“Sure. Most of these guys are scared out of their minds. Prison was the worst thing that ever happened to them and they’re desperate not to go back. They’re very compliant, even anxious for approval. Hell, the really hard-core pedophiles will check in almost daily. I’m the only adult relationship they have, and they want to make sure I’m happy.”
D.D. arched her brows and took a seat. “So they’re just a bunch of regular Joes.”
Pickler shrugged. “As much as anyone is. ’Course, you wouldn’t be here if you didn’t think someone was behaving badly. Who is it?”
D.D. checked her notes. “Brewster. Aidan Brewster.”
“Aidan Brewster?” Pickler parroted. “No way!”
“Yes way.”
Pickler’s turn to arch a brow. But then she turned to the first gray metal filing cabinet and got busy. “B … B … Brewster. Aidan. Here we go. But I can tell you now, he’s a good kid.”
“For a registered sex offender,” D.D. filled in dryly.
“Ah please. Now see, this is where the system is its own worst enemy. First, the system has managed to vilify an entire class of perpetrators. Second, the system has created a class of perpetrators too big for its own good. On the one hand, you rape thirty kids, you’re a registered sex offender. On the other hand, a nineteen-year-old has consensual sex with a fourteen-year-old, and he’s also a registered sex offender. It’s like saying a serial killer is the same as the guy who gave his wife a black eye. Sure, they’re both pieces of garbage, but they’re not the same pieces of garbage.”
“So what kind of sex offender is Aidan Brewster?” D.D. asked.
“The nineteen-year-old who had consensual sex with his younger stepsister’s fourteen-year-old friend.”
“He’s on probation for that?”
“He served two years in jail for that. If she’d been a year younger, he would’ve gotten twenty. That’ll teach a boy to keep his pants zipped.”
“Fourteen is too young to give consent,” Miller spoke up, having finally taken a seat. “Nineteen-year-old boy should know better.”
Pickler didn’t argue. “A lesson that Brewster will get to spend the rest of his life learning. You know, being a sex offender is a one-way ticket. Brewster could be clean the next thirty years; he’ll still be a registered sex offender. Meaning every time he applies for a job, or looks for an apartment, or crosses state lines, he’ll pop up in the system. That’s a lot of baggage for a twenty-three-year-old.”
“How’s he taking it?” D.D. asked.
“As well as can be expected. He’s entered a treatment program for sex offenders and is attending his weekly meetings. He has an apartment, a job, the semblance of a life.”
“Apartment,” D.D. stated.
Pickler rattled off an address that matched what D.D.’s team had already found in the system. “Does the landlord know?” D.D. inquired.
“I told her,” Pickler reported. “It’s not standard protocol for his level of offender, but I always think it’s better to be safe than sorry. If the landlord found out later and booted Aidan unexpectedly, that could create stress and strain. Perhaps set him adrift. As Aidan’s PO, I feel my job is to help him avoid unnecessary turmoil.”
“How’d the landlord take it?”
“She needed to hear the whole story, and wanted my number on speed dial. Then she seemed to be okay with it. You’d be surprised how many people are. They just want to know up front.”
“What about the neighbors?” D.D. pressed.
“Didn’t notify the neighbors or the local PDs,” Pickler supplied briskly. “Brewster shows up in SORD, of course, and I considered that adequate given his risk assessment and current level of programming.”
“Meaning …?” Miller quizzed.
“Meaning Brewster’s been doing just fine. He’s lived in the same place and held the same job and attended the same weekly support group for nearly two years now. As parolees go, I’d take more just like Aidan Brewster.”
“A regular success story,” Miller quipped.
Pickler shrugged. “As much as one expects to see. Look, I’ve been at this eighteen years now. Sixty percent of my parolees will figure things out, maybe not the first time they’re paroled, but eventually. The other forty percent …” She shrugged again. “Some will return to prison. Some will drink themselves to death. A few will commit suicide. Technically speaking, they don’t re-offend, but I’m not sure I’d call it success. Then there are the Aidan Brewsters of the world. From a PO’s perspective, he’s a good guy, and that’s the best I can tell you.”
“Employment?” D.D. asked with a frown.
“Local garage. Vito’s. Kid’s really good with his hands. That’s helped him mainstream more easily than some of these guys.”
D.D. wrote that down. “You say he’s been there two years?”
“Their top mechanic,” Pickler specified. “His boss, Vito, can’t say enough nice things about him. Employment-wise, kid’s doing aces, which matters, given his current expenses.”
“What expenses?” Miller wanted to know.
“Programming. Sex offenders are responsible for treatment costs. So in Brewster’s case, that means he’s forking over sixty bucks a week for his group counseling. Then there’s the cost of his maintenance polygraph, two-fifty a pop every ten months, to make sure he’s on track. If he had an ankle bracelet he’d have to pay for that, too, but he got lucky and hit the streets the year before the GPS became SOP. Plus, he’s got Boston rent due, transportation costs, etc., etc. Not a cheap life for someone who’s starting the game with limited employment options.”
“You mean because he can’t be around kids,” D.D. said.
“Exactly. So even at a local garage, Brewster can only work on the cars, never at the front counter. After all, you never know when a woman might walk in with two-point-two kids.”
“But he’s a good employee.”
“The best.” Colleen shot them a grin. “Vito can work Brewster to the bone, and the kid’ll never complain because they both know he can’t just quit and get a job elsewhere. People think sex offenders can’t find employment. In fact, there are certain ‘savvy’ employers out there who are more than happy to have them on board.”
Miller was frowning now. “Poor little Aidan Brewster? Couldn’t keep his hands off a fourteen-year-old, so now we should all feel sorry for him?”
“I’m not saying that,” Colleen replied evenly. “The law is the law. I’m just saying that for most of the judicial system, you do your crime, you serve your time. Brewster went to jail, but he’s still serving time, and will be for the rest of his life. Ironically enough, he would’ve been slightly better off had he killed the girl instead of sleeping with her. And as a member of the judicial system, I’m not comfortable with that analysis.”
D.D., however, was already pondering something else. She turned to Miller. “Do you know where the Joneses got their cars serviced?”
He shook his head, jotted down a note. “I’ll get on it.”
“Who are the Joneses?” Colleen asked.
“Jason and Sandra Jones. They live on the same block as Aidan Brewster. Except sometime in the middle of last night, Sandra Jones disappeared.”
“Ahh,” Colleen said with a sigh. She sat back in her chair, hooked her hands behind her fireball hair. “You think Aidan had something to do with it?”
“Have to consider him.”
“How old is Sandra Jones?”
“Twenty-three. A sixth grade teacher at the middle school. Has a four-year-old daughter.”
“So, you’re thinking Aidan abducted the mom from her house in the middle of the night, with the husband there?”
“Husband was at work—he’s a local reporter.”
Colleen narrowed her eyes. “You think Brewster was after the kid? Because Aidan’s taken four or five polygraphs where he’s had to volunteer his entire sexual history. Pedophilia has never come up.”
“I don’t know what I thin
k,” D.D. said. “Except, by all accounts, Sandra Jones is a very beautiful woman, and let’s face it, twenty-three isn’t that old. In fact, what does that make her? The same age as Brewster?”
Colleen nodded. “Same age.”
“So, we have a beautiful young mom and a registered sex offender living just houses away. Any chance that Aidan is good-looking?”
“Sure. Shaggy blond hair. Blue eyes. Kind of surfer dude, but in a sweet sort of way.”
Miller rolled his eyes.
D.D., however, kept spinning the theory out. “So Sandy’s husband works most nights. Meaning she’s alone a lot, isolated with the kid. Maybe some evening she’s out in the yard with her daughter, and Aidan comes by, strikes up a conversation. Maybe the conversation leads to a relationship, which leads to …”
“She runs away with him?” Colleen suggested.
“Or they get into a fight. She finds out about his history, gets mad. After all, he’s been around her kid, and according to all reports, Sandra Jones would do anything for her kid.”
“So he kills her,” Colleen said matter-of-factly.
“Like you said, these guys are desperate not to go back to prison.”
“So Aidan Brewster seduces the lonely housewife down the street, then murders her to cover his tracks.”
D.D.’s turn to shrug. “Stranger things have happened.”
Colleen sighed. Picked up a pencil, bounced the eraser end on her desk half a dozen times. “All right. For the record, I think you’re off base. Aidan already entered a high-risk relationship once before and he got nailed for it big-time. Given that, I think if he saw a woman like Sandra Jones out in her yard, he’d turn around and run the other way. No need to tempt fate, right? But the fact remains, Sandra Jones is missing and Aidan Brewster is the unlucky SOB that lives down the street. Protocol is protocol, so we’d better check him out.”
“Glad to hear it.”
Colleen bounced the pencil twice more. “Timeline?”
“Sooner versus later. We’re trying to get as much done under the radar as we can. We figure by seven A.M. tomorrow Sandra Jones will be missing more than twenty-four hours, meaning she’ll be upgraded to an official missing persons case and the media …”
“Will swarm you like bees on honey.”
“You got it.”
Colleen grunted. “You said she’s pretty, a young mom, a local teacher.”
“Yep.”
“You’re screwed.”
“Totally.”
“All right. You convinced me. I’ll pay Brewster a call this evening. Do a little walk-through of his home, ask about his recent activities. See if I can sniff out anything that warrants further investigation.”
“We’d like to help you pay that call.”
Colleen stopped bouncing the pencil. “No dice,” she said firmly.
“You’re not an agent of the court,” D.D. countered. “You walk through his house and see blood, violence, disarray, you can’t seize it as evidence.”
“I can give you a call.”
“Which will alert Brewster that we’re coming.”
“Then I’ll sit on the sofa with him as we both wait. Look, I’m Aidan’s PO, meaning I’ve spent two years building a relationship with him. I ask him questions, I have two years’ worth of history pressuring him to answer. You ask him questions, and he’ll shut down. You’ll get nowhere.”
D.D. thinned her lips, feeling stubborn and resigned all at once.
“He’s a good kid,” Colleen argued softly. “For what it’s worth, I really doubt he did it.”
“You been through this before?” Miller spoke up evenly. “Have one of your sex offenders re-offend?”
Colleen nodded. “Three times.”
“You see it coming?”
Pickler sighed again. “No,” she admitted quietly. “All three times … never had a clue. Guys were doing okay. They dealt with the pressure. Until one morning … they snapped. Then there was no going back.”
| CHAPTER TEN |
I have always been fascinated by secrets. I grew up living a lie, so of course I see subterfuge everyplace I look. That child in my classroom who always wears long sleeves, even on warm days—totally being beaten by his stepdad. That elderly woman who works at the dry cleaner with her pinched face and bony shoulders—totally being abused by her big brute of a son who hangs out around back.
People lie. It’s as instinctive as breathing. We lie because we can’t help ourselves.
My husband lies. He looks me in the eye as he does it. As liars go, Jason is a class act.
I think I had known him six weeks before I figured out that beneath his restrained facade there lurked a deep ocean of bad voodoo. I noticed it in small things first. The way a drawl would sometimes creep into his voice, particularly at night when he was tired and not paying as much attention. Or the times he would say he got out of bed to watch TV, except when I turned on the TV in the morning, it would go straight to the Home & Garden channel, which I had watched last, and which Jason has no use for whatsoever.
Sometimes, I tried to tease the truth out of him: “Hey, you just said ‘coke.’ I thought only a true Southerner asked for a coke instead of a soda.”
“Must be hanging out with you too much,” he’d say, but I’d see a hint of wariness crease the corners of his eyes.
Or sometimes I tried to get straight to the point. “Tell me what happened to your family. Where are your parents, your siblings?”
He’d try to hedge. “Why does it matter? I have you now, and Clarissa. That’s the only family that matters.”
One night, when Ree was five months old, and sleeping well, I was feeling edgy and restless, the way a nineteen-year-old girl does when she’s sitting across from a dark, handsome man and she’s looking at his hands and thinking about how gently they can cradle a newborn baby. Then thinking, much more importantly, how they might feel on her naked breasts, I found myself approaching the matter much more directly.
“Truth or dare,” I said.
He finally looked up from the paperback he was reading. “What?”
“Truth or dare. You know, like the game. Surely when you were a teenager you played Truth or Dare.”
Jason stared at me, his dark eyes as fathomless as always. “I’m not a teenager.”
“I am.”
That seemed to finally get his attention. He closed the book, set it down. “What do you want, Sandra?”
“Truth or dare. Just pick. It’s not so hard. Truth or dare.” I sidled closer to him. I had bathed after putting Ree down for the night. Then I smoothed an orange-scented lotion all over my body. It was a subtle scent, light, clean, but I knew he caught it, because his nostrils flared, just a fraction, then he leaned away.
“Sandra …”
“Play with me, Jason. I’m your wife. It’s not too much to ask.”
He was going to do it. I could tell by the way he steeled his spine, squared his shoulders. He had been putting me off for months. Surely he realized at a certain point he’d have to acknowledge me somehow. It couldn’t all be about Ree.
“Dare,” he said at last.
“Kiss me,” I ordered. “For one minute.”
He hesitated. I thought he’d renege, and I braced myself for the rejection. But then he sighed, ever so softly. He leaned forward, puckered up, and touched his mouth to mine.
He was going to be chaste about it. I knew him well enough by then to anticipate. And I knew that if I tried to be aggressive or demanding, he would shut down. Jason never yelled. Jason never raised his hand in rage. He simply disappeared, someplace deep inside him where nothing I said or did seemed to reach him, until I could be standing right beside him, and I would still be alone.
My husband respected me. He treated me kindly. He showered me with compassion. He did his best to anticipate my every need.
Except when it came to sex. We had been together nearly a year now, and he had yet to lay a single hand on me. It was driving me
crazy.
I didn’t open my mouth. I didn’t grab his shoulders, bury my fingers in his thick dark hair. I didn’t do anything that I longed to do. Instead, I fisted my hands at my sides, and ever so slowly, I kissed him back.
He gave me gentleness, so I returned his sweetness, my breath whispering across his closed lips. He gave me compassion, so I showered it upon the corner of his mouth, the full expanse of his bottom lip. He gave me respect, so I never once pushed the boundaries he had set. But I daresay I gave him the best damn kiss two closed-mouth people had ever shared.
When the minute was up, he drew back. But he was breathing harder now, and I could see something lurking in his eyes. Something dark, intense. It made me want to leap onto his lap, flatten him into the sofa, and fuck his brains out.
Instead, I whispered, “Truth or dare. Your turn. Ask me. Truth or dare.”
I could see the conflict. He wanted to say dare. He wanted me to touch him again. Or maybe take off my nice silky shirt. Or trail my hands across his hard chest.
“Truth,” he said huskily.
“Ask.”
“Why are you doing this?”
“Because I can’t help myself.”
“Sandy.” He closed his eyes, and for a moment, I could feel his pain.
“Truth or dare,” I demanded.
“Truth,” he nearly groaned.
“What is the worst thing you’ve ever done?”
“What do you mean?”
“What is the worst thing you’ve ever done? Come on. Have you lied? Stolen? Seduced your best friend’s baby sister? Killed anyone? Tell me, Jason. I want to know who you are. We’re married, for God’s sake. Surely you owe me that much.”
He looked at me funny. “Sandra …”
“No. No whining, no negotiating. Just answer the question. Have you ever killed anyone?”
“Yes.”
“What?” I asked, genuinely surprised.
“Yes, I’ve killed someone,” Jason said. “But that’s not the worst thing I’ve ever done.”
Then my husband got off the sofa, took his paperback, and left me alone in the room.
Jason didn’t think he’d fallen asleep, but he must have, because shortly after one A.M., a sound roused him from the love seat. He jerked upright, registering a distant banging. The noise seemed to be coming from outside the house. He stood, crossing to the front windows, where he parted the curtains one inch and peered out.