Karin Slaughter - Broken

Will had opened his briefcase on the bed. “Your right or his?”

“My right.” She stopped talking. Will had taken some kind of field kit out of his briefcase. She recognized the three small glass bottles he took out of the plastic pouch. He was going to do a Kastle-Meyer test on the stain.

Will didn’t prompt her to continue the story. He took a clean swab from the kit. He opened the first bottle and used the dropper to wet the cotton tip with ethanol. He touched the swab to the stain, gently rolling it so that the brown substance would transfer. He added the reagent, phenolphthalein, from the second bottle. Lena held her breath as he used the last dropper to add hydrogen peroxide to the mix. She had studied the procedure in class, performed it a hundred times herself. If the brown stain was human blood, the tip of the swab would rapidly turn bright pink.

The swab didn’t turn.

Will started to pack the kit back up. “What happened next?”

Lena had lost her place. She couldn’t take her eyes off the stain. How could it not be blood? It had the same shape, the same color, as a bloodstain. Tommy was in Allison’s apartment, going through her things. He was dressed like a burglar. He was standing two feet away from her blood with a knife in his hand.

Not a knife. A letter opener.

And not Allison’s blood.

Will prodded her to continue. “So, you flanked Tommy on your right. Interim Chief Wallace was on your right?”

“My left, your right.”

“Is this when you identified yourself as police officers?”

Lena held her breath. She would have to lie to him. There was no way she could say she didn’t remember, because that would be taken as an admission that she hadn’t followed the most basic procedure when confronting a suspect.

“Detective?”

Lena let out a slow breath. She tried to muster some sarcasm. “I know how to do my job.”

He gave a solemn nod. “I hope so.” Instead of jamming his foot down harder, he let up. “Tell me what happened next.”

Lena continued the story as Will walked around the garage. The space was small, but there wasn’t one inch that he didn’t study at some point. Every time he stopped to examine an item more closely—the bracing along the back wall, a strip of metal jutting out from the track for the garage door—her heart skipped.

Still, she told him about Tommy running into the street, Brad chasing him. The stabbing. The LifeFlight’s arrival. Lena finished, “The helicopter took off, and I went to the car. Tommy was already inside, handcuffed. I took him to the station. You know the story from there.”

Will scratched his jaw. “How much time would you say elapsed between when Tommy knocked you to the floor and when you were able to regain your footing?”

“I don’t know. Five seconds. Ten.”

“Did you hit your head?”

Lena’s head still ached from the bruise. “I don’t know.”

Will was at the back of the room. “Did you notice this?”

She had to force herself to walk into the garage. She followed his pointing finger to a hole in the wall. It was round with jagged edges, about the size of a bullet. Without thinking, Lena looked back at the front of the garage where Frank had been standing. The trajectory matched up. There were no casings on the floor. She hoped to God Frank had thought to look behind the garage. The bullet hadn’t stopped after grazing her hand and punching a hole in the metal siding. It was out there somewhere, probably buried in mud.

Will asked, “Did anyone fire their weapons?”

“Mine wasn’t fired.”

He looked at the Band-Aids on the side of her hand. “So, you were here on the floor.” He walked to the bed, standing where she had fallen.

“That’s right.”

“You stood up and saw that Frank Wallace was on the ground. Was he facedown? On his side?”

“On his side.” Lena followed Will as he slowly walked to the front of the garage. She stepped over magazines that had scattered in the struggle. She saw a flash of an older model Mustang clinging to the side of a racetrack.

Will pointed to the jagged metal sticking out from the garage door track. “This looks dangerous.”

He opened his briefcase again. With a steady hand, he used a pair of tweezers to pull a few threads of light tan material from the sharp metal. Frank’s coat was tan, a London Fog he’d been wearing for as long as Lena had known him.

Will handed her the K-M test kit. “I’m sure you know how to do this.”

Her hands trembled as she took the kit. She went through the same procedure Will had followed, using the dropper to add the reagent. When the tip of the swab turned bright pink, Lena didn’t think either of them was too surprised.

Will turned back around and looked at the garage. She could almost hear his mind working. For Lena’s part, she had the benefit of her own involvement to paint a picture of the truth. Tommy had shoved the table toward Lena. Frank had panicked, or startled, or something—for whatever reason, he’d ended up pulling the trigger on his gun. The shot had gone wild, taking a chunk out of Lena’s hand. Frank had dropped the gun. The Glock’s recoil had probably been unexpected. Or maybe he was so drunk by then that his balance was off. He’d pitched to the side, cutting open his arm on the sharp metal that jutted out from the track for the door. He’d fallen to the floor. He was clutching his arm by the time Lena had gotten up. By then, Tommy was running down the driveway with the letter opener in his hand.

Keystone Kops. They were a fucking joke.

How many drinks had Frank had yesterday morning? He was sitting in the car with his flask while Lena was watching Allison being dragged from the lake. He’d taken three or four swigs on the drive over. What about before then? How many drinks did it take him just to get out of bed these days?

Will was silent. He took back the swab, the bottles, and put everything back in its proper place. She waited for him to say something about the scene, about what had really happened. Instead, he asked, “Where’s the bathroom?”

Lena was too confused to answer anything other than “What?”

“The bathroom.” He indicated the open space, and Lena realized that he was right. The room was just one big box. There was no bathroom. There wasn’t even a closet. The furnishings were Spartan, nothing more than a bed that looked like it had been bought from a military supply store and a folding table of the sort they used at church bake sales. There was a small television in the corner with aluminum foil on the antennae and a Playstation jacked into the front. Instead of a chest of drawers, there were metal shelves bolted to the walls. T-shirts spilled over. Jeans. Baseball hats.

Will said, “What did Tommy say about why he was wearing a ski mask?”

Lena felt like she had swallowed a handful of gravel. “He said he had it on because it was cold.”

“It’s pretty cold in here,” Will agreed. He put the kit in his briefcase. Lena flinched when he snapped the locks shut. The sound echoed like a gunshot. Or a cell door closing.

The car magazines. The dirty sheets on the bed. The lack of even the most basic facilities. There was no way Allison Spooner had lived in this desolate garage.

Tommy Braham had.

BROCK’S FUNERAL HOME WAS HOUSED IN ONE OF THE OLDEST buildings in Grant County. The Victorian castle, complete with turrets, had been built in the early 1900s by the man in charge of maintenance at the railroad yard. That he had used funds embezzled from the railroad company was a matter later settled by the state prosecutor. The castle had eventually been auctioned on the courthouse steps to John Brock, the local mortician.