The Silent Wife (Will Trent #10) - Karin Slaughter Page 0,49

stuff instead of his. “What are you doing?”

“Looking for this.” She tossed a calculator onto her desk. “I need help counting up all the fucks I don’t give about your feelings.”

His jaw locked down so tight that he could feel his pulse throbbing in his face. “You can shove that calculator up your tight ass.”

“And you can go fuck yourself.”

“I’ve got plenty of women who can do that for me.”

“No shit, cocksucker.”

“Fuck you.”

Sara’s response got lost in the bang of Jeffrey sliding back the pocket door so hard that the doorjamb busted open. Wood splintered. Pictures fluttered through the air. In the hall, he ran into a wall of white—nurses, physician’s assistants, Dr. Barney in his lab coat—gathered around the nurse’s station. They all looked at him in disgust, because Sara was so fucking strategic that only his side of the argument had carried out into the hall.

This wasn’t a divorce. It was Carousel from Logan’s Run.

Jeffrey’s shoes squeaked as he walked up the hallway. His wet socks bunched around his ankles. He felt like steam was coming out of his head. He shouldered open the door. The storm still raged outside. Lightning cracked the sky. The clouds were as black as his mood.

He looked for his umbrella. It was in the middle of the parking lot. The rod was bent. Jeffrey walked out into the driving rain. He snatched the umbrella off the ground. His phone started to ring. He ignored it, the muscles in his arm tensing as he tried to force open the canopy.

“Shit!” Jeffrey hurled the useless umbrella toward the closed door. Rain pelted the top of his head. He trudged toward the driveway. He glanced at Sara’s car, but he wasn’t so far gone that he was going to give her the satisfaction of doing something stupid.

He looked back at the umbrella. He looked at the car.

His phone rang again.

He grabbed it out of his pocket. “Jesus, what?”

There was a hesitation. A slight intake of breath. He could tell it was Lena without looking at the caller ID.

He demanded, “What, Lena? What do you want?”

“Chief?” She was still hesitant in a way that made him want to spike his phone into the ground. He could see her across the street. She was standing inside the glass door at the front of the police station. “Chief?”

“You know I’m here, Lena. You can see me through the damn window. What is it?”

“The girl—” She stopped herself. “The other girl. The student.”

“Have you forgotten how to use adjectives?”

“She’s missing,” Lena said. “Leslie Truong. The witness who found Beckey Caterino in the woods. She never made it to the nurse’s station. She hasn’t been to her dorm or class. We can’t find her anywhere.”

Atlanta

6

Will drove in silence while Faith transcribed details from Daryl Nesbitt’s newspaper clippings into her notebook. He could hear her ballpoint pen scratching the paper. She liked to circle important words. The noise grated like sandpaper on teeth. He yearned for a distraction, but by detente, they never played the radio in the car. Faith was not going to listen to Bruce Springsteen. Will was not going to listen to *NSYNC.

Except for the occasional huh, Faith seemed content with the prolonged silence. Will’s brain kept churning up Faith-centric conversation starters—So, how are things with Emma’s father? Are stay-at-home-moms and working moms really like the Bloods and the Crips? What are the words to “Baby Shark”?—anything to save him from the rabbit hole of analyzing every single word that Sara had uttered to him in the last hour.

Not that there was a lot of raw data. Over the course of three brief conversations, his funny, articulate girlfriend was suddenly talking in a code that Alan Turing couldn’t break. Back at the prison, Sara hadn’t technically hung up on Will when he had called her from the bathroom, but the exchange had ended abruptly enough to send Will running through the halls like a lunatic. He was lucky the COs hadn’t shot him in the back. Then Sara had basically shot him in the face.

Salad?

McDonald’s?

What?

When Will was a kid and things got crazy, he’d imagine that his brain was a stack of lunch trays. He’d always been a big fan of food served in compartments—pizza in the big rectangle, corn, tater-tots and apple sauce in the squares. Visualizing trays gave him clearly defined sections to store his problems so that he could deal with them later. Or not. The stacking system had gotten him through some harrowing times.