CHAPTER THIRTY
C HAPTER T HIRTY
A half hour later, Matt leaned on the kitchen counter and studied Mrs. Osborne. Still dressed in blue work scrubs, she sat in stunned silence across her kitchen table from Bree. Mrs. Osborne was a tall woman, with broad shoulders and strong hands. Her hair, more salt than pepper, was pulled back in a simple ponytail. She seemed capable, intelligent, and utterly exhausted.
Bree unfolded the warrant. “We need to search the house.”
Mrs. Osborne waved a cooperative hand. “Simon spends most of his time in his computer room. It’s upstairs, across the hall from his bedroom.” She hadn’t seemed surprised or angry when they showed up on the doorstep with the news about Simon’s confession.
Bree motioned to Todd, who started up the steps with two deputies in tow.
A white pit bull—Matt assumed this was Daisy, the dog Simon claimed Josh Mason had poisoned—barked and scratched on the other side of the glass patio door.
“She’s friendly, but she’ll get in your way.” Mrs. Osborne stood, crossed to the fridge, and took a rubber KONG toy out of the freezer. She opened the patio door and handed the KONG to the wiggling, wagging dog. “That’s a good girl.” She closed the door. The dog lay on the patio with the toy between her front paws. “She loves frozen peanut butter.” She returned to her chair. “Do you mind if I make some coffee? I’ve been up all night, and it doesn’t seem like I’m going to get any sleep anytime soon.”
“That’s fine, ma’am,” Bree said.
Mrs. Osborne moved around the bright kitchen. Morning sunlight poured through the window over the sink. The furniture was a bit worn, but the house was clean and pleasant with rustic farmhouse decor. “The biggest surprise to me is that Simon confessed. He likes to get away with things. Then again, he also likes to prove he’s smarter than everyone else, and if he doesn’t tell anyone, who would know? But there’s one thing I’m sure about. He hated Josh Mason.”
“Why?” Matt asked.
Mrs. Osborne put a pod into the machine and placed a mug under the spout. She pressed a button, and the machine gurgled to life. “He thinks Josh poisoned Daisy, but I don’t think he did. Daisy is always eating something she shouldn’t. Last month, she puked up a golf ball. The month before, the neighbor’s kid left a box of crayons outside. Daisy was pooping rainbows for days.” She looked away, the corners of her mouth dragging down. “Josh would run past this house every morning. Simon likes to sit on the porch and watch the neighborhood. He expects people to stop and talk to him. Most people don’t want to do that. They’re busy, and frankly, he can be unsettling. Still, most folks are polite. They wave and say hi, make an excuse, like ‘Hi, Simon, gotta get to work. Have a great day.’ But Josh ran on by. He completely ignored Simon, and that made him mad.” She took a breath and studied her clasped hands for a moment. “Simon fixates on things, and everything makes him angry when he’s in that mood. I’ve tried to get him help, but he won’t go. I can’t make him. I don’t know what to do. My only option is to kick him out. But how will that help? He’d be homeless.” Her eyes were sad, but almost relieved. She flattened a palm at the base of her throat. “I’ve been living with the fear that he’d hurt someone for years. I haven’t slept since the Masons were killed.”
“Do you think he killed them?” Bree asked.
“I don’t know what to think. I hope not.” The coffee finished brewing, and she lifted the mug. “Coffee?” Bree shook her head. Mrs. Osborne added a drop of cream and a teaspoon of sugar to her coffee and stirred. “I need to get him an attorney.”
“If he can’t afford a lawyer, one will be appointed for him,” Bree said.
“Does Simon have money?” Matt couldn’t imagine Simon holding down a job.
“No, but I have a little rainy-day fund from his father’s life insurance. A private attorney would be best, right?” Mrs. Osborne dropped back into her chair at the table and wiped a tear from her eye.
“Public defenders can be good,” Bree said in a neutral tone.
They were hit-or-miss in Matt’s opinion.
Mrs. Osborne’s chest heaved with an exhausted sigh. “You must think I’m a horrible mother. I probably shouldn’t be cooperating with you. It’s not that I don’t want him to be innocent. I don’t want him to have hurt anyone. But I need to know the truth before I can help him.”
Matt’s heart bled for her. “You’re in a terrible situation.”
She eyed Matt’s bandaged arm. “When you arrived, you said he’d confessed to murder but that he was arrested for assaulting a law enforcement officer. Was that you?”
“Yes, ma’am.” Matt didn’t mention that his father had given him an antibiotic shot and a ten-day course of medicine. Apparently, the bacteria in a human mouth were worse than a dog’s. Matt was grateful humans had blunt teeth instead of big pointy ones.
“I’m sorry.” She lifted her mug with both hands and sipped her coffee, the movements mechanical.
Matt nodded. It wasn’t Simon’s fault, and Matt bore him no ill will, but he also didn’t want Simon to hurt anyone else. He didn’t want that uncontrolled rage turned on a defenseless person. The person—or Simon—could be severely injured.
Or killed, if Simon was telling the truth.
“Simon says he blacked out the night the Masons were shot,” Bree said. “Were you home that night?”
Mrs. Osborne shook her head. “I’m a nurse at the hospital. I was on night shift. Seven to seven, like last night.” She flushed, not a healthy burst of color, but two bright spots on an otherwise pale face, as if she had spiked a fever. “I give Simon a sleeping pill crushed in his dinner. I’m not proud of it, but I don’t know what else to do. He gets agitated as soon as the sun goes down. I’m afraid to go to work or close my eyes.”
“Did you give him one last tonight?” Bree asked. “Because he came into the station late in the evening.”
“I did.” Mrs. Osborne frowned. “Maybe he didn’t eat his dinner.” Her face fell into her hands. She lifted her chin, her eyes bleary and bleak. “He must suspect what I’ve been doing.”
Which meant if Simon came home, his mother would never sleep again. Did that also mean he’d be angry with her? Was she not safe?
“Are you afraid of him?” Matt asked.
She tilted her head. “I worry about other people. I don’t think he’d hurt me.”
Think?
The bite on Matt’s arm and the scratch on his face burned. He had fifty pounds of muscle on Simon, and he’d barely been able to defend himself. Simon had superhuman strength. “Do you have a gun in the house?”
“No!” she answered. “I would never take the risk. There’s no lock or safe he wouldn’t be able to crack. For all Simon’s issues, he can be brilliant.”
Bree’s voice gentled. “How did your husband die?”
“He had a heart attack.” Mrs. Osborne looked puzzled. “Why?”
“Simon suggested he was responsible,” Matt said.
Mrs. Osborne’s brows dropped. “I don’t see how. The doctor called it a widow-maker . Phil had hereditary heart disease, and he ate bacon every single day, no matter how much I begged him to stop. His arteries were so blocked, they could have been filled with glue.”
“Simon said he wished his father dead, and then it happened,” Bree explained.
“Simon also says he can control the weather with his mind, so take what he says with a grain.” Mrs. Osborne lifted a palm. “My husband was a good man, but he refused to believe Simon was mentally ill. He thought he could use normal discipline to change Simon. He used to say, ‘We have to be firm and consistent. He’ll come around.’ But sending him to his room, grounding him, or taking away his electronics made things worse, not better. We had a time-out chair when he was little. My husband would send him to the chair if he misbehaved to think about what he’d done and why it had been wrong. On the surface, he was a little boy sitting silently the way he’d been told. But I could see from his eyes that he wasn’t sorry. He was seething.”
The word plotting jumped into Matt’s mind. Goose bumps rippled up his arms. Simon sounded like that little kid from The Omen .
“He’s gotten worse over the years. He’s paranoid. He has delusions. He believes every conspiracy theory on the internet. You don’t know how many times I’ve disconnected our router or canceled our Wi-Fi service to try and keep him off the internet. The problem is, Simon is smarter than I am. To him, it’s a game, and he wins every time.”
“Ma’am?” Todd called from the hallway. “You need to see this.”
Matt and Bree followed him up the stairs. In the hallway, Todd gestured toward a dark room, where a gloved deputy rummaged through a dresser drawer. “That’s Simon’s bedroom. We didn’t find much in there, but ...” He stopped at the opposite doorway. “This is Simon’s computer room.”
Compared to the pleasant space downstairs, Simon’s room felt like a cave. The walls were painted flat black. The blinds were closed tightly, and strips of duct tape sealed the edges where sunlight might peer through. A huge desk with multiple wide-screen monitors dominated the space. The setup reminded Matt of a mall security office—or the bridge of the Enterprise .
Todd gestured toward one of the screens. On it, what appeared to be a dead body lay in the middle of a dark street. Cops clustered around the corpse. Except, the scene wasn’t quite authentic ... Some parts seemed blurry or pixelated.
Todd waved toward the computer tower under the desk. “This is quite a setup. I’d like to get Rory in here. But this was on the screen when we woke the computer. There’s a whole file of pictures like these. Hundreds of them.”
Matt crouched to get a better view of the screen. Wait ... He recognized a TV actor from a popular detective series. The picture wasn’t a real crime scene. “Is this a screenshot from one of the CSI shows?”
“We think so,” Todd said. “He has multiple streaming services set up on his computer. Most of his favorites seem to be crime shows.”
“They have to be TV scenes.” Bree rapped a knuckle on an image of a woman in designer slacks and a leather jacket. “I don’t know any real female detectives that wear four-inch heels to a crime scene. Can you imagine stepping on roaches, rat droppings, or blood in those?”
Matt glanced down at Bree’s sturdy boots.
Bree looked away from the screen. “OK. Simon was fixated on TV detective shows. That isn’t a crime. CSI is one of the most popular shows ever, isn’t it?”
“It’s not just a screenshot.” Todd pointed to the body on the screen. “Look closer.”
Bree and Matt both leaned in.
Matt squinted. “The face looks ... wrong?”
“Yes.” Todd zoomed in.
And Matt saw it. “Oh.”
Bree gasped. “That’s Josh.”
Todd nodded. “Josh Mason’s face has been photo edited onto the corpse.” He clicked the mouse, moving through more images of TV corpses, all bearing Josh’s face. He’d been hung, decapitated, buried alive, shot, stabbed, and suffocated, and that was only in the images they’d opened.
“You said there are hundreds of these?” Bree stepped back.
“Yep,” said Todd. “On this computer, Josh has been killed over and over, in every way imaginable. And TV is quite creative.”
“And yet Simon simply chose a gun as his murder weapon,” Bree mused.
“We need to find out where he got the gun.” Matt straightened and tore his eyes off the screen. The images confirmed Mrs. Osborne’s statement. Simon hated Josh Mason.