“Okay. You’re right.” He pointed to the wall again. “This is the puncture.”
She turned the video back on. She zoomed in on the black-and-white image, which was taken from an MRI. Even to her untrained eye, she could see the damage to the spinal cord, like a tire puncture from a cartoon with fluid seeping out instead of air.
He said, “No one could explain it.”
“Is there anything else about your daughter’s case that we should know about?”
“It’s all lost. The leads have gone cold. There’s no one to talk to. No one who will talk about it, anyway.” Gerald threw away the Kleenex. “Tolliver worked his ass off to make sure we never found out the truth about Beckey and Leslie. He hid information, claimed it was lost in the bureaucratic shuffle. And his sycophant, Lena Adams, did you know she shredded all of her notebooks? Can you imagine what she wrote down? She’s the bitch who didn’t even check to see if my daughter was dead or alive. All of them were standing around laughing and joking while she suffered catastrophic brain injuries.”
Faith steered him away from that rocky shore. “Tell me more about Beckey’s hair clip.”
“Yes,” he said. “It was missing. Which means nothing on its own, right? But then I talked to Bonita—”
“Leslie Truong’s mother?” Faith tried to slow him down again. “What did she say?”
Gerald’s tears had dried. He was angry again. “Leslie was missing a headband that she always wore when she washed her face at night.”
“Was the headband the only thing that she was missing?”
“Yes.” He hesitated, then admitted, “I don’t know. Maybe some shirts, some clothes, but definitely the headband. Leslie specifically called Bonita to vent. It was stupid, she said, to steal something of such little value. That’s what made her so angry, because, why would you take something like that?”
Faith thought back through the other possible victims, the other possible items stolen. “Shay Van Dorne was missing a brush?”
“A comb. She was in her car when she realized it was gone. She was so upset that she told her mother about it.” He went back to the photographs of the women from the articles. “Joan Feeney. She wore a headband at the gym. She told her sister that she couldn’t find the purple one, which was her favorite. Seeger was in her car, like Van Dorne. She was on the phone with her sister when she mentioned that the blue elastic hairband she kept in the console wasn’t there.”
Faith nodded for him to continue.
“Danske had a silver brush that belonged to her grandmother. It was missing from her dresser. Driscoll kept a brush in her glovebox. It wasn’t there when her husband checked. Spivey had a barrette in her desk at work that she used to clip back her bangs. Baker had a comb with the word Chillax written in crystals. Baum’s sister says she always coordinated her scrunchie with her outfits. She was found wearing a green shirt, but no scrunchie. And then when the sister checked her things, she found all kinds of scrunchies—red, yellow, orange. But no green.”
Faith thought about a defense attorney using the video as evidence that Gerald Caterino had planted thoughts in the heads of desperate family members. In a harsher light, what the father had done could be called witness tampering. And for what?
A brush. A comb. A scrunchie. A headband. A hair clip. Between Faith’s car, purse and house, she had all of those items, some in multiples. It would be very easy for someone to say after the fact that any one of them was missing.
Especially if they were desperately reaching for connections.
Will was obviously thinking the same thing. He waited for Faith to stop the recording.
He asked Gerald, “When you called the families, what was that like?”
“Some of them wouldn’t talk to me. Others were a dead end. I had a list of questions to screen them out. That’s how I narrowed it down to the eight victims.” He went to the opposite wall. He ripped a sheet of notebook paper out from a thumbtack. “This is what I used.”
Faith read the list.
1. Introduce yourself (be calm!)
2. Explain what happened to Beckey (just the facts!)
3. Ask if they have any suspicions about their loved one’s cause of death (act normal!)
4. Ask if their loved one mentioned anything was missing
5. Ask them to confirm absence of missing item
Gerald explained, “Every time I read a news story, I go to work. There’s a lot of stuff on the internet. People are easy to find. What I do is make a call. I’ve talked to dozens of victims’ family members over the years. I think I’ve gotten better at it. You have to feel them out, make sure they’re open to the possibility. It’s a horrible thing to lose a child, but it’s even more horrible to realize that she was stolen from you.”
Faith re-read the list, which offered a textbook example of leading questions. “This last item, number five. Did you tell them what to look for? That it would’ve been a hair-related item?”
“Yes. What else would they be looking for?” He ping-ponged back to another wall. He pointed to the printed emails from the Love2CMurder domain. “This is a list of what serial killers do. Number one, they take trophies. That’s what Beckey’s attacker is doing. He stalks them. He takes something from them. Then he attacks them and makes it look like an accident.”
“Wait,” Faith said. “What do you mean stalk?”
“Weeks before they died, every single one of these women told a family member or friend or co-worker that they felt strange, as if someone was watching them.”
Faith considered this new information. She could think of many explanations, not least of all that being a woman in the world made you feel vulnerable sometimes. “That’s not on your list of questions, to ask them about a feeling of being watched.”
“I know enough that you always hold something back. I let them tell me.”
“They just told you?”
“I was careful.” He pointed to the Love2CMurder emails. “This guy is a retired police detective. One of the rare good ones. He’s been helping me investigate. He said that the biggest mistake women make is not listening to their instincts.”
Faith scanned the emails. DMasterson had been corresponding with Gerald for at least two years. She saw PDFs for invoices. “You mentioned earlier that you paid a private investigator. Is this him?”
“No, I was talking about Chip Shepherd. I worked with him five years ago. He’s another retired cop. I paid him for three months. He worked for six. His case files are here.” He kicked the stack of boxes. “Chip came up with nothing. They always come up with nothing. For five years, I’ve worked every bone in my body to keep the case alive. The business is good, but it’s not enough. My savings are depleted. I have no retirement. The house is mortgaged. The money from the lawsuits is in a trust to take care of Beckey. Every part of my life goes toward taking care of her and Heath, and whatever is left over, I do this.”
Faith let out a long breath. The room felt claustrophobic. It was about to get smaller. Faith thought she had figured out the answer to the question that Will had been asking since they’d tossed around theories in the prison chapel this morning.
She started out gently. “Mr. Caterino, why did you send Daryl Nesbitt those newspaper articles? There was no note, no letter. Just the articles.”
“Because—” he caught himself a second too late. “He still insists he’s innocent. I wanted him to feel as trapped, as helpless, as I do.”
Faith believed that he was trying to torture Daryl Nesbitt, but there was more to the story. “I’m sorry to ask this, but why are you so certain that Daryl Nesbitt isn’t the man who hurt your daughter?”
“I never said—”
“Mr. Caterino, five years ago, you spent good money on lawyers to pay for Daryl Nesbitt’s civil suit against Jeffrey Tolliver’s estate.”
Gerald’s face registered surprise.
She said, “A lot of times, civil cases are used to get police officers on the record so that the evidence can later be used against them in criminal proceedings.”
His lips closed into a tight line.
“Five years ago, you started Beckey’s Facebook page and website,” Faith continued. “For the last five years, you’ve been collecting articles about missing women you think link back to your daughter’s attack.”
“These other women—”
“No.” Faith stopped him again. “You started your investigation five years ago. Some of these cases go back eight years. What made you believe five years ago that Daryl Nesbitt wasn’t the man who attacked Beckey? There had to be a compelling reason.”
Gerald bit his lip to keep it from quivering. He couldn’t stop the tears when they returned.
Faith slowly walked him through it. “You post about a lot of things, Mr. Caterino, but you never post about your son.”
He wiped his eyes. “Heath understands that Beckey has to be the focus.”
Faith didn’t let up. “I’ve noticed all the cameras you’ve got around the house. Inside and out. Is this a dangerous area, Mr. Caterino?”