“What was happening with the boys during all this time?” Baldwin asked.

“They were sicker than ever. I remember my mama went over and took care of Edward and Ewan one time, right before Edward passed. They’d gotten pneumonia, and Betty was locked up. The school called my pops. We didn’t have much in the way of social services back then, it was all church oriented, the kindness of neighbors and the like. They didn’t have any more money for the hospital, so Betty sold the barbecue place and ran through that money like water on all the medical expenses. My mama took care of them, was able to nurse Ewan back to health. Edward died about a week into it, the docs said his body was just too damaged to handle the bug. He’d gone too long without proper treatment. Tore my mama up. I remember her crying her head off the night he died.”

“Is there any chance Ewan could be responsible for his brother’s death?”

“Edward? No, not unless he infected him with the bug in the first place. He had fluid in his lungs at autopsy like he’d drowned.”

Baldwin raised an eyebrow, and the chief shook his head.

“I really don’t think that was the case. My mama was there for the whole thing, she’d have noticed something wrong. They were both too weak to move.”

“Okay then. Please, carry on.”

“Mama told me that all three of the boys were just covered in healing scars from all the surgeries. Crisscrossed all over their stomachs like fishing net. When Edward died, the youngest boy, Errol, he was real thin, like anorexic thin. Weighed no more than eighty pounds, the doc said. They stashed him in a psychiatric hospital for a spell while he recovered. Probably the only thing that saved him, at least for the time being.

“Anyway, Betty went crazy when she heard about Edward. They let her go to the funeral, but she still had a couple of months left on her sentence. She was in shackles, and poor Roger, he just looked all embarrassed. He blamed her, of course, they got into a huge shouting match, had to be separated. It was a big mess.

“When Betty finally got out of jail, she didn’t hesitate. She headed up to Atlanta in a fine rage and found Roger leaving the stadium after batting practice. This was right before the end of the season. Shot him pointblank. Man didn’t have a chance. Betty ran, and no one could identify her at first. Took some fine police work from the Atlanta cops. They found a videotape that had her on it two minutes after the shooting, running away from the stadium. Found her in some fleabag motel on the outskirts of town. She still had the gun, so they hauled her ass to jail. It was for good this time. The trial lasted only a couple of days, it was a cut-and-dried case. They thought about seeking the death penalty, but the district attorney up there in Atlanta, he settled for life in prison. I think he knew that it could be overturned if there was a second trial, she was obviously such a disturbed woman. The judge agreed, and she got sentenced to something like one hundred years. They sent her to the Metro State Prison in Atlanta—that’s where they handle the long-term psychiatric cases—and that’s the last we all heard of Miss Betty.”

Morgan dipped a handful of fries in ketchup and devoured them. Taylor patiently waited for him to finish chewing. After a few moments, she asked, “What happened to Ewan and Errol?”

Morgan didn’t answer right away. He bent his head hard to the right, then the left. He grunted softly, seeming to enjoy the loud pops that accompanied the violent motion. His chiropractic feat accomplished, he took a toothpick out of his front pocket and wedged it between his lips.

“Well, the boys were stuck back here in Forest City. Ewan was fourteen when his mama went away. Errol had been released by the hospital, his weight was back in a safe range, but he was still so little. Without Edward to watch out for them, they were deemed too young to be left alone. He and Errol became wards of the state. Errol was always a delicate kid, he didn’t last more than a year. Killed himself. The group home they were living in was a sad place, full of unwanted or unwilling children. The home’s administrator found Errol hanging from a rod in his closet, he’d been dead for over a day and no one had missed him.”

“Poor kid. The shame of his family’s demise was too much for him. You see that a lot in Munchausen cases, the survivors are unable to cope,” Baldwin said. “Unless Ewan had a hand in it.”

“Now that one I couldn’t tell you. Kid was horribly depressed, it wasn’t a huge shock. Though why kill Errol? Or Edward, if that was the case?”

“We’re pretty sure he got his start very young, tried his hand at hurting people when he was still a teenager. The death of a sibling at his hand would fit the profile.”

“Ah. I get it,” Morgan replied. “Well, there’s more, might answer your questions. So now we’re left with Ewan. On the surface, he seemed like a good kid. He was smart, especially with computers. He went to school every day. Stayed out of trouble. But something was wrong with him, broken. Like he was just waiting, kind of like a snake does when it’s about to have dinner. I use to have a boa constrictor. Thing was a tease. It would watch the mouse dance around, let it crawl all over him, and just when the mouse thought it was safe, that’s when the snake would attack. Same with Ewan Copeland. He was just biding his time. Fooling all of us.

“When he was sixteen, he raped one of the girls in the group home. Not your garden-variety date rape, either, he cut her up. Slashed her stomach with a knife. That got him sent to juvie. They kicked him out when he was eighteen. He disappeared from here, and no one has heard hide nor hair of him since.”

“Until now.” Taylor pushed her plate away. It was a sad story, but she felt no true sorrow for the man who’d morphed into the thing that haunted her.

“A rape that violent definitely fits. And that’s the only one on record?” Baldwin asked.

The chief handed over a file folder. “Yep. This is what I could get of his record under such short notice.”

Taylor took the file, flipped it open and set it between her and Baldwin on the table. The file was thin, but there was a picture. She detached it from the two-hole punch, angled it to get the best light from the window. A young man, with brown hair, blue eyes, a thin chin. He didn’t look like anyone she’d ever seen. She tried to age-progress him in her mind, fill out the cheeks, add some facial hair. She couldn’t envision him properly; they’d have to do it for real on the computers. He certainly didn’t look like the man she’d seen in the Nashville bar Control a year before. He looked nothing like the composite sketch they’d put together, either.

She tamped down the disappointment. Just because they had a name and a backstory, that didn’t mean it was all going to fall into place. That would make this too easy. Nothing with the Pretender was ever easy.

“What about Betty? I’d like to talk to her, if that’s possible,” Baldwin asked.

“Nope. She’s dead.”

“Man, our timing is impeccable. That’s too bad. What happened to her?”

“The cancer got her. Breast, like her mama. She died six months ago. They sent us a notice for the paper.”

The story had taken almost an hour to tell, the sky was just starting to dim. Early sunsets in the mountains during winter. Taylor was anxious to get moving, to see some of the town, to get a sense of what, and where, the Pretender, no, scratch that, Ewan Copeland had come from.

Baldwin sensed her desire.

“Chief, I can’t thank you enough for going through all of this with us. I think we’re going to ride around a bit before we crash for the night.”

“Of course. If there’s anything else I can do, just shout. I’ll be around all night. You can hang on to that file, it’s a copy. I got this. You get hungry again, you might try the barbecue place ’bout a mile down this road. It’s new.” He pointed to his right.