Tommy Braham lay on the floor of his cell. He was on his side, both arms reaching out to the bed in front of him. His head was turned at an awkward angle as he stared blankly up at the ceiling. His lips were parted. Sara recognized him now, the man he had become not much different from the little boy he’d once been. He’d brought her a dandelion once, and turned the color of a turnip when she’d kissed his forehead.
She went to him, pressing her fingers to his neck, doing a cursory check for a pulse. He had obviously been beaten-his nose broken, his eye blackened-but that was not the reason for his death. Both his wrists were cut open, the wounds gaping, flesh and sinew exposed to the stale air. There seemed to be more blood on the floor than there was inside of his body. The smell was sickly sweet, like a butcher’s shop.
“Tommy,” she whispered, stroking his cheek. “I remember you.”
Sara closed his eyelids with her fingers. His skin was still warm, almost hot. She had driven too slowly getting here. She shouldn’t have used the restroom before leaving the house. She should have listened to Julie Smith. She should have agreed to come without a fight. She should have remembered this sweet little boy who’d brought her a weed he’d picked from the tall grass growing outside the clinic.
Frank bent down and used a pencil to drag a thin, cylindrical object out of the blood.
Sara said, “It’s an ink cartridge from a ballpoint pen.”
“He must have used it to…”
Sara looked at Tommy’s wrists again. Blue lines of ink crossed the pale skin. She had been the coroner for Grant County before she’d left for Atlanta, and she knew what a repetitive injury looked like. Tommy had scraped and scraped with the metal ink cartridge, digging into his flesh until he found a way to open a vein. And then he had done the same thing to his other wrist.
“Shit.” Frank was staring over her shoulder.
She turned around. On the wall, written in his own blood, Tommy had scrawled the words Not me.
Sara closed her eyes, not wanting to see any of this, not wanting to be here. “Did he try to recant?”
Frank said, “They all do.” He hesitated, then added, “He wrote out a confession. He had guilty knowledge of the crime.”
Sara recognized the term “guilty knowledge.” It was used to describe details that only the police and the criminal knew. She opened her eyes. “Is that why he was crying? He wanted to take back his confession?”
Frank gave a tight nod. “Yeah, he wanted to take it back. But they all-”
“Did he ask for a lawyer?”
“No.”
“How did he get the pen?”
Frank shrugged, but he wasn’t stupid. He could guess what had happened.
“He was Lena ’s prisoner. Did she give him the pen?”
“Of course not.” Frank stood up, walked to the cell door. “Not on purpose.”
Sara touched Tommy’s shoulder before standing. “ Lena was supposed to frisk him before she put him in the cell.”
“He could’ve hidden it in-”
“I’m assuming she gave him the pen to write his confession.” Sara felt a deep, dark hate burning in the pit of her stomach. She had been back in town for less than an hour and already she was in the middle of yet another one of Lena ’s epic screwups. “How long did she interrogate him?”
Frank shook his head again, like she had it all wrong. “Couple’a three hours. Not that long.”
Sara pointed to the words Tommy had written in his own blood. “‘Not me,’” she read. “He says he didn’t do it.”
“They all say they didn’t do it.” Frank’s tone told her his patience was running thin. “Look, honey, just go home. I’m sorry about all this, but…” He paused, his mind working. “I gotta call the state, start the paperwork, get Lena back in…” He rubbed his face with his hands. “Christ, what a nightmare.”
Sara picked her coat up off the floor. “Where is his confession? I want to see it.”
Frank dropped his hands. He seemed stuck in place. Finally, he relented, leading her toward the door at the opposite end of the hall. The fluorescent lights of the squad room were harsh, almost blinding, compared to the dark cells. Sara blinked to help her eyes adjust. There was a group of uniformed patrolmen standing by the coffeemaker. Marla was at her desk. They all stared at her with the same macabre curiosity they had shown four years ago: How awful, how tragic, how long before I can get on the phone and tell somebody I saw her?
Sara ignored them because she did not know what else to do. Her skin felt hot, and she found herself looking down at her hands so that she would not see Jeffrey’s office. She wondered if they had left everything as it was: his Auburn memorabilia, his shooting trophies and family photographs. Sweat rolled down her back. The room was so stifling that she thought she might be sick.
Frank stopped at his desk. “Allison Spooner is the girl he killed. Tommy tried to make it look like a suicide-wrote a note, stuck Spooner’s watch and ring in her shoes. He would’ve gotten away with it but Le-” He stopped. “Allison was stabbed in the neck.”
“Has an autopsy been performed?”
“Not yet.”
“How do you know the stab wasn’t self-inflicted?”
“It looked-”
“How deep did it penetrate? What was the trajectory of the blade? Was there water in her lungs?”
Frank talked over her, an air of desperation to his voice. “She had ligature marks around her wrists.”
Sara stared at him. She had always known Frank to be an honorable man, yet she would have sworn on a stack of Bibles that he was lying through his teeth. “Brock confirmed this?”
He hesitated before shaking his head and shrugging at the same time.
Sara could feel herself getting angrier. She knew somewhere in the back of her mind that her anger was unreasonable, that it was coming from that dark place she had ignored for so many years, but there was no stopping it now-even if she wanted to. “Was the body weighted down in the water?”
“She had two cinder blocks chained to her waist.”
“If she floated with both hands hanging down, livor mortis could have settled into her wrists, or her hands could have rested at an angle on the bottom of the lake, making it look to the untrained eye as if she’d been tied up.”
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.”