Read Online The Price of Malice by Archer Mayor - Free Book Online

people knew him, even though he
didn’t
live on the street. I’m building a who’s-who list. A bunch of them swear he went after kids, but nobody’s seen anything.”
    “Hold it, hold it,” Joe requested. “There were that many kids he abused on Manor Court?”
    “No, no,” Sam reassured him. “Sorry—that kind of ran together. A few of those we canvassed said he was a snapper, but I couldn’t get a single kid’s name from any of them. It was all, ‘So-and-so told me he’d done what’s-his-name.’ Super vague right now.”
    “A snapper?” Les asked.
    Willy held up his wrist. “Comes from them using rubber bands—when they get the urge to fuck a kid, they’re supposed to snap a rubber band they wear around their wrist. Pain equals lust, so lust goes away. That’s the theory. Typical shrink crap. A bullet would make the lust go away quicker—cheaper, too.”
    “Thank you for that,” Spinney said, shaking his head but smiling. “Short and concise, as usual.”
    “I found a box of rubber bands in his apartment,” Joe told them.
    “Bet they weren’t used much,” Willy commented.
    Joe had to admit he was right—there’d been no rubber band on the body and the box had been full. “I’ll talk to his shrink tomorrow,” he said. “A word to the wise, though, before we go too far down this path. Right now, this snapper stuff is purely anecdotal, unless you know something, Willy, that you’re keeping in your pocket.”
    Willy raised his eyebrows innocently. “Not me. I just heard the guy was dirty—like Sam did—again and again.”
    “Meaning,” Joe resumed, “that he probably is. But he doesn’t have a record, which means we don’t have proof.”
    “You worried about a stiff’s reputation?” Willy challenged, his face darkening again.
    “What I’m worried about,” Joe explained, “is getting blinded bythis. Somebody killed him—maybe because he went after kids; maybe for some completely different reason. I don’t want to lose this case because we got too focused, too fast.”
    He looked over at Spinney. “You dug into Castine’s records. Anything you didn’t mention earlier?”
    Lester pulled out a couple of notes. “Wayne Castine, aged thirty-two, born Hardwick, Vermont, of Shirley Evans, since deceased, and an unknown father. Evans married when Wayne was five, and a few years later, Wayne cropped up as a person-of-interest in a child abuse case filed against the stepfather. I called a friend at child services and was told that Wayne was the victim. This conversation was off the record, of course, but it told me what you might expect—mom dragged a growing bunch of kids around the state, never making ends meet, and fell in with one loser after another. The abuse was repeated with another of mom’s boyfriends a few years later.”
    Lester, the father of two, sighed and concluded, “You get the idea—he was done for from the start.”
    “But no criminal record of his own?” Joe asked incredulously.
    “No
adult
record,” Les corrected him. “I made another call to Parole and Probation and got the skinny there. Usual bad-boy stuff—underage drinking, criminal mischief, assault, B-and-E. He messed up a lot. He spent time in juvenile detention, was finally taken away from mom and passed around to a few foster homes. But it looks like he learned not to get caught after he reached maturity, ’cause that’s where the legal trail runs out of gas.”
    “Except for the person-of-interest computer entries you mentioned,” Joe added. “I hate to say it, but that’s where you’re going to have to spend some time, talking to those POIs, just to see what might pop up.”
    Spinney looked slightly glum. “I know.”
    “At least you can start from the present and work backward,” Joe added cheerfully. “Take the most recent entry; chances are that whatever got him killed stemmed from some fresh-out-of-the-oven insult.”
    He paused to rub his eyes. “God—it’s getting