Chapter 100
Sabine Drew trailed me from the pub, leaving Sadlier inside.
“What now?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. “We’re still dealing with pieces of the puzzle, but more of them than before.”
Sadlier had told us he was prepared to go to the police and share what he’d seen in the cabin.
Combined with the Smiling Seed T-shirt at the Norton house, it might be enough to secure a search warrant for Spero, but only if DNA testing confirmed that the shirt was Scott Theriault’s.
And what then? Santopietro and Renders could deny what Sadlier claimed to have witnessed, turning the tables on him as a troublemaker who resented the assistant principal; and watching pornography together, while embarrassing and potentially damaging to their reputations as school officials, was not illegal, depending on the pornography.
What I did know was this: Those who gained pleasure from watching women being hurt and humiliated eventually got to wondering what it might be like to do some hurting and humiliating of their own, and Mallory Norton had drifted into the orbit of such men.
Before leaving the parking lot, I checked the tracker app, but Kenney’s vehicle was at his home and Teal’s was in West Gardiner.
I had run out of ideas, and soon I would run out of time.
I could only keep my promise to T. K. Norton and hope that McKibben and the Major Crimes Unit would have more luck.
Back at the Motor Inn, I wrote up my notes, answered the more urgent of my emails, and went to bed.
I anticipated having trouble sleeping, but I was out as soon as I lay down.
I wanted to escape, and my body and mind permitted it.