The Wreck (12 page)

A ripple of fear went through her when
she suddenly had the overwhelming feeling she was being watched. Looking left
and then right, she saw no one anywhere in sight. Telling herself she was being
ridiculous, Carly gathered up her gardening tools, grabbed the garbage bag, and
set off down Tucker Road. Adrenaline had her walking faster than usual, until
she finally broke into a jog on the way to her parents’ house.

To get to South Road, she had to pass
Brian’s parents’ house. Seven hundred and eighty-six steps later, she stood at
the front gate to the house where she had grown up. Anytime Carly made that
walk, she remembered the night she and Brian had counted the steps between
their two houses. Filled with nostalgia that was less sad than it used to be,
she used her key in the front door.

Even though the windows were open, the
house was musty, since her parents had left for Europe a week earlier. They
would be gone another three weeks, and while Carly was thrilled they were
finally retired and able to enjoy themselves, she missed them. Her mother was
the only person in Carly’s life—other than her nieces and nephews—who could
communicate effortlessly with her without the need for words.

Carly watered her mother’s plants and
added some junk mail to the garbage bag she had brought with her. She unlocked
the deadbolt on the back door and took the bag to the trashcan in the yard.
Lifting the rubber lid, she gasped when she found another note sitting on top
of the bag already in the can. This one said, “WHORE” in the same vivid red ink
as the note from the accident site. Carly dropped the lid and the bag she was
holding and ran into the house. She flipped the deadbolt on the door. Her hands
shaking, she reached for the phone and dialed 911.

“911, please state your emergency.”

Carly was paralyzed with fear and furious
that when she tried to speak nothing came out.

“911, please state your emergency.” Carly
didn’t answer, so the operator said, “Please stay on the line. I’m dispatching
the police to 22 South Road. If you’re able to answer the door, please press
the pound key.”

Carly did as the operator asked.

“Hang on just a minute. Police are on
their way.”

She could hear the sirens, and taking the
portable phone with her, she went to the front window to watch for them. Two
cruisers pulled up to the curb. Carly opened the front door to Deputy Chief
Matt Collins and a patrolman.

“Carly?” Matt said. “What’s wrong?”

Carly led them to the kitchen where her
parents kept a small dry-erase board for her use. She quickly told the officers
about the notes she had found and the sensation she’d had earlier that she was
being watched. As she finished writing, she looked up to find a somber
expression on Matt’s face.

He called for crime scene backup and
asked Carly to show him the notes.

The house and yard were soon overrun with
police. Chief Westbury arrived ten minutes after Matt called in the initial
report. Something about the grave way the police handled the collection of
evidence frightened Carly and led her to suspect this wasn’t the first they had
seen of these notes.

“What’s going on?” she wrote to Chief
Westbury.

“We’re not sure. Are you all right,
Carly? You’re ghostly pale.”

“I’m okay. Rattled but okay.”

He sat next to her on the sofa while his
officers continued their work. “You didn’t see anyone at the accident site?”

She shook her head. “I just felt like I
was being watched.”

“That hasn’t happened before?” It was no
secret in town that Carly maintained the memorial at the crash site.

“No.” They sat in silence for several
minutes before she took a deep breath and wrote, “You must be so proud of him.”

Michael studied her words for a long
moment before he glanced up at her. “Yes,” he said almost in a whisper. “Very.”

After a moment’s hesitation, she wrote,
“How is he?” She had never once asked that question of either of Brian’s
parents in all the years since he left home.

“He’s good. He works too hard, but he
just spent a week with Mary Ann in Florida. They had a great time.”

Carly nodded and resisted the
overwhelming urge to ask more.

“You know,” Michael said tentatively,
“I’m sure he’d love to hear from you if you wanted to write him a letter or something.
I’d be happy to give you his address.”

Sending him a sad smile, she shook her
head. “It’s better this way.”

“Carly—”

Matt Collins came into the room. “Chief,
we found a partial footprint on the path from the side yard gate to the
trashcans.”

Michael’s eyes lit up. “Let me see.” He
squeezed Carly’s hand and got up to follow his deputy outside.

The
police spent another two hours scouring every inch of the yard without
discovering anything else. The crime scene officers left to do a perfunctory investigation
at the accident site, which had been compromised by the work Carly had done
there earlier. But Michael instructed them to check anyway.

After they left, he came into the house
through the back door. They had taken a sample of Carly’s fingerprints to rule
out hers on the note she had picked from the wildflowers on Tucker Road.

“Do you have a number where I can reach
your parents?”

“A call from you will terrify them,” she
wrote. “I’ll ask Caren to call them, if you don’t mind.”

“Of course. That’s fine. It’s getting
dark. Where are you headed from here?”

“Just to Caren’s.” Her sister’s house was
less than a mile from their parents’ home.

“I’ll walk you.”

“That’s not necessary,” Carly protested.

“I
said
I’ll walk you.” His face
was set in a stern expression that made her smile.

“Thank you.” Carly hated to admit she was
grateful for his insistence. If someone was in fact watching her, it wouldn’t
hurt to have the chief of police serving as her escort.

Michael checked the deadbolt on the back
door one last time. He waited while Carly locked the front door and then
extended his arm to her. “Madame?”

With a grateful smile for the man who, in
another life, would’ve been her father-in-law, Carly hooked her hand through
his arm and let him walk her the short distance to her sister’s house.

M
ichael sat in the police station
conference room that had become the command post for the unfolding
investigation. Photocopies of each piece of evidence were tacked up on a
bulletin board. A large map of Rhode Island, Connecticut, and Massachusetts
occupied most of one wall. Four red pushpins indicated where each of the recent
sexual assaults had occurred.

Five smaller blue tacks marked the
locations where the notes had been found—three in the cemetery and the two
discovered by Carly. A yellow pin marked the unsolved carjacking in Pawtucket,
which had characteristics that mirrored the recent attacks with one distinct
difference—the carjacking victims had been murdered.

Since most of the pins were clustered
around tiny Granville, Michael, the other chiefs, and the state police officers
on the task force had concluded a sexual predator, who was also possibly a
murderer, was living among the citizens of his town. The conclusion infuriated
the man charged with keeping Granville safe. That someone he knew could be
capable of these crimes was unimaginable to him.

The fourth red pushpin was located just
over the border in Connecticut. Since the case now involved multiple states and
jurisdictions, the task force members had agreed to call in the FBI. They were
meeting with federal agents in the morning.

Matt Collins came into the room. “Mike? I
thought you had left.”

“Oh, hey,” Michael said. “What’s up?”

“We got the labs back on the new notes.”

“Let me guess? Nothing?”

Matt’s expression was grim when he said,
“Right. Just Carly’s prints on the one from Tucker Road.” He used blue pins to
add copies of the latest notes to the board. “They’re still working on the
partial footprint.”

“I hate to admit I’m actually relieved the
feds are on their way.” Under normal circumstances, he would resent the
intrusion.

“We’re out of our league here,” Matt
agreed.

“It’s someone we know,” Michael said,
feeling the need to say it out loud.

Matt sat down on the other side of the
conference table. “Yes.”

Michael studied the map intently.

“What’s on your mind, Mike?”

“I just wonder…”

“What?”

Michael finally took his eyes off the map
and focused on his friend. “This is between you and me.”

“Of course.”

“I also want to be clear that I’m
speaking as a police officer and not a grieving father.”

“You’re thinking there’s a connection
between our perp and the accident, aren’t you?”

“Hear me out on this,” Michael insisted.
“A few weeks before the accident, Brian sees a man standing in the road at the
exact place where the accident later occurs. He has to swerve to avoid hitting
him but is able to maintain control of the car. Now factor in that our perp
clearly has an ax to grind with popular kids.”

Matt nodded in agreement.

“You’ve got a group of cheerleaders and
athletes in a car that travels up and down Tucker Road every day. How hard
would it be in this town to track the whereabouts of kids who do everything
together?”

As he thought about it, Matt rubbed at
the blond stubble on his chin.

“Isn’t it
possible?”
Michael hated
the desperation he heard in his own voice.

“I know you want it to be.”

“But?”

“A guy standing in the road doesn’t
discount the fact that Sam was driving too fast.”

Michael sat back in his chair. “Granted,
but maybe he doesn’t lose control of the car if he’s not trying to avoid
hitting someone who was waiting for one of the Westbury boys to drive by.”

“For the sake of argument, let’s say it
happened just the way you think.” Matt stood, picked up a dry-erase marker, and
wrote “May 19, 1995: Accident on Tucker Road” on the board. “The next incident
is on July 6, 2000,” Matt said as he added the carjacking to the list under the
accident.

“That’s the next
known
incident.”

“Work with me here.”

Michael scowled and forced himself to
stay quiet.

“Five years after he allegedly
orchestrates a car accident that kills six popular teenagers, he carjacks a
young couple, rapes and sodomizes both of them, and then strangles them. Are we
in agreement on the facts?”

“Yes.”

“The M.O.s don’t match.” Matt raised his
hands to make his point. “In five years he goes from standing in the middle of
a road to kidnapping, raping, and murdering?”

“I’ll admit it’s a leap,” Michael
conceded as he studied the dry-erase board. Suddenly he froze.

“What?”

Michael got up and walked over to the
board. “Remember studying investigation tactics in the academy?”

“Yeah, so?”

Michael never took his eyes off the board
when he said, “They told us to look for patterns, right?”

“Where you going with this, Mike?”

“Look at the years—1995, 2000.” He
reached for the pen and added 2010 to the list, leaving a space between the
carjacking and the recent spate of attacks. In the space he wrote “2005” with a
question mark after it. He turned to Matt. “Until you put the dates on the
board, I didn’t see it.”

“An anniversary perp?”

The two men looked at each other for a
long moment.

“I’ll pull a statewide list of unsolved
cases from 2005,” Matt finally said.

“Check 1990, too. Maybe this didn’t start
with the accident.”

On his way to the door, Matt stopped and
turned around to face his friend. “If we run with this, Mike, you need to be
prepared for what people will say about your motives.”

“Let them say whatever they want. If I’m
right and we can clear Sam’s name, it’ll be worth it.”

Desperate
to get through the second half of his forced vacation, Brian took long walks
through his Tribeca neighborhood and ventured north to SoHo, Chinatown, and Little
Italy. One day he set out for Battery Park, the southernmost point in Manhattan
where the Hudson and East Rivers come together. Watching the ferries running
back and forth from Manhattan to the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island, Brian
thought about taking a trip out there, but somehow it seemed like it would
require too much effort.

Another day he wandered through the
gentrified Lower East Side and across the Brooklyn Bridge, stopping on the
Brooklyn side for a cup of coffee in a diner that reminded him of Miss Molly’s
and Carly. Like he’d done all week, he pushed the thought from his head and set
out back across the bridge to Manhattan. Another day he wandered into a few of
the galleries in SoHo. It was the most time he’d ever spent playing tourist in
more than eight years of living in the city.