The dollar amount had its own page. Jeffrey had underlined it twice, then circled it. The writing had a dimensionality. The 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.
Rebecca Caterino/DOA—attempted murder/sexual assault.
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 Leslie Truong and just as certain that it could not be linked to Beckey Caterino.
She had been wrong.
She turned through the pages, searching for anything that could help them now. Brock was still the official coroner during that time period, so all of the lab reports and findings would be wherever he stored his files. Jeffrey had transcribed some of Sara’s observations into his notebook, but what had Sara missed? What had Jeffrey missed? Was there a detail, a piece of forensics, that they had been blind to, that they had ignored, that had allowed a violent, sadistic murderer to get away?
Sara was Jeffrey’s widow. She had inherited his estate. It seemed she had also inherited the guilt.
She heard a key scrape into the deadbolt on the front door.
Sara closed the notebook. She stacked together the files and crammed them back into the box. By the time Will entered the apartment, she was standing up, waiting for him.
Sara noticed a lot of things at the same time. That he had showered. That he had changed into jeans and a button-down shirt. That his expression looked strained.
She swallowed down all of the sharp questions that churned up into her mouth: Where have you been? Why didn’t you call? Why did you go to your house to shower before coming here? What the hell is going on?
Sara saw that Will was doing his own reconnaissance. His eyes moved around the room to her unfinished dinner, the bottle of Scotch, the boxes of Jeffrey’s things.
She took a deep breath and let it go slowly, trying to avert what she was certain would be a disastrous blow-up.
She told him, “Hey.”
Will knelt down. The dogs had rushed to meet him. Betty danced around his feet. Sara’s greyhounds pressed into his legs. The air felt heavy, like they were each drowning in their own separate pools of water.
Sara spotted a cut on the knuckle of his middle finger. Blood was weeping from the wound.
She tried to joke, “Please tell me you got that from hitting Lena.”
He went to the refrigerator. He opened the door. He stared into the shelves.
She couldn’t deal with his silence right now. She asked him a question he’d have to answer. “How did it go?”
Will took a deep breath similar to the one Sara had taken.
He said, “Lena thinks you’re trying to jam her up.”
“I am,” Sara admitted, but she was galled that Lena thought all Sara did was sit around and wait for opportunities to make her miserable. “What else?”
“I almost punched her in the face. Then I nearly pulled my gun on Jared. Then I beat up Faith’s car. Oh, and before all this, I told Jared we were getting married.”
Sara felt her jaw set. The first part was obviously hyperbole. As for the last part, if this was some new, backward way of Will asking her to marry him, it wasn’t going to work. “Why did you tell Jared we’re getting married?”
Will opened the freezer. He looked inside.
Sara pivoted. “Did you have dinner?”
“I ate something at home.”
She didn’t like the way he’d said home. This was his home, the place that they shared together. “There’s yogurt.”
“You told me not to steal your yogurt.”
Sara couldn’t take this anymore. “Jesus, Will, I’m not the Javert of Yoplait. If you’re hungry, eat the yogurt.”
“I can have ice cream.”
“Ice cream isn’t the same as yogurt. It has zero nutritional value.”
He closed the freezer door. He turned around.
“What?” she asked. “What is wrong with you?”
“I thought you put a moratorium on talking.”
She wanted to kick him. “It really sucks when the person you’re supposed to be in a relationship with won’t tell you what they’re thinking.”
“So, this is a teaching moment?”
Sara thought this was a moment where things could go really, really wrong. “Let’s just drop it.”
“Why didn’t you text me?”
“I did text you.” She grabbed her phone. She showed him the screen. “Three times, and nothing, because I guess you turned off your phone.”
He rubbed his jaw with his fingers.
“I can’t take your grunts and long silences right now, Will. Can you just talk to me like a normal human being?”
Anger flashed in his eyes.
Anger was something Sara could deal with. She had already picked a fight with her sister. She was furious about Lena. She was hurt that Faith had lied to her. She was heartbroken by the Jeffrey of it all. She was terrified that she had missed something in Grant County that let a madman get away and she was desperate to make things right with the man she was going to marry if he ever got his ass off his shoulders and properly asked her.
She told Will, “Fight or fuck.”
“What?”
“Those are your choices,” she said. “You can either fight with me or you can fuck me.”