Watcher in the Woods: A Rockton Novel

by Kelley Armstrong

  It’d been in the news, and it caught my attention because it pissed me off. Roy McDonald was a university prof. Economics, which explained part of his “investment guy” false story.

  Three years ago, McDonald caught shit from his university for being a racist asshole. Surprise, surprise. He made some highly questionable comments about race and economic status, and he’d been reprimanded for it. Like too many people in that situation, convinced of the righteousness of their beliefs, he doubled down. He’d started expounding on his right to free speech and how kids these days are sensitive snowflakes, and he’s just exposing them to the harsh reality of real life.

  None of that would have caught my attention. There are racists and assholes in every walk of life, and having a doctorate degree doesn’t cure you of ignorance. What pissed me off was that McDonald then signed up for one of those online services where strangers donate funds to cover medical bills. Roy’s case, he’d been asking supporters to donate to his “cause.” That “cause” being free speech. Toss some money his way to show your support for his crusade. And if racism wasn’t enough for you, well, he had a few things to say about women, too, in an “economic sense.” Every time his fifteen-seconds threatened to expire, he found a new cause, and his coffers swelled.

  I’d been too wrapped up in a case to catch the end result. Turns out that Roy got greedy, and he screwed up, investing his newfound capital in some very questionable ventures and ended up charged with fraud. So that part of his story was true. He was indeed on the run for money problems. The story just wasn’t nearly as mundane as the one he’d given.

  For all that, there’s nothing here that suggests Roy could have been Garcia’s target. Whoever Garcia came for, it’s a violent criminal. He warned us, and now I suspect he was telling the truth.

  Which resident might have done something like that? The guy at the bottom of my list.

  I have Sebastian’s supposed real name. It brings back nothing, which is what I’d expect if his story was true. His crimes were too minor to be news, plus he’d been a minor himself. But I know his story is bullshit. Every detective cell in my body screamed it during that interview, and every answer he gave only reinforced my gut instinct. He is not a kid from the streets who grew up jacking cars and selling dope, a high school dropout living in group homes and juvenile facilities. Ten minutes of conversation would have been enough to tell me Sebastian wasn’t that guy. Dalton only bought the council’s story because Abigail was his sole experience with that sort of background, and Dalton isn’t one to draw generalizations.

  So I start throwing in other terms. Most people in Rockton use their real first name, and like Petra’s, Sebastian’s is just unusual enough that I’m hopeful. I know his age. His papers say he’s from Winnipeg, but I hear no accent in his voice, which suggests he’s from my region: southern Ontario. His universities of choice are southern Ontario, too.

  I still don’t find anything. I start tossing out search terms, and one brings back a twenty-year-old named Sebastian, who goes by Bastian. The picture isn’t our guy, but my gaze snags on the name, and there’s a click, deep in my memory.

  Holy shit.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  I type feverishly, so fast that I keep making typos as my fingers tangle. All I need is four words. Toronto. Bastion. Murder. I might not even require the fourth, but I add it anyway because it’s the one that defines this case.

  The boy’s name was Bastion. His parents may not have realized that was short for Sebastian and mistakenly gave him the diminutive, but in this case, I suspect they were just being creative. “Creative” best summed up Bastion’s parents. His mother was a film maker, his father an artist. Neither had been particularly successful, but they came from money, and having a fulfilling career was more important than success. Also more important than talent. They’d lived in a historically designated house in one of Toronto’s wealthiest neighborhoods. They threw lavish parties. They jetted around the world. Their parenting style had accommodated that lifestyle, their only child raised by nannies and tutors. Bastion had attended private school briefly when he was eight. Then his parents took him out because the class schedule interfered with their own.

  Bastion was eleven when he ran to a neighbor’s house and banged on the door. The neighbors didn’t open it. Instead, they called the police. They’d never seen Bastion before, and all they knew was that child was banging on their door and screaming at two AM. I’m not sure what they thought. That some street urchin from a Dickens’ novel had come to rob them in the night?

  The police came. They let Bastion take them back to his house and upstairs where his parents lay in their bed, dead. Poisoned. Glasses sat on the nightstands, ice not yet fully melted in their cyanide-laced Scotch. Beside those glasses lay a suicide note. They’d had enough. They’d failed in their art. They’d frittered away their lives. They could no longer bear to look at themselves in the mirror, knowing they were talentless failures who’d lived lives of unearned luxury, while people died of the cold and the heat, sleeping in cardboard boxes on the streets. Ashamed of their choices, they’d decided to end it, leaving ninety percent of their fortune to the city’s homeless, the other ten to their son, only enough to support him to adulthood.

  An astounding moment of clarity in two lives of indolence, a touch of nobility to a tragic end. And it was a lie. A complete and utter lie.

  Bastion’s parents had been murdered. And their killer? The boy himself.

  What struck me most about the case was not the idea of a child murdering his parents, as unthinkable as that might be. What sent even more chills up my spine was the breathtaking maturity of it. An eleven-year-old boy poisoning his parents’ nightcaps and then leaving that note, revealing a preternatural awareness of their shortcomings. As a child, I had grumbled about my parents, but it wasn’t until I was older that I could step back and analyze them as people, criticize and critique their life choices and my upbringing. A child accepts her situation because it’s all she knows. Yet Bastion, at the age of eleven, looked at his parents and judged them and executed them.

  When the police accused him, he could have cried. He could have feigned shock. It probably would have worked. Instead, he confessed with an equally chilling equanimity.

  You got me. I did my best, but you win.

  I don’t know if he said that, of course. But it was always the sense I got. Like a career criminal who prides herself on her skills so much that when she’s caught, she accepts defeat without fighting.

  I screwed up. I accept the punishment.

  Or like me, waiting for someone to link me to Blaine’s death, telling myself that when they do, I won’t fight it. Hoping I won’t fight it. That I have the guts to say, “You got me.”

  I do know something Bastion did say. It’s in the article, reminding me what I’d heard before, over beers with a detective who’d nominally worked the case.

  When asked why he killed his parents, the boy said, “I wanted to go to school. I wanted to play hockey. I wanted to have a skateboard and go to the park. I wanted to be a regular kid.”

  He murdered his parents to get that “normal” life. In a perverse sense, this seemed to bother cops more than the murder.

  Wanted to go to school? Play hockey? Ride a fucking skateboard?

  Spoiled little brat didn’t know what he had, how good his life was. Born with the proverbial silver spoon, and he spat it out.

  Yet this I understand. When you have money, people think that solves all your problems and you have no cause for complaint. Not true. It gives you enormous privilege and opens every door, but that doesn’t mean it’s a perfect life. Not if you’re an eleven-year-old boy, being whisked around the world, when all you want is an afternoon in a park and neighbors who know who the hell you are.

  That does not justify what Bastion did. Does not even make it comprehensible. At eleven years old, he murdered both his parents in cold blood, and the only crime they were guilty of was self-absorption. If y
ou make that an executable crime, we’d have a massacre of Fortune 500 parents. What happened here was the collision of problematic parenting with an even more problematic child. A boy with a broken psyche. A fledgling sociopath.

  Bastion’s official diagnosis was borderline personality disorder. Bastion wanted something his parents would not give him, something he deemed essential for his life, and so he got rid of them. Problem solved.

  Two weeks ago I met a girl who murdered her grandmother and two other settlers because they wouldn’t give her what she wanted. To her, it was a simple and obvious solution. Now, in our town, do we have a young man who has committed an equally horrifying and unthinkable crime?

  I can’t pull up a photograph and see whether our Sebastian is really Bastion Fowler. He was eleven. I only know his name being in law enforcement.

  Bastion was tried as a juvenile and sentenced to a psychiatric facility until his eighteenth birthday. That came a year ago, which would make him two years younger than Sebastian. Ours could easily be nineteen, though.

  When he was released, reporters had tried tracking him down. At eighteen, he was fair game. The problem was that they didn’t know his name—it was still protected. But they did find out when he was being released from prison. I find three photos of him supposedly getting out. I say “supposedly” because it’s three photos of three different young men, as if decoys had been used to throw off reporters. Two are very clearly not the young man I know. But the third . . . It’s the worst one, taken from too far away, a blurred shot of a guy in a hoodie hightailing it to a car. He’s slightly built and average height, like Sebastian. Hair hangs over part of his face. Light brown hair. I see that, and I remember the young man who sat across from me last night, hair hanging in his face.

  It’s you. In my gut, I know. In my gut, this makes sense.

  I read more. According to the articles, Bastion Fowler wasn’t the charming, manipulative sort of sociopath. He didn’t have that magnetic personality. Instead, he was polite. Calm. Deferential, even. Like the young man I’d spoken to last night.

  Unnaturally calm. Unnaturally mature. Highly intelligent. Highly creative.

  A boy who intellectually understood the difference between right and wrong. He’d tried to cover his crime, after all. He had also accepted his punishment.

  I tried. I failed. You got me.

  I’m digging for more when a voice at my shoulder says, “May I join you?” and it’s a testament to how deep I am in my research that I look up with an automatic smile, presuming it’s Dalton. It is not Dalton. It’s a guy about forty, holding a coffee and a muffin. He has a too-white smile and blond-tipped hair, spiked in a style that would have better suited him twenty years ago . . . when it was in vogue. When I smile, he puffs up in a way that makes me internally smack myself upside the head.

  “Uh . . .” I begin. “My—”

  “Sorry,” he says. “You’re hard at work, and I don’t mean to disturb you. I just hoped to use the wifi to check in with my kids and . . .”

  He jerks his chin around the patio. Every table is filled.

  “My husband will be joining me,” I say, “but you can certainly use that seat until he does.”

  He sits, and I type in more search terms. I don’t even get my results before he says, “My ex is home with the kids. I promised I’d send them photos.”

  I nod and keep my gaze on my screen, hoping his haste to clarify his marital status means nothing. I pull up an article on Bastion’s release.

  “So you’re here with your husband?” he says.

  I glance up just enough to see his gaze fixed on my empty ring finger. “Yes. We were out panning this morning. I took my band off before it fell in, and someone thought they stuck gold.” I smile, but it’s a tight one that should warn him off. Instead, he inches his chair toward mine.

  “What kind of laptop is that?” he asks.

  “No idea,” I lie. “It’s my husband’s.”

  “Looks state-of-the-art. He’s a tech geek, I take it?”

  I can’t help laughing at that. “No.”

  “So where are you from?” he asks. “I was talking to a couple just this morning from Tokyo, and our guide said tourism from Japan is booming.”

  I fix him with a steady, deadpan look. Then I return to my article. It’s on the kind of junk-news site that posts pieces by wannabe journalists. Written nine months ago, the writer claimed to have found Bastion’s apartment building, which she’d been staking out in hopes of spotting him. Not sure what she hoped to “spot” when no photos of him were available online. Did she think she’d see his crimes writ on his—

  “Surgeon or musician?” the man asks.

  I look over at him.

  “With those fingers, you must be a surgeon or a musician.” He smiles as he leans closer. “Although, with that face, I’d say model. You must have done some, right? Former model turned cardiac surgeon?”

  I stare at him. He’s grinning like he’s just paid me the biggest compliment ever, and surely I’ll rise to the bait, blushing, and stammering, my ego bolstered.

  I’m tempted to say I’m a cop, but he might like that. Somehow, I seem to attract the guys who do.

  “I’m a travel writer,” I say. “And I’m on a deadline. I’m sure your kids are waiting for those pictures.”

  Kiss-offs don’t come much clearer than that.

  “Travel writer?” He inches his chair closer still. “Got any hot local tips?”

  “The coffee shop down the road is less crowded.”

  He only laughs. When he opens his mouth again, I snap my laptop shut and stand.

  “And if you’ll excuse me, I should probably move to that other shop,” I say. “My husband’s late, and he may have gone to the wrong one.”

  I check my watch as I put my laptop away. It’s been two hours. Dalton should be here any second. I’ll find a place nearby to hang out and watch for the car.

  The encounter has annoyed me more than I like to admit. On the force, when I dared complain about being hit on, my male coworkers would either tell me I should be flattered or they’d scold me for “misinterpreting,” as if I was so conceited that I presumed any guy who speaks to me is flirting. At first, it pissed me off, and I’d try to explain that I knew the difference between conversation and flirtation and harassment. But that conversation rarely goes well. So I’ve learned to deal with it, as every woman does, and it rarely bothers me. Today it does because it drove me from my seat and from my work. So I’m fuming, walking fast, trying to regain my focus.

  I stride along one sidewalk and start crossing the road. When I check for traffic, I spot the guy I just escaped, hands in his pockets as he gazes about, his face turned the other way.

  Is he following me?

  Again, this is always a dilemma. Just because he’s left the coffee shop does not mean he’s coming after me. However, he’s also discarded his unfinished coffee and muffin, which suggests that he didn’t just happen to be done and depart at the same time. Still, if I jump to the conclusion I’m being followed, a little voice tells me I’m overreacting.

  Don’t be silly. He just finished up quickly and decided to leave.

  And if I listen to that voice, I hear others—all the voices of all the women I met as a cop in special victims, the ones who admitted they’d had a “bad feeling,” and they ignored it because they didn’t want to seem paranoid.

  That little voice in our heads does this weird thing, conflating self-preservation with self-importance. We express concern over walking around alone at night, and we imagine people scoffing, telling us we aren’t “all that.” As a cop, I know assault isn’t about physical attractiveness. Yet that voice still screams, admonishing you for your egotism.

  I’d said I was going to a coffee shop down the road. I can’t pretend to do that, because there isn’t one. There is a Greek restaurant, and I pop into it and buy a can of pop, which I tuck into my bag. I’m about to ask if there’s a washroom—and hopefully
a back exit near it—when the front door opens and my pursuer walks in. Seeing me, he pulls up short.

  “Hey, small world. I was looking for that other coffee shop you mentioned. I was going to ask in here.”

  “I think it’s closed down,” I say, “but I’m sure someone here can help you.”

  I brush past and out the door. I’m about to walk around the side of the small building. Then I stop. I don’t want to ditch this guy just yet. There’s still that whispering voice of doubt claiming it’s a misunderstanding. More important, though, is the louder one that suggests it’s odd for a casual admirer to be so ardent in his pursuit, especially when he’s gotten no encouragement in return.

  He did admire my laptop. Am I looking at a very different kind of predator here? One who sees a petite woman alone with an expensive piece of tech?

  I have no idea, but the cop in me wants to solve this mystery. So I hit the sidewalk, heading the other way at a leisurely pace. The restaurant door creaks open and bangs shut behind me. Footsteps clomp on the wooden sidewalk. I make a left at the corner and then cross diagonally at the next intersection. On one corner is the inn where Dalton and I stay when we make a supply run.

  I walk inside. As soon as I duck into the main room, one of the staff appears. His smile of recognition hitches, and he opens his mouth, probably to tell me that, with regret, that they’re full, but I reassure him that I’m not here for a room.

  “I have a favor to ask,” I say. “And it’s a little strange.”

  I tell him that a middle-aged guy has been following me, and I ask if I can slip out the rear. He’s fine with that and promises that if anyone comes in asking about me, he’ll say that he’s not at liberty to discuss his guests.

  I head out the back and, sure enough, when I peek around the corner, I see my pursuer in the parking lot. I’m wondering what he’s doing when I notice the cell phone glued to his ear.

  He turns, leaning casually against an SUV, his back to me. I zip to the other side of that vehicle. When I stop, he’s laughing.