her? Why not just do what he wanted to do? Something else was at play. “I mean, Michael, that he’s been through something. He has something wrong with him in terms of how he interacts with people. Maybe he’s been homeless or abused.” She reached up to where his hands rested on her shoulders and took his hands in hers. “Oh, Michael, what if it is him? What if it’s really Justin? What if the whole last twenty-five years has been some kind of insane nightmare?”
“It hasn’t,” he said, his voice flat. “The last twenty-five years did happen. Your mother died, and my parents split up. And we…we lived with it all that time.” He let go of her hands. “Whatever this man is up to won’t change that, don’t you see?”
Janet did see. She understood that the years and their toll wouldn’t be erased. But she wasn’t going to dwell on what had been lost. She couldn’t bear it. Like those photos that her father threw away-they were gone. She could let them go as long as she could also look forward to something more.
And here it was-the something more. Her brother might be alive. He might be alive and living right there in Dove Point. All they had to do was find him and talk to him. Whatever she needed to do to bring him back into the family, she would do. No questions asked.
“Michael,” she said. “I don’t know what your life has been like over the last decade or so, but surely this could help, couldn’t it? We could start to put some things back together.”
Michael turned away again. He looked into the distance and then Janet looked around as well. While they were walking and talking, she hadn’t been paying attention to where they were heading. She had followed Michael’s lead and concentrated on giving him a version of the day’s events. So when she looked around and followed the line of his gaze, what she saw surprised her.
They weren’t just on the edge of the subdivision.
They were across the street from the park. Michael reached out to her again, took her hand, and said, “Come on, this is what I wanted to show you.”
Chapter Twenty-nine
When Stynes reached the apartment complex, the first thing he saw was two uniformed cops leading a sweaty middle-aged man out of the manager’s office in handcuffs. The light was draining out of the day, but even in the glow from the parking lot lights, Stynes saw the man’s pasty skin, the clammy sheen of sweat across his forehead. They stuffed the guy into the back of a cruiser but left the door open when they saw Stynes approaching.
“This is our guy?” he asked the officers.
“Indeed,” one of them said. “Nicholas Reeves. Age thirty-eight. He says he’s managed this complex for the last three years.”
Stynes leaned into the car, positioning his face about a foot from Reeves. “So you like touching little girls, Nick?”
The man started crying right away. He squished his eyes shut and ducked his head and his body shook while he cried. Stynes noticed that Reeves’s lip looked a little puffy and red, the result of being kicked in the face by Ashleigh Manning. Stynes thought the girl was nuts for doing what she did, but he had to admire her cojones. And he kind of liked seeing a guy like Reeves take a good shot to the face.
“Do you think this is going to make me feel sorry for you, Nick?” Stynes asked. “This crying bullshit.”
The man still couldn’t bring himself to speak, but he managed to shake his head. In truth, Stynes did feel a little sorry for the guy. He might be a creep and a pervert, but he still possessed a vulnerable humanity that Stynes couldn’t ignore. And if he thought his life sucked while sitting handcuffed in the back of a small-town police cruiser, wait until he got a load of prison as a pasty, doughy child molester.
“She was only fifteen, you know that?” Stynes said. “Fifteen. My socks are older than that.”
“I’m sorry,” Reeves said.
“What’s that?”
“I’m sorry.”
“You’re sorry? Yes, you are. But sorry doesn’t feed the bulldog, does it?”
The man continued to weep, but his sobs were more quiet.
“Let me guess. I bet your apartment is full of porn and underwear you swiped from your tenants’ apartments when they weren’t home.”
“Don’t tell my mother,” Reeves said. “Can we just not tell my mother?”
“Does she read the newspaper? Because it will be in there under the heading ‘Felony Sexual Assault.’ ”
The man’s head jerked up. “Felony?”
“What do you think? You touch a little girl and we give you a break?”
“I just wanted to hug her,” he said. “Just…feel her.”
“You’re not supposed to do that with kids.”
“I don’t mean that way.” Reeves took a deep breath. He tried to suck some of the snot on his face back into his nose. “I mean I just wanted some companionship.”
“You should have got a cat.”
Stynes reached into his back pocket and brought out an old handkerchief he sometimes remembered to carry. He balled it up, taking great care to cover the skin of his own hand, and wiped Reeves’s nose back and forth, clearing most of the snot and tears. He tossed the handkerchief onto the ground.
“Thank you.”
“So, Nick, tell me about the guy who rented this apartment from you. You know, the apartment in which you sexually assaulted this girl today.”
Reeves took a long moment to answer. Stynes lifted his foot and gave Reeves a gentle kick in the leg.
“I’m waiting,” he said.
“Are you willing to work out a deal?” Reeves asked. “I tell you what you want to know, so you go easy on me?”
“You watch too much
Reeves nodded. He understood.
“He rented the place three months ago. A three-month lease.”
“Is that standard?”
“We offer it when we have a lot of vacancies. The rent is more per month, but you get the shorter lease.”
“Go on.”
“He showed up and paid the deposit-that was just ninety-nine dollars-and the first month’s rent. Then he didn’t pay again, so he was going to get evicted, except the lease was up anyway. And when I told him he was being evicted, he just took some of his stuff and left.”
“He pay with a check?”
“Cash.”
“His name?”
“Steven Kollman.”
“You ever talk to him or find anything else out about him?”
“Is he in trouble?” Reeves asked.
“Not as much as you. Yet.”
Reeves stared straight ahead. He seemed to be thinking something over. “I got kind of a weird vibe off the guy.”
Stynes looked at the two uniformed cops who were listening in. “
“Seriously,” Reeves said. “He said he used to live here, and he was back in town to reconnect with his roots. That’s what he said. We never talked after that until I evicted him.”
