Chapter 34
Sunday afternoon
The address led him to a second-floor apartment over a row of small shops, a nail salon, a check-cashing place, and a closed-down dry cleaner.
JP climbed the narrow staircase and knocked. It didn’t take long. The woman who answered looked to be in her thirties and seemed tired in a way that had nothing to do with sleep. She studied him before speaking.
“Yes?”
“Are you Whitney Pittman?”
“Who’s asking?”
“JP Torn,” he said. “I’m a PI, and I’m looking into the death of Todd Maddox. I was told you knew him.”
A flash of anger in her eyes. “I used to.”
“I’d appreciate a few minutes.”
She hesitated, then stepped back. “I don’t have long.”
The apartment was small but neat, with everything in its place. A life that had been pulled back into order. She didn’t offer him a seat, but she didn’t ask him to leave either.
“I understand you used to date Maddox. Is that correct?” JP asked.
“We were together about eight months,” she said. “On and off at the end.”
“Why’d it end?”
She let out a breath that sounded like a laugh. “Because I finally paid attention.”
“What does that mean?”
“At first, Todd seemed normal. He was quiet and kind of boring, honestly.” She crossed her arms. “But he had interests. At first, I didn’t think much of it. Everyone has their things.” She glanced at JP. “But it didn’t stay small.”
“What kind of interests?” JP asked.
She looked away for a moment. “His sexual interests were all about the young,” she said. “Everything had to be young. I mean, he didn’t ask me to shave or anything like that. It was more like a teenage young. And he really couldn’t function without it, if you know what I mean.”
JP nodded.
“Sometimes we’d watch porn. I was kind of okay with that, but the videos, the images were always teenage stuff.” She shook her head. “It got to where it wasn’t just something in the background. It was the only way.”
“Did you ever see him with anyone underage?” JP asked.
“No,” she said. Then, after a beat, “Not directly.”
“But?”
She shifted her weight. “He’d notice them. Out in public, at stores, parks, wherever we were.”
“How would he act?”
“Not obvious,” she said. “That’s what made it worse. He’d just watch. Like he was studying them.”
“Did he ever comment on the girls?”
“No.”
“Did you ever confront him about it?”
“Yeah,” she said. “More than once.”
“And?”
She gave a small, bitter smile. “He said I was overreacting. That I was making something out of nothing.”
She walked to the kitchen counter, then turned back. “He started asking me to dress differently,” she said. “Younger. Specific things.”
“Like what?”
She blushed. “School uniforms. Cheer outfits. Stuff like that. At first, I laughed it off, but then it kept coming up, over and over. That’s when it stopped being funny.”
“Did you ever see him cross a line?” JP asked.
She shook her head. “Not in front of me.” A pause. “But I stopped trusting what I couldn’t see.”
“Did he ever talk about specific girls?”
“No names,” she said. “Just… types.”
“Anything else you discovered about him?”
She thought about it. “He was not an upstanding guy.”
“How so?”
“He was always looking for a scheme or a con. And he wasn’t the kind of guy who returned extra change if someone made a mistake.”
JP gave a small nod. “I appreciate you talking to me.”
She crossed her arms again. “Is it true?”
“What?”
“What they’re saying. About what happened to him.”
JP met her eyes. “What did you hear?”
“That a teenager finally stopped him,” she said quietly.
“You heard right.”
He stepped out into the afternoon and closed the door behind him. Back at the truck, he sat for a moment before starting the engine.
Todd Maddox didn’t have a record, but he had patterns, low-life tendencies, and he liked teenage girls.
Now JP had something else. Not proof, but direction. Because whatever Bay saw that night, it hadn’t come out of nowhere. And whatever she had done next made more sense than it should.