Jeffrey clenched his jaw, waiting.
“Okay, yeah,” Felix finally said. “He’s been staying at Axle’s house, right? Like, I’m stuck in Dew-Lolly with damn meth freaks and he’s living it up in Avondale rent-fucking-free.”
“I need his name, Felix.”
“Nesbitt,” Felix said. “Daryl Nesbitt.”
Jeffrey felt his lungs open for the first time in two days. He had almost a full second of relief before the door banged open.
“Chief?” Frank said. “I need you.”
Jeffrey stood up. He felt off balance.
Daryl Nesbitt.
He needed to go back at Felix, figure out why Caterino and Truong had Daryl’s number in their phones. Was Daryl part of the pot business? Were the phone numbers enough of a justification to bring Daryl into the station?
Nesbitt had worked at the jobsite near the fire road. His father fixed damaged cars. Axle Abbott probably had a Dead Blow hammer set in his toolbox, a toolbox that his stepson could be holding onto while his dad was in prison.
Did Daryl have access to a dark-colored van? Was he in the vicinity of the college over the last two days? Jeffrey would need cell phone records. Credit-card statements. Arrest record. Social media.
“Over here.” Frank pulled him down the hall. Something was wrong.
Jeffrey tried to shut down the list in his head, telling Frank, “I already got Daryl’s—”
“The dean just called,” Frank said. “Another student is missing.”
Atlanta
22
“Ugh.” Faith looked up from her phone, giving herself a break from reading so she didn’t get car sick.
Will was driving while she searched police reports, newspaper articles, and social media to pull together a profile of Callie Zanger. Faith had gone into the task thinking that she would prove that Miranda Newberry and her eighty-tab, color-coded spreadsheet was wrong, but everything so far pointed to a victim who had somehow managed to get away.
Will asked, “Well?”
“First off, Callie Zanger is freaking beautiful.”
Will pulled his eyes away from the road to look at the photo on Faith’s phone. He didn’t say anything, but he didn’t have to. Zanger was gorgeous. Long, thick hair, perfect button-nose, a chin that could cut diamonds. She probably got up at four every morning to do Pilates and update her vision board.
Faith’s vision board was a tattered photograph of her sleeping.
She gave Will the summary. “Zanger is a named partner at a white-shoe law firm called Guthrie, Hodges and Zanger. Divorced. No children. She specializes in tax litigation. Forty-one years old. Lives in a six-million-dollar penthouse at One Museum across from the High. Was reported missing two years ago, March twenty-eighth.”
“Early morning?” Will asked.
“Probably. She missed a mandatory Wednesday morning meeting. Apparently, she’s a real Type A, never misses a meeting, so everybody freaked. Called the hospitals, the cops, went by her place, checked her gym. Her BMW was in the garage. Zanger’s mother, Veronica Houston-Bailey, was at the downtown Atlanta precinct by noon with her family lawyer, which is why I’m assuming APD didn’t tell her to come back in twenty-four hours.”
“Houston-Bailey of Houston-Bailey Realtors?”
“That’s the one.” The firm was by far the largest commercial real estate company in Atlanta. “For what it’s worth, I agree with APD moving fast on this. High-powered, politically connected, female attorneys don’t just disappear like that. Especially when they’re in the middle of a very nasty, zillion-dollar divorce that’s in the papers and on the news every day.”
“Did APD go at the husband?”
“Rod Zanger, and yes, they went at him like a pack of velociraptors. Rod claimed he had no idea where she was, why she was missing, all the usual. But he couldn’t account for his whereabouts the Wednesday morning she disappeared. No receipts, no phone records, no alibi witnesses. He said he was home in their Buckhead mansion with a cold. On the maid’s day off. And the gardener’s. APD were really looking at him hard.”
“Was her car garaged at work?”
“In her space at One Museum, conveniently located in a blind spot the security cameras didn’t cover. She walked to work sometimes if the weather was good. But, her purse and phone were found locked in the trunk.”
“That sounds familiar.”
“Almost like a pattern.” She asked, “Do you remember the divorce? It was pretty big, a reverse Cinderella story. They met at Duke Law School. Rod was the poor cowboy from Wyoming. Callie was the wealthy Southern debutante who swept him off his feet. The papers called him a kept man.”
Will shook his head, because he only read car magazines and magazines about cars.
Faith had gotten a text. She held up her phone in front of her face instead of the other way around. Jeremy was still begging for her help.
She swiped away the request, telling Will, “Here’s where it gets interesting. Thirty-six hours after Zanger was reported missing, she was found wandering along Cascade Road in the middle of the night. Dazed and confused. Blood was pouring from a head wound. Her clothes were torn. She was covered in mud. Her shoes were missing. At the hospital, they treated her for a severe concussion and exposure.”
“What kind of head wound?” he asked. “Hammer-shaped?”
“The police report doesn’t specify and the newspaper stories are annoyingly vague. But Zanger was taken to Grady, and Sara used to work there, so …?”
“You want her to violate patient privacy?”
Faith pivoted away from that pipe dream. “Zanger signed herself out of the hospital the next morning. According to the papers, there’s no record of her being admitted to any other metro hospitals. According to APD, she refused to file an official statement or to even submit to an informal interview. She wouldn’t talk to anybody. The husband wouldn’t talk. The mother sure as shit wouldn’t talk. So the investigation was dropped and the divorce settlement was put under seal and the newspapers had nothing else to report and here we are two years later.”
Will asked, “How did Zanger get from Cascade Road to the hospital?”
“Older couple driving their grandbaby around trying to get her to fall asleep. Which only works on grandbabies, by the way. Not on your own children.”
“There’s a lot of wooded areas near Cascade.”
“I want to get a giant satellite map of the state so I can put Xs on where the women lived, where they were found, and the last known location where they were seen alive.”
“I bet Miranda has a map.”
Faith bristled, which was probably why he’d brought it up. “Riddle me this, Batman: if Dirk Masterson was so sure that she was hunting a serial killer, then why didn’t she go to the police?”
“Because she knew that exactly what’s going to happen would happen?”
Faith looked at her phone, responding to Jeremy’s text with more attention than was warranted. Will had advocated for letting Miranda and Gerald Caterino work out a legally binding, interest-accruing repayment plan, but Will would’ve let Bonnie Parker skate so long as she pinky swore she would never rob a bank with Clyde Barrow again.
Will said, “I’m not saying Miranda is an upstanding citizen, but we wouldn’t know about any of this without her. She’s the one who fed the information to Gerald. Gerald sent them to Nesbitt. Nesbitt got us here.”
“Thanks for the summary of the last two days,” Faith said. “Miranda Newberry can’t even tell the truth about where she’s going for lunch. She set up a fake company with a fake name and a fake website and a legitimate bank account so she could cash checks. Do you really think Gerald Caterino is her only victim?”
Will didn’t have an answer this time.
“Cheaters gonna cheat,” Faith reminded him. “But, seriously, can we talk about the obvious? I’d be damned if I’d be eating at Wendy’s and wearing a dress the color of a clown’s fart if someone had given me a tax-free wind
fall of thirty grand.”
Will’s phone started ringing. He tapped the button.
Faith said, “It’s us. You’re on speaker.”
Amanda asked, “How far away are you from Zanger’s office?”
Faith guessed, “Five minutes?”
“Sara’s about the same from HQ. The Van Dornes got here early. Caroline has put them in the conference room. I want you both back here ASAP.”
Faith assumed they had decided to ask the parents for permission to exhume the body. She decided against pushing Amanda on the serial killer angle again. “We’re going to hit rush hour. I’m not sure how long it will take for us to get back.”
Will asked, “What about Brock’s files?
“Sara took a preliminary look-see. Everything is there. The coroner’s report. Sara’s original autopsy notes. The labs, photographs, even a video of the crime scene. The blood and urine screens came back negative but for cannabinoids. Truong was a student; that only goes to reason.” Amanda said, “This is from Sara: Rohypnol and GHB have short half-lives and undergo rapid metabolism, thus the toxicology results in and of themselves can’t exclude possible drugging. The symptoms could include one or all of the following: amnesia, loss of consciousness, a sense of euphoria, a sense of paranoia, and loss of muscle control, meaning legs and arms paralyzed. The effects can linger for eight to twelve hours.”
Will asked, “What about the blue Gatorade?”
“The lab confirmed a sugary substance consistent with a sports drink, blue in color, found in the stomach contents.” Amanda ordered, “Report back immediately after you speak with Zanger.”
“Wait,” Faith couldn’t let it go after all. “Are you going to ask anything about the serial killer spreadsheet?”
“I would only ask why not one of my highly trained investigators spotted these possible connections before a civilian posing as a porn detective stumbled across them.”
Faith took the dig, because it was clearly meant for her. “Do you realize how many cases I could find if I had sixty billion hours to waste in front of my computer?”
Will gave her the side-eye.
Amanda said, “The great thing about not learning from your mistakes, Faith, is that you get to keep making them until you do.”
Faith opened her mouth.
Will ended the call before she could get a word out.
He waited a beat, then told Faith, “You know Amanda is probably working this behind the scenes, right?”
Faith wasn’t going to get into a discussion about Amanda’s habit of playing hide-and-seek with information. She liked being the Great Wizard behind the curtain. Faith was tired of sitting in Dorothy’s basket.
Will said, “Amanda had a gut feeling about Masterson. That’s why she kept pushing on the ISP. She knows this is a serial. You have to trust that she has a plan. She’s trying to keep us reined in.”
“I guess this is the second day in a row I am going to have to tell a man that I am not a horse.”
Will stared ahead at the road. “Zanger was missing for thirty-six hours. What reason would she have for not filing a report?”
“Fear?” Faith asked, because that was the reason most women didn’t report attacks. She offered up the second one, “Maybe she was worried no one would believe her?”
“She had to go to the hospital. There was physical proof that she was injured.”
“Maybe she didn’t want to deal with it? Her divorce was seriously nasty. Her husband was banging strippers. The strippers talked. Then Callie’s ex-boyfriend came out with a story about her being an Adderall freak in college. All of this wasn’t just local gossip. It made it to the national news. And then, on top of everything else, she gets raped?” Faith had been spared that particular trauma, but she’d been a pregnant fifteen-year-old back when they still burned witches. She knew what it felt like to have everyone talking about you, judging you, dissecting you like a specimen under a microscope.
She told Will, “We don’t honestly know what happened to Callie Zanger in the woods. Look at the other side of the coin. She has a stressful, high-powered job, and in the middle of all of that, she’s going through a bad divorce where her most intimate details are being shared by strangers. Maybe she couldn’t take it anymore. She went into the woods to end it. Whatever she did didn’t work, so she changed her mind and walked out, and now she’s embarrassed.”
Will didn’t answer immediately. “Do you believe that’s what happened?”
Faith figured a woman like that would disappear into a Four Seasons spa before she walked into the woods. “No.”
“Me, neither.”
Faith tapped her phone over to Google Maps to make sure they were heading in the right direction. Will did not have satnav in his ancient Porsche 911. The car was nice inside, hand-restored by Will to its former glory, but unfortunately those glory days had been before cup holders and global warming. The air conditioner only went as low as warm.
“Here.” She pointed to the right. “Go down Crescent Avenue. The parking garage is accessed from the back of the building.”
Will put on the blinker. “Do we call her ahead of time or show up in her office?”
Faith considered the options as they waited out the light. “Zanger refused to talk to the cops. She sent Dirk-slash-Miranda a cease and desist letter. She’s made it clear that she doesn’t want an investigation.”
“She’s a tax litigator, not a criminal lawyer. A phone call from the GBI would probably rattle the hell out of her.” He added, “But us showing up in person …?”
Faith said, “We’re talking about freaking out a woman who was probably brutally attacked, right? Like, that was the worst day of her life, and she’s spent the last two years trying to forget about it, and now we’re going to show up with our badges and pick at that scab until it bleeds?”
“I can think of three possibilities.” Will counted them out on his fingers, “She’s either traumatized about what happened and that’s why she can’t talk about it. Or she’s afraid the attacker will come back and hurt her again, also traumatizing. Or she’s scared of the publicity because she was traumatized by it during her nasty divorce. Or she could be all of those things, but it doesn’t matter because any way you look at it, she’s traumatized and we’re trying to force her into doing something she doesn’t want to do, which is talk about what happened.”
Faith asked the question that they had both been avoiding. “What if she was hurt like Tommi Humphrey?”
The car went silent.
With very little effort, Faith was able to put herself back in the briefing room this morning. Sara was holding up the photograph of the splintered wooden end of the hammer.
Four months.
120 days.
That was the length of time Tommi Humphrey had to endure before doctors could begin to repair the physical damage to her body. The psychological damage would probably take an eternity. The young woman had tried to hang herself the day Daryl Nesbitt was convicted for possession of child pornography. Amanda had told Sara to reach out to her. Maybe that wasn’t possible. Maybe Tommi Humphrey had finally taken her own life and found peace in her grave.
Faith told Will, “I can’t imagine how Tommi Humphrey could’ve ever moved past what happened to her.”
Will cleared his throat. “Probably by not talking about it.”
“Yeah.”
The car went quiet again. Faith felt weighted down, like her blood had turned to sand.
Will said, “I can—”
“I’ll do it.” Faith dialed the main number for Guthrie, Hodges and Zanger. She talked to a way too snooty-sounding receptionist, giving her full GBI credentials and asking to speak to Callie Zanger.
Will had made the turn onto Crescent and was looking for the entrance to the parking garage by the time Zanger came on the line.
“What’s this about?” Zanger’s voice sounded as sharp as her chin.
Faith said, “I’m Special Agent—”
Faith went with the easiest possibility first. “I’m sorry to bother you, Ms. Zanger, but my boss, the deputy director of the GBI, got a call from a reporter this morning. She referred it to our public relations department, but we needed to follow up with you on a few things.”
“What few things?” she demanded. “You say no comment and let it go.”
Faith glanced at Will. He had pulled into a parking space on the street.
Faith said, “Unfortunately, we’re a government agency. We really don’t have the option of a no comment. We are answerable to the people.”
“Bullshit,” she hissed. “I don’t have to—”
“I understand that you are under no obligation to talk to me.” Faith tried another possibility. “I think you want to, though. I think you’re scared that what happened to you will happen again.”
“You’re wrong about that.”
She sounded damn sure of herself. Faith said, “This will be completely off the record.”
“There’s no such thing as off the record.”
“Look,” Faith was out of possibilities. “I’m outside the parking garage to your building. There’s a restaurant across the street. I’ll be at the bar for the next ten minutes, then I’m coming up to your office to talk to you in person.”
“God damn you.”
The phone banged down twice before Zanger got the receiver into the cradle.
Faith felt disgusted with herself. The last thing she had heard was Callie Zanger’s pained cry.
She put her head in her hands. “I hate my job.”
Will said, “She’ll expect you to be alone.”
“I know.”
Faith got out of the car. The sand in her veins continued to weigh her down as she walked toward the trendy-looking restaurant. Loud music was playing on the outdoor patio. She caught her own reflection in the glass door as she opened it. Will was twenty feet behind her, keeping his distance because he didn’t want to spook Callie Zanger if she actually showed up.
The Silent Wife: From the No. 1 Sunday Times bestselling author comes a gripping new crime thriller (Will Trent Series, Book 10) Page 39
