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 prayed the woman would meet her at the bar. The phone call had probably set off a small explosion inside the office. Showing up in person with Will, flashing their IDs, would be a nuclear detonation.

  She looked at her watch as she took her place at the empty bar. Nine more minutes. She ordered an iced tea from a bartender wearing a stupid porkpie hat. Seven more minutes. Faith looked around the restaurant. Late afternoon. She was the only person at the bar. Will was one of three single men in suits sitting at three separate tables.

  In Callie Zanger’s shoes, Faith would have been furious about the intrusion into her life. But Faith had to think about Pia Danske’s shoes. Joan Feeney’s. Shay Van Dorne’s. Alexandra McAllister’s. Rebecca Caterino’s. Leslie Truong’s. There were so many victims that Faith could not recall all of their names. She took her phone out of her purse. She accessed Miranda’s spreadsheet. Eight years. Nineteen women. Twenty if you added in Tommi Humphrey.

  “Detective Mitchell?”

  Faith didn’t correct her on the title. She recognized Callie Zanger from her photos. The tax attorney wasn’t wearing as much make-up and her hair was pulled back, but she was still a beautiful woman, even when she slumped down on the barstool beside Faith.

  Callie told the bartender, “Double Kettle One with a lime twist.”

  Faith heard a practiced cadence in the woman’s order. She would expect a high-priced tax attorney to be into wine or even whiskey. Vodka straight from the bottle was a drinker’s drink.

  Callie said, “Are you with that other detective? Masterson?”

  “No, and he’s not a detective.”

  Callie shook her head in distaste. “Let me guess, he’s a reporter?”

  Faith studied the woman. She looked so beaten down. Was she recovering the same way Tommi Humphrey was recovering? Faith silently berated herself for letting her emotions get in the way. She worked to summon her professional reserve.

  “Ma’am?” The bartender tipped his hat as he placed the vodka double on the bar.

  Faith looked down at the drink, which was a very generous pour.

  Callie didn’t seem to notice. She stirred the cocktail straw around the glass. She waited for the bartender to leave before telling Faith, “I hate men who wear hats to make up for not having a personality.”

  Faith immediately liked this woman.

  “This is about Rod?” Callie asked.

  “Why do you think I’m here about your ex-husband?”

  “Because my ex-husband is the one who abducted me.”

  Faith watched the woman gulp down half her drink. She didn’t know what to do. Rod Zanger had not been any part of any possibilities. She reached for her purse to find her notebook.

  “Off the record,” Callie said. “That’s what you promised on the phone.”

  Faith closed her purse.

  Callie finished the drink in another gulp. She signaled for a refill. “Nothing’s really off the record, is it?”

  Faith couldn’t lie to this woman. “No.”

  Callie took the straw out of her empty glass and slid it end-over-end against the bar. “I was thirteen years old the first time a man touched me without my permission.”

  Faith watched the straw slip through the woman’s fingers.

  “I was getting my teeth cleaned, and the dentist grabbed my breasts. I never told anybody.” She looked at Faith. “Why didn’t I tell anybody?”

  Faith shook her head. She had her own stories she could tell. “Because he’d call you a lying bitch.”

  Callie laughed. “They call me that anyway.”

  Faith laughed, too, but she was putting the clues together. “Did your husband hurt you?”

  Callie nodded slowly, almost imperceptibly.

  Faith bit her tongue to hold back the rush of questions. Will was so much better at leaning into silence. All Faith could do was sip her iced tea and wait.

  The bartender returned. He did the hat tip, placed the double vodka on the bar. This time, the pour wasn’t just generous. It was more like a triple. He saw Faith looking and winked before walking away.

  Callie stared down at the clear liquid. She had started chewing the inside of her lip. “I found one of those GPS things on my car.”

  “This was two years ago?”

  “Yes. During my divorce.” Callie started turning the glass in a circle. “The transceiver was in a black metal box, attached by a magnet to the wheel well. I don’t know why I checked for it. Well, yes, actually I do. I felt like I was being watched. I knew Rod wouldn’t let me go.”

  Faith asked, “Did you tell anyone about it at the time?”

  “My divorce lawyer.” She looked up at Faith. “Always listen to your lawyer. They know best.”

  Faith gathered from her tone that she was being sarcastic.

  “She told me to leave it on the car exactly where I found it. She didn’t want to tip off Rod. We wanted to maintain privilege, so her office contracted directly with an IT guy to try to trace the device. He finally told us that he couldn’t get the information without a subpoena, and filing a subpoena would tip off Rod, so …”

  Faith longed for her notebook. If Callie gave her attorney permission to break privilege, Faith could have a subpoena within hours.

  She asked Callie, “How did it happen?”

  “I was sitting in my car. About to drive to work. I had a meeting, but—” She waved her hand, brushing it all away. “I don’t think it was actually Rod who did it. He must’ve hired someone. He always liked to watch my face when he was beating me. This guy didn’t want to be seen.”

  Callie took a long pull from her glass. She thumped it down on the counter. Her hands weren’t shaking, but they were unsteady.

  She said, “I can still see it, you know? The hammer. I happened to look up into the rearview mirror. I have no idea why. I saw this hammer swinging down. It was strange-looking, the head of the thing. I’ve done so many internet searches looking for what to call it, but there are hundreds of different hammers, and they’ve got fiberglass handles and wooden ones and this hammer is for framing and that hammer is for drywall and, do you know, there are even YouTube videos that show the best way to knock out someone with a hammer?”

  Faith shook her head, pretending like her heart had not dropped into her stomach.

  The last week of March. The early morning hour. The hammer.

  Callie signaled the bartender for another, telling him, “Bring one for my friend, too.”

  Faith tried to stop her.

  Callie asked, “Are you off the record or not?”

  Faith nodded for the man to bring two drinks.

  Callie watched the bartender walk to the other end of the bar.

  She said, “He’s got a nice ass.”

  Faith didn’t care about the man’s ass. The air had folded in around them. She looked in the mirror. Will was still sitting at the table across the room. He was holding his phone in his hand, but his eyes were on the bar.

  Faith asked Callie, “What’s the next thing you remember?”

  “I woke up in the woods, of all places.” She took a breath. “Our first date was a picnic on the grounds of the Biltmore. Rod was always clever that way. He knew he couldn’t impress me with a fancy restaurant or private club. He gave me something that money couldn’t buy: homemade sandwiches, chips, paper napkins, plastic cups. He even wrote me a poem. My romantic cowboy.”

  She had moved away from that moment in the woods. Faith let her stray.

  “The first time Rod hit me, we were a week away from getting married. He knocked the hell out of me. Literally rang my bell.” She stared longingly into the empty glass. “And then he cried like a baby. And it broke my heart. This big, strong cowboy was sobbing with his head in my lap, begging me to forgive him, promising me it would never, ever happen again, and I just …”

  Faith listened to her voice trail off. There was a tinge of sadness in her tone. Callie Zanger was a smart woman. She knew the exact point in her
life when everything had turned bad.

  She glanced at Faith. “You’ve heard this old story before, right? As a police officer?”

  Faith nodded.

  “It’s so embarrassing how they all work from the same boring, predictable playbook.” She explained. “They cry and you forgive them. Then eventually, they realize that crying isn’t going to work anymore, so they make you feel guilty. And then the guilt stops working and they resort to threats, and before you know it, you’re terrified of leaving and terrified of staying and fifteen years has gone by and …”

  Faith couldn’t let her trail off again. “What made you finally leave him?”

  “I got pregnant.” She gave a thin smile. “Rod didn’t want children.”

  Faith didn’t have to ask what had happened. Callie was right. She had heard this story countless times before.

  “It was a blessing, honestly. I couldn’t protect myself. How could I protect a child?”

  The bartender made his third appearance. This time, he skipped the hat tip. He put down the two glasses with a practiced twist of his wrists. Faith gathered he had seen Callie in here before. He knew that a double meant a triple. He more than likely knew he would be well compensated for the charade.

  Callie told Faith, “Drink up.”

  Faith wrapped her hand around the glass. The liquid was cold. She pretended to take a sip.

  Callie took in a mouthful. She was two triples in and on the cusp of tipsy. Faith wondered if she’d had something else before coming down to the restaurant. Her eyelids were heavy. She kept chewing the inside of her lip.

  “Rod toyed with me during the divorce,” Callie said. “I thought I was losing my mind.”

  Faith feigned another sip.

  “When we were married, he always checked after me to make sure I put things back where they belonged. If something was out of place—” She didn’t have to finish the sentence. “When I moved out, when I got my own space, I just thought, ‘I’m going to be messy. I’m going to drop my clothes on the floor and leave the milk out and throw caution to the wind.’”

  Her laugh sounded like crystal breaking.

  “You know what happens when you leave the milk out?” She gave Faith an eye-roll. “I had fifteen years of training. I couldn’t break the neat-freak habit. It made me too nervous. And I like knowing where things are, but suddenly, things were not where they were supposed to be.”

  Faith felt a tightness in her chest. “Like what?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Maybe everything was actually really where it was supposed to be. There was a comedian who had this joke about breaking into people’s apartments and moving their things one centimeter away from where they should actually be. Isn’t that crazy?”

  Faith didn’t answer.

  “I just felt … scrutinized?” Callie didn’t seem satisfied with the word. “As if someone had been through my things. Touched my things. Nothing was missing, but then one day, suddenly, I couldn’t find my favorite hair tie.”

  Faith’s hand tightened around her glass.

  “My hair tie,” Callie repeated, as if to highlight the insignificance. “I reached into my purse for it, and it wasn’t there, and I just went mental. I tore the place apart searching for it everywhere, but it was gone.”

  “What did it look like?”

  “Just a red hair tie.” She shrugged. “I paid a few hundred bucks for it.”

  Faith looked at the tie in Callie’s hair. A gold charm dangled down from the elastic. She recognized the double C’s of the Chanel logo.

  “I know this sounds ludicrous, but that hair tie meant something to me. I usually had to get Rod’s permission to buy a pack of gum. It was the first thing I bought on my own. And the reason was, he always made me wear my hair down. Always. He would spot-check me at work.” She gave a bitter laugh. “So, he broke into my apartment and stole it from me.”

  “Did the security cameras catch him?”

  She shook her head. “I never looked. I didn’t want my super telling everyone in the building about the hysterical woman crying over a missing hair tie.”

  Faith had assumed that a $6,000,000 penthouse bought you some degree of indulgence.

  Callie said, “That’s how Rod always won. He made me feel crazy, like I couldn’t tell anybody what was going on because they wouldn’t believe me.”

  Faith gently steered her back to the attack. “You were hit in the head with a hammer. You were missing for thirty-six hours. You had—”

  “I had a gift.” Her tone made it clear that she was certain of this one thing. “Rod was going to drag me into court and air every single piece of our dirty laundry. And believe me, there’s a lot. Not just about me, but about my family. My mother. Her business. Rod wanted to burn all of us in effigy. But then he gave me this gift, this abhorrent, savage gift, and I traded my silence for my freedom. Rod slithered back to Wyoming with nothing but the clothes on his back. I walked away with my life.”

  Faith looked down at the glass in her hand. Callie Zanger sounded triumphant, avenged. But the more she talked, the more Faith was convinced that she was wrong.

  She tried, “Do you remember how you got from your car to the woods?”

  “No. The doctors said that amnesia is normal after a significant blow to the head.” She had finished her vodka. She motioned towards Faith glass. “I know what it looks like when someone is pretending to drink.”

  Faith slid her glass toward Callie. She knew what it looked like when someone was an alcoholic.

  “I remember waking up in the woods.” Callie tossed back her head. Half the liquid disappeared. “I woke up several times, actually. I don’t know if it was the head wound or the shit he was forcing me to drink, but I kept falling asleep, waking up, falling asleep.”

  “What did he make you drink?”

  “Whatever it was, it made me absolutely stoned. I was delirious. I couldn’t control my thoughts. One minute I was terrified, the next minute I was floating in the ether. I couldn’t move my arms and legs. I kept forgetting where I was, even who I was.”

  Faith thought that sounded a hell of a lot like Rohypnol. “Did you recognize the taste?”

  “Sure, it tasted like piss and sugar. I prefer this.” Callie raised the glass in a toast, then finished the vodka in one go. The alcohol seemed to catch up with her all at once. Her eyes turned glassy. She had trouble placing the empty glass flat on the counter.

  Faith reached over to help.

  “You know, it’s bittersweet that Rod’s downfall was the thing that made me fall in love with him in the first place.” She explained, “He always needed to control me. He couldn’t just leave me there to die. He had to keep coming back. Three or four times, I would wake up and he was there.”

  “Did you see him?” Faith asked. “Did you see his face?”

  “No, he was too careful. But I could sense it was him.” She slowly shook her head side-to-side. “He always loved watching me. When we first met, I thought it was unbearably sexy. I would go to the café or the library and see this tall, strapping cowboy hiding behind the corner with this intense look on his face.”

  Faith watched her bring the glass to her lips, then frown to find it empty.

  The bartender had disappeared into the kitchen. Will sat at the bar drinking a Coke, staring into the mirror.

  “When you’re that young, you think that kind of behavior is desperately romantic. Now, I realize he was stalking me.” She gave Faith a knowing look. “I figure it takes about three months of fucking you before a man really shows you how shitty he is.”

  Faith pushed her back into the woods. “What else do you remember?”

  She lazily rubbed her eyes. The vodka had made her loose. “Shadows. Leaves falling. The sound of Rod’s cowboy boots getting caught in the mud. It rained quite a lot while I was out there. I’m sure he planned it that way?”

  She had asked a question Faith did not know how to answer.

  The hair tie. The woods. The
Gatorade. The paralysis.

  Callie said, “I remember having this dream that he was brushing my hair. He started crying, then I was crying. It was so strange, because I felt at peace, you know? I was ready to give up. But I didn’t. I wouldn’t. And the best part is, it’s all his fault. He really, really fucked up.”

  “How?”

  “Because he raped me.” She shrugged as if it was nothing. “He’d done it before. I mean, my God, how many times? So boring, Rod. Get a new playbook.”

  Faith knew her matter-of-fact tone was a coping mechanism.

  “He waited until it was dark. I couldn’t see his face. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t feel my skin. But my body started—” She raised herself up on the rungs of the barstool, then let herself down, then raised herself again, simulating the motions of sex. “And I remember thinking, ‘this is the last time you are going to do this to me, Rodney Phillip Zanger.’”

  Callie shrugged it off again, but she was looking for the bartender.

  Faith said, “Callie, what—”

  “Whatelsewhatelsewhatelse?” She slurred the words together. “I spent fifteen years of my marriage in training for the what else. Taking a punch, learning how to pretend that my ribs weren’t fractured or my collarbone wasn’t broken or my ass wasn’t bleeding.”

  Her hand went to her mouth, as if she’d said something comically inappropriate.

  Faith asked, “What else?”

  “He finished raping me. He made me drink the stuff. I swallowed it. He left. I threw it up.” She smiled. “Thank you, nasty teenage cunts at my boarding school, for teaching me how to vomit on command.”

  Faith’s throat felt like she had swallowed fire.

  “I must’ve sloughed out the lining of my stomach, that’s how hard I threw up.”

  The pride in her voice was devastating.

  “It was such a weird color.” Her hand sloppily brushed the front of her blouse. “I had to get rid of my clothes. I mean, not that I’d want to keep them, but it looked like one of those guys from that group where they dance and there’s drums—what’s that group? The one where they’re blue? They played Vegas?”