The Neighbor

by Lisa Gardner

  The judge sighed. “I guess what I’m trying to say is that I had always hoped Sandy would grow out of her recklessness. And talking to that principal this morning, I thought maybe she’d finally grown up, shown some maturity. But now, to hear what you are saying … I think my daughter may have some serious issues, Jason. First she ran away from me. Now maybe it’s time to recognize that she’s run away from you, too.”

  Jason opened his mouth to object, but the words wouldn’t come out. Uncertainty took root in his gut. What did he really know of Sandy or her family? He’d always accepted what she said at face value. What reason would she have to lie to him?

  Then again, what reason did he have to lie to her? About four million and one.

  “Perhaps it’s time to meet,” Maxwell was saying now. “We can sit down, man to man, sort this all out. I have no ill will toward you, son. I just want what’s best for my daughter and grandbaby.”

  “How did Missy die?” Jason asked abruptly.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Your wife. How did she die?”

  “Heart attack,” the judge replied promptly. “Dropped dead. Terrible tragedy in a woman so young. We were shattered.”

  Jason held the phone tighter. “Where did she die?”

  “Ummm, at home. Why do you ask?”

  “Was it in the garage? Behind the wheel of her car?”

  “Why yes, now that you mention it. I suppose Sandy told you that, too.”

  “But it was a heart attack? You’re certain it was a heart attack?”

  “Absolutely. Terrible, terrible time. I don’t think my little Sandy ever quite got over it.”

  “I read the autopsy report,” Jason persisted. “My memory is that Mrs. Black was found with a cherry red face. That’s a clear indicator of carbon monoxide poisoning.”

  There was a long silence on the other end of the line; it went on for thirty seconds, perhaps even a minute. Jason felt his stomach settle, his shoulders square. Sandy had been right—her father was a very, very good liar.

  “Don’t know what you’re talking about, Mr. Jones,” Max said at last. He didn’t sound so congenial anymore. More like pissed off. A wealthy, powerful man who wasn’t getting his way.

  “Really? Because I’d think in this day and age of computerized records, you’d understand that all information is eventually accessible, especially for a guy who knows where to look.”

  “Cuts both ways, Jason. You dig around looking at me, I dig around looking at you.”

  “Knock yourself out. When’d you arrive in town?”

  “What day did you first meet my daughter?” Max countered evenly.

  “Rent a car, or use a car service?”

  “Gonna volunteer a DNA sample for the paternity test, or wait for family court to order it?”

  “Doesn’t matter. This is Massachusetts, where gay marriages are legal and in loco parentis matters more than biology for determining who should have custody of a child.”

  “You think just because you know a little Latin, you understand the law better than I do, boy?”

  “I think I recently wrote an article about a grandfather who tried to gain custody of his grandson because he disapproved of the child’s lesbian parents. The court ruled that the child should stay with the only parents he had ever known, even if they were not his biological mothers.”

  “Interesting. Well, here’s another bit of Latin for you. Maybe you heard of this phrase, too, working on your little story and all: ex parte.”

  Jason froze in the middle of the kitchen, his gaze going belatedly out the window. He saw the uniformed officer approaching his walkway, heading for his front door.

  “Means ‘in an emergency,’” Max continued smoothly, low chuckle back in his throat. “As in, a grandfather can seek an ex parte motion in front of family court, and the court could grant an ex parte order regarding visitation, without you even being aware that such a hearing is going on. After all, you are the prime suspect in a missing person investigation. Surely staying with the prime suspect in her mother’s disappearance is not in the best interest of the child?”

  “Son of a—” Jason hissed.

  Front doorbell rang.

  “Might as well answer it,” Max said. “I can see you, son. So can most of the free world.”

  That’s when Jason spotted Max, too, standing over by the cluster of white news vans, cell phone held to his ear. The older man waved his hand, looking chipper in a fresh blue suit that set off his shock of silver hair. The phone call, why Max had chatted away so readily, keeping Jason in one place, all under the guise of making amends … Jason’s doorbell rang again.

  “Got it, Daddy,” Ree sang out.

  It didn’t matter. None of it mattered. Jason had died once, nearly twenty-five years ago. This was worse than that. This was his entire world shattering. As Ree stood on tiptoe to undo the first lock, then the second.

  As she pulled the door fully open to reveal the uniformed officer.

  The man carried a folded piece of white paper. His gaze went over Ree’s head and found Jason standing in the entryway of the kitchen, still clutching the phone to his ear.

  “Jason F. Jones.”

  Jason finally set down the receiver. He moved on autopilot, stepping forward, holding out his hand.

  “Consider yourself served,” the county officer said. Then, his mission complete, he pivoted sharply and returned back down the front steps. While across the street, the photographers began to snap away.

  Jason unfolded the piece of paper. He read the official court order demanding that he produce his child tomorrow morning at eleven A.M. at the local playground, where she would have a one-hour visitation with her grandfather, the honorable Maxwell M. Black. A full hearing on visitation rights would follow in four weeks. Until then, Maxwell Black was permitted one hour every day with his granddaughter, Clarissa Jane Jones. So ordered the court.

  Each day. Every single day. Max and Ree together. Max seeing Ree, talking to Ree, touching Ree. Jason, not allowed to supervise. Jason, forced to leave his daughter all alone with a man who’d participated in the abuse of his only child.

  “What is it, Daddy?” Ree asked him anxiously. “Did you win something? What did that man bring you?”

  Jason pulled himself together, folding up the paper, tucking it into his back pocket.

  “It’s nothing,” he assured his daughter. “Nothing at all. Hey, let’s play some Candy Land.”

  Ree won three times in a row. She kept producing the Princess Frostine card in four turns or less, a sure sign she was cheating. Jason was too distracted to call her on it, and she became even more disgruntled. She was looking for boundaries. The world had rules, those rules kept it safe.

  Jason gave up on board games, and made them grilled cheese and tomato soup for lunch. Ree sulked at the kitchen counter, dipping her sandwich into the soup. He mostly stirred his soup around and around, watched the croutons turn bloodred.

  Court order was still folded up, tucked in his back pocket. As if reducing it down to a small scrap of paper could reduce the power it held over his and his daughter’s lives. He finally understood why Sandra had walked away so easily from her home and her father, and why she’d never been tempted to call, not even once, for the past five years.

  Maxwell Black played for keeps. And the judge knew how to twist the law to get exactly what he wanted. Son of a bitch.

  “I want to look for Mommy,” Ree announced.

  “What?”

  She stopped dipping her grilled cheese long enough to glare at him stubbornly. “You said police officers and friends were gonna meet at the school to help find Mommy. Well, I want to go to the school. I want to find Mommy.”

  Jason stared at his daughter. He wondered what parenting book might have a chapter on this.

  The doorbell rang. Jason got up immediately to answer it.

  Sergeant D.D. Warren and Detective Miller stood on his front porch. Instinctively Jason looked behind the
m for more officers. Seeing only the two investigators, he guessed he wasn’t being arrested. He opened the door a little wider.

  “Have you found my wife yet?” he inquired.

  “Have you started looking for her yet?” D.D. replied evenly.

  He still liked her better than Max.

  He let the two detectives in, telling Ree that she could choose a second movie, as Daddy needed a moment to talk to the nice police officers. In response, she scowled at him, then bawled, “I’m gonna find Mommy and you can’t stop me!”

  She stormed into the front room, clicking on the TV and powering up a DVD now that she’d had the last word.

  “It’s been a long day,” Jason informed D.D. and Miller.

  “It’s only eleven-thirty,” D.D. pointed out.

  “Oh goody, I have ten more hours to look forward to.”

  He moved BPD’s finest into the kitchen, as his child finally settled down to watch her favorite dinosaurs in The Land Before Time.

  “Water? Coffee? Cold tomato soup?” he offered halfheartedly.

  D.D. and Miller shook their heads. They each took a seat at the kitchen counter. He leaned against the refrigerator, arms folded over his chest. Grieving husband. Homicidal father. Grieving fucking husband.

  “What happened to you?” D.D. asked.

  “Walked into a wall.”

  “With both sides of your face?”

  “I hit it twice.”

  She arched a brow at him. He remained steadfast. What were they gonna do, throw him in jail for being bruised and battered?

  “I want it on the record we didn’t do that,” Miller said.

  “Define we.”

  “Boston PD. We haven’t even called your sorry ass down to the station yet, so definitely, whatever wall smacked your face, it wasn’t us.”

  “I believe your wall prefers Tasers, so no, it wasn’t you.”

  That retort didn’t win him any friendship with Miller, but then again, Jason was pretty sure Miller already thought he was the guilty party.

  “When did it happen?” D.D. pressed, obviously the smarter of the two. “We saw you after Hastings’s attack. No way Ethan did that kind of damage.”

  “Maybe I just take a while to bruise.”

  She arched a brow again. He remained steadfast. He could do this dance all day long. Come to think of it, she probably could, too. They were soul mates that way. Destined to piss each other off.

  He missed Sandy. He wanted to ask his wife if she was really pregnant with his child. He wanted to tell her he’d do whatever she asked, if only she’d give him a second chance to make her happy. He wanted to tell her he was sorry, especially for February. He had a lot to be sorry about in February.

  “Sandra knew what you were doing,” D.D. stated.

  He sighed, took the bait. “What was I doing?”

  “You know, on the computer.”

  Jason wasn’t impressed. He’d already guessed that much from Ethan Hastings. They were gonna have to hit him with something bigger to get his attention.

  “I’m a reporter. Of course I work on the computer.”

  “Okay, let me rephrase that: Sandy found out what you were doing on the Internet.”

  Slightly more interesting. “And what exactly did Ethan tell you I was doing on the Internet?”

  “Oh, it wasn’t Ethan.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “No, we haven’t spent the morning with Ethan. We talked to him last night, and the boy told us a couple of interesting things, including that he introduced Sandra to his uncle, who is a certified forensic computer examiner with the Massachusetts State Police.”

  “We’ve been analyzing your bank records,” Miller volunteered now, “so we know it wasn’t gambling. That leaves kiddie porn and/or adult cybersex. Why don’t you just do yourself a big favor and set the record straight? Maybe, if you cooperate with us, we can help you.”

  “I didn’t do anything wrong.” Jason said it automatically, his mind racing ahead, trying to see the angles. Sandra had somehow zeroed in on his middle-of-the-night activities. When? How much had she figured out? Not everything, or she wouldn’t have needed Ethan Hastings. But a trained forensic computer examiner. Shit. A state police expert with access to a genuine computer crime lab …

  “We have your computer,” D.D. spoke up, continuing the full court press. “Being computer savvy yourself, you know we can find everything. And I mean everything.”

  He nodded vaguely, because she was right. With the forensic tools that existed these days, he should’ve run over the family hard drive with his truck, ground the components into smithereens, then tossed the plastic bits into a commercial-grade furnace, then blown up the entire furnace room. Only way to be safe.

  He wanted to bolt to the Boston Daily offices. Grab his old computer and desperately run his own forensic diagnostics. How much had Sandra discovered? How many layers of his safeguards had she managed to unpeel? The chat room blogs? Financial transcripts? The MySpace page? Or maybe the photos? God, the photos.

  He couldn’t go back to the Boston Daily offices. He couldn’t risk touching that computer ever again. It was over, done. Best bet, grab the lockbox from the attic and get himself and Ree over the border into Canada.

  D.D. and Miller were staring at him. He forced himself to exhale loudly, to appear deeply disappointed.

  “I wish my wife had mentioned this to me,” he told them.

  D.D. gave him a look, clearly skeptical.

  “I mean it,” he insisted, going with the role of injured party. “If she’d only mentioned her fears, her concerns, I would’ve been happy to explain everything to her.”

  “Define ‘everything,’” Miller stated.

  Jason went with another sigh. “All right. All right. I have an avatar.”

  “Say what?” Miller asked, glancing at his partner, stroking his mustache.

  “An avatar. A computer-generated identity on a website called Second Life.”

  “Oh, give me a fucking break,” D.D. muttered.

  “Hey, four-year-olds have ears,” Jason admonished, pointing toward the front room, where no doubt Ree remained in full TV coma.

  “You don’t have an avatar,” D.D. said darkly.

  “Sure I do. I, uh, logged on to the website as part of a story I was working on. Just wanted to check things out. But … I don’t know. It’s a cool place. Much more intricate than I ever imagined. Social. Has its own rules, customs, everything. For example, when you first log on, you begin with a basic body, basic wardrobe. Well, hell, I didn’t know anything so I just started going into various bars and stores, checking things out. I noticed right away that none of the women would talk to me. Because I was still in the basic wardrobe. I had ‘newbie’ written all over me, like the transfer student in high school. Nobody likes the new kid, you know. You gotta earn your stripes.”

  D.D. gave him that skeptical look again. Miller, on the other hand, appeared interested. “You stay up all night pretending to be some other person on a computer-generated social site?”

  Jason shrugged, stuck his hands in his pockets. “Well, it’s not the kind of thing a grown man wants to admit, especially to his wife.”

  “What are you in this Second Life place?” Miller asked. “Rich, handsome, successful? Or maybe you’re a busty blonde with a thing for bikers?”

  “Actually, I’m a writer. Working on an adventure novel that may or may not be autobiographical. You know, a man of mystery. Women like that.”

  “Sounds like who you are here,” D.D. said dryly. “Don’t need to log on to the web for that.”

  “Which would be exactly why I didn’t tell Sandra. Are you kidding? She works all day, then watches Ree every evening while I cover local events for Boston Daily. Last thing she wants to hear is that her husband returns home at night to mess around with a computer game. Trust me, not the kind of spousal conversation that’s gonna go over well.”

  “So, you felt a need to keep it secret,” D
.D. stated.

  “I didn’t mention it,” Jason hedged.

  “Oh yeah? So secret you purged the browser history every time you went online?”

  Damn, Ethan and the computer guy had taught Sandra well. “I do that as a reporter,” Jason answered smoothly. It occurred to him that he lied just as easily as Maxwell Black. Is that why Sandra had married him? Because he reminded her of her father?

  “Excuse me?”

  “I purge the browser history to protect my sources,” Jason said again. “It’s something I learned in journalism school, class on ethics in the computer age. In theory, I’m supposed to work only on my laptop, but the family desktop is more comfortable. So I have a tendency to do my online research there, then transfer over the information. ’Course, my family computer isn’t protected from search and seizure”—he gave them a look—“so I purge the history files as standard operating protocol.”

  “You’re lying.” D.D. was scowling, looking deeply frustrated and about five seconds away from hitting something. Probably him.

  He shrugged, as if to say there was nothing else he could do for her.

  “What journalism school?” she asked abruptly.

  “What school?”

  “Where’d you take this ethics class?” She made “ethics” sound like a dirty word.

  “Oh, that was years ago. Online course.”

  “Give me the name,” she pressed. “Even online colleges keep records.”

  “I’ll look it up for you.”

  She was already shaking her head. “There was no course. Or maybe there was once, but you weren’t Jason Jones back then, were you? From what we can tell, the Jones name only reaches back about five years. Who were you before then? Smith? Brown? And tell me, when you get a new name, does the cat get one, too?”