Skin Privilege Read online

  Skin Privilege

  Karin Slaughter

  It's no simple case of murder. Lena Adams has spent her life struggling to escape her past. She has only unhappy memories of Reece, the small town which nearly destroyed her. She's made a new life for herself as a police detective in Heartsdale, a hundred miles away – but nothing could prepare her for the violence which explodes when she is forced to return. A vicious murder leaves a young woman incinerated beyond recognition. And Lena is the only suspect. When Heartsdale police chief Jeffrey Tolliver, Lena's boss, receives word that his detective has been arrested, he has no choice but to go to Lena's aid – taking with him his wife, medical examiner Sara Linton. But soon after their arrival, a second victim is found. The town closes ranks. And both Jeffrey and Sara find themselves entangled in a horrifying underground world of bigotry and rage – a violent world which shocks even them. A world which puts their own lives in jeopardy. Only Jeffrey and Sara can free Lena from the web of lies, betrayal and brutality that has trapped her. But can they discover the truth before the killer strikes again?

  ***

  'No one does American small-town evil more chillingly… Slaughter tells a dark story that grips and doesn't let go' The Times

  'This is without doubt an accomplished, compelling and complex tale, with page-turning power aplenty' Daily Express

  'Beautifully paced, appropriately grisly, and terrifyingly plausible' Time Out

  'Slaughter knows exactly when to ratchet up the menace, and when to loiter on the more personal and emotional aspects of the victims. Thoroughly gripping, yet thoroughly gruesome stuff' Daily Mirror

  'An explosive thriller with plenty of twists – this is criminally spectacular!' OK!

  'A great read… This is crime fiction at its finest' Michael Connelly 'Slaughter's plotting is relentless, piling on surprises and twists… A good read that should come with a psychological health warning' Guardian

  'Another brilliantly chilling tale from Slaughter' beat A fast-paced and unsettling story… A compelling and fluid read' Daily Telegraph

  'Structured and paced brilliantly; the tension is unceasing throughout. Slaughter's shock tactics don't allow the reader to relax for a single moment' The Times

  'Slaughter deftly turns all assumptions on their head. Her ability to make you buy into one reality then another, means that the surprises – and the violent scenes – keep coming' Time Out

  'Don't read this alone. Don't read this after dark. But do read it' Daily Mirror

  'A salutary reminder that Slaughter is one of the most riveting writers in the field today' Sunday Express

  'Confirms her at the summit of the school of writers specialising in forensic medicine and terror… Slaughter's characters talk in believable dialogue. She's excellent at portraying the undertones and claustrophobia of communities where everyone knows everyone else's business, and even better at creating an atmosphere of lurking evil' The Times

  'With Blindsighted, Karin Slaughter left a great many mystery writers looking anxiously over their shoulders. With Kisscut, she leaves most of them behind' John Connolly

  'Slaughter's narrative is superb, a game of show and tell that constantly exhilarates as the next unexpected piece of the jigsaw fits into place' Birmingham Post

  'Gripping, gruesome and definitely not for the faint-hearted' Woman Home

  'Karin Slaughter is a fearless writer. She takes us to the deep, dark places other novelists don't dare to go. Kisscut will cement her reputation as one of the boldest thriller writers working today' Tess Gerritsen

  'Unsparing, exciting, genuinely alarming… excellent handling of densely woven plot, rich in interactions, well characterised and as subtle as it is shrewd' Literary Review

  'This gripping debut novel, filled with unremittingly graphic forensic details, is likely to have Patricia Cornwell and Kathy Reichs glancing nervously in their rearview mirrors because rookie Karin Slaughter is off the starting grid as quickly as Michael Schumacher and is closing on them fast' Irish Independent

  'Brutal and chilling' Daily Mirror 'Energetic, suspenseful writing from Slaughter, who spares no detail in this bloody account of violent sexual crime but also brings compassion and righteous anger to it' Manchester Evening News

  'It's not easy to transcend a model like Patricia Cornwell, but Slaughter does so in a thriller whose breakneck plotting and not-for-the-squeamish forensics provide grim manifestations of a deeper evil her mystery trumpets without ever quite containing' Kirkus Reviews

  'A tension-filled narrative with plenty of plot twists… This is just the ticket for readers who like their crime fiction on the dark side' Booklist

  'Wildly readable… [Slaughter] has been compared to Thomas Harris and Patricia Cornwell, and for once the hype is justified… deftly crafted, damnably suspenseful and, in the end, deadly serious. Slaughter's plotting is brilliant, her suspense relentless' Washington Post

  'Slaughter has created a ferociously taut and terrifying story which is, at the same time, compassionate and real. I defy anyone to read it in more than three sittings' Denise Mina

  'Wildly readable… hits the bull's eye' New York Post 'Taut, mean, nasty and bloody well written. She conveys a sense of time and place with clarity and definite menace – the finely tuned juxtaposition of sleepy Southern town and urgent, gut-wrenching terror' Stella Duffy

  'Taut and tight and tinged with terror' Houston Chronicle 'A story that roars its way through the final pages, Slaughter's thriller is scary, shocking and perfectly suspenseful' BookPage.com

  'The undertone of violence is pervasive, even at quiet moments, amplifying Slaughter's equation of intimacy with menace and placing her squarely in the ranks of Cornwell and Reichs' Publishers Weekly

  'Slaughter's gift for building multi-layered tension while deconstructing damaged personalities gives this thriller a nerve-wracking finish' USA Today

  'A page turner… has more twists than a Slinky Factory' People

  'A debut novel that blows your socks off. Karin Slaughter has immediately jumped to the front of the line of first-rate thriller writers…' Rocky Mountain News

  Karin Slaughter

  Skin Privilege

  For Susan

  PROLOGUE

  What had they given her? What had the needle brought into her veins? She could barely keep her eyes open, but her ears were working almost too well. Under a sharp, piercing ring, she could hear a skip in the car's engine, the thump-thump as the tires rolled over uneven terrain. The man sitting beside her in the backseat spoke softly, almost like a lullaby you would sing to a child. There was something calming about his tone, and she found her head dropping down as he talked, only to jerk back up at Lena 's curt, cutting responses.

  Her shoulders ached from stretching her hands behind her back. Or maybe they didn't ache. Maybe she just thought they should, so her brain sent the message that they did. The ache was dull, a thud that throbbed along with her beating heart. She tried to focus on other things, like the conversation going on around her or where Lena was driving the car. Instead, she found herself spiraling back into her body, cocooning into every new sensation like a newborn rolling into a blanket.

  The back of her legs were stinging from the leather, though she did not know why. It was cool out. There was a chill on the back of her neck. She remembered sitting in her father's Chevette on a long trip to Florida. There was no air-conditioning and it was the middle of August. All four windows were rolled down, but nothing would cut the heat. The radio crackled. There was no music, no station they could all agree on. In the front seat, her parents argued over the route, the cost of gas, whether or not they were speeding. Outside of Opelika, her mother told her father to pull over at the general store so they could buy frozen Cokes a
nd orange crackers. They all winced as they moved to get out of the car, the skin on the back of their arms and legs sticking to the seats as if the heat had cooked their bodies to the vinyl.

  She felt the car lurch as Lena put the gear into park. The engine was still humming, the soft purr vibrating in her ears.

  There was someone else – not in the car, but in the distance. They were on the football field. She recognized the scoreboard, big letters screaming 'GO MUSTANGS!'

  Lena had turned around, was watching both of them. Beside her, the man shifted. He tucked the gun into the waistband of his jeans. He was wearing a ski mask, the kind you saw in horror films, where only the eyes and mouth were revealed. That was enough, though. She knew him, could almost say his name if her mouth would only move to let her.

  The man said something about being thirsty, and Lena passed him a large Styrofoam cup. The white of the cup was intense, almost blinding. Out of nowhere, she felt a thirst in her throat like never before. The suggestion of water was enough to bring tears to her eyes.

  Lena was looking at her, trying to say something without using her voice.

  Suddenly, the man slid across the backseat, moved close enough so that she could feel the heat off his body, smell the subtle musk of his aftershave. She felt his hand go around the back of her neck, resting lightly on the nape. His fingers were soft, gentle. She concentrated on his voice, knew that what was being said was important, that she had to listen.

  'You gonna leave?' the man asked Lena. 'Or do you want to stay put and hear what I have to say?'

  Lena had turned away from them, maybe had her hand on the door handle. She turned back now, saying, 'Tell me.'

  'If I had wanted to kill you,' he began, 'you would already be dead. You know that.'

  'Yes.'

  'Your friend here…' He said something else, but his words were jumbled together so that by the time they reached her ears, they meant nothing. She could only look at Lena and judge from the other woman's reaction what her own should be.

  Fear. She should be afraid.

  'Don't hurt her,' Lena begged. 'She's got children. Her husband-'

  'Yeah, it's sad. But you make your choices.'

  'You call that a choice?' Lena snapped. There was more, but all that came across was terror. The exchange continued, then she felt a sudden chill come over her. A familiar odor filled the car -heavy, pungent. She knew what it was. She'd smelled it before but her mind could not tell her when or where.

  The door opened. The man slid out of the car and stood there, looking at her. He did not look sad or upset. He looked resigned. She had seen that look before. She knew him – knew the cold eyes behind the mask, the wet lips. She had known him all of her life.

  What was the smell? She should remember this smell.

  He murmured a few words. Something flashed in his hand – a silver cigarette lighter.

  She understood now. Panic sent a flood of adrenaline to her brain, cutting through the fog, slashing right to her heart.

  Lighter fluid. The cup had contained lighter fluid. He had poured it all over her body. She was soaked – dripping in it.

  'No!' Lena screamed, lunging, fingers splayed.

  The lighter dropped onto her lap, the flame igniting the liquid, the liquid burning her clothes. There was a horrible keening – it was coming from her own throat as she sat helplessly watching the flames lick up her body. Her arms jerked up, her toes and feet curled in like a baby's. She thought again of that long-ago trip to Florida, the exhausting heat, the sharp, unbearable rip of pain as her flesh cooked to the seat.

  MONDAY AFTERNOON

  ONE

  Sara Linton looked at her watch. The Seiko had been a gift from her grandmother on the day Sara graduated from high school. On Granny Em's own graduation day, she had been four months from marriage, a year and a half from bearing the first of her six children and thirty-eight years from losing her husband to cancer. Higher education was something Emma's father had seen as a waste of time and money, especially for a woman. Emma had not argued – she was raised during a time when children did not think to disagree with their parents – though she made sure that all four of her surviving children attended college.

  'Wear this and think of me,' Granny Em had said that day on the school campus as she closed the watch's silver bracelet around Sara's wrist. 'You're going to do everything you ever dreamed of, and I want you to know that I will always be right there beside you.'

  As a student at Emory University, Sara had constantly looked at the watch, especially through advanced biochemistry, applied genetics, and human anatomy classes that seemed by law to be taught by the most boring, monosyllabic professors that could be found. In medical school, she had impatiently glanced at the watch on Saturday mornings as she stood outside the lab, waiting for the professor to come and unlock the door so she could finish her experiments. During her internship at Grady Hospital, she had stared blurry-eyed at its white face, trying to make out the hands, as she calculated how much longer she had left in thirty-six-hour shifts. At the Heartsdale Children's Clinic, she had closely followed the second hand as she pressed her fingers to a child's thin wrist, counting the beats of his heart as they ticked beneath his skin, seeking to discern if an 'achy all-over' was a serious ailment or if it just meant the kid did not want to go to school that day.

  For almost twenty years, Sara had worn the watch. The crystal had been replaced twice, the battery numerous times, and the bracelet once because Sara could not stomach the thought of cleaning out the dried blood of a woman who had died in her arms. Even at Granny Em's funeral, Sara had found herself touching the smooth bezel around the face, tears streaming down her own face at the realization that she could never again see her grandmother's quick, open smile or the sparkle in her eyes as she learned of her oldest granddaughter's latest accomplishment.

  Now, looking at the watch, for the first time in her life Sara was glad her grandmother was not there with her, could not read the anger in Sara's eyes, know the humiliation that burned in her chest like an uncontrollable fire as she sat in a conference room being deposed in a malpractice suit filed by the parents of a dead patient. Everything Sara had ever worked for, every step she had taken that her grandmother could not, every accomplishment, every degree, was being rendered meaningless by a woman who was all but calling Sara a baby killer.

  The lawyer leaned over the table, eyebrow raised, lip curled, as Sara glanced at the watch. 'Dr. Linton, do you have a more pressing appointment?'

  'No.' Sara tried to keep her voice calm, to quell the fury that the lawyer had obviously been stoking for the last four hours. Sara knew that she was being manipulated, knew that the woman was trying to bait her, to get Sara to say something horrible that would forever be recorded by the little man leaning over the transcript machine in the corner. Knowing this did not stop Sara from reacting. As a matter of fact, the knowledge made her even angrier.

  'I've been calling you Dr. Linton all this time.' The lawyer glanced down at an open folder in front of her. 'Is it Tolliver? I see that you remarried your ex-husband, Jeffrey Tolliver, six months ago.'

  'Linton is fine.' Under the table, Sara was shaking her foot so hard that her shoe was about to fall off. She crossed her arms over her chest. There was a sharp pain in her jaw from clenching her teeth. She shouldn't be here. She should be at home right now, reading a book or talking on the phone to her sister. She should be going over patient files or sorting through old medical journals she never seemed to have time to catch up on.

  She should be trusted.

  'So,' the lawyer continued. The woman had given her name at the start of the deposition, but Sara couldn't remember it. All she had been able to concentrate on at the time was the look on Beckey Powell's face. Jimmy's mother. The woman whose hand Sara had held so many times, the friend she had comforted, the person with whom she had spent countless hours on the phone, trying to put into simple English the medical jargon the oncologists in Atlanta were
feeding the mother to explain why her twelve-year-old son was going to die.

  From the moment they'd entered the room, Beckey had glared at Sara as if she were a murderer. The boy's father, a man Sara had gone to school with, had not even been able to look her in the eye.

  'Dr. Tolliver?' the lawyer pressed.

  'Linton,' Sara corrected, and the woman smiled, just as she did every time she scored a point against Sara. This happened so often that Sara was tempted to ask the lawyer if she suffered from some unusually petty form of Tourette's.

  'On the morning of the seventeenth – this was the day after Easter – you got lab results from the cell blast you'd ordered performed on James Powell. Is that correct?'

  James. She made him sound so adult. To Sara, he would always be the six-year-old she had met all those years ago, the little boy who liked playing with his plastic dinosaurs and eating the occasional crayon. He'd been so proud when he told her that he was called Jimmy, just like his dad.

  'Dr. Tolliver?'

  Buddy Conford, one of Sara's lawyers, finally spoke up. 'Let's cut the crap, honey.'

  'Honey?' the lawyer echoed. She had one of those husky, low voices most men found irresistible. Sara could tell Buddy fell into this category, just as she could tell that the fact the man found his opponent desirable heightened his sense of competitiveness.

  Buddy smiled, his own point made. 'You know her name.'

  'Please instruct your client to answer the question, Mr. Conford.'

  'Yes,' Sara said, before they could exchange any more barbs. She had found that lawyers could be quite verbose at three-hundred-fifty dollars an hour. They would parse the meaning of the word 'parse' if the clock was ticking. And Sara had two lawyers: Melinda Stiles was counsel for Global Medical Indemnity, an insurance company to whom Sara had paid almost three and a half million dollars over the course of her medical career. Buddy Conford was Sara's personal lawyer, whom she'd hired to protect her from the insurance company. The fine print in all of Global's malpractice policies stipulated limited liability on the part of the company when a patient's injury was a direct result of a doctor's willful negligence. Buddy was here to make sure that did not happen.