The Scent of Wrath by Greta Boris

Author:Greta Boris [Boris, Greta]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: FawkesPress
Published: 2017-11-06T05:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

ON MONDAY NIGHT, Olivia, Mike, and Sarah sat in Sarah’s gray-blue dining room with mugs of coffee in front of them while Brian watched television in the living room.

“This isn’t Proctor’s first rodeo,” Mike said. “I called the people whose names you gave me, the judge...” He shuffled through some papers.

“Drew Reynolds.” Sarah supplied the name.

“Right, and the Anderson woman. Once they heard I was working privately, not in any official capacity, they admitted he’d sold them photos. They didn’t say what was in the pictures, but my guess is they’re the same as the ones he’s blackmailing you with.”

Sarah’s cheeks flushed. “Did he leave them alone after they gave him money?”

“Yes.” The word came out long and stringy like he’d had to pull it out of himself. “But, Sarah, I think he’s only on round one. Reynolds told me Proctor left a message on his phone a couple of days earlier saying he’d be back in town after he finished up some business in So Cal. Said he was hoping to get together for dinner.”

Sarah digested the news. “What do you suggest we do?”

“Well, it took me a few days to find him, but I also called Greg Forsythe.” Greg Forsythe was the man Olivia had known as Teach.

“Greg never made any money to speak of. Why would Proctor blackmail him?” Sarah said.

“He didn’t. I went on an information gathering tour. Decided to contact as many people from that commune as I could find, which wasn’t easy. Some were dead, some off the grid. But I did talk to Forsythe, and he told me something we might be able to use. Turns out he was browsing an art website looking for prints for his home and saw a picture that looked a heck of a lot like his son Mark when Mark was a kid. The artist’s name was Jeff Proctor.”

Jeff? Olivia had never heard his first name. She’d only known him by Proctor. It seemed wrong. Jeff was too benign, too ordinary.

“So what?” Sarah shrugged. “He was an artist. He was forever snapping photos and then sketching from them. He probably drew everybody at the farm at one time or another.”

“The thing is the boy in the picture was naked. When Greg Forsythe asked his son about it, Mark was shocked. He’d never given Proctor permission to photograph him, sketch him, nada, nothing. In any case, he was too young to consent.”

That didn’t surprise Olivia. She had a vivid memory of sitting by the fire in the great room at the farm reading The Hobbit for the second time, and feeling her skin prickle. There was no reason for it. She was in a pleasant part of the book, no orcs or Black Riders in the chapter, nothing to make goose bumps rise on her arms.

She glanced around the room. No one was there, not seated on any of the other furniture, not by the bookshelves, not in the doorway. She was about to return to her book when she saw him.

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