He hit the Call Back button and waited impatiently as it rang. The Fernfield family—second edition, Morgan guessed from how young the wife was—came out of the bookshop with a train in the kid’s arms and a box of books. Nate, one arm tucked around his wife’s waist, didn’t spare Morgan a look as they walked back to his car.
It was expensive.
The ring tone cut off, and Boyd’s voice crackled down the line. “Where are you?”
“Could ask you the same,” Morgan said. “It would have been nice to have someone on my side when the shit hit the fan this morning.”
“Don’t be a dick.”
“You love it.”
Boyd laughed and then tried to turn the noise into a cough or a cleared throat. It wasn’t a convincing effort.
“Mac wants to talk to you,” he said. The last shreds of amusement drained from his voice as he talked. “I’ll give you a lift. And you don’t know I’d be on your side, Morgan.”
“I know,” Morgan said as he shifted the phone from one ear to the other. “But you’re the only one who might consider it. What does Mac want?”
It took Boyd a second to answer. “I’ll tell you when I pick you up.”
Morgan smiled thinly. “You think I’m a flight risk?”
“That is why I had to put up bail. Morgan—”
“I’ll be at the school,” Morgan said. It was, if the instructions he’d looked up before he got distracted by the fresh display of “Town’s Best Missing Kid” books in the store window, just a few blocks away. “Unless you miss me.”
He hung up. Always leave them wanting more.
THE SUNbaked faded white rose petals into the concrete as the mass of bouquets tied around the stoplight wilted and shed in the sun. A handful of teddy bears, fresh and crisp still, were buried in among the blooms. Posters were stuck up in the dusty windows of bare shops, fresh images of the little boy plastered over sun-bleached old ones with the promise “We’ll Find You.” A young man lay on his back on the pavement to take pictures of the shrine with his iPhone. Down the street, outside the school, a woman in glossy-pink newscaster chic and worn trainers spoke earnestly to the camera propped up on her coworker’s shoulder.
“Fuck,” Morgan muttered. He hunched his shoulders uncomfortably and turned away from the street to scowl into the cluttered interior of the antique shop. A creepy bald doll, a mangy gray curl painted on its forehead, stared back at him with one cracked glass eye.
Someone bumped his shoulder.
“It used to be worse,” Boyd said. He leaned against Morgan, not quite on him but an easy sprawl of contact from shoulder to hip. It was casually intimate and left Morgan uncertain of how to respond. A hand on the ass he knew what to do with, but not the nudge of Boyd’s chin against his shoulder. Most of the time he was okay with what he’d put together out of his fractured childhood, but sometimes it was impossible to ignore that he was… stunted. He watched Boyd’s reflection in the window to gauge what was appropriate… and maybe just to enjoy how pretty Boyd was, from his ridiculous stubble-shadowed jaw to his heavy cheekbones, as he made a wry face. “First anniversary, my teacher wouldn’t let me go outside. I had to sit with her in the cafeteria until it got dark.”
“Reporters?”
“A few,” Boyd said. “But it wasn’t a story yet back then. It didn’t have a following. It was more of a mob—frightened parents, angry parents, bigots. Hill had come back to work a few weeks earlier, and the anniversary brought all that animosity to a head. Mrs. Calloway torched his car.”
That dragged a blurt of surprised laughter out of Morgan. “Really?”
Boyd gave a sharp jab in the ribs with his elbow. “It wasn’t funny.”
“I suppose,” Morgan said. He slid his arm around Boyd’s waist and tucked his fingers into the waistband of his jeans. Maybe if he grabbed some ass, his brain would fall into line. “I just…. People say they’d do anything for their kids, but it’s usually just hot air and back pats. She went for arson instead, so she can’t be all bad.”
“She wants to see you,” Boyd said. “At the hospital.”
Maybe it was the flash of admiration he had for the woman’s firebug tendencies, but Morgan felt an itch of concern under his skin.
“Is she okay?” he asked.
Boyd glanced up at him, the question that wasalwaysthere suddenly unmistakably on his lips, but he resisted the urge to say it.
“No,” he said. “She’s not going to die tonight, but no. Right now she’s refusing to cooperate with anyone, so if you go to see her, it’ll speed things up.”
He left what “thing” unsaid. So Morgan corrected the sentence for him.
“So I get to leave.”
