Yeah.Hard as it is to admit, I have to agree with Mancuso.
Remi is holding something back.
“What brought this on?”I ask, even as I brace myself for the answer.
The thought my child might know more than he’s letting on about the brutal murder of Ryan Wells makes me sick to my stomach.
“This.”
Jason pulls up something on his phone and turns it around to show me.It’s a picture of a stained oil rag, folded open to reveal the dirty hunting knife it was hiding.The kind of knife the medical examiner believed to have been Ryan’s murder weapon.
My mouth goes dry as I try to process what I’m looking at, trying to put it in context.
“How…where…?”
“It was discovered wedged into the torn seat of a rusty old pickup truck in the auto shop.”
The nausea I was feeling is instantly replaced by indignant anger.
“It’s a setup,” I react promptly, my mind racing.“That knife was planted by whoever left the broken phone in the truck.”
Mancuso nods slowly before responding.“Perhaps.Or, it may have been placed there already.By your son.”
“Bullshit.”
“Hey, I wouldn’t be doing my job if I didn’t explore all possibilities.”
“You don’t really believe that, or you wouldn’t have hesitated confronting Remi with that picture, but you didn’t.You spared him that.”
Jason looks down at the tips of his shoes in a futile attempt to hide the faint grin on his face.
“A good reminder I’m dealing with a seasoned investigator,” he mutters, before lifting his head and following it up with, “Here’s what I think.No attempt was made to hide the break-in last night, only the identity of the perp.In fact, I would venture to suggest even the timing was intentional; they wanted the phone and even the knife discovered before there was any chance of your son finding it.He might have hidden the discovery from law enforcement.They wanted us to know about it.”
“To what end?Throw you off the scent?Are you following a hot lead or something?”
“We’ve been pursuing something, putting a little pressure on a couple of Ryan’s school buddies.It may have shaken something loose they’d like us to focus away from.But I suspect this whole exercise was to scare Remi.Prove to him how powerful they are, how easy it is to get to him, which suggests to me they perceive him to be a threat.”
“That’s why you’re convinced he knows more,” I propose.
“Yes.”
“But then why—God, I can’t believe my mind is even going there,” I shake my head, trying to clear a mental image.“Why not…kill him?They’ve already killed two kids that we know of.Why bother beating Remi up or leaving him threats?”
Mancuso shrugs.“My guess is they’re already feeling the squeeze now that all the dots are being connected, and they’re dealing with the FBI and not the individual local authorities.We know they’re watching, and they know we know they’re watching.Trying to take out your son under our noses is too risky.”
I rub my hands over my face, the topic of conversation getting to me, as I let his words filter through.
“But when Remi was attacked, we didn’t know the cases were connected yet,” I point out.“There was no FBI involvement.”
“True, but I’m guessing they may not have realized his mother was law enforcement.We picked up on something that could be just a curious coincidence, but it could also be a pattern of selection.”
When I raise a curious eyebrow, he continues.
“We’ve been looking for common denominators.Searching for ways these boys’ lives have overlapped, run parallel, or intersected,” he explains.“And one thing that jumped out is that both our known victims were from a single-mother household.So is Remi.If this is a pattern, it’s possible these specific boys were picked because there is no father in the picture.No male influence in their lives, which could make those kids more susceptible to manipulation.”
As much as I’d like to argue there is no difference between single moms raising their boys to two parents or a single father, the statistics prove otherwise.Boys like mine, regardless of how well I’m raising them, are at higher risk of engaging in criminal behavior.
“Clever,” I grudgingly admit.
