They called me the day the story ran.
Two detectives, a young woman and a gray-haired man, sat in my kitchen and asked me to walk them through it. I told them everything. Marcus. The duffel. The texts. The man in the windbreaker, whose real name, it turned out, was Douglas Reyes, and who had been running this circuit through three counties for eleven years.
They found him at a motel outside town. He had a rental car and a briefcase with four hundred pills and a notebook with first names in it.
The story broke statewide by Thursday. The Rockford Ledger ran it under a headline that used the word pipeline. Two school boards opened investigations. Three parents at Ashford said publicly that they had known Reyes for years, which meant either they were lying or they were stupid, and either wa
