“She’s a grown woman, not a divining rod.”
“And you both work for me. My case. My rules.” Amanda took her phone out of her pocket. She ended the discussion by showing him the top of her head. She was still typing as she left the chapel.
Will sat down on the pew. The wood creaked. He said, “Ninety percent of all the arguments I’ve ever had with Sara have been about me not telling her things.”
That seemed like a low ratio, but Faith didn’t quibble. “Look, I wouldn’t know how to be in a healthy relationship if Squidward painted me a picture, but this is one of those rare instances where I agree with Amanda. What exactly are you keeping from Sara? All we’ve got right now is a whole bunch of what the fuck?”
He started rubbing his jaw again. “You’re saying wait a few hours, see what we can dig up, but either way, tell her the truth tonight?”
The tonight part was new, but Faith asked him, “Do you really want Sara to spend the next six hours worrying about something that might not ever become a thing?”
Slowly, finally, Will started to nod.
Faith looked at her watch. “It’s almost noon. We’ll get lunch on the way to Macon.”
He nodded again, but asked, “What if this becomes a thing?”
Faith didn’t have an answer. Obviously, the worst part would be realizing that a serial killer had been operating for years without their knowledge. The second worst part was more personal. A wrongful conviction was the kind of scandal that had onions inside of onions. The media would peel back every layer. The corruption. The trial. The investigations. The hearings. The lawsuits. The condemnations. The inevitable podcasts and documentaries.
Will summed it up. “Sara’s going to watch her husband get murdered all over again.”
Grant County—Tuesday
3
Jeffrey Tolliver took a left outside the college and drove up Main Street. He rolled down the window for some fresh air. Cold wind whistled through the car. The staticky patter of the police scanner offered a low undertone. He squinted at the early morning sun. Pete Wayne, the man who owned the diner, tipped his hat as Jeffrey drove by.
Spring was early this year. The dogwoods were already weaving a white curtain across the sidewalks. The women from the garden club had planted flowers in the planters along the road. There was a gazebo display outside the hardware store. A rack of clothes marked CLEARANCE was in front of the dress shop. Even the dark clouds in the distance couldn’t stop the street from looking picture-perfect.
Grant County had not taken its name from Ulysses S., the Northern general who had accepted Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, but Lemuel Pratt Grant, the man who in the late 1800s had extended the railroad from Atlanta, through South Georgia, and to the sea. The new lines had put cities like Heartsdale, Avondale and Madison on the map. The flat fields and rich soil had yielded some of the best corn, cotton and peanuts in the state. Businesses had sprung up to service the booming middle class.
With every boom there was a bust, and the first bust came with the Great Depression. The only way the three cities could survive was to band together. They had combined sanitation, fire services and the police department in order to save money. Economizing had kept them above water until another boom had arrived by way of an army base being erected in Madison. Then came another boom when Avondale was designated a maintenance hub for the Atlanta-Savannah rail line. A few years later, Heartsdale had managed to persuade the state to fund a community college at the end of Main Street.
All of this booming had happened well before Jeffrey’s time, but he was familiar with the political forces that had led to the current bust. He had watched it happen in his own small hometown over in Alabama. The BRAC Commission had closed the army base. Reaganomics trickled down into the railroad industry and the maintenance hub had dried up. Then there were trade deals and seemingly endless wars, then the world economy didn’t just tank, it had bypassed the toilet and gone straight into the sewer. Except for the college, which had evolved into a technological university specializing in agri-business, Heartsdale would’ve followed the same downward trend as every other rural American town.
You could call it either careful planning or dumb luck, but Grant Tech was the lifeblood of the county. The students kept the local businesses alive. The local businesses tolerated the students so long as they paid their bills. As chief of police, Jeffrey’s first directive from the mayor was to keep the school happy if he wanted to keep his job.
He doubted very much the school was going to be happy today. A body had been found in the woods. The girl was young, probably a student, and certainly dead. The officer on scene had told Jeffrey that it looked like an accident. The girl was dressed in running gear. She was lying flat on her back. She had likely stumbled on a tree root and smashed the back of her head against a rock.
This wasn’t the first time a student had died under Jeffrey’s tenure. Over three thousand kids were enrolled at the university. By virtue of statistics, a small number of them would die every year. Some by meningitis or pneumonia, some by suicide or overdose, some—mostly young men—by stupidity.
An accidental death in the woods was tragic, without doubt, but something about this particular death wasn’t sitting right with Jeffrey. He’d been running in that very same forest. He’d even tripped on a tree root more times than he cared to admit. That kind of fall could lead to several different injuries. A wrist fracture if you managed to catch yourself. A broken nose if you didn’t. You might hit your temple or bust up your shoulder if you fell sideways. There were a lot of ways to hurt yourself, but it was very unlikely you would flip around mid-fall and land flat on your back.
He took a sharp turn onto Frying Pan Road, the main artery into a neighborhood colloquially referred to as IHOP, because all of the streets were named after items you would find at an International House of Pancakes. Pancake Place. Belgian Waffle Way. Hashbrown Way.
Jeffrey saw the rolling lights of a police cruiser splashing the southwest corner of Omelet Road. He parked his Town Car at an angle across the street. Spectators stood on their front lawns. The sun was still low in the sky. Some were dressed for work. Some were wearing soiled uniforms from the night shift.
He told Brad Stephens, one of his junior officers, “Roll out the tape to keep these people back.”
“Yes, sir.” Brad excitedly fumbled with his keys to open the trunk. The kid was so new to the job that his mother still ironed his uniforms. He’d spent the last three months writing tickets and cleaning up after traffic accidents. This was Brad’s first case involving a fatality.
Jeffrey took in the scene as he made his way up the street. Older cars and trucks lined the road. IHOP was a working-class neighborhood, but to be frank, it was nicer than the one Jeffrey had grown up in. There were only a few boarded-up windows. The majority of the lawns were tidy. Lightbulbs still glowed in the floodlights. The paint was peeling, but the curtains were clean, and everyone had dutifully lined up their trashcans on the curb for pick-up.
Jeffrey opened the lid on the closest can. The bin was empty.
He spotted his team standing in a wide, open field that ran behind the houses. The forest was just beyond the rise, at least one hundred yards away. Jeffrey stepped out of the street. There wasn’t a sidewalk. He walked through a vacant lot, carefully scanning the ground as he followed a worn path through the grass. Cigarette butts. Beer bottles. Wadded-up pieces of aluminum foil. Jeffrey leaned down for a better look. He caught a whiff of cat urine.
“Chief.” Lena Adams jogged to meet him. The young officer’s blue uniform jacket was so big that it rode up under her chin. Jeffrey made a mental note to look into women’s sizes the next time he ordered uniforms. Lena wasn’t going to complain, but he was embarrassed by the oversight.
He asked, “You were the responding officer?”
“Yes, sir.” She started to read from her notebook. “The nine-one-one call came in from a cell phone at 5:58 a.m. I was dispatched at th
at time and arrived at this location at 6:02. The caller met me in the middle of the field at 6:03. Officer Brad Stephens arrived to assist at 6:04. Truong then took us to the location. I verified the victim was deceased at 6:08. I assessed the position of the body and noted a large, blood-covered rock by the victim’s head. I called Detective Wallace at 6:09. We then taped off the area around the body and awaited Frank’s arrival at 6:22.”
Frank had called Jeffrey en route. He already knew the details, but he nodded for Lena to continue. The only way you learned how to do something was to do something.
Lena read, “Victim is a white female between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five, dressed in red running shorts and a navy-blue T-shirt with a Grant Tech logo. She was found by another student, Leslie Truong, age twenty-two. Truong walks this path four-to-five times a week. She goes to the lake to do tai chi. Truong didn’t know the victim, but she was pretty upset all the same. I offered to radio a car to drive her to the campus nurse. She said she wanted to walk it off, take some time to think. She struck me as the woo-woo type.”
Jeffrey’s jaw had tightened. “You let her walk back to campus on her own?”
“Yes, Chief. She was going to see the nurse. I made her promise she’d—”
“That’s at least a twenty-minute hike, Lena. All by herself.”
“She said she wanted—”
“Stop.” Jeffrey worked to maintain an even tone. Most of policing was learning through mistakes. “Don’t do that again. We turn over witnesses to family or friends. We don’t send them on a two-mile hike.”
“But, she—”
Jeffrey shook his head, but now wasn’t the time to lecture Lena about compassion. “I want to talk to Truong before the day is out. Even if she didn’t know the victim, what she saw was traumatic. She needs to know that someone is in charge and looking out for people.”
Lena gave a perfunctory nod.
Jeffrey gave up. “When you got here, the victim was lying on her back?”
“Yes, sir.” Lena thumbed to the back of her notebook. She had made a crude drawing of the body in relation to a stand of trees. “The rock was to the right of her head. Her chin was turned slightly to the left. The ground was undisturbed. She didn’t turn over. She landed on her back and hit her head.”
“We’ll let the coroner make that determination.” He pointed to the foil. “Someone was smoking meth recently. Junkies are creatures of habit. I want you to pull all the incident reports for the last three months and see if we can match a name to the foil.”
Lena had her pen out, but she wasn’t writing.
He said, “It’s garbage pick-up day. Make sure we talk to the crew. I want to know if they saw anything suspicious.”
Lena looked back toward the street, then at the forest. “The victim tripped, Chief. Her head hit a giant rock. There’s blood all over it. Why do we need witnesses?”
“Were you there when it happened? Is that exactly what you saw?”
Lena had no immediate answer. Jeffrey started walking across the field. Lena had to jog to keep up with him. She had been on the force for three and a half years, but she was smart and most of the time, she listened, so he went out of his way to teach her.
He said, “I want you to remember this, because it’s important. This young woman has a family. She’s got parents, siblings, friends. We are going to have to tell them that she’s dead. They need to know we did a thorough job investigating the cause of her death. You treat every case as a homicide until you know it’s not.”
Lena’s pen was finally moving. She was transcribing every word. He saw her underline homicide twice. “I’ll check the incident reports and follow up on the garbage truck.”
“What’s the victim’s name?”
“She didn’t have ID, but Matt’s at the college asking around.”
“Good.” Of the detectives on the force, Matt Hogan was the most compassionate. There were some solid men on patrol, too. Jeffrey had gotten lucky with most of the legacy hires. Only a few were dead weight, and they would be gone by the end of the year. After four years of proving he could do this job, Jeffrey felt he had earned the benefit of tossing the bad apples.
“Chief.” Frank stood in the middle of the field. He was twenty years Jeffrey’s senior with the physical presence of an asthmatic walrus. Frank had passed on the job of chief when the position had opened. He wasn’t one for politics, and he knew his limitations. Jeffrey was certain the detective had his back so long as it related to the job. He wasn’t so sure about the other areas of his life.
“Brock—” Frank coughed around the cigarette in his mouth. “Brock just got here. He’s on his way to the body. She’s that-a-way, about two hundred feet over the hill.”
Dan Brock was the county coroner. His full-time job was at the funeral home. Jeffrey had found him to be competent, but Brock’s father had dropped dead of a heart attack two days ago. The senior Brock had been found at the bottom of the stairs, which hadn’t surprised Jeffrey. The man was a closet drinker. He’d reeked of alcohol.
Jeffrey asked, “Do you think Brock’s up to this?”
“He’s still torn up, poor fella. He was real close to his daddy.” For unknown reasons, Frank started grinning. “I think we’ll be okay.”
Jeffrey turned to see the reason behind Frank’s glee.
Sara Linton was walking through the vacant lot. She was wearing dark sunglasses. Her auburn hair was pulled back into a ponytail. She was dressed in a white long-sleeved shirt and matching short skirt.
“Oh great,” Lena mumbled. “Tennis Barbie to the rescue.”
Jeffrey gave Lena a look of warning. Around the time of his divorce, he’d made the mistake of complaining about Sara in front of Lena. She had taken carte blanche on the insults since then.
He told her, “Make sure Brock isn’t lost in the woods. Tell him Sara is here.”
Lena reluctantly trotted off.
Frank stubbed his cigarette out on his shoe as Sara walked across the field.
Jeffrey allowed himself the pleasure of watching her. Objectively, she was beautiful. Her legs were long and lean. She had a certain grace to her movements. She was the smartest woman he had ever met in a long line of incredibly intelligent women. After their divorce, he had persuaded himself that she hated him. Only recently had he realized that what Sara felt for him was worse than hate. She was deeply disappointed.
On a good day, Jeffrey could admit that he was disappointed, too.
Frank said, “I could punch you in the nuts for the rest of my life and it still wouldn’t be punishment enough for what you did.”
“Thanks, buddy.” Jeffrey patted Frank’s shoulder in a non-appreciative way. Sara’s family was as entrenched in the community as the university. Frank played cards with her father. His wife volunteered with Sara’s mother. Jeffrey could’ve decapitated the high school mascot and gotten less grief.
“Good to see ya, sweetpea.” Frank let Sara kiss his cheek. “Did you just get back from Atlanta?”
“I decided to stay the night. Hi.” Sara spun the last word like a volley into Jeffrey’s face. “Mama told me about the body. She thought Brock might need help.”
Jeffrey was mindful that Frank was not giving them any privacy. He was also mindful that it was Tuesday morning. Sara would normally be getting ready for work right now. “It’s a little early for tennis.”
“I played yesterday. This way?” She didn’t wait for an answer. She followed the trail into the forest.
Frank walked shoulder-to-shoulder with Jeffrey. “Sara just drove down from Atlanta, but she’s wearing the same clothes she was wearing yesterday. I wonder what that means?”
Jeffrey tasted metal from the fillings in his teeth.
Frank called to Sara, “How’s Parker doing? Did you go up in his plane again?”
The metal turned to blood.
Sara hadn’t answered, so Frank told Jeffrey, “Parker used to be a Navy fighter pilot. Real Top Gun type. He’s a
lawyer now. Drives a Maserati. Eddie told me all about him.”
Jeffrey could imagine Sara’s father merrily relaying the information over a hand of cards, secure in the knowledge that Frank would do his part to poke Jeffrey with the details.
Frank laughed again. Then he coughed because his lungs were full of tar.
Jeffrey tried to put them all back on a serious footing. They were walking toward a dead young woman. He looked at his watch. He talked to Sara’s back. “The victim was found half an hour ago. Lena took the call.”
Sara didn’t turn around, but her ponytail bobbed as she nodded her head. Jeffrey told himself that it was good to have her here. She’d held the job of coroner before Brock, and unlike the funeral director, she was a medical doctor. An expert’s opinion on the victim was exactly what this case called for. There was no one Jeffrey trusted more than Sara. That the feeling was not mutual was a fact that had lately started to wear on him.
At least a year had passed since she’d filed for divorce. Jeffrey had thought Sara’s anger would eventually burn itself out, but it had taken on the aspects of an eternal flame. Intellectually, he understood why she couldn’t let it go. It was bad enough that he was a cheating asshole, but he had humiliated her in the process. Sara had literally caught him with his pants down, in their bed, in their house, with another woman. Any normal wife would’ve been pissed off. It’s what Sara had done next that was terrifying.
Jeffrey had screamed for her to wait, but Sara didn’t wait. He had wrapped a blanket around his waist as he’d chased her through the house. On her way out, she’d grabbed the baseball bat that he kept by the front door. Jeffrey was stumbling down the front porch when she swung back the Louisville Slugger. She was standing over his 1968 Ford Mustang. The sound that came out of his mouth was like a howl.
But Sara hadn’t destroyed his car. She had tossed the bat to the ground. She had walked over to her Honda Accord. Instead of driving away, she reached through the open window, released the hand brake, pushed the gear into neutral, then let the car roll into the lake.
The Silent Wife: From the No. 1 Sunday Times bestselling author comes a gripping new crime thriller (Will Trent Series, Book 10) Page 7