When he leaves the park, he stops first at a gas station to buy more cigarettes, then a little bar a few miles from his house, called The Joe. He drinks a couple pints while scratching his belly and talking with the other patrons. He’s neither overly animated, nor is he overly talkative. Just someone you could forget. I wonder how others see him. Nice guy. Friendly enough.
Every two days he stops at the large, chain grocery store. He never gets too much, just enough to get him through another couple of days. He needs the routine, I think. He relies on the grocery store, just like he relies on his morning high. It gives him purpose. After that, he settles in at home. I’ve never seen the inside of his two-story, but his meticulous disposing of his cigarette butts, and the folding of cardboard boxes makes me think he takes pleasure in the order of his home. Outside of his personal sanctuary, he is willing to discard his cigarette butts on the floor. If it’s not his, he’s willing to destroy it. You can see the flickering of the television through his drapes. What he watches, I do not know. I have never felt inclined to peek through his curtains to take a look. I’m afraid he’ll see my reflection in the television, or have a sense that someone is watching him and come charging out of the house. That would ruin everything. He eats microwavable meals for dinner: pot roast, turkey and stuffing with a side of macaroni and cheese. I find the boxes in the trash—all folded into little squares two inches long. I buy the same meals at my own chain grocery store and try to fold them like he does. I can’t get them smaller than a notecard. I eat what he eats, I smoke what he smokes, I am him. It’s a far cry from the days I spent spying on Lyndee Anthony.
It’s not until the weather turns wet, the air gathering the chill of winter, that Leroy changes his routine. He stops going to the park. At first I think something has happened—he’s ill, or he’s having car problems. I wait for him at the park around the normal time, until I notice that the monkey bars and swings are empty. This was his summer routine, I realize. The mothers have started their winter playtime hibernation. Where does this leave Leroy? The following day I wait for him near his house, behind a copse of trees where I hide my car. He emerges from his driveway at just before two, and drives to a house in the Queen Anne neighborhood—a restored two-story, painted blue. I am curious to know who lives in the house.
I follow him in my nondescript, black Honda I paid cash for the week before. Having an extra car, one that blends in, is important to my cause. I park at a distance, and we watch the house together.
At around four o’ clock, the time we usually spend at the park, the brown, wavy-haired woman comes walking out the door. She’s toting her two children with her, per usual, all three of them wearing matching North Face raincoats. I am not particularly surprised that he knows where she lives; after all, I’ve been digging through his trash for months now. She loads them into her car, and Leroy and I dutifully follow. It’s like a mother and her psychotic ducklings, I think.
She parks in the mall’s above-ground garage, and leads her children inside as they struggle and pull to get away from her and run ahead. Leroy and I follow her in. He sits outside of JCPenney, watching the indoor playground area, minus his Camels. Instead, he holds a styrofoam cup of coffee, and a newspaper he pilfered from the trash. I take the escalator to the second floor and look down on both of them. How is it that she has never noticed this lingering man, appearing at the spots she frequents with her children?
I have, on numerous occasions, entertained the idea that Leroy is an estranged relative, or ex-husband of the woman. Perhaps these are his children. Perhaps Leroy is a private detective hired by her paranoid husband, paid to keep track of what she does on a day-to-day basis. Can you really be so lost in your own world that you fail to notice how it’s coinciding with that of a sick man? Either way, I’ll be her eyes. I won’t let him hurt her or her children. I’ll hurt him first. There will be no more Nevaeh Anthonys on my watch.
But, she does get hurt, the wavy-haired woman who the news calls Jane Doe. They don’t show her face, instead the camera zooms in on her hands, and I recognize the diamond-studded ring she wears on her thumb. The man who sexually assaulted her is still at large. When I turn on the news and see the story, my whole body begins to shake. This is my fault. I had to work. I should have taken off to watch him more carefully. I sit down and press my hands between my knees to keep them still. The reporter is standing in front of a parking garage at a local mall. I recognize it as the one where Leroy was watching her. The rapist, a man she describes as being in his late thirties, abducted her here in this busy mall parking garage, forcing her into the trunk of her own car, and then driving away. He drove her to a park two hours away, where he brutally assaulted her for hours, and then simply walked away without her ever seeing his face.
I turn off the television. This is my fault. I knew what he was planning to do, and I could have stopped him. How? I ask myself. By telling the police that I was stalking a man who was stalking a woman? Maybe they would have listened to me, sent a cruiser to investigate, but without proof, without the crime, nothing could be done.
I think about a movie I watched with Judah, one in which Tom Cruise is part of a specialized crime unit which prevents crime based on foreknowledge. The discussions that resulted between us were heated. I thought that preventing a crime before it happened was ingenious. Judah insisted that tyranny always came wrapped in someone’s good intention.
“Any of us could do something wrong. Should we be arrested—and possibly executed—based on what we might potentially do? Imagine what that would look like in real life. Would you want to live in that society?”