Watcher in the Woods (Rockton #4)(84)

The police came. They let Bastion take them back to his house and upstairs where his parents lay in their bed, dead. Poisoned. Glasses sat on the nightstands, ice not yet fully melted in their cyanide-laced Scotch. Beside those glasses lay a suicide note. They’d had enough. They’d failed in their art. They’d frittered away their lives. They could no longer bear to look at themselves in the mirror, knowing they were talentless failures who’d lived lives of unearned luxury, while people died of the cold and the heat, sleeping in cardboard boxes on the streets. Ashamed of their choices, they’d decided to end it, leaving ninety percent of their fortune to the city’s homeless, the other ten to their son, only enough to support him to adulthood.

An astounding moment of clarity in two lives of indolence, a touch of nobility to a tragic end. And it was a lie. A complete and utter lie.

Bastion’s parents had been murdered. And their killer? The boy himself.

What struck me most about the case was not the idea of a child murdering his parents, as unthinkable as that might be. What sent even more chills up my spine was the breathtaking maturity of it. An eleven-year-old boy poisoning his parents’ nightcaps and then leaving that note, revealing a preternatural awareness of their shortcomings. As a child, I had grumbled about my parents, but it wasn’t until I was older that I could step back and analyze them as people, criticize and critique their life choices and my upbringing. A child accepts her situation because it’s all she knows. Yet Bastion, at the age of eleven, looked at his parents and judged them and executed them.

When the police accused him, he could have cried. He could have feigned shock. It probably would have worked. Instead, he confessed with an equally chilling equanimity.

You got me. I did my best, but you win.

I don’t know if he said that, of course. But it was always the sense I got. Like a career criminal who prides herself on her skills so much that when she’s caught, she accepts defeat without fighting.

I screwed up. I accept the punishment.

Or like me, waiting for someone to link me to Blaine’s death, telling myself that when they do, I won’t fight it. Hoping I won’t fight it. That I have the guts to say, “You got me.”

I do know something Bastion did say. It’s in the article, reminding me what I’d heard before, over beers with a detective who’d nominally worked the case.

When asked why he killed his parents, the boy said, “I wanted to go to school. I wanted to play hockey. I wanted to have a skateboard and go to the park. I wanted to be a regular kid.”

He murdered his parents to get that “normal” life. In a perverse sense, this seemed to bother cops more than the murder.

Wanted to go to school? Play hockey? Ride a fucking skateboard?

Spoiled little brat didn’t know what he had, how good his life was. Born with the proverbial silver spoon, and he spat it out.

Yet this I understand. When you have money, people think that solves all your problems and you have no cause for complaint. Not true. It gives you enormous privilege and opens every door, but that doesn’t mean it’s a perfect life. Not if you’re an eleven-year-old boy, being whisked around the world, when all you want is an afternoon in a park and neighbors who know who the hell you are.

That does not justify what Bastion did. Does not even make it comprehensible. At eleven years old, he murdered both his parents in cold blood, and the only crime they were guilty of was self-absorption. If you make that an executable crime, we’d have a massacre of Fortune 500 parents. What happened here was the collision of problematic parenting with an even more problematic child. A boy with a broken psyche. A fledgling sociopath.

Bastion’s official diagnosis was borderline personality disorder. Bastion wanted something his parents would not give him, something he deemed essential for his life, and so he got rid of them. Problem solved.

Two weeks ago I met a girl who murdered her grandmother and two other settlers because they wouldn’t give her what she wanted. To her, it was a simple and obvious solution. Now, in our town, do we have a young man who has committed an equally horrifying and unthinkable crime?

I can’t pull up a photograph and see whether our Sebastian is really Bastion Fowler. He was eleven. I only know his name being in law enforcement.

Bastion was tried as a juvenile and sentenced to a psychiatric facility until his eighteenth birthday. That came a year ago, which would make him two years younger than Sebastian. Ours could easily be nineteen, though.

When he was released, reporters had tried tracking him down. At eighteen, he was fair game. The problem was that they didn’t know his name—it was still protected. But they did find out when he was being released from prison. I find three photos of him supposedly getting out. I say “supposedly” because it’s three photos of three different young men, as if decoys had been used to throw off reporters. Two are very clearly not the young man I know. But the third . . . It’s the worst one, taken from too far away, a blurred shot of a guy in a hoodie hightailing it to a car. He’s slightly built and average height, like Sebastian. Hair hangs over part of his face. Light brown hair. I see that, and I remember the young man who sat across from me last night, hair hanging in his face.

It’s you. In my gut, I know. In my gut, this makes sense.

I read more. According to the articles, Bastion Fowler wasn’t the charming, manipulative sort of sociopath. He didn’t have that magnetic personality. Instead, he was polite. Calm. Deferential, even. Like the young man I’d spoken to last night.