“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.”
“Brad found that out?”
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.