“No problem, hoss. Lemme know if you need anything.”
Jeffrey hung up the phone. He felt a headache working its way up his neck. He should’ve taken his own order and grabbed some sleep. At the very least, he would’ve been able to process the next steps he needed to take. Make sure everyone was on the same page about yesterday morning in the woods. Re-read Frank, Lena and Brad’s notes. Make sure his own notebook lined up with their recollections. Call the mayor to warn him that something bad might be coming down the pipeline. Give Kevin Blake at the university a warning about the hell that was about to rain down.
He stared down into the blackness of his coffee. The liquid rippled against the rim. His body was still holding onto the memory of bones cracking beneath his hands. Rebecca Caterino had spent thirty extra minutes lying on her back in the forest. Jeffrey had thought seconds had passed while Sara was finding a way to make the girl breathe again, but according to her resuscitation notes, almost three minutes had gone by.
Thirty-three minutes in total, all on Jeffrey’s clock.
What he wanted to do was apologize to Gerald Caterino. And to Beckey. He wanted to tell them exactly what had happened, that people had made mistakes, and some of them were stupid mistakes, but all of them were honest mistakes.
Unfortunately, lawyers were not known to settle for apologies.
“Chief.” Frank grabbed a mug off the hook. “Anything on Leslie Truong?”
“No sign of her.”
“Not surprising.” Frank hacked out a cough. “You know how hysterical these young co-eds get. She’s probably crying in a treehouse or something.”
Jeffrey had given up trying to teach this old dog even one new trick. “I need you to memorialize yesterday morning from the moment you got the call about Caterino to right now.”
Frank didn’t miss much. “Lawsuit?”
“Probably.”
“Sara can tell them how hard it was to find a pulse. Who knows whether or not the girl was going in or out. That kind of injury, she could’ve flatlined a couple of times.” Frank topped off Jeffrey’s mug before filling his own. “Makes me feel sorry for Sara. The upside of divorcing you was she’d get to stop saving your sorry ass.”
Jeffrey was not in the mood. “You gonna break my balls about that for the rest of my life?”
“I assume the natural order of things will have me keeling over well before you.”
“I think you mean natural selection,” Jeffrey said. “Are you telling me when you go to Biloxi every other month for your gambling trips, you’re not getting your pecker wet?”
“Every other month is your take-home message. Pigs get fat. Hogs get slaughtered.” He raised his mug before taking his leave.
Jeffrey threw the rest of his coffee down the sink. He was too jittery for more caffeine.
In the squad room, he found Marla Simms, the station secretary, taking the dust cloth off her IBM Selectric. Jeffrey had bought her a computer, but as far as he knew, she had never turned it on. All of his missives were either written out in her perfect Palmer Method or pecked onto the typewriter. Some of the younger cops cringed every time she fired up the machine. The ball punching into the paper sounded like a gunshot.
The saloon doors squeaked. Lena Adams was shifting her utility belt around her waist.
“Lena, my office.”
She looked up at him like the proverbial deer in the headlights.
Jeffrey sat down at his desk. His eye caught the bookshelf, which was filled with textbooks and manuals and, worst of all, an old photograph of his mother. “Fuck me.”
“Sir?”
“My—” Jeffrey waved off the subject. He had forgotten to call the florist yesterday. Now he was going to be dealing with a screaming phone call from his mother about missing her birthday. “Shut the door. Sit down.”
Lena sat on the edge of the chair. “Is something wrong?”
He could hear Sara’s nagging voice warning him that Lena always assumed she was in trouble because she had usually done something wrong. “Give me your notebook.”
She reached for her chest pocket, then stopped. “Did I do—”
“Just give it to me.”
The notebook Lena handed to him was just like every other notebook every other cop carried because Jeffrey bought them by the hundreds and kept them readily available. Technically, that made them the property of the police department, but he hoped to God that technicality never had to be tested in a court of law.
He flipped past the back pages that detailed last night’s failed search for Leslie Truong. He could read about that in Lena’s official statement. He found what he was looking for at the front of the notebook.
Lena had crossed through JANE DOE and written REBECCA CATERINO. She had not changed the original assessment—accidental death.
Jeffrey checked that her notes matched what he had sworn to in her official statement.
5:58: 911 call received at HQ.
6:02: L.A. dispatched.
6:03: L.A. met witness Leslie Truong in field behind houses.
6:04: B.S. arrived and with L.A. and Truong located body.
6:08: L.A. verified victim deceased at neck and wrist. Body positioned as noted.
6:09: L.A. called Frank.
6:15: B.S. set up perimeter.
6:22: Frank arrived.
6:28: Chief on scene.
He asked Lena, “Brad arrived when you were talking to Leslie Truong. Did he check for a pulse when you got to the body?”
“I—” Lena had stopped being defensive. Now, she was strategizing. “I don’t remember.”
Lena was the senior officer on scene. If she told Brad not to double-check behind her, then Brad would not have dared to double-check behind her. “Next time you run that bus over another cop, make sure you give it enough gas.”
Lena looked down at the floor.
Jeffrey studied the notebook. He had lied to Sara about confirming the details yesterday. Each line of text took up one line on the page. The ink was the same color. Either Lena was incredibly prescient, or she had done exactly what she had told Jeffrey that she had done.
He turned the page. Lena had drawn a rough diagram of the position of the body. She had noted that the clothes were in place. Nothing had looked disturbed or unusual. She had been very thorough, except for leaving out one thing.
He asked, “Why did you turn off the iPod?”
Lena looked trapped.
He dropped the notebook on his desk. “You’re not in trouble. I just want the truth.”
She finally shrugged. “I don’t know. I guess I was … I was trying to do things right, but I did it kind of accidentally, like, I have an iPod Shuffle I run with, and I don’t charge it like I should so the battery runs down and …”
“You did it out of habit,” he said.
Lena nodded.
Jeffrey sat back in the chair. He could think of a lot of things you did out of habit. “When you checked her neck and wrist for a pulse, do you remember if you straightened her clothes?”
“No, sir.” She was shaking her head before he finished the question. “I wouldn’t do that. Her shirt was straight, or, like—” She put her hand to her hip. “One side was here, the other side was here, which is what you’d expect from somebody falling.”
“What about her shorts?”
“They were pulled up to her waist,” Lena said. “Honest. I didn’t touch her clothes.”
Jeffrey steepled together his fingers. “Did you smell anything?”
“Like what?”
Jeffrey became aware of a lot of different things at the same time. That Lena was a woman. That he was her boss. That the door was closed. That they were about to talk about uncomfortable things. But she was a cop, and they were both professionals, and he couldn’t treat her any differently than he would any man in uniform. “How many sexual assaults have you worked?”
“Actual sexual assaults?” she asked. “You mean, where the woman was really raped?
”
Jeffrey’s headache started to throb again. “Go on.”
“None of them ever got past the paperwork stage.” She shrugged. “You know how students are. They’re away from home for the first time. They drink too much. Start things they don’t know how to stop. Then the next morning, they remember the boyfriend back home or they panic that their parents will find out.”
If she was going to sound like Frank, then Jeffrey was going to talk to her like Frank. “Did she smell like she’d had sex?”
Jeffrey forced himself not to look away while a blush exploded up Lena’s neck and into her face.
He listed the possibilities, “Lubrication, condoms, semen, sweat, urine, a man’s cologne?”
“N-no.” She cleared her throat. Then she cleared it again. “I mean, if anything, she smelled clean.”
“Clean how?”
“Like she’d just taken a shower.” Lena retrieved her notebook. She tucked it back into her pocket. “I guess that’s weird, right? Because she took off from the college, and it wasn’t really cold but it sure wasn’t hot, but she was at least a mile into her run, so why would she smell clean and not sweaty?”
“Tell me what clean smells like.”
Lena thought about it. “I guess, like, soap?”
“Do you think she could’ve been sexually assaulted?”
Lena shook her head immediately. “No way. I talked to my sister about her. Beckey was a total nerd. She spent her nights at the library. She always sat at the front of the class.”
Jeffrey wasn’t pleased to hear his own words to Sara come back at him. “Who she is doesn’t matter. Our job is to find out what happened to her. I want you to pull all of the unsolved rape reports for the tri-county area—Grant, Memminger, Bedford. Focus on anyone who was attacked in or near a wooded area, especially if they have physical characteristics that match Caterino’s. Remember, rapists have a type. Also, I need you to make copies of your notebook. All the relevant pages. And keep this between us. Got it?”
Lena looked like she wanted to argue, but she nodded. “Yes, sir.”
“I want to talk to your sister. See if you can get her to come by this morning.”
Lena’s mouth opened. Then it closed. “She’s blind. My sister.”
“I can go to her house.”
“No!” Lena had shouted the word. The blush came back like wildfire. “Sorry, Chief. I’ll call her now. She’s probably on her way to class. She gets around on her own. She’s fine. Just don’t talk to her about personal stuff because she’s very private.”
Jeffrey hadn’t planned on delving into Sibyl Adams’ intimate details. “Let me know when she’s here. Leave the door open.”
“Yes, sir.” Lena kept her head down as she walked back to her desk.
Then, because his day hadn’t started out bad enough, Jeffrey saw Sara talking to Marla Simms over by the reception counter.
Sara looked up. She waved. He frowned.
Sara was undeterred. She left Marla. She stopped just outside his office doorway. Her briefcase dangled from her hand. “I apologize for the way I said what I said.”
“But not for what you actually said?”
She gave a tight smile. “Yep.”
Jeffrey waved her in. He caught a glimpse of the photograph of his mother and felt his headache pound up a notch.
Sara closed the door. She dropped her briefcase. She sat back in the chair. “Three things. One is the apology.”
“Was it really an apology?”
“Two is, Dr. Barney is finally retiring. I’m buying out the practice. We’ll start telling patients next week. I’ll probably need to hire another doctor. I thought you should know ahead of time.”
Jeffrey wasn’t surprised. Sara had talked about taking over from Dr. Barney for years. Now that she wasn’t helping Jeffrey pay off his student loans, she had plenty of money lying around. “Number three?”
“I spoke with Beckey Caterino’s surgeon this morning. All on the QT. He agreed to let me take a look at her films. I gave him your private email address.”
“Why didn’t you give him yours?”
“Because I’m a doctor and I am legally bound by HIPPA to protect patient privacy.”
“Did it occur to you that I’m a police officer and I am legally bound to the Constitution of the United States?”
She shrugged, because she knew that she had him exactly where she wanted him.
He asked, “What did the surgeon say?”
“That the skull fracture looked unusual. He wouldn’t go into detail. I tried to press him on the puncture in her spinal cord, but he wouldn’t speculate. Or, he didn’t want to be called to the stand.”
Jeffrey guessed he wasn’t the only man who was afraid a lawsuit was going to damage his career. “I got a warning from Nick that the father is feeling litigious.”
“I don’t blame him. His daughter’s life has been irrevocably changed. She is going to need a lifetime of medical support. He can either go bankrupt trying to take care of her at home or he’ll have to turn her over to the state. You can imagine what that would look like.”
Jeffrey thought about all of the time they had wasted standing around while Beckey Caterino fought for her life. “Do you think thirty minutes would’ve made a difference for her?”
Sara’s face took on a diplomatic expression. “She was already exhibiting bradycardia and bradypnea when I knelt down beside her.”
Jeffrey waited.
“Her respiration and heart rate were dangerously low.”
He said, “I read your resuscitation notes. Three minutes is a long time to go without oxygen.”
Sara could’ve crushed him right now. Three minutes was a benchmark for serious brain injury. Jeffrey had looked up the information online, but she had learned it in medical school.
“Every second counts,” was all that Sara would say. Then she had the generosity to change the subject. “Do me a favor, though. Brock doesn’t know I’m making phone calls. He didn’t make it to the body, let alone assess her, but I don’t want him to think I’m stepping on his toes.”
Brock would have no problem with Sara stepping on his neck. “Did you smell anything on Caterino?”
“You mean intercourse?” Sara had brought up the possibility the previous day, right before they had gotten into a one-sided screaming argument, so he wasn’t surprised she had given it some thought. “If Rebecca was sexually assaulted, she was thirty minutes out. She was paralyzed, so she couldn’t move. But, her clothes were in place. There were no signs of a struggle, no signs of bruising or trauma from what I could see of her thighs. I didn’t smell anything at all. But honestly, I wasn’t going to stop and sniff her once we realized that she was still alive.”
He appreciated the we. “I asked Lena if she smelled—”
Sara barked a genuine laugh. “How did that go?”
“Fine. She’s a professional, Sara. You need to respect her.”
Sara looked around his office. She was giving herself space to back away from that line where they were at each other’s throats again.
He said, “Lena told me Caterino smelled clean. Like soap.”
Sara chewed her bottom lip. “Okay. Let’s walk ourselves through this. What would it mean if Rebecca Caterino was attacked?”
Jeffrey opened his desk drawer. He had no fear of the line. He tossed his calculator in her direction in case she needed help counting up all of the fucks she didn’t give.
All Sara said was, “That’s fair.”
The admission didn’t make him feel any better. “It’s been a year.”
“It has.”
“I want to know about your car.”
“It’s a BMW Z4 with an inline six.”
He had already tortured himself with the details. “Your Honda was four years old. You’d just paid it off.”
Sara looked around the office again. “When I bought the Honda, I was a cop’s wife. And when I walked out of the house that day, I kn
ew I wasn’t going to be a cop’s wife anymore.”
“What I did, it was a stupid mistake.” He told her, “It didn’t mean anything.”
“Oh, wow, thank you so much, that changes everything.”
Jeffrey retrieved the calculator. He dropped it back in his desk drawer. “Rebecca Caterino. You go first.”
Sara leaned her head into her hand. He could tell she needed to do this as much as he did.
She said, “Let’s say Beckey was attacked. That would mean that someone followed her through town, into the woods, then attacked her. Maybe he knocked her unconscious with a branch or a rock. She falls. He rapes her. Then—what are we saying? He took out a bar of soap and scrubbed her down?”
“What about those wipes for babies?”
“There are other wipes with disinfectant. You can get unscented, but there’s still a scent.” Sara started to nod. She was seeing it now. “If he used a condom, that would make it very likely he didn’t leave sperm. And if she was unconscious, she wouldn’t be fighting back, so we wouldn’t find the typical defensive wounds on his arms and face.”
“You said he would’ve followed her from the school. It was roughly five in the morning when she headed out for her run.”
Sara picked up on his line of thought. “Which means he was waiting for her. Watching her. But did she always run in the mornings?”
Jeffrey thought back through the reports he’d just read. “It wasn’t normal, but it wasn’t unusual. There was a fight with one of the roommates. They didn’t say about what. Beckey went for a run to cool down.”
A visitor caught his eye through the window. Lena Adams was standing on the other side of the reception counter. She was wearing dark sunglasses and dressed in a pastel pink sweater, which was the only clue he needed to know that he was not looking at Lena Adams.
Sara had turned, too. “I volunteer with Sibyl at the Girls in STEM Club at the high school.”
“What’s she like?”
“You know how a mirror flips your reflection so that right is left and left is right?”
Jeffrey got her meaning. He shook the mouse on his computer to wake it up. He logged into his Gmail account. “I’ve got to go talk to her. If you want, you can wait for the email here.”
The offer earned him one raised eyebrow. “You’re giving me access to your computer?”
The Silent Wife: From the No. 1 Sunday Times bestselling author comes a gripping new crime thriller (Will Trent Series, Book 10) Page 21