Broken (Will Trent 4)

“Detective?”

Lena turned around. She had missed his question.

“Did you knock on the front door of the house?”

She glanced back at the house. The lights were still off. There was a small bouquet of flowers propped against the door. “No.”

Will leaned down and opened the garage’s metal door. The noise as it rolled up was deafening, a loud clanging that must have been heard by half the neighborhood. Lena saw the bed, the table, the scattered papers and magazines. There was a small pool of blood where Frank had fallen by the mouth of the entrance. Ice glazed the top. The cut in his arm was deeper than she thought. There was no way the letter opener had done the damage. Had he stabbed himself?

Will asked, “Is this how you found the garage?”

“Pretty much.” Lena crossed her arms over her chest. She could feel the cold seeping in through her jacket. She should have come back to the scene after getting Tommy’s confession and searched Allison’s things for more clues to back up Tommy’s story. It was too late for that now. The best thing Lena could do for herself was to start thinking like a detective instead of acting like a suspect. The murder weapon was probably in here. The scooter was a good lead. The stain by the bed was an even better one. Tommy could’ve hit Allison in the head, then taken her into the woods to kill her. Maybe his plan was to drown her by the lake. The girl had come to, and he’d stabbed her in the back of the neck. Tommy had lived in Grant County all his life. He’d probably been to the cove hundreds of times. He would know where the bottom dropped in the lake. He would know to take the body out deep so that she wouldn’t be easily found.

Lena exhaled. She could breathe now. This was making sense. Tommy had lied to her about how he’d killed Allison, but he had killed her.

Will cleared his throat. “Let’s go back a few steps. All three of you were standing here. The garage was closed. The house looked empty. Then what?”

Lena took a minute to regain her composure. She told him about Brad seeing the masked intruder inside, the way he had circled the building before they fanned out to confront the suspect.

Will seemed to be only half listening as she laid out the events. He stood just under the garage door with his hands behind his back, scanning the contents of the room. Lena was telling him about Tommy refusing to lower the knife when she noticed that Will was focusing on the brown stain by the bed. He walked into the garage and knelt down for a better look. Beside him was the bucket of murky water she had seen yesterday. The crusty sponge was beside it.

He looked up at her. “Keep going.”

Lena had to think to find her place. “Tommy was behind that table.” She nodded to the table, which was crooked.

Will said, “That door isn’t exactly quiet when it rolls up. Did he already have the knife in his hand?”

Lena stopped, trying to remember what she’d said the first time Will asked her the question. He wanted to know if Tommy had a sheath on his belt where he kept a knife. He wanted to know if it was the same knife that had killed Allison Spooner.

She said, “When I saw him, he already had the knife in his hand. I don’t know where it came from. Maybe the table.” Of course it had come from the table. There was a partially opened envelope there, the kind of junk mail that contained coupons nobody used.

“What else did you notice?”

She indicated the bucket of brown water by the bed. “He’d been cleaning. I guess he hit her in the head or knocked her out here. He put her on the scooter and—”

“He didn’t mention cleaning up in his confession.”

No, he hadn’t. Lena hadn’t even thought to ask him about the bucket. All she had been thinking about was Brad, and how gray his skin had looked the last time she’d seen him. “Suspects lie. Tommy didn’t want to admit how he did it. He made up a story that painted him in a better light. It happens all the time.”

Will asked, “What happened next?”

Lena swallowed, fighting the image of Brad that kept popping into her head. “I approached the suspect from the right.”

Will had opened his briefcase on the bed. “Your right or his?”

“My right.” She stopped talking. Will had taken some kind of field kit out of his briefcase. She recognized the three small glass bottles he took out of the plastic pouch. He was going to do a Kastle-Meyer test on the stain.

Will didn’t prompt her to continue the story. He took a clean swab from the kit. He opened the first bottle and used the dropper to wet the cotton tip with ethanol. He touched the swab to the stain, gently rolling it so that the brown substance would transfer. He added the reagent, phenolphthalein, from the second bottle. Lena held her breath as he used the last dropper to add hydrogen peroxide to the mix. She had studied the procedure in class, performed it a hundred times herself. If the brown stain was human blood, the tip of the swab would rapidly turn bright pink.

The swab didn’t turn.

Will started to pack the kit back up. “What happened next?”

Lena had lost her place. She couldn’t take her eyes off the stain. How could it not be blood? It had the same shape, the same color, as a bloodstain. Tommy was in Allison’s apartment, going through her things. He was dressed like a burglar. He was standing two feet away from her blood with a knife in his hand.

Not a knife. A letter opener.

And not Allison’s blood.

Will prodded her to continue. “So, you flanked Tommy on your right. Interim Chief Wallace was on your right?”

“My left, your right.”

“Is this when you identified yourself as police officers?”

Lena held her breath. She would have to lie to him. There was no way she could say she didn’t remember, because that would be taken as an admission that she hadn’t followed the most basic procedure when confronting a suspect.

“Detective?”

Lena let out a slow breath. She tried to muster some sarcasm. “I know how to do my job.”

He gave a solemn nod. “I hope so.” Instead of jamming his foot down harder, he let up. “Tell me what happened next.”

Lena continued the story as Will walked around the garage. The space was small, but there wasn’t one inch that he didn’t study at some point. Every time he stopped to examine an item more closely—the bracing along the back wall, a strip of metal jutting out from the track for the garage door—her heart skipped.

Still, she told him about Tommy running into the street, Brad chasing him. The stabbing. The LifeFlight’s arrival. Lena finished, “The helicopter took off, and I went to the car. Tommy was already inside, handcuffed. I took him to the station. You know the story from there.”

Will scratched his jaw. “How much time would you say elapsed between when Tommy knocked you to the floor and when you were able to regain your footing?”

“I don’t know. Five seconds. Ten.”

“Did you hit your head?”

Lena’s head still ached from the bruise. “I don’t know.”

Will was at the back of the room. “Did you notice this?”

She had to force herself to walk into the garage. She followed his pointing finger to a hole in the wall. It was round with jagged edges, about the size of a bullet. Without thinking, Lena looked back at the front of the garage where Frank had been standing. The trajectory matched up. There were no casings on the floor. She hoped to God Frank had thought to look behind the garage. The bullet hadn’t stopped after grazing her hand and punching a hole in the metal siding. It was out there somewhere, probably buried in mud.