The Neighbor - Lisa Gardner [151]
Finally, she had explicit instructions for the two officers watching the Jones residence. If Jason Jones so much as cracked open his front door, he was to be arrested. Pick him up for loitering, late parking tickets, she didn’t care. But he was not to leave the confines of his house unless he was wearing a pair of BPD bracelets.
They had just lost a man, and she was furious.
So it definitely didn’t help when Dispatch returned to tell her that two officers had arrived at the Hastings residence. Unfortunately, the thirteen-year-old boy was not in his room and his parents had no idea where he might have gone.
Three minutes past eleven, Ethan Hastings had vanished.
“How did you finally figure it out?” Jason was asking his wife.
“Your birthday. I was installing the iPod software on the computer and I found a photograph in the recycle bin.”
“Which one?”
“You were naked, badly beaten. There was a tarantula crawling across your chest.”
Jason nodded. His gaze was on the floor. “That’s the hardest part,” he said, softly. “On the one hand, it’s been over twenty years. I got away. The past is the past. On the other hand, the man took so many photos … and movies. He sold them. That’s how he earned money. Selling child porn to other pedophiles, who of course are still reselling the pictures, over and over again. There are so many images out there, hundreds of countries, ten of thousands of servers. I don’t know how to get them back. I can never get them all back.”
“You were abducted,” she said quietly.
“Nineteen eighty-five. Not a good year to be me.”
“When did you get away?”
“Three or four years later. I made friends with an elderly neighbor woman, Rita. She let me stay at her place.”
“And the man just let you go?”
“Oh no. He came looking for me. Tied Rita up, handed me the gun, and ordered me to kill her. That was my punishment for disobeying him.”
“But you didn’t.”
“No.” He finally looked at her. “I shot him. Then, when he went down, I kept plugging him with bullets, just for good measure.”
“I’m sorry.”
He shrugged. “It’s been a long time. I killed the man. The police returned me to my family. The case records were sealed, and I was told to get on with my life.”
“Was your family mean to you? Did they resent what had happened, what you’d been forced to do?”
“No. But they were normal. And I … wasn’t.” He regarded her thoughtfully. Inside, the bedroom was dark and gloomy. Outside, the media mob blasted the front of their home with a thousand watts of klieg lights. To him, it seemed somehow fitting. They were like two kids, hunkered under the blankets, exchanging scary ghost stories long after the adults had gone to bed. They should have done this the first night, he realized now. Other couples went on honeymoons. They should have done exactly this.
He could feel Sandy’s leg against his leg, her fingers intertwined with his fingers. His wife, sitting beside him. He wanted to keep her here.
He said, “You once told me, what’s done can’t be undone. What’s known can’t be unknown. You were right. We’re marked, you and I. Even in the middle of a crowded room, we will always feel alone. Because we know things other people don’t know, because once we did things, or had to do things, that other people have never had to do.
“The police sent me home, but not even for my parents could I magically become a real boy. It distressed them. So on the morning of my eighteenth birthday, when I came into the stock Rita had left for me, I took off. Being Joshua Ferris didn’t feel right. So I took another name. Then another, and another. I became something of an expert on inventing new identities. It soothed me.”
Sandra rubbed the back of his hand. “Joshua—”
“Jason, please. If I had wanted to be Joshua, I would’ve stayed in Georgia. I moved here, we both moved here, for a reason.”
“But that’s what I don’t understand,” she blurted out. “By your own words, you and I have so much in common. So why didn’t you tell me these things before? Especially once you knew about my