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

  Jeffrey looked at his watch. He had five hours. He wasn’t going to forget. “That’s one thing. I never asked you to—”

  “Did you remember Possum and Nell’s seventeenth anniversary is next month?” Sara apparently did. “Last time we were there, you promised them you’d drive over for the party. And that you’d write a toast. You also promised Jared you’d show him how to throw a spiral. And you need a flu shot. The titers on your vaccines should be measured. God knows you should be tested for STDs. You’re past due for a physical. You want more blood pressure medication? You need to make an appointment with your GP before your script runs out.”

  “I know all of this,” he lied. “I’ve already made appointments. I’ve got the speech on my laptop.”

  “You’re so full of shit.”

  “How about you, Sara? Can we talk about how screwed up you are for a change?” His knees banged the desk as he leaned forward. “How about this new guy you’ve been running around Atlanta with? Parker? That’s not a man’s name. That’s a mechanical pencil you get from your grandfather.”

  She laughed. “Wow, you really got me there.”

  Jeffrey was going to get her if it was the last thing he did. “You look like shit right now. How about that? Did you even brush your hair today? I can tell you’re hungover. You probably haven’t slept in a week. You’re barely hanging on. I’m trying to talk to you like an adult about—”

  “Jeffrey.” Her throat seemed to grip the word. Sara never yelled when she was mad. Her anger always hissed out in a furious whisper. “Get out of my office.”

  “Get your ass off your shoulders.” He slammed his hand on the desk. She had no right to be angry with him right now. “Jesus, Sara. I was trying to talk to you about a case and you blew it up into this—”

  “I’m not the coroner. I’m not your sounding board. You damn well made sure I’m not your wife.”

  He forced out a laugh. “I’m not the one who filed for a divorce.”

  “No, you’re just the one who kept lying to me when I asked why you were staying out late, why you suddenly had to go outside to take phone calls, why you changed your email password, why you turned the notifications off on your phone, why you put a privacy screen on your laptop.” He could see her throat straining. “You made me think I was going crazy. You humiliated me in front of the entire town. And you still keep lying about—”

  “I made one mistake. One.”

  “One.” The word came out more as a sharp breath. No matter what he said, she refused to believe it was just one stupid mistake. “It’s been an entire year and you still can’t tell me the truth.”

  “You know what, sweetheart? Here’s the truth: I’m not your husband anymore.” He stood up to leave. “I don’t have to listen to this shit, either.”

  “Then go.”

  He wasn’t going to let her have the last word. “You did things, too, Sara.”

  She held open her arms, inviting him to take his best shot.

  “How about spending a Sunday in bed with your husband instead of rushing off to have lunch with your family? How about telling your mom not to drop by unannounced six days a week? How about telling your dad to stop coming in behind me and finishing projects I can finish in my own damn time? How about not telling your sister every detail of our sex life? How about for once, just once in our entire marriage, putting my needs, my feelings, ahead of every member of your god damn family?”

  She started riffling the desk drawers, scattering papers and office supplies onto the floor.

  Jeffrey stared at the mess. This was like the car, where she went crazy and tore up her stuff instead of his. “What are you doing?”

  “Looking for this.” She tossed a calculator onto her desk. “I need help counting up all the fucks I don’t give about your feelings.”

  His jaw locked down so tight that he could feel his pulse throbbing in his face. “You can shove that calculator up your tight ass.”

  “And you can go fuck yourself.”

  “I’ve got plenty of women who can do that for me.”

  “No shit, cocksucker.”

  “Fuck you.”

  Sara’s response got lost in the bang of Jeffrey sliding back the pocket door so hard that the doorjamb busted open. Wood splintered. Pictures fluttered through the air. In the hall, he ran into a wall of white—nurses, physician’s assistants, Dr. Barney in his lab coat—gathered around the nurse’s station. They all looked at him in disgust, because Sara was so fucking strategic that only his side of the argument had carried out into the hall.

  This wasn’t a divorce. It was Carousel from Logan’s Run.

  Jeffrey’s shoes squeaked as he walked up the hallway. His wet socks bunched around his ankles. He felt like steam was coming out of his head. He shouldered open the door. The storm still raged outside. Lightning cracked the sky. The clouds were as black as his mood.

  He looked for his umbrella. It was in the middle of the parking lot. The rod was bent. Jeffrey walked out into the driving rain. He snatched the umbrella off the ground. His phone started to ring. He ignored it, the muscles in his arm tensing as he tried to force open the canopy.

  “Shit!” Jeffrey hurled the useless umbrella toward the closed door. Rain pelted the top of his head. He trudged toward the driveway. He glanced at Sara’s car, but he wasn’t so far gone that he was going to give her the satisfaction of doing something stupid.

  He looked back at the umbrella. He looked at the car.

  His phone rang again.

  He grabbed it out of his pocket. “Jesus, what?”

  There was a hesitation. A slight intake of breath. He could tell it was Lena without looking at the caller ID.

  He demanded, “What, Lena? What do you want?”

  “Chief?” She was still hesitant in a way that made him want to spike his phone into the ground. He could see her across the street. She was standing inside the glass door at the front of the police station. “Chief?”

  “You know I’m here, Lena. You can see me through the damn window. What is it?”

  “The girl—” She stopped herself. “The other girl. The student.”

  “Have you forgotten how to use adjectives?”

  “She’s missing,” Lena said. “Leslie Truong. The witness who found Beckey Caterino in the woods. She never made it to the nurse’s station. She hasn’t been to her dorm or class. We can’t find her anywhere.”

  Atlanta

  6

  Will drove in silence while Faith transcribed details from Daryl Nesbitt’s newspaper clippings into her notebook. He could hear her ballpoint pen scratching the paper. She liked to circle important words. The noise grated like sandpaper on teeth. He yearned for a distraction, but by detente, they never played the radio in the car. Faith was not going to listen to Bruce Springsteen. Will was not going to listen to *NSYNC.

  Except for the occasional huh, Faith seemed content with the prolonged silence. Will’s brain kept churning up Faith-centric conversation starters—So, how are things with Emma’s father? Are stay-at-home-moms and working moms really like the Bloods and the Crips? What are the words to “Baby Shark”?—anything to save him from the rabbit hole of analyzing every single word that Sara had uttered to him in the last hour.

  Not that there was a lot of raw data. Over the course of three brief conversations, his funny, articulate girlfriend was suddenly talking in a code that Alan Turing couldn’t break. Back at the prison, Sara hadn’t technically hung up on Will when he had called her from the bathroom, but the exchange had ended abruptly enough to send Will running through the halls like a lunatic. He was lucky the COs hadn’t shot him in the back. Then Sara had basically shot him in the face.

  Salad?

  McDonald’s?

  What?

  When Will was a kid and things got crazy, he’d imagine that his brain was a stack of lunch trays. He’d always been a big fan of food served in compartments—pizza in the big rectangle, corn, tater-tots and apple sauce in
the squares. Visualizing trays gave him clearly defined sections to store his problems so that he could deal with them later. Or not. The stacking system had gotten him through some harrowing times. If a foster parent was rough with him, or a teacher yelled at him for being stupid, he would put that bad feeling in a compartment and when all the compartments got full, he would toss another tray on the stack.

  Will didn’t know where to store the three conversations with Sara. The last two made very little sense. Sara normally refused to talk about dinner before lunchtime. She was never, ever going to bring Will McDonald’s. That left the first call, which had lasted less than one minute, to scrutinize. Sara had sounded confused, then angry, then robotic, then like she was about to start crying.

  Will rubbed his jaw.

  He was missing the most obvious clue.

  Sara had told him she was standing in the middle of a parking lot. That’s why she had ended the call. She was not going to break down in front of an audience. For all of her talk about open lines of communication, she tended to Michigan J. Frog her emotions. In public, her mood was always steady. In private, she could break down in a way that not many people would guess she was capable of. Will could count on one hand the number of times he had seen Sara absolutely lose it. Sometimes it happened when she was angry, sometimes when she was hurt, but always, always, she did it behind closed doors.

  He looked into the rearview mirror. The road stretched behind him. Sara was half the state away by now. He slid his phone out of his pocket. He could locate Sara with an app, but he knew where Sara was, and the app would not tell him what she was thinking.

  Will looked down at his phone. The lock screen showed a photo of her with the dogs. Betty was tucked up under Sara’s chin. Bob and Billy, her two giant greyhounds, were both pushing their way into her lap. Sara’s glasses were askew. She’d been trying to do a crossword puzzle. She’d started laughing and Will had taken the picture and she had begged him to erase it because she thought she looked goofy, so Will had set it as his wallpaper, and none of that mattered right now because—

  Why hadn’t she texted him?

  “Good Lord, Will. How do you sit here?” Faith demanded. “I mean, physically, how does your body fit into this space?”

  Will glanced over. She was pushing back on her seat, trying to steal some legroom.

  “Emma’s car seat is in the way.”

  She asked, “Why didn’t you move it?”

  “It’s your car.”

  “And you’re a giant man.” She got on her knees to make room in the back.

  Will stuck his phone in his pocket. He tried to keep up the conversation. “I thought they were hard to put in. Car seats.”

  “It’s not rocket surgery.” She raked back her seat and stretched out her legs in the glorious free space. “Do you know how many Saturdays I spent stopping parents to check their seats when I was in uniform? You wouldn’t believe how stupid people are. There was this one couple—”

  Will struggled to pay attention to the story, which took an unexpected turn into a drug bust and having to call animal control. He waited until Faith took a breath then nodded toward her notes. “Anything stick out?”

  “The cell phones are bothering me.” She had zeroed in on Daryl Nesbitt’s offer to trade information. “The operation has to be sophisticated. More so than the usual. Before the riot, the warden confiscated four hundred phones. That’s a hell of a lot to keister in. I mean, I’ve seen an asshole. I’ve seen a phone. I don’t get how it works. Like, physically. Look at my phone.”

  Will looked at the iPhone X in her hand. He told her, “One of those could fetch three thousand dollars inside.”

  “I could probably do two at a time.”

  Her phone dinged with a message. Then another message. Then another.

  Will guessed Amanda was behind the dings. She sent each sentence in its own separate text because the Geneva Conventions did not apply to her team.

  Faith summarized, “Amanda says Nesbitt has serious medical issues with his leg, and that’s what’s driving the one-week deadline. I assume the fact that she’s texting means they’re at the funeral home.”

  Will looked at the clock. Amanda had made good time. He guessed Lena’s house was another ten minutes away. They had already swung by the Macon Police Department, hoping to surprise her. They’d been the ones who were surprised. Lena was home on maternity leave. She was a month from her due date.

  Faith said, “I should take the lead with Lena.”

  Will hadn’t considered a strategy, but he said, “That makes sense. She’s pregnant. You’ve got two kids.”

  “I’m not bonding with that dingo over motherhood.” Faith scowled. “I hate pregnant women. Especially first-timers. They’re so smug, like something magical took place and suddenly, they’re growing life. You know how I magically grew Jeremy? I let a horny fifteen-year-old moron trick me into thinking I couldn’t get pregnant if it was only the tip.”

  Will studied the GPS display on the dashboard.

  Faith said, “I should take the lead with Lena because I’ve met your lying, duplicitous bitch of an ex-wife. And I’ve read your case notes from the last two times you investigated Lena.”

  “Only the first time was an investigation. And she was cleared of wrongdoing. At least any wrongdoing I could prove.” Will realized he wasn’t exactly defending himself. “The second time was happenstance. Lena just happened to be caught up with some guys who—”

  “‘Just happened to be caught up.’” Faith gave him a pointed look. “You don’t step in dog shit unless you’re following a dog.”

  Will was no stranger to a dog park. “All you have to do is look down.”

  Faith groaned. “You don’t see the bad in Lena. You don’t see the bad in anybody who’s like her.”

  Will had to concede, silently, that she could perhaps, possibly, be right. He had always had a soft spot for angry, damaged women. More often than not, the person they hurt the most was themselves.

  He also had to concede that they hadn’t driven to Macon for a therapy session. They were trying to get information from Lena, and Will of all people knew how difficult that was going to be.

  He told Faith, “She’s changeable.”

  “Like a demon?”

  “Like a person you trust until you don’t trust them,” Will said. “You’re talking to her, and what she’s saying makes sense, but then, suddenly, without you seeing why or when it happened, she’s angry or she’s hurt or she’s paranoid and you’re dealing with an angry, hurt, paranoid person.”

  “Sounds lovely.”

  “The hard part is, sometimes she can be a really good cop.” He caught Faith’s snort of disbelief. “She has the instinct. She knows how to talk to people. She doesn’t cheat all of the time. Just some of the time.”

  “Being a little corrupt is like being a little pregnant,” Faith said. “What I really want to get my hands on is Lena’s notebooks. This was one of her first big cases. Amanda’s right—when you’re just starting out, you write down every fart in the wind. That’s where Lena would’ve made her mistakes. We can hang her with her own words.”

  Will knew she was right. Those first few years on the job, your spiral-bound notebook felt like a diary. Your boss didn’t check it over. It wasn’t an official, sworn report. It wasn’t a statement of fact. It was where you put down stray thoughts and niggling details that you wanted to follow up on. And then a defense attorney subpoenaed it and a judge agreed and the next thing you knew, you were sweating it out on the witness stand trying to explain that DQ was where you’d gone to lunch, not the initials of an alternate suspect who could be the real murderer.

  Will said, “Lena’s cunning. The second we ask for her notebooks, she’s going to know we’re trying to jam her up. And she’s had plenty of time to think about it. Tons of people saw us at the station. There’s no way she didn’t get a call that the GBI asked for her location.”

  “Cops are such bit
chy little gossips,” Faith complained. “But we didn’t tell anybody which case we’re looking into. Lena’s probably got a lot of cases she’s worried about. Her luck is going to run out eventually, and I’m going to be there with the handcuffs.”

  Will was surprised by her vehemence. “When did you get such a hard-on for her?”

  “She’s thirty-two years old. She’s got fifteen years of policing under her belt. She doesn’t get the benefit of the doubt anymore. Plus,” Faith held up her finger, as if to signify this was the important part, “I’m Sara’s friend. The enemy of my friend is my nemesis.”

  “I don’t think that’s what Churchill said.”

  “He was only fighting Nazis. We’re talking about Lena Adams here.”

  Will let the comparison slide. And he did not admit that Faith’s diatribe was reinforcing her earlier point. The more she attacked Lena, the more Will wanted to make excuses for her. His fatal flaw was that he could understand why she did the horrible things she did. None of Lena’s mistakes were committed out of malice. She honestly thought she was doing the right thing.

  Which brought to mind one of the most important lessons Amanda had ever taught Will: the most dangerous cop on any investigation was the one who always thought he was right.

  Faith said, “I think you should tell Sara about Daryl Nesbitt.”

  Will’s head swiveled like a gun turret.

  Faith shrugged. “You’re right. We shouldn’t keep this from her. She deserves to know.”

  Will debated whether or not to confess. “You seemed really sure of yourself back at the prison. You actually said you agreed with Amanda.”

  “Yeah, well, I talk a lot of shit for somebody who can’t stay awake past nine thirty.” Her phone dinged again. And again. And again. She opened the text. “Amanda. Still no word on Nesbitt’s correspondences, so no joy on the friend who sent him the newspaper articles. Sara just started the preliminary exam on Alexandra McAllister. Amanda wants us to keep her updated on Lena. Gee, Mandy, thanks for the reminder. It never occurred to me to tell you what happens.”