David waited impatiently as the visitors settled into leather wingback chairs under the arching timber-frame ceiling of Buck Sawyer’s cabin. A fire crackled in a massive stone fireplace on the far wall of the large main room. The dogs trotted across the wooden floor and curled up on a pair of wool rugs on either side of the mantel, their alert eyes monitoring all movement. Buck went into the adjoining kitchen and prepared four cups of steaming-hot coffee. After delivering the drinks, he tossed a log onto the fire and settled into his chair. “Talk.”
David recapped the story of finding Jaxon on the highway and his tale of escape. When he finished, he paused for a second and locked eyes with Buck. “Now, a falling-down farmhouse with a trailer behind it describes a bunch of different places around here. I can even think of a few sex offenders in the county who live in a place like that. But I can only think of one person who lives in a place like that in Wattsville and who has a history of messing with a little boy.”
Buck grimaced. “Matt McGregor.”
“Yep, his old man, Rick, beat the ever-living crap out of him in front of the high school for touching that kid. Matt got expelled, and his younger brother, Mark, dropped out. I didn’t see much of either one of them for years.”
“Until Mark blew up the house.”
“Exactly.” David turned to Roxanne. “The McGregor clan dates back a long ways in these mountains. Certainly before the Civil War and probably even before the Cherokee were evicted with the Trail of Tears. They struggled as lumberjacks and farmers, but they hit their stride with moonshine. McGregor shine was known as some of the best around, and they made a bunch of it. Except they lost the touch.”
Buck stood and stirred the fire. “When their grandpappy died, the recipe must’ve gone with him, ’cause Rick’s shine was crap, and his kids didn’t do much with it, either. Matt made some small batches from time to time that weren’t bad, but Mark didn’t think there was enough money to be made, not with all the tourist stores selling their version of moonshine. Though how the hell anything legal can possibly be called moonshine escapes me.”
David continued the story, “Mark was the smarter of the brothers, though that isn’t saying much because Matt could barely read and write. Mark figured out how to make meth, and Rick used his old moonshine distribution network to sell it. Great plan right up until Mark screwed up the lab and blew up the house. Killed himself in the process. I was out here the next morning as they pulled his body out of the house.”
Roxanne asked, “Matt wasn’t hurt?”
David shook his head. “Matt was living in a trailer behind the house. Turns out Rick had banned him from the house after the high-school incident. Said he was no longer allowed to live under the same roof.”
“And Rick?”
“Wasn’t home. Maybe he was delivering product. Maybe he was with one of his girlfriends or a hooker—the two boys had different mothers. Anyway, he came driving in the next morning… in a two-tone brown-on-tan van. The same damn van they’ve had for years.”
“Where’s Rick now? He still alive?”
Buck shook his head. “No clue. I haven’t seen or heard anything from either one of them since I moved back here. Rumors bounce around, and people claim to have seen Matt from time to time, but that’s really it. People avoid him.”
Roxanne spread her arms. “Because of the incident with the boy back in high school.”
Buck leaned back in his chair. “Some, but Matt’s always been strange. A nasty mean streak. No one’s ever liked being around him.”
Roxanne counted off the connections on her fingers. “So you have a falling-down farmhouse blown up by a meth lab, a trailer behind the house, and a two-tone van. All things Jaxon’s described. What about the house with a cellar? That’s the thing we need to find.”
David turned back to Buck. “I’m hoping you can fill in the blank, because I don’t know anything about an old house with a stone cellar. Nothing shows on the property records. I could call in a chopper to fly over and tell me if something is there, but I’m hoping you’ll save me the time. We need to get up there.”
Buck stood, leaned on the mantel, and stared into the fire. “His great-grandpappy’s house is back up in those woods. I was up there a few times as a little kid, and it sure sounds like the same place.”
“Stone cellar?”
“Yep. They stored moonshine in there ’cause it was nice and cool. Used to buddy around some with Mark when I was eleven or twelve, and his daddy would make us haul that stuff up and down those steps. I did it because Rick would beat the tar out of me as fast as he would one of his own.”
“The house still there?”
“Don’t know. Haven’t been there since middle school.” He turned to face them. “Look, hanging around Mark was okay, but I didn’t like his daddy. And I sure didn’t like being near Matt, ’cause he was so weird.”
Roxanne leaned forward. “This was before the incident in high school?”
“Yeah.”
“So what made him so weird before that?”
Buck paused and looked into the air. After a few seconds, he said, “The boy was just cruel.”
“Like how?”
He sighed, and his shoulders slumped. “People up here hunt, but it’s for food. No one takes pleasure in killing animals just to kill them. But Matt was different. He would torture the hell out of little animals just to hear ’em scream. I couldn’t stand it. So I stopped hanging around.”
Roxanne and David exchanged knowing glances. What Buck described was classic early-serial-killer behavior. David asked, “Can you draw me a map to the house? I’ve got a SWAT team on standby, but I need to understand how far up in there it is.”
“Sure.” Buck collapsed into his chair and stared at the ceiling. “But you need to know something else about Matt. High school wasn’t the last time he touched a kid.”
David slammed his coffee cup down and leaned forward. “He did it again?”
“Yeah. This was after Mark was killed. I was home on leave when my dad had cancer, so I guess this would be about seventeen years ago. Daddy told me rumors were flying around that Rick was fuming ’cause he had caught Matt again. People were mad and threatening to string him up, but Rick told them not to worry, that he was gonna cure the boy good. Fix him once and for all.”
“Cure him? How?”
Buck could only shrug. “I’m sorry, David, but I don’t know. I was dealing with my daddy dying, not the McGregors.”
David squeezed his hands until his knuckles turned white. “No one thought to report it to the police?”
“That’s not the way things work up here. We handle things ourselves.”
Roxanne piped in. “Doesn’t sound like it got handled at all. No one thought he might do it again? Particularly since he had already done it before?”
Buck’s face grew red. “We screwed up, yeah, but don’t act like we’re the only ones, and don’t go blaming the people up here. The high school didn’t report it way back when the first one happened. And it’s not like the Catholic Church didn’t keep moving pedophile priests around. Or the Boy Scouts didn’t maintain a secret list of banned volunteers but didn’t bother to share it with other youth organizations. Hell, schools all over the country transferred teachers rather than dealing with it. We all keep burying the crap and hope it stays buried. So, yeah, we made the same damn mistake.”
David raised his hands to calm them. “Yeah, and I questioned him ten years ago and let him go. So let’s just fix this today and stop him.”