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

  “Dirk Masterson,” Amanda said. “Isn’t that a porn name?”

  None of them were comfortable with Amanda being the one to make this observation.

  Faith said, “I filed a subpoena to Dirk’s ISP so we can find out who he really is. I read some of his so-called case files. He sounds like a cop like I sound like a chicken.”

  “I want you in his face by the end of the day.” Amanda added, “Also, go back and look for women who were reported missing in the months of October and March over the last eight years. Email me the list. I’ll make some discreet phone calls.”

  Faith felt a glimmer of hope, but she knocked it back with sarcasm. “Since we’re not looking for a serial killer with a specific pattern, should I put out an alert for current reports of missing women, or women who’ve reported feeling like they’re being watched?”

  Amanda narrowed her eyes. “Sure.”

  “Thanks.”

  Amanda turned back to Sara. “Do you think Tommi Humphrey will talk to us? She’s the only living victim we have who can cogently provide information. It’s been nine years. Perhaps she’s remembered something.”

  Sara’s reluctance was palpable. “I showed Nesbitt’s booking photo to her the day he was arrested. For what it’s worth, Tommi said it wasn’t him, but later that day she tried to hang herself in her parents’ backyard. She was taken to a private hospital for treatment. The family moved out of Grant a year later.”

  Amanda said, “Tommi’s attacker spoke to her. He promised not to hurt more women if she kept silent. We can infer that he had other conversations with her. Perhaps she remembered something. Or, more than likely, she held something back.”

  “It’s possible,” Sara allowed, but she was still visibly reticent.

  Amanda pressed, “Would you be more amenable to reaching out to Tommi Humphrey if you could be the one to speak with her?”

  Sara deflected. “She never looked at his face. She was drugged when it happened. She went into and out of consciousness. The medication alone could cause amnesia.”

  “She could remember the days or weeks leading up to the attack,” Amanda said. “Did she feel like she was being watched? Was she missing anything that was important to her?”

  Sara’s reluctance hadn’t abated, but she said, “I’ll try.”

  16

  Gina Vogel could not shake that unsettling feeling of being watched. She had felt it at the gym. She had felt it at the grocery store. She had felt it at the post office. The only place she didn’t feel it was inside of her house, and that was because she was keeping all of the blinds and curtains closed, even during the day.

  What was wrong with her?

  One missing scrunchie and she was turning herself into Howard Hughes, sans the money, fame and genius. Even her toenails were reaching Hughesian lengths. She had canceled her usual pedicure at the nail salon. The monthly appointments had started two years ago. There came a time in a woman’s life when she was not to be trusted to safely clip her own toenails. That time was when she needed reading glasses to see the finer details of her own damn feet.

  Was she really too scared to leave the house?

  Gina put her hand to the back of her neck. The hairs stood at attention. She had goosebumps on her arms. She was talking herself into a nervous breakdown because of one missing scrunchie and a general feeling that a madman was stalking her based on absolutely no proof except a bad feeling and too many hours of watching murder documentaries.

  She had to get out of this house.

  Gina walked to the front door. She was wearing her day pajamas, but none of her neighbors were home. At least none that she liked. She would walk to the mailbox and check her mail like a normal person.

  She stepped down the concrete steps to the front stoop. She saw a car drive by. Acura. Dark green. Mom in the front. Kid in the back. Normal stuff. No big deal. Just a family going to school or to a doctor’s appointment, never mind the woman in stylish pajamas carefully stepping down from her own front door like a namby-pamby fool dipping her toe into the pool because she was afraid of jumping in.

  Gina took another step down. She was on the walkway, then she was turning right onto the sidewalk, then she was standing in front of her mailbox.

  Her hand felt trembly as she took out her mail. The pile was filled with the usual detritus—coupons, catalogs, circulars. She found her credit-card bill, which would be depressing, and a political campaign postcard, which was infuriating. The glossy magazine from her alma mater was a surprise. Gina had been blocked from the official Facebook page after she had posted that the theme for their twentieth reunion should be Fucked? Married? Killed?

  The magazine started to shake, but that was only because Gina had started to shake, too.

  She felt the freak-out steaming through her nerves like a boiling tea kettle. Her hand went to the back of her neck again. She sputtered out a breath. Her lungs went rigid. She couldn’t get enough air. She knew that someone was watching her. Was he standing behind her? Had she heard footsteps? Could she hear a man walking toward her now, his arms outstretched as he reached for her neck?

  “Shit,” she whispered. Her entire body was shaking, yet somehow her legs would not move. She felt her bladder start to ache. She closed her eyes. She forced herself to spin around.

  No one.

  “Shit.” She said the word louder this time.

  She walked back toward her house. She kept looking over her shoulder like a crazy person. She wondered if the woman who lived across the street had been watching her. The nosey nelly was always in everybody’s business. She wrote long screeds on the Nextdoor app about people leaving their trashcans out on the street and not properly separating their recycling. If she wasn’t careful, someone was going to slap some deli meat on her Nissan Leaf and then it would jump off like the Sharks and the Jets.

  Gina’s knee almost buckled as she leapt up the front stairs. She slammed the door behind her. The mail dropped from her hands and scattered onto the floor. She fumbled with the deadbolt. She didn’t lock it.

  The door had been open while she was outside. Had someone sneaked in? She had spun like a top at the mailbox. Her back was to the front door for several seconds. Someone could’ve slipped inside. Someone could be inside the house right now.

  “Shit!” She rushed to check window and door locks, looking in closets and under beds, because that was just how insane she was lately.

  Was this what it felt like to go stir crazy?

  She went back to the couch. She grabbed her iPad. She googled symptoms of being stir crazy.

  A quiz came back.

  1. Are you moody?

  2. Have you lost interest in sex?

  3. Do you feel anxious or restless?

  4. Are you overtired or sleepy during the day?

  She checked yes on every question, because her vibrator couldn’t read.

  The result:

  You are at risk of developing depression. Have you considered speaking with a therapist? I have located four different specialists in STIR CRAZY in your area.

  Gina let the iPad fall back to the couch. Now the internet knew that she was depressed. She was probably going to be inundated with spam and ads for natural cures and supplements to improve her mood.

  She didn’t need a pill. She needed to get ahold of herself. Paranoia was not her personality type. She was goal-oriented. A self-starter. Highly organized. Methodical. She socialized often, but she was as equally pleased with her own company. She was all of the things that a different quiz had told her were good qualities when, two years ago, she had googled Am I the type of person who can work from home?

  Gina had easily transitioned away from the office, but she had quickly determined that she needed a reason to occasionally shave her legs and wash her hair. Her two outlets were the gym, which she hit at least three times a week, and lunch dates, which she tried to schedule at least twice a month.

  She pulled up her calendar on her iPad. To her sur
prise, she saw that she had not been out of the house in six days. Canceled lunch plans. Skipped workouts. Missed work meetings. Instead of rectifying the situation with a burst of phone calls, she started strategizing. Between Postmates and InstaCart, she could eke out another week before she would be forced to leave the house. That was when her twelve-year-old boss wanted her in the office for a video conference with clients in Beijing. Gina would definitely have to put on clothes with buttons and zippers and actually show up because I accidentally fed a mogwai after midnight was an excuse that only worked on twelve-year-old boys in the year 1985.

  She stared at the squares on the calendar. Another week would extend her confinement to a total of thirteen days. Thirteen days was nothing. People took thirteen-day lunches in France. She had lasted almost thirteen days on the Atkins Diet. In college, she had eaten ramen noodles for a hell of a lot longer than thirteen days. Hell, she had pretended to have vaginal orgasms with various boyfriends for thirteen years.

  She got up from the couch. She went into the kitchen. She opened the fridge. Four tomato slices in a Ziploc bag. Twenty-six cans of Diet Coke. A cucumber of obscene proportions. A half-eaten Kind bar.

  If the cops looked in her fridge, they would think she was a serial killer.

  She found a pad of paper and pen in the drawer. She started a grocery list for InstaCart. She could make soups, chowders, even casseroles. She had downloaded tons of meditation apps that she’d always been too stressed out to open. There was that book she’d put off reading, the one everyone was talking about. She could download that book. She could read it like a person who reads books. She could burn the midnight oil and get her presentation for Beijing finished ahead of time. She would power through this unsettling freak-out by eating healthy meals, keeping herself fit, reading, sleeping and doing all of the self-care that was clearly lacking in her life.

  Sunlight!

  That was what she needed. Her mother used to chide her when she was a little girl.

  Get your nose out of that book and go outside!

  Gina could bring the outside in. She opened the blinds in the living room. She looked out into the street, which was a normal street without a scary man watching her house. She opened the curtains in her bedroom. She went back into the kitchen and opened the door for some fresh air. She leaned over the sink to unlock the window.

  What she really needed to do was call Nancy. Her sister would shake her out of this. And she would remember the pink scrunchie, and she would hopefully not tell her daughter that Gina had stolen it because right now, Gina could not handle a screeching howler monkey telling her she was the worst aunt on the planet.

  She felt her bubble burst.

  Nancy was her older sister, a natural-born, bossy busybody. Worse, she wanted to be her daughter’s best friend, which had worked out just as awesomely as you’d expect.

  Gina tried to refill the bubble.

  Nancy would not tell her daughter about the scrunchie. She would come over with a bottle of wine and they would laugh about how stupid Gina had been and they would watch home remodeling shows on TV where twenty-five-year-old Canadians had saved a $100,000 down-payment to buy a house while a recent item in Gina’s search history was, Is it safe to eat the part of the bread that does not have mold on it?

  She looked down at the empty bowl on the windowsill.

  The scrunchie had been there.

  And now it wasn’t.

  Gina knew that she had not misplaced it, because she was not a misplacer. She was an exact placer, as in she was highly organized, methodical, and tidy. Which was why, according to one quiz, she would be a really good candidate for working from home.

  “Fuck me.”

  Gina’s fingers twisted the window lock back into place. She would not call Nancy. She would not tell her sister any of this because, legally, it only took two people to get another person committed for a twenty-four-hour psychiatric observation and Gina could not think of one reason right now why her sister and mother would not lock her up in a rubber room.

  She reversed course through the house, bolting the doors, drawing the curtains, closing the blinds. The house got dark again. She sat on the couch. She opened up a new Google search. Her fingers rested above the keyboard. She shivered. Either someone was walking over her grave, or her body was telling her that she was about to pass the point of no return.

  Gina stared at the cursor on the tablet. She looked around the room. The remote control was lined up to the edge of the coffee table where she always left it. The blanket was neatly folded in its usual spot over the back of the chair. Her gym bag waited by the kitchen door. The keys were on the console table just inside the hallway. Her purse hung from the back of the kitchen chair.

  The bowl where she always kept her pink scrunchie with the white daisies was still empty.

  Gina typed on the iPad—

  Can I buy a gun and have it delivered to my house in Atlanta, Georgia?

  17

  Sara jotted down some notes from the briefing as she sat at her desk. She stared at Rebecca Caterino’s name. She found herself silently listing the same what ifs that she had asked herself eight years ago. What if Lena had found a pulse? What if Sara had gotten to the woods more quickly? What if those lost thirty minutes had meant the difference between a victim who could identify her attacker and a young woman sentenced to a life of unknown suffering?

  Leslie Truong might still be alive. Joan Feeney. Pia Danske. Shay Van Dorne. Alexandra McAllister. All of those stolen lives could’ve been returned if only they had found Beckey Caterino’s real attacker.

  Or Tommi Humphrey’s.

  Sara felt her stomach tighten at the thought of Tommi. She had been wrong to agree to Amanda’s request to reach out to the girl. Every time Sara thought about locating Tommi, her mind flashed up the image of the broken young woman chain-smoking in the backyard of her parents’ home. Sara had been gripping together her hands under the picnic table. Jeffrey had been silently listening, oblivious to the shared trauma of the two women sitting across from him.

  Sara returned to her notes.

  Heath Caterino. Almost eight years old. He would begin experiencing growing pains. His permanent teeth would push through. His critical thinking would begin to hone. He would start to use language to express humor.

  He would ask questions—

  Who am I? Where did I come from? How did I get here?

  Perhaps not soon, but eventually, the boy might uncover the devastating circumstances of his birth. The internet could offer answers his mother could not give and his grandfather refused to provide. Heath could read about his mother’s attack. He could do the same math that Sara had done, make the same observations as Faith, and find himself forced to shoulder a burden no child should ever have to carry.

  So many lives damningly altered by a multitude of what ifs.

  Sara could not let herself drown in the past again. She pulled up Faith’s scanned notes on her laptop. She focused her thoughts on the women in front of her.

  Joan Feeney. Pia Danske. Shay Van Dorne. Alexandra McAllister.

  Faith had clearly gotten a head start on the investigations before the briefing began. According to her records, the bodies of Feeney and Danske had been cremated. There were no autopsy reports. In each instance, the coroners had done a rough sketch of the body and documented most of the injuries, but beyond that, the trail had effectively gone cold.

  Shay Van Dorne was a different matter. Her body had been buried. Faith had listed the parents’ information alongside the number for the funeral home that had handled her internment. In Faith’s usual thoroughness, she had called the home and ascertained the location of the body. Shay Van Dorne was buried in Villa Rica, sixty miles east of GBI headquarters. There was one word that caught Sara’s attention. Faith had written VAULT in caps, then circled it.

  Sara dialed Amanda’s extension into her phone.

  Amanda answered, “Quickly, I’m expected on a conference call in four
minutes.”

  “I understand why you’re reluctant to expand the investigation into the women from the articles.”

  “But?”

  “What if it was just one jurisdiction, one coroner, one police department?”

  “Continue.”

  “Shay Van Dorne.”

  “You want to exhume the body?”

  “She was buried in a vault.” Sara explained, “That’s an outer seal around the casket. It’s made of one of four materials—concrete, metal, plastic or composite. They’re watertight to keep out the elements and prevent the earth from crushing open the casket. The more expensive ones are air-sealed, but not hermetically. Legally, funeral homes can’t make guarantees that the decedent will be preserved, but I’ve done exhumations where the body is mostly intact.”

  “You’re saying that a three-year-old body could be perfectly preserved?”

  “I’m saying she’ll be decomposed, but the damage could be minimized,” Sara said. “If Shay was mutilated in the same way as Alexandra McAllister and the others, then we’ll know she was a victim. And maybe, hopefully, we’ll find a piece of evidence that points us to the killer.”

  “Do you think that’s going to happen?”

  Sara wasn’t holding out hope, but anything was possible. “The killer has gone undetected for at least eight years. Sometimes, experience can make you sloppy. Shay Van Dorne’s body is possibly another crime scene. If we’re going to clutch at straws, that’s the first one I’d reach for.”

  “That’s a big ask from the parents.” Amanda said, “Have you looked at Gerald Caterino’s notes on his phone calls with the Van Dornes?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Read them. Text me. Let me know if you want to request an exhumation.” Sara was about to hang up, but Amanda said, “There’s a living witness.”