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

  He figured that Paul Simon meant she was thinking about Jeffrey.

  Her dead husband’s file boxes had been stacked on the dining room table when Will had walked in. The same table where Will and Sara ate meals. The same table where they had first made love.

  The sound of Will’s key in the door had clearly sent her scrambling to hide Jeffrey’s things. Will could tell from the level on the Scotch bottle that she’d had more than one drink. Her eyes were bloodshot. She’d looked shattered. He didn’t have to guess why. A few years ago, Will had overheard Sara say something to her sister about Jeffrey Tolliver’s beautiful handwriting. She was weirdly fixated on it.

  Will looked down at his printed notes. The dictation app was a godsend. His handwriting was like a child’s. Even his signature was an unreadable chicken scratch. Emma had better penmanship than he did, and she was only allowed to use crayons.

  “Wilbur.” Amanda opened the door as she knocked. Her lips pursed to bark an order, but she saw what he was wearing and recalibrated. “Were you on your way to the Dollar Store to buy cigarillos?”

  Will hadn’t wanted to go by his house this morning. He was dressed in what he’d slept in, what he’d worn to Sara’s apartment—a light blue button-down shirt and a pair of jeans.

  Unusually, Amanda seemed to be waiting for an answer.

  He said, “Yes.”

  She scowled, but let it go. “We’ve got an all-hands in the briefing room. Fifteen minutes. Be prepared to speak complete sentences with your mouth.”

  He watched the door close behind her. He did the math, calculating how long it would take him to drive from the GBI’s Pantherville Road headquarters into the city, then back again.

  A hell of a lot longer than fifteen minutes.

  There was another knock at the door. Will expected it to open, because no one waited after a knock. It was more like a one-second warning that someone was about to come in.

  The door did not open.

  Will called, “Yes?”

  Sara came in. The space instantly felt smaller. She closed the door behind her. She leaned back, her hand still on the knob like she needed to remind herself that there was an escape.

  These were the top three scenarios that Will had played out in his head last night when he was trying to rehearse a response to seeing Sara for the first time this morning:

  1. In the briefing room, her in the front, him in the back. She looked at him. He looked at her. They both did their jobs.

  2. In the morgue, her going over the findings of Alexandra McAllister’s autopsy, him patiently listening in the back.

  3. In the hallway, her walking to her office, him with Faith. They ignored each other because they were both professionals.

  None of that happened. Nor was it going to happen, because Sara started crying.

  “My love,” she said. “I’m so sorry.”

  Will felt a rock lodge inside his throat.

  “I looked for you,” she said. “I waited at your house. I drove to Amanda’s. I finally saw your car at Faith’s. I was so worried, but I didn’t—I knew you needed space. Do you still need space?”

  Will thought about her frantically driving around in the dark. Looking for him. Finding him. Going back home.

  “Will.” She walked around his desk. She got down on her knees. She gripped one of his hands in both of hers. “I am so sure of you. Of us. It never occurred to me that you needed to hear me say it. I’m sorry.”

  Will tried to clear his throat. The rock wouldn’t budge.

  “I should’ve texted you earlier. I should’ve called you. I should’ve gone to you.” She pressed her lips to the back of his hand. “I ignored the one person I needed the most. Please, tell me how to make this right.”

  Will could think of a lot of things, but he didn’t know how to ask for any of them without sounding jealous or, worse, pathetic—

  Tell me you want to spend the rest of your life with me. Tell me that I am the only man you ever want to be with. Tell me that you love me more than Jeffrey.

  She said, “I know I have no right to ask you for this, but please talk to me.”

  He finally managed to swallow the rock. It turned into battery acid inside his stomach. He told Sara, “It’s okay.”

  “It’s not okay.” She sat back on her heels. “I love you. You are my life. But—”

  He felt the room grow smaller.

  She said, “I loved Jeffrey. I would still be with him if he hadn’t died.”

  Will looked down at his hand, which she was still holding. His other hand was still bleeding. He rested it on his desk. He had no idea what was going to come out of Sara’s mouth next, but it took every ounce of self-control not to stop her.

  She said, “But that doesn’t make you my second choice, or a consolation prize, or a stand-in, or anything else that I know you’re thinking.”

  She had no idea what he was thinking.

  “Baby, I don’t have to be with anyone. I could choose to be alone for the rest of my life.” She sat up on her knees so they could face each other. “I choose you, my love. I choose you for as long as you’ll have me. I want you. I want to be with you.”

  She was saying most of the things that he wanted to hear, but Will wasn’t sure what to do with them. He was still hurt. He was still bruised from the way she had treated him. He knew the battery acid in his stomach was going to keep festering if he didn’t find some way to make it go away.

  He said, “Angie did that. What you did.”

  She looked like he’d slapped her. “Tell me.”

  Tears were already rolling down her face. He wasn’t sure he could keep hurting her like this.

  But he said, “She pushed me.”

  Sara bit her bottom lip.

  “She wanted me to be rough with her. But not—” He hated the lingering, bitter taste of Angie’s name in his mouth. “She didn’t want me to hit her, or … I mean, not like … But that’s the only way she would do it with me—rough. And she wouldn’t—you know, she wouldn’t finish. I tried, but … Christ.”

  This was too hard. Will used his thumb to squeeze the blood out of his knuckle. He watched it roll down his finger, drip onto his desk. He looked back at Sara.

  She was waiting for him to continue.

  “It’s like …” Guilt weighed on him, because this wasn’t just Will’s private misery. It was Angie’s, too. He knew so much about her life, the deep, dark, horrible things that strangers could only guess at. There was a reason she was so drawn to violence. Sometimes, he thought of himself as her Pandora’s Box. That was the problem between them. They had known each other’s most intimate secrets. He didn’t want to make the same mistake with Sara. “I don’t know.”

  She carefully stroked his hair behind his ear. “I knew the first time I made love to you that she had never let you in.”

  Will felt embarrassed. There were so many invisible ways that Angie had screwed him up. He was like a constantly reincarnating suicide bomber, but Angie held the detonator every time.

  “You are inside me,” Sara told him. “You have my heart. You have every part of me.”

  Will looked at the printout on his desk. The letters blurred. If something happened to him, all that would be left were reams of typed pages with stupid misspellings that even a third-grader would spot.

  He told her, “I’m sorry.”

  “My love, you have nothing to be sorry for. I was wrong. Everything I did with you yesterday was wrong. I am so lucky, so grateful, to have you.” Sara gently turned his head back in her direction. “You are smart, and funny, and handsome, and sexy. And I love the way you make me finish every time.”

  Will’s jaw tightened. He hadn’t asked for compliments, and he felt stupid that she thought he needed them.

  “I know we can’t be okay right now, but can we be all right?” Her fingers lightly smoothed the tension out of his jaw. There was nothing sexual about her touch. She was reconnecting with him, trying to clear away his do
ubt. “What can I do to make you sure of me?”

  Will did not have an answer. She was right. He was not okay. The only thing that would get him to all right was to stop talking. He pulled Sara into his lap. Her arms wrapped around his shoulders. She laid her head on his chest. He could tell she was listening to his heartbeat. He breathed deeply, trying to slow the pace. He felt confused and whiplashed. He yearned for that safety that only Sara had ever given him.

  Two knocks at the door introduced Faith.

  She saw Sara in Will’s lap and said, “Oh. Shit.”

  Will tensed, but Sara simply raised her head.

  She asked Faith, “Is the meeting about to start?”

  “Yep. Yep-yep-yep.” Faith clasped her hands together. “Yessiree.”

  The heel of her shoe got caught in the door as she rushed to close it.

  Sara told Will, “I brought you a suit from home. When you didn’t show up at your house this morning, I figured you’d need a change of clothes.”

  He got a petty kind of solace at the thought of Sara waiting for him to come home.

  She looked at his bleeding hand. “I want to clean that before you leave.”

  He grunted.

  “I should get my notes for the meeting.” She stood up and adjusted her dress, which was light and flowy in all the right places.

  Will realized that she was not wearing her usual work uniform of light-colored slacks and a dark blue GBI shirt. Her long, curly hair was hanging down around her shoulders instead of clipped up out of the way. She was wearing heels. Her eyeliner was darker than usual. She had even put on lipstick.

  If Will had noticed these things when Sara had first walked into his office, maybe he wouldn’t have had to tell her that Angie’s idea of a good time was antagonizing him into fucking the shit out of her.

  “I’ll see you there.” Sara stroked his face one more time before leaving.

  Will stared at the back of the door long enough that the blood on his desk congealed. He gathered his notes. Out of habit, he reached for his jacket off the back of his chair. He tried to re-center his thoughts on the case. Lena Adams. Gerald, Beckey and Heath Caterino. He was going to have to talk about them. In front of other people. People who knew him. Some of whom knew about his reading issue.

  Amanda never asked Will to lead briefings. She usually let Faith take the lead because Faith loved taking the lead. He didn’t know if Amanda was punishing him for not dressing professionally or if she was calling on him the way his teachers used to call on him because they thought they were helping Will come out of his shell when in fact what they were doing was exposing him to his worst nightmare.

  He looked for Faith in the hall. Then in her office. He found her in the kitchen getting a cup of coffee.

  He said, “Sorry about that.”

  “About what?”

  Which was how they were going to leave it.

  Will followed Faith into the squad room. She sat at one of the desks in the front row. Will felt like he needed to recalibrate his opinion of what they could talk about. Not that they had talked about anything last night. When he’d knocked on Faith’s door, she hadn’t asked him what the hell he was doing there. She had fed him a gallon of ice cream and beat his ass up and down Vice City until midnight.

  “’Sup?” Charlie Reed took a seat beside Faith. Rasheed was next. He came in carrying two cups of coffee that apparently were not meant to be shared. Gary Quintana, Sara’s assistant, joined them on the front row, all lined up like teacher’s pets.

  Will leaned his back against the wall. He was not a teacher’s pet.

  “Mornin’, bud.” Nick Shelton clapped Will on the shoulder as he passed by, doing that weird grip-pat thing again. His jeans were so tight that Will imagined he had to lie down on the floor to tug them on. Nick sat a few chairs away from Charlie. He opened up his tooled-leather briefcase that looked like it had been stolen from Patsy Cline.

  “Hey.” Sara winked at him as she entered the room. Will watched her walk to the front row. She had pinned up her hair. He studied the graceful curve of her neck as she sat beside Faith. Sara gave her a one-armed hug that Faith seemed happy to return, a woman’s version of a fist bump to smooth things over.

  Will guessed he should sit down, if only to avoid Amanda’s further ire. He took the desk in the row behind Sara, off to the side so he could see her profile. She was reading her notes. Her fingers absently twirled her hair.

  He made himself look at something other than Sara.

  The briefing room was a typical government rectangle with frayed carpet and a drop-ceiling that had dropped too many times. The floor-to-ceiling windows overlooked the parking lot. Water stains spotted the tiles. The desks were mostly squeaky or broken or both. The overhead projector was a relic that Amanda would not let go of. The television was the tube kind with a portable VCR the size of a wooden pallet. The only indication that they were living in the twenty-first century came from the four Smart Boards at the front of the room. The interactive displays could be hooked up to computers, tablets, even phones.

  Will recognized Faith’s handiwork. She had projected Gerald Caterino’s murder closet across the four panels. Every photograph, printout, police report and notation that had been recorded on her phone was blown up onto the boards.

  He still had no idea how Faith had figured out that Heath Caterino was Beckey’s child. The saliva on the back of Daryl Nesbitt’s prison envelope had proven Faith’s hypothesis. Gerald had shown them the DNA test results from the strip-mall lab that specialized in forcing men to pay child support. All of the genetic markers excluded Daryl Nesbitt from paternity. He was not Heath’s father, which meant he had not raped Beckey Caterino.

  No wonder the girl’s father had slept with a gun by his bed for the past five years.

  Will heard the click of Amanda’s cloven hooves in the hallway. She was texting on her phone even as she took her place at the podium. Eventually, she looked up. No preamble. She jumped right in.

  “We have several unknowns, but this is where we’re at: As Dr. Linton will outline, there are compelling circumstantial connections between the two Grant County victims and the murder of Alexandra McAllister. That’s it. For the purposes of our discussion, we treat the Caterino, Truong and McAllister cases as most likely perpetrated by the same unknown suspect. As to the other victims from the newspaper articles, we have nothing but supposition. For those of you keeping score, it takes three victims to make a serial killer. For those of you who cannot count, we have two dead women. Rebecca Caterino is most certainly alive. Will? You’re first. Then Dr. Linton, then Faith, then I need Nick and Rasheed to update me on the Vasquez murder at the prison.”

  Will felt a nauseating stir deep within his bowels. He would’ve loosened his tie if he had been wearing one. Which was clearly Amanda’s point.

  He said, “We interviewed—”

  “Podium.”

  Fuck.

  Will felt roughly ten years old as he walked to the front of the class. He stacked his papers on the podium. He stared down at the jumble of words. Stress exacerbated his issue. All he could make out were numbers. Fortunately, yesterday had been the kind of exhausting day that had imprinted itself into every fold of his brain.

  He said, “At eleven forty-five yesterday morning, Faith and I interviewed Lena Adams at her home in Macon, Georgia. She was notably belligerent.”

  Someone snorted. He assumed Faith.

  He said, “Faith managed to extract two useful pieces of information from Adams. One, Daryl Nesbitt’s lawsuit was funded by a benefactor. Later investigation revealed that benefactor was Gerald Caterino. Two, Bonita Truong, who was the mother of Leslie, relayed during a phone call with Gerald Caterino that a week prior to her daughter’s disappearance, she reported being upset about a stolen personal item. Again, Gerald Caterino was able to supply us with the information that the item was a headband. When Faith pushed him, he equivocated, stating there might have been other stolen items such a
s clothing. But the headband could be significant. According to Caterino’s notes on the conversations he had with parents and other survivors, the women from the articles were also missing hair items, like a comb or a brush or a clip. You can see the list on the board.”

  “If I may?” Sara had her hand raised. He couldn’t tell if she was trying to bail him out, but he welcomed the interruption. “According to what I read in the Grant County files last night, both Caterino and Truong kept the missing or stolen hair accessory in a particular location. Beckey always put her hair clip on her bedside table. Leslie kept a pink headband in a basket with the cleanser she used to wash her face every night. I would normally say take that with a grain of salt, because it’s all according to Lena’s notebooks, but—”

  “Hold on.” Faith had done a double-take. “Say that again.”

  Sara opened one of her file folders. She held up two photographs. Each one showed a different girl with her hair pulled back in a different way. “These photographs show the hair accessories.”

  Faith asked, “You’ve got Lena’s notebooks?”

  “There were only photocopies in the boxes, but yes.”

  “Ha!” Faith pumped her fist in the air. “Eat my crusty shorts, you pregnant reptile.”

  “Dr. Linton, can you share those notes, please?” Amanda added, “You might as well take over. Will, that’s all. Thank you for the usual thorough job.”

  Sara squeezed his hand as she took his position behind the podium. “I want to start with Thomasina Humphrey.”

  Faith flipped to a new page in her notebook. Will sat down beside her. He wiped the sweat off the back of his neck. His knuckle was bleeding again.

  Sara began, “Tommi was twenty-one years old when she was attacked. She grew up in the community. She was my patient at the clinic from the age of fourteen, so I knew her fairly well. She was a virgin prior to the assault, which isn’t unusual. Approximately 6.5 percent of all women report their first sexual experience is rape. The average victim is fifteen years old.” Sara held up a photograph of Thomasina Humphrey, who was standing in front of what looked like a science fair display. “I can’t definitively tell you that Tommi was the attacker’s first victim, but she might be the first time he acted out his fantasy. He clearly had a plan when he abducted her.”