Lost in the Wild by Leigh Mayberry (i am malala young readers edition txt) 📕

He nodded.

“Now, you know about Christine Tuktu, right? You know about the Amber Alert?”

“Yeah,” he said. Vincent squirmed in the chair. Meghan didn’t think it had to do with his nerves, only that his round bottom overlapped the edges of the plastic molded seat.

“So, you know why you’re here, right?”

“I guess,” he mumbled.

“I don’t care about something that isn’t actively hurting someone. But I warned you before about your little fixation. Some people have a problem with men having women’s undergarments. What I need to know, to cut through all of this, do you have a pair of Christine’s underwear?”

Meghan first learned of Vincent’s interest in ladies’ unmentionables when she investigated the strangulation death of Nancy McCormick. The former tenant in 3E lost her life. Briefly, Vincent showed up on Meghan’s radar because, in the course of routine interviews, she entered Vincent’s apartment. She found a collection of underwear that didn’t belong to him. One pair came from Nancy.

Dealing with Vincent through redirection at the time of the murder investigation worked to a point. The trouble with an obsession, it doesn’t go away. Vincent wasn’t charged with second-degree burglary or had to register as a sex offender because he didn’t collect the items from inside people’s residences. He stole them from the laundry room. No one ever filed a complaint with the police department. If anyone ever found items missing from their laundry baskets in a public use laundry room, they weren’t concerned enough to care.

Meghan saw Vincent look from the camera to the other men in the situation room. As far as she understood, without looking around, they hid their emotions. Vincent brightened with embarrassment.

“We had a discussion a while ago about that, didn’t we?” she asked.

“Yeah,” he whispered.

“You understand that right now, with the cadet finding more items in your apartment, it doesn’t look good, right?”

“Yeah.”

“And you know, and I know that one or more of those items belong to persons under the age of sixteen. You know what that means, right, Vincent?”

“I guess so,” he said.

Meghan rubbed her face. She leaned her elbows on the table. “Do you know if you have a pair of Christine Tuktu’s underwear in your apartment?”

“I don’t know.”

“Okay, this is what’s going to happen. You need to be straight with me. If you say something that gets under my skin, you and I are going to stop talking until after I read you your rights. Do you understand?”

“Yeah. But I don’t know if those belong to Chrissy. I mean, I found them, but I didn’t follow her or her mom around to get them. They were in the laundry on the floor between the washers. I just grabbed them.”

“Is that how you get the other pairs?”

“Well, yeah. Sometimes,” he said. Vincent looked at the floor again. His face looked so red, Meghan thought if she touched it, she’d burn her hands. “There’re online girls, too, you know.”

She nodded. Meghan knew. It wasn’t a crime. It was a thing. Some men paid thousands of dollars for the right pair of panties. Meghan carefully avoided using that word. Men like Vincent, who had a fetish, it was a trigger word. Making money selling underwear through the internet and the mail was a lot safer than a woman selling physical contact. Prostitution was dangerous and unsanitary. Online intimacy kept both consenting adults safe and clean.

“What we’re concerned about right now is locating Christine. When was the last time you saw her?”

Vincent waited a moment to speak again. He considered the timetable.

“I saw her and Cecil in the store on Thursday after three-thirty.”

“How do you know the time?”

“Most of the kids get out and head to the store. The store manager has someone standing in the candy aisle after school. I saw Chrissy and Cecil together. They didn’t look at candy. I think Cecil bought some bread and sandwich meat.”

Meghan waited, letting the information simmer. “I need to know how you are so sure what Cecil got on Thursday. It seems very precise.”

“Well, I was standing at the end of the candy aisle near the cooler doors. Cecil and Chrissy came into the store. They went around the front walkway and came up the dairy cooler side of the store. I saw Cecil with a loaf of bread, and he got cold cuts from the fridge while Chrissy said ‘hi’ to me.”

“So, you talked to her on Thursday afternoon. What time was that?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know, maybe around four.”

Meghan used Vincent’s conversation to verify the time again. He answered without thinking about it. That was a sign he told the truth.

“Do you remember what she was wearing at the time?”

“No, I just remember seeing her and saying, ‘hi,’” Vincent said.

“Do you and Christine talk a lot?”

“No, I see her sometimes hanging out in the stairwell. She likes to draw pictures when she’s alone.”

“You see her drawings?”

He shrugged.

“Some kids like to show off their work. Did she ever give you any of her pictures?”

“No, and she didn’t like showing anyone her pictures.”

“So, you see her in which stairwell?”

“Sometimes the center one,” he said. “Sometimes, I see her in the side stairwell when I get home after work.”

“What time do you get out of work?”

“Depends on if I need to fill the eggs and milk before I go. I usually punch out around nine-thirty or ten. It takes about ten minutes to leave the store and walk up to my apartment.”

“You see Christine alone in the stairwell drawing at ten at night?”

“Yeah.”

“How often?”

“Not too much, I think. Sometimes a week or two goes by before I’d see her again.”

“What does she draw with?” Meghan asked.

“You