The Monsters We Make by Kali White

Author:Kali White
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: CROOKED LANE BOOKS

CHAPTER 16

Two months, two weeks, fourteen hours missing

Another Friday evening, and Dale sat in the Southridge Mall food court alone, waiting.

Not for a meeting with Bud Stewart, but for a sighting of Sebastian Kovacs.

He sat at a table next to the carousel, where he could watch one of the main entrances, and sipped a cup of cold coffee. He’d been there for hours, but it wasn’t like he had anywhere else to be.

Dale was halfway through a thirty-day unpaid suspension from the force—his punishment for the incident at the library after the branch manager called the station and reported it—and had been barred from doing any official work on the Stewart case until he was reinstated in mid-November. He’d already been on thin ice with the earlier probation. If he didn’t get it together, he could lose his promotion or even be fired.

The fallout from the library incident hadn’t been restricted to his job, though. When Connie found out what had happened, she’d snapped and told him to leave the house, find somewhere else to sleep. She didn’t care where, just not in their house. He was out of control again, and this time he’d traumatized their son.

Dale had moved into a cheap motel by the airport the next day, and Connie said he couldn’t see Curtis until he got himself straightened out. There was no end in sight to his exile.

So, he spent all of his time surveilling Kovacs, unofficially, until his suspension was up.

In the last two weeks, Dale had followed Kovacs to his tutoring jobs, the library, the grocery store, the bank. He sat in his car watching Kovacs’s house, sometimes for hours at a time. He could picture every inch of the exterior. Every roof shingle, every gutter, every window outline, every shrub. He’d learned intimate details of Kovacs’s life. He tutored students in their homes every Monday through Friday between three and five PM, though it appeared he was no longer tutoring Sammy Cox, something Dale would look further into. On Saturdays, Kovacs gave piano lessons in his house starting at nine AM and ending at three PM. He still walked to South Town Park every morning at sunrise with his binoculars and black backpack, but changed his route daily. Yet no matter which route he took, he ended up deep in the park where Dale would inevitably lose him.

However, Dale had trailed Kovacs to Southridge Mall two Friday evenings in a row, where he’d observed him make a number of perplexing purchases. A pair of designer Calvin Klein blue jeans from County Seat. A half-dozen cassette tapes from Sam Goody. A pair of Nike sneakers from Foot Locker. A Walkman from Radio Shack.

Gifts, from what Dale could tell, that would appeal to prepubescent boys.

After two and a half hours of waiting, it was clear Kovacs wasn’t coming this week. Dale dumped his coffee in the trash and started walking. He hated the mall, but he couldn’t bear to go back to his depressing motel room that smelled like greasy takeout.

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