The Silent Wife (Will Trent #10) - Karin Slaughter Page 0,106
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.
He told her, “Thank you.”
“For what?”
“For helping with Tommi. For being here.”
She could’ve said a lot of things that would’ve made him regret his appreciation, but Sara only nodded.
He parked the car. He looked at the time. Bonita Truong’s plane had landed one hour ago. She had texted Jeffrey that she was heading straight to Grant County as soon as she could rent a car. The woman had at least two hours of driving. He told himself it wasn’t cowardice that kept him from calling her right now. Leslie’s mother would want details. Jeffrey wanted to offer her as many as he could.
Sara got out of the car before he did. She walked over to Brock’s mortuary van. He was pulling the folded white canvas tent from the funeral home out of the back. Frank was trying and failing to give him a hand. Jeffrey felt a sickness in his gut. Frank hadn’t said anything about a tent. Yesterday’s storm had reached the Carolinas. The scene was bad enough that they had already agreed that they needed to obscure the body.
“Hey, Brock.” Sara rubbed his arm. “I’m here if you want me. Don’t feel crowded.”
“Oh, Sara, crowd me all you want. This is something terrible. I’m not sure I can handle this job anymore.”
“You’ll be fine.” She took the crime scene kit out of the van and looped the strap over her shoulder. “I’ll help you as much or as little as you ask me to.”
Jeffrey grabbed the stack of tent poles from Frank.
Frank pointed into the woods. “Body’s about three hundred yards thattaway.”
Jeffrey followed the general direction of Frank’s finger. The area lined up with Kevin Blake’s office window. He imagined the dean was already on the phone with the board, the school