Boyd shrugged. It didn’t matter if he did or not. Shay still hadn’t answered his phone. If this was just another wild goose chase, it wouldn’t have mattered, but they needed to talk about it. Before it got back to Donna.
“He’ll call when he can” was all he said. As a firefighter, he liked Mac well enough. He was a good cop and a straight arrow, but he was also the cop who badgered Boyd to tears for some snippet of info he hadn’t kept back, the man who’d cuffed sixteen-year-old Shay and threw him in jail on suspicion of killing his brother. It wasn’t all Mac’s idea. Back then he was a patrol officer who just did his job, but knowing that didn’t make the old caution go away. “Have you seen Morgan yet?”
Mac shook his head. “I just landed, but Morgan’s lawyer said he’ll talk to me. You’ve met him, this guy who claims to be Sammy. What do you think of him?”
It wasn’t funny, but Boyd couldn’t choke back the snort of laughter. He’d lain awake all night in his hastily booked hotel room and hadn’t been able to make his mind up about that.
“He’s not claiming anything,” Boyd said. “Just the opposite. He says it’s a mistake.”
“It has to be,” Mac agreed. “Fifteen years, Boyd. Maybe Donna can convince herself there’s hope, but we both know better.”
For most of the night, maybe 80 percent of it, that’s what Boyd told himself too. He wasn’t a cop, but he’d been called out to enough scenes to know the statistics. It was just that 20 percent he couldn’t quite let slip away.
“It happens,” he said. “Sometimes people are found. Others.”
Sympathy flashed over Mac’s face. “It happens,” he allowed. It was obvious he didn’t think it had this time, but he didn’t press the point. Maybe he could tell that Boyd couldn’t even convince himself. “I’m going in now to meet with Morgan’s lawyer and look over Bennett’s work. Do you want a lift?”
Boyd took a deep breath and shoved his hands back through his hair until he could lace his fingers together behind his head. He didn’t look at Mac. His attention was on the various cameras pointed their way.
“Did you know about Mr. Hill?” he asked. “Did he really work near here?”
Mac grimaced. “Nearby,” he said. “Thirty miles, for two months.”
Far enough to be an alibi? Or close enough to rouse suspicion? Boyd didn’t know anymore. He exhaled and dropped his hands to his side.
“I’d appreciate the lift.”
The cameraman jogged onto the road behind them and filmed the back of the car as they drove away.
BENNETT USEDa chilled bottle of water as a makeshift eye mask. She looked tired, and there was a blotted-out stain that could have been blood or coffee on the collar of her blouse.
“Sergeant Lo won’t budge,” she said as she lowered the bottle. Despite the cold she’d applied, they still looked bloodshot and tired. “As is his right. He wants Morgan charged for resisting arrest and assaulting an officer. With Morgan’s record, that’s not going to go well, but it is possible that you might be able to talk to the judge, Captain Macintosh.”
“Mac, please. You don’t work for me,” Mac said.
Bennett smiled with a pleased curve of her lips and nodded. “Mac,” she said as she twisted the cap off her water and took a sip. “Heather.”
She was on the wrong track, but it wasn’t Boyd’s job to adjust her gaydar for her. He stuck his hands in his pockets and bounced on the balls of his feet with nervous energy.
“Did you get a chance to double-check the results the computer pulled out of CODIS?” he asked. “Is there any chance the match was a mistake?”
Bennett licked her lips and briefly looked Boyd up and down. “You a cop too, Mr. Maccabee?” she asked sardonically.
“Firefighter,” he said. The creak of a door made him glance around, but the man who marched into the courthouse between two guards was a sweaty, red-haired man with meth-chapped lips visible from a distance. Not Morgan. Not yet. “And I’m still trying to get in touch with the Calloways. If there was any possibility of a mistake, I want to know before I tell them there’s a chance Sammy is alive. Because that isn’t something that Donna Calloway will be able to come back from.”
“Sorry,” Bennett said after a beat. “I reran the results, and I double-checked them. The sample that Morgan gave us matches the sample the Cutter’s Gap PD logged fifteen years ago. It doesn’t mean it’s the truth, but the result wasn’t a computer error.”
The door creaked again. Boyd twisted around, and this time it was Morgan, his hands cuffed in front of him and a cop with a taped-up nose at his side. The pit of Boyd’s stomach twisted into the same weird knot of lust, guilt, and confusion as it had yesterday.
What sort of sick bastard looked at a man who was either a kidnapped child or a liar and felt their balls tighten with hunger?
Morgan glanced around as though he could sense eyes on him and met Boyd’s gaze for a second. His dark-blond hair was slicked back, and his handsome, heavy-boned face was set grimly. A muscle in his jaw jumped, clenched tightly under tanned skin and stubble, and he looked away again.
Boyd didn’t. He studied the strong profile, all cheekbone and jaw, and tried to map Sammy’s face onto it or find something that reminded him of Sammy in the way Morgan held his broad shoulders or scratched at his wrist. It was hard. As often as he’d tried to conjure a world where Sammy hadn’t been taken that day, he’d never really imagined a Sammy who’d changed.
He folded his lower lip between his teeth as he slid his gaze down to Morgan’s tight stomach and lean hips, and he’d certainly never entertained the idea that Sammy would be hot.
The admission, even in the privacy of his own head, made him squirm with embarrassment.
