Faith checked the dates above the bylines. The Grant County clippings were from eight years ago. The others spanned the years in between. “These stories aren’t exactly current.”
“My research is limited by my circumstances.” Nesbitt indicated the two more recent cases. “This one, she went missing three months ago. Her body was found last month. This one was found yesterday morning. Yesterday morning!”
His voice had screeched up on the last sentence. Faith let a few seconds pass before she answered, making it clear that yelling would not be tolerated. “How’d you hear about a body being found when you’ve been in lockdown since the riot?”
Nesbitt’s lips smacked open, then quickly shut. He must’ve had access to a smartphone. “The woman’s name is Alexandra McAllister. Her body was found by two hikers.”
Faith wanted to check on Will. She looked over her shoulder, telling him the name of the city where the body had been found, “Sautee Nacoochee.”
He nodded, but his attention was zeroed in on Nesbitt’s face. Will was good at spotting liars. Judging by his expression, he wasn’t looking at one.
Faith scanned the eight-day-old article on Alexandra McAllister’s initial disappearance. The woman had gone for a hike and hadn’t returned. The search had been called because of inclement weather. Sautee was in White County, which meant the sheriff’s department was handling the investigation. Faith had watched a news story about the woman’s body being found in the woods. The reporter had said foul play was not suspected.
She asked Nesbitt, “Who sent you these?”
“A friend, but that doesn’t matter. I have valuable information to trade.” Nesbitt clasped his hands together. His nails were rimmed with black like mold around a shower tile. “I know who killed Jesus Vasquez.”
“We’ll probably know who killed him by the end of the day,” Faith bluffed, but not by much. She was pretty sure from scanning the jackets on the eighteen inmates that they were close to nailing their guys. “Get out of jail free cards are very expensive.”
“I can save you the time. All I’m asking for is a fair shake.”
He was holding back something. Obviously. Cons held back the happy when they called their mother on her birthday.
“Look into these.” Nesbitt indicated the articles again. “You could be the cop who arrests a serial killer. All of these women got snatched after I was convicted. That’s the guy you want. Not me. I’m innocent.”
“That sets you apart from every other inmate inside these walls.”
“You’re not listening to me, dammit.” Nesbitt’s voice was loud enough to echo in the cramped room. He gritted his teeth, biting back an explosion of words. He had been institutionalized long enough to learn that anger would not get him what he wanted. But he had also been institutionalized, which meant self-control was probably not one of his strengths.
He said, “Look, I don’t belong in this facility. I was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Local law enforcement jammed me up because a young, white college student was killed and they had to pin it on somebody. It was blatant profiling.”
Faith said, “Statistically, white women are more likely to be murdered by white men.”
“That’s not the kind of profiling I’m talking about!” Nesbitt’s temper finally broke through. “Why aren’t you listening to me, you stupid fucking bitch?”
Faith felt Will coil behind her like a rattlesnake.
Nick had pushed away from the wall.
Nesbitt was surrounded, but his hands were still clenched. His ass was barely in the seat. Faith thought of all the places he could punch her before Will and Nick stopped him. Then she banished those thoughts, because she had a job to do. She’d told Will that inmates were like toddlers. If there was anything Faith knew, it was how to handle a bratty kid.
“Time out.” Faith T’d her hands to call it. “Nesbitt, if we’re going to keep talking, you’re going to have to do something for me.”
Nesbitt continued to stew in his chair, but he was listening.
Faith said, “Take in a deep breath, then slowly let it go.”
He looked confused, which was the point.
“Five times. I’ll do it with you.” Faith sucked in a deep breath to get him started. “In and out.”
Nesbitt finally relented, his chest rising and falling once, then twice, then eventually, the fury started to drain from his eyes.
Faith shushed out the fifth breath, feeling her own heart rate start to slow. “Okay, lay out your case for me. Why did you bring this to agent Shelton instead of the warden?”
“The warden’s a limp-dicked piece of shit. I know the law. The GBI is in charge of investigating corrupt law enforcement officers.” Nesbitt had spat out the words, but now he visibly worked to force some calm into his tone. “I am a victim of police corruption. I was profiled because I’m poor. Because I had a record. Because I spent too much time with girls.”
Girls.
Faith asked, “How old were these young ladies?”
“That’s not the point. Christ.” Nesbitt’s fist hovered over the table. He caught himself before banging it down. Unprompted, he took another deep breath, then hissed it out between his teeth. His breath was foul. She noticed that his skin was clammy.
Faith glanced over Nesbitt’s shoulder. Nick had put on his glasses so he could read about the Grant County side of things. Eight years felt like a lifetime. The newspaper clipping was so old that he was holding it with both hands so it wouldn’t tear. She could tell from his face that every word he was reading was like a punch to the gut.
Faith told Nesbitt, “Like I said, we’ve got the Vasquez thing pretty much figured out and if we choose to investigate these cases, you’ve already given us the articles, so we really don’t—”
“Wait!” He reached for her hand, but stopped at the last minute. “Just wait, okay? I’ve got more.”
Faith left her hand on the table, though her instinct had been to reel back. She looked at her watch. “You’ve got one minute.”
“Vasquez was killed for his distribution network.” Nesbitt licked his lips, anxious for a reaction. “I can tell you how they’re bringing in the phones. Where they’re stashing them. How the money works. I won’t testify, but I can put you exactly where they’ll be when the phones come in.”
Faith felt obliged to point out the obvious. “We can break the distribution network ourselves. We did it four years ago. Almost fifty corrections officers are behind bars right now because of it.”
“Do you have another year to launch an investigation?” Nesbitt asked. “Does the GBI wanna waste all that time and money and resources and pull in the FBI and DEA and the sheriff’s office and put agents undercover and work another sting that takes millions of dollars and ends up embarrassing your sorry asses with all those bad cops on trial every time you turn on the news?”
The guy had done his homework. Money. Federal agencies. Public humiliation. There wasn’t one part of what he’d said that didn’t shoot fear into the heart of every cop over the rank of sergeant.
“I can hand the phone racketeering to you on a silver platter,” Nesbitt said. “I’ll give you one week to look into these cases in the newspapers. One week instead of a year-long investigation. Plus you get to nail a serial killer. All you’ve got to do is—”
“Stop the bullshit!” Without warning, Nick raked back Nesbitt’s chair and slammed him into the wall.
Faith was so shocked that she stood up, hand going to her belt, but her gun was in a lockbox by the metal detector. “Agent Shelton,” she boomed, using her cop voice. “Back away from—”
“You slimy kidfucker.” Nick grabbed Nesbitt’s shirt and yanked him up to standing. “You know you’re not getting out of here. Your own article says your conviction was upheld twice. No one believed your bullshit. Not the jury. Not the appellate court. Not the state supreme court.”
“So what?” Nesbitt screamed back. “Sandra Bland is dead! John Hinckley�
�s a free man! OJ’s playing golf in Florida! You’re telling me our legal system is fair?”
Nick’s face was so close that their noses were touching. His fist reared back. “I’m telling you to watch your fucking mouth or I will beat you to the fucking ground.”
Will’s hand was on Nick’s shoulder. Faith hadn’t seen him move, but suddenly, he was there. She saw his fingers flex, more like the pat that Nick had given him back in the interrogation room.
Faith was running through all the ways this could go from bad to worse when the air changed in the room.
Slowly, Nick turned. He looked at Will. His eyes were wild, and then they weren’t. His muscles were tensed, but then they weren’t. His fists unclenched. He took a step back.
“Jesus!” Nesbitt hopped on one leg, trying to put some space between them.
Will righted the chair. He helped Nesbitt sit back down.
Faith silently begged Nick to leave, but he took his post behind the inmate, hands shoved deep into the front pockets of his jeans.
“Asshole.” Nesbitt smoothed down his wrinkled shirt. He was visibly shaken. Faith felt the same. This wasn’t how they did things. She had never seen Nick explode like that. She never wanted to see it again.
“Okay.” Faith could barely hear her own voice over the rapid tap of her own heartbeat. She had to get the interview back on track, not least of all because she didn’t want to be called to testify by a prosecutor who was charging Nick with a custodial assault. “Nesbitt, I’m listening to you. Tell me about the articles. What are we looking for?”
Nesbitt wiped his mouth with his hands. “You gonna let him get away with that?”
“Get away with what?” Faith shook her head in mock disbelief, making herself the shittiest kind of cop there was. “I didn’t see anything.”
She didn’t need to look back at Will to know that he was shaking his head, too.
“Nesbitt,” she said. “This is your moment. Either start talking or we’ll leave.”
“I was set up.” Nesbitt wiped his mouth again. “God’s honest truth. I was framed.”
“Okay.” Faith could feel a river of sweat flowing down her back. She had to make this man feel like he was being listened to. “Who framed you? Tell me about it.”
“It was those fucking small-town cops, okay? They controlled everything that happened in that county. The prosecutor, the judge, the jury—they all bought into that self-righteous cowboy bullshit.”
He turned around, making sure that they all knew the kind of cowboy bullshit he was talking about.
“Careful, son.” Nick’s voice sounded gravelly. “You don’t wanna go letting something out that you can’t put back in the bottle.”
Nesbitt’s anger had given way to despair. “You stupid redneck motherfucker, what do you think I’ve got to lose?”
Faith waited for Nick to do something stupid again, but he just lifted his chin and stared out into the hallway.
She studied Nesbitt’s face. Dark circles pooled under his eyes. Deep lines creased his forehead. He looked like an old man. Being inside could age anyone, but being inside with a disability must’ve been a whole new circle of hell.
In the silence, she drummed her fingers on the table. She asked Nesbitt, “How do you know about Vasquez’s phone business?”
“I’ve been doing janitorial in this place for six years. Nobody sees me, so I can see everybody else.” Nesbitt counted off on his fingers. “I can give you names, places, suppliers and dealers. You think the warden found all the phones in this place? A man can’t take a shit in here without a cell signal squirting out.”
Faith scanned the Grant County articles, confirming what Nick had said. “You’ve already lost two appeals. You know judges don’t like to admit other judges are wrong. How is an investigation going to benefit you?”
“It’ll benefit everybody. These are dirty cops. They locked up the wrong man. They framed me and they let the real killer get away. The rot started in Grant County, but it spread across the state and now these other women are dead because of it.” Nesbitt sat back with a smug look on his face. He could feel the tide shifting. “We’re in lockdown for another week. Like I said, I’ll give you that long to look into it.”
“We’d need a proffer,” Faith said. “Something to prove that you can deliver what you’re offering.”
“I will tell you one stash location once I know you’re seriously investigating these cases.”
“Define that,” Faith said. “What does ‘seriously investigating’ mean?”
The smug look got even smugger. “I’ll know.”
Faith’s fingers were still drumming the table as she tried to see through to the end of this game. “Hypothetically, let’s say we uncover proof that law enforcement acted inappropriately. That’s no guarantee that you’re going to get out of here.”
Nesbitt confirmed one of her suspicions. “Second-best thing to me getting out of this hellhole would be those crooked bastards ending up in here.”
“I hate to tell you this,” Faith said. “But Jeffrey Tolliver died five years ago.”
“You think I don’t know that? The whole fucking county went into mourning. There’s a damn plaque in the middle of Main Street, like he was some kind of hero, but I’m telling you he was poison.” Nesbitt was getting agitated again, this time with righteous indignation. “Tolliver was the ringleader. He taught that entire force how to break the law and get away with it, and they’re still out there doing it. I want that fucking plaque torn down. I want to shit on his name, then set it on fire.”
Faith had to wrap this up before Nick went off again.
She told Nesbitt, “No matter how solid your information is, the state is not going to spend resources on a vendetta. We investigate crimes. We make cases. We can’t retroactively charge dead people.”
“This dirty fucker will snitch on Tolliver the minute you show her the cuffs.” Nesbitt jabbed his finger into one of the Grant County articles.
DETECTIVE TAKES THE STAND
Nesbitt said, “She’s still a cop. Still out there pulling the dirty shit Tolliver taught her, destroying everything she touches. It’s your job to take down bad cops. You take her down, I guarantee she’ll drag Tolliver and everybody else down with her.”
Even without the articles, the she narrowed it down to the point of a pin. Grant County had only ever had one female detective in its entire history. Lena Adams had been recruited straight out of the academy. All of her early promise had dissolved into a cesspit of lazy shortcuts and dirty tricks.
Faith knew this because Lena had been investigated by the GBI before. Will had been the agent in charge. When Sara had found out, she had almost left him. And for good reason. Nesbitt wasn’t wrong about Lena Adams destroying everything she touched.
She was the reason that Jeffrey Tolliver had been murdered.
Faith leaned her head into her hand as she read through Daryl Eric Nesbitt’s jacket. The file was as thick as a Bible, most of it filled with treatment notes relating to his amputation. Faith’s eyes blurred over the impenetrable medical jargon. Her back was aching. She was balancing more than sitting in what passed for a pew inside the prison chapel. She glanced up to check on Will. He was doing his usual, leaning against a wall, listening but not listening. Nick was giving Amanda the rundown of what Nesbitt had told them in the cramped office and why he had waited until now to tell her about it.
Faith wondered if he was going to get to the part where he’d laid hands on an inmate, but Nick seemed mostly focused on Nesbitt’s smug demeanor. Later tonight when Faith was trying to sleep, she would go through every single second of the interview and excoriate herself for protecting Nick. It had been instinctual, visceral, like vomiting when you had food poisoning.
And the worst part was that she knew she would do the same thing the next time.
Faith blinked to clear her eyes. She ignored the low rumble of one of Amanda’s pointed questions. She looked around the room, which
was set up for all denominations, with every shade of Jesus as well as a metal colander she assumed was for Pastafarians, a religion that, after several lawsuits, was legally recognized by the state. Graffiti was scratched into the pulpit. Colored stickers lent a stained-glass effect to the one sliver of a window. The damp little room was depressing enough to turn the Pope into an atheist.
“Ma’am.” Nick was clearly trying to hold it together. “Tolliver was as solid as they come. You know that. He was one of the best cops—the best men—in the damn state. I put my life in his hands more than once. I’d gladly do it again if he was still with us. Hell, I’d trade places with him right now.”
Faith checked on Will again. It was hard enough to compete with a ghost. Hearing Jeffrey put up there with the saints must’ve been excruciating.
Amanda asked, “There’s no way to extricate one from the other? Throw Adams under the bus, keep Tolliver out of it?”
Nick shook his head.
So did Faith. Daryl Nesbitt seemed determined to drag Jeffrey’s name through the mud right alongside Lena’s. Which was a particular talent of the heinous bitch. She always managed to taint everyone around her.
“All right.” Amanda gave a curt nod. “Nesbitt is offering two things. One, the names of Vasquez’s killers. Two, information on the influx of cell phones into this facility. In exchange, Nesbitt has put a one-week clock on us opening the cases of the dead women from the articles and investigating Grant County. Yes?”
“Yes,” Nick said.
Faith nodded.
Will kept holding up the wall.
Amanda said, “Let’s start with the Vasquez murder. Two suspects. Maduro and who else?”
“My money is on Michael Padilla,” Nick said. “He’s a bone breaker with a side of psychosis. Got transferred here from Gwinnett DOC after biting off another inmate’s finger.”
Faith recognized the name from the stack of jackets she’d read through. “It’s not a stretch to think a finger-biter would be a hand-chopper.”
The Silent Wife: From the No. 1 Sunday Times bestselling author comes a gripping new crime thriller (Will Trent Series, Book 10) Page 5