Tucker’s brows rose. “Define ‘involved.’”
I sighed as I backed toward the basement stairs. “I’d rather not.”
He shrugged, a hint of a grin peeking out at me from the upturn of one side of his mouth. “Whatever’s going on is none of my business. All I know is that you deserve better than Eamon, and I hope you get it.”
I gave him a hug, blinking back surprised tears. Then I cleared my throat and headed down the stairs. “Let’s do this.”
“What do you mean, he took Davey?” Billy launched himself off the cot in his cell as if it had just sent a jolt of electricity through him. “Are you sure? How do you know?”
“I found her bag at his place, and she’s not answering her phone. She’s not at home.” Which we’d confirmed on our way to the bar from Cam’s trailer. “She’s missing, Billy. He has her.”
“You searched Denny’s place? What place?”
“We’re the ones asking questions,” Tucker said, stationed behind me to my right, close enough that his shadow merged with mine. He could be quite intimidating when he wanted to be.
Evidently this was one of those moments.
“Yeah. Okay.” Billy nodded several times, rapidly, his pulse racing. “What do you need, then?”
“Information. Anything you can give us,” I said.
He sank onto the cot again. “I’ve told you everything I know.”
“And yet you came up with more when Vance interviewed you yesterday. I’m asking you to try one more time. For Davey. Anything you can remember about any place Denny used to go. Any building he’d have access to. Some place he wouldn’t be noticed. Or bothered. Some place he could take her while she—” I bit the rest off, not because he shouldn’t hear it, but because I couldn’t say it.
“You think he bit her.”
“Or he’s going to.”Please, please don’t let us be too late. “Why else would he take her?”
“Wherewould he take her?” Tucker stepped forward, even with me.
Billy shook his head, lank hair falling over his forehead. “I don’t—”
“What about his mother?” Tucker demanded. She wasn’t mentioned in any of his social media, the email address she’d written to Silas from was inactive, and without access to his birth certificate, we had nothing else to go on. No way to identify her.
“I told you, I never met her. All I know is her first name. Rebecca. Silas called her Becky. My mom did too. She didn’t like Denny’s mom. Said any woman who’d give her kid away over a ‘behavioral incident’ wasn’t any good as a mother anyway.”
That assessment hardly seemed fair to me, considering the severity of Denny’s currentbehavioral incident, but that wasn’t the point. “Did she say anything else about Becky?”
Billy shrugged. “I mean, yeah. She was Silas’s ex, and my mom had opinions. She thought Becky gave Denny too much freedom, then blamed Silas when her approach backfired. She thought Becky was wrong to want money from Silas, but not his ‘presence’ in Denny’s life. Until she got tired of him and gave him to us.”
It was a one-sided debate without Becky’s input, but all of that was beside the point. “Did your mother ever say anything about where Becky lived? Where Denny was before he came to live with you?” If his mother had left him any property, it could be exactly what we were looking for. Assuming she had passed.
“Um…” Billy closed his eyes, clearly searching his memory. “She said once that she thought Becky had really sent him to live with us because there wasn’t room for a teenage boy in their place. ‘Cause it only had one bedroom. She said Becky was probably tired of sleeping on the couch in her own home.”
I could understand that, whether or not it was her reason for sending her son to his father.
“Did she say where that was?” Tucker asked. “Or what kind of place it was? A house? Apartment? Trailer?”
“Apartment?” I guessed, having never seen a one-bedroom house or trailer. But if it was an apartment, chances were slim that Cam would have taken Davey there. Both because his mother couldn’t have left him a place she didn’t own, and because there’d be too many neighbors as potential eye-witnesses.
“I don’t know,” Billy said.
“What town?” Tucker asked. “Do you know what school Billy went to, before he lived with you?”
“It was something small. Even smaller than my school. He said there were only, like, thirty kids in his class. I don’t remember the town, but he did have this school shirt he used to wear, until he outgrew it. I remember that the mascot was a beaver, because Silas used to laugh every time Denny wore it. I didn’t get why, at the time.”
I turned to Tucker, who nodded, then practically raced from the room, armed with a new nugget—small though it was—of information.
