Leon glanced at the camera on my chest, shook his head. “You can take me to the station or whatever.”
Everything inside me screamed that this kid had been abused. I needed to get him to talk. I needed to reach him, unlike I’d been able to do with my own sister two months earlier. Unlike I was able to do with Sophie. “I’m not going to do that, Leon. Not until I understand what happened here.”
Leon lowered his head, stared at his key chain.
“Hey,” I said softly. “Look at me. I promise we’ll handle this delicately. Can you tell me why your friend in the other room called us?”
“I was the one who wanted to call. I’ve wanted to many times before, but I’ve never done it. I can’t believehe’dcall you.”
“Okay, well, let’s back up a little, okay? Can you tell me whyyouwanted to call for help?”
“It got out of hand. We were arguing. I could tell it was escalating. I didn’t want that, so I tried to leave. I grabbed my keys and was trying to go out the front door, but he pulled me back. He tackled me andgot on top of me.” He swallowed hard and took a shaky breath. “He’s done it before.”
“Done what before?”
Leon peered around me, as if he might get his boyfriend’s permission to say the things he was telling me.
“Leon,” I said. “He’s not listening. He’s done what before?”
He swallowed hard, his Adam’s apple like a mouse looking for a way out. “Pushed things too far, you know, forced things,” he whispered. “When I don’t want it.”
His voice faded. More key chain contemplation.
A roaring sensation filled my ears. Despite my best efforts, as if I’d brought Sophie’s blond-haired ghost into this small house with me, all the images from that night in the woods—our frantic running, the branches lashing against us, the gnarled fingers of exposed roots grabbing our ankles and tripping us until we at last curled in tight behind a thick, fallen ponderosa to hide—all came rushing back.
“I see,” I said, pushing my own anger down. “Whose place is this?”
“His.”
“Owns it?”
“Rents.”
“His name?”
“Mark.”
“Mark what?”
“Mark Coleman.”
The name snapped on a floodlight in a dark cave.
I stopped writing. My breath caught.
That’s why he looked so familiar. When Jess told me his name, I’d done searches on him. Found out about his scattered upbringing in foster homes. He had no record, but I found photos of him on Facebook before facial hair.
The black-marble eyes, the crooked nose, the high cheekbones.
It was him.
“What’s his full name?” I turned back to Leon. “You know?”
“Markus Mallory Coleman,” Leon said.
TheMallorychecked, too.
I was standing in the same room as the beast who 100 percent had forced himself on my sister. The man who’d irrevocably changed her. Made her a shell of her former self, made her a nightmare-laden nervous wreck afraid of her own shadow.
