Blake didn’t—”
“Her parents withdrew her from class. I’m not sure what happened to her things.”
“But Sibyl—”
“You need to leave it alone.”
“Tommi Humphrey was the victim of a crime. From what you’re saying, it was a serious crime. And now Leslie Truong is missing. Who knows what the hell happened to Beckey Caterino. These are links, Sara. We have to explore them.”
“Are you going to open up every rape investigation in town? How are you going to find the women who were too damaged, or too afraid, to report it? How are you going to locate girls who left the school because fifteen, twenty, thirty minutes of their lives erased every meaningful second of the two decades that came before it?”
He seldom heard Sara speak so passionately about something so raw. He had always wondered about Tessa. She had spent a lot of drunken nights during high school and college. Jeffrey could vividly recall making a five-hour drive to Florida in the middle of the night to talk the local sheriff out of charging her for drunk and disorderly.
He chose his words carefully. “If there’s a connection between what happened to Tommi Humphrey and what happened to Beckey Caterino or Leslie Truong—”
“Leave her alone, Jeff. Please. For me.”
He was so close to agreeing with her, if only because he wanted desperately to do something, anything, that made Sara trust him again.
Then his computer chimed, announcing a new email.
Sara went behind his desk. She put on her glasses. She did a couple of clicks. He could see the images reflected in the lenses.
She said, “Come here.”
Jeffrey stood behind her. He guessed he was looking at a slide from an MRI. He recognized cervical vertebrae stacked down from the skull, but the cord running behind it resembled a piece of rope that had frayed at the middle. Fibers jutted out. Something that looked like a liquid bubble encased the area.
Sara said, “This is the spinal cord puncture. Something sharp and pointed entered the skin here.”
Jeffrey felt Sara’s fingers press against the back of his neck.
“Her legs would be paralyzed, everything from here down.” Her hand went to her hip. “This injury was deliberate. It wouldn’t happen from the fall. I would guess the instrument was similar in shape to an awl or a counterpunch, but don’t quote me on that.”
Jeffrey held back his questions. Sara was opening the next file, which was an X-ray.
“The skull fracture.” She clicked in for a closer view.
Jeffrey knew what an intact skull was supposed to look like. The fracture was at the back of the head, the spot where most men started to go bald. The bone had splintered into sunrays. A semi-circular piece rested against the brain.
Sara knelt down, leaning in close to the monitor. “Here.”
Jeffrey leaned down beside her. He followed her finger as it traced a crescent shape at the bottom of the fracture.
He knew that she wouldn’t say definitively what had happened, so he asked, “Best guess?”
“It’s not a guess,” Sara told him. “She was hit in the back of the head with a hammer.”
Atlanta
11
Sara couldn’t finish her second Scotch. Her stomach felt sour. She was shaky in a way that was hard to articulate. Jeffrey’s notes. Jeffrey’s files. Jeffrey’s field interview cards. Jeffrey’s ruler-straight lines drawn across a faded topographic map of Heartsdale. His ghost sat at the table across from her as she read his words from eight years ago. The names came back with a startling clarity.
Little Bit. Chuck Gaines. Thomasina Humphrey.
The delicate script was such a sharp contrast to his tough exterior. Jeffrey had been the embodiment of tall, dark and handsome. He’d had a football player’s swagger combined with a wonderfully sharp intelligence. Even in the precise, technical jargon of a police report, the summation of a witness interview, the transcript of a phone call, his personality shone through.
Sara held one of Jeffrey’s spiral-bound notebooks in her hand. It was roughly the size of an index card. He had put the dates on the cover alongside the cases encapsulated inside. She flipped it open. Grant County was a small enough force that the chief of police doubled as an investigator. Every case that Jeffrey had worked on had made it into his notebooks. He had been a meticulous record keeper. Sara paged through the headers in the first few dozen pages—
Harold Niles/burglary. Gene Kessler/bike theft. Pete Wayne/stolen tips.
$80,000.
The dollar amount had its own page. Jeffrey had underlined it twice, then circled it. The writing had a dimensionality. The