The Silent Wife (Will Trent #10) - Karin Slaughter Page 0,134
gave a strained laugh. “Where else do I have to go? There’s nothing I can do, is there? Nothing at all.”
Jeffrey waited for her to say more, but the line went dead.
He punched Sara’s number into his BlackBerry. His thumb hovered over the green button to make the call. Instead, he clicked the red button, erasing the number.
The Kudzu Arms had stirred up some unflattering memories. He kept thinking about Sara walking in on him in their bedroom. Watching her roll her car into the lake. She had walked to her parents’ house. He had wanted to follow her, but the farther away she got, the more he felt a slack in the rope that tied them together. Since then, he couldn’t tell if she was playing tug-of-war or trying to tie a noose around his neck.
Jeffrey clicked the scroll wheel to Sara’s email address, taking the coward’s option. She was good with parents. She couldn’t have kids of her own—an appendectomy had gone wrong when she was in college—but Sara knew how to handle grief in a way that Brock did not. He forwarded Bonita Truong’s details and asked Sara to reach out to the mother about arranging transportation of her daughter’s body.
The rest of the autopsy report was on Jeffrey’s fax machine. He paged through to the summation. Sara’s findings backed up Frank’s assessment. She had found exactly what he’d expected her to find: the puncture in the spinal cord, the blue liquid in the stomach. In other words, nothing that could point them in any direction. They would have to wait three to four weeks for the toxicology reports to come back from the GBI. A finding of GHB or Rohypnol was not going to break open any new leads.
“Morning.” Brad Stephens was walking through the squad room with a boxful of sealed evidence bags. He’d spent the night at Leslie Truong’s apartment cataloging her personal items.
Jeffrey called to him, “Anything?”
“No, Chief, not really.” Brad came into his office and put the box down on Jeffrey’s desk. “I went through her contacts like you asked, but she didn’t have any names, just phone numbers.”
Jeffrey had his notebook in his pocket. He found the page where he had transcribed Daryl’s number from Rebecca Caterino’s cell phone.
Brad flipped open Leslie Truong’s phone and scrolled through her numbers. “Right here, third one down.”
Jeffrey confirmed the information with his own eyes. Two victims, both with the same ten-digit number stored in their phones. Then again, they were both students. If Daryl was a pot dealer, half the phones on campus probably had the same number.
But he didn’t know if Daryl was a pot dealer.
The Little Bit Chuck Gaines had identified from his notecards had been arrested yesterday afternoon.
Jeffrey was about to call Lena for more information on the arrest when he saw her sitting down at one of the desks. He looked at the clock. There was no way she’d had time to go by the construction site.
“Lena!” his voice was louder than it should’ve been. He saw Brad cringe as he grabbed the box of evidence and hustled out of the office.
“Chief?” Lena still had on her bulky jacket. The teeth of the zipper had worn a red mark on her neck. “Is something wrong?”
“Close the door.”
He motioned for her to sit, but he remained standing. “Why am I paying for your BlackBerry if you’re not going to check it?”
She looked startled. He watched her dig into her coat pocket for the phone.
“I told you to go by that construction site on Mercer first thing.”
She was reading the email as he spoke. “I’m sorry, Chief. I was up all—”
“We were all up all night, Lena. That’s the job. Are you telling me you can’t do it?”
“No, sir, I—”
“Little Bit.”
“Uh—” she was still scrambling. “Felix Floyd Abbott. I arrested him yesterday. He’s in holding on his way to—”
“Did he confirm he goes by the name Little Bit?”
“Yeah, I mean, yes, sir. And he matches the description Chuck gave us. Skateboarder, long hair, carrying just under the line for intent to distribute.”
“Where are your notes? I told you to make copies.”
She jumped up from the chair. He watched her run back to the desk, then return to his office with a handful of photocopies. “I did them after I pulled all of those rape cases for you.”
He snatched the papers out of her hand. Jeffrey scanned her neat, block writing. Her notes read like a PowerPoint presentation. “You rewrote these.”