Broken (Will Trent 4)

“All right. We’ll start packing tonight. You can move in with me and we’ll figure out later what you’re going to do.”

Lena stared at the river. She could hear the rush of the current. The sound was like boiling water in her ears. Even though the rain had stopped, the river was still rising. She conjured the image of a huge wave crashing down the hill, flooding out the street and taking away the police station.

“Lee?” Jared asked.

“I’m all right—” Her voice caught. She couldn’t start crying now or she’d never stop. “I should be home in an hour or two.” Her throat started to tighten. “I love you.”

She ended the call before he could answer. Lena looked at her watch. There was a doc-in-the-box in the drugstore over in Cooperstown. Maybe she could find a physician’s assistant who needed some cash and wouldn’t ask questions. She pushed away from the wall just as the back door opened.

Lena said, “Oh.”

“I didn’t see your car out front.”

“I’m parked across the street.” Lena held up her hand, showing the dangling Band-Aids. “I … uh … kind of have a problem I can’t take to the hospital.”

There was none of the expected reluctance. “Come on in.”

The smell of bleach hit Lena as she walked into the building. The cleaning staff had been thorough, but the stench made her stomach turn.

“Go into exam one. I’ll be right there.”

“All right,” Lena agreed.

Being in the doctor’s office seemed to give her body permission to hurt. Her hand was throbbing with every heartbeat. She couldn’t pull her fingers into a fist. There was a high-pitched noise in her ears. Then another one. She realized she was hearing sirens.

Lena bypassed the exam room and went to the front of the building to see what was going on. The pocket door to the front office took some coaxing to open. The blinds were drawn, the room dark. She turned on the lights and saw the source of the odor.

Two gallon jugs of bleach were on the desk. Leather gloves soaked in a stainless steel bowl. Cotton swabs and paper towels littered the floor. A wooden baseball bat was laid out on a sheet of brown craft paper. Blood was embedded in the letters around the Rawlings logo.

Lena put her hand to her gun, but she was too late. She felt a drop of blood trickle down her neck before her body registered the pain of the cold steel of a knife pressing into her skin.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHARLIE REED BOUNDED DOWN THE DORM STAIRS WITH a smile showing under his mustache. He was in a white clean suit, covered head to toe in Tyvek. “Glad you’re here. We were just about to start the magic.”

Will tried to return his smile, but the effort failed. Charlie was a forensics expert. He had the luxury of looking at cases through the lens of a microscope. He saw bone and blood that needed to be photographed, analyzed, and catalogued, where Will saw a human being whose life had been ended by a cold-blooded killer who seemed to be doing a very good job of evading justice.

Despite Will’s earlier hopes, none of the evidence they’d found so far had been useful. Jason Howell’s Saturn station wagon was remarkably tidy. Aside from some breath mints and a couple of CDs, there was nothing personal in the car. The blanket Will had found in the bathroom stall held more promise, but that had to be analyzed in the lab. This process could take a week or more. The hope was that the killer had injured himself or leaned against the blanket, leaving trace evidence that might link him to the crime. Even if Charlie found DNA in the material that did not belong to Jason, they could only run it through the database and hope that their killer was in the system. More often than not, DNA was a tool used to rule out suspects, not track them down.

“This next bit should go a little faster.” Charlie leaned down and rummaged through one of the open duffel bags at the bottom of the stairs. He found what he was looking for and told Will, “Suit up. We should be ready in five minutes.” He bounded back up the steps two at a time.

Will grabbed one of the folded clean suits from the pile at the bottom of the stairs. He tore the package open with his teeth. The suit was meant to limit skin and hair transfer to the crime scene. It had the added bonus of making Will look like a giant, elongated marshmallow. He was tired and hungry. He was pretty sure he smelled, and though his socks were dry now, they had dried in such a way as to feel like sandpaper rubbing across the blister on his heel.

None of this mattered. Every second that ticked by gave Jason and Allison’s killer the freedom to move about freely, planning his escape or, worse, planning his next murder.

Will glanced at Marty Harris. The man was still guarding the front door with his usual degree of thoroughness. Marty’s head was back against the wall, glasses askew. His soft snores followed Will up the stairs.

Charlie knelt in the middle of the hallway, adjusting a fixture on top of a tripod. There were three more tripods spaced evenly across the hall, going all the way to the bathroom. Similarly Tyvek-suited men all adjusted gauges as Charlie told them to go up or down. They had been here for hours. Photographing the scene, graphing the measurements of the hall, the bathroom, Jason’s room, his desk and his bed. They had documented every item from the inside out. Finally, they had given Dan Brock permission to remove the body. Once Jason was gone, they had taken more photos, diagrammed more graphs, and finally started bagging any evidence that seemed pertinent to the case.

Jason’s laptop was toast, soaked to the core. There was a Sony Cyber-shot with some provocative photos of Allison Spooner in her underwear. All of Jason’s schoolwork and notebooks seemed to be what you’d expect. His Dopp kit contained the normal toiletries and no prescription bottles. The strongest drug he had in the room was an expired bottle of Excedrin PM.

Jason’s cell phone was more interesting, if not more helpful. The contacts list contained three numbers. One belonged to Jason’s mother. She wasn’t pleased to be talking to the police twice in one day about a son she apparently didn’t care that much about. The second number dialed the main switchboard to the physical engineering building, which was closed for the holiday. The third belonged to a cell phone that rang once, then announced that the voice mailbox was full. The cell phone company had no record of who the number belonged to—it was a pay-as-you-go deal—an expected revelation considering none of these kids seemed to have good enough credit to get a phone in their own names.

Will assumed the cell phone with the full mailbox belonged to Allison Spooner. She had called Jason fifty-three times over the weekend. Nothing came in after Sunday afternoon. Jason’s only outgoing call had been made to his mother three days before he died. Of all the details that Will had discovered about the victims in this case, Jason Howell’s sad, lonely life was the most depressing.

“Almost ready,” Charlie said, the excitement building in his voice.

Will stared into the hallway, wishing he never had to see this place again. The dingy tan linoleum on the floors. The scuffed and dirtied white walls. Making it worse was the lingering smell of Jason’s body, even though the kid had been removed several hours ago. Or maybe it was all in Will’s mind. There were crime scenes he had visited years ago that felt like they’d left their mark on his nasal passages. Just thinking about them could evoke a certain odor or bring a sour taste into the back of his throat. Jason Howell would forever be trapped in the pantheon of Will’s bad memories.