Safer by Sean Doolittle Read Free Book Online Page A

mind when you returned home from a short trip to the nearest grocery store to find your wife, Sara, struggling with this man?”
    I’d been suckered so easily it was embarrassing. Maya Lamb actually winked.
Your move.
Behind her, the camera guy fine-tuned his lens with one hand and waited to see what I’d do.
    Looking back, I suppose I could have raised hell, or shut the door on them, or done any number of things. On the other hand, any self- respecting third grader could have seen that trick coming. I had my pride to consider.
    The truth was, squinting against the light from the rolling camera now shining in my eyes, I couldn’t find the energy to be angry. It had been a long, not- so- great day, and something about getting outfoxed by a twenty- something local television reporter seemed to give me all the permission I needed to lighten up. I had to hand it to her.
    “It all happened so fast,” I said. “One minute you’re minding your own business, the next you’ve been ambushed in your own home.”
    “I can only imagine,” Maya Lamb said.
    Our story led the local segment on
News Five Clark Falls.
Sara and I watched the broadcast sitting up in bed. At the sight of me in my television debut—a one- eyed raccoon caught in the headlights of an oncoming car—she laughed a little, patted my leg through the covers, and said, “Sorry. I was still pissed at you.”
    “It did occur to me that I should have gone to the meeting.”
    “Then you wouldn’t have gotten to be on TV.”
    We weren’t fighting anymore. By that point we’d learnedwhat made a home invasion in Roger Mallory’s neighborhood a great angle.
    As it turned out, Roger Mallory wasn’t just the president of the Ponca Heights Neighborhood Association. He was also the head of the Safer Places Organization, a citywide coalition of citizen patrols he’d founded himself half a decade ago.
    In her report, Maya Lamb provided the broad strokes. Sara had come home from the meeting with more specific details, most of them supplied by Melody Seward and Trish Firth, whose husbands we’d met the night before, in their neighborhood patrol vests.
    Ten years ago—while Sara and I were still getting to know each other in Boston—Roger Mallory had lived right here in Sycamore Court. He’d had a wife named Clair, a son named Brandon, and the rank of sergeant with the Clark Falls Police Department. One crisp autumn afternoon, a Wednesday in the middle of November, twelve- year- old Brandon Mallory stepped off the school bus at the corner of Belmont, a six- minute walk from home. He never got there.
    When Brandon hadn’t arrived in time for supper, Clair Mallory began making phone calls. By 10 p.m. the following evening, the local authorities—all of them Roger’s colleagues from the police force, many of them close personal friends— had canvassed the area. They’d spoken to Brandon’s friends and their parents. They’d spoken to his teachers at school. They’d spoken with every kid who had ridden Brandon’s bus that day, along with every available resident of the burgeoning Ponca Heights subdivision.
    Within the week, Brandon Mallory’s broad- daylight disappearance had become a statewide news story. Search parties had moved by land and air into the surrounding woods—nearly two thousand acres of state preservation land that, then as now, begins at the backyards of the homes in Sycamore Court and spreads west to the river, north into the bluffs.
    On the first day of the organized search, party membershad found Brandon’s backpack at the base of a towering old pin oak just inside the refuge.
    The backpack, and that was all. Nobody had seen anything. Nobody could help. It was as if Roger and Clair Mallory’s only son had climbed the tree and vanished into the sky.
    The first blizzard of that long cold winter had rolled in on Thanksgiving Day, covering Clark Falls in a foot of snow, effectively shutting down the search effort once and for all.
    Five