Free Broken by Karin Slaughter Page A

times. He used his plastic badge to open the large steel door that led to the cells. A blast of hot air met them.
    Frank noticed her discomfort. “Furnace is acting up.”
    Sara took off her jacket as she followed him through the door. When she was a child, the local school had sent kids on field trips to the jail as a way of scaring them away from a life of crime. The Mayberry motif of open cells with steel bars had changed over long ago. There were six steel doors on either side of a long hallway. Each had a wire-mesh glass window and a slot at the bottom through which food trays could be passed. Sara kept her focus straight ahead as she followed Frank, though out of the corner of her eye, she could see men standing at their cell doors, watching her progress.
    Frank took out his keys. “I guess he stopped crying.”
    She wiped away a bead of sweat that had rolled down her temple. “Did you tell him I was coming?”
    He shook his head, not stating the obvious: he hadn’t been sure that Sara would show up.
    He found the right key and glanced through the window to make sure Tommy wasn’t going to be any trouble. “Oh, shit,” he muttered, dropping the keys. “Oh, Christ.”
    “Frank?”
    He snatched up the keys off the floor, uttering more curses. “Christ,” he murmured, sliding the key into the lock, turning back the bolt. He opened the door and Sara saw the reason for his panic. She dropped her coat, the bottle of pills she’d shoved in the pocket before she left the house making a rattling sound as they hit the concrete.
    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 afight. 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