The Silent Wife (Will Trent #10) - Karin Slaughter Page 0,88
ballpoint pen point had left an indentation like Braille.
Sara thought about all of the things that could’ve backed up that $80,000. Not a burglary. Not a bike. Then, she extrapolated the number to Jeffrey’s life. His house had cost more than that. His student loans had been slightly less. His credit-card balance, at least the last time she’d seen it, was around five percent of that number.
Sara smiled.
There was only one thing that cost $80,000 from that time period, and that was Sara’s first Z4. She had absolutely bought the car to humiliate him. The miserable look on Jeffrey’s face every time he saw the sportscar had made Sara feel more transcendent than any orgasm he had ever given her. And Jeffrey had been damn fucking good at giving her orgasms.
Sara turned the page.
Rebecca Caterino/DOA.
The DOA had been crossed out with a single line and amended to attempted murder/sexual assault.
The tension between Jeffrey and Sara had shifted during the Caterino/Truong cases. Sara had found a way to be at peace with his refusal to tell the truth about how many women, how many times, he had cheated on her. As with many of her emotional shifts, the peace had come from her family. Sara remembered a conversation with her mother the night after they had found Beckey, before the assumed accident had turned into a full-on investigation.
She was sitting at her parents’ kitchen table. Her laptop was open. She was trying to update patient charts but feeling so overwhelmed that she had finally given up and put her head on the table.
Cathy had sat down beside her. She had grabbed Sara’s hands. Her mother’s skin was calloused. She was a gardener, a volunteer, a handyman, and anything else that required her to roll up her sleeves and get to work. Sara had been fighting tears. She was upset about the poor girl in the woods. She was furious at Lena. She was shaken because all of this tragedy had brought her into such close proximity with Jeffrey. And she was deeply ashamed of how she had volleyed insults with him inside her clinic office like a churlish ex-wife.
“My precious child,” her mother had said. “Let me carry the burden of your hate. Let me do that for you so that you can move on.”
Sara had joked about there being plenty of hate for Jeffrey to go around, but the mental image of her mother’s strong back carrying the burden of Sara’s hate, her sorrow, her humiliation, her disappointment and her love—because that was the most difficult part, the fact that Sara was still so much in love with Jeffrey—had somehow managed to lighten the weight that for the previous year had pressed down into every bone in her body.
Sara looked up from Jeffrey’s notes. She took a sip of Scotch. She wiped her eyes. She returned to the task at hand.
Jeffrey had documented arriving at the scene in the woods, discussing crowd control with Brad, getting the rundown from Lena. Like most cops, he used a shorthand, abbreviating Lena as L.A., Frank as F.W., and so on.
He’d written a phone number in the margins. No name, just a number. Sara’s brain automatically went to the assumption that it belonged to a woman he’d been seeing. She sat back in the chair. She tried to clear the spark of jealousy that accompanied the thought.
She turned the page.
TALK TO SL RE: 30 MINUTES.
Jeffrey had been haunted by the thirty minutes that Beckey Caterino had lain in the woods. Sara felt haunted, too. Thirty minutes was a long time, half of the golden hour in which a patient’s remaining lifespan was predicted by the actions that were taken to prolong her survival. Sara had equivocated when Jeffrey had asked her if thirty minutes would’ve made a difference. Medically speaking, thirty seconds might have made a hell of a difference. The tragedy on top of the tragedy was that they would never know.
Sara looked down at the notebook. Beneath her initials, Jeffrey had written the name Thomasina Humphrey.
Sara combined the two details, and suddenly, she found herself back in Jeffrey’s office. She had been waiting for the email to be sent to his computer when Jeffrey had returned from his talk with Sibyl Adams. Sara had been so close to telling him about her own rape. She had wanted to protect Tommi from the pain of an interrogation. She had been certain that the girl’s attack had nothing to do with