Don't Make a Sound (Sawyer Brooks #1)(54)

She kept her eyes on him. Watched his body language for any sign that he might be lying.

“What are you doing here?” he cried out.

“Explain it to me, Uncle Theo. After spending ten years locked up, they let your sorry ass out of jail, and one of the first things you did was commit murder?”

“I didn’t kill anyone.”

“For all those years you were locked up, there were no murders. But you’re released, and another young girl is murdered. Coincidence?”

“I swear to you, I didn’t do it. I’m on a new path.”

It irked her that she actually believed him. But that wasn’t going to stop her from poking and prodding. If he knew anything about Isabella’s murder, she planned to make him talk. “Asking for forgiveness because you’ve found God is such a crock of shit,” she said. “Guys like you can’t just stop assaulting young girls. It’s in your DNA. It’s in your blood. It’s what you do. So stop with the finding-God shit, okay?”

“I wish I could take back everything I ever did to you and your sister.”

Sawyer narrowed her eyes. “But you can’t.”

“It doesn’t go away,” he said with a shake of his head. “I wish it did.”

“What doesn’t go away?” Sawyer asked. “I want to hear you say it.”

“The urge to sin, to do the wrong thing and make bad choices. I got a lot of therapy inside, plenty of solitude to think about things I did. I would never harm another person.”

“That’s bullshit.”

He shook his head adamantly. “No. It’s the solemn truth. I mean it. Never again.”

“Maybe you told yourself that you would never rape another innocent girl, but the urge was too great, so you killed Isabella instead.”

“I don’t know any Isabella. Please. Leave me alone. I said I was sorry.” His head fell, chin to chest.

“You’re good at this, aren’t you, Uncle Theo? You’ve been at this game for a long time. Sexual predators know how to groom and manipulate people. It’s what they do.”

He didn’t look at her. Uncle Theo had spent his entire life coercing victims. He was an actor. Oscar material. She left him standing in the middle of the room. The kitchen was easy enough to find. She began opening drawers and digging into his things. She wasn’t sure what she was looking for, but she felt good about going through his belongings and causing him grief.

She found an old black-and-white photo of Uncle Theo with Sawyer, Aria, and Harper at a barbecue at her parents’ house. Uncle Theo was all smiles. Sawyer took a close look at Harper. She was probably thirteen at the time, lean and long with freckles across her nose. Her jawline looked rigid, her eyes cold. Her disdain for the picture-taker was clear.

Aria’s arm was draped around Sawyer. They looked neither happy nor sad.

Three young girls, and yet only one seemed to know what the future held. Sawyer ripped the photo to shreds and continued on.

“Please don’t do this,” he said. “I told you I was sorry, and I meant it.”

She stopped and turned his way. “What about your friends? The men you sold me to that first night? Who were they?”

He shook his head. “I don’t remember.”

“I want names,” Sawyer said. “Give me a name and I’ll leave.”

Uncle Theo’s weakness emboldened her. When she was small, he’d made her cower, and now she would do the same to him, show him what it felt like to have no choice, no power. She entered the only bedroom in the house, opening drawers, rummaging through his things.

“How much money did you make that night?” she asked him as she tossed a pile of shirts out of her way. “Or any night, for that matter,” she went on. “Aria told me they were called rape fantasy parties.” She looked at him. “It has a nice ring to it. How did you advertise?”

He fidgeted, looked around, anywhere but at Sawyer.

“Look at me! How do you expect to ever garner forgiveness if you can’t even look me in the eyes?”

His head came up. His watery eyes fixated on hers.

“How much money did you make?” She stepped closer to him, heat warming her face, making her head throb. “Tell me the name of one of your fucking friends!”

“They weren’t my friends,” he shouted back at her. “None of it was my idea.”

He wasn’t making sense. “What?”

He shook his head and said nothing.

“You said it wasn’t your idea. I want to know whose idea it was to sell me and my sister to your friends?”

He was crying now, sobbing uncontrollably.

As far as Sawyer was concerned, he wasn’t human. “It must suck to lose everything. You were living the high life, and you were so damn cocky, but then you got caught and look where you ended up? In a dump.” She cocked her head. “Did you ever stop to think that someday one of your victims, like, say, me—your own niece—might come to visit you when you were old and useless, beaten down by your own depravity? Did you ever think about that?”

He said nothing.

She opened the closet door.

“Please don’t,” he begged.

“Oh, why not?” She tucked her phone into her waistband. “I’m getting warm, aren’t I?” There were piles of worn shoes on the closet floor, a paper bag filled with aged Playboy magazines, and two plastic bins. She reached for the bins and slid them out. The top one was filled with odds and ends: cooking utensils, a dented tin pan, paintbrushes, a hammer and nails, a measuring tape, wood glue. She moved the bin aside.