Part 3 — Brandons Real Name
The sergeant slid the folder across the table. The man my daughter called Brandon was 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 Kaylee and me in a patrol car with a female deputy and drove us to a safe address, then sent two unmarked units to my street. They were sitting in neighbors driveways when Garrett came strolling up with a little pink jacket in his hand.
He punched in the garage code that my granddaughter had spelled out for him in kindergarten letters. The side door was open, as he had asked. Deputies waited inside my kitchen with the lights off, and he walked straight into them.
He was taken into custody with no one hurt. In his car were a roll of tape, a set of keys copied from another womans house, and a notebook 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 scrubs. 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 was true. A good person can be fooled by a professional. What counts is what you do the day you find out. By then she already had her phone out, showing the detective every message and every date.
The detectives pieced together the routine. Charm the daughter, win over the mother, and use the little ones tablet as a game to learn the house. Kaylee was never his victim in the way I feared, only his unwitting messenger, and she kept every secret because she thought it would keep her mother safe.
The child specialist told us the same. The game had never been anything worse than a stolen list of questions. Kaylee was frightened, not harmed, and the guilt was not hers to carry. A counselor named Dr. Weiss started seeing her weekly, and within a month the bathroom crying stopped.
Garrett was charged with attempted burglary, fraud, identity theft, and using a minor to commit a crime. Gregg County prosecutors added the Longview case, and the court froze the account where that retired schoolteachers savings had gone.
The other two women in the sergeants file were found safe. One had lost a little money, and the other nothing, because her granddaughter was too shy to answer his messages. The sheriff mailed warnings to every address in his notebook.
Ashley took leave from her double shifts and stayed with me through the winter. We changed every code and lock and painted the garage door yellow, which Kaylee chose.
On a Friday the counselor said Kaylee was ready to tell her story, so she drew it. A girl, a grandmother, and a mother holding hands under a big sun, with a lizard in the corner. The lizards name was Brandon. She said the name was funny now.
