Page 72 of Husband Missing

Alec pocketed his lighter and puffed rapidly, his cigarette burning down to a nub in seconds. He flicked the butt onto the ground with the others. Then his head sank into his hands. Several deep breaths later, he hopped off the picnic table and adjusted the waistband of his jeans.

“The alias she used was Bethany Rounds. I wasn’t having an affair with her. She had explicit photos of my eleven-year-old daughter.”

FORTY-NINE

Josie shouldn’t have been surprised by the depth of Lila’s depravity but standing behind the ramshackle restaurant, staring at the broken father before her, shock rippled over her body, making her skin feel cold and clammy.

Trinity said, “Oh God.”

Alec sighed and put his hands on his hips. “Video games. My kid wasn’t big into them, but she played a couple on her phone. Annoyed the hell out of my wife. I used to see those warnings on the news and on those network shows about people grooming kids using video games. Never gave it a second thought. I mean, how does that even happen? I didn’t realize that pretty much every single one has a chat feature. My wife refused to let Erica join any social media platforms. Neither of us thought to keep an eye on the people she played video games with.”

Trinity said, “You’re saying Lila—through her alias—groomed your daughter using the chat feature in a video game and got her to send explicit photos of herself?”

Alec started pacing in a tight circle, the edges of his boots kicking the cigarette butt pile each time he passed it. “I don’t know if it was Lila specifically. The person Erica was in touch with said he was a teenage boy. We didn’t do a good job ofteaching her how to evaluate people for truthfulness. We didn’t do a good job of teaching her anything, I guess. She…she had a lot of mental health issues and as a result, she often sought attention. I don’t think she understood that some types of attention are extremely bad. Anyway, this kid never sent her a photo of himself, but Erica believed he was a fifteen-year-old boy who lived nearby. He flirted with her. Made her feel special. It escalated. They took things off the game chat and started texting. His instructions were clear—delete every message immediately after sending or receiving so your parents never see anything.”

Josie strongly doubted the fifteen-year-old boy Erica Slater had messaged with was real. Lila might have done the set-up work herself or she might have hired someone else to do it. Regardless, nothing was as it seemed. “What happened?”

“I used to order lunch from this place down the street from the hospital. It was better than the cafeteria food. DoorDash usually delivered it. One day, I opened the bag and in there with my sandwich and chips was a cheap cell phone with a note rubber-banded to it that said, ‘Mr. Slater, check your text messages.’ It was the weirdest damn thing. I thought it was some kind of joke. A prank or something. But I went along with it. No password needed. No icons on the screen other than the factory-installed shit. There was only one contact programmed into it. Bethany Rounds. The messages were from her. Well, not messages. Just photos of my daughter nearly naked in very suggestive poses.”

He squeezed his eyes shut, a full body shudder going through him. “Rounds told me that if I didn’t pay her, she would distribute them on the internet. Every pervert in the world would have access to them. I confronted Erica and she told me she’d sent them to this boy. Confessed the whole story.”

“Why didn’t you go to the police?” asked Trinity.

He laughed bitterly. “I was going to. I went to the restaurant to see if they knew how the phone got into my bag. They didn’t. I tracked down the DoorDash driver. He claimed not to know anything either. I thought maybe I could track Rounds down, get ahead of her, but then she said she’d make it look like I was the one who took the photos. Make me look like some kind of pervert. Erica used the timer on her phone to take the pictures so it looked like another person took them. Anyway, I figured it was better to go to prison for embezzling than for…that.”

“You didn’t think your daughter would back you up?” asked Josie.

“Of course she would but she was terrified. She was…listen…like I told you, Erica always had issues. Major mental health stuff. The truth is that she’s my brother’s kid. He had lifelong addiction issues. I hadn’t seen him since we were in our early twenties. I didn’t even know Erica existed until he showed up on my doorstep with this eight-year-old kid. Her mother had overdosed. He was in the end stages of pancreatic cancer. Asked me to adopt her.”

“Wow,” Trinity said. “That must have been rough. Losing your brother, taking on your niece.”

He stopped pacing, eyes cast down at his boots. “Yeah. It was horrible. My brother passed days after the adoption was finalized. Erica was a mess. Very shut down. Extremely fragile. She didn’t like to talk about her life before we adopted her. Over time, she confided in me. Told me some stuff about her mom, but I know she held back a lot. I don’t think her mom was very good to her but Erica sure did love her. Missed her something awful.”

“That’s terrible,” murmured Trinity.

Alec nodded. “My brother had a good heart, but I can’t imagine he was a stable parent. I was afraid that putting Erica through something like that—having to talk to investigators,maybe even testifying at a trial—would break her. She begged me not to tell anyone. Not to mention, if I did go to the police and Rounds made good on her promise to accuse me, my life would be over. Once you’re accused of something like that, it doesn’t really matter if you’re proven innocent, does it? The stain is there forever. I didn’t want Erica being teased at school for having a pervert dad. School was hard enough for her as it was.”

“What did your wife say?” asked Trinity.

“I didn’t tell her. Erica begged me not to. My wife was always tough on her. She wasn’t thrilled about adopting her in the first place. She and Erica didn’t have a great relationship, and I knew…shit.” He rubbed hard at the back of his neck. “I knew my wife would blame Erica. Punish her. She always thought Erica was some master manipulator, but she was a kid! I mean yeah, she had a lying problem. She always did. We worked with a therapist on that. It was like she couldn’t stop herself, and the thing was that she lied because she’d tell you what she thought you wanted to hear. It was like she thought we wouldn’t love her if she didn’t give the right answers.”

In Josie’s experience, that kind of behavior was often a result of trauma.

“My wife didn’t understand.” Alec used his thumb to rub at the tattoo on his other hand. “Erica wasn’t some Machiavellian supervillain. She was a stupid, scared kid who got screwed over by some piece of garbage, and once she told me the truth, she looked to me to protect her. I promised her I would and that’s what I did. Yeah, my life is shit now and yeah, it was embarrassing for my family when I got caught but as far as I know, the photos never got out.”

“What did Bethany Rounds offer you by way of assurance?” asked Trinity.

Alec stared down at the tattoo, momentarily lost in thought. Josie took a step closer, finally able to see that it was some kind of animal footprint. A long, silent moment passed. From inside the restaurant came the sound of metal scraping against metal. A spatula over a hot grill, if Josie had to guess.

With a sigh, Alec dropped his hands to his sides. “Bethany Rounds gave me the photos on a flash drive which I destroyed—along with the phone she gave me, even though I’d already deleted the pictures. I’m not naive enough to believe those were the only copies but what else could I do? The bottom line is that I never got accused of being a pervert. My daughter finished school, and no one gave a shit that her dad got convicted of embezzling. Hell, I don’t think any of those dumbass kids even knew what the word meant. Since Rounds gave me the burner phone to use, none of the stuff the police seized—my personal devices, phone and email records—implicated her. The investigators hounded me pretty bad about what I did with the money. I told them it was stolen. Gave them some story which they were never able to prove or disprove. One of ’em’s probably still keeping tabs on me to see if I suddenly buy a flashy car or something but I’m paying it back, so there’s not much they can do.”

“You recognized Lila’s photo,” said Josie. “Which means you met her. You could have called the police when she set up the meeting, had them there waiting.”

“Yeah, sure, and risk all hell breaking loose? No fucking way.” Alec balled his hands into fists. “And let me tell you something else. About a week before this bitch set up our little meeting, I got jumped by two guys while I was out for a run. Broke my nose and three of my ribs. They told me it was my reminder not to involve the police and if I did, it wouldn’t be just me who paid the price. They threatened my kid! What would the police do? They don’t offer round-the-clock security. It’s not likewe could have gone into some witness protection program. No one could stop them if they wanted to come after Erica or my wife. No one. That’s the fucking reality.”

Leave it to Lila to wage a war of terror to make sure every loose end was tied up and no one would come after her. Josie had known her to manipulate men into doing all kinds of things for her, but she’d never known Lila to have enforcers before. Then again, given that she was coming into two hundred grand, it wouldn’t have been difficult to pay a couple of guys to rough up Alec Slater.

“Those guys are still out there,” Alec pointed out. “Right before my trial, they came for me again. Had to make sure I wasn’t going to rat anyone out. So I took my punishment. I’m still taking it, but my daughter is safe. After all these years, those assholes should know that I’m not about to start talking now.”

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