“Thirty-one likes for a donut joke.” Will swiped down the page. “He posted the same newspaper articles that Nesbitt gave us?”
“The latest one is an AJC story about Alexandra McAllister being found yesterday morning.”
“He’s vigilant,” Will said. “Every time someone posts something, within minutes, he replies.”
“Brace yourself. This takes a really dark turn.” She accessed her browsing history, then pulled up the JUSTICE 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.”
“That’s fine with me.”
Faith still couldn’t wrap her head around what Amanda had told them. Attacking a woman, raping her, terrifying her, murdering her, were all bad enough. To torture her in that way, to paralyze her so she couldn’t fight back—was a whole new level of terror.
She said, “Sara found knife wounds around the abdomen and around the armpits. The killer must know something about animal behavior, right? He sliced open McAllister’s skin to draw blood so that the predators would eat the evidence.”
Will shoved a handful of chips into his mouth. He was staying away from the Sara part of the discussion. Or maybe he was still processing the grisly details, the same as Faith. Most killers were not caught because they left at the crime scene a grain of sand from a remote island that only they could’ve visited. They got caught because they were sloppy and stupid.
This killer was neither of those things.
“Brad Stephens.” Will opened the bag of Cheetos. “He’s missing from the list of cops in the COVER-UP section.”
“He must’ve been fresh out of the academy when this happened.” Faith knew exactly what that looked like. “He would’ve been doing the scut work, gathering all the reports, filing, canvassing, door knocking, talking to secondary witnesses.”
“He would’ve seen everything.”
Faith glanced at her partner. He was brushing crumbs off his tie. The more they talked about the case, the better Will sounded. She asked, “Take me through your thinking. How do you draw the line between Gerald Caterino and Brad Stephens?”
“I’m Gerald Caterino,” Will said. “My daughter has been gravely injured. I’ve got to deal with that in the immediate, right? Her recovery, physical therapy, whatever. And all that time, I’m thinking the guy who hurt her is behind bars. The guy goes through two appeals that he loses. Three years pass. I’m rocking along with my life, but then the guy I think is guilty writes to me and tells me he didn’t do it.”
Faith nodded, because that seemed like the most likely turn of events. “You wouldn’t believe that guy.”
“I would not.” Will dumped the rest of the Cheetos into his mouth. He chewed, then swallowed, then said, “I’m a dad, though. I can’t let it go. I’ve got this guy who I think hurt my daughter, but he’s telling me it was somebody else who’s still out there, possibly hurting other women. What do I do next?”
“You’re a middle-class white man, so you assume the police will help you.” Faith handed him her Diet Coke to open. “Five years ago, Matt Hogan was gone. So was Tolliver. Frank Wallace was the interim chief. Lena was chief detective. Brad was a senior patrolman.”
Will passed back the open soda. “Frank would be zero help. Lena might try to help, but not in a meaningful way.”
Faith could imagine Lena trying to control the situation and watching it blow up like a roadside IED. “The civil suit wouldn’t get Nesbitt access to the Truong and Caterino files. Nesbitt was only the assumed perpetrator. His conviction was based on the child porn.”
“Right, but there’s only a few ways you can personally sue a cop. Excessive force. A fourth amendment violation for unreasonable search and seizure. A charge of discrimination and/or harassment.” Will explained, “You can’t base your case off of one bad act. You need to show a pattern of behavior. That’s how they get access to the Caterino and Truong files. They tell the judge they need to look at previous investigations to establish a pattern.”
Faith took a sip of cola. As legal strategies went, it was a good one. “Gerald Caterino must’ve been pissed off when Daryl Nesbitt dropped his suit in exchange for medium security.”
“He still kept in touch,” Will said. “He sent the articles to Nesbitt in prison.”
“Just the articles,” Faith said, reminding him of the detail Amanda had passed on. “There were no letters, no Post-it notes. Just the clippings in an envelope with a PO box for the return address.”
“GDOC only keeps mail records for three years. We don’t know if they corresponded before that.”