“Do you know who killed the teacher?” He nodded and said he did. “Did you have anything to do with it?”
“No. I only know who did it, not...I don’t want him to get into trouble. I think he might blame her...well, he does blame her for me being gone and all, but I’m the one that did the deed…you know, killed myself.” Mitch told him he knew that. “He’s a good guy. Straight up nice. But Ms. Candlewick, she was not as nice as people thought she was. And now...she’s coming around here telling me that we were meant to be together.”
“She want you to do anything else?” Jerry went to his window but didn’t answer him. Mitch knew how hard it was to admit that something had been done to you. And that the people you trusted most were the ones that did it. “My foster family, they’re suing me because when they tried to rape me, I told on them.”
Jerry turned to look at him. “She didn’t have to rape me, if that’s what you’re thinking. I wasn’t going to have sex with her, not intercourse anyway. But the rest? I was willing. At first anyway. But then she...she had a husband, she said, and there was a problem with him.”
“Did she want you to kill him?” As soon as he asked, Mitch knew it wasn’t that. And when Jerry shook his head, there was a new kind of dread washing over him.
“He liked to see her fucking someone, she told me. And I was prime to watch. I thought that was all it was going to be. Him getting his jollies while I went down on his wife. I never...we never had intercourse, like I said, but it was close sometimes. But when I got to the house, we had a nice dinner and then....” Jerry looked out the window and didn’t say any more.
“Did they drug you?” Jerry nodded, still not looking at him. “When you left the house that night, did you know you were going to kill yourself?”
“No. I sort of just come to that after I was taking the fourth shower that night. I just couldn’t get clean, you see. And then I got this text from my girlfriend. She said she was looking forward to us having a wonderful wedding night. It was just too much.” He turned to look at him then. “You and Mr. Steele, you can help me, right? I don’t want to leave my mom, but I need to...I can’t be here anymore.”
“We can help you.” Jerry nodded and told him about the things he’d hidden. “Can you tell me where they are? It would go a long way to helping your friend. Because you know as well as I do he’ll get caught.”
“Yeah, I know.” It took him ten minutes to get to the box. It held his cell phone, which had never been found, as well as a long note telling why he’d done it and why he couldn’t live with himself any longer, and sealed the deal on the teacher’s fate. He even had a few pictures on his phone that he’d managed to get of the teacher and her supposed husband right before he’d passed out from the drugs they’d given him.
Chapter 11
“Good work out there,” Drew said to him when he sat beside him on the way back home. “How did you know? I mean, I know you can talk to them, but how did you know he’d be at his house?”
“His mom was there.” Drew said that wasn’t much of an answer. “The boy didn’t kill himself at his home where his mom might find him, but out where the teacher would. He wanted her to know, even subconsciously, that it was her fault.”
“Yeah, I don’t think that was anything she was thinking, do you?” Mitch had to laugh. The teacher, not married and selling sex tapes of the boys she’d had sex with on the Internet, had been really pissed off when she found out that not only was she dead, but all her movies had been taken down, as well as her site. “And to find out that the principal was in on it was really a shocker.”
Mitch had read the boy’s notes before turning them over to the police. He wouldn’t have changed them in any way, but he didn’t want the mom to find out anything else that would hurt her. The note he’d written to his mom was just where he’d said it would be, in the drawer where the gun had been hidden in her room. He wanted her to find it in the event she wanted to end her life as well.
“He knew I’d think about it, didn’t he?” Mitch said nothing to answer her, but Jerry told him he knew that she had several times. “I miss him so much. Every day it’s like getting up in a pool of heavy syrup and to have it clog your every pore and every fiber of your being with every breath. I don’t...I love him so very much.”
“He loves you as well.” She knew what they were now. He and Steele had talked to her at length about Jerry and what he wanted from her. “You’re going to do as he asked? You’ll make sure that it’s done that way?”