Page 133 of I Will Find You

“My God,” Sarah said. “We need to arrest Mackenzie.”

“Sarah—”

“Are you listening to yourself, Max? You’re being played.”

“The DNA test—”

“—shows he’s not the father. Big whoop. If anything, this hurts his case.”

“How so?” Max asked.

“The wife. The one we just visited. She’s not telling us everything. You can see that, right?”

“Right.”

“It’s pretty simple, Max. She had an affair. Or a boyfriend. Heck, probably with her current husband. Maybe Matthew is his son, that Dreason guy’s, and David Burroughs found that out.”

“So Burroughs killed the little boy?”

“Sure, why not? You think he’s the first cuckold to kill an offspring? But either way—and I need you to listen to this, Max—we have a legal system to remedy these things. A perfect system? No. In your free time, you can go through all the prisons and find innocent people who have been incarcerated and help free them. Do it. I’ll admire it. But don’t break them out of prison, Max. Don’t give them guns. Don’t let them destroy whatever is left of our tattered, flawed system. We need to capture Burroughs. That’s it. He’s an armed and dangerous felon. We need to treat him like one. You got that?”

“I want to know if he did it or not.”

“Then I’m calling this in,” Sarah said.

“What do you mean?”

“I’m getting you removed from this case, Max. You don’t belong on it.”

“You’d do that to me?”

“I love you,” Sarah said. “I also love our oaths and our legal system. You’re not seeing straight.”

Her phone buzzed. She answered it. “Jablonski.”

“Burroughs just broke into a home in Connecticut. He held a woman hostage at gunpoint.”

***

What else could I do?

I couldn’t shoot Irene Longley. I couldn’t tie her up. That all looks good on television, but the practicality of it made no sense. I guess if we had more time, we could have taken her phone and locked her in a closet, but she was trying to get us out of the house fast because her boys would be home and so they’d find her and again did I want to leave this poor woman with any more mental scars, not to mention what finding their mother locked in a closet would do to two young boys?

So we begged her not to call the police. We explained as best we could that we were trying to rescue my son. She nodded, but as I’ve now mentioned several times, she was only doing this to placate me. She wasn’t listening. And so we drove fast and hoped for the best.

What else could we do?

The police would find us. It was only a question of time. We debated changing license plates with a car in a lot again or trying to get Hester Crimstein to send us another vehicle or even just taking an Uber. We concluded that any of that would just slow us down.

In the end, the drive from Irene’s house to the Payne estate would be a little over two hours. The police had no idea where we were going. It was best, Rachel and I decided, to go for it.

We were now at the end game. There was no reason to run anymore.

Rachel has given me the wheel now. I am driving over the speed limit but not fast enough for us to get stopped. It is odd to be driving a car after five years. It isn’t like I forgot or anything. The old line about never forgetting how to ride a bike applies to cars too, I guess. But the experience, after spending the last five years in a cage, is strangely invigorating. I am focused solely on finding my son, on rescuing him, on learning the truth about what happened on that horrible night. That was the only reason I wanted to escape. I didn’t care about freedom for myself. But now that I’m out, now that I am tasting what life used to be like, I can’t help but want to be free. I am not saying it was something I took for granted. It just didn’t matter with Matthew gone.

“I don’t understand this,” Rachel says to me. “Why would Matthew be with Hayden Payne?”

I have some theories, but I don’t want to voice them yet.

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