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He leans closer, his fingers threading together into a single fist. “And you can. I swear. I have nothing to hide.” He pauses, his teeth dragging over his full bottom lip. “Or…I won’t. Once I tell you one last thing.”
My stomach knots around what little food I managed to force down. “Okay,” I say, even though I’m not sure I want to hear his “one last thing.” I’m already struggling. I don’t know if I’ll be able to let my walls down and trust him again.
One more lie might be all it takes to put the nail in the coffin of this relationship.
“It’s about Carl,” he says, surprising me.
I sit back, blinking faster. “Carl? The man in the woods?”
Wes nods tightly. “A few days after he attacked you, I mentioned what happened to an old high school friend of mine who’s a cop. I was just wondering if I needed to come in and give a statement or something. But she said no one had reported anything like that. When I realized you hadn’t told the police about what happened, I thought about coming to talk to you, to try to convince you to come to the station with me.” He sighs, dragging a hand through his hair. “But then I started thinking about all the women I’ve represented in court, all those restraining orders that did jack shit to keep their abusive partners away from them. One of my clients ended up in the hospital with a broken jaw. Another…didn’t make it out of the relationship. She ended up going back to her abuser. He’d made it too scary for her to keep fighting for her freedom. Every time I see her in town, she looks smaller, more…hollow inside.”
He trails off, misery clear on his face.
I want to reach out to him, to pull him in for a hug and tell him how sorry I am that he has a front row seat to the worst aspects of humanity. But the hugging part of me is still locked away with the rest of the vulnerable emotions that ran for shelter when I read that text.
Instead, I hold out my fast-food bag. “My churro chunks are still in here. I couldn’t eat them.”
His lips twitch. “Thanks, I’m good.”
“Are you sure? Sugar makes everything better.”
“Maybe later. I have to get this out first. My stomach is in knots.”
“I get it.” I tuck the bag back in the side pocket of my camp chair and close the Velcro flap, keeping it safe from Freya, who is still prowling around the fire, looking for microscopic pieces of meat she might have missed.
Wes sighs. “So, yeah, I thought about all that and understood why you’d decided against reporting.”
“He didn’t really hurt me, Wes,” I say. “I mean, he did, obviously. I was terrified, and I have no doubt that he would have done very bad things to me if you hadn’t shown up. But he didn’t get to follow through on those things. In the eyes of the law, he was only guilty of roughing me up a little. That’s not enough to land him in prison or get him off the streets for any length of time. It’s only enough to make him even more angry and myself more of a target.”
He nods, his jaw tight. “I thought about that, too. Our system is so messed up. The fact that we have to wait until clearly violent people step over the line drives me crazy. So…” He clears his throat and blows out a long breath. “This is hard,” he mutters. “You’re going to think I’m crazy.”
“Just tell me,” I say, my own stomach churning. “The suspense is worse than whatever you did.”
He glances up, arching a thick brow. “You want to bet?”
I let out a nervous laugh. “Jesus, you’re scaring me. What did you do? Kill him?”
He pauses just long enough to make the blood drain from my extremities before he says, “No, but I stalked him. Or, paid a private detective to stalk him for me, since I didn’t really have the time.”
My eyes bulge. “What?”
“He wasn’t an accountant, like he told you. He wasn’t from Redwood Falls, either. He was a janitor at a high school in Chicago.”
My jaw drops. “Chicago? But his location tracking said—”
“He must have been using a VPN or something to make it look like he was local,” Wes cuts in. “In reality, he lived with his mother in a bad neighborhood in South Shore and had a reputation for being a creep. The police knew he wasn’t quite right, but they were busy dealing with gangs and drug dealers. Carl had never done anything bad enough to get more than a ticket for trespassing and a strongly worded warning to quit lurking outside the girls’ locker room at the YMCA.”
“Gross,” I say, my nose wrinkling.
“Yeah.” Wes pauses, unlacing and relacing his fingers, his gaze shifting to the fire as he adds, “He was gross, but he wasn’t doing anything criminal. Not anything we could use to get him locked up, anyway. Not until my guy realized he hadn’t brought groceries home in close to three weeks.”
I frown. “Is that a crime? If so, I might be guilty. Sometimes I go weeks without hitting the store. I live on leftovers from catering events, frozen soup, and fancy oatmeal.”
“He wasn’t bringing home leftovers, either. And his house didn’t look like the kind of place where people were freezing soup or whipping up batches of oatmeal, if you know what I mean,” he says, his gaze still locked on the fire. “It was a hunch, really. The PI and I both felt in our gut that something was wrong in there. We suspected his mother, a shut-in who’d had several strokes, was probably being abused.”
“Oh no,” I say, feeling terrible for the woman. Monsters like Carl usually aren’t raised by sweet little homemakers, but no one deserves to be trapped or forced to go hungry.
Wes gives a short nod. “Yeah. But…it was worse than we thought.”
