“We’d like to help you pay that call.”

Colleen stopped bouncing the pencil. “No dice,” she said firmly.

“You’re not an agent of the court,” D.D. countered. “You walk through his house and see blood, violence, disarray, you can’t seize it as evidence.”

“I can give you a call.”

“Which will alert Brewster that we’re coming.”

“Then I’ll sit on the sofa with him as we both wait. Look, I’m Aidan’s PO, meaning I’ve spent two years building a relationship with him. I ask him questions, I have two years’ worth of history pressuring him to answer. You ask him questions, and he’ll shut down. You’ll get nowhere.”

D.D. thinned her lips, feeling stubborn and resigned all at once.

“He’s a good kid,” Colleen argued softly. “For what it’s worth, I really doubt he did it.”

“You been through this before?” Miller spoke up evenly. “Have one of your sex offenders re-offend?”

Colleen nodded. “Three times.”

“You see it coming?”

Pickler sighed again. “No,” she admitted quietly. “All three times … never had a clue. Guys were doing okay. They dealt with the pressure. Until one morning … they snapped. Then there was no going back.”

CHAPTER TEN

I have always been fascinated by secrets. I grew up living a lie, so of course I see subterfuge everyplace I look. That child in my classroom who always wears long sleeves, even on warm days—totally being beaten by his stepdad. That elderly woman who works at the dry cleaner with her pinched face and bony shoulders—totally being abused by her big brute of a son who hangs out around back.

People lie. It’s as instinctive as breathing. We lie because we can’t help ourselves.

My husband lies. He looks me in the eye as he does it. As liars go, Jason is a class act.

I think I had known him six weeks before I figured out that beneath his restrained facade there lurked a deep ocean of bad voodoo. I noticed it in small things first. The way a drawl would sometimes creep into his voice, particularly at night when he was tired and not paying as much attention. Or the times he would say he got out of bed to watch TV, except when I turned on the TV in the morning, it would go straight to the Home & Garden channel, which I had watched last, and which Jason has no use for whatsoever.

Sometimes, I tried to tease the truth out of him: “Hey, you just said ‘coke.’ I thought only a true Southerner asked for a coke instead of a soda.”

“Must be hanging out with you too much,” he’d say, but I’d see a hint of wariness crease the corners of his eyes.

Or sometimes I tried to get straight to the point. “Tell me what happened to your family. Where are your parents, your siblings?”