The Silent Wife: From the No. 1 Sunday Times bestselling author comes a gripping new crime thriller (Will Trent Series, Book 10)

by Karin Slaughter

  They passed three COs leaning against the fence, each sporting a thousand-yard stare. There was nothing to guard. They were just as bored as the inmates. Or maybe they were biding their time. Six of their fellow guards had been injured in the riot. As a group, COs weren’t known for their ability to forgive and forget.

  Faith kept her voice low, saying, “The warden went apeshit over the phones. Segregation was already at full occupancy. He suspended all yard time, shut down the commissary, stopped visitation, turned off the computers and TVs, even closed the library. For two weeks, all these guys could do was wind each other up.”

  “Sounds like a smart way to start a riot.” Will opened another door. They walked past offices with plate-glass windows overlooking the hallway. All of the chairs were empty. Instead of desks, there were folding tables to make sure no one could hide anything. Inmates filled most of the administrative jobs. It was hard to beat their three-cents-an-hour wage.

  The warden’s office didn’t have a hall window, but Will recognized Amanda’s deceptively calm tone coming from the other side of the closed door. He imagined the man was fuming. Wardens didn’t like being scrutinized. Another reason the man had gone apeshit over all of those confiscated phones. There was nothing more humiliating than hearing one of your inmates talking live to a television station from inside your own facility.

  Will asked Faith, “How many calls got out during the riot?”

  “One to CNN and one to 11-Alive, but there was an election-scandal-thingy, so no one paid attention.”

  They’d reached a long, wide hallway with an even longer line of inmates. Their eighteen murder suspects, Will assumed. The men had been posed like miserable isosceles triangles. The upper halves of their bodies were tilted forward, legs straight, ankles bent, their weight resting on their foreheads against the wall, because the two COs in charge of them were apparently raging assholes.

  Lockdown protocol dictated that any inmate outside their cell be restrained in what was called a four-piece suit. Wrists handcuffed, handcuffs attached in front to a belly chain. Ankle irons attached to a twelve-inch length of chain that kept them doing the two-step. Being bound this way, then forced to press your forehead against a cinder-block wall, put a hell of a lot of pressure on your neck and shoulders. The belly chain would add extra stress to the small of your back as your hands were pulled forward by gravity. Apparently, the inmates had been posed this way for a while. Sweat streaked down the walls. Will saw limbs shaking. Chains rattled like nickels in a dryer.

  “Jesus Christ,” Faith muttered.

  As Will followed her down the line, he saw an array of tattoos rendered in familiar shaky-lined prison ink. All of the inmates appeared to be over thirty, which made sense. Speaking from experience, Will knew that men under thirty did a lot of stupid things. If a guy was still in prison past the third decade of his life, it was because he had either really fucked up, been really fucked over, or was actively making the kind of bad decisions that kept him in the system.

  Faith didn’t bother to knock on the closed door to the interrogation room. Special Agents Nick Shelton and Rasheed Littrell were sitting at the table with a stack of folders in front of them.

  “… telling you this gal had an ass like a centaur.” Rasheed stopped telling his story when Faith walked in. “Sorry, Mitchell.”

  Faith scowled as she shut the door. “I’m not half horse.”

  “Shit, is that what that means?” Rasheed laughed good-naturedly. “’Sup, Trent?”

  Will lifted his chin by way of greeting.

  Faith paged through the files on the table. “These all the jackets?”

  An inmate’s jacket was basically a diary of his life—arrest reports, sentencing guidelines, transportation details, medical charts, mental health classification, threat assessment, education level, treatment programs, visitation records, disciplinary history, religious preference, sexual orientation.

  She asked, “Anyone look good?”

  Rasheed gave them the lowdown on the eighteen suspects in the hallway. Will kept his head turned toward the special agent the way you would if you were paying close attention, but he was actually taking a moment to figure out what to say to Nick Shelton.

  Years ago, when Nick was assigned to the GBI’s southeastern field office, he had worked very closely with Sara’s dead husband. Jeffrey Tolliver had been the chief of police for Grant County. He was an ex-college football player and, from all accounts, an ass-kicker. Some of Nick’s summations on their cases read like movie scripts. Jeffrey Tolliver had been the Lone Ranger to Nick’s Tonto, if Tonto had talked like Foghorn Leghorn and dressed like a casual-day Bee Gee in gold chains and way-too-tight skinny jeans. The two cops had taken down pedophile rings and drug traffickers and murderers. Jeffrey could’ve parlayed his wins into a much bigger paycheck in a larger city, but he’d bypassed the fame and glory in order to serve Grant County.

  Sara probably would’ve married him a third time if he hadn’t died during the second go-round.

  “That’s something to work with,” Faith said. Unlike Will, she had been paying actual attention to Rasheed’s rundown. She asked, “Anything else?”

  “Nah.” Nick scratched at his Barry Gibb beard. “Y’all take the room. Rash and me’ve gotta couple’a three witnesses we wanna go back at.”

  Faith sat in Rasheed’s abandoned chair and started picking out promising suspects. Will could see that she was going straight to the discipline forms. She was a firm believer in history repeating itself.

  Nick asked Will, “What’s Sara up to these days?”

  Will silently careened through a series of humiliating answers before settling on, “She’s in the cafeteria. You should go see her.”

  “Thanks, fella.” Nick half-grabbed, half-patted Will on the shoulder before leaving.

  Will gave far too much attention to the shoulder grab-pat. It was somewhere between a Vulcan death grip and rustling the fur on a dog’s butt.

  Faith waited until the door clicked closed. “Was that uncomfortable?”

  “Depends on which half of the horse you’re asking.” Will put his hand on the doorknob but didn’t open it. “What’s our play here? I’m not sure these guys are going to feel comfortable being questioned by a woman.”

  “You’re probably right.” She slid a jacket out of the pile. “Maduro.”

  Will opened the door. The CO was waiting outside. Will kept his voice low. “Get those men off that wall before I make you piss out your lungs.”

  The man cut his eyes at Will, but like most bullies, he was a coward. He turned toward his prisoners, bellowing, “Inmates! On the floor!”

  There were collective groans of relief. The men had to peel themselves off the cinder block walls. They all had bright red blotches on their foreheads and glassy looks in their eyes. Some struggled to sit. Some of them simply collapsed onto the floor in relief.

  Will called, “Maduro, you’re up.”

  A short fireplug of a man stopped mid-squat. He turned on one foot, his ankles catching on the short chain. Twelve inches wasn’t much, approximately the length of two one-dollar bills placed end-to-end. Maduro’s walk was stiff and labored. He held up his belly chain to keep it from digging into his hipbones. There were pinpricks of blood where the cinder block had eaten into his forehead. He edged through the door and waited in front of the table.

  Georgia’s prisons ran on a para-military platform. Unless they were chained, inmates had to walk with their hands clasped behind their backs. They were expected to stand up straight. Keep their cells spotless and their bunk sheets tight. Most importantly, they were required to address the COs with respect—yes sir, no sir, can I scratch my balls, sir.

  Maduro was looking at Will, waiting to be told what to do.

  Will crossed his arms over his chest and let Faith take the lead because these guys were murder suspects. They didn’t get to choose who questioned them.

  “Sit,” Faith ordered. She checked the inmate�
�s ID card and photograph against the jacket. “Hector Louis Maduro. Serving four years on a string of B&Es. Looking at another eighteen months for participating in the riot. Have you been advised of your rights?”

  “Español.” The man leaned back heavily in the chair. “Tengo derecho legal a un traductor. O te podrías sacar la camisa y te chupo esas tetas grandes.”

  Emma’s father was second-generation Mexican-American. Faith had learned Spanish so she could piss him off in two languages. “Yo puedo traducir por ti, y puedes hacerte la paja con esa verguita de nada cuando vuelves a tu celda, pendejo de mierda.”

  Maduro’s eyebrows arched. “Damn, pasty, they didn’t teach you that filthy shit in white girl school.”

  Faith cut to the chase. “You were a known associate of Jesus Vasquez.”

  “Look.” Maduro leaned forward, hands wrapped around the edge of the table. “There’s a lot of inmates in here who’ll tell you they’re innocent, but I’m not innocent, okay? I committed those burglaries for which I was convicted, but I’ll tell you what, I’ve seen a lot of injustices in this institution—staff on inmates, inmates on inmates—and I should let you know that I’m a Christian man, and right is right and wrong is wrong, so when I saw that inmates were joining together for a common purpose, to instill and ensure the human rights of—”

  “Let me interrupt your TED talk,” Faith said. “You knew Jesus Vasquez?”

  Maduro’s gaze nervously darted toward Will.

  Will kept a neutral expression. He had learned in interrogations that silence served as a very effective conversation starter.

  Faith told the inmate, “You’ve been caught with cell phones in the past. You’ve got two shots in your file for arguing with—”

  Suddenly, Nick jolted into the room like a Pop-Tart. He’d clearly been running. Sweat dripped from his sideburns. A crumpled sheet of paper was in his fist. He told Maduro, “Outside, inmate.”

  Faith gave Will a questioning glance. Will shrugged. Nick had been an agent for twenty years. He’d seen everything from the heinous to the stupid. If something had rattled him, then they should all be rattled.

  “Move.” Nick pushed Maduro toward the CO in the hall. “Put them back in their cells.”

  The door was shut. Nick didn’t speak. He smoothed out the note on the table. Sweat dropped onto the paper. He was breathing hard.

  Faith shot Will another questioning look.

  He gave her the same shrug from five seconds ago.

  Faith opened her mouth to pry out the information, but Nick started talking.

  “An inmate named Daryl Nesbitt passed me this note. Wants to make a deal. He says he knows who killed Vasquez and how they’re getting the phones inside.”

  This time, it was Will looking at Faith with a question. This was an extremely positive development. So why did Nick look so freaked out?

  Faith had the presence of mind to ask, “What else did the note say?”

  Nick didn’t tell her, which was even more strange. Instead, he turned the note around and slid it toward Faith.

  She scanned the words, calling out the important parts. “Wants to trade. He knows where the phones are being stashed …”

  Nick said, “Third paragraph.”

  Faith read, “‘I am the victim of a conspiracy by small-town law enforcement to put me in prison for the rest of my life for a crime I did not commit.’”

  Will didn’t look over her shoulder at the letter. He watched Nick’s face. The man was a study in conflict. The only thing Nick seemed sure about was that he was not going to look in Will’s direction.

  Faith continued, “‘That shithole county was a pressure cooker. A white college student was attacked. The campus was on high alert. No women felt safe. The Chief had to arrest somebody. Anybody. Or he would lose his job. He fabricated a reason to come after me.”

  Faith turned around to look at Will. She had clearly read ahead and didn’t like where this was going.

  Will kept his focus on Nick, who was suddenly consumed by the desire to wipe the smudges off the ornate metal tips of his blue cowboy boots. Will watched him take out a handkerchief, then bend down and buff the silver like a shoeshine.

  Faith continued reading, “‘I am an innocent man. I would not be here but for that crooked-ass cop and his even crookeder-ass department. Everybody in Grant County believed the Chief’s bullshit lies.’”

  Faith read more, but Will had heard everything that he needed to know.

  College. Grant County. The Chief.

  Nesbitt was talking about Jeffrey Tolliver.

  2

  Faith had to use the men’s restroom because the only women’s room was a ten-minute walk to the visitation wing. She washed her hands at the slimy-looking sink. She splashed cold water on her face. Nothing short of a Brillo pad would remove the prison grime from her pores.

  Even inside of the administrative building, the air was thick with desperation. She could hear shouting from the segregation ward. Crying. Howling. Pleading. Faith’s skin tingled in a fight-or-flight reaction. She had been on flight from the moment she’d walked through the gate. Her job meant that she spent most of her days being the only woman in the room. Being the only woman in a men’s prison was a different beast. She couldn’t stray too far from the men she knew were good guys. And by good guys, she meant the men who wouldn’t gang-rape her.

  She shook the water off her hands, dismissing the fear. All of her brainpower had to go toward breaking Daryl Nesbitt because she was not going to blow up Sara’s life over some sleazy convict’s play for attention.

  Faith opened the door. Nick and Will were both stone-faced. She could tell they hadn’t talked to each other because why would they talk when they could silently brood?

  She said, “This Nesbitt asshole has to be full of shit, right? He’s a con. It’s never their fault. They’re always innocent. The cops are always crooked. Fuck the man. Am I right?”

  Nick sort-of-but-not-really nodded.

  Will glowered.

  She asked Nick, “What do you know about Nesbitt?”

  “I know he’s a convicted pedophile, but I didn’t do a deep dive into his jacket.”

  Drilling down on Daryl Nesbitt would’ve been Faith’s first act before running around like a chicken with its head cut off.

  She asked, “Why?”

  Faith watched Nick’s jawbone stick out like a goiter on the side of his face. This was the reason that Will was glowering. Nick wouldn’t be this upset if he truly believed that Daryl Nesbitt was lying. He would not have pinwheeled into the interrogation room. His skin would not be the color of hot dog water. Every single action Nick had taken so far was like a giant neon sign with a flashing arrow pointing at the word MAYBE!

  “Let’s get this over with.” Faith started up the hallway. She didn’t bother to check in with Will. He wasn’t going to stop for a heartfelt conversation. Based on past experience, she could hazard a guess as to what was running through his mind. He was trying to figure out how to hide all of this from Sara.

  Faith was all in on this conspiracy of silence. For fucksakes, Sara had watched her husband die five years ago. She had crawled back from grief through the flames of hell. She was finally happy with Will. They were probably going to get married if Will ever worked up the nerve to ask her. There was no reason to tell Sara about Daryl Nesbitt unless and until there was something to tell.

  Faith took a left into the last office at the end of the hall.

  Nesbitt was sitting in a chair behind the folding table. Caucasian, mid-thirties, brown hair streaked with gray, glasses taped at the bridge. He was unrestrained. No cuffs, no chains. The bottom half of his leg was missing. A below-the-knee prosthetic leg was propped against the wall. He looked like a stoner who had dreamed of becoming a skateboard star but ended up arrested for robbing a Dunkin’ Donuts. Newspaper clippings were stacked neatly on the table in front of him.

  Nick made the introductions. “Daryl Nesbitt, special agents
Trent and Mitchell.”

  Nesbitt dove straight in. “This one here—” he stabbed his finger into a stack of articles. “She was twenty-two.” He pointed to another stack. “She was nineteen.”

  Faith sat down in the only other chair in the room, across the table from Nesbitt. The man smelled of decay, but maybe Faith was smelling herself. Her clothes and hair had absorbed the odor from the cafeteria. The office was small, slightly larger than one of the cells. Nick took his place directly behind the inmate. His back pressed against the wall. Will stayed in the doorway just behind Faith.

  She let the silence linger so Nesbitt knew who was in charge. She’d made a point of not looking down at the clippings, but she had seen enough to get the basics. Ten stacks in total, maybe five or six articles each. Two of the piles looked recent, though the other eight had yellowed with age. One set had almost completely faded. The gray words ghosted across the news page. She saw a logo for the Grant Observer. Nick hadn’t said anything about the articles. Then again, Nick wasn’t saying much about anything.

  Nesbitt told Faith, “If you read—”

  “Hold up.” She put the interview on formal grounds, telling the inmate, “You’re in custody, but you still have the right to remain—”

  “I waive my rights.” Nesbitt held up his hands, palms out. “I’m here to work a trade. I’ve got nothing to hide.”

  Faith doubted that very seriously. If she’d seen Nesbitt on the street, she would’ve immediately clocked him as a con. The beady eyes. The beaten-down, angry slope of his shoulders. If he wasn’t hiding something, then she was in the wrong business.

  He pointed to the articles again. “You need to read these. You’ll understand.”

  She read off some of the headlines from the first stack of clippings. “‘Teenager’s Body Found in Woods.’ ‘Student Declared Missing.’ ‘Mother Pleads with Police to Search for Missing Daughter.’”

  She thumbed through the other stacks. More of the same, all in reverse order so they started with a body being found and ended up with a woman who hadn’t shown up for work, class or a family dinner. Someone else had collected these stories for Nesbitt. There were no newspapers in prison. The articles must have been mailed to him. And since they were actual newsprint articles, she assumed a mother or elderly relative had done the honors.