Читать книгу The Silent Wife - Karin Slaughter, Karin Slaughter - Страница 10

Faith had to use the men’s restroom because the only women’s room was a ten-minute walk to the visitation wing. She washed her hands at the slimy-looking sink. She splashed cold water on her face. Nothing short of a Brillo pad would remove the prison grime from her pores.

Even inside of the administrative building, the air was thick with desperation. She could hear shouting from the segregation ward. Crying. Howling. Pleading. Faith’s skin tingled in a fight-or-flight reaction. She had been on flight from the moment she’d walked through the gate. Her job meant that she spent most of her days being the only woman in the room. Being the only woman in a men’s prison was a different beast. She couldn’t stray too far from the men she knew were good guys. And by good guys, she meant the men who wouldn’t gang-rape her.

She shook the water off her hands, dismissing the fear. All of her brainpower had to go toward breaking Daryl Nesbitt because she was not going to blow up Sara’s life over some sleazy convict’s play for attention.

Faith opened the door. Nick and Will were both stone-faced. She could tell they hadn’t talked to each other because why would they talk when they could silently brood?

She said, “This Nesbitt asshole has to be full of shit, right? He’s a con. It’s never their fault. They’re always innocent. The cops are always crooked. Fuck the man. Am I right?”

Nick sort-of-but-not-really nodded.

Will glowered.

She asked Nick, “What do you know about Nesbitt?”

“I know he’s a convicted pedophile, but I didn’t do a deep dive into his jacket.”

Drilling down on Daryl Nesbitt would’ve been Faith’s first act before running around like a chicken with its head cut off.

She asked, “Why?”

Faith watched Nick’s jawbone stick out like a goiter on the side of his face. This was the reason that Will was glowering. Nick wouldn’t be this upset if he truly believed that Daryl Nesbitt was lying. He would not have pinwheeled into the interrogation room. His skin would not be the color of hot dog water. Every single action Nick had taken so far was like a giant neon sign with a flashing arrow pointing at the word MAYBE!

“Let’s get this over with.” Faith started up the hallway. She didn’t bother to check in with Will. He wasn’t going to stop for a heartfelt conversation. Based on past experience, she could hazard a guess as to what was running through his mind. He was trying to figure out how to hide all of this from Sara.

Faith was all in on this conspiracy of silence. For fucksakes, Sara had watched her husband die five years ago. She had crawled back from grief through the flames of hell. She was finally happy with Will. They were probably going to get married if Will ever worked up the nerve to ask her. There was no reason to tell Sara about Daryl Nesbitt unless and until there was something to tell.

Faith took a left into the last office at the end of the hall.

Nesbitt was sitting in a chair behind the folding table. Caucasian, mid-thirties, brown hair streaked with gray, glasses taped at the bridge. He was unrestrained. No cuffs, no chains. The bottom half of his leg was missing. A below-the-knee prosthetic leg was propped against the wall. He looked like a stoner who had dreamed of becoming a skateboard star but ended up arrested for robbing a Dunkin’ Donuts. Newspaper clippings were stacked neatly on the table in front of him.

Nick made the introductions. “Daryl Nesbitt, special agents Trent and Mitchell.”

Nesbitt dove straight in. “This one here—” he stabbed his finger into a stack of articles. “She was twenty-two.” He pointed to another stack. “She was nineteen.”

Faith sat down in the only other chair in the room, across the table from Nesbitt. The man smelled of decay, but maybe Faith was smelling herself. Her clothes and hair had absorbed the odor from the cafeteria. The office was small, slightly larger than one of the cells. Nick took his place directly behind the inmate. His back pressed against the wall. Will stayed in the doorway just behind Faith.

She let the silence linger so Nesbitt knew who was in charge. She’d made a point of not looking down at the clippings, but she had seen enough to get the basics. Ten stacks in total, maybe five or six articles each. Two of the piles looked recent, though the other eight had yellowed with age. One set had almost completely faded. The gray words ghosted across the news page. She saw a logo for the Grant Observer. Nick hadn’t said anything about the articles. Then again, Nick wasn’t saying much about anything.

Nesbitt told Faith, “If you read—”

“Hold up.” She put the interview on formal grounds, telling the inmate, “You’re in custody, but you still have the right to remain—”

“I waive my rights.” Nesbitt held up his hands, palms out. “I’m here to work a trade. I’ve got nothing to hide.”

Faith doubted that very seriously. If she’d seen Nesbitt on the street, she would’ve immediately clocked him as a con. The beady eyes. The beaten-down, angry slope of his shoulders. If he wasn’t hiding something, then she was in the wrong business.

He pointed to the articles again. “You need to read these. You’ll understand.”

She read off some of the headlines from the first stack of clippings. “‘Teenager’s Body Found in Woods.’ ‘Student Declared Missing.’ ‘Mother Pleads with Police to Search for Missing Daughter.’”

She thumbed through the other stacks. More of the same, all in reverse order so they started with a body being found and ended up with a woman who hadn’t shown up for work, class or a family dinner. Someone else had collected these stories for Nesbitt. There were no newspapers in prison. The articles must have been mailed to him. And since they were actual newsprint articles, she assumed a mother or elderly relative had done the honors.

Faith checked the dates above the bylines. The Grant County clippings were from eight years ago. The others spanned the years in between. “These stories aren’t exactly current.”

“My research is limited by my circumstances.” Nesbitt indicated the two more recent cases. “This one, she went missing three months ago. Her body was found last month. This one was found yesterday morning. Yesterday morning!”

His voice had screeched up on the last sentence. Faith let a few seconds pass before she answered, making it clear that yelling would not be tolerated. “How’d you hear about a body being found when you’ve been in lockdown since the riot?”

Nesbitt’s lips smacked open, then quickly shut. He must’ve had access to a smartphone. “The woman’s name is Alexandra McAllister. Her body was found by two hikers.”

Faith wanted to check on Will. She looked over her shoulder, telling him the name of the city where the body had been found, “Sautee Nacoochee.”

He nodded, but his attention was zeroed in on Nesbitt’s face. Will was good at spotting liars. Judging by his expression, he wasn’t looking at one.

Faith scanned the eight-day-old article on Alexandra McAllister’s initial disappearance. The woman had gone for a hike and hadn’t returned. The search had been called because of inclement weather. Sautee was in White County, which meant the sheriff’s department was handling the investigation. Faith had watched a news story about the woman’s body being found in the woods. The reporter had said foul play was not suspected.

She asked Nesbitt, “Who sent you these?”

“A friend, but that doesn’t matter. I have valuable information to trade.” Nesbitt clasped his hands together. His nails were rimmed with black like mold around a shower tile. “I know who killed Jesus Vasquez.”

“We’ll probably know who killed him by the end of the day,” Faith bluffed, but not by much. She was pretty sure from scanning the jackets on the eighteen inmates that they were close to nailing their guys. “Get out of jail free cards are very expensive.”

“I can save you the time. All I’m asking for is a fair shake.”

He was holding back something. Obviously. Cons held back the happy when they called their mother on her birthday.

“Look into these.” Nesbitt indicated the articles again. “You could be the cop who arrests a serial killer. All of these women got snatched after I was convicted. That’s the guy you want. Not me. I’m innocent.”

“That sets you apart from every other inmate inside these walls.”

“You’re not listening to me, dammit.” Nesbitt’s voice was loud enough to echo in the cramped room. He gritted his teeth, biting back an explosion of words. He had been institutionalized long enough to learn that anger would not get him what he wanted. But he had also been institutionalized, which meant self-control was probably not one of his strengths.

He said, “Look, I don’t belong in this facility. I was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Local law enforcement jammed me up because a young, white college student was killed and they had to pin it on somebody. It was blatant profiling.”

Faith said, “Statistically, white women are more likely to be murdered by white men.”

“That’s not the kind of profiling I’m talking about!” Nesbitt’s temper finally broke through. “Why aren’t you listening to me, you stupid fucking bitch?”

Faith felt Will coil behind her like a rattlesnake.

Nick had pushed away from the wall.

Nesbitt was surrounded, but his hands were still clenched. His ass was barely in the seat. Faith thought of all the places he could punch her before Will and Nick stopped him. Then she banished those thoughts, because she had a job to do. She’d told Will that inmates were like toddlers. If there was anything Faith knew, it was how to handle a bratty kid.

“Time out.” Faith T’d her hands to call it. “Nesbitt, if we’re going to keep talking, you’re going to have to do something for me.”

Nesbitt continued to stew in his chair, but he was listening.

Faith said, “Take in a deep breath, then slowly let it go.”

He looked confused, which was the point.

“Five times. I’ll do it with you.” Faith sucked in a deep breath to get him started. “In and out.”

Nesbitt finally relented, his chest rising and falling once, then twice, then eventually, the fury started to drain from his eyes.

Faith shushed out the fifth breath, feeling her own heart rate start to slow. “Okay, lay out your case for me. Why did you bring this to agent Shelton instead of the warden?”

“The warden’s a limp-dicked piece of shit. I know the law. The GBI is in charge of investigating corrupt law enforcement officers.” Nesbitt had spat out the words, but now he visibly worked to force some calm into his tone. “I am a victim of police corruption. I was profiled because I’m poor. Because I had a record. Because I spent too much time with girls.”

Girls.

Faith asked, “How old were these young ladies?”

“That’s not the point. Christ.” Nesbitt’s fist hovered over the table. He caught himself before banging it down. Unprompted, he took another deep breath, then hissed it out between his teeth. His breath was foul. She noticed that his skin was clammy.

Faith glanced over Nesbitt’s shoulder. Nick had put on his glasses so he could read about the Grant County side of things. Eight years felt like a lifetime. The newspaper clipping was so old that he was holding it with both hands so it wouldn’t tear. She could tell from his face that every word he was reading was like a punch to the gut.

Faith told Nesbitt, “Like I said, we’ve got the Vasquez thing pretty much figured out and if we choose to investigate these cases, you’ve already given us the articles, so we really don’t—”

“Wait!” He reached for her hand, but stopped at the last minute. “Just wait, okay? I’ve got more.”

Faith left her hand on the table, though her instinct had been to reel back. She looked at her watch. “You’ve got one minute.”

“Vasquez was killed for his distribution network.” Nesbitt licked his lips, anxious for a reaction. “I can tell you how they’re bringing in the phones. Where they’re stashing them. How the money works. I won’t testify, but I can put you exactly where they’ll be when the phones come in.”

Faith felt obliged to point out the obvious. “We can break the distribution network ourselves. We did it four years ago. Almost fifty corrections officers are behind bars right now because of it.”

“Do you have another year to launch an investigation?” Nesbitt asked. “Does the GBI wanna waste all that time and money and resources and pull in the FBI and DEA and the sheriff’s office and put agents undercover and work another sting that takes millions of dollars and ends up embarrassing your sorry asses with all those bad cops on trial every time you turn on the news?”

The guy had done his homework. Money. Federal agencies. Public humiliation. There wasn’t one part of what he’d said that didn’t shoot fear into the heart of every cop over the rank of sergeant.

“I can hand the phone racketeering to you on a silver platter,” Nesbitt said. “I’ll give you one week to look into these cases in the newspapers. One week instead of a year-long investigation. Plus you get to nail a serial killer. All you’ve got to do is—”

“Stop the bullshit!” Without warning, Nick raked back Nesbitt’s chair and slammed him into the wall.

Faith was so shocked that she stood up, hand going to her belt, but her gun was in a lockbox by the metal detector. “Agent Shelton,” she boomed, using her cop voice. “Back away from—”

“You slimy kidfucker.” Nick grabbed Nesbitt’s shirt and yanked him up to standing. “You know you’re not getting out of here. Your own article says your conviction was upheld twice. No one believed your bullshit. Not the jury. Not the appellate court. Not the state supreme court.”

“So what?” Nesbitt screamed back. “Sandra Bland is dead! John Hinckley’s a free man! OJ’s playing golf in Florida! You’re telling me our legal system is fair?”

Nick’s face was so close that their noses were touching. His fist reared back. “I’m telling you to watch your fucking mouth or I will beat you to the fucking ground.”

Will’s hand was on Nick’s shoulder. Faith hadn’t seen him move, but suddenly, he was there. She saw his fingers flex, more like the pat that Nick had given him back in the interrogation room.

Faith was running through all the ways this could go from bad to worse when the air changed in the room.

Slowly, Nick turned. He looked at Will. His eyes were wild, and then they weren’t. His muscles were tensed, but then they weren’t. His fists unclenched. He took a step back.

“Jesus!” Nesbitt hopped on one leg, trying to put some space between them.

Will righted the chair. He helped Nesbitt sit back down.

Faith silently begged Nick to leave, but he took his post behind the inmate, hands shoved deep into the front pockets of his jeans.

“Asshole.” Nesbitt smoothed down his wrinkled shirt. He was visibly shaken. Faith felt the same. This wasn’t how they did things. She had never seen Nick explode like that. She never wanted to see it again.

“Okay.” Faith could barely hear her own voice over the rapid tap of her own heartbeat. She had to get the interview back on track, not least of all because she didn’t want to be called to testify by a prosecutor who was charging Nick with a custodial assault. “Nesbitt, I’m listening to you. Tell me about the articles. What are we looking for?”

Nesbitt wiped his mouth with his hands. “You gonna let him get away with that?”

“Get away with what?” Faith shook her head in mock disbelief, making herself the shittiest kind of cop there was. “I didn’t see anything.”

She didn’t need to look back at Will to know that he was shaking his head, too.

“Nesbitt,” she said. “This is your moment. Either start talking or we’ll leave.”

“I was set up.” Nesbitt wiped his mouth again. “God’s honest truth. I was framed.”

“Okay.” Faith could feel a river of sweat flowing down her back. She had to make this man feel like he was being listened to. “Who framed you? Tell me about it.”

“It was those fucking small-town cops, okay? They controlled everything that happened in that county. The prosecutor, the judge, the jury—they all bought into that self-righteous cowboy bullshit.”

He turned around, making sure that they all knew the kind of cowboy bullshit he was talking about.

“Careful, son.” Nick’s voice sounded gravelly. “You don’t wanna go letting something out that you can’t put back in the bottle.”

Nesbitt’s anger had given way to despair. “You stupid redneck motherfucker, what do you think I’ve got to lose?”

Faith waited for Nick to do something stupid again, but he just lifted his chin and stared out into the hallway.

She studied Nesbitt’s face. Dark circles pooled under his eyes. Deep lines creased his forehead. He looked like an old man. Being inside could age anyone, but being inside with a disability must’ve been a whole new circle of hell.

In the silence, she drummed her fingers on the table. She asked Nesbitt, “How do you know about Vasquez’s phone business?”

“I’ve been doing janitorial in this place for six years. Nobody sees me, so I can see everybody else.” Nesbitt counted off on his fingers. “I can give you names, places, suppliers and dealers. You think the warden found all the phones in this place? A man can’t take a shit in here without a cell signal squirting out.”

Faith scanned the Grant County articles, confirming what Nick had said. “You’ve already lost two appeals. You know judges don’t like to admit other judges are wrong. How is an investigation going to benefit you?”

“It’ll benefit everybody. These are dirty cops. They locked up the wrong man. They framed me and they let the real killer get away. The rot started in Grant County, but it spread across the state and now these other women are dead because of it.” Nesbitt sat back with a smug look on his face. He could feel the tide shifting. “We’re in lockdown for another week. Like I said, I’ll give you that long to look into it.”

“We’d need a proffer,” Faith said. “Something to prove that you can deliver what you’re offering.”

“I will tell you one stash location once I know you’re seriously investigating these cases.”

“Define that,” Faith said. “What does ‘seriously investigating’ mean?”

The smug look got even smugger. “I’ll know.”

Faith’s fingers were still drumming the table as she tried to see through to the end of this game. “Hypothetically, let’s say we uncover proof that law enforcement acted inappropriately. That’s no guarantee that you’re going to get out of here.”

Nesbitt confirmed one of her suspicions. “Second-best thing to me getting out of this hellhole would be those crooked bastards ending up in here.”

“I hate to tell you this,” Faith said. “But Jeffrey Tolliver died five years ago.”

“You think I don’t know that? The whole fucking county went into mourning. There’s a damn plaque in the middle of Main Street, like he was some kind of hero, but I’m telling you he was poison.” Nesbitt was getting agitated again, this time with righteous indignation. “Tolliver was the ringleader. He taught that entire force how to break the law and get away with it, and they’re still out there doing it. I want that fucking plaque torn down. I want to shit on his name, then set it on fire.”

Faith had to wrap this up before Nick went off again.

She told Nesbitt, “No matter how solid your information is, the state is not going to spend resources on a vendetta. We investigate crimes. We make cases. We can’t retroactively charge dead people.”

“This dirty fucker will snitch on Tolliver the minute you show her the cuffs.” Nesbitt jabbed his finger into one of the Grant County articles.

DETECTIVE TAKES THE STAND

Nesbitt said, “She’s still a cop. Still out there pulling the dirty shit Tolliver taught her, destroying everything she touches. It’s your job to take down bad cops. You take her down, I guarantee she’ll drag Tolliver and everybody else down with her.”

Even without the articles, the she narrowed it down to the point of a pin. Grant County had only ever had one female detective in its entire history. Lena Adams had been recruited straight out of the academy. All of her early promise had dissolved into a cesspit of lazy shortcuts and dirty tricks.

Faith knew this because Lena had been investigated by the GBI before. Will had been the agent in charge. When Sara had found out, she had almost left him. And for good reason. Nesbitt wasn’t wrong about Lena Adams destroying everything she touched.

She was the reason that Jeffrey Tolliver had been murdered.

Faith leaned her head into her hand as she read through Daryl Eric Nesbitt’s jacket. The file was as thick as a Bible, most of it filled with treatment notes relating to his amputation. Faith’s eyes blurred over the impenetrable medical jargon. Her back was aching. She was balancing more than sitting in what passed for a pew inside the prison chapel. She glanced up to check on Will. He was doing his usual, leaning against a wall, listening but not listening. Nick was giving Amanda the rundown of what Nesbitt had told them in the cramped office and why he had waited until now to tell her about it.

Faith wondered if he was going to get to the part where he’d laid hands on an inmate, but Nick seemed mostly focused on Nesbitt’s smug demeanor. Later tonight when Faith was trying to sleep, she would go through every single second of the interview and excoriate herself for protecting Nick. It had been instinctual, visceral, like vomiting when you had food poisoning.

And the worst part was that she knew she would do the same thing the next time.

Faith blinked to clear her eyes. She ignored the low rumble of one of Amanda’s pointed questions. She looked around the room, which was set up for all denominations, with every shade of Jesus as well as a metal colander she assumed was for Pastafarians, a religion that, after several lawsuits, was legally recognized by the state. Graffiti was scratched into the pulpit. Colored stickers lent a stained-glass effect to the one sliver of a window. The damp little room was depressing enough to turn the Pope into an atheist.

“Ma’am.” Nick was clearly trying to hold it together. “Tolliver was as solid as they come. You know that. He was one of the best cops—the best men—in the damn state. I put my life in his hands more than once. I’d gladly do it again if he was still with us. Hell, I’d trade places with him right now.”

Faith checked on Will again. It was hard enough to compete with a ghost. Hearing Jeffrey put up there with the saints must’ve been excruciating.

Amanda asked, “There’s no way to extricate one from the other? Throw Adams under the bus, keep Tolliver out of it?”

Nick shook his head.

So did Faith. Daryl Nesbitt seemed determined to drag Jeffrey’s name through the mud right alongside Lena’s. Which was a particular talent of the heinous bitch. She always managed to taint everyone around her.

“All right.” Amanda gave a curt nod. “Nesbitt is offering two things. One, the names of Vasquez’s killers. Two, information on the influx of cell phones into this facility. In exchange, Nesbitt has put a one-week clock on us opening the cases of the dead women from the articles and investigating Grant County. Yes?”

“Yes,” Nick said.

Faith nodded.

Will kept holding up the wall.

Amanda said, “Let’s start with the Vasquez murder. Two suspects. Maduro and who else?”

“My money is on Michael Padilla,” Nick said. “He’s a bone breaker with a side of psychosis. Got transferred here from Gwinnett DOC after biting off another inmate’s finger.”

Faith recognized the name from the stack of jackets she’d read through. “It’s not a stretch to think a finger-biter would be a hand-chopper.”

Amanda said. “Nick, see if you can get Maduro to turn on Padilla. If we can unwind the Vasquez murder, we can cut Nesbitt off at the knees.”

Faith felt a jolt of shock. Amanda didn’t know about Nesbitt’s prosthesis, and Faith could not think of a natural way to bring it up.

Amanda called to Nick, “None of this gets back to Sara. Understood?”

“Yes, ma’am.” Nick had a grim set to his mouth. On his way out of the chapel, he patted Will on the shoulder. Faith didn’t know if Nick was offering Will support, thanking him for intervening with Nesbitt, or tapping him in. The least she could do was make sure she said Jeffrey Tolliver’s name as little as possible.

Amanda said, “Faith, nutshell it for me.”

“Okay, this is where it gets tricky. Grant County never charged Nesbitt with murder.”

Amanda raised an eyebrow. “No?”

“The investigation is still technically open and considered unsolved. There was a ton of circumstantial evidence that led them to presume that Nesbitt was the killer. The biggest mark against him was that the bad things stopped happening when Nesbitt was locked up.”

“The Wayne Williams Paradigm.”

“Correct. Nesbitt was arrested and convicted for other, unrelated crimes that were uncovered during the murder investigation, but it’s presumed he committed the underlying crimes.” Faith added, “If I had to use a bad cliché, I’d say Nesbitt is playing chess instead of checkers. He thinks if we can clear him of the murder, that opens up the possibility of his next move, which would be knocking down the other charges.”

“The other charges being?”

“Initially, Grant County caught him with a shit-ton of kiddie porn on his laptop computer. We’re talking tweens, eight to eleven years old.” Faith pushed away thoughts of her own children. “Nesbitt was sentenced to five years with possible probation after three, but it never came to that. The idiot is king of the self-inflicted wound. He started making trouble the minute he walked through the gates. Lots of fighting, holding on to contraband, stealing shit from the wrong people. Finally, he ended up punching out a CO who woke up out of a coma two weeks later. Nesbitt got two dimes tacked onto his initial sentence for attempted murder of a corrections officer.”

“He’s looking at Buck Rogers Time,” Amanda said, using old-timey slang for a release date so far into the future that it felt like a fantasy. “Nesbitt doesn’t have a lot to lose. He has a history of creating trouble. What’s your impression? Does he really think he’s going to walk out of here?”

“He’s a below-the-knee amputee.”

“Does that change your answer?”

“No.” Faith tried to put herself in Nesbitt’s shoe. “He’s behind bars for the attack on the CO no matter what happens to his original case. There’s no causal connection between the alleged constitutional violation and the acts he took against the guard. But here’s where the chess moves come in. Take away the cloud hanging over Nesbitt’s head concerning the Grant County investigation. If Nesbitt can get the kiddie porn charge off his sheet, he’s out of protective custody. Then, he can petition for transfer. Yes, he’s got the attempted murder on the CO, but I can see a scenario where he argues diminished capacity because of the disability. That could buy him a ticket into a low-security facility, which is a country-club compared to where he is now.”

“You think he’s playing us for better accommodations?”

“I think he’s absolutely playing us. Con’s gonna con. Nesbitt wouldn’t do this if he wasn’t working at least twenty different angles. My gut tells me that vengeance against Grant County is his primary motive, but there’s a lot of other benefits he can get if we re-open his original case. Attention. Special treatment. Trips to the police station, the courthouse.”

Amanda asked, “Will? Anything to add?”

Will said, “No.”

Amanda told Faith, “Tell me about Nesbitt’s petitions for post-trial relief.”

“He appealed his kiddie porn conviction on two separate issues.” Faith referred to her notes to make sure she got it right. “First, he said the initial search of his house that revealed the contents of his hard drive was fruit of the poisoned tree. Law enforcement did not have a warrant and they did not have probable cause to enter his residence. Nothing pointed to him as a suspect.”

“Second?”

“Even if law enforcement had probable cause to enter, they were limited to searching for a suspect or a weapon or a possible hostage, not a computer file. They would’ve needed a warrant to search the computer.”

Amanda’s eyebrow rose up again, because Nesbitt’s lawyers were on firmer ground. “And?”

Faith’s cheeks felt red. Will had started to pay close attention. He had a weird sixth sense about when shit was about to get real. “One of the detectives testified at trial that she was searching the desk drawers for weapons when she accidentally bumped the laptop. The screen woke up, she saw images of child pornography, and they charged Nesbitt for possession of illegal images.”

“Lena Adams.” Amanda’s disgusted tone said it all. None of them bought the story. This was why Nick had been so hot under the collar when they were interviewing Nesbitt. For Faith’s part, she wouldn’t believe Lena Adams if the crooked cop swore on a stack of Bibles that the sun rose in the east.

Faith felt overwhelmed by the need to state the obvious. “If we discover during an investigation that Lena lied about how the porn was found on Nesbitt’s computer, then every single case she’s ever worked on will be put under a microscope. And Nesbitt can make a damn good argument to kick that porn charge off his sheet. We would basically be helping a pedophile.”

“You just said he’d remain in prison.”

“But it would be a nicer prison.”

“We’ll burn that bridge when we cross it.” Amanda paced off the space between the pulpit and the wall, her hands clasped together under her chin. “Tell me about the newspaper articles.”

Faith wanted to stew on Nesbitt some more, but Amanda was right.

She said, “All of the articles appear to be from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution except for the Grant County ones, which are from the Grant Observer. When I asked Nesbitt how he got the articles, he said ‘a friend’ sent them.”

“Mother? Father?”

“According to his jacket, Nesbitt’s mother died from an overdose when he was a kid. His stepfather raised him, but that guy’s been serving time in the Atlanta Pen for almost a decade. They don’t write or talk on the phone. Nesbitt’s got no other family. He hasn’t had a visitor since he entered the system. He doesn’t make phone calls or send emails. Unless he’s using a contraband phone, then all bets are off.”

“I’ll put in a request for Nesbitt’s mail. There’s a central station where all inmate correspondences are scanned and cross-checked for suspected criminal activity.” Amanda typed the order into her phone, asking Faith, “What’s the importance of Nesbitt’s one-week deadline? What happens in a week?”

“The prison is taken off lockdown. Maybe his phone smuggling information won’t be relevant when the inmates are out of their cells. Maybe they’ll kick his ass if they find out he’s been talking to the po-po.” She shrugged. “Maybe he’s been inside long enough to know that inertia is the enemy of progress.”

“Maybe.” She dropped her phone back into her pocket. “Should I be worried about Nick?”

Faith’s stomach clenched. “Everybody needs worrying about sometime.”

“Thank you, Agent Fortune Cookie.” She rolled her hand at the wrist to move along the conversation. “Return to the articles.”

“Eight possible victims total. And obviously that’s not including Grant County.” Faith looked back at her notes. “They were all Caucasian females between nineteen and forty-one years old. They were students, office workers, an EMT, a kindergarten teacher, and a vet tech. Married. Divorced. Single. The articles start with Grant County. The other cases spanned the subsequent eight years and took place in Pickens, Effingham, Appling, Taliaferro, Dougall, and if he’s right about the woman found yesterday, White County.”

“So, someone took a dartboard to the state.” Amanda turned and paced back to the pulpit. “MO?”

“All the women were reported missing by friends or family. They were found anywhere from eight days to three months later, usually in a wooded area. Not hidden, just laid on the ground. Some were on their backs. Some were face-down, on their sides. A lot were ravaged by local wildlife, especially the ones up north. All of the victims were dressed in their own clothes.”

“Raped?”

“The articles don’t say, but if we’re talking murder, we’re more than likely talking about rape.”

“Cause of death?”

Faith didn’t have to look at her notes, because the deaths had all been classified the same way. “None of the coroners saw anything untoward, so we’ve got: unknown, no suspected foul play, unknown, undetermined, wash, rinse, repeat.”

Amanda frowned, but she was clearly unsurprised. At the county level, only coroners had the power to officially rule a death suspicious and request an autopsy by a professional medical examiner. They were all elected officials and a medical license was not required to do the job. Only one county coroner in Georgia was a physician. The rest were, among other things, funeral directors, teachers, a hairdresser, the proprietor of a car wash, a heating and air technician, a motorboat mechanic and the owner of a shooting range.

Faith said, “There’s speculation in some of the newspaper articles about murder, but nothing concrete. Maybe the local cops disagreed with the coroner and leaking to the press was their way of juicing an investigation. I would need to go to the individual counties to request the case files, then we’d need to interview the investigators and witnesses to find out if there were any suspects. That’s eight different local law enforcement agencies to negotiate with.”

Faith left unsaid the resultant shitshow. The GBI was a state agency the same way the FBI was at the federal level. With limited exceptions, they had no jurisdiction over local cases, even murder. They could not just waltz in and take over an investigation. They had to be asked by the local sheriff, the local prosecutor, or ordered in by the governor.

“I can query some sources on an informal basis,” Amanda said. “Tell me about the victims. Blonde? Plain? Pretty? Short? Fat? Did they sing in the choir? Play the flute?”

She was looking for a detail that connected the women. Faith said, “All I can go by is the photos that accompanied the articles. Some blonde. Some brunette. Some of them wore glasses, some didn’t. One had braces. Some kept their hair short, some wore it long.”

“So,” Amanda summarized, “taking out Grant County, we have eight different women of different ages who were working in different fields, looked nothing alike, and were all found dead showing no discernable cause of death, located in different areas of a state where thousands of missing women cases remain open, in a country where roughly 300,000 women and girls are reported missing every single year.”

“The woods,” Will said.

Amanda and Faith turned to look at him.

He said, “That’s what connects them. Their bodies were left in wooded areas.”

Amanda said, “Two thirds of the state is covered in forests. It would be difficult not to leave a body in the woods. The phone rings off the hook during hunting season.”

“We need to know how they died,” Will said. “They weren’t violently, visibly murdered and their bodies weren’t put on display the way you would expect with a serial killer. Murdering them was secondary to rape.”

Faith tried to put his theory in plain English. “You’re saying he’s not a serial killer. He’s a serial rapist who kills his victims because they could identify him?”

Amanda intervened, “Let’s not use the word serial so casually here. Daryl Nesbitt is a convicted pedophile who seems to be playing us like a fiddle. The only serial at this point is what you had for breakfast.”

Faith looked down at her notes. She knew Amanda was right. But she’d also been a cop long enough to trust her instincts. Faith imagined if she could strip Amanda down into parts, she’d feel the same kind of tingling that was shaking Faith’s own bones right now.

Will asked, “You know all of those backlogged rape kits that are finally being tested?”

“Of course,” Amanda said. “We’ve made dozens of arrests off the results.”

“Sara told me about this paper in one of her journals.” Will explained, “Some graduate students looked at the offender methodology from the solved cases. We’re talking all over the country. What they found is that, with some exceptions, the majority of serial rapists aren’t stuck on one way of doing things. Sometimes the guy is violent and sometimes he’s not. Sometimes he takes the woman to a second location and sometimes he doesn’t. The same guy might use a knife one time or a gun the other, or he might tie up one victim with rope and use zip ties on the next one. Basically, a serial rapist’s M.O. is rape.”

Faith felt a crushing sense of futility. Every single law enforcement class taught them to investigate by M.O.

Amanda simply asked, “And?”

“If all of the cases from Nesbitt’s articles are linked, trying to connect the victims through their jobs or their hobbies isn’t going to lead us to the killer.”

“We should pull rape reports from the areas.” Faith thought he was on to something. “There could be other victims out there that he raped but didn’t kill. Maybe they didn’t see his face. Maybe he decided to let them go.”

“Do you want to cull thousands of rape reports from the last eight years?” Amanda asked. “How about the women who were raped but didn’t file reports? Should we start knocking on doors?”

Faith sighed through the acrimony.

Will said, “We need to find out how the victims died. He killed them without leaving a visible cause of death. That’s not always easy. Bone shows bullet and knife blade marks. Strangulation almost always results in a broken hyoid. A tox screen would show poisoning. How’s he killing them?”

Faith still liked his theory. “If he’s a rapist who murders instead of a murderer who—”

“The academic paper you’re relying on is just that, one academic paper.” Amanda waved them off the subject. “Let’s return to Nesbitt. What made him focus on these articles in particular?”

“Is Nesbitt the one who focused on them?” Faith asked. “He’s working with someone on the outside. We need to know who his friend is and what criteria the friend used to select these particular articles.”

Will suggested, “The friend could be the murderer. Or a copycat.”

“Or a nutjob. Or an acolyte,” Faith said. “Nesbitt told us he’d know if we were ‘seriously investigating.’ He’d need a person on the outside to do that. So, a private detective. A corrections officer. God help us, law enforcement.”

“Let’s not drive over that cliff just yet,” Amanda cautioned. “Nesbitt’s playing omniscient, but the way he would know we’re investigating is the same way the world would know about it. The news reporters would be all over a possible multiple murder case. Not just local, but national. That kind of scrutiny is exactly what I want to avoid. Everything from here on out stays between us. We need to fly so low under the radar that a snake can’t sense what we’re up to.”

Faith couldn’t disagree, but only because her inclination was to deprive Daryl Nesbitt of anything he wanted. “It’s subjective anyway. What’s a serious investigation? Who gets to decide the definition? A convicted child predator? I don’t think so.”

Amanda said, “For the moment, we deal with what’s in front of us. Nick will work the Vasquez murder. I’ll track down Daryl Nesbitt’s friend on the outside. You two need to get Lena’s version of the Grant County investigation. She would’ve still been in uniform then. I imagine she noted every degree in the weather. Step lightly. Even a broken clock is right twice a day. We may end up needing her. We’ll regroup this afternoon and go from there.”

“Hold on.” What Will said next seemed to surprise Amanda as much as Faith. “Sara has a right to know what’s happening.”

“What’s happening?” Amanda asked. “We have a pedophile making wild accusations. We have some newspaper stories that show absolutely no pattern. I’m not sure this isn’t all some inmate’s idea of a wild goose chase. Are you?”

Will said, “Sara was the medical examiner for Grant County. She could remember—”

“How do you think Sara is going to respond to the accusation that Jeffrey Tolliver ran a crooked shop? Look at what it did to Nick. In twenty years, I’ve never seen him so rattled. Do you think Sara’s going to take it any easier? Especially since Lena Adams is involved.” Amanda went in for the kill. “That went so well for you the last time, didn’t it?”

Will said nothing, but they all knew that Sara had been furious the last time Will had let himself get sucked into Lena’s bullshit. Not without reason. Lena had a habit of getting the people closest to her killed.

“We need information, Wilbur. We are investigators. Let’s investigate.” Amanda’s tone indicated that was the end of the discussion. “Lena Adams is still in Macon. I want you both to drive down there right now and squeeze the truth out of her. I want her copies of case files, autopsy reports, notebooks, cocktail napkins—anything she has. As I said, play nicely, but remember that Adams is the one who threw this steaming pile of horse manure in our laps. If this goes south, we’re going to throw it right back into her face.”

Faith was ready to follow her out of the chapel, but Will had taken on the physical attributes of a block of cement.

Amanda told him, “If you agree to keep Sara out of it for the moment, I’ll get the White County coroner to bring her onto the most recent case.”

Will rubbed his jaw.

“Not five minutes ago you said that the way we find the perpetrator is by the way he kills. If Sara autopsied the first victim, then she might recognize the killer’s signature on the most recent one.”

“She’s a grown woman, not a divining rod.”

“And you both work for me. My case. My rules.” Amanda took her phone out of her pocket. She ended the discussion by showing him the top of her head. She was still typing as she left the chapel.

Will sat down on the pew. The wood creaked. He said, “Ninety percent of all the arguments I’ve ever had with Sara have been about me not telling her things.”

That seemed like a low ratio, but Faith didn’t quibble. “Look, I wouldn’t know how to be in a healthy relationship if Squidward painted me a picture, but this is one of those rare instances where I agree with Amanda. What exactly are you keeping from Sara? All we’ve got right now is a whole bunch of what the fuck?”

He started rubbing his jaw again. “You’re saying wait a few hours, see what we can dig up, but either way, tell her the truth tonight?”

The tonight part was new, but Faith asked him, “Do you really want Sara to spend the next six hours worrying about something that might not ever become a thing?”

Slowly, finally, Will started to nod.

Faith looked at her watch. “It’s almost noon. We’ll get lunch on the way to Macon.”

He nodded again, but asked, “What if this becomes a thing?”

Faith didn’t have an answer. Obviously, the worst part would be realizing that a serial killer had been operating for years without their knowledge. The second worst part was more personal. A wrongful conviction was the kind of scandal that had onions inside of onions. The media would peel back every layer. The corruption. The trial. The investigations. The hearings. The lawsuits. The condemnations. The inevitable podcasts and documentaries.

Will summed it up. “Sara’s going to watch her husband get murdered all over again.”