“Deacon Hill was a teacher at the school and one of the first suspects, along with Shay. Never found any evidence, but these are the anonymous reports that people called in about who he had sex with and how, that he’d spoken to a kid in the supermarket, that he’d looked at a kid funny, that he was seen three blocks away from the Calloway house five months before this happened. In the end, he left town. I can tell you where he went because for years, every time anything happened to a kid in whatever town he was in, or, hell, whatever county, we’d get a call to see how we liked him for the Calloway case.”
“Did you?” Morgan asked.
“Some did. Some didn’t,” Mac said. He rubbed his hand over his face and up into his hair with a flash of exhaustion that broke through his facade. “I could never decide if he was a good liar or a good man. This case didn’t happen fifteen years ago, Morgan. It’sbeenhappening for fifteen years, every day that someone asks Boyd if he really doesn’t remember anything or Donna wakes up and wonders if her son cried for her when he died. Fifteen years, Morgan. I want this to end. I hope you can help me with that.”
The admission was heartfelt. Genuine. It made Morgan recoil as though it were salt on raw skin. Expectations and him had never mixed well. He turned and walked over to peer at one of the framed photos on the wall. Velvet drapes and bright lights filled the background while Mac posed awkwardly with some sort of plaque between him and an expensively dressed man with an asshole’s empty smile.
“Yeah, well, I guess an open case like this doesn’t do your career much good,” he mocked.
Mac’s sigh was a harsh exhalation that was nearly a groan. “I don’t think it’s done anyone in this town much good,” he said. “Shay’s a good man—”
Morgan turned around. “Unless he killed his brother, right?” he interrupted.
That made Mac wince and rub his eyebrow with one thumb. He pulled a rueful face. “That’s the question, isn’t it? The one I hope you can help me answer.”
“And what if I’m telling the truth?” Morgan asked. “What if I don’t know anything more than you?”
Mac’s face hardened. “Then what good are you to me?” He leaned over and pulled open a draw to lift out a plain white envelope with his name scratched on the front in pen. “There’s a room available in the Inn. And this time, do as you’re told and stay away from the Calloways. And Boyd.”
Chapter Seven
THEY WEREN’Tsupposed to call them trailers anymore. The proper term wasmanufactured home. Whatever you called them, they still burned like a bastard. It was like someone had set the fire to fast-forward.
Hot yellow flames licked out through the shattered windows and blistered the aluminum siding. The porch was already burned down to charred sticks, the front door buckled and red-hot as the fire ate into it. The water from the tanker sizzled and spat as it hit the hot sides, and a cloud of steam condensed on masks and floated like fog in the air.
Inside a cat or a baby screamed. It could be either. The neighbors who’d turned out to watch, lined up on the far side of the street or pushed up against the cordon around the truck, had been no help. Whoever lived here kept to themselves, worked late, didn’t socialize. Someone said they saw a kid hanging around, although they didn’t know who it belonged to, so the crew had to assume they could be inside.
Boyd stood on the hood of an up-on-blocks old Camry and flexed gloved hands around the shaft of the ax to check his grip. He exhaled. Everything else—the fact that he still hadn’t gotten rid of his old couch, the fact that Mac had told him to stay away from Morgan, wondering whether Mac knew he’d slept with him—dropped away as the situation finally got immediate enough to bully his brain into focus.
“Breach it!” Harry ordered.
Boyd swung, and the ax head cut through the thin outer wall like scissors through foil. Hot air and a foul cloud of smoke belched out at him. He squinted and swung again until he’d ripped a hole in the side of the structure.
“Going in.”
He grabbed the sides, hot even through his gloves, and climbed in. The floor felt compromised, bouncy as a dance floor but not dangerously so yet. He’d come in through the family room. There was a couch that had probably been pink before it was stained gray with smoke and ashes, and a TV with a shattered screen. It looked more like from a fist than from the heat.
“Hey! Hello. Anyone hear me? Stay where you are. I’ll come and get you, but just yell. Let me know.”
The squall got louder.
Boyd followed it down into one of the back rooms. It was laid out like a kid’s bedroom, with an empty cot and pictures torn out of storybooks pinned up on the wall. The squaller, however, was a skinny gray cat hunched on the floor.
“Hey, noisy,” he said. “C’mere.”
He reached for the cat. It swiped at his hand with a grubby paw, hissed—all tiny white fangs and patchwork black-and-pink mouth—and skittered under the dresser at the far side of the room. It screamed at him from under there.
“We got a cat,” he said as he went down carefully on his knees. “Kid’s room here, but—”
“Oh damn, can you get it out?” Jessie asked over the radio. “Do cats still hate you?”
“They don’t hate me,” Boyd said. “They just don’t—”
He broke off as he looked under the dresser, ready to scruff the screaming cat. It was tucked up next to the body of an unconscious toddler, claws tangled in theDora the Explorerpajamas as it wailed unhappily.
“We have a kid too,” Boyd said. He reached in, ignored the cat’s attempt to bite him, and tapped the fat baby cheek. Nothing. The child’s lips were pale, almost gray, and their eyes bruised. “They crawled under the dresser to hide, but they’re not responsive now.”
Kids always hid. It was surprising where they could squeeze into when they were scared enough. But if they went in, they’d come out. Boyd grabbed the collar of the kid’s shirt and pulled. The cat came along for the ride, tangled in the kid’s shirt and screaming.
