The Silent Wife by Karin Slaughter

Author:Karin Slaughter [Slaughter, Karin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780008303440
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2020-06-22T18:30:00+00:00

Grant County—Wednesday

14

Jeffrey’s phone rang again as he drove onto campus. He’d told Frank to keep all discussions about finding Leslie Truong’s body off of the phones and radios. When a seasoned detective told you something was bad, you knew it was really bad. Jeffrey didn’t want details about the murder leaking out to the press. He had three victims now. Two of them were still alive.

Barely.

He looked at the phone. A Sylacauga number flashed on the screen. His mother was calling from her neighbor’s phone. Jeffrey silenced the ringing, but not before Sara saw the caller ID. If she got any satisfaction from knowing that his mother had called three times during the fifteen-minute drive from Avondale, she didn’t show it.

By silent decree, both he and Sara had retreated to their separate corners. He had no idea what was going on in her mind right now. For Jeffrey’s part, he was doing his best not to think about what Sara had told him on the drive over.

She had fallen back on dense medical jargon as she had relayed the physical ramifications of Tommi Humphrey’s attack. Jeffrey had tasted blood in his mouth by the time she’d finished. He wanted to write down every word, to memorialize what had happened to the twenty-one-year-old girl in case she ever got to the point where she felt strong enough to file an official complaint.

Time was not on her side. The abduction alone was a felony charge, but Georgia’s statute of limitations narrowed down her window for filing to seven years. Rape was limited to fifteen years. Unfortunately, Tommi had refused to allow Sara to collect samples from the attack. The slivers, the buccal swabs, the fingernail scrapings—any one of those pieces of evidence could have bought Tommi some breathing room. The law stipulated that the prosecution of kidnapping, aggravated sodomy, and aggravated sexual assault could commence at any time when DNA was used to identify the suspect.

If fourteen years from now, a defense lawyer asked why Tommi Humphrey had waited so long to come forward, and how she could be so sure about the details, Jeffrey wanted to be there with his dated and time-stamped notebook to cram the details down the asshole’s throat.

His phone rang again. He tapped the screen to put it on speaker. “What is it, Lena?”

“I found the guy going by the name Little Bit,” she said. “His name is Felix Floyd Abbot, twenty-three years old. He took off on his fucking skateboard. I had to chase him half a mile. He had a couple of dub sacks on him. Just under the limit for distribution.”

“Book him. Let him stew. I’ll get to him later.” Jeffrey ended the call. Felix Floyd Abbott, not Daryl, so he still needed to locate the man from Beckey Caterino’s phone book. He told Sara, “Little Bit is the campus pot dealer.”

Sara nodded. Her hand rested on the door handle. Jeffrey was pulling into the staff parking lot. She was anxious to get this over with.

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