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

  She tried again. “I’ll let you know when I’m on the way.”

  He paused a beat. “Okay.”

  Sara ended the call. Three okays and she’d probably made things worse. This was exactly why she hated lying or hiding things or whatever bullshit excuse Amanda had given for holding back this information from Sara like she was a child who couldn’t handle the truth about the Easter Bunny.

  Nesbitt. Jeffrey. Lena Fucking Adams.

  It was Faith’s silence that hurt the most. Sara would just as soon be mad at Amanda for obfuscating as she would be at a snake for hissing. Will had come clean because even an amoeba could be taught to avoid negative stimuli. Faith was her friend. They never talked about Will, but they talked about other things. Serious things, like Faith’s misery as a pregnant fifteen-year-old. Like Sara’s heartbreak when Jeffrey had died. They swapped recipes neither of them would ever try. They gossiped about work. Faith complained about her sex life. Sara babysat Faith’s kid.

  Amanda said, “Would you mind rolling down the window? There’s a smell, like—”

  “A bloody toilet?” Sara cracked the window just enough to give herself some fresh air. She stared at the blur of trees as they coasted up the highway. Looking at the forest brought her back to that day in the woods. The Viewfinder in her head retrieved the image—Sara on her knees. Jeffrey across from her.

  Sara had longed to be held by him, which had felt devastating all over again. The only person she had wanted comfort from was the only person who could not give it. She had ended up calling her sister to meet her at work just to sit with Sara for a few minutes while she’d cried.

  Amanda said. “You’re awfully quiet over there.”

  “Am I?” The words felt thick in Sara’s mouth.

  “Penny for your thoughts.”

  Amanda couldn’t afford her thoughts. Sara said, “Those ridges on the side of the road. The ones that make a thumping sound when the tires go over them. What are they called?”

  “Rumble strips.”

  Sara held her breath before letting it go. “They always remind me of running my fingers down Will’s stomach. His abdominal muscles are so—”

  “How about some music?” Amanda’s radio was permanently tuned to the Frank Sinatra station. The speakers purred with a familiar samba—

  The girl from Ipanema goes walking …

  Sara closed her eyes. Her breathing was too shallow. She felt lightheaded. She forced her respiration to calm. She unclenched her hands in her lap. She let her thoughts fall back into Grant County.

  Rebecca Caterino had been found exactly one year and a day after Sara had filed divorce papers at the courthouse. To commemorate the anniversary, Sara had driven into Atlanta to meet a man. He wasn’t a particularly memorable man, but she had told herself that she was going to have fun if it killed her. Then she had drunk too much wine. Then she’d drunk too much whiskey. Then she’d ended up with her head in a toilet.

  The next thing she remembered was waking up in her childhood bedroom with a jaw-dropping hangover. Her car was parked in the driveway. Tessa and her father had driven into Atlanta to get her. Sara was not the type of person who ever drank too much. Tessa had teased her over the breakfast table. Eddie had asked her if she’d enjoyed her trip to Barf-A-Lona. Cathy had told her to go help Brock. The only clean clothes Sara could find in her old chest of drawers was a tennis outfit straight out of Sweet Valley High.

  “Do you know this one?” Amanda turned up the volume. Sinatra had moved on to “My Kind of Town.” She told Sara, “My father used to sing this to me.”

  Sara wasn’t going to traipse down memory lane with Amanda. She had her own memories to wrestle with.

  Jeffrey had been a Frank Sinatra kind of man. Respected. Capable. Admired. People naturally wanted to be around him, to follow his lead. Jeffrey had taken it all in stride. He’d gone to Auburn on a football scholarship. He’d graduated with a degree in American History. He’d chosen to be a cop because his mentor was a cop. He’d moved to Grant County because he understood small towns.

  Sara could clearly remember the first time she’d seen him. She was volunteering as the team doctor at a high school football game. Jeffrey, the new chief, was glad-handing the crowd. He was a breathtakingly gorgeous man. In her entire life, Sara had never felt such a naked, visceral attraction. She had stared at Jeffrey long enough to do the calculations. Tessa was going to be sleeping with him before the weekend was over.

  But Jeffrey had chosen Sara.

  From the beginning, she had been all the wrong things with him. Flattered. Completely out of her element. Easy, because she’d slept with him on the first date. Damaged, because Jeffrey was the first man Sara had been with after being brutally raped in Atlanta.

  She had told Jeffrey that she’d moved back to Grant County because she wanted to serve a rural community. That was a lie. From the age of thirteen, Sara had been determined to become the top pediatric surgeon in Atlanta. Every spare moment from that point onward had been spent with her head in a textbook or her butt in a desk chair.

  Ten minutes in the staff restroom of Grady Hospital had completely derailed her life.

  Sara had been handcuffed. She had been silenced. She had been raped. She had been stabbed. She had developed an ectopic pregnancy that robbed her of the ability to have children. Then there was the trial. Then there was the excruciating wait for the verdict, the even more excruciating wait for the sentencing, the move back to Grant County, the establishment of a new career, a new life, a new kind of normal.

  Then there was this beautiful, intelligent man who knocked her off her feet.

  At first, Sara hadn’t told Jeffrey about the rape because she was waiting for the right moment. Then she’d realized there wasn’t going to be a right moment. The one thing that Jeffrey was most attracted to, the thing that Sara had over most everyone else, was her strength. She couldn’t let him know that she’d been broken. That she had given up her dreams. That she had been a victim.

  Sara had kept the secret throughout their first marriage. She had been relieved she’d held it back during their divorce. She had kept it hidden when they’d started dating again, falling in love again. She had kept the secret for so long that by the time she’d finally told Jeffrey, Sara had felt ashamed, as if it was all somehow her fault.

  The song on the radio pulled her back into the present. Amanda’s ring clicked against the steering wheel as she tapped along to Sinatra’s ode to Chicago—

  One town that won’t let you down.

  Sara looked for a tissue. Her sleeve—Will’s sleeve—was empty. Charlie had taken her duffle bag. She’d left her purse in the van. She should call Charlie and ask him to lock it in her office, but the thought of taking her phone out of her pocket, dialing the number, was too much.

  She wanted Will. To spoon with him on the couch. To sit in his lap and feel his arms around her. He was probably halfway to Macon right now. They were literally going in opposite directions.

  Sara could remember exactly when she had told Will about the rape. She’d only known him for a few months. He was still married. She was still unsure. They were standing in her parents’ front yard. It was freezing cold. Her greyhounds were shivering. Sara was longing for Will to kiss her, but of course he wasn’t going to actually kiss her until she kissed him. The confession had come naturally. Or as naturally as it ever could. She had told Will that she had put off telling her husband about the rape because she didn’t want Jeffrey to think that she was weak.

  Will had told Sara that he’d never once thought of her as anything but strong.

  He was kind that way. He was physically impressive. He was razor-sharp. But Will was not the type of man who commanded attention. He was the man at the party who stood in the corner petting the neighbor’s dog. His humor was mostly self-deprecating. He worried about how people felt. He was silent, but always watchful. Sara assumed this came from his horrific childhood. Will had grown up in the foster care system. H
e seldom talked about that time, but she knew that he had suffered a shocking level of abuse. His skin told her the story—cigarette burns, electrical burns, jagged ridges where bone had fractured through skin. He was shy about the scars, unreasonably embarrassed that he’d been the sort of child that someone would hate.

  That wasn’t the Will that the rest of the world knew. His protracted silences made most people uncomfortable. He had a feralness to him. An undercurrent of violence. An internal spring that threatened to flick open like the blade of a knife. In another life, he might have been one of the thugs locked up at Phillips. Will had barely graduated high school. He’d been homeless at eighteen. There were criminal charges in his background that Amanda had somehow managed to expunge. This clean slate had given Will the opportunity to change his life. Most men would not have taken it. Will was not most men. He’d gone to college. He’d become a special agent. He was a damn good cop. He cared about people. He wanted to get it right.

  Sara was loath to compare the two great loves of her life, but there was one very stark difference between them: With Jeffrey, Sara had known that there were dozens, possibly hundreds of other women who could love him just as intensely as she did.

  With Will, Sara was keenly aware that she was the only woman on earth who could love him the way that he deserved to be loved.

  Amanda said, “We’ve got another half hour. Is there something you’d rather listen to?”

  Sara dialed the tuner to Pop2K and cranked up the volume. She rolled down the window the rest of the way. The sharp breeze cut into her skin. She closed her eyes to keep them from burning.

  Amanda endured ten seconds of the Red Hot Chili Peppers before she broke.

  The radio snapped off. Sara’s window snicked up.

  Amanda said, “Will told you about Nesbitt.”

  Sara smiled, because it had taken her long enough. “I thought you were a detective.”

  “I thought so, too.” Amanda’s tone showed a begrudging respect. “How much do you know?”

  “Everything Will knows.”

  The words clearly stung. Amanda wasn’t used to Will choosing a different side. Still, she told Sara, “Nesbitt’s jacket is in my briefcase behind the seat.”

  Sara stretched around to retrieve the file. She opened it on her lap. The jacket was at least two inches thick. She skipped over the expected—that the raging asshole had managed to buy himself twenty more years—and found the medical section. They didn’t need a warrant to read the details. As an inmate, Nesbitt didn’t have a right to privacy. Sara skimmed the voluminous notes on his past hospitalizations and multiple visits to the prison infirmary.

  Nesbitt was a below-the-knee amputee, abbreviated as BKA. During his eight-year incarceration, he’d seen dozens, possibly hundreds, of different doctors. There was no continuity of care in prison. You were more likely to see a unicorn than a wound-care specialist. Inmates got what they were given, and if they were very lucky, the doctor wasn’t fleeing malpractice suits or employed by a private contractor whose bottom line depended on providing the absolute bare minimum of care.

  Sara flipped ahead to the pages and pages of invoices. Prisoners were charged a $5 a visit co-pay no matter if they were seeing the doctor for congestive heart failure or getting their toenails clipped. Nesbitt owed the state of Georgia $2,655. His commissary account and three-cents-an-hour janitorial wage were being garnished until the debt was resolved. If he ever got out of prison, that money would continue to be garnished from whatever paycheck he managed to earn. In the last eight years alone, Nesbitt had required 531 medical visits and 28 hospitalizations. That was more than one visit per week.

  Sara told Amanda, “Nesbitt’s foot was amputated after a car accident. He’s lost four inches of leg since he became incarcerated. He was poorly fitted for a prosthetic. A bad prosthetic is like a shoe that doesn’t fit. The rubbing and friction occludes normal capillary pressure. The tissue becomes ischemic. If this goes on long enough, which it’s bound to in prison, the tissue becomes necrotic.”

  “And then?”

  “Then—” Sara paged through the chart, which was a case study in Third World medicine. “Diagnostically, you stage the damage based on what you can see. Stage I is superficial, just a red patch. Stage II involves the top two layers of skin. It looks like a blister, basically. Stage III is an ulcer with full thickness. That’s an open sore. You can see the fat, but the bone and muscle aren’t visible. There’s a white or yellow slough that has to be wiped away.”

  “Pus?”

  “More like a slimy film. It smells awful. You have to keep it clean or you’ll develop an anaerobic bacterial undergrowth.” Sara noted in the chart that bacteria had repeatedly set up in Nesbitt’s leg. Inmates were not allowed to keep medications inside their cells, and sterile cloths were hard to come by, especially at $5 each visit.

  Sara continued, “Stage IV is a full-thickness ulcer. You can actually see inside the leg to bone, muscle and tendon. Past that, it’s technically unstageable because you can’t see anything. The skin develops a black, hard scar tissue that’s as thick as the sole of a shoe. You have to saw through it. The smell is putrid. Think of rotting meat, because that’s basically what’s happening. The muscle is destroyed. The bone becomes infected. Nesbitt has reached this point four times over the last eight years, and each time, they cut off a little bit more of his leg.”

  “Is that the best way to treat it?”

  Sara would’ve laughed if the situation wasn’t so appalling. “If you’re on a Civil War battlefield, absolutely. But this is the twenty-first century. The gold standard is to use a vacuum-assisted closure and ideally, hyperbolic oxygen treatments to bring blood flow back to the area. In the best of circumstances, it would take months of intensive wound care to heal.”

  “The state would never pay for that.”

  Sara allowed the laugh to come out. The state barely paid for clean sheets. “Nesbitt currently has a stage III, full-thickness ulcer. You’d be able to smell the rot if you stood close enough. He’s one, maybe two more infections away from losing his knee joint. That opens up a whole new set of problems. Even good candidates have trouble adapting to an AKA prosthesis.”

  “He’ll keep losing sections of leg until there’s nothing left?”

  “It won’t come to that. They’ll put him in a wheelchair. He won’t have access to physical therapy. His exercise will be limited. It’s almost impossible to stay well-hydrated drinking toilet water. He’s already carrying an extra twenty pounds. His blood pressure, cholesterol and A1c are elevated. Diabetes is right around the corner.”

  “Another level of hell?”

  “Rock bottom,” Sara said. “He can monitor his blood sugar in his cell, but he’ll have to go to the infirmary each time he needs an injection. You can imagine how well that system works. Hundreds of inmates die every year from diabetic ketoacidosis. Nesbitt is standing at the precipice of a cascade that is going to cut decades off of his life. Not to mention the trauma of what he’s already experienced.”

  “You seem to have a lot of compassion for a pedophile who tried to sue your husband’s estate.”

  Sara realized that Amanda had done some investigating on her own. The civil suit wasn’t mentioned in Nesbitt’s jacket. “I’m giving you a medical opinion, not a personal one.”

  Still, Sara could hear her mother’s niggling voice: Whatsoever you do to the least of my brothers, you do unto me.

  “It’s strange,” Amanda said. “Nesbitt never hinted at using his medical needs as a bargaining chip. We could transfer him to a hospital right now to treat his wound.”

  “That’s a spit in the ocean. To really take care of him, you’re looking at north of a million dollars.” Sara laid it out for her. “A wound-care specialist. An orthopedist who specializes in limb salvage and amputation. A cardiologist. A vascular surgeon. A properly fitted prosthesis. Physical therapy. Quarterly adjustments. Complete replacement every three to four years. Nutritional supp
ort. Pain management.”

  “I get it,” Amanda said. “Nesbitt must get it, too. That’s why he’s so focused on revenge. He’s determined to tarnish the Grant County force.”

  “You mean Jeffrey.”

  “I mean Lena Adams. He wants to see her behind bars.”

  “Well what do you know. I’ve found common ground with a pedophile.” Sara paged back to Nesbitt’s most recent infirmary visit. “Absent a miracle, he’ll be in sepsis within the next two weeks. When the symptoms get bad enough, they’ll hospitalize him. Then he’ll be transferred back to prison. Then he’ll get sicker. Then they’ll hospitalize him. He’s been here four times. He knows what’s coming.”

  “That explains his one-week deadline.” Amanda asked, “Can you recall anything about the Grant County investigation?”

  “I can only give you a medical examiner’s perspective.” Sara tried to be diplomatic. During that time, most of her conversations with Jeffrey had quickly devolved into cheap shots and name-calling. “I was working as an advisor to the local coroner. Jeffrey and I weren’t on good terms.”

  Amanda took a sharp turn onto a side street. Sara had lost track of time. They had already reached the Ingle Funeral Home of Sautee. Amanda looped around the building, then parked at the front entrance. She took out her phone to let their contact know that they’d arrived.

  There was only one other car by the entrance, a red Chevy Tahoe. Sara looked up at the two-story brick building. Crisp white trim. Copper gutters. Alexandra McAllister was inside. She was twenty-nine years old. She had been missing for eight days. Her body had been found by two hikers who were out walking their dog.

  Instead of silently wallowing in the past, Sara should’ve been drilling Amanda for details on the present.

  “Two minutes.” Amanda was off the phone. “The family is about to leave.”

  Sara asked the question she should’ve asked half an hour ago. “Do you think Nesbitt is right? Is there a serial killer?”

  “Everyone wants to work a serial killer case,” Amanda said. “My job is to bring focus to the team so they stop swatting at flies and figure out where the rotting meat is.”