Brethren Shawn Ryan

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"Have you heard anything?" she asked in an excited voice. "Do you know where
Matt is? Is he all right?"
"Would you two care to sit?" Jason asked.
Mrs. Greene stood there trembling, her face going flat with the implications of
Jason's question. She stared into his eyes and they told her what she was terrified
of knowing. With a stifled cry, she collapsed on the floor in a heap.
Her husband ran to her and rolled her onto her back. He looked at Jason, silently
asking the question he couldn't put into words. Jason gave a small, somber nod.
Greene picked up an ashtray and flung it into the nearest wall, where it shattered,
ripping a chunk out of the Sheetrock.
For five minutes, Greene ran around the house in a blind panic. He ignored his
wife, leaving Badger to pick her up and lay her on the couch while Jason soaked
some towels in cold water and laid them on her forehead. Greene, meanwhile,
kept running into his son's room, only to emerge seconds later, gasping for air.
When he wasn't doing that, he was screaming at Jason and Badger, threatening to
sue, have their jobs and kick their asses. Finally he fell into his recliner and
began crying.
By the time Mrs. Greene revived several minutes later, her husband was calm
and going into shock. She also was having trouble grasping the situation, but
between them they managed to mumble answers to a few questions.
Matt was at Little League practice from five until seven the evening before, they
said. He practiced every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, with games on
Saturday mornings. The ball field was only about half a mile away and Matt
always walked to and from practice. All he had to do was cut through a section
of woods behind the house and he was at the field within five minutes. Since it
still was light at seven, his parents didn't worry about him walking home. And
there usually were a couple of kids who lived in the same neighborhood walking
with him.
Phone calls to friends, the team's coach, and a handful of others led to nothing,
so at eight o'clock Rick Greene went looking. It was growing dark by then and
he took a flashlight, cutting down the path in the woods that led to the ball field.
He didn't find anything and when he returned home, he began calling the police
every hour. He was told as the Bentons had been that children weren't
considered missing until twenty-four hours went by.
"There'd already been one murder," Greene said. "Why weren't you taking
missing children more seriously?"
Badger and Jason remained silent. They had no explanation.
Greene stared at the floor and shook his head from side to side. "I don't
understand," he mumbled. "I just don't understand."
"Mr. and Mrs. Greene," Jason said, "I have one final question and then we'll be
through. Did Matthew have a stuffed frog, a toy frog that he carried with him?"
"No," Mrs. Greene said. "He threw away all his stuffed animals a couple of years
ago. He was afraid other boys would come into his room and think he was a
sissy. Besides, he never had a stuffed frog at all."
Badger glanced at Jason, his eyebrows raised.
The questioning over, Badger called forensics to examine the Greene's house and
the path to the ball field. Then he phoned a squad car to take the Greenes to
identify the body. Jason couldn't help but imagine how it would be to identify
your little boy by looking at his severed head. He stopped thinking along those
lines. It made him ill.
He and Badger wandered out to the backyard, looking for the trail that cut
through the woods. It was easy to spot, a gap in the azaleas at the corner of the
yard. The gap opened onto a foot-wide trail that angled off between the trees.
The woods, mostly a set of Southern pines and dogwoods, were hardly dense or
impenetrable. From where they stood, Jason and Badger could see at least two
hundred feet into the trees and could hear the roar of lawn mowers coming from
the ball field.
Forensics arrived within twenty minutes. One team took the house while another
fanned out along the trail. About three hundred feet into the woods, one of the
technicians almost tripped over a baseball glove lying beside a dogwood. A few
feet away, a Louisville Slugger baseball bat, the Dale Murphy model, was
partially obscured by a pile of leaves. Ten yards farther was a spot in the
undergrowth where a struggle obviously took place. Leaves were scattered about
and patches of bare ground showed through. Nearer the trail, a small pool of
blood was found on some leaves.
While forensics was making its discoveries, Jason and Badger were at the ball
field, questioning the maintenance workers who were getting the diamonds ready
for the night's games. None of them had been there yesterday afternoon; they had
been at the complex in Mountain Park.
Jason and Badger drove back to headquarters and started making phone calls.
The first was to the Little League's main office to get a list of the boys on Matt's [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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