Page 146 of Long Way Down

Beside him, Kat pulled a pamphlet off the board and replaced its tack. He showed the face of it:Eyes Ahead: The Path To Overcoming All Your Obstacles.

“It sounds so innocent like that,” Pongo said. “How about ‘Eyes Ahead: How to Stop Wanting to Stab People.’”

Kat flicked open the brochure. “It says the leader is someone named Benjamin Crider.”

Pongo snapped a few photos of the pamphlet and fired them off to Dixie.

~*~

The Waxmans lived in a luxury townhouse, one in a row of handsome Victorians with three floors, multiple balconies, and a lovely view of the park in all its autumn colors. The daughter was home, chewing at her fingernails over coffee in the kitchen, while, upstairs, Forensics picked apart Doug’s room.

“Look,” the sister, Cara said, twitchingly uncomfortable and not wanting to make eye contact. “Doug’s always been a little…off. Mom will tell you he’s sweet, and kind, but troubled, and all of that, but my brother’sweird.” She met their eyes, finally, Melissa and then Contreras. “When we were kids, he was constantly biting me, or kicking me, or screaming in my face. He destroyed my toys for no reason. I used to wake up and find him standing over my bed. He was sleepwalking, my parents said, and it scared the hell out of me.” She shuddered and took a sip of coffee. “He didn’t care about anything. He was like a zombie, wouldn’t pay attention in school. And then he’d have these tantrums. Rolling around in the floor, screaming, hitting, biting. They banned us from the playground because he kept attacking other kids.”

“Sounds like a violent kid,” Contreras said. “Did your parents take him to a psychiatrist at any point?”

“Oh, yeah. When he was seven. His teachers said he was disrupting class too much, so they took him to a doctor. Said he had ADHD and put him on some pills. Adderall or Ritalin, or something, I dunno.” She flapped a hand dismissively, as manicured as her mother’s, minus the spots and raised veins in the back. “He took it for a few years, and it made him really quiet…but then we found out he’d been cutting himself, and he talked about wanting to drown in the bathtub, so they took him off of it.”

“Any serious suicide attempts?” Melissa asked.

“No.” She shook her head and frowned. “That’s the thing with Doug. There was never anything really wrong with his life. Mom and Dad have always had money. We have this house, and a house in the Hamptons. We always had all the latest toys. Doug got really into video games, so he had as many as he wanted. We weren’t hungry, no one beat us. No childhood trauma. But he was just…” She shrugged, searching for a word. “Unhappy, all the time. He didn’t ever, you know, torture animals, or actually do anything to seriously harm himself, so I think Mom and Dad just said he was ‘like that’ and didn’t look too deep because they kept hoping it was some sort of stage that he’d grown out of.”

She sipped more coffee. Looked at Melissa, specifically. “Did he really rape those girls?”

“It’s looking likely, yeah.”

Another headshake; she looked a little punch drunk, but, unlike her mother, she didn’t try to defend him. “You’re not going to turn him loose soon, are you?” Her voice took on an edge of fear.

“No,” Contreras said. “He held a knife on a detective, so he’s gonna do some time for that, at the very least.”

She let out a deep, relieved breath. “Okay. That’s good. That’s…” Her gaze sharpened. “For what it’s worth, don’t listen to my mom. She’s gonna tell you how innocent he is, but that’s not true. But Dad’s totally gonna believe that he’s some sort of criminal mastermind. I think he’s always thought that, and he’s just thrown booze at him and pretended he wasn’t high all the time for the sake of peace in the house.

“But they’re both wrong. If you tell me my brother’s a monster, I’ll believe you. But he’s not a mastermind, and he’s not brave. If he raped someone, he had encouragement. Maybe he wanted to hurt someone, but someone else pushed him into actually doing it.”

Doug’s bedroom was down in the finished basement. It was a deep space, comprised of bedroom, bathroom, sitting room, and even a kitchenette. The ceilings were surprisingly high, and the walls painted white. It would have been spacious and welcoming, as far as basements went…if Doug hadn’t lent the place his own personal touch.

The smell hit her halfway down the staircase: a choking fug of weed smoke, BO, and something sickly sweet that might have been spilled liquor or some sort of incense. Liquor, she decided, when she reached the floor and saw the array of bottles on a shelf over by the kitchenette.

One wall of the living area was dominated by a huge entertainment center, complete with stereo equipment, a massive flat-screen TV, and more than one game console, the floor a nest of tangled wires, bean bag chairs, abandoned cups, and clothes in little piles like he’d stepped out of them and never bothered with a laundry hamper.

“Shit,” Contreras said. “I know young guys aren’t known for their housekeeping, butshit.”

The smell was much worse, down here, amid the row of sticky, cloudy glasses lined up on the counter, the Pizza Hut boxes spilling out of the trashcan and onto the floor. He’d played darts on one wall, minus the dartboard, the darts sunk in the sheetrock, a constellation of holes proving he’d played more than once.

Melissa walked over and found that he’d drawn on the walls, too: furious, black Sharpie squiggles, most of which had been scratched out – sometimes with actual scratches, like he’d taken a knife to the paint, others with ink – but some of which revealed detailed pornographic sketches that involved human women and men with wings, and horns, and tails.

Techs moved through the room, toting plastic crates full of evidence bags.

Deming waited for them in the bedroom, as much of a wreck as the living room, unmade bed a wad of sheets she could smell from the doorway, nightstand heaped with plates, glasses, and wads of crumpled paper. “This kid has alotof weed,” the lead technician said, pointing down into a pulled-out drawer with his penlight.

“Anything harder?” Contreras asked.

“We’ve found pills – some in prescription bottles, some loose, so we won’t know what they are until we run them at the lab. Lotta alcohol, and some regular nicotine.” He lifted a bottle of what she thought was the goop that went in a vape pen. “There’s some knives, small ones. We’ll swab them for blood.”

Melissa turned toward the desk, where a computer perched amid more glasses, to-go cups, and empty candy bar wrappers. A brochure lay crumpled on one corner, and she snapped on gloves before she picked it up. Eyes Ahead.

She turned it over and found the name, number, and email address for the group’s organizer: Benjamin Crider.

In her pocket, her phone chimed with a new text.

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