Forgive Me(59)

“Promise me you’ll bring her home,” Carolyn said, her voice cracking.

Angie knew better. So much could go wrong, so many terrible things could happen. Of course she knew better. “I promise,” she said, smoothing the back of Carolyn’s head. “I promise.”





Raynor Sinclair had followed Angie all the way from Arlington to Potomac and that amused him. Wasn’t she the purported expert at tailing someone? And he was tracking Angie in plain sight, never once rousing her suspicion. She made a pit stop at her apartment before journeying to Maryland, but the detour wasn’t to evade him. She had gone upstairs and came down minutes later, taking enough time to water a plant and check the mail, he supposed. There were dozens of ways Angie could have lost him if she had wanted to, but she took no counter measures.

Highway driving made it especially easy to spot him in his Acura SUV. All Angie had to do was change speed—say, drop her speed from seventy-five miles per hour down to sixty. If she still saw his car in her rearview mirror, it would be cause for concern. With little traffic on the roads at that time of morning, he was relatively easy to spot, but she was clueless. She was focused on all the wrong things.

Good for him, bad for her.

Angie left the highway. Raynor did the same, following at a safe distance as she drove along leafy streets dotted with fine-looking homes, all with well-tended lawns.

They reminded him of his childhood home in Madison, Wisconsin. More specifically, the lawns reminded him of his father, now long dead, the man who had taught him how to grow grass and the proper way to cut it. No grass grew where Raynor lived now, a two-bedroom luxury apartment in DC that boasted of being a big city sanctuary in the middle of everywhere.

His father had taught Raynor many things, including how to hunt. Raynor might have shunned grass for a concrete landscape, but he still loved to hunt, and tracking Angie counted as sport.

A hundred or so yards up ahead, she pulled to a stop. Raynor pulled over as well. From his car, he watched her ascend a flight of stairs to the wide front porch of a colonial home. A woman came to the door and Angie went inside. No other cars were parked curbside, so he decided to drive around the block. A check of the address told him it was Carolyn Jessup’s residence. Angie’s business there was perfectly justified.

He had a good idea where she’d be headed next. With only one way to get there from where he was, Raynor drove off and found parking where he could wait without being conspicuous. Eventually, he would affix a GPS tracker to the undercarriage of Angie’s car so he could watch her all the time. The technology, though, didn’t feel like sport. It felt like cheating.

Sport. Hunting. Raynor again thought of his father, Truman Sinclair, a stoic disciplinarian who’d corralled four sons with lies about needing only the Bible, when what he really used was his belt. Of the four brothers, Raynor, who was the youngest, was also the best hunter. He could innately judge his quarry’s pace. As Wayne Gretzky famously said of the hockey puck, Raynor went not to where the animal was, but to where the animal was going to be. He could spot blood on a trail as if he possessed a hound’s nose for the scent.

A memory came to him—the blur of a grouse carving through thickets.





It was a difficult shot, one Raynor’s brothers and his highly skilled father would have passed on. But Raynor thought he could hit the bird, even though his backside hurt from the belt beating he’d taken the day before. Only fourteen years old, and somehow he could block out his excruciating pain to get a lock on his target.

Raynor and his father were grouse hunting by themselves.

“Quality time,” his dad called it as he tightened the laces of his boots. The hunt was Truman Sinclair’s way of apologizing for the thrashing he had given his son over a stack of video games Raynor stole from the home of a neighborhood kid.

He had been at the boy’s home the day of the theft, so it wasn’t a stretch when suspicion fell on him. Parents exchanged phone calls, and upon returning home from his job at the insurance company, Truman Sinclair went on a hunting expedition of a different sort. In no time, he found the missing items in a shoebox stashed underneath Raynor’s bed. Confronted with the evidence, Raynor had no choice but to confess. Punishment was meted out swiftly and without mercy. The belt, oh the damned belt.

Tears clung to Rainer’s eyes as his father drove him to the neighbor boy’s home to return the stolen items. The pain from the welts on his backside paled when compared to the agony of his humiliation. While the boy stood in the doorway of his ranch home looking smug, the mother stood behind her son as triumphant as a queen rejoicing over her enemy’s head on a spike.

She wasn’t rejoicing the day Raynor shoved a stick through the spokes of her beloved son’s bicycle wheel as he barreled down Ridge Road. The bike stopped rolling, but the boy kept going—right over the handlebars and onto the unforgiving pavement, where he landed with a crunch. The boy suffered a cracked skull, broken leg, and a raft of internal injuries. Police never did find out who shoved a branch through the bicycle wheel. That was because while the boy lay on the ground, bleeding from the ears, Raynor set the heel of his boot on the boy’s throat and swore he’d kill him if he ever told.

The kid spent two weeks in a hospital recovering. He was really never quite the same. Popular and preppy before, Smash Mouth (that’s what Raynor called him) turned moody and withdrawn. At a class reunion years later, Raynor heard that Smash Mouth, then in his twenties, had overdosed on painkillers while living in his parents’ basement.