I clearly needed to talk to Brad, but when I left Kenny’s house, it was too late in the day for a road trip down to the prison. Instead, I hit up a Starbucks drive-through for another cup of tea and sat in the parking lot, poaching their Wi-Fi to look into the other names that appeared with Brad Stockton’s in my father’s notes.
First, I nosed around on Brian Zollinger, the guy Kenny said had moved away junior year. The entry next to his name in the notebook said Bullying, plagiarism. That hardly seemed relevant to my case, but I pulled background info on him anyway. He lived in Chicago and posted a lot on Twitter about craft beers. I turned up a phone number for him and left a voice mail, requesting a call back.
The next name on the list was Dylan Lapka. His entry read B&E, which I interpreted as breaking and entering. But I determined in short order that he was dead—car accident, a decade ago.
Zero for two so far.
I had better luck on the third name: Michael Timton, sealed JV record? He had a Columbus address, and he also had an adult record that rendered his sealed juvie crimes irrelevant: he was fresh out of jail from a sexual assault six years ago.
Mallory Evans had been sexually assaulted.
This was worth paying attention to. Michael Timton’s name was crossed out in Frank’s notes—for who knew what reasons—but since he was local, I figured I could just ask him.
First, I tried his home address, a shabby James Road bungalow with an overturned children’s picnic table in the yard. A skinny blond woman answered the door with an urgent enthusiasm that told me she was expecting somebody but it wasn’t me. “Oh,” she said, scratching at the inside of her elbow.
“Looking for Michael,” I told her. “Is he around?”
“No, he’s at work.”
“Where’s that?”
“Are you a cop?”
“I don’t want to make any trouble for him,” I said, a hedge that sometimes worked. “I just need to talk to him.”
The woman leaned on the doorframe. She was wearing a long, ratty green cardigan over pajamas. I was willing to bet that under her sleeves, her arms were dotted with needle marks, and that the person she’d been hoping was at the door had something to do with that. She glanced at the street behind me and said, quickly, “He works at the electronics drop-off over by Walmart. Look, can you leave? I’m waiting for a friend.”
“Hey, sure,” I said. “Thanks a lot.”
She closed the door without saying anything else.
A few more minutes of research yielded the information I needed: Powered Up, an electronics recycling center on Main Street that was run by a reentry support group, offering employment and training to recently released felons. They accepted broken televisions and fax machines and microwaves—the kind of electronics you’re not supposed to throw in a Dumpster—and repaired them, then resold them in their retail storefront, which closed at 4 p.m. on Saturdays. So I hurried over to Main and found Powered Up in a mostly vacant plaza across the street from the Walmart, hoping he’d actually be there.
He was. I recognized him from his mug shot on the sex-offender registry and spotted him from the street as he wrestled what appeared to be a miniature organ out of the trunk of an ancient Bonneville and into the open door of the shop. A well-dressed, elderly lady nodded approvingly after him and then got into the car and drove away. That left the lot empty. I pulled into a parking spot and a few seconds later, Michael Timton came back out. He was big and angry-looking, wearing one of those back braces that professional movers use. His forearms were covered with tattoos, some crude and improvised. He looked like the type of person to own a camo jacket, but he didn’t have any facial piercings.
“Can I help you,” he said, like he had no interest in doing so at all.
I got out of the car. “Hi, Michael,” I said.
He just looked at me.
“My name is Roxane Weary. I’m a private investigator and I was hoping to ask you a few questions”—here his features screwed up into an expression of pure hatred—“about someone you went to high school with.” Then his face relaxed into confusion. “In Belmont.”
“What?” he said.
“Do you have a few minutes to talk?”
“I don’t—high school? Seriously?”
“Seriously,” I said.
He folded his arms over his chest. “Who?”
“A classmate of yours, Mallory Evans. She was murdered your senior year.”
“Seriously?” he said again. “Why?”
“Did you know her?”
“No. I have to go back to work.”
“You didn’t know her at all?”
Michael scowled at me. I opened my wallet and teased up the corner of a twenty dollar bill. He cocked his head at it. I pulled out forty bucks and held it nonchalantly in my hand.
“I didn’t really know her, no,” he said. He released the scowl and went back to looking confused. “I knew who she was, but we weren’t in the same circles. I was a jock, she was, like, a druggie.”
I didn’t say anything about the woman who had pointed me here. It seemed like Michael Timton had fallen on trouble of his own design no matter which way you sliced it. “The police questioned you after she was murdered, didn’t they?”
“Yeah.”
“Why? If you didn’t know her?”
“You’d have to ask them.”
“I’m asking you.”
He scowled again. He appeared to have two modes: irritated and puzzled. “There was this girl,” he said, “she claimed I forced her to suck my dick at a party. Pressed these bullshit charges and everything. And then I was like on a list or something. A list of guys the police bothered any time some bitch claimed she saw someone looking at her funny.”
Thoroughly charmed by him, I said, “So what did the police want to know?”
“Where I was and shit. The night she was last seen.”
“And where were you?”
“I wasn’t even in town. I was in Virginia with my family for my grandpa’s funeral.”
I let out a sigh. That seemed like a pretty solid reason for his name to be crossed out in my father’s notes. “And that was the end of it?”
“Yeah.” He held out his hand. “Give me my money.”
I didn’t feel like I’d gotten forty bucks’ worth of information out of him. “What about Brad Stockton,” I said, “did you know him?”
“Brad?” He almost smiled. “That dude. Yeah. You know he’s on death row.”
“He is.”
“Why are you asking about him?”
“I heard he got questioned about Mallory Evans too,” I said. “Was he like you, always getting bothered by the police?”
“I didn’t know him too well. But yeah, he was in trouble a lot. I know he got suspended, because of some poem.”
“A poem?”
“He was always writing these dumb poems in his notebook. He wrote one about this substitute teacher we had, about how much he wanted to fuck her. It got around and he got in big trouble for it, and then he sliced up her car or something.” He looked smug, like this was an act he’d never stoop to. “She never came back after that.”
I didn’t like the sound of this at all. The car vandalism was bad enough, but I had been thinking it was over something like a bad grade, not a sexually explicit poem. “Imagine that.”
“Look, I can’t just stand out here, lady,” he said. “Can I have my money?”
I held out the bills, feeling defeated.