Will asked, “Did you call Allison to let her know you had her car?”
“We don’t call people when we tow them. Signs are up all over the school with our number. I figured the owner got a ride home for the holiday and we’d get a call when they got back and saw the vehicle wasn’t there.” Al offered, “Tommy’s Malibu is on the lot if you want to see it.”
Will had forgotten about the young man’s car. “Did you figure out what was wrong with it?”
“Starter was stuck again. He was crawling under there and hitting it with a hammer to get it unstuck.” Al shrugged. “I went ahead and fixed it. Gordon’s truck doesn’t have much more life left in it. He’ll need something to drive.” He took a rag out of his pocket and wiped his hands. The gesture had the hallmark of a nervous tic. His hands were as clean as Will’s.
Will asked, “Did you know Tommy well?”
“Yep.” He tucked the rag into his pocket. “I’ll leave you guys to it. Just holler if you need me.”
“Thank you.”
Charlie walked over to the car. He put his tackle box on the floor and opened the lid. “Sara?” he asked.
“She’s a doctor in town.” He corrected, “I mean, Atlanta. She works at Grady Hospital. She grew up here.”
Charlie handed him a pair of latex gloves. “How long have you known her?”
“Little while.” Will took a longer time putting on the gloves than the task warranted.
Charlie got the message. He opened the car door. The hinges squealed loudly. Lionel Harris had been right about the condition of the Daytona. It was more rust than paint. The tires were bald. The engine hadn’t been started in days but the smell of burning oil and exhaust filled the air.
“I guess the rain got to it,” Charlie said. The dash was a sturdy molded plastic, but the cloth seats were wet and moldy. A stream of water had poured in from the busted hatchback, soaking the carpets, flooding the footwells. Charlie pulled up the front seat and water sloshed onto his pants. School papers floated in the murky liquid. The ink had washed away. “This is going to be fun,” Charlie muttered. He was probably wishing he was back at the campus with his fancy lights. “I suppose we should do this right.” He took his video camera out of the tackle box. Will walked around the car while he got everything ready.
The trunk was held down with a frayed bungee cord. The glass was safety-coated with a transparent sheet that held the shattered pieces of the window together. Will had a spiderweb view inside the messy trunk. Allison was as sloppy as Jason was neat. Papers were scattered around, their ink smudged from the rain. Will saw a flash of pink. “That’s her book bag.” He reached down to loosen the bungee cord.
“Hold on, now.” Charlie backed him off. He checked the rubber gasket around the window to make sure it was doing its job. “Looks like it held,” Charlie told him. “Still, be careful. You don’t want a sheet of glass coming down on your head.”
Will figured there were worse things that could happen. He waited patiently as Charlie focused the camera on Will, narrating in an official-sounding voice for the benefit of the tape. “This is Agent Will Trent with the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. I’m Charles Reed, also with the bureau. We are at Earnshaw’s Garage on Highway 9 in the city of Heartsdale, which is in Grant County, Georgia. It’s Tuesday, November twenty-sixth, at approximately ten thirty-two in the evening. We are about to open the trunk of a Dodge Daytona reportedly belonging to murder victim Allison Spooner.” He nodded, indicating Will could finally proceed.
The bungee cord was stretched to its limit. Will had to put some muscle into unhooking it from the bumper. The hatchback was heavy, and he remembered Lionel saying the pistons were blown. Allison had used a broken-off broom handle to prop it open. Will did the same. Tiny pieces of glass rained down as he opened the hatch all the way.
“Hold for just a second,” Charlie said, zooming in on the book bag, the papers, and fast-food trash.
Finally, he gave the okay to remove the bag.
Will grabbed the strap. The bag had some heft to it. Despite the pink, the fabric looked waterproof. Under the camera’s watchful eye, he pulled back the thick zipper. There were two heavy books on top, perfectly dry. From the drawings of molecules on the outside, Will assumed these were Allison’s chemistry texts. There were four spiral-bound notebooks, each with different-colored covers. Will flipped through these for the camera, the pages blurring. He guessed these were Allison’s class notes.
“What’s that?” Charlie asked. A slip of paper was sticking out of the blue notebook.
Will unfolded the page. It was half a sheet of college-ruled paper. The side edge showed where it had been ripped away from the spiral. There were two lines of text on the page. All caps. Ballpoint pen. Will stared at the first word, trying to make out the shapes of the letters. His reading was always worse when he was tired. His eyes refused to focus. He held up the paper to the camera, asking, “You want to do the honors?”
Thankfully, Charlie didn’t find the request odd. He narrated in his camera voice, “This is a note found in the pink book bag reportedly belonging to the victim. It reads, ‘I need to talk to you. We’ll meet at the usual place.’”
Will looked back at the words. Now that he knew what they said, he could better make out the letters. He told Charlie, “The ‘I’ looks familiar. It’s similar to the one written on the fake suicide note.” He pointed to the torn bottom half of the page for the benefit of the video camera. “The note found at the lake was written on the bottom half of a torn sheet of paper.” Will recalled Charlie’s words, “‘I need to talk to you. We’ll meet at the usual place.’ And then you add the last part from the fake suicide note, which is ‘I want it over.’”
“Makes sense.” Charlie’s voice changed again as he announced that he was stopping the tape. Wisely, he didn’t want to record their speculation for a future defense attorney to show in court.
Will studied the letters on the page. “You think a man or a woman wrote this?”
“I have no idea, but it doesn’t match Allison’s handwriting.” Will guessed he was using the girl’s class notes as a comparison. Charlie continued, “I saw some of Jason’s homework in his room. He wrote in all caps like that.”
“Why would Allison have a note like this from Jason?”
Charlie guessed, “He could’ve been an accomplice to her murder.”
“Could be.”
“And then the killer decided he didn’t want to leave any witness.”
Will’s brain was starting to hurt. The theory didn’t add up.
Charlie offered, “I’m not a professional, but I’d say the writing in Allison’s journal matches the writing on the pill bottle.”
“Her journal?”
“The blue notebook. It’s obviously some kind of journal.”
Will thumbed through the pages. Slightly less than half the notebook was filled. The remaining pages were blank. He checked the printing on the front of the plastic cover. The number 250 was in bold type with a circle around it. He assumed that was the number of total pages. “Doesn’t this seem like a weird choice for a diary?”