The Silent Wife (Will Trent #10) - Karin Slaughter Page 0,189

up spending the day in bed, eating take-out and talking about their childhoods. The manhunt through the woods, Jeffrey’s fear that she was being held captive in the shed, were both unfounded.

He could torture himself with all the different ways he would’ve handled Daryl Nesbitt without the possible abduction of Rosario Lopez hanging over his head, but Jeffrey had learned a long time ago kicking yourself about the past would only trip you up in the future.

Besides, there were bigger mistakes that he was losing sleep over.

Rebecca Caterino was still in a coma. No one could say how much damage had been done to her brain. Everything was wait-and-see. Jeffrey kept telling himself that she would eventually recover. Beckey would never be able to walk again, but she would have a life. She could go back to school. She could graduate. The county’s insurance company was already negotiating a settlement with the girl’s father. The school was going to pay through the nose. Way down on that list was the fact that Jeffrey would keep his job.

For now, at least.

Bonita Truong had flown back to San Francisco with her daughter’s body. She had called Jeffrey twice since then. Each time, all he could do was listen to her cry. There was nothing anyone could say that would lessen her grief. As Cathy Linton was known to say, time was a tincture.

Jeffrey yearned for that healing elixir. He wanted the clock to speed up so that he was on the other side of his own sorrow. He had left Birmingham to get away from these kinds of violent, heartbreaking cases. He had thought that Grant County would be his Valhalla, where the worst thing that would happen was a stolen bike or a frat boy wrapping his car around a tree.

He told himself that nothing had changed. Daryl Nesbitt was an aberration. A once-in-a-lifetime psychopath. Jeffrey’s career from this point forward would be spent shaking hands at Rotary Club meetings and helping old ladies find their cats.

He unwrapped a cough drop and flipped it into his mouth.

Spring was making itself known from one end of Main Street to the other. Downtown still looked picture-perfect, despite the horrors that had unfolded in the woods last week. The leaves on the dogwoods waved frantically in the breeze. The flowers the garden club had planted were in full bloom. The gazebo display in front of the hardware store was being kept company by a wooden bench. The rack of clearance clothes had been picked clean outside the dress shop.

Jeffrey coughed again.

The smoke inhalation wasn’t the only reason his throat was hurting. He’d spent the last hour arguing with the district attorney and the mayor about the evidence against Daryl Nesbitt. The hammer. The proximity. The phone number.

The shed.

Jeffrey was filled with dread every time he thought about the homemade prison in Daryl Nesbitt’s back yard. The bars on the window and door had been installed with eight-inch, one-way screws. They’d had to drill them out to open the door. Inside, they’d found a cot with a pastel pink blanket. There was a bucket in the corner. A pink hairbrush and matching comb.

There was also a length of chain attached to a metal ring that was concreted into the floor.

No blood. No fluids. No hair. No DNA. The shed looked like a prison cell, but having a shed that looked like a prison cell was not illegal. Neither was working near a fire road that offered easy access to the location where a body was found. Or owning a 1.5-pound mallet that was part of a Brawleigh Dead Blow set. Or driving a charcoal van. Or your number showing up in the phones of two women who were both attacked.

The child porn, on the other hand, was enough to put Daryl Nesbitt away for at least five years.

Five years.

Jeffrey could work with that. Witnesses would come forward. People would remember things. Tommi Humphrey could decide to break her silence. Jeffrey was dubious of her negative response to Daryl Nesbitt’s booking photo. He wanted to put the pedophile in a line-up, allow Tommi time to study his face from the safety of darkness. Seeing a one-dimensional mugshot was very different from seeing a man in person.

The biggest obstacle was Nesbitt’s lawyer. He was from Memminger, well-versed in the defense of scumbags. The lawyer would fight a line-up. He’d already refused to grant access to his client. He’d wrangled Nesbitt an extended stay in the Macon Hospital