Karin Slaughter - Broken

Lena wiped her eyes with her hand. The wind was cutting, making her nose run, her eyes water. She had to carve out ten, fifteen minutes alone so she could think this through. Will’s presence made it impossible for her to do anything but worry about the next question that would come out of his mouth.

“Ready?” Will asked. They had reached the Porsche. The car was an older model than Lena thought. There was no remote to unlock the door. Will did the honors, then handed her the key.

Lena felt a new wave of nervousness wash over her. “What if I crash this thing?”

“I’d really appreciate it if you didn’t.” He reached in and tucked his briefcase behind the front seat.

Lena couldn’t move. This felt like a trap but she couldn’t see the reason.

“Is there a problem?” Will asked.

Lena gave in. She climbed into the bucket seat, which was more like a recliner. With her feet stretched toward the pedals, the back of her calves were only a few inches off the floorboard.

Will opened the passenger door. She asked, “You don’t have a car from the job?”

“My boss wanted me to get here as soon as possible.” He had to let the seat back before he got into the passenger’s side of the car. “It adjusts on the front,” he told Lena. She reached down and dragged herself closer to the steering wheel. Will’s legs were about ten feet longer than hers. Lena was practically pressed into the steering wheel by the time her feet found the clutch and gas.

For his part, Will couldn’t get his seat right. He pushed it to the end of the track, then cranked it down as low as it would go so his head wouldn’t hit the roof. Finally, he folded himself into the car like a piece of origami. She waited for him to buckle in, chancing a look at him. He was fairly average except for his height. He was lean, but his shoulders were broad, muscled, like he spent a lot of time at the gym. His nose had obviously been broken at some point in his life. Faint scars were on his face, the sort of damage you got from fighting with your fists.

No, he definitely was not Amanda Wagner’s second string.

“All right,” Will said, finally settling into the seat.

She reached toward the ignition, but there wasn’t one.

“It’s on the other side.”

She found the ignition on the left-hand side of the steering wheel.

Will explained, “It’s from Le Mans racing. So you can start the engine with one hand while you change the gears with the other.”

She was extremely right-handed and it took a few tries before she managed to get the key to turn. The engine roared to life. The seat vibrated underneath her. She could feel the clutch pushing back against the ball of her foot.

Will stopped her. “Can you give her a few minutes to warm up?”

Lena took her foot off the pedal. She stared across the street. He’d parked on the far side of the lot, the nose of the car facing out. She had a clear view to the children’s clinic across the way. Sara’s clinic. She wondered if he had parked here on purpose. He seemed to be very deliberate about everything he did. Or maybe her paranoia was such that she couldn’t watch his chest rise and fall without thinking it was part of some master plan to trip her up.

Will asked one of his random questions. “What do you think about the 911 call?”

She told him the truth. “It bothers me that it came from a blocked number.”

“She called in a fake suicide. Why?”

Lena shook her head. The caller was the last thing on her mind right now. “Tommy might have talked to her. She could be a co-worker. An accomplice. A jealous girlfriend.”

“Tommy didn’t strike me as a player.”

No, he hadn’t. During the interrogation, Lena had asked him to be explicit because she wasn’t sure he really knew what sex was.

Will asked, “Did Tommy say anything about dating anyone?”

She shook her head.

“We can ask around. At the very least, the girl who called in the fake suicide knew something wasn’t right. She was obviously laying down a foundation for Tommy’s defense.”

Lena’s head jerked around. “How so?”

“The phone call. She said Allison got into a fight with her boyfriend. That’s why she was worried she’d committed suicide. She didn’t say anything about Tommy.”

Lena felt every ounce of blood in her body freeze. Her hand gripped the steering wheel. Frank’s amended transcript didn’t mention a boyfriend. Will must have already contacted the call center in Eaton. So why had he asked Marla for the audio?

To set a trap. And Lena had just fallen right into it.

Will’s tone of voice was even. “Obviously, we’ll need to find the boyfriend. He’ll probably be able to lead us to the caller. Did Allison have any photographs in her apartment? Love letters? A computer?”

Photographs. Did he know about the missing picture? Lena’s throat felt so raw that she couldn’t swallow. She shook her head.

Will took his briefcase from behind the seat. He snapped open the locks. She could hear a high-pitched alarm in her ears. Her chest was tight. Her vision blurred. She wondered if this was what a panic attack felt like.

“Hmm,” Will mumbled, rifling through the case. “My reading glasses aren’t in here.” He held out the transcript. “Do you mind?”

Lena’s heart shook against her rib cage. Will held the paper in his hand, the edge fluttering in the air blowing out from the heater.

Her voice was barely a whisper. “Why are you doing this?”

Fear saturated her every word. Will stared at her for a long while—so long that she felt as if her soul was being peeled away from her body. Finally, he gave one of his patented nods, as if he’d made a decision. He put the transcript back in his case and snapped the locks shut.

“Let’s go to Allison’s.”

TAYLOR DRIVE WAS less than ten minutes from the station, but the trip seemed to take hours. Lena felt so panicked that she slowed down a couple of times, thinking she was going to be sick. She needed to concentrate on Frank, to figure out how many nails he could put in her coffin, but she was thinking about Tommy Braham instead.

He had died on her watch. He was her prisoner. He was her responsibility. She hadn’t patted him down when she put him in the cells. She had assumed because he was slow that he was without guile. Who was the stupid one now? Lena thought the kid was capable of murder but considered him so harmless that she’d let him walk into a cell with a sharp object hidden on his person. Frank was right—she was lucky Tommy didn’t turn the weapon on someone else.

When had Tommy taken the ink cartridge out of her pen? He must have known when he did it that he was going to use it for something bad. By the time he finished writing his confession, Tommy was in tears. The Kleenex box was empty. Lena had left him alone for no more than half a minute to get more tissues. When she came back into the room, his hands were under the table. She had wiped his nose for him like he was a child. She had soothed him, rubbed his shoulder, told him everything was going to be okay. He seemed to believe her. He’d blown his nose, dried his eyes. She had thought at the time that Tommy had resolved himself to his fate, but maybe the fate he had decided on was a lot different from the one that Lena had imagined.

Was it sympathy for Tommy or her instinctual need for self-preservation that had kept Lena from getting rid of the letter opener he had used on Brad Stephens? Last night, she had thought about tossing it over one of the thousands of concrete bridges between here and Macon. But she hadn’t. It was still wrapped in its bag, buried under the spare tire in the trunk of her car. Lena hadn’t wanted it in the house. Now, she didn’t like that it was so close to the station. Frank had doctored paperwork. He’d broken the chain of custody. He’d tampered with evidence. She wouldn’t put it past the old man to rummage through her car.