The Silent Wife (Will Trent #10) - Karin Slaughter Page 0,64
FOR REBECCA website. Faith pointed to the menus as she read, “THE CRIME. THE INVESTIGATION. THE EVIDENCE. THE COVER-UP.”
She tapped down to a sub-menu under cover-up.
She read the blue, hyperlinked words, “Jeffrey Tolliver. Lena Adams. Frank Wallace. Matt Hogan.”
Will randomly selected the names. The accompanying photographs had been Photoshopped to look like mugshots. A red bullseye was placed over each face like you’d find on a paper target at a shooting range.
Jeffrey Tolliver had a fake bullet hole between his eyes.
Faith had seen the images while Will was inside the store, but she still found them deeply unsettling. Legally, they fell under protected speech. There was no way to tell if Caterino was making a joke, engaging in a bit of fantasy, or encouraging violence against the police.
As a law enforcement officer, Faith lacked the generosity to give him the benefit of the doubt.
Will said, “A lot of people on the internet do things just because they can do them.”
The car was silent for a moment. Will was looking at both sides, but Faith could tell he was just as troubled as she was. He kept staring at the phone. He was probably thinking about what it would do to Sara to find a photo of her dead husband with a bullet hole Photoshopped in his head.
Will finally said, “I don’t want Sara to see this unless she has to.”
“Agreed.”
He handed back the phone. “What else is on there? Anything?”
Faith took a breath before jumping back in, because she would never leave the house if she let this kind of shit get to her. “I skimmed the crime/evidence stuff. The guy likes his adverbs. There’s a lot of wild conjecture and conspiracy theory bullshit, but not much in the way of concrete facts. Mostly, his focus is on how the police suck and that they should all be put on death row for not doing their jobs. It comes off like Peppa Pig trying to do John Grisham.”
“Death row?”
“Yep.”
There was another moment of silence.
Will said, “So, is he an acolyte? Copycat? Nutjob? Murderer?”
He was asking the questions they’d volleyed around this morning in the prison chapel.
“I think he’s a devastated father whose daughter was brutally attacked, and he blames the police for ruining both of their lives. If anything, he comes off as a cop-hating Don Quixote.”
“You said that Caterino started this online stuff five years ago. Beckey was attacked eight years ago. He waited three years before he got into it. What set him off?”
“Let’s see if he’ll tell us.”
Faith put the car in gear. She had already entered the address into the navigation system. Lena had done them at least one favor by dragging them down into the belly button of the state. Gerald Caterino lived in Milledgeville, about half an hour outside of Macon. Faith had called his office pretending to need an estimate on landscaping. They had told her that Gerald was working from home today. She had pulled up the county tax records and located Caterino’s $240,000 house in an older part of town.
Will opened the bag of Doritos. “We need to know more about the Leslie Truong case. From what Amanda told us, Sara found the same type of puncture wound in Alexandra McAllister’s spinal cord that Beckey Caterino had. What about Truong?”
“I bet you Lena drew a diagram in her notebook,” Faith said. “Fucking bitch.”
“The information will be in the files.”
Faith listened to him chew.
The files meant Jeffrey’s files. Sara was going to get them out of storage, a detail Amanda had relayed among a long list of tasks the team was expected to complete by the end of the day. Fortunately, Emma was staying with her father this week. The time was already creeping up on three o’clock. Faith had been awake since three this morning. All she could think about right now was walking through her front door, taking off her bra and reading escalator fatality stories until it was dark enough to go to bed.
Will said, “It takes three murders to make a serial.”
“We could have a lot more than that if we can get the bodies from the articles exhumed.” Faith hoped to God she wasn’t the person who had to ask the families for permission to dig up their dead children. “Let’s say Gerald Caterino agrees to talk to us. Do we tell him about McAllister’s death being ruled a homicide?”
“If we have to,” Will said. “We should hold back the bulk of the details, though.”