Karin Slaughter - Broken

Will rolled up the legs of his jeans. His shoes were already soaked, so he didn’t bother to take them off before walking into the lake. The cold water sloshed into his sneakers.

“What are you doing?”

He went out a few feet and scanned the shoreline, studying the trees, the underbrush.

Lena had her hands on her hips. “Are you crazy? You’re going to get hypothermia.”

Will studied each tree, each branch, each section of weeds and moss. His feet were completely numb by the time he found what he was looking for. He walked toward a large oak that was leaning away from the shore. Its knotty roots coiled into the lake like an open fist. At first, Will had thought he was seeing a shadow on the bark, but then he remembered you had to actually have sun or some other source of light to cast a shadow.

Will stood in front of the tree, his shoes sinking into the silt at the bottom of the water. The tree was deciduous, its bony canopy reaching up at least a hundred feet overhead. The trunk was about three feet around and bowed away from the water. Will wasn’t an arborist, but there were enough oaks around Atlanta so that he knew their red-brown furrows of bark turned the color of charcoal as the tree aged. The scaly bark had absorbed the rain like a sponge, but there was something else Will had noticed from his vantage point in the water. He scraped at a small section of bark with his fingernails. The wood left a wet, rust-colored residue. He rolled the grit between his fingers, squeezing out the moisture.

Blood really was thicker than water.

“What is it?” Lena asked. She kept her hands in her pockets as she leaned out into the water.

Will remembered the flashlight in his jacket pocket. “Look.” He traced the light along a dark stain that sprayed up the trunk. He thought about what Sara had said about Allison’s injury, that there would be a high-velocity spray, like a hose turned on full blast. Four to five pints of blood. That was over half a gallon.

Will said, “She must have been facedown on the ground, just shy of the water. Her blood spattered up and back in an arc. You can see the dispersement is thicker here at the base of the tree, closer to her neck. Then it starts to dissipate at the top.”

“That’s not—” Lena stopped. She saw it now. He could see from her shocked expression.

Will glanced up at the sky. The clouds were letting loose a few drops at a time. They hadn’t been given much of a reprieve. It didn’t matter. Short of scrubbing the bark, there was no way to completely clean the tree. The wood had absorbed the mark of death the same way it would absorb smoke from a fire.

Will asked, “You still think our murderer is a nineteen-year-old boy who lives with his father?”

The wind whipped off the lake as Lena stared at the tree. Tears came into her eyes. Her voice shook. “He confessed.”

Will quoted Tommy’s words back to her. “‘I got mad. I had a knife on me. I stabbed her once in the neck.’” He asked, “Did you find blood in the garage?”

“Yes.” She wiped her eyes with the heel of her hand. “He was cleaning it up when we got there. I saw a bucket, and there was …” Her voice trailed off. “There was blood on the floor. I saw it.”

Will rolled down the legs of his jeans. His shoes were sinking into the mud at the base of the tree. He saw there was a new color mixed in with the soil, a deep rust that soaked into the mesh on the toe of his sneaker.

Lena saw it, too. She fell to her knees. She stuck her fingers deep into the ground and grabbed a fistful of earth. The soil was soaked, but not just with rainwater. She let the dirt fall back to the ground. Her hand was dark red, streaked with Allison Spooner’s blood.

LENA PRESSED A WET PAPER TOWEL TO HER NECK. SHE WAS sitting with her back against the stall of the locker room toilet. A patrolman had tried to come in while she was dry-heaving. He’d left without saying a word.

She’d never had a strong stomach. Her uncle Hank used to say that Lena didn’t have the guts for the kind of life she was living. He wouldn’t have taken any pleasure in seeing that he was right.

“Oh, God,” she whispered, as close to a prayer as she’d come in a long while. What had that stupid kid gotten himself into? What else had she missed?

She closed her eyes. Nothing made sense right now. Nothing was fitting together the same way it had yesterday morning.

He did it. Lena knew Tommy had killed Allison. People didn’t confess to murder unless they were guilty. Even without that, less than fifteen minutes after they pulled the girl out of the lake, they had found Tommy in Allison’s apartment going through her things. Wearing a black ski mask. He ran when they confronted him. He stabbed Brad, even if it was with a letter opener. Lena had seen him stab Brad with her own eyes. She had listened to Tommy’s confession. She had watched him write down everything in his own stupid words. And he had killed himself. The guilt had gotten to him and he had sliced open his wrists because he knew what he had done to Allison was wrong.

So why was Lena doubting herself?

Suspects lied all the time. They never wanted to confess to all the horrors they’d committed. They split hairs. They admitted to rape but not murder. They admitted to punching but not beating, stabbing but not killing. Was it as simple as that? Had Tommy lied about killing Allison in the garage because he’d wanted to make the crime seem more understandable, more spur of the moment?

Lena pressed her head against the wall.

That stupid profile Will Trent came up with kept coming back to her. Cold. Calculated. Deliberate. That wasn’t Tommy. He wasn’t smart enough to think of all the variables. He would’ve had to plan ahead, get the cinder blocks and chains ready, carry them out to the lake ahead of time. Even if Tommy got the blocks after the fact, he would’ve had to anticipate the blood, and plan on the rain covering his tracks.

All that blood. The ground was soaked in it.

Lena scrambled to her knees and held her head over the toilet. Her stomach clenched, but nothing was left to come up. She sat back on her heels, staring at the back of the tank. The cool white porcelain stared back. This was her stall, and only her stall. This toilet was the one piece of ground she had managed to stake out solely for herself in the unisex locker room. The urinals were stained like old-lady teeth. The other two stalls were disgusting. They reeked of excrement no matter how many times they were cleaned. This morning, it didn’t seem to stop there. The whole place reeked of shit. And it was all coming from the top down.

Lena wiped her mouth with the paper towel. Her hand was throbbing where she’d been shot. She was probably getting an infection. The skin felt hot down to her wrist. She squeezed her eyes shut. She wanted to be away from here. She wanted to be back in bed with Jared. She wanted to go back to yesterday and shake Tommy Braham until he told her the truth about what really happened. Why was he in Allison’s apartment? Why was he going through her things? Why was he wearing the ski mask? Why did he run? And why, in God’s name, did he kill himself?

“Lena?” Marla Simms’s creaky voice was just above a whisper. “Can I have a minute?”

Lena pressed herself up to standing. It was not lost on her that the only spot she could call her own in this entire godforsaken place was the toilet.

Marla stood with a folded sheet of paper in her hands. “You all right?”

“No,” she said, because there was no use lying. She need only glance in the mirror to see the truth. Her hair was disheveled. Her face was red and blotchy. She was punch-drunk with lack of sleep and her nerves were so raw that she felt like she was vibrating even standing dead still.