Part 3 — Who Brandon Really Was
The sergeant slid the folder across the table. The man my daughter called Brandon was named Garrett Pruitt, forty-four, wanted in two counties for fraud against older women. The photograph in the file was Ashleys July picture, cropped and enlarged.
The deputies did not wait for him to reach my house. Deputy Ortiz put me and Kaylee in a patrol car with a female deputy, drove us to a safe address, and sent two unmarked units to my street. They were sitting in my driveway, in my own neighbors cars, when Garrett came strolling up with a little pink jacket in his hand.
He punched in the garage code, the one my granddaughter had spelled out for him in kindergarten letters. The side door was open, exactly as he had asked. The deputies were waiting inside my kitchen with the lights off, and he walked straight into them.
He was arrested without anyone being hurt. In his car were a roll of tape, a set of keys he had copied from another womans house, and a notebook of names and addresses of widows in Smith and Gregg counties. My name was on page three.
Ashley drove to the sheriffs office straight from her shift, still in her scrubs. I will never forget the look on her face when the sergeant told her the truth. She sat down on the floor of the hallway and said, over and over, I brought him into her life.
I held my daughter and told her what I knew to be true. A good person can be fooled by a professional. What matters is what you do the day you find out. She had her phone out within the hour, showing the detective every message, every date, every dinner.
The detectives pieced together the rest. Garrett had a whole routine. Date the daughter, charm the mother, and use the little ones tablet as a game to learn the houses. Kaylee was never his victim in the way I feared, she was his unwitting messenger, and she kept every secret because she thought it would keep her mother safe.
That is exactly what the child specialist told us when we brought Kaylee in. The game was never anything worse than a stolen list of questions. Kaylee had not been harmed, only frightened, and the guilt was not hers to carry. A counselor named Dr. Weiss started seeing her once a week, and within a month the bathroom crying stopped.
Garrett Pruitt was charged with attempted burglary, fraud, identity theft, and using a minor to commit a crime. The prosecutors from Gregg County added the Longview case. The woman there, a retired schoolteacher, had her savings traced to an account he held, and the court froze it.
The two other women in the sergeants file were found safe. One had lost a little money. The other had lost nothing at all, because her granddaughter had been too shy to answer his messages. The sheriffs office sent letters to every address in his notebook.
Ashley took a leave from her double shifts and moved in with me for the winter. We rearranged the house together, changed every code and lock, and painted the garage door a cheerful yellow that Kaylee chose.
On Friday the counselor told us that Kaylee was ready to tell her own story, so she drew it. A picture of a girl, a grandmother, and a mother holding hands, with a big sun overhead and a lizard in the corner. The lizards name was Brandon. She said the name was funny now.