All the Dangerous Things(30)

“I imagine they were interviewed, right?”

“Sure, the serious ones,” I say, pointing to the spreadsheet printed out and tacked next to it. My eyes skim down the grid of names and addresses, page after page after page. “Criminal sexual misconduct with minors, child pornography, rape. But there are hundreds of them. Thousands. The cops barely even scratched the surface.”

Waylon stands up and steps closer, too, probably thinking the same thing I was the first time I let it truly sink in: the magnitude of it. They’re everywhere, it seems. Our neighbors, coworkers. Friends.

“What did you do?” he asks, barely a whisper.

I’m quiet, still eying those little red pins. My mind on Detective Dozier at the vigil and the way he had sunk back into the trees, watching.

“I would advise you not to do anything impulsive.”

“There was this older man who used to work at the grocery store,” I say at last, a cold detachment in my voice. “He always liked Mason. He used to keep these stickers in his apron pockets and hand them to the kids at checkout. He was sweet. I liked him. I always made it a point to get in his line, you know, make small talk … until I found his name on the list.”

Waylon is quiet, letting me continue.

“I told Dozier, but he wouldn’t listen. He said it wasn’t enough—a lesser charge, no probable cause—and at that point I just felt like everyone had stopped trying, stopped caring, so I went to the store one night and confronted him myself.”

I still remember the look on his face: the wrinkles in his cheeks stretching when he saw me and smiled; his arms outstretched like he was going in for a hug. And then: the terror. I couldn’t stop myself. As soon as I saw him, I couldn’t stop. The screaming, the thrashing. My fists flying and connecting with anything they could find until the other employees were able to shake off the shock and rush over, hold me back.

“It was public indecency,” I continue, my eyes still drilling into the wall. I can’t bring myself to look at Waylon and see the judgment there. “Apparently, he had stumbled behind some bar after too many drinks and peed in front of a cop. That was it.”

I’ll never forget his body on the floor, a trembling ball of limbs. Looking back, I don’t even know if I truly believed it was him. Maybe I did—maybe some small part of me had seen the way he looked at Mason, those stickers in his pockets, and assumed the worst—or maybe I was just looking for someone to blame. An outlet for the anger that had been roiling inside me.

It had been there so long, it was bound to boil over.

“Any mother would have done the same thing,” Waylon says at last, but it sounds like a courtesy. Like he can’t think of anything else to say.

“Yeah, well, he didn’t press charges, so the cops went easy on me, but they’ve never really wanted me around after that,” I continue. “Ben moved out shortly after. I guess it was his final straw.”

The house is uncomfortably quiet, and I start to chew on my nail to give my hands something to do. I feel a rip, a sharp sting. Taste blood on my tongue from where my cuticle tore.

“Why do you do this for a living?” I ask at last, an exasperated laugh escaping my lips. “How can you possibly stand it, listening to these stories over and over again? I always think about that, you know, when I go to those conventions. I ask myself how people could possibly get enjoyment out of listening to a story like that. Like mine.”

“Oh, yeah,” Waylon says, pushing a loose strand of hair away from his forehead, embarrassed. “I got into it because, uh, because of my sister’s murder, actually.”

His words send a knife through my chest. I inhale, trying to breathe through that familiar, painful twisting.

My sister’s murder.

“I’m so sorry,” I say. “I didn’t mean—”

“No, it’s fine,” he says. “I get it. It’s a morbid career.”

“What happened to her?” I tread lightly, realizing now that after all of our encounters together—after our conversation on the airplane, our email exchanges, our meal at Framboise, and now this—I have never stopped to wonder what Waylon’s story is. I’ve been so used to being the one with a tale to tell, the one with a tragedy, that I’ve never even thought to ask. “Your sister?”

Waylon shrugs, shoots me a sad little smile.

“That’s the question,” he says. “The one case I’ve been working on since I was twenty-three years old.”

The sun is sinking quickly now, and I glance outside, watching the sky brighten into an unnatural orange one last time before the light is bound to disappear again. With that one single admission, I realize that, for the first time in three hundred and sixty-eight days, I’m not approaching the impending night with the same sense of dread that always comes when it’s time to buckle up, settle in. Ride out the long, lonely hours with nothing but my thoughts, my memories. My mind.

Instead, I feel hope.

I feel it, I really do. Just the faintest little glimmer, but it’s there. Because now I understand something crucial. I understand that Waylon and I may be more alike than I thought. Both of us are victims of the violence, spending our lives in the dark searching blindly for answers; both of us tainted by tragedy, defined by our loss, unable to do what everyone keeps telling me to do: just move past it, move on.