by D. K. Wall
“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves, okay, Theo?”
“But it’s possible.”
Hesitating, David decided he had to answer to keep the trust going. “Yeah, it’s possible. That happens sometimes, especially if the home isn’t particularly stable or—”
Theo finished the thought. “Or if they didn’t care I was gone.”
David turned into the hospital entrance. “Possible, yes, but not likely. Let’s stay positive.”
“But if that’s true, it would explain why I can’t remember before. Because maybe I don’t want to. I mean, what if they, like, gave me to him? It’s possible, right?”
David parked the SUV and shut off the engine. Before opening the door, he looked into the darkened backseat. “One step at a time, Theo, okay? Can you trust me on that?”
When the boy nodded, David stepped out of the car and opened the back door. He draped his arm over the boy’s shoulder and escorted him into the hospital with Dr. Sorenson in tow.
54
As small as Millerton Community Hospital was, the staff all knew each other. The nurse at the duty station on the fifth floor looked surprised when Heather stepped off the elevator. She was sure that word had floated around quickly about the deception, just as she had learned via the active rumor mill that the boy was now being called Theo. The nurse offered quiet condolences before a patient-call button interrupted their conversation. With a roll of her eyes, the nurse went into a patient’s room, leaving Heather alone.
She padded quietly to the end of the hall and slipped into the room before anyone else noticed. Without the glow of monitors, only the night-light shining through the partially open bathroom door and the natural light through the window provided any illumination. Heather could make out the tray table pushed up against one wall and an empty visitor’s chair. She sidled up to the edge of the bed and stared at the huddled form under the blankets, his open eyes glistening in the dim light as he stared back.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered.
She blinked back the threatened tears. “I know, honey.”
“I didn’t mean to hurt anyone.”
“We’re hurting, but it’s not because of you. We’re hurting because we know my son is gone. We loved him.”
“So did I.” Those gray eyes blinked, and Theo shifted his gaze to the window. His tongue flicked out and ran across his lips. “I’m alive because of him. I would have never made it all those years without him.”
She struggled with her emotions. She knew she would spend part of the next day at the mortuary, planning a service. Connor had promised to go with her and help figure out the arrangements. No nineteen-year-old should ever have to plan his little brother’s funeral, but she needed his strength to get through it. And the boy sitting in front of her reminded her with his very presence of that pain.
But at the same time, she wanted to wrap her arms around him, pull him tightly against her, and kiss away that tear rolling down his face.
Her son was gone. This boy was there. The answer was that simple.
She reached out and held him as he cried. Once his tears dried up, she lowered his head to the pillow and pulled the sheet over his chest.
“I want to talk to you about Connor.”
The sides of the boy’s mouth turned up slightly. “I can see why Jaxon liked him so much. He’s a good brother.”
“Yeah. He’s a great brother. I wish he had gotten more time to be one.” She looked away to avoid making eye contact. “He’ll probably visit you tomorrow. I’m not sure if that’s good for him or not, but I think he will, anyway.”
“You don’t want him to see me?”
“It’s not that. I’m not mad at you, Theo.” She hesitated. “It’s that I’m not sure he should. I’m not sure it’s good for you, either. But I also don’t know if it’s bad for you.” She smoothed his hair with her hand. “He’s old enough to make his own decisions, and you’ve certainly earned the right to make your own decisions. I think maybe he needs to see you, needs to hear things.”
“Needs to hear things?”
“I think he needs to know more about what happened to his brother while he was with you… there.”
He studied his scarred hands. “Do you want to know more?”
“No.” She wiped the sweat from her hands across her scrubs. “I want to remember Jaxon as a happy little kid, not how things were there. Does that make sense?”
“I understand.” He nodded. “He was happy before. That’s why I knew so much about you and Connor. He talked all the time about how great you were.”
The room blurred as her eyes watered, and she fought against the tears. She resolved she wasn’t going to cry in front of him again. He didn’t need her tears. “I worked too much. I should have been there more. Loved him more.”
Theo sat up in the bed and focused on her. “I lived because he was there for me, but he lived because he knew you loved him. He never doubted that, not once, not on the darkest day. He always thought you or Con would save him. Or maybe his soldier dad would bust down the door. You may not want to know anything else that happened there, but you should know that.”
She bowed her head and let the tears flow despite her earlier efforts to hide them. She hadn’t realized how much she had needed to hear that, but she felt tension slip out of her. When she felt steady again, she lifted her head and smiled at him. “Good luck to you, Theo. I mean that.”
She turned to leave but stopped with her hand on the door handle when his voice reached her. “I am sorry. For lying, yeah, but for losing Jaxon too. I wish none of it had ever happened.”
“Me too,” she whispered and left the room.
55
David sipped a cup of mediocre coffee and scanned the notes on the whiteboards in the task-force room. Roxanne summarized the latest lab results. “Two more victims identified, both within the same two-hundred-mile radius that appeared to be Matthew McGregor’s hunting ground. That brings us to ten of the fourteen young boys’ bodies identified. Four to go.”
He leaned back in the chair and sighed. The feeling of missed opportunities gripped him again. “If only I had figured out it was Matt McGregor back then. I can’t believe I looked him in the eyes and didn’t figure it out.”
“And how would you have figured that out back then?”
“I knew he was messing with little boys.”
“Boy. Singular. You knew he had touched one kid when he was a teenager. You didn’t even know the details because no one ever made a report about it. You just followed up on it because you heard about it. You knew nothing else, and yet you checked on him. And at the same time, how many other convicted molesters did you talk to? A dozen? Two dozen?”
“But all those boys…”
She placed her hand on the stack of folders indicating Matt McGregor’s victims. “Crossing state lines, keeping his abductions spread months apart, never doing anything dramatic. Each case, on its own, appears to be a situation of a child wandering off and becoming lost or a victim of a parental dispute. Even those considered abductions were never connected.”
David shook his head. “Wattsville sits on a state line. Thanks to the interstate, he could reach seven different states in two hours or less. What I know about the guy says he wasn’t particularly smart. I think he just ran on pure instinct and was lucky.” He pulled his legal pad toward him. “Which brings me to the thing that’s still keeping me up all night. I’ve been trying to figure out why Jaxon and Theo were allowed to mature into teenagers. In fact, if Theo’s story about the hiker is accurate, and all the forensics say it is, then Jaxon, aka Kevin, would have kept living except for violating the rules. All of the other boys died much younger.”
“Just luck, maybe, though I don’t know if that’s good luck or bad.”
“I think it’s more than that. All the other boys had one other thing in common. They were all either older or younger than Jaxon and Theo. Only those two are the same age. And they were near instant fr
iends from the time Jaxon arrived, and their bond only grew over the years.”
Roxanne nodded. “Right. We think they were allowed to live so long because they were friends.”
“But see, I’m beginning to think that’s not quite right. I read and reread the psychiatrist’s reports last night. I don’t think they lived so long because they were friends. I think Jaxon lived so long because he was Theo’s friend.”
Roxanne sat back in her chair and chewed her pen. “That would have made Theo more important to Matthew than Jaxon.”
“Exactly. It clicked for me when I noticed an interesting anomaly in our interviews with Theo, when he describes the fear the various boys felt about being summoned upstairs.”
“Of course. That must have been awful. The things that pervert did to them.”
“Exactly, except his description is always in third person. They felt this. He felt that. He never says ‘I.’” David flipped to a highlighted section in a pad of notes. “The psychiatrist working with him thinks he doesn’t use ‘I’ because he was never the target. He never describes being touched. Not one single time. Dr. Sorenson thinks he may never have been molested.”
“Maybe he just buried the memories.”
David nodded. “Certainly possible, but isn’t it strange that he doesn’t have a problem remembering all the other horrible things that happened? He often describes being summoned upstairs, but he always seemed to assume Matt had some task for him to do so he didn’t feel the same fears. Awful, heinous tasks like burying bodies or washing blood out of the van, true, but he also never mentions any other boy ever being invited outside to do tasks like he did.”
“Was Jaxon the same way?”
“I wish that were true, but no. Theo remembers clearly consoling Jaxon after molestation episodes. They were less frequent as he was older, and especially if other, younger victims were with them at a given time, but Jaxon was not spared.”
“So Theo wasn’t molested. And Jaxon, who was molested, was allowed to live longer because he was friends with Theo. What makes Theo so special?” Roxanne started and sat up. “You’re not suggesting—”
The sheriff nodded. “Bethany Ann Andrews. The prostitute.”
“You think she’s Theo’s mother?”
“It fits and would explain why Theo can’t remember a before. Maybe he didn’t have a before. Rick meets a prostitute and maybe falls for her, or maybe he pays her to move in with him, or maybe he does kidnap her—who knows? He was seen picking her up in Knoxville. If Theo is the same age as Jaxon—and we all think he is because the timing is about right—Rick McGregor gets Bethany Ann pregnant and has a third son, Theo.”
“So you think Matt and Theo are half brothers?”
“And a half brother to Mark. Same father. Three different mothers.” David leaned back in his chair. “So I started thinking, maybe Matt killed his father precisely because Bethany was pregnant. Or maybe after the child was born. Either way, now he needs to keep her around to raise the kid. By the time she died, he had grown attached.”
“So attached he left the kid in a basement and beat him.”
“I didn’t say he was normal.”
Roxanne tsked. “That poor kid. Can you imagine the horror of finding out that maniac is your brother?”
David leaned back in his chair. “We’ll know soon enough. Get your lab to test his DNA against Rick’s and Bethany’s. Since it’s a simple yes-or-no question, we’ll have an answer quick.”
56
Connor strode down the hospital hallway, averting his eyes from the glances of the nurses working at the central station. Trigger, adorned in his purloined service-dog vest, walked beside him with his head held high.
In his earlier visits, he had worried someone might challenge Trigger’s right to be there. He wasn’t a service dog, and people knew it.
But now he worried about his own right to visit. Maybe Theo didn’t want to see him, or maybe there was a rule against it. They weren’t related, at least not anymore.
He realized he liked it better when he did things without thinking about the consequences. Thinking about what could go wrong was exhausting.
With a trembling hand, he knocked on the door and waited for the mumbled reply. He pushed the latch and stuck his head through the crack on the door. “Mind if I come in for a minute?”
Whatever hesitance Connor was feeling wasn’t shared by the dog. Trigger let loose a soft chuff, forced open the door with his body, and scrambled across the linoleum floor. His claws clattered on the slick surface, and he launched himself through the air, landing with an enthusiastic bounce on the bed. The dog’s squeaks of delight and Theo’s giggles filled the room as Connor let the door click shut behind him. He set the stack of Harry Potter books on the bed and settled into the empty visitor’s chair. Trigger’s obvious delight—that sweeping tail threatened to clear the tray table of its water glass and pitcher—made Connor smile despite the violation he had felt since the revelation of the previous night.
Once the dog settled on the bed, still jubilant in the reunion but calmer, Connor cleared his throat. “I debated all night whether I should come. I didn’t know if you would want to see me.”
The smile faded from Theo’s face, and he wouldn’t meet Connor’s eyes. “I’m glad you did. I wanted to say… I’m sorry. I should never…”
Connor waved the apology away with a swoop of his hand. “I think I kinda get it. Why you didn’t tell us you weren’t him. I mean, if you had told us, we probably wouldn’t have gotten to know you. And we wouldn’t have taken you home.”
The bed squeaked as Trigger pawed at the boy’s hand to continue petting him. Theo turned his head toward the dog, his eyes glistening. “It’s the first place I’ve ever been I didn’t want to leave.”
Connor cupped his hands behind his head, looked up at the ceiling, and exhaled. “I get it. And I’m glad you were there. It was fun, hanging out.”
Theo nodded. “I liked it too.”
They sat in an uncomfortable silence, only the noise of the dog’s panting in the room. Connor leaned forward. “Can you tell me something?”
“Sure.”
“What was he like? My brother. Tell me something good about him.”
Theo thought for a minute and then looked at the pile of books. “Did you know he taught me how to read?”
Connor sat up in shock. “He did?”
“Yeah. Most of the kids were so little they could only sound out a few words. I don’t think I knew any at all. But Jaxon loved to read. We had a few old books lying around, and he read them all to me. He would read until it got too dark to see. And then he would tell me the stories of books he had read before.”
“That sounds like Jax.”
“So, anyway, one of the books we had was that dictionary. I don’t remember who brought it or anything, but it was always there. And Jaxon liked to flip through it and learn new words, so one day he started showing me how words worked. He invented the dictionary game to teach me how to read. He would look up a word and have me sound it out. We kept trying harder and harder words, and we had to try and figure out what they meant without looking at the definition.”
“So he taught you Harry Potter?”
Theo shook his head. “No. We didn’t have those. I think he would have liked them. But I know I can read ’em because he showed me how.”
“That’s cool.” Connor shifted in his chair. Something had kept him up all night, and he had to ask. “The story about Kevin being beaten for calling out to the hitchhiker. Was that true?”
The boy buried his face into the dog’s neck, his shoulders shuddering. He sniffled and answered, his voice muffled in the fur. “Yes. Everything I told you was true. Except my name.”
“So Kevin was Jaxon?” He could barely bring himself to say it. “That means you saw that man beat my brother to death?”
“Yes.”
The room blurred as tears of anguish filled his eyes. His chest ached, as if he wa
s drowning in a sea of pain. He struggled to breathe, each intake of air hitching against the sobs trying to escape. Jaxon had been beaten to death because he had ridden off with his friends rather than watch his little brother.
Theo sighed. “I wanted to stop him, but he would have done the same thing to me.”
“I get it.”
“He was my best friend. I loved him. Like a”—Theo took in a deep breath, his own words slurred with emotion—“like a brother. If I could have stopped it…”
Connor rose to his feet and stumbled toward the bed. He reached out for the younger boy’s hand, his fingers wrapping around his wrist. “I’m glad he had you as a friend. I can’t imagine how horrible it would’ve been alone there.”
Theo looked up, their eyes meeting. “It was awful alone. Once he was gone, I wanted to die too.”
Connor wrapped his arms around the boy, drawing them chest to chest, where they consoled each other. Trigger wriggled between them, alternately licking their faces clear of the flowing tears. “I’m glad you didn’t.”
57
The number of agents had dwindled to only a couple, the buzz in the large room muted. Excess computer equipment had been packed into boxes and stacked along the wall, waiting for movers to carry them down the steps and load them into trucks. The case files were moving back to the sheriff’s office.
David sat at the conference table with his coffee cup in hand and the DNA results for Theo in the other. Ever since the confirmation had come in, he had been horrified how right his conclusion had been. And how wrong.
He looked at Roxanne. “Thanks for your help. We’d be waiting for months for the state labs to get all these tests done.”
She looked glumly at the board. One more child victim’s name had been filled in. Three question marks remained. “We’ll keep trying, but sometimes those identifications never happen. John Wayne Gacy killed thirty-three young men, but six of the recovered bodies were never identified. Some took years to be.”
