The Silent Wife (Will Trent #10) - Karin Slaughter Page 0,156

wasn’t going to get into a discussion about Amanda’s habit of playing hide-and-seek with information. She liked being the Great Wizard behind the curtain. Faith was tired of sitting in Dorothy’s basket.

Will said, “Amanda had a gut feeling about Masterson. That’s why she kept pushing on the ISP. She knows this is a serial. You have to trust that she has a plan. She’s trying to keep us reined in.”

“I guess this is the second day in a row I am going to have to tell a man that I am not a horse.”

Will stared ahead at the road. “Zanger was missing for thirty-six hours. What reason would she have for not filing a report?”

“Fear?” Faith asked, because that was the reason most women didn’t report attacks. She offered up the second one, “Maybe she was worried no one would believe her?”

“She had to go to the hospital. There was physical proof that she was injured.”

“Maybe she didn’t want to deal with it? Her divorce was seriously nasty. Her husband was banging strippers. The strippers talked. Then Callie’s ex-boyfriend came out with a story about her being an Adderall freak in college. All of this wasn’t just local gossip. It made it to the national news. And then, on top of everything else, she gets raped?” Faith had been spared that particular trauma, but she’d been a pregnant fifteen-year-old back when they still burned witches. She knew what it felt like to have everyone talking about you, judging you, dissecting you like a specimen under a microscope.

She told Will, “We don’t honestly know what happened to Callie Zanger in the woods. Look at the other side of the coin. She has a stressful, high-powered job, and in the middle of all of that, she’s going through a bad divorce where her most intimate details are being shared by strangers. Maybe she couldn’t take it anymore. She went into the woods to end it. Whatever she did didn’t work, so she changed her mind and walked out, and now she’s embarrassed.”

Will didn’t answer immediately. “Do you believe that’s what happened?”

Faith figured a woman like that would disappear into a Four Seasons spa before she walked into the woods. “No.”

“Me, neither.”

Faith tapped her phone over to Google Maps to make sure they were heading in the right direction. Will did not have satnav in his ancient Porsche 911. The car was nice inside, hand-restored by Will to its former glory, but unfortunately those glory days had been before cup holders and global warming. The air conditioner only went as low as warm.

“Here.” She pointed to the right. “Go down Crescent Avenue. The parking garage is accessed from the back of the building.”

Will put on the blinker. “Do we call her ahead of time or show up in her office?”

Faith considered the options as they waited out the light. “Zanger refused to talk to the cops. She sent Dirk-slash-Miranda a cease and desist letter. She’s made it clear that she doesn’t want an investigation.”

“She’s a tax litigator, not a criminal lawyer. A phone call from the GBI would probably rattle the hell out of her.” He added, “But us showing up in person …?”

Faith said, “We’re talking about freaking out a woman who was probably brutally attacked, right? Like, that was the worst day of her life, and she’s spent the last two years trying to forget about it, and now we’re going to show up with our badges and pick at that scab until it bleeds?”

“I can think of three possibilities.” Will counted them out on his fingers, “She’s either traumatized about what happened and that’s why she can’t talk about it. Or she’s afraid the attacker will come back and hurt her again, also traumatizing. Or she’s scared of the publicity because she was traumatized by it during her nasty divorce. Or she could be all of those things, but it doesn’t matter because any way you look at it, she’s traumatized and we’re trying to force her into doing something she doesn’t want to do, which is talk about what happened.”

Faith asked the question that they had both been avoiding. “What if she was hurt like Tommi Humphrey?”

The car went silent.

With very little effort, Faith was able to put herself back in the briefing room this morning. Sara was holding up the photograph of the splintered wooden end of the hammer.

Four months.

120 days.

That was the length of time Tommi Humphrey had to endure before doctors could begin to repair the