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

  Nothing.

  Jeffrey counted slowly in his head.

  When he got to nineteen, Lena banged on the door again.

  Jeffrey was about to correct her. This was patrol 101. She was supposed to call out Nesbitt’s name, tell him that she was a police officer.

  “Fuck!” Someone yelled from deep inside the house. Male voice. Irritated. “What the fuck?”

  Footsteps. A chain sliding. Deadbolts clicking back.

  The door swung open.

  Jeffrey recognized Daryl Nesbitt from his license photo. His greasy hair was the color of a pinecone. He was wearing a pair of yellow gym shorts. The only other item of clothing he wore was a pair of white gym socks with blue stripes around the tops. His bare chest was flushed red up to his face. Even from twelve feet away, Jeffrey could see the man had an erection. He didn’t smell of pot. He smelled of sex.

  Lena’s chin tilted up. She had smelled it, too.

  “What?” Daryl glared down at her. “What the fuck do you want?”

  “Daryl Nesbitt?” Lena asked.

  “He doesn’t live here anymore,” Daryl said. “He moved to Alabama last week.”

  The door started to close.

  Lena reached out.

  It happened so fast that Jeffrey only had time to think the word—

  Don’t.

  Lena’s hand clamped around Daryl’s wrist. He tried to jerk away. He stepped backward. Lena stumbled forward. Her left foot crossed the threshold. Then her right. She was inside the house. She kept moving forward. Daryl’s arm swung out, disappearing behind the doorjamb. He could be reaching for a knife, a gun, a hammer.

  The door started to close.

  Jeffrey felt his finger on the trigger of his Glock before he realized that he’d pulled it out of the holster, raised it up in the air and aimed at Daryl Nesbitt’s head.

  The gun exploded.

  The door splintered as it banged closed.

  Jeffrey leapt across the porch. The door was locked. He took a step back and kicked it open. His gun pointed around the room, but nothing looked like he’d been expecting. The dining room. The living room. The kitchen. He couldn’t see any of it. There were doors everywhere, all of them closed.

  “On your left!” Matt bolted past him. Hendricks took up the rear. The gunshot had been like a starting pistol. Matt busted through the flimsy door into the hallway. Hendricks broke into the dining room. Jeffrey took a step. His foot hit something hard. He watched Lena’s gun skitter across the floor.

  “Lena!” he yelled.

  A shotgun went off.

  Brad Stephens stumbled into the kitchen.

  “Lena!” Jeffrey took the stairs two at a time. He was halfway up before he remembered that someone could’ve been at the top waiting to blow off his head.

  Jeffrey ducked and rolled. He ended up in the hall bathroom. He looked behind him. Four bedrooms. The doors were closed.

  Lena screamed.

  Jeffrey ran toward the master bedroom. He splintered open the door.

  Lena was crumpled by the bed. Her head was bleeding. She had fallen against a wooden desk. Jeffrey felt sick as he ran toward her. His responsibility. His fuck-up. Lena’s life. He checked her pulse. The tap of her carotid against his fingertips slowed down his own heartbeat by a millisecond.

  He glanced up.

  He saw the laptop computer on the desk.

  Children.

  Jeffrey swallowed the bile that swirled up his throat. He swiveled his eyes around the room. Cheap plastic blind on the window. The closet door was missing. Clothes were piled onto the floor. The bed was a mattress on the carpet. A dirty white gym sock was crumpled on the floor.

  “Chief!” Matt was at the end of the hall. Brad was taking up his rear. They started busting open doors.

  Lena whispered, “Jeffrey?”

  The world slowed down as he turned back toward her.

  She had never called him by his name before. There was something so intimate about the way she said it. Lena’s arm was raised. Her hand was wavering from the effort.

  She was pointing to the window. The plastic slats clicked in the breeze.

  “Shit!” Jeffrey ripped away the blinds. The window had guillotined, the top panel sliding down behind the bottom. Daryl Nesbitt was inches away, standing on the overhang above the kitchen door.

  As Jeffrey watched, the man ran and jumped. Daryl’s arms were out. His legs bicycled through the air. He landed with a thump on the roof of the shed.

  Jeffrey didn’t stop to think.

  He kicked out the window. He stepped onto the overhang, which gave him no more than five feet. Ten more feet to the shed. The roof sloped just the way Matt had said, like a ski jump.

  Jeffrey took a running start and hurled his body through the air.

  His arms flailed. He tried to line up his feet for landing. He found himself calculating all the things that could go wrong. He could miss the roof. Break through the plywood. Land sideways. Break his leg, his arm, his fucking neck.

  Jeffrey landed on the toes of his right foot. He felt his body twist on impact, his spine painfully torquing. He caught himself on his left foot, stuttered back onto his right, then tumbled down the back side of the slope. He landed flat on his ass on the ground.

  He had to shake the stars out of his eyes. The wind was knocked out of him. He looked around.

  Daryl was running through the backyard. He glanced over his shoulder at Jeffrey as he hurdled the fence to his neighbor’s yard.

  Jeffrey was up and running after him, gasping for breath as he jumped the fence. His foot slipped on the grass. His skull was pounding. He felt like something had ripped in his back. He gained his footing as he ran around the side of the house.

  He saw Daryl sprinting toward the street. His arms started windmilling as he took a sharp turn onto Valley Ridge. His bare feet skipped across the asphalt. By the time Jeffrey made the turn, the man was thirty yards away.

  “No-no-no,” Jeffrey begged.

  He couldn’t close the gap. The kid was too fast. Jeffrey looked down the street, searching for Dawson. The patrol car was a football field away. Dawson had seen Daryl. He was out of his car, running toward the action.

  Jeffrey’s sense of relief was cut off by a woman’s piercing scream.

  Again, the world slowed down to a crawl, the blur of houses and trees in Jeffrey’s periphery stuttering into freeze-frame.

  The woman had been walking to her car. Jeffrey saw her mouth open. He watched Daryl’s fist swing back.

  Jeffrey tried, “No!”

  It was too late. The woman collapsed to the ground. Daryl scooped up her car keys.

  Jeffrey kept running.

  He earned fifteen hard feet while Daryl fumbled with the door of the woman’s red station wagon.

  Another five feet while Daryl tried to crank the engine.

  Another five while he shifted the gear into reverse.

  Jeffrey squeezed out the last ounce of adrenaline in his body and lunged toward the open car window.

  His hand grabbed the first thing he could reach, a fistful of Daryl’s greasy hair.

  “Motherfu—” Daryl punched at him, his foot still on the gas.

  Jeffrey’s head snapped back. His shoes skipped along the road. Daryl punched him again, then again. All at once, Jeffrey’s muscles gave in to exhaustion. Daryl’s hair slid through his fingers.

  Jeffrey hit the pavement. His head cracked against the asphalt. Something told him to get back on his feet as quickly as possible. He pushed his hands against the pavement. He looked up.

  From behind the windshield, Daryl’s mouth twisted into a smirk. He was going to run Jeffrey over. The kid stood on the gas pedal.

  Jeffrey scrambled.

  Instead of lurching forward, the car shot back, bouncing over the curb, slamming into the house across the street.

  Not just the house.

  The gas meter.

  Like every man who had ever started a barbecue grill, Je
ffrey had seen fuel catch fire before. The blue-white glow was almost mesmerizing as the fumes ignited into thick flames. The gas meter on the front of the house was filled with nothing but fumes. He watched helplessly as the metal supply line was wrenched apart by 3,000 pounds of steel. There was nothing to enthrall him, just a spark of metal like a match being struck, then the air burned with light.

  Jeffrey’s arms flew up to cover his face.

  The explosion sent a fireball crashing around his body. Glass shattered. A car alarm wailed. His ears started ringing. He felt like his head was inside of a gong. The heat was like a sauna. Jeffrey tried to stand. He lost his balance. His knee pounded into the asphalt.

  “Help!”

  Daryl was still in the car. He was stuck. He rammed his shoulder against the door, furiously trying to get out. His screams were like a siren.

  “Chief!” Dawson was fifty yards away. His arms pumped as he ran.

  “Help!” Daryl yelled. He was halfway out of the car. “Help me!”

  Jeffrey stumbled across the road. The heat felt like it was chewing at his face.

  “Help!” Daryl screamed. Fire licked at his back. He was folded over the door, clawing at the ground. His leg was caught inside. He couldn’t get out. “Please! Help me!”

  Jeffrey dodged the flames. He grabbed Daryl’s wrists and pulled.

  “Harder!” Daryl started kicking at the steering wheel with his free leg.

  The flames shot higher. The heat was melting the paint off the car. Jeffrey could see the flat metal bottom of the gas tank glowing red.

  “Pull!” Daryl begged.

  Jeffrey leaned back, using every ounce of weight in his body.

  “No!” Daryl screamed. “Oh, God! No!”

  Jeffrey felt something pop. The release was like a champagne cork flying across the room. His body fell backward. Daryl Nesbitt collapsed on top of him. Jeffrey tried to shift him off. The gas tank was going to blow.

  “Chief!” Dawson grabbed Jeffrey under his arms. He dragged him away from the flames. Someone threw water on his face. Someone else wrapped a jacket around his shoulders.

  Jeffrey coughed up a pool of black liquid onto the ground. His eyes were burning. His skin felt singed. The hair had burned off his arms.

  “Chief?” Matt said. Brad was with him. Cheshire. Hendricks. Dawson.

  Jeffrey rolled over. Blood dripped down his throat. His nose was broken again. He turned his head.

  Daryl Nesbitt was flat on his back, arms out, eyes closed, unmoving.

  Just like Tommi Humphrey.

  Just like Beckey Caterino.

  Just like Leslie Truong.

  Jeffrey pushed himself up on his elbow. He saw a thick line of blood in the grass that traced all the way back to the burning car. He followed the line to Daryl.

  The champagne cork.

  The pop had come from Daryl Nesbitt’s ankle joint as his foot had been ripped away from his leg.

  Atlanta

  26

  Will pecked at his keyboard, carefully filling out the last box on the application for a subpoena. He had driven by the One Museum condo complex on the way to work. Callie Zanger’s building superintendent hadn’t appreciated being roused from bed at five in the morning, but the man had been coherent enough to give Will the information that he needed.

  There were no two-year-old hard drives lying around. The state-of-the-art building security system was backed up to the cloud. The building’s insurance company required them to store the encrypted data for five years. Will was asking the judge to grant the GBI access to all of the recordings from the three months before and after Callie Zanger’s abduction.

  He touched his finger under each word, checking for mistakes before uploading the request to the system. He sat back in his chair. The subpoena could take as long as four hours to get a judge’s approval. Then the lawyers would get involved. Another day might pass before the data was transferred. Streaming through over two thousand hours of video would take more eyes than Will had in his head.

  He looked at the time. Amanda had called their meeting for seven sharp. He would ask her to put a rush on the subpoena. For now, he had eight minutes of peace before his day ramped up.

  He allotted himself four minutes to worry.

  First up was Faith. She had been gutted by the Callie Zanger interview. Will hadn’t been much better. The drive back to headquarters had been excruciating for both of them, Faith because she was trying not to cry, and Will because seeing Faith trying so hard not to cry had made him want to break things.

  He craned his ear toward his open office door. Faith’s door was closed. She had arrived fifteen minutes ago. He could hear her poking around, but she hadn’t come by and he wasn’t sure she wanted to be bothered.

  Will looked at the clock on his computer. One minute down.

  He let his thoughts travel to the next woman he was worried about: Sara. The exhumation of Shay Van Dorne was not going to be easy. But that wasn’t all that was troubling him. They had both fallen asleep on the couch last night, Sara’s head like dead weight on his chest, but every time Will thought about the connection between them, his brain threw up the image of an extension cord lying two feet away from the socket.

  Will couldn’t figure out a way to plug back in.

  Sara had told him about the U-Store being across the street from the cemetery, and Will had believed her when she said that she hadn’t visited Jeffrey, but every time he found himself thinking about the Chief, he wanted to grab Sara, throw her over his shoulder, and lock her in a room like a caveman.

  Or a serial killer.

  Will picked at the Band-Aid Sara had wrapped around his knuckle. He had never thought of himself as the jealous type. Then again, Angie had never wholly belonged to him. She’d been screwing around since she was old enough to sneak out of a window. Will had been mildly irritated by her bad reputation, and furious about the syphilis, but he had found all kinds of ways to justify her non-monogamy. Angie had been damaged by so many men in her life. Sex was her way of stealing back some of that power. Will was the only man she had ever really loved. Or at least that’s what she had told him.

  Being with Sara, knowing what love really felt like, had exposed the extent of her lie.

  “Mornin’, hoss.” Nick sauntered into his office. “Meeting’s about to start.”

  Will thought about punching him.

  “Lookit, bud.” Nick sat down on the couch without being asked. “Can I be honest with you?”

  Will turned his chair to face him. Usually, when someone asked if they could be honest, that meant they’d either been lying before or they were going to start lying now.

  Nick said. “First time I heard you were hooking up with Sara, I gotta admit, I wanted to kill you so dead that even God wouldn’t look for your body.”

  Will had never hooked up with Sara. “You could still try.”

  “Nah, man, I can see where her heart is.”

  Will didn’t know what to say, so he said nothing.

  “You fuck it up, though …” Nick grinned like an angry clown. “Take a little advice from a dead man’s grave. Ain’t no woman on earth as good as the one you got right there in the palm of your hand.”

  They locked eyes. Will ran through a few responses, but he figured throwing out a “no shit, hoss” was probably not going to keep this pissing contest at a draw.

  He went with his old standard. He grunted, then nodded, then waited for Nick to leave.

  Will’s eyes slid back to the time on his computer.

  Nick had run up a one-minute deficit.

  Faith’s office was on the way to the stairs. Will did the door-knock-walk-in thing to tell her it was time for the meeting. The words got caught in his throat.

  Faith’s head was on the desk. Her face was buried in her arm.

  Will swallowed, trying to find the right thing to say. “Faith?”

  She turned her head, squinting at Will. “I am so fucking hungover.”
/>   Will’s relief was cut by exasperation. He had never been a fan of alcohol. When he was a kid, a drunk adult generally meant Will was about to take a beating. “It’s almost seven.”

  “Super.” Faith gathered up her notebook and Starbucks coffee. Her clothes were wrinkled. She had dark circles under her eyes. “Amanda and Mom forced me into choir practice last night. I passed out when they started talking about their CHiPS fantasies.”

  Will winced.

  “Right?” Faith closed the door behind her. “I totally get horndogging over Eric Estrada, but Larry Wilcox? Seriously, Amanda?”

  “So you two are okay?”

  “Ehn. I’m not going to change. She’s not going to change. Naysayers gonna nay.” Faith laughed. “And that is my third and last horse joke in as many days.”

  Will wasn’t sure it was a joke, but he was glad to hear Faith back to her usual sarcastic self.

  He held open the door to the stairs. Faith’s voice echoed off the concrete as she told him a story about her ex taking Emma and some of her friends to play at the Fun Zone.

  “Welcome to parenthood, my dude.” Faith cackled. “You paid sixty bucks to expose your kid to a communicable disease.”

  Will held open the next door. Faith started another story. He let his thoughts wander back to Sara. He could still feel the weight of her head on his chest. The way she had looked at him last night was different. She was hesitant. She was still worried about his feelings. Will felt petty because a deep, dark, maybe even sadistic part of him liked the idea of her being unsure.

  Amanda was not in her office, but Nick had already snagged a spot on the couch. His cowboy boot rested on the edge of the coffee table. Faith sat next to him, diving into the usual small talk. Will leaned his back against the wall, which he had done so many times before that he was surprised his shoulder blades hadn’t worn an indentation into the cinderblock.

  He heard the clop of Amanda’s tiny feet approaching. She looked exactly the same as she did every day. Salt-and-pepper helmet hair. Skirt and matching jacket. Make-up discreetly applied. If she was hungover, she was keeping it all on the inside.