Then his computer chimed, announcing a new email.
Sara went behind his desk. She put on her glasses. She did a couple of clicks. He could see the images reflected in the lenses.
She said, “Come here.”
Jeffrey stood behind her. He guessed he was looking at a slide from an MRI. He recognized cervical vertebrae stacked down from the skull, but the cord running behind it resembled a piece of rope that had frayed at the middle. Fibers jutted out. Something that looked like a liquid bubble encased the area.
Sara said, “This is the spinal cord puncture. Something sharp and pointed entered the skin here.”
Jeffrey felt Sara’s fingers press against the back of his neck.
“Her legs would be paralyzed, everything from here down.” Her hand went to her hip. “This injury was deliberate. It wouldn’t happen from the fall. I would guess the instrument was similar in shape to an awl or a counterpunch, but don’t quote me on that.”
Jeffrey held back his questions. Sara was opening the next file, which was an X-ray.
“The skull fracture.” She clicked in for a closer view.
Jeffrey knew what an intact skull was supposed to look like. The fracture was at the back of the head, the spot where most men started to go bald. The bone had splintered into sunrays. A semi-circular piece rested against the brain.
Sara knelt down, leaning in close to the monitor. “Here.”
Jeffrey leaned down beside her. He followed her finger as it traced a crescent shape at the bottom of the fracture.
He knew that she wouldn’t say definitively what had happened, so he asked, “Best guess?”
“It’s not a guess,” Sara told him. “She was hit in the back of the head with a hammer.”
Atlanta
11
Sara couldn’t finish her second Scotch. Her stomach felt sour. She was shaky in a way that was hard to articulate. Jeffrey’s notes. Jeffrey’s files. Jeffrey’s field interview cards. Jeffrey’s ruler-straight lines drawn across a faded topographic map of Heartsdale. His ghost sat at the table across from her as she read his words from eight years ago. The names came back with a startling clarity.
Little Bit. Chuck Gaines. Thomasina Humphrey.
The delicate script was such a sharp contrast to his tough exterior. Jeffrey had been the embodiment of tall, dark and handsome. He’d had a football player’s swagger combined with a wonderfully sharp intelligence. Even in the precise, technical jargon of a police report, the summation of a witness interview, the transcript of a phone call, his personality shone through.
Sara held one of Jeffrey’s spiral-bound notebooks in her hand. It was roughly the size of an index card. He had put the dates on the cover alongside the cases encapsulated inside. She flipped it open. Grant County was a small enough force that the chief of police doubled as an investigator. Every case that Jeffrey had worked on had made it into his notebooks. He had been a meticulous record keeper. Sara paged through the headers in the first few dozen pages—
Harold Niles/burglary. Gene Kessler/bike theft. Pete Wayne/stolen tips.
$80,000.
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
