Sara had joked about there being plenty of hate for Jeffrey to go around, but the mental image of her mother’s strong back carrying the burden of Sara’s hate, her sorrow, her humiliation, her disappointment and her love—because that was the most difficult part, the fact that Sara was still so much in love with Jeffrey—had somehow managed to lighten the weight that for the previous year had pressed down into every bone in her body.
Sara looked up from Jeffrey’s notes. She took a sip of Scotch. She wiped her eyes. She returned to the task at hand.
Rebecca Caterino/DOA—attempted murder/sexual assault.
Jeffrey had documented arriving at the scene in the woods, discussing crowd control with Brad, getting the rundown from Lena. Like most cops, he used a shorthand, abbreviating Lena as L.A., Frank as F.W., and so on.
He’d written a phone number in the margins. No name, just a number. Sara’s brain automatically went to the assumption that it belonged to a woman he’d been seeing. She sat back in the chair. She tried to clear the spark of jealousy that accompanied the thought.
She turned the page.
TALK TO SL RE: 30 MINUTES.
Jeffrey had been haunted by the thirty minutes that Beckey Caterino had lain in the woods. Sara felt haunted, too. Thirty minutes was a long time, half of the golden hour in which a patient’s remaining lifespan was predicted by the actions that were taken to prolong her survival. Sara had equivocated when Jeffrey had asked her if thirty minutes would’ve made a difference. Medically speaking, thirty seconds might have made a hell of a difference. The tragedy on top of the tragedy was that they would never know.
Sara looked down at the notebook. Beneath her initials, Jeffrey had written the name Thomasina Humphrey.
Sara combined the two details, and suddenly, she found herself back in Jeffrey’s office. She had been waiting for the email to be sent to his computer when Jeffrey had returned from his talk with Sibyl Adams. Sara had been so close to telling him about her own rape. She had wanted to protect Tommi from the pain of an interrogation. She had been certain that the girl’s attack had nothing to do with Leslie Truong and just as certain that it could not be linked to Beckey Caterino.
She had been wrong.
She turned through the pages, searching for anything that could help them now. Brock was still the official coroner during that time period, so all of the lab reports and findings would be wherever he stored his files. Jeffrey had transcribed some of Sara’s observations into his notebook, but what had Sara missed? What had Jeffrey missed? Was there a detail, a piece of forensics, that they had been blind to, that they had ignored, that had allowed a violent, sadistic murderer to get away?
Sara was Jeffrey’s widow. She had inherited his estate. It seemed she had also inherited the guilt.
She heard a key scrape into the deadbolt on the front door.
Sara closed the notebook. She stacked together the files and crammed them back into the box. By the time Will entered the apartment, she was standing up, waiting for him.
Sara noticed a lot of things at the same time. That he had showered. That he had changed into jeans and a button-down shirt. That his expression looked strained.
She swallowed down all of the sharp questions that churned up into her mouth: Where have you been? Why didn’t you call? Why did you go to your house to shower before coming here? What the hell is going on?
Sara saw that Will was doing his own reconnaissance. His eyes moved around the room to her unfinished dinner, the bottle of Scotch, the boxes of Jeffrey’s things.
She took a deep breath and let it go slowly, trying to avert what she was certain would be a disastrous blow-up.
She told him, “Hey.”
Will knelt down. The dogs had rushed to meet him. Betty danced around his feet. Sara’s greyhounds pressed into his legs. The air felt heavy, like they were each drowning in their own separate pools of water.
Sara spotted a cut on the knuckle of his middle finger. Blood was weeping from the wound.
She tried to joke, “Please tell me you got that from hitting Lena.”
He went to the refrigerator. He opened the door. He stared into the shelves.
She couldn’t deal with his silence right now. She asked him a question he’d have to answer. “How did it go?”
Will took a deep breath similar to the one Sara had taken.
He said, “Lena thinks you’re trying to jam her up.”
“I am,” Sara admitted, but she was galled that Lena thought all Sara did was sit around and wait for opportunities to make her miserable. “What else?”
“I almost punched her in the face. Then I nearly pulled my gun on Jared. Then I beat up Faith’s car. Oh, and before all this, I told Jared we were getting married.”
Sara felt her jaw set. The first part was obviously hyperbole. As for the last part, if this was some new, backward way of Will asking her to marry him, it wasn’t going to work. “Why did you tell Jared we’re getting married?”
Will opened the freezer. He looked inside.
Sara pivoted. “Did you have dinner?”
“I ate something at home.”
She didn’t like the way he’d said home. This was his home, the place that they shared together. “There’s yogurt.”
“You told me not to steal your yogurt.”
Sara couldn’t take this anymore. “Jesus, Will, I’m not the Javert of Yoplait. If you’re hungry, eat the yogurt.”
“I can have ice cream.”
“Ice cream isn’t the same as yogurt. It has zero nutritional value.”
He closed the freezer door. He turned around.
“What?” she asked. “What is wrong with you?”
“I thought you put a moratorium on talking.”
She wanted to kick him. “It really sucks when the person you’re supposed to be in a relationship with won’t tell you what they’re thinking.”
“So, this is a teaching moment?”
Sara thought this was a moment where things could go really, really wrong. “Let’s just drop it.”
“Why didn’t you text me?”
“I did text you.” She grabbed her phone. She showed him the screen. “Three times, and nothing, because I guess you turned off your phone.”
He rubbed his jaw with his fingers.
“I can’t take your grunts and long silences right now, Will. Can you just talk to me like a normal human being?”
Anger flashed in his eyes.
Anger was something Sara could deal with. She had already picked a fight with her sister. She was furious about Lena. She was hurt that Faith had lied to her. She was heartbroken by the Jeffrey of it all. She was terrified that she had missed something in Grant County that let a madman get away and she was desperate to make things right with the man she was going to marry if he ever got his ass off his shoulders and properly asked her.
She told Will, “Fight or fuck.”
“What?”
“Those are your choices,” she said. “You can either fight with me or you can fuck me.”
“Sara—”
She walked over to him, because she always had to do everything. She put her hands on his shoulders. Looked him in the eye. “We can either talk about all the things that we’re not talking about, or we can go to the bedroom.”
His jaw tightened, but he looked persuadable.
“Will.” Sara brushed back his hair. His skin was hot. She could smell the light scent of his aftershave, which meant that even though he was mad at her, he had still shaved for her because he knew that Sara preferred his face to be smooth.
She kissed him lightly on the lips. When he didn’t resist, she kissed him again, this time making it clear that there were other things she could do with her mouth.
Will seemed game until he wasn’t. He broke away. He stared down at her. She could see all of the things that they were both afraid to talk about bubbling to the surface.
Sara would not survive another argument. She kissed him again.
Her hands slipped inside his shirt. She let her fingers trail along the ripple of muscles. She whispered in his ear, “Come sixty-nine with me.”
His breath caught. His heartbeat doubled. She felt his response pressing against her leg.
“Sara—” his voice was thick in his throat. “Should we—”
Her lips brushed his ear. She kissed his neck, started to unbutton her shirt. She could still feel his reluctance even as he cupped his hand on her breast. Her mouth went back to his ear. Instead of kissing it, she clenched his earlobe between her teeth.
Will’s breath caught again.
She told him, “Let’s get a little rough.”
This time, when she kissed him, he kissed back harder. He grabbed her by the waist. He backed her into the cabinet. Her body crushed against his. His hand squeezed her breast. She felt the blissful release of her senses flooding with desire.
But then Will stepped away.
He held her at arm’s length. “I’m sorry. This is my limit.”
She shook her head. “What?”
“You’ve hit my limit, Sara. This is it.”
“What are you—” She said the words to his back, because he was walking away from her. “Will.”
The door closed behind him.
Sara looked around the kitchen, trying to replay in her head what had just happened.
What limit?
What did this is it mean?
She tried to button her shirt. Her fingers were clumsy. Will was screwing with her, playing some kind of game. He was probably waiting on the other side of the door, expecting her to chase after him. They had danced to this song once before, back when Sara had reached her own limit. She had been livid with Will for hiding things, lying to her face. She had told him to leave and he had left, but when she’d opened the door, he was sitting in the hallway waiting for her. He had said—
I don’t have a lot of quit in me.
Sara rubbed her face with her hands. She wasn’t about to quit Will, either. She couldn’t be untethered right now. She would have to fix this no matter what. If that meant apologizing to a sulking grown man, then she was going to apologize to a sulking grown man.
Sara walked to the door. She threw it open.
The hallway was empty.
Grant County—Wednesday
12
Jeffrey sat across from Kayleigh Pierce inside the dorm she shared with Rebecca Caterino. He didn’t have time to kick himself for not listening to his instincts. The Caterino case had gone from a DOA to an accident to an attempted murder and possible sexual assault within the span of twenty-four hours. What he needed now were facts. Everything they had done so far had been going through the motions. Now he knew the hard truth.
Caterino had been targeted by her attacker. You didn’t just walk around with a hammer unless you had plans to use it. The girl had either been followed off campus or followed into the woods by someone who intended to commit an act of violence.
And now, Leslie Truong, the witness that his own damn team had let walk away, was missing, possibly abducted.
The only path open to Jeffrey was to start over from the beginning.
“I don’t know what I can say?” Kayleigh had a habit of letting her voice go up at the end of every other sentence, as if she was asking a question instead of answering one.
He said, “I know you already talked to one of my officers. Just take me through the events of yesterday morning. Anything you can remember would be helpful.”
She picked at a piece of loose skin on the sole of her foot. The girl was wearing blue silk pajamas. Chinese characters were tattooed on the inside of her wrist. Her short blonde hair had worked its way into a spiral while she’d slept.
“Like I said, I was asleep?”
Jeffrey looked down at his notebook. He silently debated whether or not to tell Kayleigh that her friend had been attacked. He went with his gut, which was telling him that the second she found out, her usefulness as a witness would take a nose-dive. The girl tended to turn everything back around on herself. Which wasn’t unexpected. She was still at that age where you could only see the world through your own lens.
He told Kayleigh, “Go on.”
“Becks was really mad at us? All of us? She just started screaming like a crazy person, knocking stuff over, throwing things?”
The kitchen was a mess, but Jeffrey could tell the garbage can had been kicked. The plastic was dented. The trash on the floor had created a slime trail. The only item that seemed to have been spared was a tan leather backpack beside the fridge.
He asked, “Why was Beckey mad?”
“Who knows?” Kayleigh shrugged, but Jeffrey could guess that she not only knew what her friend had been angry about, but with whom she was angry. “She kicked open my door? And she yells, ‘you bitches’ like she hates us? Then I follow her to her bedroom to see what her deal is? Only, she won’t tell me?”
“Beckey’s room is at the end of the hall?”
“Yes.” She finally managed to phrase a proper answer. “When we first got here, everybody saw the room was the smallest, and we were all bracing for a fight or something, but Becks goes, ‘I’ll take the small one,’ and like that, we were all best friends.”
“Was she seeing anyone?”
“She broke up with her girlfriend over the summer? But there’s been nobody since then. Not even a date. There’s a lot of assholes on campus?”
“Was anyone fixated on her?”
“No way. Becks didn’t even go to bars or have fun or anything?” She shook her head hard enough to make her hair fly. “If someone was, like, fixated, I would’ve gone straight to the cops. The for reals cops, not the mall cops on campus.”
Jeffrey was glad she knew there was a difference. “Did Beckey ever tell you she felt unsafe? Or like someone was watching her?”
“Oh my God, was someone watching her?” She looked at the kitchen, the door, the hallway. “Should I be worried? Am I, like, in danger?”
“These are routine questions. It’s the same thing I would ask in any other interview.” Jeffrey watched the anxiety tease in and out of her features. Within an hour, every woman on campus would probably be asking if she should be worried. “Kayleigh, let’s concentrate on yesterday morning. Did Beckey say anything to you when you followed her back to her bedroom?”
“She was, like, putting on her running clothes? Which, okay, she likes to run but it was super early? And then Vanessa goes, ‘Don’t go out at rape o’clock,’ which was funny at the time, only, now we’re all just so worried because she’s in the hospital? And her dad, Gerald, called this morning and he was crying, which is hard because I’ve never heard my own dad cry, so hearing him cry made me really sad?” Kayleigh rubbed her fingers into her eyes, but there were no tears. “I had to tell my teachers I need to skip classes for the rest of the week. It’s just so random? Becks going for a run, then she hits her head and her life is—her life is, I don’t know? But it’s so sad. I can barely get out of bed because what if it had been me? I like to run, too.”
Jeffrey paged back through his notebook. “Deneshia told me that Beckey spent the previous night at the library.”
“She did that a lot. She was, like, terrified of losing her scholarship?” Kayleigh took a handful of tissues from the box on the table. “I mean, she talked about money a lot. A lot? Like, not the way you talk about money, because you just don’t?”
Jeffrey was familiar with the paradigm. Growing up in Sylacauga, he had known that he was poor, but he hadn’t realized until his first day at Auburn what the opposite of poor really looked like.
He asked, “Is that her backpack?”
Kayleigh looked over at the kitchen. “Yeah?”
Jeffrey returned his notebook to his pocket. He walked into the kitchen. He had to step over empty yogurt cartons and popcorn bags. The backpack was good leather with the initials BC monogrammed onto the flap. He assumed it was a graduation gift, because it wasn’t the kind of thi
ng a poor college kid would spend money on.
Jeffrey carefully laid out the contents on the small square of available counter space. Pens. Pencils. Papers. Printouts. Work assignments. The flip phone was an older model. He opened it. The battery was almost dead. There were no missed calls. The recent calls were cleared. He checked the contacts. Dad. Daryl. Deneshia.
He asked Kayleigh, “Who’s Daryl?”
“He lives off-campus?” She shrugged. “Everybody knows him? He used to go here but he dropped out two years ago because he’s, like, trying to be a professional skateboarder?”
“Does he have a last name?”
“Like, I’m sure he does, but I don’t know?”
Jeffrey recorded Daryl’s number in his spiral-bound notebook. The phone would be logged into evidence, something Lena had failed to do yesterday when she’d talked to Rebecca Caterino’s dorm mates.
He reached into the backpack again. He found a textbook on Organic Chemistry, another on textiles, a third on ethics in science. The laptop computer was a newer model, judging by the weight. He opened the clamshell. The document on screen was entitled RCATERINO-CHEM-FINAL.DOC.
He paged through the exam, which was just as tedious and pedantic as every paper he had written in college.
He looked up at Kayleigh. She was still picking at the skin on her foot.
He asked her, “Can you come over here and tell me if there’s anything missing?”
She heaved herself up from the couch. She flounced over. She looked at the textbooks and papers and she told him, “I guess no? But, her banana clip would be by the bed?”
“Banana clip?”
“It’s, like, for your hair?”
Jeffrey felt his gut instinct send up a flare. Leslie Truong had been missing a headband. Now, Beckey Caterino was missing a hair clip.
He didn’t want to lead Kayleigh. He asked, “Is it still by the bed?”
“No, because that’s the point?” She seemed confused. “Beckey couldn’t find it? And then we all looked, and we couldn’t find it? I told the lady cop this?”
The Silent Wife: From the No. 1 Sunday Times bestselling author comes a gripping new crime thriller (Will Trent Series, Book 10) Page 23