Someone with a number he didn’t recognize had texted him tofuck off and die.
It was Sullivan who finally came through with a link in an email, along with a brief explanation that he hadn’t broken the story, but he had to cover it. Familiar contempt at the old excuse clenched in the hinges of Boyd’s jaw, but he still clicked on the link. Someone elsetutted as they manhandled a double stroller past him, and he finally shifted out of the way, toward the yellow painted curb.
A blog article slowly opened on his phone, the text half-obscured with google ads and pop-ups. But the headline was legible almost immediately—Calloway or Conman? It didn’t get any better as the rest of the page loaded with a grim mug shot of a younger, bonier Morgan and a grainy shot of him with Boyd as they limped out of the bar after the fight. To Boyd there was something obviously intimate in the shot, the way his hand was on Morgan’s hip and the hint of a grin on Morgan’s profile as he angled his face toward Boyd. That might just be him, because whomever had written the article definitely saw it as more conspiratorial.
He tried to read it, but after a few lines, his eyes gave up and just skipped from quote to quote on the screen. That was bad enough. His suspension—“for financial misconduct”—was in there, along with Morgan’s record and a pious line about how Donna was “too upset” to be interviewed.
“Shit,” Boyd muttered.
He stared at the cracked screen for a moment as he tried to decide what to do next. More lines jumped out at him, a “When did you stop beating your wife” question about Deacon Hill, reference to Shay’s financial problems at the body shop, and an arch reference to the old reward that James Fernfield had offered for any news about Sammy’s disappearance. The urge to shortcut anything actually useful and just throw his phone through a shop window got him by the throat.
Before he gave in to it, another message popped up on the screen.Call me, Shay demanded in all caps.
That might not be a good idea, but at least it wasn’t a phone through a window. Boyd tapped in Shay’s number, and the call barely got to ring once before Shay picked up.
“Did you talk to Sullivan?” Shay skipped the usual pleasantries to ask harshly.
Boyd stumbled over a lie long enough that in the end, he just settled on the truth. “Yeah.”
“Yeah? That’s it?” In the background Shay heard something metal smash against metal. “You screweverythingup, and that’s it? Yeah? Why the hell did you go to Ben Sullivan, of all goddamn people. I mean, I don’t like Macintosh, but at least he only fucked us over because he was incompetent. Sullivan did it for money, more than once. He built his fucking Malibu beach house on my little brother’s grave!”
The accusation made Boyd grimace unhappily. Part of him didn’t think it was entirely fair, that Sullivan had done his job and reported on the case, but he also remembered the sick shock when he walked into Target and saw Sammy’s face on Sullivan’s latest book in Bestsellers. Yet even then, Mrs. Calloway loved Sullivan’s books for keeping Sammy’s case alive.
It wasn’t simple. Shay thought it was, Boyd wished it were, but it never had been.
“I needed to know who Morgan was,” Boyd said. “And Sullivan doesn’t have to go through the proper channels like Mac does.”
Shay made a disgusted, frustrated sound down the phone. “For God’s sake, youknowwho he is. Or you would if you stopped thinking with your cock. My brother was a good kid. He was smart, and he was honest. He wasloyal.If he’d had a chance to grow up, you really think he’d be…that?A crook? A liar? Someone who just fucks strangers to get a bed for the night?”
His voice was loud enough that a woman gave Boyd a sharp look as she caught the tinny tail end of Shay’s sentence. She pulled her phone out of her pocket to text as she walked away. Heat scalded Boyd’s cheeks, but he didn’t know if it was embarrassment or anger. He pressed the phone harder against his ear to muffle the other side of the conversation and picked up his pace as he headed for his pickup.
“That’s not fair. You don’t know him.”
“And you do?”
No. Maybe. Not really, of course. Not like he knew everyone else he’d ever dated in town, from who their third-grade teacher was to the time they got arrested, drunk, out at the old mill… because everyone had done that. Boyd had no idea what Morgan had done or where he’d been, but he knew Morgan flushed like a kid when Boyd liked how he tasted and that he kissed Boyd like it meant everything… that he behaved like an asshole to push Boyd away and then second-guessed himself if he thought it worked.
Boyd might notknowMorgan, but he knew he liked him. That wasn’t any of Shay’s business, though. Not now, and not when he’d punched Boyd in the mouth.
“I don’t know enough,” he admitted. “But at least I admit that. And anyhow, Sullivan didn’t break this story. He’s had bylines in theWashington Post. He doesn’t write for some true crime blog.”
He reached the truck and pulled open the door, switched the phone from one hand to the other as he climbed in.
“Yeah, well, maybe he didn’t write the piece, but who gave the blog the story? Now he can cover it, blow the whole thing wide open officially, and still make out that he’s the good guy,” Shay said impatiently. “I know your attention span is shit, but—”
Boyd hung up before Shay said something that would take more than time and a moved couch to forgive. He tossed his phone onto the passenger seat, half-buried among the old receipts and mail, and ignored it when it rang. Shay could wait until he got back. If they’d cleared the crash, it would be two hours to get back to Cutter’s Gap, less if Boyd put his foot down. Maybe by then he’d be able to talk to Shay without wanting to lay him out.
The phone kept ringing as Boyd reversed out of the space and pulled onto the road. It took an hour, on and off, before Shay finally gave up.
BOYD STEPPEDinto the narrow paneled box of the elevator and pressed the scratched third-floor button with his thumb. He leaned against the back wall as the doors closed and let the plastic-wrapped bouquet dangle against his thigh. He exhaled as the winch mechanism screeched softly and the car started to rise.
The flowers were a mistake. They were cheap and cheerful, gerberas bought from a sullen teenager in the pop-up florist in the clinic parking lot, and the potent, indiscriminately floral scent of them reminded Boyd of his joyless annual pilgrimage to the Calloway house.
Guilt and flowers. Boyd absently tapped the plastic against his leg as he watched the floors count off. After all these years, he didn’t know how to do one without the other.
It was a relief when the elevator stopped and the doors bounced open to let in the sharp smells of antiseptic and boiled water with that undercurrent of sickness. Not particularly nice to breathe, but there were no bad memories attached either.
Boyd got off the elevator, turned, and hesitated as he saw Shay slouched carefully and uncomfortably in a plastic chair by the nurses’ station. He hadn’t changed out of his work clothes, the oil-stained jeans and battered old band T-shirt. His feet in well-worn work boots were tucked under him to keep them out of everyone’s way.
