Karin Slaughter - Broken

Frank looked away. “I saw them, Sara. She was tied up.” He opened a file on his desk and handed her a piece of yellow legal paper. The top was torn where it had been ripped away from the pad. Both sides were filled. “He copped to everything.”

Sara’s hands shook as she read Tommy Braham’s confession. He wrote in the exaggerated cursive of an elementary school student. His sentence construction was just as immature: Pippy is my dog. She was sick. She ate a sock. She needed a picture took of her insides. I called my dad. He is in Florida. Sara turned the page over and found the meat of the narrative. Allison had spurned a sexual advance. Tommy had snapped. He’d stabbed her and taken her to the lake to help cover his crime.

She looked at both sides of the paper. Two pages. Tommy had ended his life in less than two pages. Sara doubted he’d understood half of it. The only time he’d used a comma was right before a big word. These, he printed in block letters, and she could see small dots where he had pressed the pen under each letter to make sure he’d spelled it correctly.

Sara could barely speak. “She coached him.”

“It’s a confession, Sara. Most cons have to be told what to write.”

“He doesn’t even understand what he’s saying.” She skimmed the letter, reading, “‘I punched Allison to subdude .’” She stared at Frank, disbelieving. “Tommy’s IQ is barely above eighty. You think he masterminded this fake suicide? He’s less than one standard deviation from being classified as mentally disabled.”

“You got that from reading two paragraphs?”

“I got that from treating him,” Sara snapped. It had all come flooding back to her as she read the confession: Gordon Braham’s face when Sara suggested his son might be developing too slowly for his age, the tests Tommy had endured, Gordon’s devastation when Sara told him his son would never mature past a certain level. “Tommy was slow, Frank. He didn’t know how to count change. It took him two months to learn how to tie his shoes.”

Frank stared back at her, exhaustion seeping from every pore. “He stabbed Brad, Sara. He cut me in the arm. He ran from the scene.”

Her hands started shaking. Her body surged with anger. “Did you think to ask Tommy why?” she demanded. “Or were you too busy beating his face to a pulp?”

Frank glanced back at the officers by the coffee machine. “Keep your voice down.”

Sara was not going to be silenced. “Where was Lena when all this happened?”

“She was there.”

“I bet she was. I bet she was right there pulling everybody’s strings. ‘The victim was tied up. She must have been murdered. Let’s go to her apartment. Let’s get everybody around me hurt while I walk away without so much as a scratch.’” Sara could feel her heart shaking in her chest. “How many people does Lena have to get injured—killed—before somebody stops her?”

“Sara—” Frank rubbed his hands over his face. “We found Tommy in the garage with—”

“His father owns the property. He had every right to be in that garage. Did you? Did you have a warrant?”

“We didn’t need a warrant.”

“Have the laws changed since Jeffrey was alive?” Frank winced at the name. “Did Lena identify herself as a cop or just start waving her gun around?”

Frank didn’t answer her question, which was answer enough. “It was a tense situation. We did everything by the book.”

“Does Tommy’s handwriting match the suicide note?”

Frank blanched, and she realized he hadn’t asked the question himself. “He probably forged it, made it look like the girl’s.”

“He didn’t have the intelligence to forge anything. He was slow. Is that not getting through to you? There’s no way in hell Tommy could’ve done any of this. He wasn’t mentally capable of plotting out a trip to the store, let alone a fake suicide. Are you being willfully blind? Or just covering for Lena like you always do?”

“Mind your tone,” Frank warned.

“This is going to catch her.” Sara held up the confession like a trophy. The shaking in her hands had gotten worse. She felt hot and cold at the same time. “Lena tricked him into writing this. All Tommy wanted to do was please people. She pushed him into a confession and then she pushed him into taking his own life.”

“Now, hold on—”

“She’s going to lose her badge for this. She should go to prison.”

“Sounds to me like you care a hell of a lot more about some punk kid than a cop who’s fighting for his life.”

He could have slapped her face and the shock would have been less. “You think I don’t care about a cop?”

Frank sighed heavily. “Listen, Sweetpea. Just calm down, okay?”

“Don’t you dare tell me to calm down. I’ve been calm for the last four years .” She took her cell phone out of her back pocket and scrolled through the contacts, looking for the right number.

Frank sounded scared. “What are you going to do?”

Sara listened to the phone ring at the Georgia Bureau of Investigation’s headquarters in Atlanta. A secretary answered. She told the woman, “This is Sara Linton calling for Amanda Wagner.”

SARA SAT IN HER CAR IN THE HOSPITAL PARKING LOT, STARING out at Main Street. The facility had stopped accepting patients a year ago, but the building had looked abandoned long before that. Weeds sprouted in the ambulance bay. Windows on the upper floors were broken. The metal door that used to be propped open for smokers was bolted shut with a steel bar.

Guilt about Tommy Braham still weighed heavily on her—not just because she hadn’t remembered him, but because in the space of a few seconds, she had taken his death and used it as a launching pad for her own revenge fantasy against Lena Adams. Sara realized now that she should have just let it play out on its own instead of inserting herself into the middle. A suicide in police custody automatically triggered an investigation by the state. Frank would have followed the chain of command, calling in Nick Shelton, Grant County’s local field agent for the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. Nick would have talked to all the officers and witnesses involved. He was a good cop. In the end, he would have come to the same conclusion as Sara: that Lena had been negligent.

Unfortunately, Sara hadn’t been patient enough to trust the process. She had unilaterally decided to be town coroner again, elbowing poor Dan Brock out of the way, taking her own photographs of the scene, doing sketches of Tommy’s cell, before she allowed the body to be removed. She’d made copies of every sheet of paper she could find in the station house that referred to Tommy Braham. Even with all of this, calling Amanda Wagner, a deputy director with the GBI, was the worst of her transgressions. It was like swinging a sledgehammer at a thumbtack.

“Stupid,” she whispered, leaning her head into the steering wheel. She should be home right now looking at the marble tile her father had installed in the master bathroom, not waiting for someone straight from GBI headquarters to show up so she could unduly influence an investigation.

She leaned back against the seat, checking the clock on the dashboard. Special Agent Will Trent was almost an hour late, but she had no way of calling him. The trip from Atlanta was four hours—less if you knew you could flash your badge and talk your way out of a speeding ticket. She looked at the clock again, waiting out the flicker of 5:42 changing to 5:43.

Sara had no idea what she was going to say to him. She had talked to Will Trent probably a half dozen times while he worked a case involving one of Sara’s patients at Grady’s ER. She had shamelessly inserted herself into the investigation then, much as she was doing now. Will would probably start to wonder if she was some kind of crime scene voyeur. At the very least, he would question her obsession with Lena Adams. He would probably think that she was crazy.