“Here and there,” he said. “We moved around.”
Mac waited.
“I don’t remember,” Morgan said. Old anger was like ashes on his tongue. “I was a kid. St. Louis. Around St. Louis. Trailer parks mostly. Why? No one cared that my childhood was shitty back then. Why would you give a damn now?”
“Because if you were in St Louis, then you couldn’t have been here.”
“We both know I wasn’t.”
Mac nodded. “But if I have a school registration for you in St. Louis—picture of you in a scout troop, record of your birth, even—when we know Sammy was here? Then we won’t have to wait until we can get a sample from Shay, compare the two. You won’t have to stay in town. No more sleeping on Boyd’s couch.”
Yeah, well, one way or another, Morgan had no intention of spending that many more nights folded up under a too-narrow blanket on a too-short bit of furniture. He wouldn’t have spent last night there if guilt hadn’t landed such a good haymaker on Boyd.
That information probably wouldn’t convince Mac to open the damn door and let him out, though.
“I’ll see if I can find anything,” Morgan said. “I can call some people. They might remember where I started.”
“Any chance your mother might have anything?” Mac asked with the careful cadence of someone who knew he was on thin ice. “Could you ask her?”
“No.”
“If she knows something—”
“She’s dead.”
The words dropped flatly into the conversation. Morgan grimaced to himself. He usually thought about the consequences to a lie before he told it.
Mac grimaced. “Fine,” he said. “I’ll see if I can track anything back through her contact with social services. And, um, sorry about your loss.”
Morgan shrugged. “I remember her every time my jaw hurts in cold weather. Are we done?”
There was a pause as Mac looked at him. “Almost,” he said as he stood and scooped up the coat. It ended up draped over his arm as he jerked his head toward the door. “Come on. I want to show you something.”
“Last time I heard that, it was from a fat guy in a trench coat.” Morgan pushed himself off the wall without bothering to take his hands out of his pockets. “I laid him out. Just so we’re clear.”
Mac opened the door and waved Morgan through it. “You’re not my type.”
“Too good-looking?”
“Too much of an asshole,” Mac said bluntly. “I get enough of that at work without taking it home.”
Yeah, that was probably fair enough. Morgan glanced around the station as he followed Mac down the thin-carpeted halls. Sunlight squeezed into the building through slatted blinds, long strips of it laid over the MDF desks and white plastered walls. There was a drunk guy cuffed to a bench as he slurred abuse at the world, an irritated prostitute in skin-tight Lycra and six-inch plastic heels, and three sullen-looking slouching teenagers with inky fingers and defiant expressions.
“I thought small towns were supposed to be wholesome,” Morgan said.
“That’s just what we tell the tourists,” Mac said tiredly.
He led the way to his office and opened the door to let Morgan go in first. It was dim inside, the only light from a half window tucked up high in a corner, and it smelled of paper and Tiger Balm. Morgan made a mental note to go for the knees if he ever got in a fight with Mac. There were framed pictures on the wall. Some of them looked as though they’d been there as long as the wall, old photos of the town in blurred sepia tones, while others showed Mac in uniform with various shades of gray in his beard.
On the far side of the room, wedged under the wall to make the most of the small window, was a desk covered in paperwork, old photos, and files.
“The Calloway file,” Mac said as he stepped around Morgan. He picked up a loose cassette from the desk and glanced at the label. “Interviews with Shay Calloway. Sixteen, and his mother threw him out because the captain back then convinced her he was involved.”
“Was he?”
Mac shrugged as he put the cassette back down. “We don’t know. That’s the thing about this case, Morgan, we don’t know anything. Was Shay involved? I don’t think so, but Sergeant Lawrence and the woman who lives down the street from him and calls us every week about how her kid saw him in the street… they disagree.”
He unearthed a thick file held closed by rubber bands.
