Gentry nodded. “I did.”
“Then take him to Jesper County B&B.”
“What’s that?” Eustace looked worried.
“That’s the jail, kid.” I rolled my eyes. “Hope you enjoy long stays. You’ll be there until Tuesday.”
“What??” he asked. “Why?”
“Because Monday is a holiday, and the government doesn’t work on national holidays.”
Eustace made a sound in his throat.
“Looks like you’ll get to hang out with Paco and Burt.” Gentry walked toward Eustace and reached for his cuffed arm.
“Wait…”
A door slammed, and then Eustace’s mother was barreling through the kitchen, heading right for her son.
None of us made a move to stop her as she took the book in her hands and slammed it against the side of Eustace’s face. “What did you do?”
Her hysterical cries would haunt me.
She sounded ravaged.
“Why did you do it?”
Something slipped from the pages, and I bent down to pick it up.
A Polaroid.
My stomach soured as I saw the same photo that I’d seen once before, though done by a much more professional lens.
The first kid that I’d done an autopsy on hanging from a tree.
“Son of a bitch,” I said, handing it to Black.
Black took it and glanced at it.
He placed it gently on the table, then said, “Mrs. Pendelton, let me have the book and step away from him.”
She didn’t listen.
Not until Black bodily picked her up and walked her out of the room.
I caught all the photos that trailed behind him.
All of them were of the teenage victims.
All of them but one.
The last one was of Pendelton.
Dead in the middle of his living room floor.
Black scanned through the book while Mrs. Pendelton sobbed on the couch right next to the sheet-covered body of her husband.
She sobbed.
