The Neighbor

more officers. Seeing only the two investigators, he guessed he wasn’t being arrested. He opened the door a little wider.

“Have you found my wife yet?” he inquired.

“Have you started looking for her yet?” D.D. replied evenly.

He still liked her better than Max.

He let the two detectives in, telling Ree that she could choose a second movie, as Daddy needed a moment to talk to the nice police officers. In response, she scowled at him, then bawled, “I’m gonna find Mommy and you can’t stop me!”

She stormed into the front room, clicking on the TV and powering up a DVD now that she’d had the last word.

“It’s been a long day,” Jason informed D.D. and Miller.

“It’s only eleven-thirty,” D.D. pointed out.

“Oh goody, I have ten more hours to look forward to.”

He moved BPD’s finest into the kitchen, as his child finally settled down to watch her favorite dinosaurs in The Land Before Time.

“Water? Coffee? Cold tomato soup?” he offered halfheartedly.

D.D. and Miller shook their heads. They each took a seat at the kitchen counter. He leaned against the refrigerator, arms folded over his chest. Grieving husband. Homicidal father. Grieving fucking husband.

“What happened to you?” D.D. asked.

“Walked into a wall.”

“With both sides of your face?”

“I hit it twice.”

She arched a brow at him. He remained steadfast. What were they gonna do, throw him in jail for being bruised and battered?

“I want it on the record we didn’t do that,” Miller said.

“Define we.”

“Boston PD. We haven’t even called your sorry ass down to the station yet, so definitely, whatever wall smacked your face, it wasn’t us.”

“I believe your wall prefers Tasers, so no, it wasn’t you.”

That retort didn’t win him any friendship with Miller, but then again, Jason was pretty sure Miller already thought he was the guilty party.

“When did it happen?” D.D. pressed, obviously the smarter of the two. “We saw you after Hastings’s attack. No way Ethan did that kind of damage.”

“Maybe I just take a while to bruise.”

She arched a brow again. He remained steadfast. He could do this dance all day long. Come to think of it, she probably could, too. They were soul mates that way. Destined to piss each other off.

He missed Sandy. He wanted to ask his wife if she was really pregnant with his child. He wanted to tell her he’d do whatever she asked, if only she’d give him a second chance to make her happy. He wanted to tell her he was sorry, especially for February. He had a lot to be sorry about in February.

“Sandra knew what you were doing,” D.D. stated.

He sighed, took the bait. “What was I doing?”

“You know, on the computer.”

Jason wasn’t impressed. He’d already guessed that much from Ethan Hastings. They were gonna have to hit him with something bigger to get his attention.

“I’m a reporter. Of course I work on the computer.”

“Okay, let me rephrase that: Sandy found out what you were doing on the Internet.”

Slightly more interesting. “And what exactly did Ethan tell you I was doing on the Internet?”

“Oh, it wasn’t Ethan.”

“Excuse me?”

“No, we haven’t spent the morning with Ethan. We talked to him last night, and the boy told us a couple of interesting things, including that he introduced Sandra to his uncle, who is a certified forensic computer examiner with the Massachusetts State Police.”

“We’ve been analyzing your bank records,” Miller volunteered now, “so we know it wasn’t gambling. That leaves kiddie porn and/or adult cybersex. Why don’t you just do yourself a big favor and set the record straight? Maybe, if you cooperate with us, we can help you.”

“I didn’t do anything wrong.” Jason said it automatically, his mind racing ahead, trying to see the angles. Sandra had somehow zeroed in on his middle-of-the-night activities. When? How much had she figured out? Not everything, or she wouldn’t have needed Ethan Hastings. But a trained forensic computer examiner. Shit. A state police expert with access to a genuine computer crime lab…

“We have your computer,” D.D. spoke up, continuing the full court press. “Being computer savvy yourself, you know we can find everything. And I mean everything.”

He nodded vaguely, because she was right. With the forensic tools that existed these days, he should’ve run over the family hard drive with his truck, ground the components into smithereens, then tossed the plastic bits into a commercial-grade furnace, then blown up the entire furnace room. Only way to be safe.

He wanted to bolt to the Boston Daily offices. Grab his old computer and desperately run his own forensic diagnostics. How much had Sandra discovered? How many layers of his safeguards had she managed to unpeel? The chat room blogs? Financial transcripts? The MySpace page? Or maybe the photos? God, the photos.

He couldn’t go back to the Boston Daily offices. He couldn’t risk touching that computer ever again. It was over, done. Best bet, grab the lockbox from the attic and get himself and Ree over the border into Canada.

D.D. and Miller were staring at him. He forced himself to exhale loudly, to appear deeply disappointed.

“I wish my wife had mentioned this to me,” he told them.

D.D. gave him a look, clearly skeptical.

“I mean it,” he insisted, going with the role of injured party. “If she’d only mentioned her fears, her concerns, I would’ve been happy to explain everything to her.”

“Define ‘everything,’” Miller stated.

Jason went with another sigh. “All right. All right. I have an avatar.”

“Say what?” Miller asked, glancing at his partner, stroking his mustache.

“An avatar. A computer-generated identity on a website called Second Life.”

“Oh, give me a fucking break,” D.D. muttered.

“Hey, four-year-olds have ears,” Jason admonished, pointing toward the front room, where no doubt Ree remained in full TV coma.

“You don’t have an avatar,” D.D. said darkly.

“Sure I do. I, uh, logged on to the website as part of a story I was working on. Just wanted to check things out. But… I don’t know. It’s a cool place. Much more intricate than I ever imagined. Social. Has its own rules, customs, everything. For example, when you first log on, you begin with a basic body, basic wardrobe. Well, hell, I didn’t know anything so I just started going into various bars and stores, checking things out. I noticed right away that none of the women would talk to me. Because I was still in the basic wardrobe. I had ‘newbie’ written all over me, like the transfer student in high school. Nobody likes the new kid, you know. You gotta earn your stripes.”

D.D. gave him that skeptical look again. Miller, on the other hand, appeared interested. “You stay up all night pretending to be some other person on a computer-generated social site?”

Jason shrugged, stuck his hands in his pockets. “Well, it’s not the kind of thing a grown man wants to admit, especially to his wife.”

“What are you in this Second Life place?” Miller asked. “Rich, handsome, successful? Or maybe you’re a busty blonde with a thing for bikers?”

“Actually, I’m a writer. Working on an adventure novel that may or may not be autobiographical. You know, a man of mystery. Women like that.”