The crime scenes were disjointed, almost like the sets of crimes were committed by two different people.
An idea occurred to me, one I mentally punched myself in the face for not having before, and I called my brother.
“Sheriff,” Trey said when he answered.
“Hey, do you happen to have any security systems installed in homes near Sutton’s?”
“Afraid not,” he said. “I already checked after her break-in.”
“Fuck, okay. What about any of these places?” I rattled off the addresses for the first three break-ins and listened to the clacking of Trey’s computer keys coming from the other end of the line.
“Weren’t there more after Sutton’s?” Trey asked as he searched.
“Yes,” I admitted but didn’t explain further.
I had an inkling about this case, an itch in the back of my brain I was so close to scratching, and I wanted to see if anything popped at the first three crime scenes before I moved onto the more recent ones.
“Got a door camera across the street from the first one,” Trey said. “What was the date of the incident?” I provided it, and he went back to typing. Then silence descended as he presumably watched the footage.
In two of the first three break-ins, the families hadn’t been home. They’d taken place in the early evening, when the owners had been out at some town function. Though at the first house, the Lennar family had been home, they hadn’t been roused from sleep by the intruder, and no damage was done to their personal property.
Sutton’s and the two after had taken place much later, in the darkest hours of the day,andhad occurred while the residents were home.
“That little shit,” Trey muttered to himself, but I perked up.
“You got something?”
“Oh, I got something, alright, but you’re not going to like it. Hell, I might ring his neck before you can question him.”
“Give me the fucking name, Trey.”
“Parker Abrams.”
Oh, hell. Not this shit again.
“I thought he was on the straight and narrow.”
“You and me both, brother,” Trey said wearily. “We just won a state championship, for fuck’s sake.”
When all that shit had gone down a few years back with that crazy arsonist, Parker got caught up in it. From a lower-class family, he’d been desperate for money since his stepfather, the incomparable Tony Walter, usually drank whatever his wife managed to bring home. The arsonist—who had nearly killed both Aspen and Crew on top of twelve others—had cornered him and preyed on that weakness, offering him a job for some quick cash. Set a fire in the dumpster behind Mozzy’s, the local pizza shop, and earn five hundred dollars. Naturally, the kid hadn’t balked at committing a crime—although he might have had he known when he’d taken the job that he was doing the bidding of a serial killer.
Back then, I’d let him go with a warning. Though he’d committed arson, I hadn’t wanted to make the kid’s life more difficult than it already was, which proved to be a good move. That fall, he joined the football team, showcasing a previously undiscovered talent at wide receiver that had Trey calling him up from the JV to the varsity team. And last November, he helped lead the Dusk Valley Spuds to that state championship victory. According to Trey, scouts were sniffing around, and if Parker stayed out of trouble and put up similarly impressive numbers in his senior season, he had a good shot at earning himself a football scholarship to college and getting the fuck out of this town.
So why thehellwould he risk it all now? Were he, his mom, and his sister really that hard up for money? Were things in the Abrams-Walter home reallythatbad?
Knowing Tony, I guessed they probably were.
“Why hadn’t he come to me?” Trey whispered, pulling me out of my thoughts. “If he needed help, I would’ve done whatever I could.”
“You can help him now,” I said.
“How?”
“Go to the school. Say you need to talk to him about some football shit. I’ll meet you both at your office in twenty minutes.”
“Okay. And Lane?”
“Yeah?”
