The Silent Wife (Will Trent #10) - Karin Slaughter Page 0,131
skin tones, even the shapes of their faces, were all different.
Jeffrey rubbed his face. He couldn’t keep going in these same circles. Two women had been attacked in two days. Now they were starting another day. What was going to happen?
He checked the time again before picking up the landline and dialing a familiar number.
“Mornin’,” Nick Shelton said. “What can I do you for?”
“It’s Jeffrey. How long would it take for the FBI to generate a profile?”
“How long until you retire?”
“Shit,” Jeffrey mumbled. “That long?”
“I could winnow it down to a year if I got the right fella on the case.”
Jeffrey did not want to think about what would happen if this case dragged on that long. He had seen what had happened to Leslie Truong. He had heard the details from Tommi Humphrey. “Nick, being honest, if this thing goes to the end of the month, I’m going to get the state involved. This guy keeps learning. He’s going to hurt more women.”
“You really wanna get into a pissing contest with my boss?” Nick chuckled. “No offense, bubba, but her dick’s bigger than both of ours put together.”
Jeffrey rubbed his eyes. If he let himself go there, he could still see the broken neck of the wooden hammer. “My ego will be fine. We’ve got to stop this guy.”
“I hear ya, buddy.” Nick offered, “Go on and send me the details. Might as well put it in the pipeline. Whether or not we end up taking over, if there’s a trial, it’d be good to have a Fee-Bee on the stand looking all J. Edgar for the jury.”
“You’ll have it by the end of the day.” Jeffrey returned the receiver to the cradle. He kept his hand on the phone. He debated calling Brock for a report, but he knew that Sara would’ve called immediately if something useful had turned up during the autopsy.
He rolled up the topographical map and set it aside. He skimmed his emails. The mayor wanted to talk to him. The dean wanted a meeting. The district attorney wanted a check-in. The Grant Tech student newspaper wanted a written interview. The Grant Observer wanted an in-person sit-down. Jeffrey sent back anodyne responses to everyone, resisting the desire to tell them what they wanted and what they actually needed were two different things.
At least his mother was off his back. After the umpteenth missed call, he had finally called Mae to wish her happy birthday. When she’d balked, Jeffrey had gaslighted his own mother. He’d created a false memory of a conversation they’d never had, “reminding” Mae that he’d promised her months ago to take her out to dinner the weekend after her birthday. Like any knee-walking drunk, she had pretended to remember, and like any child of an alcoholic, Jeffrey was simultaneously filled with satisfaction that he’d finally found a way to use her drinking in his favor and eaten up with guilt for tricking her.
He was saved further introspection by the fax machine grinding out a page behind him. Brock had sent him details on the hammer Sara had excised from Leslie Truong’s vagina. By sheer luck, there was a manufacturing mark stamped on the end.
Jeffrey looked up the product number on his computer. He recognized the distinctive yellow and green stripes of the tool brand.
The Brawleigh twenty-four-ounce cross-peen was part of a three-hammer set that was aptly called a Machinist’s Dead Blow Kit. Peening hammers were specifically designed for metalwork. In fact, peening referred to the process of working a metal surface to improve its material properties. Brawleigh offered a straight-peen hammer and a bossing mallet to round out its Dead Blow collection.
Jeffrey scanned the details. The head of the 1.5-pound mallet was filled with sand and coated in polyurethane. The two hammers had plastic disks covering the flat sides of the heads. All of the tools were engineered to minimize the elastic rebound from a struck surface; hence the narrow neck of the wooden handle on the murder weapon.
He zoomed in on the hammer. There was something sinister-looking about the metal head. The peen, the opposite end of the face, was conical in shape, used to shape sharp angles. He had no way of knowing whether the hammer had been used on Tommi Humphrey. Had the killer purchased it specifically for the attacks, or was it something that he’d found lying around his shop?
Brawleigh was a nationally known brand, as ubiquitous in the tool industry as Snap-On and Crafstman. Jeffrey did a