Page 74 of Good Half Gone

He blinks in surprise. The apartment is so quiet, I can’t hear any traffic from the city below.

I continue despite the look on his face. “Piper’s killer is in D hall. Jude Fields killed my sister. He was her youth pastor, and I think—no, I know—he took advantage of her. Abused her. And then he killed her, just like he killed his wife and kid. The only difference is they never found Piper.”

I’m too chicken to look at his expression.

“That…wow. Iris, I don’t know what to say.”

He clears his throat, then leans his head back against the sofa like he’s thinking.

“Jude was a youth pastor. I can confirm that at least.”

I’m sweating. I wipe my palms on my pants.

“The summer before Piper went missing, she was spending a lot of time at church. You know—youth group and Bible study and all that. She was really into it. She even started babysitting for the youth pastor, sleeping over at his house. Gran didn’t see a problem with it because Piper said she was helping his wife. Piper played it off like they were friends.”

He’s watching me intently, his eyes narrowed as I speak. I go on. “It was weird because when she went missing, no one from the church called. No one came around or asked about her. I didn’t care at the time, I never liked church anyway, and when I did go I sat in the main service with Gran. Gran never went back to the church because of it. She was hurt by how little they cared.”

“That’s very unusual,” Leo says. “No one from the congregation?”

I think about it. “Gran had a few friends who reached out at the beginning because of her health issues, but no one in leadership like the main pastor or Jude believed Piper was kidnapped.

“A few years ago I was going through Gran’s photo albums and I noticed a lot of the photos were missing, big gaps everywhere. It was only certain photos—like the ones at church and camp. I found the missing photos in the attic in Piper’s things. It wasn’t rocket science to figure out that the only common denominator in all of the photos she took was one man.”

“Jude?”

“That’s right,” I say. “Piper took the photos that included Jude out of the album and put them in her drawer. I don’t know if she did that because she was in love with him and wanted the pictures for herself, or if she was angry with him and trying to erase him from our lives.She clearly hadn’t gotten rid of the photos.”

“Did you tell your grandmother?”

“Yes. After I found the photos, we both looked him up online. Once I typed his name in the search engine, the internet pretty much lit up. And wouldn’t you know it, he was about to be tried for capital murder: Piper’s fucking youth pastor. For murdering his teen wife and baby daughter. We figured that no one from the church told us because they had a bigger fish to fry: one of their pastors was a murderer. Look, if he killed his wife and baby, what’s not to say he did the same to Piper?”

Leo sets his empty water bottle on the floor. Then he runs a hand across his jaw, his expression guarded. He thinks I’m crazy.

“What’s he like?” I ask. “Jude? Is he coherent…mean…passive?”

“You know I can’t talk about my patients.” Beneath his beard his lips are turned down. “I can’t tell you that, Iris. You know that.”

“Okay,” I say slowly. “I’ll tell you what I know, and you can tell me if I’m right.”

“I need a drink.” Leo goes to the kitchen and opens a cabinet. He looks inside, closes it, opens another.

“Tell me about Jude’s brain—what does he have going on up there?” I ask wrapping my arms around my knees.

“He was raised in a religious home. His father called his personality a darkness and punished him by locking him in a closet for hours at a time,” I say.

Leo opens the dishwasher and pulls out a coffee tumbler. He looks inside to make sure it’s clean, then tilts a bottle of Tito’s over the rim.

“They went to the church for help, and the pastor suggested one of those fucked-up religious boarding schools.” All of that information was in the court documents.

“No.” He shakes his head. “Don’t give me the textbook shit. Tell meyourthoughts.”

“Okay.” I shrug. “He internalized his father’s views about women.”

“Which were what?”

“His father thought women were whores if they had sex before marriage. Jude fetishized virginity. His victims were always underage, the first was his wife, who was only seventeen when they got married. His wife’s family said that he was excessively controlling, and isolated her from her family and friends—narcissism, sociopathy. When he murdered them he was wearing his god complex on his sleeve. Piper was his second victim. What else do you want from me?” My tone is angry.

“I don’t want anything from you, Iris, I like being around you. Do you like being around me, or are you just trying to get to Jude?”

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