Widowmaker (Mike Bowditch #7)(4)

I was still struggling to understand what any of this had to do with me. “So what happened to him?”

“Senior year, he met a girl from Vail. Her name was Alexa Davidson. She was a freshman.”

From the way she spit out that last word, I suspected I knew what was coming next. “How old was she?”

“She was fourteen, although she looked and acted a lot older than that.”

“And how old was Adam?”

“He was seventeen for most of the semester.”

I set the photo on the table between us, facedown. “And then he turned eighteen. And someone found out he and Alexa were having sex?”

“The parents demanded that the school investigate. It would have been bad enough if they’d just expelled him, and taken away his dreams of skiing professionally, but the f*cking headmaster decided to bring in the police.”

“And they arrested Adam for statutory rape,” I said.

“They totally set him up to make it look worse than it was.” Her hair fell around her face. She pushed the strands away violently. “I had to sell my condo to pay for the lawyer—thirty thousand dollars—and all he did was lose the case. Adam still ended up going to jail. They were both just kids!”

Not in the eyes of the law. “How long was he in jail?”

“Two years.”

“Where?”

“Bucks Harbor.”

It was a prison in easternmost Maine, not far from one of my old districts. It was a minimum-security facility—low-to medium-risk prisoners. Informally, it was known to be a warehouse for convicted sex offenders, although the Department of Corrections would deny up and down that it was a dumping ground for the lowest of the low.

I noticed she hadn’t mentioned Adam’s father. There was no ring on her finger, either.

“How long has he been out?” I asked.

“Three months,” she said with a sneer. “He’s on supervised release, which means he has to register as a sex offender for the next ten years. He has to meet with a probation officer in Farmington every week and pay to go to counseling with a bunch of child rapists until he’s ‘cured’ or something.”

At least he hadn’t been fitted with an electronic monitoring device, I thought.

She removed a pack of Capris from her vest and then seemed to realize she shouldn’t light up in my house without asking permission. She stuffed the cigarettes in her pocket. When she looked up again, her eyes were full of fury.

“Do you know what the worst thing is, though?” she said. “They put his picture on the Internet! There’s a Web site where you can look up who the sex offenders are in your town. So people see there’s this new ‘predator’ named Adam Langstrom living nearby, and they freak out about their kids, even though he is completely normal and would never, ever hurt a child. My landlord wouldn’t allow him to stay with me because the f*cking neighbors saw his picture on the Internet. Adam had to go live at this logging camp in the middle of nowhere.”

“A logging camp?”

“It’s kind of like a halfway house, too. The probation officer sends people there who don’t have anywhere else to go. All I know is that Adam hates the place. He said the man who runs it is a lying sack of shit who doesn’t care about the safety of his workers. A man died there a month ago when a tree fell on him!”

I could guess the rest. “How long has Adam been missing?”

“Two weeks,” she said. “He was supposed to check in with his parole officer, but he never did. She got a judge to put out a warrant for him.”

In Maine, game wardens are trained alongside state troopers and have all the same arrest powers, but searching for fugitive sex offenders didn’t normally fall within our purview—not unless they ran off into the woods. “And you haven’t heard from him?”

Her voice had a sharp new edge. “If I had, I wouldn’t be here, because at least then I’d know he was safe somewhere. His f*cking PO thinks he ran off, but she’s not going to go chasing him. She says he’ll show up eventually, and then the cops will just arrest him again. Only this time, he’ll be going to prison for ten years!”

“Your son is an adult, and he is going to have to live with the consequences of his actions.”

“You don’t understand. I’m afraid something happened to him!”

An image came into my mind of a friend, a veteran of the war in Iraq, who hadn’t been able to escape his own demons after he returned home from the VA hospital.

“Was Adam suicidal?” I asked carefully.

“I don’t know. I never used to think his father was.”

Her answer raised so many questions, I had to resist diverting the conversation down a new path. “What about the people at the halfway house?” I asked. “Maybe Adam said something to them before he vanished.”

“The * who runs the place wouldn’t talk to me. He said he has a rule against violating his workers’ privacy. But I’m Adam’s mother!”

“I’m not a private detective, Amber.”

She seemed stunned by my refusal. “What about Jack? You helped him. Everyone says you tried to prove his innocence.”

“That was different. I’m sorry, but I just can’t help you.”