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

  The desperation in his voice was like a vise closing down on the room.

  Will said, “Mr. Caterino, you mailed those specific newspaper articles to Nesbitt for a reason. What made you choose them?”

  “I talked to the families.” Gerald sprinted toward the back of the closet. He stood beside the filing boxes. “Look, here are my call notes. Get my notes.”

  Faith swung the camera around. She wanted Gerald on the recording, too.

  He said, “I made dozens of phone calls. Every time a woman was found, I tracked down the family and spoke to them. I was able to narrow down the victims to eight.”

  He pointed behind Faith, but she didn’t turn. She recognized the women’s faces from the newspaper articles, but the photographs on the wall were different, more personal, the kind of thing you would keep in a frame on your desk.

  Gerald pointed to each woman, calling out their names. “Joan Feeney. Bernadette Baker. Jessica Spivey. Rennie Seeger. Pia Danske. Charlene Driscoll. Deaundra Baum. Shay Van Dorne.”

  Faith zoomed in on each, making certain to keep Gerald in the frame.

  He pointed again, saying, “Headband. Comb. Barette. Hairband. Brush. Brush. Scrunchie. Comb.”

  “Wait,” Faith said. “What are you talking about?”

  “That’s what they were missing. Didn’t you look into this? Haven’t you read anything?”

  “Mister—”

  “No!” He yelled. “Don’t tell me to calm down. I told that fucking cop that Beckey was missing the hair clip her mother gave her. It was tortoiseshell. Beckey accidentally broke one of the teeth. She always kept it on her bedside table. The morning she went out—” he ran back across the room. “Look, it says it right here. Kayleigh Pierce, her roommate. This is her official statement.”

  Faith had followed him with the camera.

  “Kayleigh said that the morning Beckey was found, before that, when she was getting dressed, she said—” He was breathless. “She said …”

  Faith told him, “It’s okay, Mr. Caterino. Look at me.”

  He looked at her with a piercing desperation.

  “Take your time. We are listening to you. We are not going anywhere.”

  “Okay, okay.” He tapped his fist over his heart as he tried to steady himself. “Kayleigh said that Beckey couldn’t find her hair clip on the nightstand. It wasn’t there that morning. The nightstand is where she always left it. Even before Beckey went away to college, she left the clip on the side of her bed. She didn’t want it to get damaged, but she wanted to wear it when she needed to be close to Jill, all right?”

  “Jill was her mother?”

  “Yes, right.” Gerald pointed to a photograph of Beckey before the attack. She was reading in bed. Her hair was clipped back. “The hair clip was never found. The girls, Kayleigh and her roommates, they turned the dorm upside down, okay? Before the police even did their search. Not that they searched much, because at that point, they didn’t care. But the girls knew how much the hair clip meant to Beckey, so while she was in the hospital, they looked for it. And they didn’t find it. And when the cops bothered to actually investigate what happened, they didn’t find it, either.”

  Faith bit the tip of her tongue. She could not believe that this was a detail Lena Adams had forgotten.

  “Those cops,” Gerald said. “Tolliver, he was the worst. He came across all sympathetic, like he cared, but he just wanted to tick a box and clear this case so he could keep getting paid.”

  Faith knew what a cop’s paycheck looked like. It hardly inspired motivation.

  “He told me, that lying, fucking asshole told me—” Gerald cut himself off, trying to regroup. “Tolliver framed Nesbitt. I’ll tell you that. If I could prove it, I’d sue that town to the ground. You know the college paid out, right? And the county. They knew that police force was corrupt. That’s why they paid through the nose.”

  Faith was suddenly glad that she was filming the man who sued police departments. She asked, “Was there a trial for damages?”

  “They didn’t want a trial because they knew all the incriminating details would come out. Don’t you see? The insurance company, the town, the lawyers—even my own legal team—they were all part of the cover-up.”

  In Faith’s experience, legal teams did whatever they could to get the largest payout.

  Gerald said, “The county settled with me, but they wouldn’t say they did anything wrong, even though we know they did. We know they did. Thirty god damn minutes. Thirty minutes of my daughter’s life. I’m breaking that non-disclosure agreement right now. I should’ve gone on the news. I still could go. Let them try to claw the money back. I dare them.”

  Faith moved her thumb to cover the microphone, even though it was too late.

  Gerald told Faith, “You have a son. How are you going to feel when you send him off to college? You trust them, right? You trust the police. You trust everybody to look out for your kid, and when they don’t, you make them pay.”

  Will cleared his throat. “How much did they pay?”

  “Not enough.” Gerald looked around the room. His lip started to quiver. “Not fucking enough.”

  His voice had raked up on the last word, cut off by a sob. He covered his mouth, trying to keep it in. Gerald lost the battle. He bent over at the waist. A distraught wail seeped from his lips. His knees gave out. He dropped to the floor. He covered his face with his hands. He started keening like a child.

  Faith turned off the video. Will stopped her from going to Gerald. He found a box of Kleenex in the corner. The trashcan beside it was already overflowing.

  Gerald’s head was pressed to the carpet. His sobs filled the room. Comforting him wasn’t the answer. You could not comfort hope.

  Will knelt down. He offered him the Kleenex.

  “I’m sorry.” Gerald took a tissue. He wiped his eyes. “This happens sometimes. I can’t stop it.”

  Will helped the father stand.

  Gerald blew his nose. His face was red. He was embarrassed.

  Faith gave him a few more seconds before leading him back to the present. “Mr. Caterino, downstairs, when my partner told you the spinal cord damage was C5, that seemed to set you off.”

  He blew his nose again, straightened his shirt.

  “Beckey had a puncture.” He pointed to a black-and-white image on the wall. “I was going to take this to you downstairs, but I thought it was better to bring you up here and show you. There’s so much, and I—I don’t—”

  “It’s okay,” Faith soothed. “I’m glad you allowed us to see this. It’s important that we keep all of the hard work you’ve done intact.”

  “Okay. You’re right.” He pointed to the wall again. “This is the puncture.”

  She turned the video back on. She zoomed in on the black-and-white image, which was taken from an MRI. Even to her untrained eye, she could see the damage to the spinal cord, like a tire puncture from a cartoon with fluid seeping out instead of air.

  He said, “No one could explain it.”

  “Is there anything else about your daughter’s case that we should know about?”

  “It’s all lost. The leads have gone cold. There’s no one to talk to. No one who will talk about it, anyway.” Gerald threw away the Kleenex. “Tolliver worked his ass off to make sure we never found out the truth about Beckey and Leslie. He hid information, claimed it was lost in the bureaucratic shuffle. And his sycophant, Lena Adams, did you know she shredded all of her notebooks? Can you imagine what she wrote down? She’s the bitch who didn’t even check to see if my daughter was dead or alive. All of them were standing around laughing and joking while she suffered catastrophic brain injuries.”

  Faith steered him away from that rocky shore. “Tell me more about Beckey’s hair clip.”

  “Yes,” he said. “It was missing. Which means nothing on its own, right? But then I talked to Bonita—”

  “Leslie Truong’s mother?” Faith tried to slow him down again. “What did she
say?”

  Gerald’s tears had dried. He was angry again. “Leslie was missing a headband that she always wore when she washed her face at night.”

  “Was the headband the only thing that she was missing?”

  “Yes.” He hesitated, then admitted, “I don’t know. Maybe some shirts, some clothes, but definitely the headband. Leslie specifically called Bonita to vent. It was stupid, she said, to steal something of such little value. That’s what made her so angry, because, why would you take something like that?”

  Faith thought back through the other possible victims, the other possible items stolen. “Shay Van Dorne was missing a brush?”

  “A comb. She was in her car when she realized it was gone. She was so upset that she told her mother about it.” He went back to the photographs of the women from the articles. “Joan Feeney. She wore a headband at the gym. She told her sister that she couldn’t find the purple one, which was her favorite. Seeger was in her car, like Van Dorne. She was on the phone with her sister when she mentioned that the blue elastic hairband she kept in the console wasn’t there.”

  Faith nodded for him to continue.

  “Danske had a silver brush that belonged to her grandmother. It was missing from her dresser. Driscoll kept a brush in her glovebox. It wasn’t there when her husband checked. Spivey had a barrette in her desk at work that she used to clip back her bangs. Baker had a comb with the word Chillax written in crystals. Baum’s sister says she always coordinated her scrunchie with her outfits. She was found wearing a green shirt, but no scrunchie. And then when the sister checked her things, she found all kinds of scrunchies—red, yellow, orange. But no green.”

  Faith thought about a defense attorney using the video as evidence that Gerald Caterino had planted thoughts in the heads of desperate family members. In a harsher light, what the father had done could be called witness tampering. And for what?

  A brush. A comb. A scrunchie. A headband. A hair clip. Between Faith’s car, purse and house, she had all of those items, some in multiples. It would be very easy for someone to say after the fact that any one of them was missing.

  Especially if they were desperately reaching for connections.

  Will was obviously thinking the same thing. He waited for Faith to stop the recording.

  He asked Gerald, “When you called the families, what was that like?”

  “Some of them wouldn’t talk to me. Others were a dead end. I had a list of questions to screen them out. That’s how I narrowed it down to the eight victims.” He went to the opposite wall. He ripped a sheet of notebook paper out from a thumbtack. “This is what I used.”

  Faith read the list.

  1. Introduce yourself (be calm!)

  2. Explain what happened to Beckey (just the facts!)

  3. Ask if they have any suspicions about their loved one’s cause of death (act normal!)

  4. Ask if their loved one mentioned anything was missing

  5. Ask them to confirm absence of missing item

  Gerald explained, “Every time I read a news story, I go to work. There’s a lot of stuff on the internet. People are easy to find. What I do is make a call. I’ve talked to dozens of victims’ family members over the years. I think I’ve gotten better at it. You have to feel them out, make sure they’re open to the possibility. It’s a horrible thing to lose a child, but it’s even more horrible to realize that she was stolen from you.”

  Faith re-read the list, which offered a textbook example of leading questions. “This last item, number five. Did you tell them what to look for? That it would’ve been a hair-related item?”

  “Yes. What else would they be looking for?” He ping-ponged back to another wall. He pointed to the printed emails from the Love2CMurder domain. “This is a list of what serial killers do. Number one, they take trophies. That’s what Beckey’s attacker is doing. He stalks them. He takes something from them. Then he attacks them and makes it look like an accident.”

  “Wait,” Faith said. “What do you mean stalk?”

  “Weeks before they died, every single one of these women told a family member or friend or co-worker that they felt strange, as if someone was watching them.”

  Faith considered this new information. She could think of many explanations, not least of all that being a woman in the world made you feel vulnerable sometimes. “That’s not on your list of questions, to ask them about a feeling of being watched.”

  “I know enough that you always hold something back. I let them tell me.”

  “They just told you?”

  “I was careful.” He pointed to the Love2CMurder emails. “This guy is a retired police detective. One of the rare good ones. He’s been helping me investigate. He said that the biggest mistake women make is not listening to their instincts.”

  Faith scanned the emails. DMasterson had been corresponding with Gerald for at least two years. She saw PDFs for invoices. “You mentioned earlier that you paid a private investigator. Is this him?”

  “No, I was talking about Chip Shepherd. I worked with him five years ago. He’s another retired cop. I paid him for three months. He worked for six. His case files are here.” He kicked the stack of boxes. “Chip came up with nothing. They always come up with nothing. For five years, I’ve worked every bone in my body to keep the case alive. The business is good, but it’s not enough. My savings are depleted. I have no retirement. The house is mortgaged. The money from the lawsuits is in a trust to take care of Beckey. Every part of my life goes toward taking care of her and Heath, and whatever is left over, I do this.”

  Faith let out a long breath. The room felt claustrophobic. It was about to get smaller. Faith thought she had figured out the answer to the question that Will had been asking since they’d tossed around theories in the prison chapel this morning.

  She started out gently. “Mr. Caterino, why did you send Daryl Nesbitt those newspaper articles? There was no note, no letter. Just the articles.”

  “Because—” he caught himself a second too late. “He still insists he’s innocent. I wanted him to feel as trapped, as helpless, as I do.”

  Faith believed that he was trying to torture Daryl Nesbitt, but there was more to the story. “I’m sorry to ask this, but why are you so certain that Daryl Nesbitt isn’t the man who hurt your daughter?”

  “I never said—”

  “Mr. Caterino, five years ago, you spent good money on lawyers to pay for Daryl Nesbitt’s civil suit against Jeffrey Tolliver’s estate.”

  Gerald’s face registered surprise.

  She said, “A lot of times, civil cases are used to get police officers on the record so that the evidence can later be used against them in criminal proceedings.”

  His lips closed into a tight line.

  “Five years ago, you started Beckey’s Facebook page and website,” Faith continued. “For the last five years, you’ve been collecting articles about missing women you think link back to your daughter’s attack.”

  “These other women—”

  “No.” Faith stopped him again. “You started your investigation five years ago. Some of these cases go back eight years. What made you believe five years ago that Daryl Nesbitt wasn’t the man who attacked Beckey? There had to be a compelling reason.”

  Gerald bit his lip to keep it from quivering. He couldn’t stop the tears when they returned.

  Faith slowly walked him through it. “You post about a lot of things, Mr. Caterino, but you never post about your son.”

  He wiped his eyes. “Heath understands that Beckey has to be the focus.”

  Faith didn’t let up. “I’ve noticed all the cameras you’ve got around the house. Inside and out. Is this a dangerous area, Mr. Caterino?”

  “The world is a dangerous place.”

  “This seems like a very safe neighborhood.” Faith paused. “It makes me wonder what you’re protecting.”

  He shrugged defensively. “It’s not against the law to have security cameras and a gate.”
>
  “It’s not,” Faith agreed. “But I wanted to tell you how impressed I am with your little boy. He’s really smart. He’s hitting a lot of benchmarks ahead of time. Has your pediatrician told you that? He’s almost like an eight-year-old.”

  “He’ll be seven at Christmas.”

  “Right,” she said. “His birthday is about thirty-nine weeks after Beckey was attacked.”

  Gerald could only hold her gaze for a few seconds before he looked down at the floor.

  “Here’s what I think,” Faith said. “I think that five years ago, Daryl Nesbitt wrote to you from prison.”

  The muscles along Gerald’s throat tightened.

  “I think you saw that letter, and you realized that Daryl Nesbitt licked the flap to seal the envelope. His saliva was on the back of the stamp.” Faith tried to be as gentle as she could. “Did you test Daryl Nesbitt’s DNA from the envelope, Mr. Caterino?”

  Gerald kept his head bent, his chin touching his chest. Tears splattered onto the carpet.

  “You know what would scare me, Mr. Caterino? What would make me put up security cameras and gates and fences and sleep with a gun by my bed?”

  He took in a deep breath, but still kept his eyes on the floor.

  “The thing that would keep me up at night,” Faith said. “Was worrying that the man who attacked my daughter would find out that, nine months later, she gave birth to his son.”

  9

  Sara looked at the clock on the stove.

  7:42 p.m.

  Time had slipped away from her while she was taking care of Alexandra McAllister. First, there were the logistics of getting Ezra Ingle to change the official cause of death. Then Amanda had started working with the sheriff’s office to put through the formal requests to allow the GBI to take over. Next, Sara had to transport the body to GBI headquarters so she could perform the autopsy. Then she was dictating her report and signing off on all the evidence and lab orders and forensics. Then a junior medical examiner had asked her to review the autopsy records on Jesus Vasquez, the murdered inmate from the prison riot. Then Sara had sat at her desk for God only knew how long trying to bring some clarity to her endlessly troubling day.