“Why wouldn’t I, Sara? I’ve got nothing to hide.” He double-checked the account to make sure it was the one that Sara knew about. “Do what you want. Wait here. Don’t wait here. I don’t care.”
The squad room had started to fill as Jeffrey walked toward the reception counter. He pushed through the saloon doors. “Ms. Adams?”
“It’s Dr. Adams,” Marla told him, her voice too loud for comfort because she apparently assumed Sibyl’s blindness equated to some kind of deafness as well. “She was on her way to school when Lena called her to drop by.”
“Thank you, Marla.” Jeffrey offered his hand. Then he took it back.
“Hello?” Sibyl sounded like a softer, less intense version of her sister. “Are you Chief Tolliver?”
“Yes.” Jeffrey felt like a certain kind of fool. His only way out was honesty. “I’m sorry, Dr. Adams. I’m not sure how to navigate this. How can I make you more comfortable?”
She smiled radiantly. “It sounds awfully loud in here. Do you mind walking outside?”
“Absolutely.”
She used her cane to find the door.
He held it open for her, saying, “Thank you for coming by. I know you’re busy with Spring Break coming up.”
“This takes priority.” She tilted her chin up toward the sun. The rain had passed. There was a crisp breeze in the air. Her accent was softer than Lena’s but still pure South Georgia. “What can I tell you about Beckey and Leslie?”
“I know the highlights. They were both good students. You taught both of them.”
“I have Beckey this semester. She was supposed to meet me at seven yesterday morning. I had given her the usual warning about wasting my time, but I was honestly surprised when she didn’t show. She was generally hard-working and respectful.”
“What about Leslie?”
“The same. Hard-working, good attitude. She applied to the graduate program. I wrote her a letter of recommendation.” She added, “To be frank, I don’t fraternize with undergrads. I’m close to their age. I’m trying for tenure. I don’t want to be their friends. I’m their teacher. My job is to mentor them.”
Jeffrey understood. As obstinate as Lena could be, he felt a tremendous reward any time he was able to drill something useful into her thick skull. “Do you know anything about Beckey or Leslie’s social lives? Maybe you saw them—”
Sibyl smiled, because she didn’t see anything. “I hear quite a lot. Schools thrive on gossip. So I can tell you that Leslie was arguing with her roommates. I have one of them in my three o’clock intro to chem: Joanna Gordon. She’s been complaining about her living situation lately. Apparently, there’s been some stealing going on.”
Jeffrey remembered Bonita Truong mentioning that her daughter had complained about some clothes and a headband that had gone missing. He was grateful that the voluminous number of student thefts were handled by campus security. “Would you say that Leslie was temperamental?”
“I gather you’re asking if I think she ran off in a fit of pique?”
Jeffrey frowned, but then he realized she couldn’t see him frown. “That was some pretty tough going, what happened yesterday. I don’t think many girls that age would be able to handle what she saw.”
“I don’t think many boys would, either, but would we be having this conversation if one had?”
Jeffrey cringed, but she couldn’t see that, either. “I’m relying on facial expressions to smooth out the awkwardness.”
She smiled. “I know.”
Jeffrey looked up the street. He could see a group of students heading to class. He asked Sibyl, “Is there anything that feels weird about this to you?”
“Do you think my loss of sight has sharpened my other senses?”
“No. I think you’re a teacher, and having been a student for many years, I know that the one thing teachers are really good at is seeing through bullshit. And not with their eyes.”
She smiled. “You’re right. I’ll tell you why I don’t think Leslie would run away. The work matters to her. She’s spent most of her life getting to this level. She’s got deep roots at the school. She’s in the band. She volunteers at the math lab. She has responsibilities. And I know that someone from the outside might think that all of these responsibilities are burdens, but that’s not how Leslie looks at them. It’s a very difficult thing being a woman in science. You must know this from Sara.”
“I do.”
“You have to fight twice as hard for half the respect, and then you go to sleep and you wake up the next day and you have to fight the same battles all over again. Leslie was willing to do that. She knew what she was getting into. She relished the challenge.”
Jeffrey kept his gaze on the end of the street. He didn’t want to think about optics, but one missing student, another gravely injured, and a bunch of cops who stood around asking about hysterical young girls was not how he wanted his police force to be viewed.
Sibyl asked, “You know she’s gay?”
Jeffrey felt his eyebrows spring up. “Leslie?”
“No, Beckey.” Sibyl explained, “I heard her telling Kayleigh about a Dear Jane email she’d received from her high school sweetheart. Beckey sounded quite raw over it. Kayleigh was urging her to get back out there. Beckey said she wanted to concentrate on her schoolwork.”
Jeffrey wasn’t sure why Lena hadn’t mentioned this detail in her report. “You’re talking about her dorm mate, Kayleigh Pierce?”
“That’s right,” Sibyl confirmed. “Between us, I think she was crushing on Kayleigh. I noted a change in the cadence of her voice. I’m not certain Kayleigh felt the same way. It’s hard at that age. Feelings are so intense.”
“Is Leslie Truong gay?”
“She had a boyfriend.” Sibyl added, “Of course, that doesn’t mean much. This is still a very small town, and I work at a very conservative school.”
Jeffrey felt the need to apologize on behalf of the town. “There are good people here, but you’re right. We are not as welcoming to minorities as we should be.”
“Are you saying I’m a minority?” She put her hand to her face. “Oh, no.”
Jeffrey took way too long to realize that she was kidding. Maybe because he was wondering if he was looking at a hate crime. Which he could’ve been thinking about a lot sooner if Lena Adams had done the same easy detective work as her sister and figured out that Rebecca Caterino was gay.
He said, “Thank you, Dr. Adams. I really appreciate your dropping by to talk to me.”
“Oh, is that it?” she asked. “I assumed when Lee mentioned Leslie that you wanted to ask about Tommi?”
“Who’s Tommi?”
“Thomasina Humphrey. Didn’t Sara tell you about her?”
Jeffrey studied the woman’s face. He detected no guile. She genuinely assumed that Jeffrey knew something that he did not know.
And that Sara should have told him.
Sibyl seemed to sense his thoughts. “I shouldn’t have said. I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay. If you could—”
“I should go. Good luck to you, Chief Tolliver. I’m sorry I wasn’t more helpful.”
Jeffrey stopped short of grabbing her arm.
He watched Sibyl Adams using her cane to find her way down the sidewalk. A student joined her. Then another one. Soon, she was one of a crowd.
Jeffrey closed his eyes and tilted his face up to the sun, the same way Sibyl had. He heard a truck drive by. The wind picked up, rustling through his hair. He racked his brain, searching for any report that had come across his desk with the name Thomasina Humphrey attached.
Nothing.
He walked back into the station. Sara was still in his office. She had opened her laptop to work. His computer monitor was turned so she could see if an email came in.
Jeffrey closed the door. He leaned his back against it, his hand still on the knob.
He told Sara, “Thomasina Humphrey.”
She lifted up her chin, acknowledging
the name.
“Is there something you’re not telling me?”
“Obviously.” She seemed to want to leave it at that.
Jeffrey looked back at the squad. Every chair had a butt in it. Half the patrol unit was loitering outside the briefing room, waiting for Jeffrey to start the day. He was not going to have another argument where he was the only hysterical idiot anybody could hear.
“Sara.”
She took off her glasses. She closed her laptop. She turned in her chair to look at him. “Sibyl brought her to me about five months ago, at the end of October. Tommi didn’t leave at the end of her morning class. She had started bleeding. She made out like it was her period, but Sibyl could tell something was wrong. She talked to her. It took a while, but Tommi admitted that she had been raped the night before.”
Jeffrey took a beat in order to keep his temper in check, because rape was a crime, and Sara knew this, yet she hadn’t reported anything to him. “Did she know her attacker?”
“No.”
“Did she report it?”
“No.”
“Did you tell her to?”
“Once, but she refused, and I didn’t press her.”
“Because?”
“Because she was a good student. She was careful. She always had her nose in a book.”
“You really think now is the right time to throw those words back in my face?”
“No, but you need to listen to me about this, Jeffrey, because it explains a lot of things.” Sara stood up. She walked over to him. “Do you remember that book you read to me, the one about Hiroshima?”
There was something so intimate about her tone that she was able to put him back in that exact moment. They were both lying in bed. He loved reading to her at night. Jeffrey was showing her some photographs from his book, reading out some of the more poignant lines.
She said, “You told me about the shadows, do you remember that?”
He did. The heat from the atomic explosion was so intense that anything in its path burned a shadow into the walls or pavement behind it. A man walking with a cane. A person sitting on a set of stairs. Plants and bolts and machinery. They had all left permanent shadows that you could still see today.
Sara told him, “That’s what rape is like. It’s a black shadow that burns through you. It alters your DNA. It follows you for the rest of your life.”
“How bad was it?”
“Very bad,” Sara said. “I knew Tommi from before. She was one of my patients. That’s why Sibyl brought her to me. She thought I could help her.”
“Did you?”
“I sutured her. I gave her pain medication. I promised her I wouldn’t tell anyone. That was her overriding fear, that her father would find out the details, that her friends and teachers and everybody on campus would know. But, did I help her?” Sara looked haunted by the question. “You can’t help anyone who goes through that. You can try to make them feel safe. You can listen to them. The only thing that you can really do is hope and pray that they find a way to help themselves.”
“I understand what you’re saying,” he told her. “But why did Sibyl bring up Tommi’s name in relation to Leslie Truong?”
“I assume because the next day, Tommi disappeared from school. She left all of her things. She didn’t come back. She didn’t contact anyone. Her phone was disconnected. She was just gone.”
“Kevin Blake didn’t—”
“Her parents withdrew her from class. I’m not sure what happened to her things.”
“But Sibyl—”
“You need to leave it alone.”
“Tommi Humphrey was the victim of a crime. From what you’re saying, it was a serious crime. And now Leslie Truong is missing. Who knows what the hell happened to Beckey Caterino. These are links, Sara. We have to explore them.”
“Are you going to open up every rape investigation in town? How are you going to find the women who were too damaged, or too afraid, to report it? How are you going to locate girls who left the school because fifteen, twenty, thirty minutes of their lives erased every meaningful second of the two decades that came before it?”
He seldom heard Sara speak so passionately about something so raw. He had always wondered about Tessa. She had spent a lot of drunken nights during high school and college. Jeffrey could vividly recall making a five-hour drive to Florida in the middle of the night to talk the local sheriff out of charging her for drunk and disorderly.
He chose his words carefully. “If there’s a connection between what happened to Tommi Humphrey and what happened to Beckey Caterino or Leslie Truong—”
“Leave her alone, Jeff. Please. For me.”
He was so close to agreeing with her, if only because he wanted desperately to do something, anything, that made Sara trust him again.
Then his computer chimed, announcing a new email.
Sara went behind his desk. She put on her glasses. She did a couple of clicks. He could see the images reflected in the lenses.
She said, “Come here.”
Jeffrey stood behind her. He guessed he was looking at a slide from an MRI. He recognized cervical vertebrae stacked down from the skull, but the cord running behind it resembled a piece of rope that had frayed at the middle. Fibers jutted out. Something that looked like a liquid bubble encased the area.
Sara said, “This is the spinal cord puncture. Something sharp and pointed entered the skin here.”
Jeffrey felt Sara’s fingers press against the back of his neck.
“Her legs would be paralyzed, everything from here down.” Her hand went to her hip. “This injury was deliberate. It wouldn’t happen from the fall. I would guess the instrument was similar in shape to an awl or a counterpunch, but don’t quote me on that.”
Jeffrey held back his questions. Sara was opening the next file, which was an X-ray.
“The skull fracture.” She clicked in for a closer view.
Jeffrey knew what an intact skull was supposed to look like. The fracture was at the back of the head, the spot where most men started to go bald. The bone had splintered into sunrays. A semi-circular piece rested against the brain.
Sara knelt down, leaning in close to the monitor. “Here.”
Jeffrey leaned down beside her. He followed her finger as it traced a crescent shape at the bottom of the fracture.
He knew that she wouldn’t say definitively what had happened, so he asked, “Best guess?”
“It’s not a guess,” Sara told him. “She was hit in the back of the head with a hammer.”
Atlanta
11
Sara couldn’t finish her second Scotch. Her stomach felt sour. She was shaky in a way that was hard to articulate. Jeffrey’s notes. Jeffrey’s files. Jeffrey’s field interview cards. Jeffrey’s ruler-straight lines drawn across a faded topographic map of Heartsdale. His ghost sat at the table across from her as she read his words from eight years ago. The names came back with a startling clarity.
Little Bit. Chuck Gaines. Thomasina Humphrey.
The delicate script was such a sharp contrast to his tough exterior. Jeffrey had been the embodiment of tall, dark and handsome. He’d had a football player’s swagger combined with a wonderfully sharp intelligence. Even in the precise, technical jargon of a police report, the summation of a witness interview, the transcript of a phone call, his personality shone through.
Sara held one of Jeffrey’s spiral-bound notebooks in her hand. It was roughly the size of an index card. He had put the dates on the cover alongside the cases encapsulated inside. She flipped it open. Grant County was a small enough force that the chief of police doubled as an investigator. Every case that Jeffrey had worked on had made it into his notebooks. He had been a meticulous record keeper. Sara paged through the headers in the first few dozen pages—
Harold Niles/burglary. Gene Kessler/bike theft. Pete Wayne/stolen tips.
$80,000.
The dollar amount had its own page. Jeffrey had underlined it twice, t
hen circled it. The writing had a dimensionality. The ballpoint pen point had left an indentation like Braille.
Sara thought about all of the things that could’ve backed up that $80,000. Not a burglary. Not a bike. Then, she extrapolated the number to Jeffrey’s life. His house had cost more than that. His student loans had been slightly less. His credit-card balance, at least the last time she’d seen it, was around five percent of that number.
Sara smiled.
There was only one thing that cost $80,000 from that time period, and that was Sara’s first Z4. She had absolutely bought the car to humiliate him. The miserable look on Jeffrey’s face every time he saw the sportscar had made Sara feel more transcendent than any orgasm he had ever given her. And Jeffrey had been damn fucking good at giving her orgasms.
Sara turned the page.
Rebecca Caterino/DOA.
The DOA had been crossed out with a single line and amended to attempted murder/sexual assault.
The tension between Jeffrey and Sara had shifted during the Caterino/Truong cases. Sara had found a way to be at peace with his refusal to tell the truth about how many women, how many times, he had cheated on her. As with many of her emotional shifts, the peace had come from her family. Sara remembered a conversation with her mother the night after they had found Beckey, before the assumed accident had turned into a full-on investigation.
She was sitting at her parents’ kitchen table. Her laptop was open. She was trying to update patient charts but feeling so overwhelmed that she had finally given up and put her head on the table.
Cathy had sat down beside her. She had grabbed Sara’s hands. Her mother’s skin was calloused. She was a gardener, a volunteer, a handyman, and anything else that required her to roll up her sleeves and get to work. Sara had been fighting tears. She was upset about the poor girl in the woods. She was furious at Lena. She was shaken because all of this tragedy had brought her into such close proximity with Jeffrey. And she was deeply ashamed of how she had volleyed insults with him inside her clinic office like a churlish ex-wife.
“My precious child,” her mother had said. “Let me carry the burden of your hate. Let me do that for you so that you can move on.”
The Silent Wife: From the No. 1 Sunday Times bestselling author comes a gripping new crime thriller (Will Trent Series, Book 10) Page 22
