Chapter 34
thirty-four
. . .
LANE
A few days later, I was once again at my desk, the files from each of the break-ins spread across its surface. I’d been staring at them for over an hour, willing something—anything—to jump out at me, but so far, I hadn’t found any clue as to who we were dealing with.
One thing I could say for certain, however, is that the earlier break-ins, the ones that happened before the perp hit Sutton’s house, were different from hers and the few that came after.
In the first three, there was minimal destruction of property to be found beyond broken windows or busted doorknobs—the points of entry. While everything had been mostly left alone, those homeowners were missing several items of value, mostly jewelry or devices that could fit into pockets.
Sutton’s house is where things had changed, where the perp had also started to destroy the homes, though Sutton’s remained the worst.
The crime scenes were disjointed, almost like the sets of crimes were committed by two different people.
An idea occurred to me, one I mentally punched myself in the face for not having before, and I called my brother.
“Sheriff,” Trey said when he answered.
“Hey, do you happen to have any security systems installed in homes near Sutton’s?”
“Afraid not,” he said. “I already checked after her break-in.”
“Fuck, okay. What about any of these places?” I rattled off the addresses for the first three break-ins and listened to the clacking of Trey’s computer keys coming from the other end of the line.
“Weren’t there more after Sutton’s?” Trey asked as he searched.
“Yes,” I admitted but didn’t explain further.
I had an inkling about this case, an itch in the back of my brain I was so close to scratching, and I wanted to see if anything popped at the first three crime scenes before I moved onto the more recent ones.
“Got a door camera across the street from the first one,” Trey said. “What was the date of the incident?” I provided it, and he went back to typing. Then silence descended as he presumably watched the footage.
In two of the first three break-ins, the families hadn’t been home.
They’d taken place in the early evening, when the owners had been out at some town function.
Though at the first house, the Lennar family had been home, they hadn’t been roused from sleep by the intruder, and no damage was done to their personal property.
Sutton’s and the two after had taken place much later, in the darkest hours of the day, and had occurred while the residents were home.
“That little shit,” Trey muttered to himself, but I perked up.
“You got something?”
“Oh, I got something, alright, but you’re not going to like it. Hell, I might ring his neck before you can question him.”
“Give me the fucking name, Trey.”
“Parker Abrams.”
Oh, hell. Not this shit again.
“I thought he was on the straight and narrow.”
“You and me both, brother,” Trey said wearily. “We just won a state championship, for fuck’s sake.”
When all that shit had gone down a few years back with that crazy arsonist, Parker got caught up in it.
From a lower-class family, he’d been desperate for money since his stepfather, the incomparable Tony Walter, usually drank whatever his wife managed to bring home.
The arsonist—who had nearly killed both Aspen and Crew on top of twelve others—had cornered him and preyed on that weakness, offering him a job for some quick cash.
Set a fire in the dumpster behind Mozzy’s, the local pizza shop, and earn five hundred dollars.
Naturally, the kid hadn’t balked at committing a crime—although he might have had he known when he’d taken the job that he was doing the bidding of a serial killer.
Back then, I’d let him go with a warning.
Though he’d committed arson, I hadn’t wanted to make the kid’s life more difficult than it already was, which proved to be a good move.
That fall, he joined the football team, showcasing a previously undiscovered talent at wide receiver that had Trey calling him up from the JV to the varsity team.
And last November, he helped lead the Dusk Valley Spuds to that state championship victory.
According to Trey, scouts were sniffing around, and if Parker stayed out of trouble and put up similarly impressive numbers in his senior season, he had a good shot at earning himself a football scholarship to college and getting the fuck out of this town.
So why the hell would he risk it all now? Were he, his mom, and his sister really that hard up for money? Were things in the Abrams-Walter home really that bad?
Knowing Tony, I guessed they probably were.
“Why hadn’t he come to me?” Trey whispered, pulling me out of my thoughts. “If he needed help, I would’ve done whatever I could.”
“You can help him now,” I said.
“How?”
“Go to the school. Say you need to talk to him about some football shit. I’ll meet you both at your office in twenty minutes.”
“Okay. And Lane?”
“Yeah?”
“Go easy on him.”
I grimaced and hung up.
I couldn’t make any promises.
“So what’s this about? Did another scout reach out?
” I heard Parker ask before he and Trey rounded the corner in the boys’ locker room to Trey’s office, which was currently being used by the varsity basketball coach since they were in season and football wasn’t.
Still, it was a quiet, private place to talk.
“No, uh…” Trey mumbled, searching for and failing to find a good excuse.
They came into view then, the sandy blond-haired seventeen-year-old who, freakily enough, could pass for Trey’s son, and my brother.
With a file folder tucked under his arm, he wrung his hands together in front of him, twisting his fingers this way and that.
We all had our nervous tics, and this was Trey’s.
“The fuck?” Parker asked when he laid eyes on me, then turned to Trey. “Coach?”
“The sheriff just has a few questions, kid,” Trey said. “You’re not in trouble.”
Parker’s brow creased in confusion, like he genuinely couldn’t figure out what I was doing here, and that annoyed the shit out of me. Still, I kept my mouth shut as we headed into the office, Trey closing and locking the door behind us.
“Will one of you please tell me what is going on?”
Trey flipped the folder open on the desk and spread out the photos within, which were stills he’d printed from the security footage he’d combed earlier.
“If you were going to break into someone’s house, Abrams, you could’ve at least not worn your team hoodie.”
I hadn’t been sure how Trey had so easily known it was Parker in the footage, but it became obvious when I studied the photos. His name and number blazed brightly under the streetlights in the darkness.
“That’s not me,” Parker said quickly.
“Park,” Trey sighed. “This will be easier for you if you just tell the truth.”
“I am telling the truth. That’s not me.”
“Parker.”
“I do know who it is, but…” He trailed off and glanced up at his coach imploringly. “It’s not what it looks like. And if I tell you, you cannot tell anyone. I swear to god, Coach. This would fuck up a lot of people.”
Trey looked at me, and I subtly dipped my chin. I wasn’t making any promises, but we’d cross that bridge when I had all the information in hand.
“Okay.”
“Actually, for the sake of protecting them, I’m not even going to tell you their name. But—”
“There’s no ‘but’ here, Parker,” I said, joining the conversation for the first time. “If you don’t tell me who this is, you could be facing charges for these break-ins.”
Parker’s eyes widened in horror. “Oh, fuck. This is bad.”
“Glad you finally realize how serious this is,” I said.
“She can’t possibly have done this,” he mumbled to himself, head tilting into his hands.
“Who is ‘she’?” Trey prompted.
“Sadie Lennar.”
“Like…the daughter of these homeowners?” my brother asked, tapping the photo.
“Yeah,” Parker said, still not lifting his head.
“But…That’s…” I sputtered dumbly. “She lives there.”
“Yep.”
“You can’t break into your own house.”
Parker snorted. “No shit. I told you it wasn’t what it looked like.”
“Listen, you little shit—”
“Hey, it’s not my fault you don’t know—”
Parker and I tried to talk over each other, but Trey waved his hands, silencing us both.
“Parker, start from the beginning.”
To Trey, he said, “Did you bother to check the timestamp on that video?” He lifted the photo and held it in front of Trey’s face, his thumbnail digging into the paper beneath the date and time printed in the upper right-hand corner.
Trey cursed lowly, and Parker shifted the photo to me.
The timestamp read nearly four o’clock in the morning.
“She snuck out earlier.” He glanced at Trey pointedly. “You must have missed that. This was her sneaking back in.”
“How do you know?”
He shrugged, though I noted his cheeks had pinkened. “She was with me.”
“Where?”
“My house. Tony was on a bender somewhere, so the house was actually quiet for once. We watched movies until late.”
“Did anyone see you?”
“Gabby was with us.”
“And Gabby is…”
“His sister,” Trey supplied. “She and Gabby are on the cheer team together, right?” Parker nodded.
“Okay…” I said slowly, quickly writing all of that down in my notebook. “That doesn’t explain the items the Lennars claimed were missing, though.”
“Sadie took that stuff and sold it,” Parker said. “She needed money and couldn’t ask her parents for it. Don’t ask me what for,” he hedged before I could do exactly that. “I’m not going to tell you.”
“She didn’t by chance break into these other houses, did she?” I asked, pulling out my notebook, where I’d jotted down the addresses before leaving the department earlier.
Parker didn’t even bother looking at the list before shaking his head. “No fucking way. Her boyfriend, on the other hand…He could be a contender.”
“Who is her boyfriend?”
“Older guy from Boise. Real piece of work.”
Unable to stand anymore, I sank down hard on the nearest empty chair and scrubbed my hand down my face in exasperation.
“How much older?” Trey asked. “Do you have a name? Does he have anything to do with why she needs money?”
“It wasn’t not for him, if that’s what you’re asking.”
“If it wasn’t…” Trey trailed off, eyes widening as something seemed to spark in his mind. He and Parker shared a look, Parker’s pleading while Trey’s seemed…concerned.
“Someone tell me what the fuck is going on right now,” I demanded.
“Sadie is pregnant, isn’t she?” Trey whispered.
“Was,” Parker corrected. “The money was so she could get an abortion.”
“What does the boyfriend have to do—Oh.” Realization dawned. “It was his and he wanted her to get rid of it.”
“She wanted to get rid of it. He doesn’t even know she was pregnant. If he did, he probably would’ve found some way to make her keep it just so he could keep his hooks in her.”
“Fucking teenagers,” I muttered.
This whole situation was messy as fuck, but none of it helped me figure out who committed the rest of the break-ins. If it wasn’t Parker or Sadie, and it definitely wasn’t Sutton—then who the hell was it?
“I’m sure you weren’t a peach in your day either,” Parker shot back.
Touche, kiddo. Hell, I was probably worse.
Then again, I hadn’t killed anyone until my twenties, so maybe not.
“What’s the boyfriend like?”
“He’s a fucking loser,” Parker said with a snort. “Your classic ‘bad boy.’” He hooked finger quotes around the term. “Sadie met him at a party during winter break last year. He was here dealing drugs—not that she knew that at the time. They’ve been together for over a year now.”
“And he’s the kind of guy who would break into people’s houses? Even destroy their property?”
“Absolutely. I do my best to steer clear of him because I can’t stand him—and trust me, the feeling is mutual—but from the way Sadie talks about him, he gets his kicks in doing shit like this. Stealing cars, dealing drugs. I wouldn’t put it past him to add breaking and entering to his resume.”
I clicked a pen open and poised it over my notebook. “What’s his name?”
“No clue what his first name is,” Parker admitted. “He just goes by his last.” I snapped my fingers in the kid’s face, and he rolled his eyes as he said, “Boyd. His last name is Boyd.”
My blood ran cold in an instant, and I caught Trey’s eyes, which were as wide as mine surely were.
“You don’t think…?”
Shaking my head, I said, “I have no fucking clue. But I don’t believe in coincidences.”
“What’s going on?” Parker asked.
“Nothing you need to worry about,” I said, placing a reassuring hand on his shoulder. “I’m sorry we came at you guns blazing. Just…take care of your friend, okay?”
“Is she going to get in trouble?”
“No,” I promised. “But do me a favor, Parker?”
“Anything.”
“Convince her not to pawn anymore of her parents’ things.”
He chuckled. “Sure thing, Sheriff.”
Trey ruffled Parker’s hair and sent him on his way with instructions to keep up on his off-season training program. When he was gone, Trey blinked slowly at me.
“This is like the plot of a fucking soap opera.”
“I can’t figure out why someone would accuse Sutton of this when it’s obvious it has nothing to do with her.”
“And Boyd? Think there’s any connection to the family?”
I shook my head, not only because I had no idea, but because my brain was running a thousand miles a minute with all of the unanswered questions swirling around up there.
But at the very least, we might be a step closer to finding out who was really responsible for the break-ins and clearing my girl’s name.
“Think you can find out?” I asked my brother.
Trey grinned. “I don’t think, little brother. I know I can.”