“These were pictures his friend had taken.”
Duckworth nodded. “Seems he’d just come back from some trip. A place where a person with those kinds of tastes can find just what he’s looking for. And in that instant, when he saw those pictures, he realized that what your brother had said years ago was the truth. He hadn’t been making it up. A man who would take these kinds of pictures was the sort of man who would have assaulted your brother.”
“Who?” I asked, but I believed I already had the answer.
Duckworth held up his hand again. “Let me tell this. So when this friend of your dad’s came back into the room, your dad confronted him with it. Asked him what the hell it was. Said he now realized it had to be true, what Thomas had told him.”
“What did the man say?”
“Denied it to hell and back, of course.”
“What’d my dad do?” One thing I was pretty sure he must have done was a search on his laptop for child prostitution.
“I guess he stewed about it for a while. Finally, he called me. He said he was just sick about it, that he’d tried to apologize to your brother about it, that they’d had a fight over it. He wanted to know whether the man could still be charged, for what he did to Thomas. I told him it was pretty unlikely. It happened so long ago, and given your brother’s tendencies, it would be pretty hard to get a conviction.”
“What about the pictures on the man’s phone?”
“Your dad knew he’d probably deleted them right away, soon as he left, but even so, he was asking me, could someone go after him, for paying to have sex with kids in some foreign country.”
“Thailand,” I said.
“Excuse me?”
“I think we’re probably talking about Thailand. I know it’s not the only country in the world where that sort of thing is available—hell, I’m sure it goes on in this country—but one of Dad’s friends has traveled to Thailand.”
“I haven’t answered your question about who the friend is,” Duckworth said, “because I don’t know. Your dad never told me, because he hadn’t decided what to do about this man.” He sighed. “And then he had that accident. And died.”
“Yeah,” I said. “He had that accident.”
SEVENTY-THREE
“LEN Prentice,” I said.
“Say again?” Duckworth said, getting out his notebook.
“Dad worked for him for years. They’d been friends a very long time. Thomas has never liked him. Len came by here the other day, tried to force Thomas to have lunch with him. Maybe he was trying to find out what Dad might have told him before he died.” I thought a moment. “And he takes trips without his wife, to Thailand.”
“Well,” Duckworth said. “That’s pretty interesting, isn’t it?”
I felt exhaustion wash over me. All that had happened in the last few days, and now this. “The son of a bitch. The fucking pervert. He forces himself on Thomas, and knows he can get away with it, because if Thomas ever says anything, Len can just say, ‘Hey, you know that kid—he’s nuts.’”
“It’s part of the pattern,” Duckworth said. “They target the vulnerable, people they can control.”
Blood pulsed in my temples. I wanted to get in the car, go over to Len Prentice’s house, and throttle him. Strangle the bastard with my bare hands.
“Thomas went years without ever talking about this,” I said.
“Because he got into so much trouble before, when he told his father about it,” Duckworth said. “He just wanted it to go away.”
“And when my father brought it all up again, when he tried to tell my brother that he now believed him, how must that have made Thomas feel?” I wondered aloud. “It must have made him angry. That now, finally, Dad was prepared to do something about it. When the damage was already done.”
Duckworth nodded solemnly. “Maybe so.”
I clasped my head with my hands. “I’m on overload.”
“I don’t doubt it.”
We were both quiet for a moment. I was the one who finally spoke. “There’s something that’s been troubling me from the moment I came home, after I got word that my father was dead.”
Duckworth waited.
“The circumstances. They’ve always bothered me.”
“How so?”
“I know it looked like an accident. He was riding the tractor along the side of a steep hill, and rolled it. But he’d been mowing like that, safely, for years.”
“A lot of people do the same foolish thing for years, and one day it catches up with them,” Duckworth offered.