Page 83 of What Boys Learn

Willa added, “Crumpled like a cheap little tin can. Any normal car would demolish a little two-seater like that.”

By normal, Willa meant something big. She’d been begging me to buy a giant gas-guzzling SUV for years now, for “safety’s sake.”

“Get your radio on,” she said. “They’re still talking about him.”

“That’s okay, I’m looking up the details online. We should get off and I’ll call you back tonight.”

But she was too hyped to hang up. “They found more of the drug that Izzy had an allergic reaction to. Tablets of something.Cata-something.”

My blood froze.

“Catapres?”

“Maybe.”

That was a brand of antihypertensive. I took the generic version. Clonidine. Catapres. Practically identical.

“It’s common. Are they saying Sidney was dosed with the same drug?”

“They mentioned a ‘benzo’ something and opioids, not much but enough to do the job, ground into powder and dissolved in a bottle of prosecco.”

“Geneva’s sleeping pills and pain pills. But they didn’t mention clonidine, in Sidney’s case?”

“What am I, a pharmacist?”

“No. Sorry. I’m just trying to understand.”

I pulled out the laptop I’d brought in order to look at the Grove summer contract. From the parking lot, the Wi-Fi recognized I’d been here before and connected automatically.

As Willa talked, I opened a window and located photos of the scene. None of the big outlets near us—theChicago Tribune, or even theLake County News-Sun—had run anything yet. But there was a Madison, Wisconsin, news article with a photo of a crashed car, an open trunk with duct tape, zip ties, garbage bags, several dark green fleece blankets, and a close-up of pills. I enlarged the photo on my screen. They weren’t the same as mine. Different color, different letters on the tiny tablets.

I googled quickly and without satisfaction. At home, I could look up the drugs in myPhysician’s Desk Reference.

“Anyway, the sicko’s dead now,” Willa said. “Skidded off the road and rolled over. Good thing the evidence was in his car.”

“Good thing,” I said, still taking it all in. Evidence. Phone. Photos. Pills. And of course, they’d have no trouble matching his DNA, especially in the case of Sidney, if he’d been the one to have intercourse with her, as the news reports suggested.

I looked back at the article. The accident had taken place in Janesville, south of Madison—a hit-and-run, tire tracks clearly showed. A drunk driver possibly; the common tire brand and paint color left at the site of impact were both unfortunate, in terms of pursuing leads, although the police pledged to try. What did it matter? He was a bad man. The killer had been found—and not just found but stopped, forever.

I re-skimmed the Wisconsin article.The driver was a former resident of a juvenile facility near Madison.

I googled those last four words, and several facilities showed up. One of them had Menkoka in the title. The name rang a bell.

“I should get off,” I said to Willa.

“Okay. Have a good one.”

The first article had provided the driver’s name—Christopher Weber. I searched and found another short item from a Wisconsin news outlet. Weber was twenty-two. He had aged out of a juvenile correctional facility for the mentally ill and was supposedly rehabilitated, but as a commentator noted,Most of these kids are never fully rehabilitated.

Ewan had been placed in a psychiatric treatment center at the age of eighteen, but he was moved to a regular prison at the age of nineteen. That’s why Menkoka sounded familiar. It was the only facility of its kind in our area that worked with extremely difficult youth offenders. It was the place Ewan had spent some portion of a year—barely six months—prior to aging out.

I had twenty minutes left until I needed to get back to Curtis’s office and pick up Benjamin. Still, I kept searching. Weber. Born in Milwaukee. One website already had his photo up. Handsome, clean-cut, sharp nose, small mouth, dark close-set eyes. Like they always said:normal. And a little too young to be a likely suspect in other crimes, like the murder of Harper McKibben.

All the proof of Weber’s involvement was there, even zip ties and blindfolds—not that he’d used those things on Sidney or Izzy. But maybe he planned to use them on another victim, his next time.

Now there would be no next time. A more ideal resolution couldn’t be imagined, and yet I didn’t feel satisfied. I felt confused—by everything that made no sense, by everything that madetoo much sense.

And what about the missing girl, Veronica Lovell? She was never mentioned in any of the news stories. What about the possibility of other girls, other women?