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His reply was, “There is no time in my life when I’ve ever been able to say Bobby Graham was a decent guy.”
There you go.
“He’s an unqualified ass,” he went on.
“Right,” I murmured.
“What I meant was, there are people who do things to kids. There are people who do things to teenagers. There are people who do things to women. There are people who do things to boys or men. Although not unheard of, a suspect jumping from an eight-year-old to a nineteen-year-old doesn’t fit neatly into a profile. Dahmer was convicted of killing seventeen men and boys. Of them, ten were in their twenties, three were nineteen, two were in their thirties, and two were fourteen. The ages ranged from fourteen to thirty-six, which is a large gap. But even though you and I think of fourteen-year-olds as boys, they weren’t eight.”
“I see what you’re saying.”
“He’s earned that blame, but she blames Bobby for a lot. And if she formed this club you explained with the other women whose men Audrey targeted, she and they have been feeding their resentment for a long time. Not only not letting it die but nourishing it so it grows.”
It really couldn’t be argued they’d done that.
Bohannan kept speaking.
“Jace, Jess, Harry and me have turned over every stone. Including all the shit that swirled around Audrey. Lana and Bobby stayed together, until now. Wendy and Dwayne too. Annie and Jay broke up. Word is, Wendy busts Dwayne’s balls, and Dwayne kisses Wendy’s ass, and I’m not talking in a way that Dwayne evidently has a proclivity for that to be. That wasn’t the way they were before Audrey. She’s making him pay for the long haul. What Lana said to you, she’s been waiting to get her ducks in a row. When Bobby was having an affair with Audrey, Lana was a stay-at-home mom. She didn’t have any power, in terms of the fact she didn’t have an easy way to strike out on her own. I’m pretty stunned about Sarah. Revenge fucking doesn’t seem like her thing. But if she’s egged on by her posse, that’s a different story.”
“You can’t blame them,” I defended.
He shook his head. “What I’m saying is, that’s their damage. And they’ve been embroiled in that damage for a really long time. All of them, hanging on to it. So it stands to reason with what happened to Alice, that would be Lana’s go to. We’ve looked at everyone who has anything to do with Dale, Audrey, Will, Alice or Sarah, which sent us looking at everyone who had anything to do with those players. Unless I’m losing my touch, there’s no one in that mix who would drive all the way to Berkeley to snatch a college freshman and drag her back to Washington to kill her, roll her in plastic and leave her in a lake.”
“Okay,” I said slowly, knowing he saw Alice, knowing how deeply he investigated that, knowing he saw Malorie, knowing he just listened to all I said about Lana and that lot, and last, knowing he’d spent hours with those letters, I asked, “So what do you think?”
“I don’t wanna say what I think.”
“Say it anyway.”
“Right, then, you don’t wanna hear what I think.”
I leaned to him and grabbed his hand.
“Bohannan, I’m not just here for my sage wisdom on how to valiantly and highly successfully raise teenage girls.”
His lips tipped up, but his head dropped down, and he watched himself as he turned my hand in his.
What he didn’t do was tell me.
I was about to prompt him when, abruptly, his head came up.
“When you saw that guy out your window, and you texted us, what was your first thought?”
I sensed this was a very important question, but I felt the answer was obvious.
“That he shouldn’t be there.”
“You were surprised when we thought it was about you. A fan or some photographer,” he noted.
That needle bomb exploded again, piercing my skin everywhere from the small of my back to up over my scalp.
“You’d seen him seconds, who did you think he was?” Bohannan pressed.
“Alice’s killer,” I whispered.
“Why?”
“Needle bomb.”
“What?”
“It just happened again. Just now. It starts at my lower back, but it feels like, in a wave, thousands of needles are being jabbed in, from my back all the way up over my head.”
“Have you ever felt that before?”
I shook my head, but then clenched his hand.
“Mom had a man friend I didn’t like. I was there, in the house, when she told him about me, when before, she’d kept the fact she had a kid from him, and he lost it. Shouting at her. I came out of my room and looked at him, he looked at me, and it wasn’t as intense, but it happened then. I was probably, I don’t know, eleven.”
