Stealing Faces - Michael Prescott [116]
Shepherd, who had seen what a gun could do in the hands of a drunk or a gangbanger or a child, nodded slowly.
“So Justin grew up playing softball and washing the neighbors’ cars for pocket money, and he never had a rifle to his name. Never went hunting. None of that.”
Hunting. The word stirred a small, furtive anxiety in the back of Shepherd’s mind.
He hunts them, Kaylie had said to the 911 operator. It’s a sport for him. He lets them go, and he tracks them, hunts them down like animals.
“Now, I don’t want to mislead you, Roy. When I speak of Justin’s boyhood, I don’t want you to think he was any sort of angel. Guns or not, he did get into trouble. He hot-wired cars, for one thing. Got himself a rap sheet by the age of fourteen for joyriding around.”
“Did he?” Shepherd said softly.
McMillan showed him a sly look. “Yes, sir. You’re thinking of Kaylie, aren’t you? The way she hot-wired a truck after she busted out of the institute twelve years ago?”
“As a matter of fact, I was.”
“She learned it from Justin. Must have. He was chock-full of these special talents.” The man sighed, releasing a great billow of breath. “I don’t mean to make light of it. Fact is, matters got pretty serious for a while. Justin set a fire in the high school gymnasium. Might’ve done some real damage if the gym teacher hadn’t smelled smoke and doused the flames with a fire extinguisher.”
“Why did Justin do that?”
A lift of McMillan’s shoulders. “Why does a cat play with a ball of string? For the sheer pleasure of it, I expect.”
“Were there other fires?”
“None that were linked to him. There were a few, though, that were never explained. The Gilfoyles lost their mobile home in one blaze. Justin swore he didn’t do it. Me and Regina—we wanted to believe him.”
Shepherd had read up on the behavioral development of psychopaths. Fire starting was often one of the earliest warning signs.
“This sort of thing went on for couple years,” McMillan said quietly. “Then a miracle. Justin straightened out. He quit the joyriding, the shoplifting—yes, there’d been some of that, too. But not anymore. He was a normal kid suddenly. Better than normal. Outstanding. Folks started saying that Justin McMillan, after a spate of hell-raising, had turned out all right.”
“What happened? Why did he change?”
“There was no reason. Certainly nothing we did for him. It appeared to be just what I said—a miracle.” Anson stared at the far mountains, their humped backs red with the ebbing glow of the sunset. “But maybe there are no miracles. Maybe he never really changed at all. Maybe he just pushed it down deep—that part of him—and it took a while to burrow its way back to the surface.”
He took a long swig of his root beer, and Shepherd, out of courtesy, made a pretense of swallowing another sip.
“Justin graduated from high school, moved out on his own. He got a good job clerking in the hardware store. He was going to night school to learn the computer trade. You know anything about computers, Roy?”
“Not much. My wife was the expert.”
“Was? You divorced?”
“She died.”
“Sorry to hear it. My Regina’s gone too. I visit her grave once a week and on holidays. Never miss her birthday. You visit your wife?”
“Sometimes.”
“We all lose what we love, don’t we? In the old country they have a saying about it. In the end, they say, the world will break your heart.”
Shepherd watched the sunset’s afterglow. He was silent,
“Anyway, Justin was learning all about computers. He had a future, or so we all thought. Then to top it off, he started dating Kaylie Henderson, who was, I believe, just about the prettiest girl in town. She was the quiet type, sort of aloof, and people got the idea she was stuck up. They were wrong. She was shy, that’s all, painfully shy. You couldn’t blame her, after the life she’d had.”
“What do you mean?”
“You don’t know? She’d had it rough, Roy.