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

  So why did this feel like cheating? Because the U-Store was located on Mercer Avenue, directly across from the Heartsdale Memory Gardens, where Jeffrey was buried?

  The location of the building was not within Sara’s control. What she needed to do in the immediate was to study the information from Leslie Truong’s autopsy. There could be a clue inside the pages, something they had all overlooked, that helped find the killer.

  Sara took the path of least resistance, texting Amanda—

  Heading to Grant County to retrieve Brock’s files. Still working on locating Humphrey. Back at HQ ASAP.

  She started the engine. She pulled out of the space.

  For the first time in her life, Sara dreaded the thought of going home.

  Grant County—Thursday

  18

  Jeffrey flipped on the lights as he walked through the station. As usual, he was the first person in the building. He turned on the air conditioning. He started the coffee. He opened the blinds in his office. He sat at his desk.

  The clock on his computer told him it was 5:33 a.m. Sara had worked through the night. She would be finished with Leslie Truong’s autopsy by now. Brock had assisted her. Frank had acted as a third witness. Normally, Jeffrey would’ve taken that job, but he’d spent the last twelve hours talking to potential witnesses, re-canvassing Rebecca Caterino’s dorm, interviewing Leslie Truong’s roommates, interrogating the college staff, combing the woods for evidence and offering Bonita Truong, Leslie’s mother, a shoulder to cry on.

  None of it had made a damn bit of difference. He was in exactly the same position he’d been in this time yesterday morning, except now he had a dead college student on his hands.

  Jeffrey rolled out the topographic map of the forest onto his desk. The bird’s-eye view afforded him a better understanding of the terrain. The dips and valleys. The rolling hills. The lakes and streams. The paper was still damp from spreading it across the hood of his car. He had used a ruler and different colors of Sharpies to draw lines across the woods. Red traced the possible path that Beckey Caterino had taken on her run. Blue followed the most likely trail that Leslie Truong had walked back to campus after finding Beckey’s body. The rain had washed away both scenes, but he’d still ordered a thorough search of the two-mile stretch.

  Leslie had been found in dense overgrowth approximately thirty yards from the main trail that wound its way from the campus to the north side of the lake. Jeffrey didn’t know if she had walked there on her own or been carried there by her killer. All he knew for certain was that her lower body would’ve been paralyzed. She had probably been drugged. He didn’t want to consider what Leslie had thought as she lay in what would become her final resting place. Jeffrey wasn’t a praying man, but if he was, he’d pray to God that she had been completely unconscious.

  A blue X marked the spot where Leslie had lain. The contour lines on the map swirled closer together, indicating a valley that had been imperceptible when Jeffrey was standing in the physical location. Campus security cameras verified that the killer had not approached from the college side. IHOP was around one and a half miles away from the scene. The closest access point to Leslie’s body was the fire road Frank had mentioned.

  Jeffrey had used a dotted green line to suggest the killer’s possible trek from Leslie’s body back to the unpaved, one-lane road. Again, the contour lines showed a lower elevation where the perpetrator had most likely parked his vehicle out of sight. There were no tire prints. No footprints. The rain had flooded the roadtop into a muddy slick.

  A dark van. That was all that Tommi Humphrey could recall from the night of her brutal attack. Jeffrey had done a cursory search for dark vans in the tri-county area. Memminger and Bedford, much like large swaths of Grant County, were filled with painters, electricians, plumbers, carpenters and people who simply liked to drive vans. The tally was at 1,893 and climbing by the time Jeffrey had closed the search on his computer.

  He returned to the map. He followed the fire road back to its starting point off Stehlik Way. Stehlik was accessed via Nager Road from the north and Richter Street from the south. The Heartsdale Memory Gardens with its rolling hills was approximately two miles off Richter, straight down Mercer Avenue.

  A storage facility was under construction across the street.

  He picked up his BlackBerry. He sent an email to Lena Adams, instructing her to go by the worksite on her way into the station. It was possible that a construction worker had seen a suspicious-looking vehicle, possibly a dark van. It was also possible that a construction worker drove the suspicious-looking vehicle. He sent another email telling Lena to get all of the names of any workers or visitors who had been on site in the last three months.

  It was feasible that a stranger had stumbled onto the fire road, but the more Jeffrey thought about the women who were attacked in the woods, the more likely it seemed that the perpetrator was someone who was familiar with the terrain—a student or professor who had lived on or near campus, someone in the fire services division, an emergency worker, someone in the department of transportation, a traveling salesman, an adjunct, a janitor, a handyman, or a local who had lived here all of his life.

  Counting the students, the county’s population topped out at 24,000 residents. Jeffrey would knock on every door in the vicinity if that’s what it took. The problem was that the county wasn’t an island. The killer could very well be from one of the adjoining towns. If he added in Memminger and Bedford, that pushed the population north of 100,000. If he added the southern part of the state, that pushed the number into the millions.

  He searched his desk for the folder Lena had left him. As ordered, she had summarized all of the reported rape cases in the tri-county area. There was a total of three dozen unsolved rapes, which felt like a too-exact number. None of the M.O.s matched the Grant County women. None of the victims shared any similarities to Tommi Humphrey, Rebecca Caterino or Leslie Truong.

  Jeffrey closed the folder.

  At the police academy and during every subsequent seminar Jeffrey had ever attended, he’d been taught that rapists stuck to a type. They were drawn to a particular age group or a particular look; young blondes with ponytails, grandmothers with pin curls, cheerleaders, prostitutes, single mothers. Attackers had their choice of victims and they chose according to their own sick fantasies.

  That theory didn’t seem to be holding up in the Grant County cases. Tommi’s hair was short and blonde at the time of her attack. Beckey’s hair was brunette and long. Leslie’s was black, cut in a pageboy. One had reportedly been a virgin, the other a lesbian, the third someone who, according to her mother, was experienced. All three victims were students at Grant Tech, but their ages, physical builds, skin tones, even the shapes of their faces, were all different.

  Jeffrey rubbed his face. He couldn’t keep going in these same circles. Two women had been attacked in two days. Now they were starting another day. What was going to happen?

  He checked the time again before picking up the landline and dialing a familiar number.

  “Mornin’,” Nick Shelton said. “What can I do you for?”

  “It’s Jeffrey. How long would it take for the FBI to generate a profile?”

  “How long until you retire?”

  “Shit,” Jeffrey mumbled. “That long?”

  “I could winnow it down to a year if I got the right fella on the case.”

  Jeffrey did not want to think about what would happen if this case dragged on that long. He had seen what had happened to Leslie Truong. He had heard the details from Tommi Humphrey. “Nick, being honest, if this thing goes to the end of the month, I’m going to get the state involved. This guy keeps learning. He’s going to hurt more women.”

  “You really wanna get into a pissing contest with my boss?” Nick chuckled. “No offense, bubba, but her dick’s bigger than both of ours put together.”

  Jeffrey rubbed his eyes. If he let himself go there, he could still see the broken neck of the woo
den hammer. “My ego will be fine. We’ve got to stop this guy.”

  “I hear ya, buddy.” Nick offered, “Go on and send me the details. Might as well put it in the pipeline. Whether or not we end up taking over, if there’s a trial, it’d be good to have a Fee-Bee on the stand looking all J. Edgar for the jury.”

  “You’ll have it by the end of the day.” Jeffrey returned the receiver to the cradle. He kept his hand on the phone. He debated calling Brock for a report, but he knew that Sara would’ve called immediately if something useful had turned up during the autopsy.

  He rolled up the topographical map and set it aside. He skimmed his emails. The mayor wanted to talk to him. The dean wanted a meeting. The district attorney wanted a check-in. The Grant Tech student newspaper wanted a written interview. The Grant Observer wanted an in-person sit-down. Jeffrey sent back anodyne responses to everyone, resisting the desire to tell them what they wanted and what they actually needed were two different things.

  At least his mother was off his back. After the umpteenth missed call, he had finally called Mae to wish her happy birthday. When she’d balked, Jeffrey had gaslighted his own mother. He’d created a false memory of a conversation they’d never had, “reminding” Mae that he’d promised her months ago to take her out to dinner the weekend after her birthday. Like any knee-walking drunk, she had pretended to remember, and like any child of an alcoholic, Jeffrey was simultaneously filled with satisfaction that he’d finally found a way to use her drinking in his favor and eaten up with guilt for tricking her.

  He was saved further introspection by the fax machine grinding out a page behind him. Brock had sent him details on the hammer Sara had excised from Leslie Truong’s vagina. By sheer luck, there was a manufacturing mark stamped on the end.

  Jeffrey looked up the product number on his computer. He recognized the distinctive yellow and green stripes of the tool brand.

  The Brawleigh twenty-four-ounce cross-peen was part of a three-hammer set that was aptly called a Machinist’s Dead Blow Kit. Peening hammers were specifically designed for metalwork. In fact, peening referred to the process of working a metal surface to improve its material properties. Brawleigh offered a straight-peen hammer and a bossing mallet to round out its Dead Blow collection.

  Jeffrey scanned the details. The head of the 1.5-pound mallet was filled with sand and coated in polyurethane. The two hammers had plastic disks covering the flat sides of the heads. All of the tools were engineered to minimize the elastic rebound from a struck surface; hence the narrow neck of the wooden handle on the murder weapon.

  He zoomed in on the hammer. There was something sinister-looking about the metal head. The peen, the opposite end of the face, was conical in shape, used to shape sharp angles. He had no way of knowing whether the hammer had been used on Tommi Humphrey. Had the killer purchased it specifically for the attacks, or was it something that he’d found lying around his shop?

  Brawleigh was a nationally known brand, as ubiquitous in the tool industry as Snap-On and Crafstman. Jeffrey did a general search for the cross-peen hammer and found it was readily available at Pep Boys, Home Depot, Costco, Walmart and Amazon. Subpoenaing the records of sales in the area would be a David vs. Goliath quest. Grant County’s district attorney worked on a part-time basis. Filing the subpoenas would take days. Jeffrey didn’t have days.

  He closed the tabs and returned to the Brawleigh site. The Dead Blow kit was under the METALWORKS menu. He hovered the mouse over the sub-menus. Nothing stood out. He went to WOODWORKS and found exactly what he was looking for.

  NAILSETS AND AWLS.

  He studied the nailsets, which were used to sink finish nails into wood. The tool was tempered steel, round, about six inches in length, thick at the top so a hammer could strike it, narrow to a point at the bottom to countersink the head of a nail. Jeffrey fisted his hand. He had held his share of nailsets. The tool was too small to effectively use as a weapon, let alone as a device to puncture the spinal cord.

  He clicked on AWLS.

  Scratch awls. Stitching awls. Bradawls.

  He zoomed in on the bradawl, which was similar in look to a screwdriver. Instead of a flat or Phillips head, the metal tip was honed to a sharp point. The tool was another one that was familiar to Jeffrey. It was used to make indentations in wood to help guide a nail or screw into the correct position.

  It was also long enough, and precise enough, to puncture a woman’s spinal cord.

  There was movement in the squad room. Matt was pouring himself a cup of coffee. Frank was taking off his suit jacket and hanging it on the back of his chair.

  Jeffrey went out to meet them, asking Frank, “Autopsy?”

  He shook his head. “Nothing but a sick fuck.”

  Jeffrey had expected the news, but he was still frustrated. “How many autobody and mechanic shops do you think we’ve got in town?”

  “Between Avondale and Madison?” Matt asked. “I can think of twelve off the top of my head.”

  Since he was the first to volunteer the information, Jeffrey told him, “I need you to go to each shop and discreetly figure out if anyone is missing a Brawleigh cross-peen hammer.”

  “Brawleigh,” Frank said. “That’s my brand.”

  Matt volunteered, “I’m a Milwaukee man myself.”

  They’d stumbled onto a good point. Men tended to stick with the same tool brand. Jeffrey’s own workbench was marked by a distinctive DeWalt yellow.

  He told Matt, “Mechanics usually have their own tools. Pay attention to who buys Brawleigh.”

  “Yessir.” Matt gave him a salute as he walked toward the door.

  Jeffrey asked Frank, “Any luck tracking down the Daryl from Caterino’s phone?”

  “I checked all of our incident reports, FIs, traffic stops. The only Daryl that came up was Farley Daryl Zowaski, age eighty-four.”

  “Another sick fuck.” They all knew the notorious flasher. One of the first arrests Jeffrey had made in Grant County was scooping up Zowaski outside the elementary school.

  He asked Frank, “What about the sex offender registry?”

  “We got three official predators registered in the county.”

  Jeffrey knew the number should be ten times that. “Let’s do a briefing at eight. I should have the full Truong autopsy report by then. We need to get a plan.”

  “What kind of plan?” Frank seemed genuinely curious. “This killer is a hell of a lot smarter than we are.”

  Jeffrey couldn’t counter the statement, but he asked, “What makes you say that?”

  “He’s methodical, deliberate. He’s stalking these gals, right? He don’t just snatch ’em in broad daylight without a plan.” Frank shrugged. “Stranger abductions are the hardest to solve. And if we’re dealing with a serial component, well, hell, game over.”

  He sounded glib, but Jeffrey knew Frank was at that point in his career where nothing a person did, no matter how horrendous, could shock him.

  Jeffrey said, “Okay, he stalks them. Then what?”

  “I’m thinking he don’t take ’em anywhere, right? Maybe he parked his van on that fire road, but that was for his getaway. What happened was, he saw Leslie in the woods. He managed to get her off the path. He did his thing, then he left her there.”

  “You’re saying that he stayed in the woods after attacking Caterino. Then he saw Leslie Truong.”

  “Or maybe she saw him?”

  “Lena’s pretty high on my shitlist right now, but even she would’ve mentioned that Leslie Truong saw the man who attacked Beckey Caterino.”

  “Yeah, but maybe Truong didn’t realize she saw the bad guy. Remember, for all she knew, it was an accident when she walked back to campus. Could be the bad guy followed her. She recognized his face from before, then he went after her. Or maybe he didn’t give her time to recognize him. Maybe he was mad for interrupting him.”

  Jeffrey thought about the internal damage to Tommi Humphrey and Leslie Truong. Rebecca Caterino had been spared tha
t one horror. Frank only knew about the two recent victims, so he had to ask, “What did Truong interrupt?”

  “Fucking her?” Frank dragged up another shrug. “Bundy went back to the bodies. I heard this FBI jag-off this one time up in Atlanta. He had this whole presentation. Told us that Bundy would go back days, weeks, sometimes months later. He’d put make-up on ’em, fix their hair, jack off, screw them. He was a twisted individual, that guy. Sometimes, he even cut off their heads and took them back to his place for some alone time.”

  Jeffrey didn’t want to hear about Ted Bundy in relation to their case. The serial killer had been captured three times, twice after escaping from custody, though not through any Sherlockian feat of policing. All three times, he’d been pulled over for motor vehicle violations. That kind of luck was not going to happen in Grant County.

  Frank said, “Bundy targeted students. He had a type—middle class, long dark hair, slim build, young. Same as my type, come to think about it.”

  Jeffrey’s BlackBerry started ringing back in his office. He jogged over to catch it before it went to voicemail. The number belonged to Bonita Truong. Three hours ago, he had left her at the Kudzu Arms outside of Avondale. Jeffrey had told her to get some rest, but they had both known that was not going to happen.

  He answered, “Chief Tolliver.”

  He heard a gasp for breath on the other end of the line. Jeffrey closed his office door. He sat on the edge of his desk and listened to the woman cry.

  She tried, “I-I’m s-so—”

  “It’s okay,” he told her. “I’m here.”

  “Sh-she—” Her words broke into an unintelligible wail.

  Jeffrey thought about the childless mother sitting alone in her room at the Kudzu Arms. The brown carpet that always felt damp. The sagging ceiling and cigarette-scarred bathroom sink. After Sara had kicked him out, Jeffrey had spent many drunken nights at the sleazy roadside inn. Sometimes he’d been alone, most times he’d been with a woman who’d left a phone number the morning after that they both knew he was never going to call.