2 Sisters Detective Agency(63)

Turning to Vera, Benzo, Sean, and Penny had been the natural move, he told us. Ashton thought of the crew as his “angry” friends. There were other kids in his life—mostly the children of his parents’ wealthy friends, princes and princesses of worthy empires—but they were just as dim-witted and shallow as his parents and hopelessly immune to discontent. The members of the Midnight Crew were capable of hate. They listened to Ashton when he spoke about feeling alone, feeling like just another of his parents’ accessories—a toy that had been fun to tote around when he was small and cute and could be dressed like a doll but eventually had grown tiresome as he got older. He was a troublesome boy. He wanted to talk about legal reform and taxes and poverty and things that made his parents and their guests very uncomfortable. They couldn’t throw money at him and make him shut up. That was annoying.

Vera had texted their group, saying, We should do something ourselves.

Ashton had sent a laughing emoji, and for a while there had been silence. He’d got the feeling, a sixth sense, that the others were talking on some other group text thread without him. Then Vera had texted again.

Let’s meet up. I can tell you about our game.





Chapter 84



The game was everything Ashton had wanted. One big, loud, violent release. They called themselves the Midnight Crew. They wore a uniform. Moved in sync, like ninjas or black ops soldiers.

The look on his uncle Ray’s terrified face when he and his friends stormed into the bedroom and threw on the lights had given Ashton a deep, stomach-clenching, skin-tingling pleasure that he’d been able to call upon even months afterward. They locked his aunt in the bathroom and tied Uncle Ray to his desk, then stripped, taunted, and belittled him, leaving him bloodied and sobbing and drooling onto his paperwork as they ransacked his house. Ashton jumped on the bed, threw a can of beer from the fridge at a mirror in the guest room, and heard the giggles rippling up from inside him at the delicious smashing sounds.

The righteous violence released his tense shoulder and neck muscles so that the next morning he was actually walking straighter. Thinking clearer. He was braver, smarter, fiercer. He felt tough. Capable. He snapped at a guy in a café who tried to cut ahead of him in line, sent him shuffling away. He fired his acting coach and personal trainer, and demanded his father’s secretary find him better ones. Ashton was finally the big man. He was in touch with his primal, powerful self. He couldn’t wait to wear the black skull mask again that Vera had given him. He wished he could wear it every hour of the day and night.

The next raids followed quickly. Ashton barely listened to the justifications for the victims they chose. Some guy had catcalled Penny outside a construction site. A woman had turned Vera away from a dance club. All he had to know was that these were bad people who didn’t know their place. Ashton told himself he was doing a good thing—dishing out justice, teaching people respect, humility. But he hardly needed any convincing. He was having so much fun.

Aunt Francine left Uncle Ray. Ashton heard talk at the next party that she had moved to London and started trading expensive antique pottery, had a younger guy living in her apartment—a much younger guy. He had seen his uncle once afterward, at a christening. Ray had looked pale and thin.

As I sat listening to Ashton, my mind bounced between pity and fury at the child before me. A part of me wanted to scream at him that the “righteous anger” that had led him down his violent path was just the selfish whining of a spoiled brat who too early had gotten bored of being rich and didn’t know what to do with all his pent-up energy. But another part of me knew that it didn’t matter how much money a kid had, how big his house was, or how many toys his parents paid the holiday decorators to wrap and arrange artfully under the tree. If a parent ignored, abandoned, or abused their child, an angry seed was planted that could grow into a poisonous tree. I knew that whether a parent was rich and snubbed their kid for expensive wine or they were poor and snubbed them for cheap crack, the message to the kid was the same:

You’re not as important to me as my next high.

The slap Ashton witnessed that had so outraged him wasn’t as important as the parents who hadn’t listened to that outrage. I’d been dealing with the fallout of ignored kids in courtrooms for a decade, defending girls and boys who had gone out looking for the attention and acceptance they didn’t get at home, looking in all the wrong kinds of places, with all the wrong kinds of people.

“How did your little game get this out of control?” I asked when Ashton had finished his story. Ashton looked up at me, gripped the torn knees of his jeans.

“We messed with the wrong guy,” he said.





Chapter 85



I sat thinking. Baby scrolled and tapped on her phone. I knew that even though she seemed distracted, she had been soaking up everything, probably confirming or discounting what Ashton said with searches online. He explained Derek Benstein’s death and the terrifying encounter he had had with the killer outside the house in Brentwood the night before. It was a lot to take in.

Ashton was watching me hopefully, and even though I hadn’t decided how best to help him, I knew I needed to begin throwing ideas around just to ease the tension before it consumed him again.

“Whoever this guy is,” I said, “he’s on your list, and he’s got a big-ass rifle. He’s probably military or ex-military, if what you’ve said about his sharpshooting skills is correct. So we just look at the list of all the houses you hit and find a military family.”