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Brent winced. “That’s a logical question in hindsight. The quick answer is that the minute I stepped into the role, the department had to deal with a full plate, handling an uptick in major crime. That’s why the people voted me into office. They wanted, needed, a change at the top. My immediate focus was to get more deputies out on the street. Cold cases took a backseat. After things settled down, this crazy thing happened. Somebody tried to kill me by blowing up my house.”
That got Brogan’s attention. She stopped playing with the puppy long enough to sit down next to Lucien. “Oh, my God. Were you hurt?”
“Yup. And somewhat shaken up, wondering who could’ve been behind it. My parents live in Santa Cruz. They offered to take me in. After all, my house was completely destroyed in the blast. But when the doctors released me from the hospital, I wanted out of Santa Cruz. I needed time to think. That’s why I came here to live, to stay in my grandmother’s house, and try to figure things out.” He scrubbed his hands down his face. “I’m getting way off point here.”
“No, I see how things could’ve overwhelmed your entire department,” Brogan sympathized. “We all have situations that spiral, either up or down, and suddenly huge responsibilities loom ahead of us we never counted on happening.”
Brent gave her a half smile. “I appreciate that. But the truth is that I’d lost faith in the system I’d believed in my whole life. And when I found out my biggest rival kept stabbing me in the back at every turn, hoping to get my job, the disappointment was overwhelming. The stress wasn’t doing much for my recovery. At the core of everything, I discovered I wasn’t happy. For the first time in memory, I wanted out of law enforcement. Ken Rivkin and his wild theory took a major backseat to what was happening to me personally. I know it’s not much of an excuse, but it’s the truth.”
Lucien nodded. “I get it. But it sounds like you couldn’t have changed Rivkin’s conclusion even if the department had time to work on the case. It was a foregone conclusion.”
“It happens more often than you think. A lead detective feeling the heat, a law enforcement system makes a judgment call and gets it wrong. I know Trey Rescher didn’t kill the Dolworths. I know he didn’t kidnap the little boy.”
Lucien lifted a brow. “How?”
“By applying simple logic. What did a fourteen-year-old do with a kid? How did he get away with Elliott on a bicycle?”
“The cops never found Trey’s bike,” Lucien pointed out. “But we now know a neighbor kid found it ten days later leaning against the old barn in back of the house and took it. A kid named Bryan Sutherland traded his old Huffy for Trey’s much newer mountain bike.”
Brent’s eyes grew wide. “That’s good to know, but it doesn’t explain how the detectives missed that in the initial sweep. I wondered. Here’s what I think went down that morning. Trey’s delivering his papers like he has every morning for four years. He’s pedaling up to the summer house when he nears the driveway and hears gunshots. He stops. Everything from that point happens in an instant. Elliott comes running out of the house. Trey rushes up the pavement to save the kid who’s probably crying or screaming his head off. The two take off running. But Trey stops to pick up his treasured bike, losing precious seconds. By this time, the killer has emerged from the house. He’s right behind them, maybe even pointing a gun at them. Trey sees the manandthe gun. He realizes the situation is dire. He picks up his bike and tries to pedal with Elliott but discovers it’s too cumbersome to handle both the bike and the little kid. When he reaches the field behind the house, he drops the bike, picks up the kid, and starts running. But it’s already too late. The killer is faster and more determined to leave no witnesses behind. He catches up with them in the field behind the house. Here’s where it gets interesting.”
Caught up, Brogan snickered. “We don’t know what happens after that either.”
Brent laughed. “Exactly.”
“We know he didn’t kill the kids then and there and bury them in the field,” Lucien added. “We spent the day covering that area, the woods, the barn, with GPR. There are no bodies anywhere around there.”
“I know. I got wind of it,” Brent said with a grin. “Someone from the Sheriff’s Department had eyes on you guys the entire time. One reason I thought it was time to talk face to face.”
“Who do you think murdered Anna and Mack?” Brogan asked. “Doesn’t it strike you as strange when the murders occurred? Why was it early morning and not the middle of the night?”
“You have your own theory,” Brent mused.
“I think the killer had to wait until he got off shift to do the deed.”
“Interesting. I like the way you think. But if it’s Aaron Deming who did this—because he showed up at the crime scene a mess—you should know that the doctor left his job at the medical center in 2002, about six months after the murders. He abandoned his practice and took off. I tried to track him down. It seems he’s disappeared off the radar.”
Lucien’s mouth dropped open before getting to his feet. He ran his hands through his hair. “What does that mean ‘disappeared’ off the radar? Like the two kids disappeared into thin air? How does a surgeon, a cardiologist, just disappear like that?”
Brent stood up. “I hate to drop another bombshell and take off, but Mack wasn’t having an affair. The person he called with a New Jersey number over two hundred times was his son.”
“His son? You did investigate this case,” Lucien charged.
“I told you I heard rumors, theories I thought were ridiculous at the time. Whenever I had a spare minute, I looked into the Dolworth case as much as possible without anyone noticing.” Brent chuckled to himself. “Hard to think back to that timeframe and remember how eager I was about the job. You should tell the guy that hired you, Chad Pollock, that I came up with stuff he couldn’t buy under the table. If you have the stuff Pollock paid the deputy to copy, you’re working with dated information.”
“Then enlighten us about Mack’s son,” Brogan prompted.
“The bad blood between the Lombardis and that New York family occurred because Malcolm Lombardi, aka Mack Dolworth, got a fifteen-year-old girl pregnant when he himself was only fifteen. That girl’s name was Angelina Castorini, daughter of Marco Castorini, part of Buffalo’s crime family in and around Upstate New York.”
“The one with the drug pipelines in and out of Canada,” Lucien stated.
“I see you’ve done some work on the Castorinis.”
“We didn’t have a name.”
“Now you do. Unfortunately for the Lombardi family, Castorini controlled the trucking industry and those drug pipelines. As soon as Castorini learned what the Lombardi boy had done to his daughter, he ran the family out of the trucking business. Then he decided to take it a step further and ran them out of New Jersey. He demanded Angelina put the child up for adoption, which she did, a boy. It was that boy who had just turned fifteen and who reached out to Mack.”
“You’ve already contacted the son,” Brogan deduced.
