Lisa Gardner - The Neighbor

D.D., however, was already pondering something else. She turned to Miller. “Do you know where the Joneses got their cars serviced?”

He shook his head, jotted down a note. “I’ll get on it.”

“Who are the Joneses?” Colleen asked.

“Jason and Sandra Jones. They live on the same block as Aidan Brewster. Except sometime in the middle of last night, Sandra Jones disappeared.”

“Ahh,” Colleen said with a sigh. She sat back in her chair, hooked her hands behind her fireball hair. “You think Aidan had something to do with it?”

“Have to consider him.”

“How old is Sandra Jones?”

“Twenty-three. A sixth grade teacher at the middle school. Has a four-year-old daughter.”

“So, you’re thinking Aidan abducted the mom from her house in the middle of the night, with the husband there?”

“Husband was at work-he’s a local reporter.”

Colleen narrowed her eyes. “You think Brewster was after the kid? Because Aidan’s taken four or five polygraphs where he’s had to volunteer his entire sexual history. Pedophilia has never come up.”

“I don’t know what I think,” D.D. said. “Except, by all accounts, Sandra Jones is a very beautiful woman, and let’s face it, twenty-three isn’t that old. In fact, what does that make her? The same age as Brewster?”

Colleen nodded. “Same age.”

“So, we have a beautiful young mom and a registered sex offender living just houses away. Any chance that Aidan is good-looking?”

“Sure. Shaggy blond hair. Blue eyes. Kind of surfer dude, but in a sweet sort of way.”

Miller rolled his eyes.

D.D., however, kept spinning the theory out. “So Sandy’s husband works most nights. Meaning she’s alone a lot, isolated with the kid. Maybe some evening she’s out in the yard with her daughter, and Aidan comes by, strikes up a conversation. Maybe the conversation leads to a relationship, which leads to…”

“She runs away with him?” Colleen suggested.

“Or they get into a fight. She finds out about his history, gets mad. After all, he’s been around her kid, and according to all reports, Sandra Jones would do anything for her kid.”

“So he kills her,” Colleen said matter-of-factly

“Like you said, these guys are desperate not to go back to prison.”

“So Aidan Brewster seduces the lonely housewife down the street, then murders her to cover his tracks.”

D.D.’s turn to shrug. “Stranger things have happened.”

Colleen sighed. Picked up a pencil, bounced the eraser end on her desk half a dozen times. “All right. For the record, I think you’re off base. Aidan already entered a high-risk relationship once before and he got nailed for it big-time. Given that, I think if he saw a woman like Sandra Jones out in her yard, he’d turn around and run the other way. No need to tempt fate, right? But the fact remains, Sandra Jones is missing and Aidan Brewster is the unlucky SOB that lives down the street. Protocol is protocol, so we’d better check him out.”

“Glad to hear it.”

Colleen bounced the pencil twice more. “Timeline?”

“Sooner versus later. We’re trying to get as much done under the radar as we can. We figure by seven A.M. tomorrow Sandra Jones will be missing more than twenty-four hours, meaning she’ll be upgraded to an official missing persons case and the media…”

“Will swarm you like bees on honey.”

“You got it.”

Colleen grunted. “You said she’s pretty, a young mom, a local teacher.”

“Yep.”

“You’re screwed.”

“Totally.”

“All right. You convinced me. I’ll pay Brewster a call this evening. Do a little walk-through of his home, ask about his recent activities. See if I can sniff out anything that warrants further investigation.”

“We’d like to help you pay that call.”

Colleen stopped bouncing the pencil. “No dice,” she said firmly.

“You’re not an agent of the court,” D.D. countered. “You walk through his house and see blood, violence, disarray, you can’t seize it as evidence.”

“I can give you a call.”

“Which will alert Brewster that we’re coming.”

“Then I’ll sit on the sofa with him as we both wait. Look, I’m Aidan’s PO, meaning I’ve spent two years building a relationship with him. I ask him questions, I have two years’ worth of history pressuring him to answer. You ask him questions, and he’ll shut down. You’ll get nowhere.”

D.D. thinned her lips, feeling stubborn and resigned all at once.

“He’s a good kid,” Colleen argued softly. “For what it’s worth, I really doubt he did it.”

“You been through this before?” Miller spoke up evenly. “Have one of your sex offenders re-offend?”

Colleen nodded. “Three times.”

“You see it coming?”

Pickler sighed again. “No,” she admitted quietly. “All three times… never had a clue. Guys were doing okay. They dealt with the pressure. Until one morning… they snapped. Then there was no going back.”

I have always been fascinated by secrets. I grew up living a lie, so of course I see subterfuge everyplace I look. That child in my classroom who always wears long sleeves, even on warm days-totally being beaten by his stepdad. That elderly woman who works at the dry cleaner with her pinched face and bony shoulders-totally being abused by her big brute of a son who hangs out around back.

People lie. It’s as instinctive as breathing. We lie because we can’t help ourselves.

My husband lies. He looks me in the eye as he does it. As liars go, Jason is a class act.

I think I had known him six weeks before I figured out that beneath his restrained facade there lurked a deep ocean of bad voodoo. I noticed it in small things first. The way a drawl would sometimes creep into his voice, particularly at night when he was tired and not paying as much attention. Or the times he would say he got out of bed to watch TV, except when I turned on the TV in the morning, it would go straight to the Home & Garden channel, which I had watched last, and which Jason has no use for whatsoever.

Sometimes, I tried to tease the truth out of him: “Hey, you just said ‘coke.’ I thought only a true Southerner asked for a coke instead of a soda.”

“Must be hanging out with you too much,” he’d say, but I’d see a hint of wariness crease the corners of his eyes.

Or sometimes I tried to get straight to the point. “Tell me what happened to your family. Where are your parents, your siblings?”

He’d try to hedge. “Why does it matter? I have you now, and Clarissa. That’s the only family that matters.”

One night, when Ree was five months old, and sleeping well, I was feeling edgy and restless, the way a nineteen-year-old girl does when she’s sitting across from a dark, handsome man and she’s looking at his hands and thinking about how gently they can cradle a newborn baby. Then thinking, much more importantly, how they might feel on her naked breasts, I found myself approaching the matter much more directly.

“Truth or dare,” I said.

He finally looked up from the paperback he was reading. “What?”

“Truth or dare. You know, like the game. Surely when you were a teenager you played Truth or Dare.”

Jason stared at me, his dark eyes as fathomless as always. “I’m not a teenager.”

“I am.”

That seemed to finally get his attention. He closed the book, set it down. “What do you want, Sandra?”

“Truth or dare. Just pick. It’s not so hard. Truth or dare.” I sidled closer to him. I had bathed after putting Ree down for the night. Then I smoothed an orange-scented lotion all over my body. It was a subtle scent, light, clean, but I knew he caught it, because his nostrils flared, just a fraction, then he leaned away.