Those Empty Eyes

by Charlie Donlea

Raymond Quinlan was thirteen years old, a troubling age for the shooter—old enough to be a viable witness, but young enough to make the next decision challenging.

“I would have loved to call Detective Alvarez to the stand to question him about this but that became impossible after the detective took his own life just prior to the start of this trial.

First were the mysterious photos discovered in her parents’ bed the night they were killed. The photos held images of three unidentified women,

An object at rest stays at rest unless acted upon by an unbalanced force.

correcting her trajectory through life was more important than arriving at some imagined utopia in the end.

That man was Roland Glazer. Over the years, Alex had meticulously researched the man to the point of obsession. The research wasn’t difficult. Roland Glazer had been all over the news. An American businessman convicted of sex trafficking of teenage girls, Glazer died in jail while awaiting trial in 2012, a couple of months before Alex’s family was killed.

The three women who had been linked to Glazer were the same women in the photos found on her parents’ bed the night they were killed.

Sometimes, she learned, talents were discovered without cultivating them, and goals reached without pursuing them—or even knowing they existed.

During his first summer at Montague, he, too, had been one of Mr. Lolland’s victims.

He didn’t stop Mr. Lolland that night. But as he stood in the dark shadows of the forest, he came up with a plan to make sure Jerry Lolland never hurt anyone again.