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Автор Elle Cosimano
Elle Cosimano
Nearly found
“WHEREVER HE STEPS, whatever he touches, whatever he leaves, even unconsciously, will serve as a silent witness against him. Not only his fingerprints or his footprints, but his hair, the fibers from his clothes, the glass he breaks, the tool mark he leaves, the paint he scratches, the blood or semen he deposits or collects. All of these and more, bear mute witness against him. This is evidence that does not forget. It is not confused by the excitement of the moment. It is not absent because human witnesses are. It is factual evidence. Physical evidence cannot be wrong, it cannot perjure itself, it cannot be wholly absent. Only human failure to find it, study and understand it, can diminish its value. ”
PROLOGUE
TJ WILES SAT BEHIND ME in chemistry class for nine months before I knew he was a killer. If I’d ever bothered to pay attention, I might have known sooner. I could have sensed the bitterness he felt for my father, my family, the rage boiling inside him. Maybe I would have felt what he was becoming, in time to save the people he killed.
But my occasional backward glance wasn’t enough to see him for what he was.
I hadn’t been able to see my father truly either. Once upon a time, he’d been the man who took me to Belle Green Park to play, who held me in his lap and did stupid magic tricks just to make me laugh.
But David Boswell was a thief. A liar and a conman who used his ability to taste emotion—by touching a person’s skin—to prey on his own friends, siphoning their assets to finance his illegal activities, using their clean money to launder his own. Because he could always tell what they were feeling, he was uncannily disarming, easily able to gain their confidence and assuage their fears. He played TJ Wiles’s father like a card, then tossed him aside when the stakes got too high, before disappearing altogether five years ago.
TJ had lived in Belle Green once, in a huge brick house with a manicured lawn as green as the golf course it nestled up to. But after TJ’s father went to prison, TJ’s mother committed suicide and TJ was left to live with his uncle here in Sunny View trailer park. A football scholarship had become his only hope for getting out—the same way the chemistry scholarship had become mine. He’d played hard, like his entire future depended on it, until the day he blew out his knee, and his entire future went with it.
My father hadn’t just hurt TJ and his family. He’d ripped TJ apart, leaving a dark hole inside TJ’s chest where his heart used to be. A space TJ imagined he could only fill by taking from me everything he’d lost. Two months ago, TJ testified that his hatred of my family drove him to kill four of my classmates in an attempt to frame me and exact some kind of twisted retribution against my father. TJ’s victims—kids I’d been tutoring, kids I’d cared about—were gone and they were never coming back. Posie, Teddy, Marcia, and Kylie. They’d still be alive if it hadn’t been for what my father did.
