Free Blue Molly (Danny Logan Mystery #5) by M.D. Grayson Page B

up again this afternoon and now a quiet but steady drumming of raindrops struck the sliding glass door that led to our patio. The lights from the restaurants around Chandler’s Cove were nearly obscured.
    I was kicked back on the sofa with my guitar tuned DADGAD and working on a particularly difficult passage in a Juber song when my phone beeped, informing me I had a new e-mail from Dwayne. Rather than try to read it on my phone’s tiny screen, I walked over to the table and opened it up on my laptop. There was a file attached titled “Enrico Maroni” and a note from Dwayne on the cover that said:
Danny—
    You were right. Enrico Maroni is a scumbag. File attached.
    Pavel Laskin is worse. Let’s meet in my office, Monday 0800.
    —Dwayne
    That’s Dwayne’s way of getting right to the point. I opened the PDF file on Maroni and spent the next few minutes reading through it.
    When I was all done, I read it again, then I leaned back in my chair and closed my eyes and took a deep breath.
    Basically, Dwayne was right—Maroni really
was
a scumbag. And it turns out that he’d undersold things a bit when he’d told Toni he’d just gotten out of jail. The fact was, he’d just gotten out of prison in Monroe. He’d been arrested three times before, including once when he was eighteen when he’d been caught masturbating as he peeked through an open window in the girls’ locker room at his own high school. He was sentenced to two years’ probation and mandatory counseling, which he completed. Toni sure as hell didn’t know about this, or I’m pretty sure she’d never have saved his ass in the parking lot.
    A year later, he was arrested for burglary, but the charges were dropped when the DA failed to assemble the case on time.
    Then, in late 2009, he’d been caught living with a runaway girl who was just fifteen years old. He was twenty-four by then, and the state of Washington takes a dim view of an adult engaged in a sexual relationship with a minor below the age of consent (sixteen in Washington). In this case, it led to a conviction of child molestation in the third degree, which, by virtue of his prior conviction, earned Maroni an eight-year sentence. He’d served four of ’em at Monroe and had been paroled last month with four more years to go. In addition to all his other problems, the guy was now a registered sex offender.
    I leaned back in my chair, took a deep breath, and thought about what I’d just read. In my experience, sex offenders are hard to read and, at least at the early stage, hard to predict. Some of them are totally nonviolent. Sad? Yes. Pathetic? Most likely. But cruel and violent? Usually not. But there are exceptions. Some of the most vicious, sadistic, bloodthirsty monsters ever known started out with some sort of sexual deviancy that, given the “right” personality and circumstances, just blossomed into murdering lunacy. Bundy, Gacy, Ridgway, Richard Ramirez—all these guys were sexual deviants who eventually morphed into the most infamous killers we’ve ever known.
    So where did Maroni fall on this spectrum? That was the question. I studied his file. If I put my hard-nosed, analytical hat on and decided to throw down some odds, I had to say that statistically, he almost certainly wasn’t in the Bundy category for the simple reason that not many are, thank God. But that was small comfort because when it involved Toni, I didn’t have the luxury of viewing Maroni as a statistic, a sort of data point falling somewhere on the sexual deviancy probability scale. This was personal. I mean, given the guy’s relationship with my girlfriend—the person I loved most in the whole world—he didn’t need to be anywhere near as bad as Bundy to get my attention.
    Almost on cue, my phone rang. Toni, sounding a little inebriated, was calling to tell me she needed to spend the night at her mom’s. I could hear loud music in the background and both her mom and her sister laughing.
    “Have you guys