Watcher in the Woods (Rockton #4)(83)

Correction—these are things Petra has told me about herself. That doesn’t make them true.

Those keywords lead to nothing useful, and I don’t have time to dig deeper.

On to Roy. I put in the name from his application, but it’s a laughably common one. Roy McDonald. Again, I have my list of keywords. Two lists. The first is specific to his story. The second is a list of things we may know about him—the city where Dalton picked him up, his approximate age, and so on.

I start with the most obvious. Is there a Roy McDonald who worked as an investment manager and was accused of cheating his clients? I’m mildly surprised when I don’t get a hit. I keep digging, using my keywords and then . . .

“Holy shit,” I whisper, because I know Roy McDonald. Not by name. Not even by face. But his story? That I know.

It’d been in the news, and it caught my attention because it pissed me off. Roy McDonald was a university prof. Economics, which explained part of his “investment guy” false story.

Three years ago, McDonald caught shit from his university for being a racist asshole. Surprise, surprise. He made some highly questionable comments about race and economic status, and he’d been reprimanded for it. Like too many people in that situation, convinced of the righteousness of their beliefs, he doubled down. He’d started expounding on his right to free speech and how kids these days are sensitive snowflakes, and he’s just exposing them to the harsh reality of real life.

None of that would have caught my attention. There are racists and assholes in every walk of life, and having a doctorate degree doesn’t cure you of ignorance. What pissed me off was that McDonald then signed up for one of those online services where strangers donate funds to cover medical bills. Roy’s case, he’d been asking supporters to donate to his “cause.” That “cause” being free speech. Toss some money his way to show your support for his crusade. And if racism wasn’t enough for you, well, he had a few things to say about women, too, in an “economic sense.” Every time his fifteen-seconds threatened to expire, he found a new cause, and his coffers swelled.

I’d been too wrapped up in a case to catch the end result. Turns out that Roy got greedy, and he screwed up, investing his newfound capital in some very questionable ventures and ended up charged with fraud. So that part of his story was true. He was indeed on the run for money problems. The story just wasn’t nearly as mundane as the one he’d given.

For all that, there’s nothing here that suggests Roy could have been Garcia’s target. Whoever Garcia came for, it’s a violent criminal. He warned us, and now I suspect he was telling the truth.

Which resident might have done something like that? The guy at the bottom of my list.

I have Sebastian’s supposed real name. It brings back nothing, which is what I’d expect if his story was true. His crimes were too minor to be news, plus he’d been a minor himself. But I know his story is bullshit. Every detective cell in my body screamed it during that interview, and every answer he gave only reinforced my gut instinct. He is not a kid from the streets who grew up jacking cars and selling dope, a high school dropout living in group homes and juvenile facilities. Ten minutes of conversation would have been enough to tell me Sebastian wasn’t that guy. Dalton only bought the council’s story because Abigail was his sole experience with that sort of background, and Dalton isn’t one to draw generalizations.

So I start throwing in other terms. Most people in Rockton use their real first name, and like Petra’s, Sebastian’s is just unusual enough that I’m hopeful. I know his age. His papers say he’s from Winnipeg, but I hear no accent in his voice, which suggests he’s from my region: southern Ontario. His universities of choice are southern Ontario, too.

I still don’t find anything. I start tossing out search terms, and one brings back a twenty-year-old named Sebastian, who goes by Bastian. The picture isn’t our guy, but my gaze snags on the name, and there’s a click, deep in my memory.

Holy shit.





THIRTY-FOUR

I type feverishly, so fast that I keep making typos as my fingers tangle. All I need is four words. Toronto. Bastion. Murder. I might not even require the fourth, but I add it anyway because it’s the one that defines this case.

The boy’s name was Bastion. His parents may not have realized that was short for Sebastian and mistakenly gave him the diminutive, but in this case, I suspect they were just being creative. “Creative” best summed up Bastion’s parents. His mother was a film maker, his father an artist. Neither had been particularly successful, but they came from money, and having a fulfilling career was more important than success. Also more important than talent. They’d lived in a historically designated house in one of Toronto’s wealthiest neighborhoods. They threw lavish parties. They jetted around the world. Their parenting style had accommodated that lifestyle, their only child raised by nannies and tutors. Bastion had attended private school briefly when he was eight. Then his parents took him out because the class schedule interfered with their own.

Bastion was eleven when he ran to a neighbor’s house and banged on the door. The neighbors didn’t open it. Instead, they called the police. They’d never seen Bastion before, and all they knew was that child was banging on their door and screaming at two AM. I’m not sure what they thought. That some street urchin from a Dickens’ novel had come to rob them in the night?