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

  Faith said, “Okay, deep breath. Let’s get past this.”

  Will wasn’t going to get past this. Not until he hurt somebody.

  “Another deep breath,” Faith coaxed.

  Will could feel his fingernails digging into his palms. He wasn’t one of her suspects who needed a fucking time out.

  “Okay,” Faith’s tone said she was ready to move on. “Let’s focus on what we accomplished in there. We managed to Scooby-Doo two new details before shit got crazy.”

  Will gritted his teeth. He didn’t give a shit about details.

  Faith said, “One, who gave Nesbitt the money to hire a lawyer? No one sues a dead cop’s wife on a contingency.”

  Will had been a fool for thinking Lena had any saving graces. There was nothing good about her. She had twisted him into a corkscrew and he hadn’t even seen it coming.

  “Number two,” Faith said, oblivious to his rage. “Truong’s mother reported that her daughter thought her roommates were stealing from her. That could be the bad guy taking a trophy.”

  Will squeezed his fist tighter. He wanted to break something. To hurt something. To kill something.

  “We could find out if the women from Nesbitt’s articles were—”

  “Jesus, Faith!” Will exploded. “What is the fucking point of this? Amanda told us before we went in. McAllister’s death was accidental. Thieving roommates and an ambulance chaser aren’t clues. And you’re right about the woods. The woods are every-fucking-where.”

  Faith pursed her lips.

  “What, Faith? What’s the fucking point of talking about this? Any of this?”

  She said nothing.

  Will realized the seatbelt chime had been going off since they’d left Lena’s. He yanked on the belt. The strap caught. He yanked it harder. “It’s bullshit, is what it is. All of this is fucking bullshit, because Sara called it. Amanda called it. You called it. Lena lies, and Nesbitt lies and—”

  Will couldn’t get the belt to buckle. The chimes were like a railroad spike in his ears.

  He said, “There’s nothing here, right? Lena gave us jack shit, just like you said she would. Are you going to answer me? Are you?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Yeah,” he repeated. “Which means we wasted the entire fucking day. Listening to a fucking pedophile. Listening to a hateful, lying bitch. And dying, because, yes, Faith, here’s the answer to your question: Hell-fucking-yes, the Jeffrey part of this is absolutely killing me. And it’s all my fault, because Amanda was right about waiting to tell Sara. But I didn’t listen to her, so Sara’s been worrying about Jeffrey all fucking day, not texting me a god damn thing, and now I’m going to have to go back and tell her to her face that Lena thinks she’s behind some scheme to lock her up for perjury, and don’t you spin me some bullshit about lying about what really happened with Lena because I’m not fucking lying. Fuck!”

  He gave up on the seatbelt. The metal buckle hit the window as it reeled back. Will punched the dashboard. Then he punched it again and again.

  “Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!”

  He pulled the last punch, stunned by his own violence. His fist hung in the air like a hammer. He was sweating, his breath huffing out like a steam engine. The car had shaken with every blow. What the hell was he doing? Will never went off like this. He was the guy who stopped the guy from going off.

  Faith slowed the car. She pulled onto the shoulder. She put the gear in park. She gave Will a moment to come back to his senses.

  It didn’t take long. Shame was his overriding emotion. He couldn’t even look at her.

  Faith said, “I think that’s the longest sentence you’ve ever said to me the entire time I’ve known you.”

  Will wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. He tasted blood. His knuckle had busted open from the impact. “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s fine. Really. This is just the last new car I’ll ever drive until my daughter graduates from college.”

  Will ran his fingers along the dashboard to make sure he hadn’t cracked the surface.

  She said, “I can’t believe the airbag didn’t go off.”

  “Right?”

  Faith found a Kleenex in her purse. “New rule: we don’t ever talk to Lena Adams ever again.”

  Will dotted at the blood on his hand. How was he going to tell Sara about any of this? Will wasn’t even sure when the interrogation had taken such a seriously wrong turn. Had Lena been playing them from the beginning? She was like the scorpion riding their backs across the river.

  Faith’s phone started to ring.

  She told Will, “It’s Amanda.”

  He rubbed his face with his hands. Amanda meant Sara. What should Will tell her, that he wanted Burger King instead of McDonald’s? That he was looking forward to a salad? That it would’ve taken her two seconds to text him that they were okay and maybe he wouldn’t have gone into a rage spiral and assaulted Faith’s car?

  The phone kept ringing.

  Will said, “Answer it.”

  Faith clicked the button. “We’re both here. You’re on speaker.”

  “Where have you been?” Amanda demanded. “I’ve been calling and texting for the last twenty-eight minutes.”

  Faith mumbled a curse as she clocked the dozens of notifications on her phone. “Sorry, we were interviewing Lena and—”

  “Sara found something during the examination. Alexandra McAllister was definitely raped and murdered. Sara confirmed there are links to the Grant County cases.”

  Will stared at Faith.

  She had slapped both hands over her mouth in disbelief.

  Suddenly, everything Lena had said actually mattered. What had they missed? Someone paid the lawyer to sue Jeffrey’s estate. Leslie Truong’s stuff was missing, but then stuff always went missing. Maybe Caterino was missing something. Maybe not. They couldn’t go back and ask Lena to clarify. She had shredded her notebooks. Will had almost pulled a gun on her husband. Faith had called dibs on punching her in the face. There was no way either of them could ever be in the same room with Lena Adams again.

  “There’s more,” Amanda said. “I heard back from the GDOC on who’s been sending those articles to Daryl Nesbitt. It’s the same benefactor who funded the civil suit against Tolliver’s estate.”

  “Okay.” Faith had finally found her voice. “Who is it?”

  “Gerald Caterino,” Amanda said. “Rebecca Caterino’s father.”

  7

  Gina Vogel looked up from her laptop and stared out the window. Her eyes struggled to focus on the new perspective. Trees, a birdfeeder, windchimes. She had reached that age where reading glasses stopped being a future indignity and started to become a full-on necessity.

  She looked down at her computer. The letters were still blurry. She adjusted the font size to the equivalent of the E on an eye exam chart. Then she opened her browser and googled if I change font size in my email will other people know, because she was not going to let her twelve-year-old boss think he was opening an email from his grandmother.

  Google needed more information than Gina was capable of providing.

  She closed the laptop and tossed it onto the coffee table. She tried looking at the tree again. Her eye doctor had told her to reset her distance vision at least twice an hour. The advice had sounded silly last year, but now she was obsessively looking at trees every ten minutes because her vision was so bad that she had to stand up and walk to the TV whenever a character onscreen sent or read a text.

  She stood up and stretched her back—another part of her body that had betrayed her. She was only forty-three years old, but apparently, all of those warnings from doctors over the years about eating better and getting more exercise had been correct.

  Who could’ve guessed?

  Her right knee took a few steps to get the hang of walking again. She’d been on the couch for too long. Working from home had its perks, but she was going to have to sit at her desk from now on. Curling onto the couch like a cat was a youth
ful indulgence.

  Gina turned on the TV in the kitchen. She watched a few minutes of weather. When the newscaster started to report on a woman’s body that had been found in the woods, she changed the channel to HGTV. The only bodies she wanted to hear about belonged to the Property Brothers.

  She opened the refrigerator. She piled vegetables into her arms and deposited them in the sink to wash. For a few seconds, she contemplated Uber Eats, but statistically, she would eventually reach the age of forty-four, which was followed by forty-five, which was practically fifty, which meant a healthy salad for dinner instead of a greasy cheeseburger and fries.

  Or did it?

  She turned on the sink faucet before she could change her mind. She pulled the strainer out of the cabinet. She reached toward the bowl over the sink. Her fingers did not find the expected scrunchie. Gina was not a disorganized person. She always kept the same scrunchie in the same bowl. It was girlie pink with white daisies, purloined from her niece on a family beach vacation over ten years ago.

  Gina searched the counters, moving around canisters and the Cuisinart mixer. She bent down and looked under the cabinets. She rummaged through her purse, which was hanging on the back of the kitchen chair. She looked in her gym bag by the door. Then she checked the floor in the hallway. Rifled the bathroom shelves. Opened every drawer in her bedroom. Then in the spare bedroom. Then in the living room. She even checked the refrigerator, because once, she had left her phone by the milk.

  “Crap.” She stood in the middle of the kitchen, hands on her hips.

  She never wore the scrunchie outside because the color was embarrassing and also, her niece had a memory like an elephant and the lung capacity of a spoiled three-year-old.

  Still, Gina grabbed her keys off the console table, went outside, and searched her car. She even popped open the trunk.

  No pink scrunchie.

  Gina returned to the house. She bolted the door. She tossed her keys onto the hall table. She felt a strange tingling in her body. Had someone been inside the house? She’d had a weird feeling last week, like things had been moved around. Nothing had been missing. Even the scrunchie had still been in its place.

  Yesterday, she had found a window unlocked, but then it was nice outside. Gina had taken to leaving the windows open during the day. It was possible that she had forgotten to lock one. Actually, the explanation was more probable than a scrunchie thief targeting the neighborhood. Because who would want her laptop, her iPad, her 55” TV, when there was a decade-old pink scrunchie with white daisies just asking for it in the bowl over the sink?

  She walked back toward the kitchen. She could not shake the unsettling feeling. It was the sort of thing that you couldn’t describe, because if you did try to describe it, people would laugh at you for being silly.

  And she was being silly. She’d left the water running in the sink. The stopper had slipped down into the drain. She was two seconds away from flooding the kitchen.

  Gina wasn’t just losing her youth.

  She was losing her marbles.

  8

  Faith hated when men cited their status as a father, husband or brother as the reason they were taking a stand on issues that affected women, as if raising a baby girl had suddenly made them realize that rape and sexual harassment were actually really bad. But she felt on a personal level that being the mother of a sensitive son and the sister of an obnoxious older brother had taught her how to deal with men when they were in a bad place. You didn’t ask them how they were feeling. You didn’t badger them to talk. You let them listen to their boring music on the radio and you took them to the store to buy junk food.

  She sat in her car while Will paid for his haul inside the convenience store. His jaw was still locked down tight. He was getting that feral look he used to have before Sara came into his life.

  Faith looked down at the text exchange on her phone:

  FAITH: I just now told Will to tell you but he already told you and I’m sorry for being a bad friend please forgive me.

  SARA: Thank you. It’s okay. We’re all having a difficult day. Talk later.

  The return text had been delivered five minutes ago. It was a perfectly nice, normal response unless you’d spent half the day with Will.

  Faith couldn’t think how to reply. They had a rule about Will. Sara had said from the outset that they shouldn’t talk about him in a personal way, because Faith was his partner, and she always, always had to take Will’s side.

  In theory, Faith had understood the reasoning. Their job put them into some tense situations. The guns they carried were not for show. Now, Faith had a bone-deep appreciation for the rule, because seeing Will so torn up, watching him check his phone every ten minutes until finally turning it off, made Faith want to rip out Sara’s throat.

  She returned her phone to the cupholder. She tested herself, letting her mind go back to Lena Adams to see if the blinding hate had lessened even the teeniest bit.

  Nope.

  The door opened. Will climbed into the car. His arms were full of bags of Doritos, Cheetos, Bugles, and a half-eaten hot dog that he shoved into his mouth before the door was closed. He reached into his jacket pockets and retrieved a Dr Pepper for himself and a Diet Coke for Faith. His shopping spree had clearly not included Band-Aids. Will was annoyingly cheap about strange things. He’d spooled out toilet paper from the convenience store bathroom and wound it around his bleeding hand.

  “Do you have any Scotch tape?” He indicated the expert wrapping, which hung down like the dirty string on a tampon. “This keeps coming loose.”

  Faith let out a very loud sigh. She opened the armrest console. She found some bandages in her emergency first-aid supply. “Elsa or Anna?”

  “There’s no Olaf?”

  Faith sighed again. She found the last Olaf, guaranteeing a screaming fit from Emma when she realized her favorite snowman was gone. “I’ve been thinking about Lena and Jared.”

  Will started to peel off the toilet paper. The cheap paper stuck to the wound.

  “Jared must’ve been in high school when Lena was working the Caterino case.” Faith opened the Band-Aid with her teeth. “That is some gross math.”

  Will said, “He’s a good-looking kid.”

  “Yeah, well.” Faith covered his knuckle, which was still bleeding. “Guys you think are complicated and misunderstood in your twenties turn out to be assholes in your thirties.”

  Will looked at the radio. She’d tuned in the E-Street station.

  Faith said, “I love hearing old men repeatedly clear their throats.”

  He turned off the music. “What did you find out about Gerald Caterino?”

  Faith retrieved her phone. She’d had a few minutes to search and found a lot of information that she should’ve looked for hours ago. “No criminal background. Not even a parking ticket. He owns a landscaping business. The website’s pretty fancy. It looks like a legit operation, with an office manager, two crew bosses. You wanna see?”

  Will took the phone and scrolled through the site. He clicked to the owner section. Gerald Caterino’s photo put him in his mid-fifties, which tracked with having a twenty-seven-year-old daughter. What was left of his dark hair was streaked with gray. He had a push-broom mustache and wore wire-rimmed glasses.

  Faith provided, “His bio says his hobbies are gardening, reading with his son and finding justice for his daughter. Look at this part.”

  Faith tapped the link. The screen filled with a Facebook page.

  “Justice for Rebecca,” Faith said. She was never certain how quickly Will could read. “Caterino created the page five years ago. There’s about four hundred followers. It links to a bunch of other Facebook pages for women who have been missing or murdered. Mostly, it’s parents railing about the police being lazy or stupid or incompetent or basically not doing enough.”

  “Thirty-one likes for a donut joke.” Will swiped down the page. “He posted the same newspaper articles that Nesbitt gave us?”
<
br />   “The latest one is an AJC story about Alexandra McAllister being found yesterday morning.”

  “He’s vigilant,” Will said. “Every time someone posts something, within minutes, he replies.”

  “Brace yourself. This takes a really dark turn.” She accessed her browsing history, then pulled up the JUSTICE FOR REBECCA website. Faith pointed to the menus as she read, “THE CRIME. THE INVESTIGATION. THE EVIDENCE. THE COVER-UP.”

  She tapped down to a sub-menu under cover-up.

  She read the blue, hyperlinked words, “Jeffrey Tolliver. Lena Adams. Frank Wallace. Matt Hogan.”

  Will randomly selected the names. The accompanying photographs had been Photoshopped to look like mugshots. A red bullseye was placed over each face like you’d find on a paper target at a shooting range.

  Jeffrey Tolliver had a fake bullet hole between his eyes.

  Faith had seen the images while Will was inside the store, but she still found them deeply unsettling. Legally, they fell under protected speech. There was no way to tell if Caterino was making a joke, engaging in a bit of fantasy, or encouraging violence against the police.

  As a law enforcement officer, Faith lacked the generosity to give him the benefit of the doubt.

  Will said, “A lot of people on the internet do things just because they can do them.”

  The car was silent for a moment. Will was looking at both sides, but Faith could tell he was just as troubled as she was. He kept staring at the phone. He was probably thinking about what it would do to Sara to find a photo of her dead husband with a bullet hole Photoshopped in his head.

  Will finally said, “I don’t want Sara to see this unless she has to.”

  “Agreed.”

  He handed back the phone. “What else is on there? Anything?”