Karin Slaughter - Faithless

She shook her head, smoothing down the blanket as she put it on the foot of the couch.

He poured the coffee anyway. When he turned around, Sara was sitting at the kitchen island, sorting through some mail.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“For what?”

“I feel like…” His voice trailed off. He didn’t know what he felt like.

She flipped through a magazine, not touching the coffee he’d poured. When he didn’t finish his thought, she looked up. “You don’t have to explain it to me,” she said, and he felt as if a great weight had been lifted.

Still, he tried: “It was a hard night.”

She smiled at him, concern keeping the expression from reaching her eyes. “You know I understand.”

Jeffrey still felt tension in the air, but he didn’t know if it was from Sara or his own imagination. He reached out to touch her and she said, “You should wrap your hand.”

He had taken off the bandage after digging in the forest. Jeffrey looked at the cut, which was bright red. As he thought about it, he felt the wound throb. “I think it’s infected.”

“Have you been taking the pills I gave you?”

“Yes.”

She looked up from the magazine, calling him on the lie.

“Some,” he said, wondering where he had put the damn things. “I took some. Two.”

“That’s even better,” she said, returning to the magazine. “You can build up your resistance to antibiotics.” She flipped through a few more pages.

He tried for humor. “The hepatitis will kill me anyway.”

She looked up, and he saw tears well into her eyes at the suggestion. “That’s not funny.”

“No,” he admitted. “I just… I needed to be alone. Last night.”

She wiped her eyes. “I know.”

Still, he had to ask, “You’re not mad at me?”

“Of course not,” she insisted, reaching out to take his uninjured hand. She squeezed it, then let go, returning to her magazine. He saw it was the Lancet , an overseas medical journal.

“I wouldn’t have been much company anyway,” he told her, remembering his sleepless night. “I kept thinking about it,” he said. “It’s worse finding it empty, not knowing what happened.”

She finally closed the magazine and gave him her full attention. “Before, you’d said maybe someone came back for the bodies after they died.”

“I know,” he told her, and that was one of the things that had kept him from sleep. He had seen some pretty horrible things in his line of work, but someone who was sick enough to kill a girl, then remove her body for whatever reason, was a perpetrator he was unprepared to deal with. “What kind of person would do that?” he asked.

“A mentally ill person,” she answered. Sara was a scientist at heart, and she thought there were concrete reasons that explained why people did things. She had never believed in evil, but then she had never knowingly sat across from someone who had murdered in cold blood or raped a child. Like most people, she had the luxury of philosophizing about it from behind her textbooks. Out in the field, he saw things very differently, and Jeffrey had to think that anyone capable of this crime had to have something fundamentally wrong with his soul.

Sara slid off the stool. “They should be able to do the blood types today,” she told him, opening the cabinet beside the sink. She took out the sample packets of antibiotics and opened one, then another. “I called Ron Beard at the state lab while you were in the shower. He’s going to run the tests first thing this morning. At least we’ll have some idea how many victims there might have been.”

Jeffrey took the pills and washed them down with some coffee.

She handed him two other sample packs. “Will you please take these after lunch?”

He would probably skip lunch, but he agreed anyway. “What do you think of Terri Stanley?”

She shrugged. “She seems nice. Overwhelmed, but who wouldn’t be?”

“Do you think she drinks?”

“Alcohol?” Sara asked, surprised. “I’ve never smelled it on her. Why?”

“ Lena said she saw her getting sick at the picnic last year.”

“The police picnic?” she questioned. “I don’t think Lena was there. Wasn’t she on her hiatus then?”

Jeffrey let that settle in, ignoring the tone she gave “hiatus.” He told her, “ Lena said she saw her at the picnic.”

“You can check your calendar,” she said. “Maybe I’m wrong, but I don’t think she was there.”

Sara was never wrong about dates. Jeffrey felt a niggling question working its way through his brain. Why had Lena lied? What was she trying to hide this time?

“Maybe she meant the one before last?” Sara suggested. “I recall a lot of people drinking too much at that one.” She chuckled. “Remember Frank kept singing the national anthem like he was Ethel Merman?”

“Yeah,” he agreed, but Jeffrey knew that Lena had lied. He just couldn’t figure out why. As far as he knew, she wasn’t particularly close to Terri Stanley. Hell, as far as he knew, Lena wasn’t close to anybody. She didn’t even have a dog.

Sara asked, “What are you going to do today?”

He tried to get his mind back on track. “If Lev was telling the truth, I should have some people from the farm first thing. We’ll see if he goes through with the polygraph. We’re going to talk to them, see if anyone knows what happened to Abby.” He added, “Don’t worry, I’m not expecting a full confession.”

“What about Chip Donner?”

“We’ve got an APB on him,” Jeffrey said. “I don’t know, Sara, I don’t like him for this. He’s just a stupid punk. I don’t see him having the discipline to plan it out. And that second box was old. Maybe four, five years. Chip was in jail then. That’s pretty much the only fact we know.”

“Who do you think did it, then?”

“There’s the foreman, Cole,” Jeffrey began. “The brothers. The sisters. Abby’s mother and father. Dale Stanley.” He sighed. “Basically, everybody I’ve talked to since this whole damn thing started.”

“But no one stands out?”

“Cole,” he said.

“But only because he was yelling to those people about God?”

“Yes,” he admitted, and coming from Sara it did sound like a weak connection. He had made an effort to back Lena off the religious angle, but he felt maybe he had picked up some of her prejudices. “I want to talk to the family again, maybe get them alone.”

“Get the women alone,” she suggested. “They might be more talkative without their brothers around.”

“Good idea.” He tried again, “I really don’t want you mixed up with these people, Sara. I don’t much like Tessa being involved, either.”

“Why?”

“Because I’ve got a hunch,” he said. “And my hunch tells me that they’re up to something. I just don’t know what.”

“Being devout is hardly a crime,” she said. “You’d have to arrest my mother if that were the case.” Then she added, “Actually, you’d have to arrest most of my family.”

“I’m not saying it has anything to do with religion,” Jeffrey said. “It’s how they act.”

“How do they act?”

“Like they’ve got something to hide.”

Sara leaned against the counter. He could tell she wasn’t going to give in. “Tessa asked me to do this for her.”

“And I’m asking you not to.”

She seemed surprised. “You want me to choose between you and my family?”

That was exactly what he was asking, but Jeffrey knew better than to say it. He had lost that contest once before, but this time he was more familiar with the rules. “I just want you to be careful,” he told her.

Sara opened her mouth to respond, but the phone rang. She spent a few seconds looking for the cordless receiver before finding it on the coffee table. “Hello?”