Karin Slaughter - Broken

“Not exactly between.”

“Do you think I can borrow a jacket?”

“What?”

“A raincoat. Jacket. Whatever you have.” Will stood up from the desk. “I’d like for us to go for a walk.”

THE RAIN HAD TURNED unrelenting, dark clouds rolling across the sky, tossing down buckets of water that all seemed to fall directly on Will’s head. He was wearing a police-issue jacket meant for a man with considerably more girth than Will carried. The sleeves hung down past his thumbs. The hood fell into his eyes. The reflective panels on the back and front slapped against him with every step.

Will had always had trouble finding clothes that fit, but usually the opposite was the problem: short cuffs, tight seams stretching against his shoulders. He had been expecting Lena to offer him one of her own coats as a sort of joke. Apparently, she had come up with a better idea. Will stared down at the stitching on the breast pocket as they made their way around the lake. The jacket belonged to Officer Carl Phillips.

He stuck his hands into the pockets as the wind picked up. He could feel some latex gloves, a measuring tape, a plastic pen, and a small flashlight. At least he hoped it was a small flashlight. Despite Lena’s worst intentions, the jacket was nice, a North Face rip-off with tons of zippered pockets and enough insulation to keep the wind out. Will had the brand-name version back at home. He hadn’t brought it because in Atlanta, cold weather never lasted more than a few days, and even then, the sun came up to burn off the chill. The thought of the jacket hanging in his closet gave him a longing to be back home that surprised him.

Lena stopped, turning back toward the police station. She raised her voice to be heard over the rain. “The college is back there, past the station.”

Will guessed they had been walking for about fifteen minutes. He could barely make out a bunch of buildings resting in the curve of the lake just beyond the police station.

Lena said, “There’s no reason for Allison to walk this way.”

“Where’s Lover’s Point?”

She pointed in the opposite direction. “That cove about a half mile away.”

Will followed the line of her finger to the indentation in the shoreline. The cove was smaller than he’d thought it would be. Or perhaps the distance made it seem that way. Large boulders were scattered along the shore. He imagined people built campfires when the weather was better. It looked like the kind of place a family might pull up a boat to for a long picnic.

“Are we just going to stand here?” Lena had her hands deep in her pockets, head down against the wind. Will didn’t need ESP to figure out she didn’t want to be out here in the pouring rain. It was so cold by the water that he had to fight to keep his teeth from chattering.

He asked, “Where are the roads again?”

She gave him a look that said she wasn’t going to play this game much longer. “There.” She pointed into the distance. “That’s the fire road. It hasn’t been used in years. We checked it when we pulled the body out of the lake. Nothing’s there.”

“That’s the only egress from here to Lover’s Point, right?”

“Like I showed you on the map back at the station.”

Will had never been good with maps. “That place over there.” He pointed to an area just past the cove. “That’s the second road that people normally use to get to the cove, right?”

“Empty, like I told you. We checked it, all right? We’re not total morons. We checked for cars. We checked for tire tracks, footprints. We checked both roads and neither one of them showed any signs of use.”

Will tried to get his bearings. The sun wasn’t doing much to help light the way. The sky was so dark that it could’ve been nighttime instead of smack in the middle of morning. “Where’s the residential area?”

She pointed across the lake. “That’s where Sara lives. Her parents. Over here”—she pointed farther along—“all of this shoreline, including where we’re standing, belongs to the State Forestry Division.”

“Do people take their boats out?”

“There’s a dock at the campus for the rowing teams. A lot of the homeowners go boating during the summer. No one would be stupid enough to be out here in this rain.”

“Except us.” Will put as much cheer into his voice as he could muster. “Let’s keep going.”

She trudged along ahead of him. Will could see her sneakers were soaked. The running shoes he had found in the back of his car weren’t faring much better. Allison’s shoes, or at least the ones found near her body, were dirty, but not caked in mud. If she had walked along the shore, the terrain had been a lot harder than the red Georgia clay that was sliding out from under his feet.

Will had checked the weekly weather report last night on his computer. Temperatures had been lower the morning Allison was found, but the same rain they were seeing now had been pounding down the night before. It was a good time to kill somebody. Trace evidence on the shore would be lost. The cold water would make guessing when the murder occurred next to impossible. Except for the 911 caller, no one would have known there was a body in the lake.

Lena slipped in the mud. Will reached out, catching her before she fell into the water. She was so light that he could almost pick her up with one hand.

“Christ.” She braced her hand against a tree. She was breathing hard. He realized she had been walking fast to keep a few paces between them.

Will asked, “Are you okay?”

She pushed away from the tree, a look of determination on her face. Will watched her feet as she picked her way across the large roots and fallen branches that riddled the shoreline. He had no way of knowing whether or not Allison had made her way to Lover’s Point along this same route. His goal was to get Lena Adams out of the station, out of her element, so that she would talk to him. Between the pounding rain and the rough going, he was thinking that it might be wise to set the bar lower. For instance, he could aim not to let them both freeze to death.

Lena was so certain that Tommy Braham had killed Allison Spooner—just as certain as Sara was that Tommy had not. Will felt caught in the middle, and was mindful that it would be wrong to let either woman influence his thinking. He supposed for Lena the question of Tommy’s innocence carried with it a lot more guilt than she wanted to shoulder. To believe otherwise would mean that the kid had killed himself for nothing. That she had given him the means—and the motivation—to take his life. For Sara’s part, admitting Tommy was a murderer would mean admitting that Lena wasn’t as ruthless as she wanted to believe.

Will didn’t feel the rain let up so much as hear it. The constant tapping of water against leaves died down to a gentle whisper. He heard a bird, a bunch of crickets. Up ahead, a large tree blocked the path. Thick roots jutted into the air, earth dripping from the tendrils. Lena lifted herself up and over. Will followed her, looking around, trying to get his bearings again. They were near the fire road. At least he thought they were.

“There,” she said, pointing to a pile of stacked logs. “That’s the end of the road.” She took off her hood. Will followed suit. Two strips of earth about the width of the front end of a car lined the road for about ten feet, then gave way to thick forest. He understood why Lena was convinced the road was untraveled. You’d need a bulldozer to get through.

She told him, “The road on the other side is the one most people use, but it’s about a hundred yards west of the cove. I told you, we had to clear out a path to get the emergency vehicles back here.”

Will guessed they hadn’t been looking for tire tracks on the way to a suicide. They had probably destroyed any evidence of another car out by the cove. He asked, “If Allison didn’t have a car, how did she get here?”