Will put the phone back on the hook. “I’ll have Faith do a trace tomorrow. My bet is that it was a throwaway phone. Do you remember anything else about Julie? Anything she said?”
“I could tell that she was calling from a bathroom,” Sara told him. “She said that Tommy had texted her that he was in jail. Maybe you can get the transcript from his phone?”
“Faith can do that, too,” he offered. “What about Julie’s voice? Did she sound young? Old?”
“She sounded really young and really country.”
“Country how?”
Sara smiled. “Not like me. At least I hope not. She sounded more like the wrong side of the tracks. She used the word ‘you’uns.’”
“That’s mountain talk.”
“Is it? I’m not up on dialects.”
“I had an assignment in Blue Ridge a while back,” he explained. “Do you hear that word around here much?”
She shook her head. “Not really. Not that I can remember.”
“All right, so we’ve got someone young, probably a transplant from north Georgia or Appalachia. She told you that she was Tommy’s friend. We’ll dump his phone line and see if they’ve ever called each other.”
“Julie Smith,” Sara said, wondering why it had never occurred to her that the girl might be using an alias.
“Maybe the phone taps will give us something.”
Sara indicated the photocopies she’d made. “Were these helpful?”
“Not in the way you’re thinking.” He thumbed through the pages. “I asked the station secretary, Mrs. Simms, to fax these to Faith. Can you look at them for me?”
Sara glanced through the pages. There were handwritten numbers at the top. She stopped on the eleventh page. Someone had written the number twelve in the corner. The two was backward. “Did you number these?”
“Yes,” he said. “When I got them back from Mrs. Simms, one of the pages was missing. Page eleven. The page right after Detective Adams’s field report.”
Sara thumbed back to the second page. The two was written the correct way. She checked the third and fifth page. Both numbers were facing the correct direction. The pen had been pressed so hard that the paper felt embossed.
He asked, “Can you remember what’s missing?”
Sara went through them again, concentrating on the content instead of the numbering. “The 911 transcript.”
“You’re sure?”
“There was another page from Lena’s notebook. It was taped on the sheet of paper by itself. She wrote down the contents of the 911 call.”
“Can you remember what it said?”
“I know that it was a woman’s voice. I can’t really remember the rest.”
“Did they trace the number she called from?”
“I didn’t see anything indicating they had.” She shook her head. “Why can’t I remember what else it said?”
“We can get it from the call center.”
“Unless they managed to lose it.”
“It’s no big deal,” he told her. “You got the file from Frank, right?”
“From Carl Phillips.”
“The booking officer?”
“Yes. Did you talk to him tonight?”
“He’s gone on vacation with his family. No idea when he’ll be back. No phone. No cell. No way to get in touch with him.”
Sara felt her mouth drop open.
“I doubt he’s really gone. They’re probably keeping him away from me. He might even be at the station tomorrow, hiding in plain sight.”
“He’s the only African American on the force.”
Will laughed. “Thanks for the tip. That narrows things down considerably.”
“I can’t believe they’re doing this.”
“Cops don’t like to be questioned. They circle their wagons, even if they know it’s wrong.”
She wondered if Jeffrey had ever done anything like this. If he had, it was only because he wanted to be the one to clean out his own house. He would never let someone come in and do his job for him.
Will asked, “Where did you make the copies?”
“At the front of the room.”
“The copier that’s on the table by the coffeemaker?”
“That’s right.”
“Did you get some coffee?”
“I didn’t want to dawdle.” Everyone had been staring at her like she was a monster. Sara’s only goal had been to make the copies and get out of there as soon as possible.
“So, you’re standing by the copier waiting for the pages to come out. That looked like an old machine. Does it make a noise?”
She nodded, wondering where this was going.
“Like a whirring or a clunking?”
“Both,” she answered, and she could hear the sound in her head.
“How much coffee was left in the pot? Did anyone come up?”
She shook her head. “No. The pot was full.” The machine was older than the copier. She could smell the grounds burning.
“Did anyone talk to you?”
“No. No one would even look at-” She saw herself standing by the copier. The machine was old, the kind you had to feed the pages into one at a time. She had read the file to keep from staring aimlessly at the wall. “Oh.”
“What do you remember?”
“I skimmed the 911 transcript while I was waiting for the copier to warm up.”
“What did it say?”
She could see herself standing back in the station reading the files. “The woman called it a possible suicide. She said she was worried her friend had done something.” Sara narrowed her eyes, trying to force the memory to come. “She was worried Allison was going to kill herself because she’d gotten into a fight with her boyfriend.”
“Did she say where she thought Allison was?”
“Lover’s Point,” she recalled. “That’s what town people call it. It’s the cove where Allison was found.”
“What’s it like?”
“A cove.” Sara shrugged. “It’s romantic if you’re out for a walk, but not in the pouring rain and cold.”
“Is it secluded?”
“Yes.”
“So, according to this caller, Allison got into a fight with her boyfriend. The caller was worried Allison was suicidal. The caller also knew she was going to be at Lover’s Point.”
“It was probably Julie Smith. Is that what you’re thinking?”
“Maybe, but why? The caller wanted to bring attention to Allison’s murder. Julie Smith was trying to help Tommy Braham get away with murder. They seem to have opposite goals.” He paused. “Faith is trying to track her down, but we’re going to need more than a disconnected number to find her.”
“Frank and Lena are probably thinking the same thing,” Sara guessed. “That’s why they hid the transcript. They either don’t want you to talk to her or they want to talk to her first.”
Will scratched his cheek. “Maybe.” He was obviously considering another option. For her part, Sara could not get past Marla Simms hiding information in a formal investigation. The old woman had worked at the station longer than anyone could remember.
Will sat up on the couch. He thumbed through the pages on the coffee table. “Mrs. Simms took it upon herself to send some extra information. I had Agent Mitchell scan these in so I could print them out.” He found what he was looking for and handed it to Sara. She recognized the form, a two-page incident report. Patrolmen filled out dozens of these a week to notate cases where they had been called in but no arrest had been made. They were useful to have in case something bad happened later, sort of like a progress report on a person or an area of town.
Will said, “These are incident reports documenting Tommy’s run-ins with the law.” He indicated the pages in Sara’s hands. “This one talks about a girl he got into a screaming match with at the roller rink.”
She saw there was a yellow dot in the corner of the report.
He asked, “Did you ever know Tommy to have a temper?”
“Never.” Sara checked through the other incident reports. There were two more, each two stapled pages, each with a dot from a colored marker in the corner. One was red. The other was green.