Mortal Sin (22 page)

Unfortunately, with Cody looking into Prenter’s death, it might be too late.

In the back of her mind, Lucy knew that if not her, someone else at WCF would have worked on Prenter. WCF had dozens of volunteers, but only a handful of paid staff. Fran ran background checks on everyone. Some of the volunteers had tragedy in their own lives; others were retired law enforcement; others were active in public safety and used their free time to help. All had to pass a security check, but they weren’t foolproof.

Lucy couldn’t tell Fran unless she was certain. It would devastate the director to think that her organization had been used to kill a rapist. Their donors, their funding would dry up. All the good work they’d done in the past would be scrutinized. The active cops associated with them could be in jeopardy. Like Cody.

The people Lucy worked with didn’t kill predators, they put them in prison. It sickened her to think that their work might be tainted because one person wanted Prenter dead.

When Lucy arrived home, she smelled the roses before she saw the bouquet on the table next to the stairs. Red roses in a clear glass vase. She saw the card on the table next to it with her name. On the notepad next to the phone, Kate had scrawled, “These were delivered as I was leaving. Gorgeous! I want the scoop when I get home.”

The tension from her contemplative Metro ride and walk home began to fade. She opened the card.

He hadn’t signed it, just added a scrawl of something illegible. She smiled and smelled the flowers. Roses had never been her favorite, but today they were. Sean had quickly become important to her. She’d liked him when Patrick first introduced them but thought Sean wasn’t at all serious. His car, his plane, his computer toys—he seemed to be all about his stuff. But the last few days spending time with him, getting to know him better, kissing him … she felt a peace and comfort she hadn’t felt for a long time, and a deep attraction that surprised her. Sean might appear frivolous on the surface, but Lucy saw a depth of character and raw intelligence that was as captivating as his Irish charm and good looks.

She reluctantly put the card down. She hadn’t ditched
work to sit around, but needed to find out exactly what had happened to Brad Prenter.

His killer knew how WCF tracked paroled sex offenders and sent them back to prison to complete their original sentence. Did someone in WCF have a vendetta against Prenter?

The most logical explanation was that one of his victims had gone after him.

Lucy went to her room and logged onto her computer. She could access WCF files from home, though she rarely did. She pulled down Prenter’s criminal records, though she knew them by heart, just to reread and make sure she hadn’t missed anything.

He’d been convicted of raping Sara Tyson. Two other women came forward to testify against him, and Lucy didn’t know why they hadn’t filed charges. Lack of evidence? The judge had allowed the testimony, but as Lucy reviewed the transcripts she realized that their testimony had been limited. They spoke only to facts that could be corroborated by a witness—both of them had appeared intoxicated at a public place and Prenter had taken them home. Prenter never denied having sex with them, but said it was consensual. They had likely been drugged—hence the appearance of drunkenness—but there was no proof; however, it looked bad to the jury that Prenter on two occasions had taken advantage of a drunk college student. Coupled with the proof that he’d drugged Sara Tyson, the jury had convicted him.

Lucy further researched Sara and the other two women. All had graduated from college. None of them lived within a hundred-mile radius. One was engaged to be married, and Sara attended law school in Texas.

Not in Prenter’s file, but in Lucy’s personal notes, was
the information about his high school girlfriend in Rhode Island.

Evelyn Oldenburg had come home late on Saturday night from a house party. Her parents were asleep and didn’t hear her come in, but her younger brother said he’d heard the garage door close at 1:40, over an hour past her curfew. He didn’t want to get her in trouble, so he didn’t say anything. The next morning, her mother went to wake her and Evelyn was unresponsive. The girl had vomited on the floor next to her bed, indicating that she’d likely been conscious when she came home. The parents and paramedics believed it was alcohol poisoning, and her best friend, Sheila, tearfully confirmed that she’d driven Evelyn home in Evelyn’s car, then Sheila had walked to her own house.

It was what happened between 11:45 and one a.m.—when Sheila couldn’t find Evelyn—that was suspicious. No one, not even the police or hospital staff, had thought that Evelyn had anything but alcohol poisoning. Drug tests came back inconclusive. Further tests confirmed that she had ingested an unknown anabolic steroid—similar but not identical to GHB.

Evelyn had no signs of violent rape but did have signs of recent sexual intercourse. No DNA had been found on her person, but the rapist could have worn a condom. In addition, Sheila had found Evelyn naked in a backyard hot tub. The water and heat easily could have destroyed evidence.

Prenter had been at the party, and Sheila gave a statement that he’d been with Evelyn the entire night—until they disappeared at 11:45. He was nowhere to be found when Evelyn turned up in the hot tub. Other witnesses corroborated the fact. He said they’d had consensual
sex, and Evelyn’s own diary confirmed that she was considering having sex with Prenter. But he said he left at midnight.

While the police suspected Prenter of drugging her, they had no evidence, and Prenter graduated from high school and went off to college.

Homemade Liquid X coupled with alcohol most likely sent Evelyn’s system into shock, but it couldn’t be proven. She slipped into a coma, where she remains today—eight years later.

Lucy did a deep search of Evelyn’s family. Her brother, Kyle, was a freshman in college on the West Coast. Her parents still lived in Providence, and Evelyn was living in hospice care. Her father was a bank manager, her mother a teacher. They lived modestly. The mom had a Facebook page, and Lucy read the archives, heartbroken and uplifted at the same time. Most of the time, Mrs. Oldenburg was positive, but last year on Evelyn’s twenty-fifth birthday she’d written:

Lucy didn’t notice the tears running down her face until they dropped onto her desk. She felt the mother’s pain. Her brother Patrick had been in a coma for nearly two years, all because of an explosion that Adam Scott had rigged. He’d been alert after the explosion, but pressure on his brain had necessitated emergency surgery, and he hadn’t woken up for twenty-two months.

She wiped away the tears, furious with Brad Prenter
and angry with Evelyn’s peers who hadn’t told the complete truth.
Someone
knew what happened at the party. If Brad Prenter was innocent of drugging her, he’d still slept with a girl who was obviously intoxicated and unable to give informed consent.

She couldn’t see the Oldenburgs going after Prenter using such an elaborate ruse as WCF’s parolee project, but she certainly understood how ordinary people could kill.

She pulled the binder where she kept every sheet on every predator she’d worked on at WCF. Not all of them were part of the parolee project—some were predators luring kids on the Internet whom she’d identified and referred to law enforcement for investigation and prosecution. But the bulk of her work was on the parolee project.

There were twenty-seven special cases in which she chatted with paroled sex offenders. They’d been identified through a variety of means, but most were creatures of habit and walked in the same cyber-circles. Once a sex offender’s preferences were identified, he rarely deviated from his preferred victim type. Lucy’s computer program helped identify those types and where on the Internet the predator was most likely to lurk. WCF monitored numerous message boards and chat rooms looking for keywords and phrases. If someone sparked the interest of WCF staff or volunteers, they’d track the screen name and, if possible, the email. They’d compare that data with known parolees, and if there was a match, that sex offender was targeted.

Most of these guys had already broken their parole by returning to chat rooms, but most judges would not put
them back in prison for that. Overcrowding and cost controls in the criminal justice system were a huge problem, and law enforcement didn’t have the time or manpower to follow up on every paroled sex offender who logged into a chat room. WCF selected only high-risk repeat offenders, sexual predators who should never have been let out of prison.

Of the twenty-seven Lucy had worked on, nine hadn’t taken the bait. Predators were notoriously good at sniffing out police activity. Seventeen were arrested and returned to prison. There was no trial, since they were all in violation of their parole. And when it came to sexual predators, most judges simply revoked their parole when they crossed the line. However, two parolees had a judge who felt the violation wasn’t severe enough to warrant reincarceration. They were still on the streets.

Frustrated that she didn’t have an answer, and not wanting to go to Fran without something tangible, Lucy wondered whether there was another connection to Prenter. Perhaps he’d pissed off someone in prison. But she needed greater access to information.

Her sister-in-law wasn’t home, which was good because Lucy needed to use her computer.

Kate had access to public and prison records through her FBI credentials, and Lucy knew her password. Whether Kate knew she had access or not, Lucy didn’t know, but Kate probably never thought she would use it. Lucy could legally obtain the information she needed on her own, but it would take time to jump through the hoops and fill out the request forms, and time was not on her side. Not when Cody Lorenzo thought she had been party to murder.

One by one, Lucy went through the names on her list and using Kate’s access to federal records, wrote down which prison they had been incarcerated in and the year they would be released, who their cell mates were, if any, and any problems they’d had in prison. When she had all the information, she’d cross-reference it to Prenter, his victims, and WCF employees and volunteers and see if there was a connection that wasn’t obvious.

There was nothing that seemed unusual. Next, she used Lexis-Nexis to search newspaper archives, wondering if the parolees who had been no-shows had gone to a state prison or a county jail on unrelated charges.

Lucy checked each name.

Tobias Janeson was dead. Murdered in Raleigh, North Carolina.

She felt the blood drain from her face. One by one she looked up each of the nine parolees.

It didn’t take Lucy long to learn that seven of the nine men she thought hadn’t shown up for their “date” were, in fact, dead.

And each had been killed the night Lucy had set them up to be arrested.

Lucy hugged Sean tightly as soon as he arrived. He’d either run or sped the six blocks, because it took him less than five minutes.

“What has you so panicked?” Sean asked quietly, though his eyes were deadly serious.

“I need to lay it all out for you,” she said and led him to the dining table, “otherwise you won’t believe me.”

“Of course I’ll believe you.”

Last week it was two FBI agents shaking her foundation, but she’d gotten through it. Now? It was far worse. She reached for Sean’s hand.

“Lucy, tell me.”

“I’ve volunteered with WCF for nearly three years,” she began. “We’ve had so much success—taking hundreds of predators off the Internet and putting them in prison.” Lucy realized she was stalling—at the fundraiser the other night, if Sean hadn’t already known this, he would have picked up the basics then.

“And. Well.” She drank half a water bottle. “Another WCF project focuses on high-risk repeat offenders on parole. We know that fifty to eighty percent—depending on which study—of sex offenders who target children or teens and are paroled will be arrested for a like crime within three years. Those are the ones who are caught.
We find them in chat rooms popular with their target victim, and wait for them to contact one of us. We create a profile that fits their preferences, and it rarely takes longer than three months to identify and locate them. Most of these guys, by virtue of talking online with a minor, have already violated parole, but because of overcrowding, we usually need more than that to put them back in prison. We need them to try and meet up with a potential victim.

“I was involved in twenty-seven of these cases,” she said. Then added, “Twenty-eight. Brad Prenter was the latest parolee we targeted. He had a strict parole—no alcohol, mandatory AA meetings, for example—and was easier to put in a situation where he’d break parole. I chatted him up in a popular college chat room. He made a move immediately; I drew it out until the time was right. Then I set it up for last Thursday at the Firehouse Bar & Grill in Fairfax.

“Cody Lorenzo takes many of these cases when he’s off duty. But Prenter didn’t show Thursday night. He was killed in a robbery outside a different club.” She slid over a copy of the autopsy report to Sean. “I pulled the autopsy report. Look at those entrance wounds. Three in the abdomen, one in the back of the head. Then I found out that Prenter’s online account was deleted. Wiped. Gone. I couldn’t get it back. Cody found out from the bartender that Prenter was meeting someone at the club that he’d met online, and then he found an email in the police investigation files that came from my alias ‘Tanya’ sending Prenter to the other bar. He thought I had written it.” She hesitated, then added, “On purpose. To kill Prenter.”

Her bottom lip quivered, but she bit it to control her emotions.

Sean said, “Sit down.”

“I can’t—”

Sean grabbed her hand and pulled her into the seat next to him. “Why would your ex-boyfriend think you had done something like this?”