She waited for him to ask something else, but Will was silent. Lena wondered if what she had told him was the truth. If Tommy hadn’t been in Allison’s apartment, they still would have found a way to get into the garage. Gordon Braham was out of town. Knowing Frank, he would’ve broken the lock and gone into Allison’s apartment anyway. He would have made some comment about how it was better to ask for forgiveness than permission. No one would have minded a simple breaking and entering when a young girl from the college had been murdered.
Will asked, “Did you canvass the neighbors?”
Lena stopped the car in front of the Braham house. “Patrol did. No one saw anything different from what happened.”
“And what exactly did happen?”
“Brad was stabbed.”
“Tell me from the beginning. You pulled up here …”
She tried to take a breath. Her lungs would only fill to half capacity. “We approached the garage—”
“No,” he interrupted. “Go back to the very beginning. You drove up to the scene. Then what?”
“Brad was already here.” She didn’t tell him about the pink umbrella or Frank’s screaming fit.
“You got out of the car?” Will prodded. He really was going to make her go through this step-by-step.
She opened her door. Rain splattered her face with lazy, fat drops. Will had gotten out of the car, too. She told him, “The rain had died down. Visibility was good.” She started up the driveway. Will was beside her with his briefcase in his hand. At the top of the hill, she could see that the garage was marked with yellow crime scene tape. Frank must have come back last night. Or maybe he had sent patrol to mark the space so it looked like they were taking this seriously. There was no telling anymore what he was doing or why.
Will opened his briefcase and pulled out a sheet of paper. “The search warrant came in while you were getting your coat.”
He handed the document to Lena. She saw it had been issued by a judge out of Atlanta.
He asked, “What next? I take it the garage door was closed when you approached?”
She nodded. “We were standing about here. All three of us. The lights were out. There weren’t any cars in the driveway or on the street.” She pointed to the scooter. Mud was caked around the plastic fenders. “The lock and chain appeared to be the same.” Lena stared at the scooter, feeling good about the debris lodged in the tires. Tommy could have gone to the woods on the scooter. They wouldn’t be able to find tracks, but the mud on the wheels would match the mud around the lake.