“Coincidence?” he asked. “Or are you stalking me, Morgan?”
“Neither,” Morgan said. “The doughnuts might be a stereotype, but I’ve never met a cop who didn’t need a coffee. And this is the closest diner to the station.”
“What if I got Starbucks?” Mac asked. He nudged Morgan’s feet out of the way and sat down. The leather cushions under him creaked as he sat back. “Were you just going to come back tomorrow?”
Morgan picked at the cut of a graffiti heart someone had scored into the Formica of the table. The remnants of old ink were still worked into the scratches.
“I would have come to you,” Morgan said, ignoring the fact that Cutter’s Gap didn’thavea Starbucks. “I just had enough of the cop shop recently. So? Where do we stand?”
“We?” Mac pulled his arms out of his jacket, folded it, and hung it neatly over the back of the booth. “You and me? Or you and Boyd after that show you made of yourselves the other night.”
Morgan poked absently at the inside of his cheek, the chunk he’d taken out of it just a tender spot now.
Ah.
“Bob made a complaint?”
“You’re lucky he didn’t,” Mac said. “His father didn’t want the bad press. He never does, although usually he’s talking people into dropping charges. Did Boyd really hit Bob with a—”
“Chair, yes,” Morgan said. He could feel the stupid grin on his face, and he reached for the milkshake. It might taste bad, but at least he could hide behind it. “I didn’t ask him to.”
A reluctant smile tugged at the corner of Mac’s mouth. “You wouldn’t need to,” he said. “The amount of fights that kid got into….”
He trailed off with a rueful shake of his head. Morgan took a drink of the too-sweet shake and tried to imagine Boyd as a troublemaker. It wasn’t that difficult, actually. Boyd was easily led. He wiped his mouth and shrugged off the soft feeling.
“So I don’t need to worry about Bob,” he said. “Just this whole ‘you’re a dead—’”
Mac held up a hand to shut him up as Bertie came over with two cups and a carafe of coffee. She pursed her lips as the table went quiet with her arrival.
“No refills,” she said. The cups went down on the table, and she filled them up. “Not after the lunch rush.”
Nobody cared. By this point Morgan figured a good cup of coffee was as hard to find in Cutter’s Gap as a missing eight-year-old.
“You turned up anything about that DNA?” Morgan asked when she was gone. He swapped the milkshake for the cup, liquid hot against his palms. It was a double-edged question. He wanted to know why a fifteen-year-old mystery had screwed up his life, but if he was going to get Shay’s car, he needed to be sure of what Mac already knew. “Still think I’m Sammy Calloway?”
It was a joke… and a test.
Mac leaned back in the booth. The star on his chest glittered dimly in the overhead lights. He took a long drink of his coffee and then set the cup down.
“It doesn’t matter what I think,” he said. “Just what I can prove. Right now we still don’t know. So far no one has come back with any record of you from the places you said you lived as a child. That could mean something, or it could mean that some small town hasn’t gotten around to digitizing their records. And the DNA results we did this time were inconclusive.”
“What does that mean?”
A muscle jumped in Mac’s cheek as he clenched his jaw. After a second he visibly forced his jaw to relax. “That means I need to tell Donna what’s happened and rip her heart open again.”
Morgan shrugged uncomfortably. “Just tell her it’s a mistake,” he said. For an instant he forgot that he was going to—maybe—pretend that he was. “I’m obviously not this kid.”
“That doesn’t matter,” Mac said as he lifted the coffee off the table. He got it halfway to his face and paused, mug forgotten in his hand. “Donna believes that Sammy’s alive, the same way Catholics believe in Mass. Nobody is going to change her mind because she doesn’t want to believe he’s dead. And you, Mr. Graves? You look like her prayers come to life.”
The back of Morgan’s throat felt raw with…. What? Guilt? None of this was his fault. He hadn’t asked to get dragged to this dying town so they could jam him into the hole left by a lost kid. The feeling scraped against his chest walls as he swallowed, but resentment made him force it down.
“First time a mom would have said that about me,” he said. “You could just leave the DNA and wait and see if someone finds my own school photos or something. I played hooky often enough. There has to be some kind of record?”
Mac considered that for a moment. Then he sighed, shook his head, and finally remembered to take a drink of coffee. It had cooled enough that he could taste it, and he grimaced.
“You aren’t a low-profile man, Morgan,” he said. “And around here, the Calloway case isn’t a low-profile story. Donna already knows there was some new evidence in the case. I’ve put her off about what exactly, but I can only do that so long. I should have told her already. I just wanted to have something concrete first.”
He looked into his coffee, made a face, and shoved it over to sit next to the sad blue shake.
