Nope.
The door opened. Will climbed into the car. His arms were full of bags of Doritos, Cheetos, Bugles, and a half-eaten hot dog that he shoved into his mouth before the door was closed. He reached into his jacket pockets and retrieved a Dr Pepper for himself and a Diet Coke for Faith. His shopping spree had clearly not included Band-Aids. Will was annoyingly cheap about strange things. He’d spooled out toilet paper from the convenience store bathroom and wound it around his bleeding hand.
“Do you have any Scotch tape?” He indicated the expert wrapping, which hung down like the dirty string on a tampon. “This keeps coming loose.”
Faith let out a very loud sigh. She opened the armrest console. She found some bandages in her emergency first-aid supply. “Elsa or Anna?”
“There’s no Olaf?”
Faith sighed again. She found the last Olaf, guaranteeing a screaming fit from Emma when she realized her favorite snowman was gone. “I’ve been thinking about Lena and Jared.”
Will started to peel off the toilet paper. The cheap paper stuck to the wound.
“Jared must’ve been in high school when Lena was working the Caterino case.” Faith opened the Band-Aid with her teeth. “That is some gross math.”
Will said, “He’s a good-looking kid.”
“Yeah, well.” Faith covered his knuckle, which was still bleeding. “Guys you think are complicated and misunderstood in your twenties turn out to be assholes in your thirties.”
Will looked at the radio. She’d tuned in the E-Street station.
Faith said, “I love hearing old men repeatedly clear their throats.”
He turned off the music. “What did you find out about Gerald Caterino?”
Faith retrieved her phone. She’d had a few minutes to search and found a lot of information that she should’ve looked for hours ago. “No criminal background. Not even a parking ticket. He owns a landscaping business. The website’s pretty fancy. It looks like a legit operation, with an office manager, two crew bosses. You wanna see?”
Will took the phone and scrolled through the site. He clicked to the owner section. Gerald Caterino’s photo put him in his mid-fifties, which tracked with having a twenty-seven-year-old daughter. What was left of his dark hair was streaked with gray. He had a push-broom mustache and wore wire-rimmed glasses.
Faith provided, “His bio says his hobbies are gardening, reading with his son and finding justice for his daughter. Look at this part.”
Faith tapped the link. The screen filled with a Facebook page.
“Justice for Rebecca,” Faith said. She was never certain how quickly Will could read. “Caterino created the page five years ago. There’s about four hundred followers. It links to a bunch of other Facebook pages for women who have been missing or murdered. Mostly, it’s parents railing about the police being lazy or stupid or incompetent or basically not doing enough.”
“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
