Bogeyman by Steve Jackson Read Free Book Online Page B

feeling, and speak to a monster like Giles as if he were a friend. He could talk to another cop about “the job,” or he could internalize it, which he knew wasn’t healthy, but it wasn’t something he could share with anyone else. So he bottled it up, tried to file it away in some dark recess, and forget about it.
    The Giles case also taught him that witnesses couldn’t be counted on to tell the truth, not even if it was for their benefit. Whether it was Smiley Johnson protecting her great-grandson, or the young black woman who would rather let her attacker off the hook than admit she was wrong, human beings were motivated by a variety of not necessarily logical factors. He would have to keep that in mind as he went forward with his career.
    Dealing with Michael Giles also strengthened Sweet’s belief that he’d been given a special gift with which to combat evil—a knack for disguising his determination to see justice get served behind a calm, friendly persona that convinced even conscienceless monsters like Giles to relax. The point was reinforced about six months after Giles was sentenced when the teen’s mother called him. She said she’d just talked to her son and he wanted to know when Sweet planned to visit him in prison, as if they were friends or connected by some sort of weird bond. The truth was that behind the façade, Sweet would have liked to have reached across the table and strangled Giles during his confession.
    It was all part of a detective’s learning process. And for Sweet, it would someday seem that his involvement in the Giles case was part of a journey leading to a confrontation with the kind of evil psychopath who would make Giles seem tame by comparison. He hadn’t realized it at the time, but walking into the Garland Police Department murder closet in 1996 had been the first step along that road, and two years later a simple phone call would be another.
    In the summer of 1998, the crimes against persons bureau office was configured as a big open room with the detectives’ desks ringing the walls. When a call from the outside came in to the department receptionist, she would go down the alphabetical list of detectives and pass it to the first detective she got to answer the telephone. Because Sweet was near the end of the list, if he was alone in the office, he’d hear her try one desk, then another, and several more before reaching him.
    On this particular day, Sweet was alone, although not by coincidence as much as habit. Early in his career when he was a school resource officer, he’d started eating lunch at 11 a.m. and then going back to work at 12 o’clock to be with the kids. He’d continued the habit as a detective, eating early and then having the office to himself when the other detectives and supervisors went to lunch at noon. It gave him some quiet time to catch up on work and an extra hour on the computer he shared with another detective.
    However, this time habit crossed paths with fate, as the telephone rang at first one empty desk and then the next, until finally reaching Sweet. When he answered, the woman on the other end of the line identified herself as Tammy Lopez. She said she was calling in regard to the murder of her daughter Roxann.
    It took a moment for Sweet to realize that he was speaking to Roxann Reyes’ mother, who at the time of her daughter’s disappearance had been Tammy Reyes. But once it clicked, there was no need for her to further explain who she was; even if he hadn’t leafed through the files in the murder closet two years earlier, there wasn’t an officer on the Garland police force who didn’t know the case. Roxann was the first child-abduction murder in the city’s history, and it stuck in every Garland cop’s craw that her killer had never been caught. He immediately let the woman know that he was familiar with what happened to her daughter and asked what he could do to help.
    “I heard there was some new information about my