The Neighbor - Lisa Gardner [74]
“What about Thursday nights?” he asked abruptly. “When Sandy and Ree came to see the basketball games?”
“What about them?”
“Did she sit in the same place? Maybe beside the same guy? Perhaps she met someone during those nights, a fellow parent.”
Elizabeth shrugged. “I don’t know, Jason. I never noticed. But then, I haven’t made it to many of the games this season.” She gestured to her silvered hair. “I’m a grandma now, can you believe it? My daughter had her first child in November. I’ve spent most of my Thursday nights rocking my grandson, not sitting courtside. Though I can tell you who would know about Thursday nights. The basketball team picked up a new statistician for the season: Ethan Hastings.”
| CHAPTER EIGHTEEN |
Sergeant D.D. Warren didn’t give a flying fig what Colleen Pickler had said about sex offenders being model parolees, full of repentance and eager to please their court-appointed babysitters. D.D. had served eight years in uniform, and as a first responder to too many scenes of hysterical mothers and glassy-eyed children, she was firmly of the opinion that when it came to sex offenders, hell was not big enough.
Homicides in her world came and went. The CSAs, on the other hand, always left their mark. She could still recall the time she was called out to a preschool after a five-year-old boy disclosed to his teacher that he had been assaulted in the bathroom. The alleged perpetrator—the kid’s classmate, another five-year-old boy. Upon further investigation, D.D. and her partner had determined that the suspect lived with not one, but two registered sex offenders. The first being his father, the second being his older brother. D.D. and her partner had dutifully reported the incident to DCF, naive enough to believe that would make a difference.
No. DCF had determined it was not in the boy’s best interest to break up the family. Instead, the kid was kicked out of the preschool for inappropriate contact with another classmate and absolutely nothing else happened until six months later when D.D. encountered the same kid yet again. This time, he was a witness to a triple homicide, perpetrated by his older brother.
D.D. still dreamed of the kid’s empty gray eyes sometimes. The learned hopelessness as he flatly recounted his sixteen-year-old brother pulling into the mini-mart, how he followed his older brother into the store, thinking he was gonna get a Twinkie. Instead, his brother had pulled a gun, and then, when the nineteen-year-old store clerk hesitated, the brother had opened fire on the clerk, as well as two other kids, who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
D.D. had taken the boy’s testimony. Then she’d sent him home to his sex offender father. Nothing else the system would allow her to do.
That had been twelve years ago. Every now and then, D.D. was tempted to run the boy’s name, see what had happened to him. But she didn’t really need to. A kid like that, who by the age of five had been a repeated victim of sexual assault, a perpetrator of sexual assault, and then a witness to a triple homicide … Well, it’s not like he was gonna grow up to be President, now, was he?
There were other stories, of course. The time she’d arrived at a dilapidated triple-decker to discover the wife standing over her husband’s dead body, still holding the butcher knife, just in case after being stabbed two dozen times, he managed to get back up. Turned out, the wife had discovered her husband’s secret file on the computer, where he stored home videos he’d been shooting every night of himself having sex with their two daughters.
Interestingly enough, the daughters had disclosed for the first time when they were seven and nine, but when the police followed up, they’d found no evidence of abuse. The girls tried again when they were twelve and fourteen, but by then, given their penchant for micro minis and tube tops, not even their own mother had found them credible.
The video, on the other hand, had done