Chapter Fifty-One

That Friday evening, both Hunter and Garcia got to their respective support groups with ten minutes to spare. Hunter's support group met in North Long Beach. Garcia's group met eight miles northwest of that location, in Watts – the same neighborhood where they met Officer Emiliano Esqueda. Garcia's meeting for that evening was scheduled to start at 7:30 p.m., just like most of his previous support-group meetings, but Hunter's one, due to it being a little further outside central LA, started forty-five minutes later, at 8:15 p.m.

In Watts, the meeting was being held in a classroom on the second floor of a public high school building and, once again, the few rules given out by the group's moderator at the start of the meeting were simple – no phones, don't interrupt, and be courteous.

Garcia switched his cellphone to ‘flight mode' and placed it inside a basket before taking a seat next to a tall African American man, with droopy eyelids and sad eyes. People were still arriving, while a few were already at the refreshment table, pouring themselves coffees, teas, and digging into the cookie jar. Just a minute after Garcia took his seat, a dark-haired man with a short ponytail, whose eyebrows looked like savage caterpillars, took the chair to his left.

‘Would you like one,' he said, offering Garcia one of the oatmeal cookies he had brought back from the table with him.

‘No, thank you,' Garcia gave the man a shy smile. ‘I just had dinner.' He lied.

Tessa, the moderator, a petite lady in her early thirties who looked to be of Korean descent, welcomed everyone with a pleasant smile and a few comforting words, but just as she was about to start proceedings, a tall and well-built man came to the door. He had clearly run up the stairs to get to the classroom in time.

‘Is it still OK if I join?' he asked, as he caught his breath, his tone uncertain, his voice pleading.

‘Of course,' Tessa said, ushering him inside before indicating the pile of chairs in the corner. ‘Please grab a chair and join the circle. Sit anywhere you like.'

The man reached for his cellphone, tapped its screen a couple of times and placed it inside the phone basket. This clearly wasn't his first support-group session. He then grabbed a chair from the pile that Tessa had indicated and slotted it between two of the four women in the group, three seats to Garcia's right.

Garcia was the second out of the ten attending members to introduce himself, and this time, he went with the name ‘Jack'.

Introductions done, Tessa asked if anyone would like to be the first to share something with the group.

The caterpillar-eyebrows man to Garcia's left lifted a shy hand.

‘I can go first,' he said. His name was Trevor.

Just as with all the members' accounts in all previous group meetings that Garcia had attended, the stories were told in the third person, and every single one of them started with the phrase, ‘This happened to a friend of mine'. As they introduced themselves, every group member was sure to emphasize the fact that they were trying their best to do better… that they knew they had a problem… and that they were willing to work on it. But despite all their excuses and verbal ‘disclaimers', Garcia knew that many of them would never do better, and at times he really had to level himself not to blow his cover.

In the past two weeks, Garcia had heard over thirty-five accounts from people who had physically hurt either their kids, their partners or both. Reading between the lines of all the ‘this happened to my friend' stories, Garcia knew that he had sat face to face with individuals who had physically hurt the very people who they were supposed to love, and they had hurt them in some of the most horrific ways: from flesh-cutting, where a scar would forever live, to scalding their skin until it'd blistered; from knocking them unconscious with a fist punch, to bone-breaking. Right from his first ever group meeting, Garcia knew that Hunter had been right. If this killer really was after parents who had physically hurt their kids, these support-group meetings were a treasure chest.

That evening, seven out of the ten group members shared stories. The late arrival, who had introduced himself as George, was one of the three who passed when his turn came up, but right from the very first account, the one shared by caterpillar-eyebrows Trevor, Garcia noticed how attentive George was to every story being told. He seemed to be eagerly taking in every word as if at the end of the meeting the moderator would quiz the group. That immediately put Garcia on alert, so for the first forty-five minutes of the meeting – until they reached the coffee break – Garcia tried his best to get a good look at George's hands and fingers, but in doing that he encountered two problems. The first was that the angle at which they were sitting in relation to each other was an awkward one, because droopy-eyelids man, sitting to Garcia's right, took at least 70 percent of his line of vision. To peek at George, Garcia had to lean forward a fair amount and twice, in the many times that Garcia had repeated the movement, George had caught him doing it. Their eyes locked for a fraction of a second and all that Garcia could do to try to play it down was pretend that he was just stretching his stiff neck.

The ‘play down' move might've worked the first time around, but as Garcia's and George's eyes met for the second time, Garcia saw how oddly George looked back at him. He clearly wasn't buying the stiff-neck excuse anymore.

The second problem that Garcia had encountered was that from the instant that he'd sat down, George kept his arms crossed in front of his chest, with his hands conveniently tucked under his armpits. If he did uncross them even once during the entire meeting, it had been when Garcia wasn't looking.

At the 45-minute interval, Garcia saw George leave the classroom, probably going for a bathroom break, like a few were doing. He waited ten seconds, so as not to be too obvious, and casually followed the group outside.

George was nowhere to be seen.

But Garcia already knew from when he'd arrived that the closest bathroom was just down the corridor and around to his left. As he rounded the corner, he saw the bathroom door closing. Garcia chose not to wait, in case George had decided to split before the meeting resumed.

This was an all-girls' school, so there were no urinals in the bathroom. Five toilet stalls lined the south wall, with three washbasins positioned directly across the room from them, on the opposite wall. George wasn't washing his hands. Garcia turned to face the stalls. Only one of them was occupied. He looked left then right to make sure that he was alone, before bending down a little to peek under the stall door, but the gap wasn't wide enough and he couldn't quite make out the person's feet. For him to get a proper look, he would have to kneel down and bring his face to just an inch or so from the floor. He paused and gave it a moment's thought.

If he tried properly looking under the stall door, there was a chance that someone could walk in on him, or worse, George, if he really was the person inside the stall, could all of a sudden open the door and catch Garcia as a peeping Tom – definitely not a good look. But all Garcia really wanted to do was to take a peek at George's hands and fingers, not have an intimate conversation with him – and what better way to do that than being right at the next washbasin, while George washed his hands?

Garcia quickly decided on a plan of action. He would wait at the second washbasin – the one in the middle – pretending to be checking his reflection in the mirror. Once George left the stall, he would only have two choices – both of them right by Garcia's side.

So Garcia did exactly that – stood facing the mirror, pretending to be checking something in his right eye, for almost two minutes before he finally heard the stall door behind him unlock. But the person who'd been locked inside the toilet stall wasn't George. It was droopy-eyelids man, who gave Garcia a half-embarrassed nod.

They both quickly washed their hands and returned to the support-group meeting. George was sitting back between the two women, arms crossed in front of his chest, hands tucked away under his armpits.

Where the hell did he go?Garcia wondered, as he got back to his seat.

When Garcia's turn to share came up, he gave them the story that, by then, sounded so natural coming out of his lips, he felt he could ace a polygraph. As he delivered his tale, his sad tone of voice and seemingly aimless head and eye movement were nothing short of perfect, and he made absolutely sure that at the exact moment that he said the words – ‘the next thing that my friend remembers was the sound of his son screaming in pain because, somehow, a couple of his fingers were broken' – he had casually leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees, and his gaze had panned right, in the general direction of George.

That was when he saw it.

Not George's hands and fingers, but the look in his eyes… the muscle that involuntarily twitched on his lower jaw… the way in which his crossed arms clearly tightened their grip on his chest, as if to hide his hands even more.

Garcia wasn't sure if George had noticed that Garcia had picked up on how discomforted he looked, but this time, it was George's eyes that darted away a little awkwardly.

Garcia felt a lump come to his throat.

Once he finished telling his story, Garcia sat back on his chair and made no new attempt to peek at George's hands and fingers again.

He didn't need to.

His gut was telling him that he was right.