Read Eye of Vengeance for Free Online Page B

the older one was so protective of her sister. The description of what they were wearing on their final day.
    As the girls were walking to the park which they now considered home, Ferris pulled alongside in his familiar truck. He told them their mother had gone out to look at a house they might move to. He said she’d asked him to give them a ride. Maybe the girls were reluctant, but they knew him, had ridden in the truck—with their mother—before.
    Ferris took them to a small house less than three miles from the park. He knew it was the younger girl’s birthday and promised a cake. But once inside, he molested the six-year-old in a bedroom. When she began to cry, her sister came to her aid. Ferris killed them both and then hid their tiny bodies in the attic of the house. When they failed to show up at the park, the girls’ mother went to the school and police were called. She immediately identified Ferris as a man who had befriended them. It took a day for detectives to track him down. They found him in the small rental house and interviewed him for an hour. They read him like a book and returned the same afternoon with a search warrant.
    Nick had gone to the crime scene. He had been there when the two small body bags were carried out, just like the rest of the press. But for this one he could not tear his eyes away. He remembered the look in the lead investigator’s eyes when he later told Nick he would never forget the feeling of realizing that the bodies of those girls had been lying right above him as he’d listened to Ferris deny he had even seen the children. Nick remembered thinking they should not let detectives or police reporters who have kids of their own go to crime scenes involving the deaths of children. He remembered interviewing the mother, even though he knew she was still in shock, her eyes swollen, the pupils enlarged and glossed by sedatives and some internal message that kept trying to convince her it wasn’t so. He remembered hating Steven Ferris.
    Nick scrolled down through the story, past the history he’d dug up on Ferris: the arrests for loitering, the multiple laborer jobs, the interview with the girlfriend who had left him after she’d caught him in her daughter’s room but had never reported it, just cursed him and kicked him out.
    None of that had come out in court. Ferris’s trial had been emotional and sensational. Nick hadn’t covered it. That assignment belonged to the court reporter. But Nick had slipped into the courtroom on several days, squeezing into the back rows and watching the back of Ferris’s head as he sat at the defense table. One day the little girls’ mother, who could not stand to sit inside, was in the hallway on a bench and recognized Nick as he quietly left during testimony.
    “Mr. Mullins,” she said and stood.
    Nick stopped and looked at her face, trying to read whether she was indignant or angered by something he had written. “You are the reporter, yes?”
    “Yes, ma’am,” Nick said, taking two steps closer to her.
    When she put out her hand, he closed the final gap and clasped her fingers softly.
    “Thank you, sir,” she said. “For the way you treated me and my girls in your stories.”
    Nick was silent, not knowing how to react, seeing her eyes again, clearer now, but still holding a pain that would be there forever. Nick knew even then that whatever went on in the courtroom would never ease her pain.
    “They were beautiful children,” he remembered saying and then had excused himself and walked away.
    Now he knew the pain personally. Loved ones dead. A child you could never hold again. The urge for vengeance. Robert Walker.
    Within days of the start of Ferris’s trial the predator was convicted by a jury that would later recommend the death penalty. The judge had agreed. Nick shook the scenes out of his head. He remembered each detail, but today’s story wasn’t so much about Ferris as it was about his killer.
    He moved on to the other