The Silent Wife (Will Trent #10) - Karin Slaughter Page 0,166

been absorbed.” Sara chose her words carefully. “If there was bruising, or internal tearing, the damage would still be apparent.”

Larry asked, “Tearing?”

“Yes.”

He stared at Sara, unspeaking. His eyes were light green, like her own eyes.

Like her father’s.

Eddie had never asked and Sara had never shared with him the details of her rape, though the weight of it had shifted their relationship in subtle ways. Cathy likened it to Adam eating from the tree of knowledge. They had both been thrown out of paradise.

“Larry.” Aimee had her arms crossed again. She was visibly struggling to hold back her emotions. “You know where I stand. But this isn’t my decision alone. Shay is just as much yours as she is mine.”

Larry looked down at his twisted hands. “Two yesses, one no.”

Sara recognized the phrase from her work at the children’s clinic. A lot of parents agreed to the dictum that on the important decisions, you had to have two yesses. One vote of no from either parent, for any reason, could shut down the conversation.

Larry leaned up to find his handkerchief in his back pocket. He blew his nose.

Sara was about to offer to leave, but the father stopped her.

“Yes,” he said. “Dig her up. I want to know.”

Sara spread out Leslie Truong’s paperwork across several desktops, trying to figure out what was bothering her. There was no lightning bolt. Her concentration was shot. Her brain had lost its sense of logic. She was standing in the briefing room, the same room they had all sat in this morning, but with another stressful twelve hours tacked onto her sleepless night.

The timing. Something was bothering her about the timing.

A wide yawn broke her train of thought. Neither of the two coffees she’d bolted down was having the desired effect. All Sara wanted in the world was to put her head down on one of the desks and grab five minutes of sleep. She looked at the clock on the wall. 7:02 p.m. The floor-to-ceiling windows showed an ominous black outside. She rubbed her eyes. Stray bits of mascara still clung to her lashes. She had washed off in the shower at the back of the morgue. Her scrubs smelled like the chemicals Gary used to scour the tables, but she’d trade that for the formaldehyde stench and U-Store damp any day.

She looked at the clock again, because she kept losing track of time. That was what happened when you drove around town all night with a blinding rush of shit in your brain. At least Tessa had gotten a good laugh out of it.

She had to look at the clock a third time.

7:03 p.m.

Sara’s only hope was that she would catch her second wind when the briefing started. Then, she would go home and fall into bed.

Whether or not Will was beside her was completely out of her hands.

“Doc.” Nick placed his rhinestone cowboy briefcase in one of the chairs. “Amanda told me you were in Grant County today.”

“For two seconds. Brock gave me access to his storage facility.”

“Find any taxidermied corpses dressed like his mother?”

Sara abhorred that kind of teasing. “I found the files we need to investigate this case, and I’m grateful that Brock was willing to help us.”

Nick’s eyebrows went up, but he didn’t apologize. He unhooked his reading glasses from his shirt. He looked down at the papers on the desks. “This everything?”

“Yes.”

He ran his fingers down a few paragraphs. “It’s hard for me to accept that Jeffrey was wrong on this one.”

“You mean the Chief?”

Nick kept his eyes on the page, but she saw the sly grin on his lips. He had never called Jeffrey by that name.

“Nick, what you’re doing with Will,” Sara said. “I know that Jeffrey would’ve appreciated it, but I don’t.”

He looked at her over his glasses. He gave a curt nod. “Message received.”

“Dr. Linton.” The top of Amanda’s head entered the room first. As usual, she was typing on her phone. “I sent the Van Dorne paperwork to Villa Rica. They’ve scheduled the exhumation for five tomorrow morning. The information is on the server.”

“Great,” Sara said, because standing in a cold, dark cemetery at the crack of dawn was much better than sleeping in her warm bed.

Nick asked Amanda, “How’d it go with Zanger? Is she a victim or was that Miranda gal just blowing smoke up our asses?”

“I haven’t been updated.” She asked Sara, “Tommi Humphrey?”

Sara’s brain took a moment to catch up. It wasn’t like Faith and Will not to report