Frank Wallace never smoked in his county-issued Lincoln Town Car, but the cloth seats had absorbed the fug of nicotine that seeped from every pore in his body. He reminded Lena of Pig Pen from the Peanuts comic strip. No matter how clean he was or how often he changed his clothes, the stench followed him like a dust cloud.
“What’s wrong?” he demanded, not even giving her time to shut the car door.
Lena shucked her wet parka onto the floorboard. Earlier, she had thrown on a jacket with two shirts underneath to help fight the cold. Still, even with the heat blasting, her teeth were chattering. It was as if her body had stored up all the chill while she was standing outside in the rain and only let it out now that she was safely sheltered.
She held her hands up to the vent. “God, it’s freezing.”
“What’s wrong?” Frank repeated. He made a show of pulling back his black leather glove so he could see his watch.
Lena shivered involuntarily. She couldn’t keep the excitement out of her voice. No cop would ever admit it to a civilian, but murders were the most exciting cases to work. Lena was so pumped through with adrenaline that she was surprised the cold was getting to her. Through chattering teeth, she told him, “It’s not a suicide.”
Frank looked even more annoyed. “Brock agree with you?”
Brock had gone back to sleep in his van while he waited for the chains to be cut, which they both knew because they could see his back molars from where they were sitting. “Brock wouldn’t know his ass from a hole in the ground,” Lena shot back. She rubbed her arms to coax some warmth back into her body.
Frank took out his flask and handed it to her. She took a quick sip, the whisky burning its way down her throat and into her stomach. Frank took a hefty drink of his own before returning the flask to his coat pocket.
She told him, “There’s a knife wound in the neck.”
“Brock’s?”
Lena gave him a withering glance. “The dead girl.” She leaned down and searched her parka for the wallet she had found in the pocket of the woman’s jacket.
Frank said, “Could be self-inflicted.”
“Not possible.” She put her hand to the back of her neck. “Blade went in about here. The killer was standing behind her. Probably took her by surprise.”
Frank grumbled, “You get that from one of your textbooks?”
Lena held her tongue, something she wasn’t used to doing. Frank had been interim police chief for the last four years. Everything that happened in the three cities that comprised Grant County fell under his purview. Madison and Avondale carried the usual drug problems and domestic violence, but Heartsdale was supposed to be easy. The college was here, and the affluent residents were vocal about crime.
Even without that, complicated cases had the tendency to turn Frank into an asshole. Actually, life in general could turn him into an asshole. His coffee going cold. The engine in his car not catching on the first try. The ink running dry in his pen. Frank hadn’t always been like this. He’d certainly leaned toward grumpy for as long as Lena had known him, but his attitude lately was tinged with an underlying fury that seemed ready to boil to the surface. Anything could set him off. In the blink of an eye he’d turn from being manageably irritated to downright mean.
At least in this particular matter Frank’s reluctance made sense. After thirty-five years of policing, a murder case was the last thing he wanted on his plate. Lena knew that he was sick of the job, sick of the people it brought him into contact with. He had lost two of his closest friends in the last six years. The only lake he wanted to be sitting in front of right now was in sunny Florida. He should’ve had a fishing pole and a beer in his hands, not a dead kid’s wallet.
“Looks fake,” Frank said, opening the wallet. Lena agreed. The leather was too shiny. The Prada logo was plastic.
“Allison Judith Spooner,” Lena told him, watching Frank try to peel apart the soaked plastic picture sleeves. “Twenty-one. Driver’s license is from Elba, Alabama. Her student ID’s in the back.”
“College.” Frank breathed out the word with something like despair. It was bad enough Allison Spooner had been found on or near state property. Add to that the fact that she was an out-of-state kid attending Grant Tech, and the case just got twenty times more political.
He asked, “Where’d you find the wallet?”
“In her jacket pocket. I guess she didn’t have a purse. Or maybe whoever killed her wanted us to know her identity.”
He was looking at the girl’s driver’s license photo.
“What is it?”
“Looks like that little waitress who works at the diner.”
The Grant Diner was on the opposite end of Main Street from the police station. Most of the force ate there for lunch. Lena stayed away from the place. She usually brown-bagged it, or, more often than not, didn’t eat.
She asked, “Did you know her?”
He shook his head and shrugged at the same time. “She was good-looking.”
Frank was right. Not many people had a flattering driver’s license photo, but Allison Spooner had been luckier than most. Her white teeth showed in a big smile. Her hair was pulled back off her face, revealing high cheekbones. There was merriment in her eyes, as if someone had just made a joke. This was all in sharp contrast to the body they had pulled out of the lake. Death had erased her vibrancy.
Frank said, “I didn’t know she was a student.”
“They usually don’t work in town,” Lena allowed. Grant Tech’s students tended to work on campus or not at all. They didn’t mix with the town and the town did its best not to mix with them.
Frank pointed out, “The school’s closed this week for Thanksgiving break. Why isn’t she home with her family?”
Lena didn’t have the answer. “There’s forty bucks in the wallet, so this wasn’t a robbery.”
Frank checked the money compartment anyway, his thick, gloved fingers finding the twenty and two tens glued together with lake water. “She could’ve been lonely. Decided to take the knife and end it herself.”
“She’d have to be a contortionist,” Lena insisted. “You’ll see when Brock gets her on the table. She was stabbed from behind.”
He gave a bone-weary sigh. “What about the chain and cinder blocks?”
“We can try Mann’s Hardware in town. Maybe the killer bought them there.”
He tried again. “You’re sure about the knife wound?”
She nodded.
Frank kept staring at the license photo. “Does she have a car?”
“If she does, it’s not in the vicinity.” Lena pressed the point. “Unless she carried forty pounds’ worth of cinder blocks and some chains through the woods …”
Frank finally closed the wallet and handed it back to her. “Why is it every Monday just gets shittier and shittier?”
Lena couldn’t answer him. Last week wasn’t that much better. A young mother and her daughter had been taken by a flash flood. The whole town was still reeling from the loss. There was no telling what they’d make of a pretty, young college girl being murdered.
She told Frank, “Brad’s trying to track down somebody from the college who can get into the registrar’s office and give us Spooner’s local address.” Brad Stephens had finally worked his way up from patrol to the rank of detective, but his new job didn’t have him doing much more than his old one did. He was still running errands.
Lena offered, “Once the scene is cleared, I’ll work on the death notification.”
“Alabama’s on central time.” Frank looked at his watch. “It’ll probably be better to call the parents direct instead of waking up the Elba P.D. this early in the morning.”
Lena checked her own watch. They were coming up on seven o’clock, which meant it was almost six in Alabama. If Elba was anything like Grant County, the detectives were on call during the night, but not expected to be at their desks until eight in the morning. Normally at this time of the day, Lena would be just getting out of bed and fumbling with the coffeemaker. “I’ll put in a courtesy call when we get back to the station.”
The car went quiet except for the brushing sound of rain against steel. A bolt of lightning, thin and mean, sparked in the sky. Lena instinctively flinched, but Frank just stared ahead at the lake. The divers weren’t worried about the lightning. They were taking turns with the bolt cutters, trying to disentangle the dead girl from the two cinder blocks.
Frank’s phone rang, a high-pitched warble that sounded like a bird sitting somewhere in the rain forest. He answered it with a gruff “Yeah.” He listened for a few seconds, then asked, “What about the parents?” Frank grumbled a string of curses under his breath. “Then go back inside and find out.” He snapped his phone shut. “Jackass.”
Lena gathered Brad had forgotten to get the parents’ information. “Where does Spooner live?”
“Taylor Drive. Number sixteen and a half. Brad’s gonna meet us there if he manages to get his head out of his ass.” He put the engine in gear and slung his arm over the seat behind Lena as he backed up the car. The forest was dense and wet. Lena braced her palm against the dashboard as Frank slowly made his way back to the road.
“Sixteen and a half must mean she’s in a garage apartment,” Lena noted. Many of the local residents had converted their garages or empty toolsheds into the semblance of a living space so that they could charge exorbitant rent to the college students. Most students were so desperate to live off campus that they didn’t ask too many questions.
Frank said, “Gordon Braham’s the landlord.”
They hit a bump that made Frank’s teeth clamp together. “His mother told him.”
“Well.” Lena searched her mind for something positive to say about Brad. “Shows initiative that he found out who owns the house and the garage.”
“Initiative,” Frank mocked. “That kid’s gonna get his head shot off one day.”
Lena had known Brad for over ten years. Frank had known him even longer. They both still saw him as a goofy young boy, a teenager who looked out of place with his gun belt tightened high on his waist. Brad had put in his years in uniform and passed the right tests to garner his gold detective shield, but Lena had done this job long enough to know that there was a difference between a paperwork promotion and a street promotion. She could only hope that in a small town like Heartsdale, Brad’s lack of street smarts wouldn’t matter. He was good at filling out reports and talking to witnesses, but even after ten years behind the wheel of a squad car, he still tended to see the good in people instead of the bad.
Lena had been on the job less than a week when she’d realized that there was no such thing as a truly good person.
Herself included.
She didn’t want to waste time worrying about Brad right now. She flipped through the photographs in Allison Spooner’s wallet as Frank made his way through the forest. There was a picture of an orange tabby cat lying in a ray of sunshine, and a candid snapshot that showed Allison with a woman Lena assumed was her mother. The third photo showed Allison sitting on a park bench. On her right was a man who looked a few years younger than she was. He was wearing a baseball cap pulled down low and had his hands tucked deep into the pockets of his baggy pants. On Allison’s left was an older woman with stringy blond hair and heavy makeup. Her jeans were skintight. There was a hardness to her eyes. She could have been thirty or three hundred. All three of them sat close together. The boy had his arm around Allison Spooner’s shoulders.
Lena showed Frank the picture. He asked, “Family?”
She studied the photo, concentrating on the background. “Looks like this was taken on campus.” She showed Frank. “See the white building in the back? I think that’s the student center.”
“That girl don’t look like a college student to me.”
He meant the older blonde. “She looks local.” She had the unmistakably trashy, bleach-blond air of a town-bred girl. Fake wallet aside, Allison Spooner appeared to be several rungs up on the social ladder. It didn’t jibe that the two would be friends. “Maybe Spooner had a drug problem?” Lena guessed. Nothing crossed class lines like methamphetamine.
They’d finally made it to the main road. The back wheels of the car gave one final spin in the mud as Frank pulled onto asphalt. “Who called it in?”
Lena shook her head. “The 911 call was made from a cell phone. The number was blocked. Female voice, but she wouldn’t leave her name.”
“What’d she say?”
Lena carefully thumbed back through her notebook so the damp pages would not tear. She found the transcription and read aloud, “ ‘Female voice: My friend has been missing since this afternoon. I think she killed herself. 911 Operator: What makes you think she killed herself? Female voice: She got into a fight last night with her boyfriend. She said she was going to drown herself up by Lover’s Point.’ The operator tried to keep her on the line, but she hung up after that.”
Frank was quiet. She saw his throat work. His shoulders were slumped so low that he looked like a gangbanger holding on to the steering wheel. He’d been fighting the possibility that this was a murder since Lena got into the car.
She asked, “What do you think?”
“Lover’s Point,” Frank repeated. “Only a townie would call it that.”
Lena held the notebook in front of the heating vents, trying to dry the pages. “The boyfriend is probably the kid in the picture.”
Frank didn’t pick up on her train of thought. “So, the 911 call came in, and Brad drove out to the lake and found what?”
“The note was under one of the shoes. Allison’s ring and watch were inside.” Lena bent down again to the plastic evidence bags buried in the deep pockets of her parka. She shifted through the victim’s belongings and found the note, which she showed to Frank. “ ‘I want it over.’ ”
He stared at the writing so long she was worried he wasn’t minding the road.
“Frank?”
One of the wheels grazed the edge of the asphalt. Frank jerked the steering wheel. Lena held on to the dash. She knew better than to say anything about his driving. Frank wasn’t the type of man who liked to be corrected, especially by a woman. Especially by Lena.
She said, “Strange note for a suicide. Even a fake suicide.”
“Short and to the point.” Frank kept one hand on the wheel as he searched his coat pocket. He slid on his reading glasses and stared at the smeared ink. “She didn’t sign it.”
Lena checked the road. He was riding the white line again. “No.”
Frank glanced up and steered back toward the center line. “Does this look like a woman’s handwriting to you?”
Lena hadn’t considered the possibility. She studied the single sentence, which was written in a wide, round print. “It looks neat, but I couldn’t say if a man or woman wrote it. We could get a handwriting expert. Allison’s a student, so there are probably notes she took from classes or essays and tests. I’m sure we could find something to compare it with.”
Frank didn’t address any of her suggestions. Instead, he said, “I remember when my daughter was her age.” He cleared his throat a few times. “She used to draw circles over her i’s instead of dots. I wonder if she still does that.”
Lena kept quiet. She had worked with Frank her entire career, but she didn’t know much about his personal life beyond what most everyone else in town knew. He had two children by his first wife, but that was many wives ago. They’d moved out of town. He didn’t seem to have contact with any of them. The subject of his family was one he never broached, and right now Lena was too cold and too wired to start sharing.
She put the focus back on the case. “So, someone stabbed Allison in the neck, chained her to some cinder blocks, threw her in the lake, then decided to make it look like a suicide.” Lena shook her head at the stupidity. “Another criminal mastermind.”
Frank gave a snort of agreement. She could tell his mind was on other things. He took off his glasses and stared at the road ahead.
She didn’t want to, but she asked, “What’s going on?”
“Nothing.”
“How many years have I been riding with you, Frank?”
He made another grunting noise, but he relented easily enough. “Mayor’s been trying to track me down.”
Lena felt a lump rise in her throat. Clem Waters, the mayor of Heartsdale, had been trying for some time to make Frank’s job as interim chief a more permanent position.
Frank said, “I don’t really want the job, but there’s nobody else lining up to take it.”
“No,” she agreed. No one wanted the job, not least of all because they would never in a million years match the man who’d held it before.
“Benefits are good,” Frank said. “Nice retirement package. Better health care, pension.”
She managed to swallow. “That’s good, Frank. Jeffrey would want you to take it.”
“He’d want me to retire before I have a heart attack chasing some junkie across the campus quad.” Frank took out his flask and offered it to Lena. She shook her head and watched him take a long pull, one eye on the road as he tilted back his head. Lena’s focus stayed on his hand. There was a slight tremor to it. His hands had been shaking a lot lately, especially in the morning.
Without warning, the rain’s steady beat turned into a harsh staccato. The noise echoed in the car, filling up the space. Lena pressed her tongue to the roof of her mouth. She should tell Frank now that she wanted to resign, that there was a job in Macon waiting for her if she could bring herself to make the leap. She had moved to Grant County to be near her sister, but her sister had died almost a decade ago. Her uncle, her only living relative, had retired to the Florida Panhandle. Her best friend had taken a job at a library up North. Her boyfriend lived two hours away. There was nothing keeping Lena here except inertia and loyalty to a man who had been dead for four years and probably hadn’t thought she was a good cop anyway.
Frank used his knees to hold the steering wheel steady as he screwed the cap back on the flask. “I won’t take it unless you say it’s okay.”
She turned her head in surprise. “Frank—”
“I mean it,” he interrupted. “If it’s not okay with you, then I’ll tell the mayor to shove it up his ass.” He gave a harsh chuckle that rattled the phlegm in his chest. “Might let you come along to see the look on the little prick’s face.”
She made herself say, “You should take the job.”
“I don’t know, Lee. I’m gettin’ so damn old. Children are all grown up. Wives have moved on. Most days, I wonder why I even get out of bed.” He gave another raspy chuckle. “Might find me in the lake one day with my watch in my shoes. But for real.”
She didn’t want to hear the tiredness in his voice. Frank had been on the job twenty years longer than Lena, but she could feel the weariness in his tone like it was her own. This was why she had been spending every free minute of her time taking classes at the college, trying to get a bachelor’s degree in forensic science so she could work on the crime scene investigation end instead of enforcement.
Lena could handle the early morning calls that yanked her from sleep. She could handle the carnage and the dead bodies and the misery that death brought to each and every moment of your life. What she could not take anymore was being on the front lines. There was too much responsibility. There was too much risk. You could make one mistake and it could cost a life—not your own, but another person’s. You could end up getting someone’s son killed. Someone’s husband. Someone’s friend. You found out fairly quickly that another person dying on your watch was far worse than the specter of your own death.
Frank said, “Listen, I need to tell you something.”
Lena glanced at him, wondering at his sudden openness. His shoulders had slumped even more and his knuckles were white from gripping the steering wheel. She ran through the catalogue of things she might be in trouble for at work, but what came out of his mouth took her breath away. “Sara Linton’s back in town.”
Lena tasted whisky and bile in the back of her throat. For a brief, panicked moment, she thought she was going to throw up. Lena could not face Sara. The accusations. The guilt. Even the thought of driving down her street was too much. Lena always took the long way to work, bypassing Sara’s house, bypassing the misery that churned up every time she thought of the place.
Frank kept his voice low. “I heard it in town, so I gave her dad a call. He said she was driving down for Thanksgiving today.” He cleared his throat. “I wouldn’t’a told you, but I’ve stepped up patrols outside their house. You’d see it on the call sheet and wonder—so, now you know.”
Lena tried to swallow the sour taste in her mouth. It felt like glass going down her throat. “Okay,” she managed. “Thanks.”
Frank took a sharp turn onto Taylor Road, blowing through a stop sign. Lena grabbed the side of the door to brace herself, but the movement was automatic. Her mind was caught up in how to ask Frank for time off during the middle of a case. She would take the week and drive over to Macon, maybe scope out some apartments until the holiday was past and Sara was back in Atlanta where she belonged.
“Look at this dumbass,” Frank mumbled as he slowed the car.
Brad Stephens was standing outside his parked patrol car. He was wearing a tan suit pressed to within an inch of its life. His white shirt almost glowed against the blue striped tie that his mama had probably laid out for him with the rest of his clothes this morning. What was obviously bothering Frank was the umbrella in Brad’s hand. It was bright pink except for the Mary Kay logo stitched in yellow.
“Go easy on him,” Lena tried, but Frank was already getting out of the car. He wrestled with his own umbrella—a large black canopy that he’d gotten from Brock at the funeral home—and stomped over to Brad. Lena waited in the car, watching Frank berate the young detective. She knew what it felt like to be on the other end of Frank’s tirades. He had been her trainer when she first entered patrol, then her partner when she made detective. If not for Frank, Lena would’ve washed out of the job the first week. The fact that he didn’t think women belonged on the force made her damned determined to prove him otherwise.
And Jeffrey had been her buffer. Lena had come to the realization some time ago that she had a tendency to be mirror to whoever was in front of her. When Jeffrey was in charge, they did everything the right way—or at least as right as they could. He was a solid cop, the kind of man who had the trust of the community because his character came through in everything he did. That was why the mayor had hired him in the first place. Clem wanted to break the old ways, to pull Grant County into the twenty-first century. Ben Carver, the outgoing chief of police, was as crooked as a stick in water. Frank had been his right-hand man and just as jagged. Under Jeffrey, Frank had changed his ways. They all had. Or at least they had as long as Jeffrey was alive.
Within the first week of Frank being put in charge, things had started to slip. It was slow at first, and hard to spot. A Breathalyzer result had gone missing, freeing one of Frank’s hunting buddies from a DUI. An unusually careful pot dealer at the college was suddenly caught with a huge stash in the trunk of his car. Tickets disappeared. Cash was missing from the evidence locker. Requisitions turned iffy. The service contract for the county cars went to a garage Frank had part ownership in.
Like a dam breaking, these small cracks had led to larger issues until the whole thing burst open and every cop on the force was doing something they shouldn’t do. Which was one of the biggest reasons Lena had to get out. Macon didn’t do things the easy way. The city was bigger than the three cities of Grant County combined, topping out at a population of around a hundred thousand. People sued if they were wronged by the police, and they tended to win. Macon’s murder rate was one of the highest in the state. Burglaries, sex crimes, violent crimes—there was plenty of opportunity for a detective, but even more work for a crime scene tech. Lena was two courses away from getting her criminal science degree. There were no shortcuts in evidence collection. You dusted for prints. You vacuumed the carpets for fibers. You photographed the blood and other fluids. You catalogued the evidence. Then you handed it all off to someone else. The lab techs were responsible for doing the science. The detectives were responsible for catching the bad guys. All Lena would be was a glorified cleaner with a badge and state benefits. She could spend the rest of her life processing crime scenes, then retire young enough to supplement her pension with private investigation work.
She would end up being one of those asshole private detectives who were always putting their noses where they didn’t belong.
“Adams!” Frank slammed his hand on the hood of the car. Water splashed up like a dog shaking itself. He was finished yelling at Brad and was spoiling for someone else to rip into.
Lena took the dripping wet parka off the floor and put it on, tightening the strings on the hood so her hair wouldn’t get soaked. She caught a look at herself in the rearview mirror. Her hair had started to twist into curls. The rain had brought out her Irish Catholic father’s roots and managed to suppress her Mexican grandmother’s.
“Adams!” Frank yelled again.
By the time she got out of the car, he was concentrating another tirade on Brad, yelling at him about how he was wearing his gun holster too low on his belt.
Lena forced her lips into a tight smile, trying to give Brad some silent support. She had been a dumb cop herself many years ago. Maybe Jeffrey had thought she was worthless, too. The fact that he had tried to turn her into something worthwhile was a testament to his determination. One of the few reasons Lena could give herself for not taking the job in Macon was thinking that she could do something to help Brad be a better cop. She could keep him away from the corruption, train him to do things the right way.
Do as I say, not as I do.
“Are you sure this is it?” Frank demanded. He meant the house.
Brad’s throat worked. “Yes, sir. That’s what the college had on file. Sixteen and a half Taylor Drive.”
“Did you knock on the door?”
Brad seemed unsure of which answer was the right one. “No, sir. You said to wait for you.”
“You got a phone number for the owner?”
“No, sir. His name is Mr. Braham, but—”
“Christ,” Frank muttered, stalking up the driveway.
Lena couldn’t help but feel sorry for Brad. She thought about reaching up and patting him on the shoulder, but he tilted his bright pink umbrella the wrong way and ended up sending a sheet of rain down on her head.
“Oh,” Brad breathed. “Gosh, I’m sorry, Lena.”
She pressed down some expletives that wanted to come and walked ahead of him, joining Frank.
Sixteen and a half Taylor Drive was a one-story garage that was slightly deeper than a minivan and twice as wide. “Converted” was a loose term, because the structure had not been altered well on the outside. The roll-up metal door was still in place, black construction paper covering the windows. Because of the overcast day, the lights inside the apartment showed through the cracks in the aluminum siding. Tufts of pink fiberglass insulation were matted down by rain. The tin roof was rusted red, a blue tarp covering the back corner.
Lena stared at the structure, wondering why any woman in her right mind would live here.
“Scooter,” Frank noted. There was a purple Vespa parked by the garage. A bike chain attached the back wheel to an eyebolt screwed into the concrete drive. He asked, “Same chain as what was on the girl?”
She saw a flash of bright yellow under the wheel. “Looks like the same padlock.”
Lena glanced toward the main house, a split ranch with a sloping gable on the front. The windows were dark. There was no car by the house or on the street. They would have to find the landlord for permission to go into the garage. She flipped open her cell phone to call Marla Simms, the station’s elderly secretary. Between Marla and her best friend, Myrna, they represented a combined Rolodex of every person in town.
Brad pressed his face up to one of the windows in the garage door. He squinted, trying to see past a rip in the construction paper. “Jeesh,” he whispered, backing up so quickly that he almost tripped over his feet. He drew his gun and went into a crouch.
Lena’s Glock was in her hand before she thought about putting it there. Her heart had jumped into her throat. Adrenaline made her senses sharpen. A quick look over her shoulder showed Frank had drawn his weapon, too. They all stood there, guns pointed toward the closed garage door.
Lena motioned for Brad to move back. She kept a low crouch as she walked up to the garage window. The tear in the construction paper seemed larger now, more like a target she was about to put her face in front of. Quickly, she glanced inside. There was a man standing at a folding table. He was wearing a black mask. He looked up as if he heard a noise, and Lena ducked down again, her heart racing. She stood still, counting off the seconds as her ears strained to hear footsteps, a gun loading. There was nothing, and she slowly let out the breath she’d been holding.
She held up one finger to Frank: one person. She mouthed the word “mask,” and saw his eyes widen in surprise. Frank indicated his gun and she shrugged as she shook her head. She hadn’t been able to see whether or not the man was holding a weapon.
Without being told, Brad walked toward the side of the building. He went around the back, obviously checking for exits. Lena counted the seconds, reaching twenty-six by the time he showed up on the other side of the building. Brad shook his head. No back door. No windows. Lena indicated that he should go down the driveway and serve as backup. Let her and Frank handle this. Brad started to protest, but she cut him with a look. Finally, he hung his head in surrender. She waited until he was at least fifteen feet away before nodding to Frank that she was ready to go.
Frank walked toward the garage and leaned down, wrapping his hand around the steel handle at the base of the roll-up door. He checked with Lena, then yanked up on the handle hard and fast.
The man inside was startled, his eyes going wide behind the black ski mask covering his face. He had a knife in his gloved hand, raised as if to charge. The blade was long and thin, at least eight inches. What looked very much like dried blood was caked around the handle. The concrete beneath his feet was stained a dark brown. More blood.
“Drop it,” Frank said.
The intruder didn’t comply. Lena took a few steps to her right, closing any escape routes. He was standing behind a large cafeteria table with paperwork strewn across it. A twin bed was angled out from the wall so that between the bed frame and the table, the entire room was cut down the middle.
“Put down the knife,” Lena told him. She had to turn sideways to get past the bed. There was another dark stain on the concrete under the bed. A bucket with brown water and a filthy-looking sponge was beside it. She kept her gun trained at the man’s chest, stepping carefully around boxes and scattered pieces of paper. He glanced nervously between Lena and Frank, the knife still raised in his fist.
“Drop it,” Frank repeated.
The man’s hands started to lower. Lena let herself exhale, thinking this was going to go easy. She was wrong. Without warning, the man shoved the table violently to the side, slamming it into Lena’s legs, sending her back onto the bed. Her head grazed the frame as she rolled onto the concrete floor. A shot rang out. Lena didn’t think it was from her gun, but her left hand felt hot, almost on fire. Someone shouted. There was a muffled groan. She scrambled to stand. Her vision blurred.
Frank was lying on his side in the middle of the garage. His gun lay on the ground beside him. His fist was clamped around his arm. She thought at first that he was having a heart attack. The blood seeping between his fingers showed that he had been cut.
“Go!” he yelled. “Now!”
“Shit,” Lena hissed, pushing away the table. She felt nauseated. Her vision was still blurred, but it sharpened on the black-clad suspect bolting down the driveway. Brad was standing stock-still, mouth open in surprise. The intruder ran right past him.
“Stop him!” she screamed. “He stabbed Frank!”
Brad jerked around, giving chase. Lena ran after them, sneakers slapping against the wet ground, water flying up into her face. She rounded the end of the driveway and flew down the street. Ahead, she saw Brad gaining on the suspect. He was taller, fitter, every stride closing the gap between him and the intruder.
Brad yelled, “Police! Stop!”
Everything slowed. The rain seemed to freeze in midair, tiny droplets trapped in time and space.
The suspect stopped. He reared around, slicing the knife through the air. Lena reached for her gun, felt the empty holster. There was a popping sound of metal breaking through flesh, then a loud groan. Brad crumpled to the ground.
“No,” Lena gasped, running to Brad, falling to her knees. The knife was still in his belly. Blood seeped into his shirt, turning the white to crimson. “Brad—”
“It hurts,” he told her. “It hurts so bad.”
Lena dialed her cell phone, praying the ambulance team was still at the lake and not making the half-hour trip back to the station. Behind her, she heard loud footsteps, shoes pounding pavement. With startling speed, Frank sprinted past her, yelling with uncontrolled rage. The suspect turned around to see what hell was about to be unleashed upon him just as Frank tackled him to the asphalt. Teeth shattered. Bones snapped. Frank’s fists were flying, a windmill of pain raining down on the suspect.
Lena pressed the phone to her ear. She listened to the rings that were going unanswered at the station.
“Lena …” Brad whispered. “Don’t tell my mom I messed up.”
“You didn’t mess up.” She used her hand to shield the rain from his face. His eyelids fluttered, trying to close. “No,” she begged. “Please don’t do this to me.”
“I’m sorry, Lena.”
“No!” she yelled.
Not again.