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

  “I’m s-sorry,” Bonita said.

  “Ma’am, you have no reason to apologize.”

  The validation brought another wave of tears. Jeffrey silently listened, because that was all he could do. He glanced into the squad room. Frank was at his desk. Marla Simms was helping herself to some coffee. He was mildly irritated that Lena wasn’t there, but then he remembered he’d told her to go to the construction site and gather names.

  “I—” Bonita tried. “I just—I can’t believe she’s gone.”

  Jeffrey gritted his teeth so he wouldn’t blurt out something stupid, like promise her that he was going to find and punish the man who had taken away her baby. “Mrs. Truong, I will do everything in my power to make sure you have justice.”

  “Justice,” she said, a useless word to someone drowning in grief. “I found—found the picture. The one with the headband. You asked me to see if I had it.”

  The woman had left San Francisco yesterday thinking that she would need photographs for missing posters. Now, she would more than likely cull through them to display at her daughter’s funeral.

  “I talked—” Bonita’s voice caught again. “Her roommates told me that they had borrowed some things without asking permission. Clothing. Some make-up.”

  “I’d still like copies of the photos you brought from home,” Jeffrey requested. He needed to think about this case in terms of working it with Nick. He found a piece of paper and jotted down some notes about Frank’s theory. The attacker returning to the bodies would be dangerous, not least of all because each new contact with the body could leave trace evidence. The killer had either lucked up with the rain or planned it that way.

  “I need—” Bonita’s voice caught again. “I need to figure out how this works. How can I—when can I—I need to take her home. She should be at home.”

  “I can have the coroner call you. She’ll explain the details.” Jeffrey knew Brock was technically in that position, but he wanted Sara to help this woman. “Are you going to be at the hotel?”

  “I—I guess?” She gave a strained laugh. “Where else do I have to go? There’s nothing I can do, is there? Nothing at all.”

  Jeffrey waited for her to say more, but the line went dead.

  He punched Sara’s number into his BlackBerry. His thumb hovered over the green button to make the call. Instead, he clicked the red button, erasing the number.

  The Kudzu Arms had stirred up some unflattering memories. He kept thinking about Sara walking in on him in their bedroom. Watching her roll her car into the lake. She had walked to her parents’ house. He had wanted to follow her, but the farther away she got, the more he felt a slack in the rope that tied them together. Since then, he couldn’t tell if she was playing tug-of-war or trying to tie a noose around his neck.

  Jeffrey clicked the scroll wheel to Sara’s email address, taking the coward’s option. She was good with parents. She couldn’t have kids of her own—an appendectomy had gone wrong when she was in college—but Sara knew how to handle grief in a way that Brock did not. He forwarded Bonita Truong’s details and asked Sara to reach out to the mother about arranging transportation of her daughter’s body.

  The rest of the autopsy report was on Jeffrey’s fax machine. He paged through to the summation. Sara’s findings backed up Frank’s assessment. She had found exactly what he’d expected her to find: the puncture in the spinal cord, the blue liquid in the stomach. In other words, nothing that could point them in any direction. They would have to wait three to four weeks for the toxicology reports to come back from the GBI. A finding of GHB or Rohypnol was not going to break open any new leads.

  “Morning.” Brad Stephens was walking through the squad room with a boxful of sealed evidence bags. He’d spent the night at Leslie Truong’s apartment cataloging her personal items.

  Jeffrey called to him, “Anything?”

  “No, Chief, not really.” Brad came into his office and put the box down on Jeffrey’s desk. “I went through her contacts like you asked, but she didn’t have any names, just phone numbers.”

  Jeffrey had his notebook in his pocket. He found the page where he had transcribed Daryl’s number from Rebecca Caterino’s cell phone.

  Brad flipped open Leslie Truong’s phone and scrolled through her numbers. “Right here, third one down.”

  Jeffrey confirmed the information with his own eyes. Two victims, both with the same ten-digit number stored in their phones. Then again, they were both students. If Daryl was a pot dealer, half the phones on campus probably had the same number.

  But he didn’t know if Daryl was a pot dealer.

  The Little Bit Chuck Gaines had identified from his notecards had been arrested yesterday afternoon.

  Jeffrey was about to call Lena for more information on the arrest when he saw her sitting down at one of the desks. He looked at the clock. There was no way she’d had time to go by the construction site.

  “Lena!” his voice was louder than it should’ve been. He saw Brad cringe as he grabbed the box of evidence and hustled out of the office.

  “Chief?” Lena still had on her bulky jacket. The teeth of the zipper had worn a red mark on her neck. “Is something wrong?”

  “Close the door.”

  He motioned for her to sit, but he remained standing. “Why am I paying for your BlackBerry if you’re not going to check it?”

  She looked startled. He watched her dig into her coat pocket for the phone.

  “I told you to go by that construction site on Mercer first thing.”

  She was reading the email as he spoke. “I’m sorry, Chief. I was up all—”

  “We were all up all night, Lena. That’s the job. Are you telling me you can’t do it?”

  “No, sir, I—”

  “Little Bit.”

  “Uh—” she was still scrambling. “Felix Floyd Abbott. I arrested him yesterday. He’s in holding on his way to—”

  “Did he confirm he goes by the name Little Bit?”

  “Yeah, I mean, yes, sir. And he matches the description Chuck gave us. Skateboarder, long hair, carrying just under the line for intent to distribute.”

  “Where are your notes? I told you to make copies.”

  She jumped up from the chair. He watched her run back to the desk, then return to his office with a handful of photocopies. “I did them after I pulled all of those rape cases for you.”

  He snatched the papers out of her hand. Jeffrey scanned her neat, block writing. Her notes read like a PowerPoint presentation. “You rewrote these.”

  “I—”

  “This isn’t what you showed me yesterday.” He found the bullet-pointed steps she had taken to assess Rebecca Caterino’s body. A passage had been added explaining in detail how she had checked both the carotid and wrist twice. “Are you willing to put your hand on a Bible in front of a judge and swear this is the truth?”

  Lena’s throat worked. “Yes, Chief.”

  “Jesus.” He flipped through the copies. Every detail looked so uniform that it could’ve come out of a typewriter. He turned the page.

  PRELIMINARY INTERVIEW WITH LESLIE TRUONG

  —Man with black knit cap

  —No idea how old/hair color/eye color

  —Can’t remember what he was wearing

  —Did not speak to each other

  —Nothing suspicious

  Jeffrey felt a sharp pain in his jaw. He’d read her official report. Nothing about a man with a black knit cap was anywhere to be found. “What the fuck is this?”

  “Uh,” Lena craned her neck to see. “What she said. Leslie. I wrote down—”

  “Leslie Truong, the woman who found Rebecca Caterino, saw a man in a knit cap and you didn’t think that was important enough to tell me?”

  Lena’s face told him she knew exactly how much she had fucked up. “It didn’t seem important, Chief.”

  “Jesus Christ. I told you everything was important. What else did she say?”

  “Nothing,�
� Lena said. “I mean, something—what I wrote down. That’s all she said. I swear to God. I asked her if she’d seen anybody in the area and she said about four different people. Three women she didn’t know but she thought they were students, and one guy, and that’s the guy she described, but it’s not really a description, is it? I swear that’s all she said. It was nothing. We all thought Caterino was an accident.”

  “Not all of us, Lena.” He was gripping the pages hard enough to crumple them in his hand. “Leslie Truong was mutilated. Do you know what was done to her? The witness you let walk away?”

  Jeffrey threw Sara’s summary in her direction. She struggled to catch it. Then she read the words. He watched the horror spread across her face.

  “That.” Jeffrey stabbed his finger into the paper. “That’s what happened to the woman who saw the attacker’s face. You let her go. She had a god damn target on her back, and you sent her into the woods on her own, and this is what happened to her.”

  Lena looked sick.

  Jeffrey was glad.

  “Chief, I—”

  “You need to get your ass over to that construction site right now before I take your badge and frogmarch you out of my squad room.”

  She jumped out of the chair.

  He wasn’t going to let her off that easy. “You come directly back here when you’re finished, you hear me? Don’t dawdle around, don’t wander off chasing your tail. Right back here. I mean it.”

  “Yes, Chief.”

  He watched her run past Frank, through the saloon doors.

  Jeffrey turned toward the window. Lena was in the parking lot. She was trying to unlock the door to her Celica.

  “Chief?” Frank was at the door expecting an explanation.

  “Not now.” Jeffrey had to get out of this building before he ripped it apart with his bare hands. “I’ll be back for the briefing. I’m on my phone if something comes up.”

  Frank stepped aside to let him pass.

  Jeffrey ignored the looks in the squad room, Marla’s pursed lips behind the reception desk. He resisted the temptation to kick open the saloon doors. He kept his shit together until he was outside on the sidewalk.

  “Fucking god damn fucking shit,” he hissed, fisting his hands inside of his pockets.

  A cold breeze pushed back against him as he walked the length of Main Street. Still, he was sweating by the time he took a left toward the lake. The wind turned into a knife as it sliced across the water. The grass was still wet with dew. He watched the cuffs of his gray pants slowly turn black from the moisture.

  Jeffrey forced his hands to unclench. He tried to rationalize away his anger. Lena had fucked up, but she worked for him, which meant that every mistake she made fell squarely on his shoulders. He tried to see her side of things. He’d told her to clean up her notes. She had cleaned up her notes. When she had talked to Leslie Truong, she had believed that Rebecca Caterino had suffered from an unfortunate accident. Could Jeffrey honestly say that he would’ve found an escort to take the young woman back to campus? He sure as fucking hell would’ve mentioned to his boss that there was a man in a black knit cap roaming around a crime scene.

  What kind of knit cap? What did nondescript mean—average height, body type, hair color? Or did she mean his face was absent a beard, mustache, piercing, tattoo?

  “Shit.”

  Jeffrey needed to talk to Lena again, this time without yelling at her. Her original notebook was somewhere. He needed to see the details from her interview with Leslie Truong.

  He turned around, glancing at the back of the houses along the lake. He was about half a mile from downtown. Sara’s house was another quarter mile in the other direction. Jeffrey thought about knocking on her door. He had the pretense of the autopsy. He could pretend he hadn’t seen the fax back in his office. Sara would be getting ready for work, probably exhausted from the long night. Maybe they could take some coffee onto the back porch and he could walk her through the case and she could sprinkle around some of her white magic to clear his mind and he could go back to the station and figure out how to stop a sadistic killer from attacking another student.

  Jeffrey rubbed his mouth.

  It was a nice fantasy while it lasted.

  He walked between two houses and found his way to her street. The wet hem of his pants stuck to the back of his calves. The sun was blinding. He held up his hand to shield his eyes.

  Sara was standing fifty yards away. She was dressed in running gear, her hair tied up behind her head, her breath visible in the crisp morning air. She had her hands on her hips.

  She did not look happy to see him.

  Jeffrey lifted his hand to wave, but she turned her back on him and started to run.

  Without knowing what he was doing, Jeffrey found himself running after her. Call it stupidity or desperation or a cop’s training. If someone was running away from you, then you chased after them.

  Sara sprinted around a steep curve that followed the lakeshore. Jeffrey picked up his feet, pumped his arms. She had a head start, but he was a stronger runner. He saw her cut through Mrs. Beaman’s front yard. He sidestepped into the Porters’ driveway, then through their backyard. By the time they both reached the lake, he’d cut about twenty yards off her head start.

  Sara wasn’t good on the grass. She looked back over her shoulder. Jeffrey gained another five yards. He gulped a mouthful of air and pushed his legs until they were screaming. Another five yards gained, but Sara had reached the back of her property. Her foot slipped as she sprinted up the steep slope toward the house, the same steep slope that her Honda had rolled down.

  Jeffrey narrowed the gap even more, jumping over the retaining wall, cutting across the lawn. He was close enough to smell the sweat on her as she darted up the stairs. He hurdled the steps, his foot catching on the top tread. He righted himself, but he couldn’t stop his momentum. He watched the door slam, and then, Wile E. Coyote-like, Jeffrey slammed face-first into the door.

  “Fuck!” His hands went to his nose. Blood poured between his fingers. “Fuck!”

  He leaned over. Blood dripped onto the deck. He saw stars. His nose had to be broken. He could feel it beating like a second heart.

  “Sara?” He banged on the door. “Sar—”

  Jeffrey heard an engine start. The Z4. He was familiar with the low grumble. He heard it every fucking time he was in his office and Sara started the $80,000 sportscar across the street.

  He shook the blood off his hands. He found his handkerchief in his back pocket. It took every bit of Jeffrey’s self-control not to run around to the side of the house and watch her drive away.

  Atlanta

  19

  Gina Vogel forced her shoulders to slide away from her ears as she pushed her shopping cart up and down the aisles of the local Target. Her period had forced her out into the world. She’d scrounged up two tampons in her purse and one in her gym bag before running out of options. Her overly familiar relationship with her InstaCart delivery boy precluded home delivery. Amazon two-day shipping was two days too late, and she wasn’t so far gone that she was willing to spend $49.65 to overnight a box of tampons that she could get for eight bucks at the store.

  Besides, a woman couldn’t just buy tampons. She needed chocolate, Advil, more chocolate and a bag of miniature-sized candy bars because treats did not have calories if you could fit the entire serving into your mouth.

  Despite these inducements, Shawshanking her way out of the house had been embarrassingly difficult. Gina had procrastinated for as long as she could, making do with so much wadded-up toilet paper that her bathroom looked like Jeffrey Dahmer’s kitchen. Even then, Gina had found excuses. She had vacuumed the house top to bottom. Cleaned the baseboards. Dusted the ceiling fans, light fixtures, and the parts of the blinds she could reach with the slats closed. She’d even worked through the night to finish her report for Beijing.

  Honestly, Gina hadn’t been this manic since she’d tried coke those three hundred times
in college.

  Forcing herself to get dressed had been the hard part. Gina had always been of the mind that once you put on the proper attire—gym togs, business suits, edible panties—you were pretty much locked into the task appropriate to the outfit. Pulling on a pair of sweatpants had not been the hard part. Sweatpants were, in fact, an integral part of her day-pajama Garanimal sets. Walking out the door, exposing herself to not only the nosey neighbor across the street but to the public at large, had felt like an unbearably risky proposition.

  Gina was being watched. She knew this for a fact. But she was not sure enough about this fact to tell her sister. Or the police.

  Just the thought of the 911 call made her cheeks catch fire.

  Yes, could you please help me leave my house I promise I’m not crazy but you see I stole this scrunchie from my mopey, annoying niece—yes, that’s the one—and now someone stole it from me and I feel eyes on me wherever I go and … yes … I’ll hold … Hello? Hello? Is there anybody out there?

  Gina had started to compare her paranoia to one of those weird pantyhose masks that bank robbers wore in movies. Or maybe in real life. Whatever. The point was, she felt the weight of her trepidation like an actual thing that was smooshing down her features.

  She had been so anxious about leaving the house that she had made two false starts, both times getting as far as the car, once even starting the engine, before running back inside like the stupid girl in a horror movie who you knew was going to trip and fall and get chainsawed in two.

  Gina had pledged a sorority. It was totally on-brand.

  Finally, a phone call from her sister had propelled her out into the world.

  Nancy was furious at her daughter. Gina relished these rare opportunities for cattiness, because it was the only time her sister ever admitted that the girl was an ungodly sulk. This time, there had been a pregnancy scare because who would’ve ever guessed that sometimes condoms did not work? Why wasn’t there an article? Or a Discovery Investigates?

  Gina had gasped all the right oh dears and how could shes and oh no she didn’ts to pull out every juicy, dramatic tidbit, but after an hour, Nancy had eventually gotten around to asking Gina what she was up to.