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

  Amanda said. “Nick, see if you can get Maduro to turn on Padilla. If we can unwind the Vasquez murder, we can cut Nesbitt off at the knees.”

  Faith felt a jolt of shock. Amanda didn’t know about Nesbitt’s prosthesis, and Faith could not think of a natural way to bring it up.

  Amanda called to Nick, “None of this gets back to Sara. Understood?”

  “Yes, ma’am.” Nick had a grim set to his mouth. On his way out of the chapel, he patted Will on the shoulder. Faith didn’t know if Nick was offering Will support, thanking him for intervening with Nesbitt, or tapping him in. The least she could do was make sure she said Jeffrey Tolliver’s name as little as possible.

  Amanda said, “Faith, nutshell it for me.”

  “Okay, this is where it gets tricky. Grant County never charged Nesbitt with murder.”

  Amanda raised an eyebrow. “No?”

  “The investigation is still technically open and considered unsolved. There was a ton of circumstantial evidence that led them to presume that Nesbitt was the killer. The biggest mark against him was that the bad things stopped happening when Nesbitt was locked up.”

  “The Wayne Williams Paradigm.”

  “Correct. Nesbitt was arrested and convicted for other, unrelated crimes that were uncovered during the murder investigation, but it’s presumed he committed the underlying crimes.” Faith added, “If I had to use a bad cliché, I’d say Nesbitt is playing chess instead of checkers. He thinks if we can clear him of the murder, that opens up the possibility of his next move, which would be knocking down the other charges.”

  “The other charges being?”

  “Initially, Grant County caught him with a shit-ton of kiddie porn on his laptop computer. We’re talking tweens, eight to eleven years old.” Faith pushed away thoughts of her own children. “Nesbitt was sentenced to five years with possible probation after three, but it never came to that. The idiot is king of the self-inflicted wound. He started making trouble the minute he walked through the gates. Lots of fighting, holding on to contraband, stealing shit from the wrong people. Finally, he ended up punching out a CO who woke up out of a coma two weeks later. Nesbitt got two dimes tacked onto his initial sentence for attempted murder of a corrections officer.”

  “He’s looking at Buck Rogers Time,” Amanda said, using old-timey slang for a release date so far into the future that it felt like a fantasy. “Nesbitt doesn’t have a lot to lose. He has a history of creating trouble. What’s your impression? Does he really think he’s going to walk out of here?”

  “He’s a below-the-knee amputee.”

  “Does that change your answer?”

  “No.” Faith tried to put herself in Nesbitt’s shoe. “He’s behind bars for the attack on the CO no matter what happens to his original case. There’s no causal connection between the alleged constitutional violation and the acts he took against the guard. But here’s where the chess moves come in. Take away the cloud hanging over Nesbitt’s head concerning the Grant County investigation. If Nesbitt can get the kiddie porn charge off his sheet, he’s out of protective custody. Then, he can petition for transfer. Yes, he’s got the attempted murder on the CO, but I can see a scenario where he argues diminished capacity because of the disability. That could buy him a ticket into a low-security facility, which is a country-club compared to where he is now.”

  “You think he’s playing us for better accommodations?”

  “I think he’s absolutely playing us. Con’s gonna con. Nesbitt wouldn’t do this if he wasn’t working at least twenty different angles. My gut tells me that vengeance against Grant County is his primary motive, but there’s a lot of other benefits he can get if we re-open his original case. Attention. Special treatment. Trips to the police station, the courthouse.”

  Amanda asked, “Will? Anything to add?”

  Will said, “No.”

  Amanda told Faith, “Tell me about Nesbitt’s petitions for post-trial relief.”

  “He appealed his kiddie porn conviction on two separate issues.” Faith referred to her notes to make sure she got it right. “First, he said the initial search of his house that revealed the contents of his hard drive was fruit of the poisoned tree. Law enforcement did not have a warrant and they did not have probable cause to enter his residence. Nothing pointed to him as a suspect.”

  “Second?”

  “Even if law enforcement had probable cause to enter, they were limited to searching for a suspect or a weapon or a possible hostage, not a computer file. They would’ve needed a warrant to search the computer.”

  Amanda’s eyebrow rose up again, because Nesbitt’s lawyers were on firmer ground. “And?”

  Faith’s cheeks felt red. Will had started to pay close attention. He had a weird sixth sense about when shit was about to get real. “One of the detectives testified at trial that she was searching the desk drawers for weapons when she accidentally bumped the laptop. The screen woke up, she saw images of child pornography, and they charged Nesbitt for possession of illegal images.”

  “Lena Adams.” Amanda’s disgusted tone said it all. None of them bought the story. This was why Nick had been so hot under the collar when they were interviewing Nesbitt. For Faith’s part, she wouldn’t believe Lena Adams if the crooked cop swore on a stack of Bibles that the sun rose in the east.

  Faith felt overwhelmed by the need to state the obvious. “If we discover during an investigation that Lena lied about how the porn was found on Nesbitt’s computer, then every single case she’s ever worked on will be put under a microscope. And Nesbitt can make a damn good argument to kick that porn charge off his sheet. We would basically be helping a pedophile.”

  “You just said he’d remain in prison.”

  “But it would be a nicer prison.”

  “We’ll burn that bridge when we cross it.” Amanda paced off the space between the pulpit and the wall, her hands clasped together under her chin. “Tell me about the newspaper articles.”

  Faith wanted to stew on Nesbitt some more, but Amanda was right.

  She said, “All of the articles appear to be from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution except for the Grant County ones, which are from the Grant Observer. When I asked Nesbitt how he got the articles, he said ‘a friend’ sent them.”

  “Mother? Father?”

  “According to his jacket, Nesbitt’s mother died from an overdose when he was a kid. His stepfather raised him, but that guy’s been serving time in the Atlanta Pen for almost a decade. They don’t write or talk on the phone. Nesbitt’s got no other family. He hasn’t had a visitor since he entered the system. He doesn’t make phone calls or send emails. Unless he’s using a contraband phone, then all bets are off.”

  “I’ll put in a request for Nesbitt’s mail. There’s a central station where all inmate correspondences are scanned and cross-checked for suspected criminal activity.” Amanda typed the order into her phone, asking Faith, “What’s the importance of Nesbitt’s one-week deadline? What happens in a week?”

  “The prison is taken off lockdown. Maybe his phone smuggling information won’t be relevant when the inmates are out of their cells. Maybe they’ll kick his ass if they find out he’s been talking to the po-po.” She shrugged. “Maybe he’s been inside long enough to know that inertia is the enemy of progress.”

  “Maybe.” She dropped her phone back into her pocket. “Should I be worried about Nick?”

  Faith’s stomach clenched. “Everybody needs worrying about sometime.”

  “Thank you, Agent Fortune Cookie.” She rolled her hand at the wrist to move along the conversation. “Return to the articles.”

  “Eight possible victims total. And obviously that’s not including Grant County.” Faith looked back at her notes. “They were all Caucasian females between nineteen and forty-one years old. They were students, office workers, an EMT, a kindergarten teacher, and a vet tech. Married. Divorced. Single. The articles start with Grant County. The other cases spanned the subsequent eight
years and took place in Pickens, Effingham, Appling, Taliaferro, Dougall, and if he’s right about the woman found yesterday, White County.”

  “So, someone took a dartboard to the state.” Amanda turned and paced back to the pulpit. “MO?”

  “All the women were reported missing by friends or family. They were found anywhere from eight days to three months later, usually in a wooded area. Not hidden, just laid on the ground. Some were on their backs. Some were face-down, on their sides. A lot were ravaged by local wildlife, especially the ones up north. All of the victims were dressed in their own clothes.”

  “Raped?”

  “The articles don’t say, but if we’re talking murder, we’re more than likely talking about rape.”

  “Cause of death?”

  Faith didn’t have to look at her notes, because the deaths had all been classified the same way. “None of the coroners saw anything untoward, so we’ve got: unknown, no suspected foul play, unknown, undetermined, wash, rinse, repeat.”

  Amanda frowned, but she was clearly unsurprised. At the county level, only coroners had the power to officially rule a death suspicious and request an autopsy by a professional medical examiner. They were all elected officials and a medical license was not required to do the job. Only one county coroner in Georgia was a physician. The rest were, among other things, funeral directors, teachers, a hairdresser, the proprietor of a car wash, a heating and air technician, a motorboat mechanic and the owner of a shooting range.

  Faith said, “There’s speculation in some of the newspaper articles about murder, but nothing concrete. Maybe the local cops disagreed with the coroner and leaking to the press was their way of juicing an investigation. I would need to go to the individual counties to request the case files, then we’d need to interview the investigators and witnesses to find out if there were any suspects. That’s eight different local law enforcement agencies to negotiate with.”

  Faith left unsaid the resultant shitshow. The GBI was a state agency the same way the FBI was at the federal level. With limited exceptions, they had no jurisdiction over local cases, even murder. They could not just waltz in and take over an investigation. They had to be asked by the local sheriff, the local prosecutor, or ordered in by the governor.

  “I can query some sources on an informal basis,” Amanda said. “Tell me about the victims. Blonde? Plain? Pretty? Short? Fat? Did they sing in the choir? Play the flute?”

  She was looking for a detail that connected the women. Faith said, “All I can go by is the photos that accompanied the articles. Some blonde. Some brunette. Some of them wore glasses, some didn’t. One had braces. Some kept their hair short, some wore it long.”

  “So,” Amanda summarized, “taking out Grant County, we have eight different women of different ages who were working in different fields, looked nothing alike, and were all found dead showing no discernable cause of death, located in different areas of a state where thousands of missing women cases remain open, in a country where roughly 300,000 women and girls are reported missing every single year.”

  “The woods,” Will said.

  Amanda and Faith turned to look at him.

  He said, “That’s what connects them. Their bodies were left in wooded areas.”

  Amanda said, “Two thirds of the state is covered in forests. It would be difficult not to leave a body in the woods. The phone rings off the hook during hunting season.”

  “We need to know how they died,” Will said. “They weren’t violently, visibly murdered and their bodies weren’t put on display the way you would expect with a serial killer. Murdering them was secondary to rape.”

  Faith tried to put his theory in plain English. “You’re saying he’s not a serial killer. He’s a serial rapist who kills his victims because they could identify him?”

  Amanda intervened, “Let’s not use the word serial so casually here. Daryl Nesbitt is a convicted pedophile who seems to be playing us like a fiddle. The only serial at this point is what you had for breakfast.”

  Faith looked down at her notes. She knew Amanda was right. But she’d also been a cop long enough to trust her instincts. Faith imagined if she could strip Amanda down into parts, she’d feel the same kind of tingling that was shaking Faith’s own bones right now.

  Will asked, “You know all of those backlogged rape kits that are finally being tested?”

  “Of course,” Amanda said. “We’ve made dozens of arrests off the results.”

  “Sara told me about this paper in one of her journals.” Will explained, “Some graduate students looked at the offender methodology from the solved cases. We’re talking all over the country. What they found is that, with some exceptions, the majority of serial rapists aren’t stuck on one way of doing things. Sometimes the guy is violent and sometimes he’s not. Sometimes he takes the woman to a second location and sometimes he doesn’t. The same guy might use a knife one time or a gun the other, or he might tie up one victim with rope and use zip ties on the next one. Basically, a serial rapist’s M.O. is rape.”

  Faith felt a crushing sense of futility. Every single law enforcement class taught them to investigate by M.O.

  Amanda simply asked, “And?”

  “If all of the cases from Nesbitt’s articles are linked, trying to connect the victims through their jobs or their hobbies isn’t going to lead us to the killer.”

  “We should pull rape reports from the areas.” Faith thought he was on to something. “There could be other victims out there that he raped but didn’t kill. Maybe they didn’t see his face. Maybe he decided to let them go.”

  “Do you want to cull thousands of rape reports from the last eight years?” Amanda asked. “How about the women who were raped but didn’t file reports? Should we start knocking on doors?”

  Faith sighed through the acrimony.

  Will said, “We need to find out how the victims died. He killed them without leaving a visible cause of death. That’s not always easy. Bone shows bullet and knife blade marks. Strangulation almost always results in a broken hyoid. A tox screen would show poisoning. How’s he killing them?”

  Faith still liked his theory. “If he’s a rapist who murders instead of a murderer who—”

  “The academic paper you’re relying on is just that, one academic paper.” Amanda waved them off the subject. “Let’s return to Nesbitt. What made him focus on these articles in particular?”

  “Is Nesbitt the one who focused on them?” Faith asked. “He’s working with someone on the outside. We need to know who his friend is and what criteria the friend used to select these particular articles.”

  Will suggested, “The friend could be the murderer. Or a copycat.”

  “Or a nutjob. Or an acolyte,” Faith said. “Nesbitt told us he’d know if we were ‘seriously investigating.’ He’d need a person on the outside to do that. So, a private detective. A corrections officer. God help us, law enforcement.”

  “Let’s not drive over that cliff just yet,” Amanda cautioned. “Nesbitt’s playing omniscient, but the way he would know we’re investigating is the same way the world would know about it. The news reporters would be all over a possible multiple murder case. Not just local, but national. That kind of scrutiny is exactly what I want to avoid. Everything from here on out stays between us. We need to fly so low under the radar that a snake can’t sense what we’re up to.”

  Faith couldn’t disagree, but only because her inclination was to deprive Daryl Nesbitt of anything he wanted. “It’s subjective anyway. What’s a serious investigation? Who gets to decide the definition? A convicted child predator? I don’t think so.”

  Amanda said, “For the moment, we deal with what’s in front of us. Nick will work the Vasquez murder. I’ll track down Daryl Nesbitt’s friend on the outside. You two need to get Lena’s version of the Grant County investigation. She would’ve still been in uniform then. I imagine she noted every degree in the weather. Step lightly. Even a broken clock is right twice a day.
We may end up needing her. We’ll regroup this afternoon and go from there.”

  “Hold on.” What Will said next seemed to surprise Amanda as much as Faith. “Sara has a right to know what’s happening.”

  “What’s happening?” Amanda asked. “We have a pedophile making wild accusations. We have some newspaper stories that show absolutely no pattern. I’m not sure this isn’t all some inmate’s idea of a wild goose chase. Are you?”

  Will said, “Sara was the medical examiner for Grant County. She could remember—”

  “How do you think Sara is going to respond to the accusation that Jeffrey Tolliver ran a crooked shop? Look at what it did to Nick. In twenty years, I’ve never seen him so rattled. Do you think Sara’s going to take it any easier? Especially since Lena Adams is involved.” Amanda went in for the kill. “That went so well for you the last time, didn’t it?”

  Will said nothing, but they all knew that Sara had been furious the last time Will had let himself get sucked into Lena’s bullshit. Not without reason. Lena had a habit of getting the people closest to her killed.

  “We need information, Wilbur. We are investigators. Let’s investigate.” Amanda’s tone indicated that was the end of the discussion. “Lena Adams is still in Macon. I want you both to drive down there right now and squeeze the truth out of her. I want her copies of case files, autopsy reports, notebooks, cocktail napkins—anything she has. As I said, play nicely, but remember that Adams is the one who threw this steaming pile of horse manure in our laps. If this goes south, we’re going to throw it right back into her face.”

  Faith was ready to follow her out of the chapel, but Will had taken on the physical attributes of a block of cement.

  Amanda told him, “If you agree to keep Sara out of it for the moment, I’ll get the White County coroner to bring her onto the most recent case.”

  Will rubbed his jaw.

  “Not five minutes ago you said that the way we find the perpetrator is by the way he kills. If Sara autopsied the first victim, then she might recognize the killer’s signature on the most recent one.”