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

  There was only one lady cop on the force. “Officer Adams?”

  “Yeah, I told her that Beckey’s banana clip, the one her mom gave her, wasn’t on the nightstand where she always left it and at first, Beckey was mad at me, but then she knew I didn’t take it because I wouldn’t take something that was special like that because she had already told me the story about how her mom gave it to her, like it was the very last thing she gave to her, only it was to borrow, but then her mom died so she had it to keep forever?”

  Jeffrey tried to parse the run-on sentence. “You told Officer Adams that Beckey was missing her banana clip?”

  “Right.”

  Now it was Jeffrey’s turn to do the irritating question thing. “The clip belonged to her mother?”

  “Right.”

  “And Beckey always kept the clip on her nightstand?”

  “Right.”

  “But the morning she looked for it, the clip wasn’t there?”

  “Yes.”

  “Show me?”

  She took him down the hallway. He ignored the pungent odor of pot and sweat and sex that permeated the rooms. No beds were made. Clothes were strewn across the floor. He saw bongs and underwear and used condoms dropped beside trash cans.

  “Here.” Kayleigh had stopped just outside the bedroom at the end of the hall. “We already, like, looked? To take it to her at the hospital? But we couldn’t find it?”

  Jeffrey took in the room. Beckey wasn’t tidy, but she wasn’t on the same level of disorder as her dorm mates. He saw the nightstand. Water glass. Lamp. Book of poetry pressed open so that the spine was cracked. Jeffrey resisted the temptation to close the book. He got down on his hands and knees. There was nothing under the nightstand. He looked under the bed. One sock. A bra. Fuzz and the expected detritus.

  He asked Kayleigh, “Does Beckey know Leslie Truong?”

  “The missing girl?” She frowned. “I don’t think so? Because, she’s, like, older? Like, about to graduate?”

  “Would they have run into each other in the library?”

  “Maybe? But it’s a big library?”

  Jeffrey’s cell phone rang. He suppressed a curse when he saw the number. His mother had called him three times already. She was probably nursing her fourth drink of the day and mourning the fact that her only son was an uncaring jerk.

  He silenced the call.

  “Chief?” Lena was in the hallway. “I recanvassed the dorm. No one remembered anything new.”

  He stood up from the floor. Fuzz covered the bottom half of his pants. He tried to wipe it away. “We’re needed back to the station.”

  Lena stepped aside so he could pass. Jeffrey had already given Kayleigh his business card. He imagined the girl would avail herself of the number when she found out that her dorm mate had been the victim of more than an accident. He assumed word was already spreading around campus. Sibyl Adams was right about the school thriving on gossip. Maybe someone would say the wrong thing to the right person, because the way it was looking now, that was the only way he was going to break either of these cases.

  Jeffrey looked for Brad in the main hallway. He had been assigned to canvassing the dorm for a second time. Jeffrey caught him coming out of one of the rooms. “Caterino’s backpack is in the kitchen. Log everything into evidence.”

  “Yes, Chief.”

  Jeffrey retrieved his notebook. He dialed the number for Daryl. The phone rang once, then he heard an operator tell him that the line was no longer in service.

  He looked at the phone as if it could offer an explanation. He double-checked the number. He tried it again. The same message came back. The line had been disconnected.

  Lena asked, “What is it, Chief?”

  Jeffrey bypassed the elevator and took the stairs. There could be a lot of reasons that Daryl’s phone number was no longer in service. Most of the students were barely scraping by. Burner phones were not uncommon. Neither was running out of money to buy more minutes.

  Still, the timing bothered him.

  Outside, Lena double-stepped beside him to keep up as they walked across the quad. She asked, “Isn’t your car the other way?”

  “Yes.” Jeffrey kept his stride long so she had to work for it. “Did you search Beckey Caterino’s bookbag?”

  “I was—” Lena’s face told the story. “She had an accident, at least that’s what we thought, so—”

  “I stood in that field twenty-four hours ago and told you that we always treat accidents like potential homicides. Didn’t I tell you that?” Jeffrey wasn’t in the mood for one of her excuses. “What about the hair clip?”

  “The—”

  “You didn’t think the missing hair clip was something that should be brought to my attention?”

  “I—”

  “It’s not in your official report, Lena. Is it in your notebook?”

  She scrambled to unbutton her shirt pocket.

  “Don’t put it in there after the fact. It’ll look suspicious.”

  “Suspicious to—”

  “We’re going to get hit with a massive lawsuit over this. You realize that?” He kept his voice low as he walked past a group of students. “Rebecca Caterino laid there for half an hour while we stood around with our thumbs up our asses. Can you put your hand on a Bible in front of a judge and honestly swear that you did everything you could from the moment you found her?”

  Lena was smart enough to not try to answer.

  “That’s what I thought.”

  Jeffrey yanked open the door to the security office.

  Chuck Gaines had his size twelves propped on the desk. He was eating an apple and watching an episode of The Office. Jeffrey had never seen the man leave his desk during working hours except to go to the toilet or the lunch counter. He didn’t even have the courtesy to stand when Jeffrey entered the building.

  “Daryl,” Jeffrey said, giving the name from Rebecca Caterino’s phone. “He used to be a student. I need his last name.”

  Chuck pushed a bite of apple into his cheek. “Gonna need more than that, Chief.”

  “Skateboarder. Mid-twenties. Dropped out two years ago.”

  “You know how many—”

  Jeffrey kicked his feet off the desk. He slapped away the apple. He shoved the chair back against the wall. Then he got into Chuck’s face. “Answer my god damn question.”

  “Jesus Christ.” Chuck had his hands up in surrender. “Daryl?”

  Jeffrey took a step back. “Skateboarder. He dropped out two years ago. Everyone on campus supposedly knows him.”

  “I don’t know a Daryl, but—” Chuck duck-walked his chair over to his desk. He found a stack of notecards in a drawer. “Might be something in here.”

  Jeffrey had a similar collection of field interview cards back at the station. Every cop had their own stack of FIs, an informal record of the names and details of suspicious characters who hadn’t yet earned an official police file.

  “All right, let’s see.” Chuck removed the rubber band from the campus FIs. None of them were written in his own hand. He left that work to the guards underneath him who actually patrolled the campus. He shuffled through the cards until he found what he was looking for. “Here it is. There’s an asswipe who’s always skateboarding near the library. Tears up the metal railings on the stairs. Older kid, maybe late twenties. Floppy brown hair. Eyefucks all the girls, the younger the better, but who can blame him? There’s not a name. According to this, everybody calls him Little Bit. He’s a small-time weed dealer. None of the hard stuff.”

  Rebecca Caterino was a college student. Jeffrey had not been surprised to smell pot in her dorm. If Daryl was her dealer, that would explain why the burner phone number had been disconnected. Dealers were always changing up their numbers.

  Jeffrey took the FI card from Chuck. Little Bit. Skateboarder. Late twenties. Pot dealer. The information reflected everything he’d just been told.

  Chuck rolled his chair across the room to retrieve his
apple from the corner. He bit it between his teeth so he could use both hands to pull his way back to his desk. “That all you need, Chief?”

  Jeffrey tried another name. “Thomasina Humphrey.”

  Chuck’s face showed recognition. “Her.”

  “Yeah, her. What do you know?”

  Chuck looked at Lena for the first time. Then he looked away. “Just scuttlebutt, mostly. She disappeared. Kids talked the usual crazy shit. She joined a cult. She tried to kill herself. Who knows what really happened?”

  Jeffrey would’ve bet that Chuck knew, but he’d already humiliated this man once today. There would be other cases they had to work on together. He had to leave Chuck with some dignity. “Do you have access to Humphrey’s details?”

  “Maybe.” Chuck tapped some keys on his computer. He found a clean notecard. He wrote down an address and phone number. “This is where her final transcripts were sent. I don’t know if she’s still there.”

  Jeffrey saw that the address was in Avondale, which lined up with what Sara had told him. Tommi had been one of her patients at the clinic. That was why Sibyl Adams had called her for help.

  Chuck had the apple back in his mouth. “Next time, just say please.”

  Jeffrey tucked the address in his coat pocket as he walked out the door.

  He could feel Lena dogging his heels like a needy puppy.

  “Chief,” she tried.

  He stopped so abruptly that she bumped into him. “Have you gone through those unsolved rape reports like I told you?”

  “I filed the requests with the other counties. They should be emailed to me no later than this afternoon. There are only twelve Grant County reports.”

  “Only,” he repeated. “Those are twelve women, Lena. Twelve lives that were irrevocably altered. I don’t want to ever hear you say only about them ever again.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “We live in a god damn college town. There are thousands of young women in and out of this campus every year. Do you genuinely think that all of them are liars? That they fucked some guy and regretted it, so there’s no need for you as a police officer to help them?”

  “Chief, I—”

  “Follow up on that subpoena I put in for Rebecca Caterino’s medical charts. We need to make this official. Let me know the minute Bonita Truong reaches the station. I want to talk to her as soon as possible. She is not to hear about Rebecca Caterino from anyone else but me.”

  “Yes, Chief, but—” Lena mulled the but. “When are we going to tell people that it wasn’t an accident?”

  “When I’m damn good and ready. Take out your notebook. Make a list.”

  She fumbled at her pocket.

  He didn’t wait for her. “Go back to Caterino’s dorm mates and see if there are any photographs of her wearing the hair clip. Do the same with Leslie Truong. She was missing a headband. They might have a photograph. Next, track down this Daryl Little Bit or whatever the hell his name is. We’ve got probable cause on the pot, so search him. If you find weed, arrest him. If you don’t, take him in for questioning. And you don’t go home tonight until you’ve summarized every single rape report from the tri-county area. I want it on my desk first thing. Understood?”

  “Yes, Chief.”

  Jeffrey headed toward his car in the staff parking lot. His phone started to ring again. His mother. She would be well into the bottle by now. Jeffrey silenced the call. He got into the car. He bumped the gear into reverse and swung out of the space.

  He tried to game out next steps as he drove toward Avondale. He would have to formally announce that Rebecca Caterino had been attacked. That would send shockwaves through the school. And it should. Some lunatic had attacked a defenseless woman with a hammer.

  “Christ,” he whispered. If he thought about it hard enough, he could still remember the horror of Caterino’s sternum breaking. Jeffrey couldn’t imagine what it took to lodge a hammer inside another human being’s skull.

  He shook out his hands, ridding himself of the sensation.

  Leslie Truong’s mother would be at the station in a few hours. She would have questions that Jeffrey wanted to honestly try to answer. This Little Bit skateboard punk would have to be dealt with, too. If the kid was dealing pot around campus, and he was in fact the same Daryl from Rebecca Caterino’s phone book, then she was likely a client. Eliminating or confirming him as a suspect in the attack was a high priority.

  Lastly, there was Lena Adams. Jeffrey would have to go back through every single piece of information she had collected and verify the work. As far as he was concerned, her training wheels were officially off. If Lena didn’t show him in real time that she could keep to the straight and narrow, he was going to send her packing.

  His phone started to ring. His mother again. She was clearly on one of her benders. He couldn’t blame her. He was a shitty son. Hell, he had been a shitty chief, a shitty mentor, a shitty husband.

  Jeffrey let himself stew on his missteps until he passed the sign welcoming him to the Avondale City Limits, population 4,308. Jeffrey referenced the address Chuck had given him. He should’ve run the information through his own system to make sure that the Humphries still lived at the same location, but he needn’t have bothered. Jeffrey could tell from the car parked in front of the house that the girl was still there.

  Sara’s silver Z4 was in front of the mailbox. The convertible top was down to take advantage of the good weather.

  “For fucksakes.” Jeffrey parked behind the $80,000 sportscar. He took a few seconds to swallow down his irritation. If Sara wanted to ride around with the top down, Dolly Parton blaring from the speakers like some sad version of a tricked-out hillbilly nerd, then godspeed.

  He opened his notebook. He jotted down the list of action items from the ride over. He wasn’t as careful a note taker as he should’ve been. He was always riding Lena and Brad about making sure their asses were covered. Jeffrey hated to be thinking about it this way, but if Gerald Caterino really was going to sue the force, he needed to make sure his ass was covered, too.

  He closed his notebook and pocketed his pen. He got out of the car. He looked up at the house. Avondale had at one time been filled with blue-collar workers from the railroad maintenance hub. The job had put them solidly in the middle class, and the architecture of the homes reflected that. Brick on all four sides. Aluminum-framed windows. Concrete driveways. All the modern conveniences of 1975.

  The Humphreys hadn’t made any changes to the outside of the house. The white paint had yellowed, but it wasn’t peeling. The car in the driveway was an older model minivan. The front door was a high-gloss black.

  Jeffrey knocked once, but the door was already opening.

  The woman who answered looked drawn. She was only slightly older than Jeffrey, but her hair had gone completely gray. The curls were clipped tight to her head. Dark circles rimmed her eyes. She was wearing a house dress that zipped in the front. The way she looked at Jeffrey made him feel guilty for being here. He assumed Sara would make him feel worse.

  “Mrs. Humphrey?”

  She looked into the driveway, then the street. “Did you see a blue Ford truck?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “If my husband comes, you’ll have to leave. He doesn’t want Tommi bothered with this. Do you understand?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  She opened the door wide enough for him to pass. “They’re in the back yard. Please, be quick.”

  Jeffrey walked into what he was expecting, a rectangle chopped up into small rooms with a bowling alley hallway down the middle. He glanced at the photographs hanging on the walls. He assumed that Tommi Humphrey was an only child. The pictures showed a happy young woman, usually surrounded by a group of friends. She had played flute in the marching band. She had competed in several science fairs. She had a series of dogs, then a cat, then a boyfriend who had taken her to the prom. The last photo was of Tommi holding a moving box outside what was obviously one of the dorm rooms
at Grant Tech.

  There were no more pictures after that.

  Jeffrey pushed open a sliding glass door. He could see Sara sitting at a picnic table with a painfully thin young woman. Bright white skin. Her hair was short and black now. Tommi Humphrey must’ve been in her early twenties, but she looked somehow older and younger at the same time. She was smoking a cigarette. Even from several yards, he could see the tremble in her hand.

  Sara did not look surprised to see him. She told the girl, “This is Jeffrey.”

  Tommi turned slightly, but did not look at him.

  Jeffrey took his cue from Sara. She indicated the other side of the table.

  He sat back on the bench. He kept his hands in his lap. He had interviewed many rape victims in his law enforcement career. The first thing he’d learned was that they never acted a particular way. Some were angry. Some entered into a fugue state. Some wanted revenge. Most desperately wanted to leave. A few had even laughed when they told their stories. He had noted the same unpredictable affects among veterans returning from war. Trauma was trauma. Every person reacted differently.

  Sara spoke to Jeffrey, but she looked at Tommi. “Sweetheart, what you just told me is so important. Can you tell Jeffrey?”

  Jeffrey gripped his hands under the table. His only option was to sit still and be quiet.

  Sara said, “If it’s easier, I can tell him. You’ve already given me permission. We want to do whatever is easiest for you.”

  Tommi tapped her cigarette on the side of an overflowing ashtray. Her breath had the audible rasp of a chain smoker. Jeffrey thought about all of the photographs lining the hallway. Sara was right to compare what had happened to an atomic blast. Before the assault, Tommi had been ebullient, popular, happy. Now, she was a dark shadow of her former self.

  Sara said, “We could leave right now, if that’s what you want. But it would be helpful if Jeffrey could hear it in your own words. I promise you on my life that nothing will happen. This isn’t official. You’re not making a statement. No one will even know about this conversation. Right?”

  She had asked Jeffrey this question. He struggled to answer, not because he didn’t agree but because he felt like saying the wrong thing at this moment could break this poor woman all over again.