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

  “No, thank you.” Sara worked to keep the tremble out of her voice. “You straightened up.”

  “I was so ashamed yesterday after you left. I don’t usually let things get that bad.” He motioned toward the small table. “Have a seat. Can you stay a while?”

  Sara placed her purse on the table, making sure the camera was pointed toward the other chair. She sat all the way back, putting as much space as she could between them.

  Brock said, “Maybe I shouldn’t risk getting your cold.”

  Instead of taking the chair across from her, Brock went behind his desk and sat down.

  The thick binders were in front of him. Sara could see his hands resting on the desk, but the camera could not.

  The hole in her purse was too low.

  Will would be anxious. He would want to see Brock’s hands at all times. She prayed that he would not come crashing through the door.

  Brock asked, “Did you get the number you were looking for?”

  She felt her eyebrows go up.

  “For Delilah?” Brock said, “I asked Mama, but you know how forgetful she can be, bless her heart.”

  Sara felt a quiver in her bottom lip. This was too normal. She couldn’t let this be normal.

  “Sara?”

  “Yes.” She had to push out the words. “I found her.”

  “That’s good,” he said. “How’d Lucas and them treat you in Villa Rica this morning?”

  She felt the surprise spread across her face. Lucas had assisted her with the exhumation of Shay Van Dorne.

  He said, “Lucas uses AllCare for his embalming.”

  Her lip would not stop quivering. She could not maintain this charade. “There was latex.”

  He waited.

  “Her t-teeth.” Sara stuttered again. “I found latex stuck in Shay’s teeth.”

  Brock’s face was expressionless.

  “From a condom,” she said. “Post-mortem.”

  His face did not change. He straightened the green binders, making sure they were parallel to the edge of the desk. “You wanna hear something funny, Sara?”

  She felt her stomach drop. She had pushed him too fast, too soon. She tried, “Brock—”

  “After you left yesterday, I was thinking about the first time I realized you were my friend. I bet you didn’t even notice when it happened, did you?”

  Sara couldn’t do this. “Dan, please.”

  “You were always so kind to me. You were the only one who was ever kind.” His voice had taken on a wistful tone. “I remember thinking, well, that Sara Linton is kind to everybody, and I was an everybody, so that’s why I was included. But then one day, you stood up for me. Do you remember what you did?”

  She had to bite her lip to stop the quiver. What was he doing? She had told him about the latex. Ezra Ingle had probably shared the details of Alexandra McAllister’s exam. Brock had read the text about Tommi Humphrey that Sara had accidentally sent to him instead of her mother.

  “We were in sixth grade.” Brock held up his hands, wagged his fingers. “Coach Childers.”

  Sara felt a distant memory creep into her consciousness. Childers had been a farmer. He’d supplemented his income at the school. “He got caught in a combine.”

  “That’s right. The rollers on the corn picker pulled him in. Sheared off all his fingers on one hand. Ripped his other arm clean off,” he said. “Poor fella bled to death before anybody could save him.”

  Sara shook her head. What was the point of this? Why was he telling her this story?

  “I remember when Daddy wheeled Coach Childers into the basement. I wasn’t allowed down there on my own, but I just had to see.” Brock chuckled, as if he was relaying a youthful indiscretion. “I waited until everybody was asleep, then I went down there and unzipped the bag. Coach Childers was lying there on his back. His arm was in a plastic bag on his chest. I guess they couldn’t locate the fingers.”

  Sara remembered now. The day after Coach Childers had died, Brock had gotten onto the bus to a chorus of taunting children. They all knew the details of the accident. They knew where Coach Childers’ body had been taken.

  She said, “Dead man’s hands.”

  Brock’s smile had no joy in it. “That’s right. That’s what they kept saying. Dead-man’s-hands, dead-man’s-hands.”

  He waved his hands the same way the children had. Brock had suffered through their malicious teasing for weeks.

  He asked, “Do you remember what you did?”

  She tried to swallow. There was no spit left in her mouth. “I yelled at them.”

  “You didn’t just yell at them. You stood up in the middle of that bus and you howled at all of them to shut the fuck up.” Brock laughed, as if he was still amazed. “I don’t think any of us had ever heard that word out loud before. Hell, most of us didn’t even know what it meant. My mama, she said, ‘Oh that Eddie Linton is a potty mouth cursing around them girls.’ But do you remember what happened next?”

  This felt so normal. How could it feel normal?

  She said, “I got detention.”

  “You’d never been in trouble a day in your life.” His smile faltered. “You did that for me, Sara. That’s when I knew you were my friend.”

  She pressed together her lips. The room felt hot. Sweat was pouring down her back. She didn’t know what to do, what to say. She begged, “Please.”

  “Oh, Sara. I know this is hard.” Brock clasped together his hands on the desk. “I’m sorry.”

  His voice was so familiar, so compassionate. She had heard him use the same comforting tone with countless mourners. She recalled it from her own experience the day she had gone to the funeral home to make arrangements for Jeffrey.

  Brock said, “I took Coach’s arm into the woods with me.”

  Sara concentrated on the anxiousness in his eyes. He had always been terrified of rejection. She tried to force off the switch in her head, to blunt her emotions.

  “I was so lonely.” He was watching her, trying to test how far he could go. “I just wanted someone to be with. That’s all it ever was for me, Sara. I wanted somebody who couldn’t laugh at me or push me away.”

  Her hand had gone to her mouth. Her mind refused to understand what he was saying.

  He said, “It took me a while to figure out that blood is a lubricant.”

  Vomit churned into Sara’s throat. She swallowed it back down, trying to steel herself. She could not recoil from him. She had to keep him talking. This was for the families. This was for the victims they did not know about.

  “You make a puncture here.” Brock rubbed his fingers across his chest. “Then you press down, and blood fills the mouth.”

  Her throat tensed. He was making it sound almost gentle, but Shay Van Dorne’s jaw had been dislocated. The condom had ripped against her teeth. Tommi Humphrey had been mutilated. Alexandra McAllister had been scraped out with a knitting needle.

  Sara forced the images to leave her mind.

  She made herself meet Brock’s needy gaze. He was waiting for permission to continue.

  She could not trust herself to speak, so she nodded.

  He said, “The first time was with Hannah Nesbitt.”

  She felt her throat constrict.

  “I was home from college. Daryl was a kid, maybe ten or eleven, when his mama died. You can look it up, right?”

  He was expecting an answer. She knew that Daryl Nesbitt’s mother had OD’d when he was eight years old, but she told him, “Yes.”

  “The family asked for an open casket. I was in the viewing room making sure everything looked right. And then I got this urge that I had to kiss her one last time.”

  One last time?

  “It was very chaste. Just touching my lips to hers.” He held his breath a moment before letting it go. “I turned around, and there was Daryl. Standing there. Watching. Neither one of us said anything, but there was this silent communication between us. We were two lonely people who knew that something deep
down inside of us was wrong.”

  Sara struggled to keep her silence. She had been inside of that room. She could visualize the sickening scene in her head. Daryl was a child when he’d walked in on a grown man desecrating his mother’s corpse. He’d probably been too frightened, too confused, to make sense of it.

  “I just knew he was gonna tell.” Brock couldn’t look at her anymore. He stared down at his desk. “I waited for him to run off and blab, but he didn’t. He kept the secret. So, I had to keep his.”

  Brock sniffed. He wiped his nose with the back of his hand.

  “Daddy did ten or twelve services a year for a Nesbitt or an Abbott or some Dew-Lolly who’d married in.” He told Sara, “Daryl was always around the young girls. Even his own cousins. He would rub up against them. Play with their hair. Sometimes he would take them into the bathroom and they would come out crying.”

  Brock’s eyes were wet with tears.

  “I’d get so angry, because I knew I couldn’t report him. Daryl would tell on me, and Daddy and Mama would hear about it, and that would be the end of my life.” He looked at Sara. “I could never do that to Mama. You understand what I’m saying? She can never know.”

  Sara nodded, but not in agreement. Her emotional switch had flipped off once he’d confessed to bringing a child into his sick confidence.

  She slipped her hand back into the pocket of her cardigan. The revolver was sticky from her sweat.

  “A lot of people, when they drink, they do awful things. Then they sober up and they say, ‘It wasn’t me. It was the booze.’” He looked down at his desk. “But I always wondered, what if the person they are when they’re drunk is who they really are? What if the person who’s sober is the one who’s really putting on an act?”

  Sara had discerned a pattern. He would wander off topic, then drop in a detail that he knew would keep her listening. She did not have to wait long for him to circle back around.

  “Axle, Daryl’s step-daddy, he did work for us.” Brock explained, “Sometimes, you get a metal casket in, and there’s a crushed corner or a ding. Insurance pays for it, but you can still sell it if you can find somebody to fix the damage. Somebody who knows how to work with metal.”

  Sara said, “The Dead Blow kit.”

  “Axle left the hammer in one of the caskets.” Brock’s weak smile had returned. “I don’t know why I kept it. I liked the weight of it. The end was pointed. I found it useful.”

  Brock had stopped looking at her again. He picked at the corner of one of the green binders. The noise made a ticking sound.

  She said, “You left the hammer inside Leslie. You knew it could be traced by the manufacturing number on the handle.”

  “I planned on saying something when you pulled it out, like, ‘oh I’ve seen that thing before.’ But I didn’t know Axle was in prison,” Brock said. “Jeffrey told Frank something while we were all walking to the crime scene—do you remember that day in the woods?”

  Sara remembered the video. The blood that had poured from between Leslie’s legs. The splintered hammer jutting out like broken shards of glass.

  Brock said, “I heard Jeffrey ask Frank about Daryl. The idea was already in his head. I knew Daryl had access to Axle’s tools because sometimes Axle would bring Daryl to the house to help fix a casket.”

  Sara wanted his confession clear for the recording. “You left the hammer inside Leslie Truong in order to frame Axle Abbott?”

  Brock responded with a slight tilt of his head, which wasn’t enough.

  She said, “The hammer was jammed so deep inside of Leslie that I had to cut it out.”

  Brock wiped his mouth with his fingers. For the very first time, he expressed regret. “I got carried away. I had to—I had to work fast. She was almost to the campus when I caught up with her. There wasn’t a lot of time to think it through.”

  He hadn’t been thinking at all. He had been acting on his darkest, most heinous instincts. Leslie Truong had not been one of his fantasies. She had been an impediment to Brock acting out his sick desires.

  She asked, “Did you take something from Leslie? Were you stalking her?”

  “I didn’t know her before that day.”

  The randomness did not make the violation feel any less grievous.

  “Sara, you have to understand. There was no time to plan. She was walking back to the campus. I knew that she had seen me in the woods. If you hadn’t been there, I was going to have to come up with a lie to tell Jeffrey so I could find her.”

  Sara remembered finding Brock leaning against a tree, sobbing about the recent loss of his father. At least that’s what she had assumed at the time. Now, she wondered if he was crying because he was terrified that he would get caught.

  Brock said, “I had to take advantage of the opportunity. There was only a small amount of time to take care of her. And you’re right about the hammer. I knew the number on the handle would help Jeffrey put together the pieces. That’s why I left it. But I thought it was Axle who would get in trouble. And it ended up being Daryl. Everything lined up so perfectly, Sara. It was like God meant it to be.”

  It was more like dumb luck. “Don’t bring God into this.”

  “I stopped a pedophile from hurting more children,” Brock said. “You know about that shed, Sara. Daryl was planning to take a child. He had everything ready to go. I stopped that from happening. I helped put a baby raper in prison.”

  She bit her tongue so she wouldn’t tell him that they were both rapists.

  Brock picked up on her reaction anyway. His eyes would no longer meet Sara’s. He started picking at the corner of the binder again.

  Tick-tick-tick.

  “Mama had that asthma attack the October before Daddy died,” he said. “That’s what you want to know about, right?”

  Sara’s heart lurched into her throat. “Yes.”

  “I needed comfort,” Brock said, the same thing he had told Tommi Humphrey nine years ago. “I didn’t plan on doing what I did, but I’d been watching her for so long, and the urge inside of me got so intense, and the next thing I knew, we were in the woods together.”

  Sara knew this was a lie. He’d been prepared when he’d abducted Tommi. He’d brought the spiked Gatorade. He’d dipped the washcloth in bleach. He’d pressed a knitting needle against her neck. He had mutilated her so badly that she could not have children. The sadistic freak hadn’t been looking for comfort. He’d wanted to create his own macabre version of a silent wife.

  “Say her name,” Sara told him. She wasn’t asking for the recording. She was asking for herself, for Tommi, for all the women he had destroyed. “Say her name.”

  He wouldn’t do it.

  Brock said, “That was in October. Then in March, that’s when Daddy died.”

  March. Rebecca Caterino. Leslie Truong.

  He asked, “Do you remember Johanna Mettes? I think you took care of her kids at the clinic.”

  He was teetering back on the far end of the circle. Sara tried to push him along. “She died in a car accident.”

  “I was with her when Daddy came down the basement stairs.” Brock’s voice took on a heaviness. “I was inside of her mouth, and Daddy walked in on us.”

  Sara’s hand went to her throat.

  “Daddy just dropped. He didn’t even clutch his arm. I thought he’d fallen down the stairs. The heart attack wasn’t what killed him. It was seeing me.”

  Brock opened his desk drawer. He took out a pack of tissues. He wiped his eyes.

  “I was so ashamed. But I felt this freedom, too. I didn’t have to hide it anymore, or sneak around. Mama never went into the basement. I could do what I wanted, but …” His voice trailed off. “I messed up so bad the first time. Nothing happened the way I thought it would. I didn’t know the right dosage on the Rohypnol. She kept waking up and moving around. I couldn’t get what I needed out of her. Do you get what I’m saying, Sara? I needed her to be still.”

  Sara had seen exactly what he had done
. “You mutilated Tommi.”

  “She was so dry, and I needed—” His voice dropped to a whisper. “I know I got carried away. The hammer kept catching, and I didn’t realize how sharp the knitting needle was, and—and I was used to the blood being cold. She was so warm. Like a hand wrapping around me. I kept wanting more. It felt so good to be with someone who was a living, breathing thing.”

  Angry tears burned Sara’s eyes. Tommi was not a thing.

  “She tried her best to keep still, but she kept twitching,” Brock said. “That’s why I had to use the awl on Beckey. To make it so she couldn’t move.”

  Sara was able to take her first deep breath. There was his confession. He had finally spoken a name.

  Brock said, “The awl only paralyzed the lower extremities. I figured out how to fix that through trial and error.”

  Sara could only think about all of the victims who represented those trials and errors.

  “With Beckey, she kept swinging her little fists. She couldn’t keep the Gatorade down. I had to hit her to make her stop. But here’s the thing.”

  Sara sat back as he leaned forward.

  “Beckey got away, didn’t she?” He held up his palm, indicating that Sara wasn’t meant to answer. “I gave them a chance. I left them alone. All of them, at some point, they had the opportunity to leave me.”

  Sara shook her head at the lie. He hadn’t given them a chance. He had drugged them until the drug stopped working, and then he had used the awl to paralyze them. Some of them, so very few of them, had been lucky enough to take advantage of the narrow window of time in between.

  Brock said, “When I would go visit them in the woods and see that they were still there, it was just … magical.”

  There was something overtly sexual in the way he lightly traced his finger along his lips.

  “The ones who stayed with me, I would take my time with them. I brushed their hair. Fixed their make-up. It wasn’t always about making love. Sometimes I would hold their hands. And when they were gone, I let the animals have them. That’s the natural order of things, isn’t it? Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.”

  He was referencing their conversation from yesterday morning. Sara wasn’t going to let him justify his delusions. “They all ended up back here, didn’t they? I saw the map in the corridor. All the counties where you left the bodies are counties that you serve. That’s how Shay Van Dorne got the condom stuck in her teeth. You raped her again when she was brought here.”