“You could have just cooperated,” he said. “But you had to be an asshole.”
Once he was close enough, Lo hooked a short, mean punch around into Morgan’s side. The kidney shot sliced a hot, sharp pain through Morgan’s guts and down into his cock. It made his knees go rubbery, but Lo propped him up with his shoulder. Morgan clenched his teeth and swallowed hard as he tried to will the pain back into his side.
“And now so did I,” Lo said as he turned Morgan around and shoved him back into the bar. He pulled Morgan’s arms back and yanked the cuffs tightly around his wrists. “So answer Owen’s question, Morgan. You understand your rights as they’ve been read to you?”
“Sure,” Morgan said as Lo pulled him off the bar. In the middle of the bar, Rookie Owen stood with his gun still awkwardly clutched in one hand. “I get exactly how this is going to go.”
IT TURNEDout he was wrong.
“Do you know this boy?” Detective Heather Bennett asked as she slid an eight-by-ten glossy across the scarred metal table.
Morgan ignored it as he glanced around the beige box of the Huntington Police Department’s interview room. He clocked the two discreet cameras in the corners of the room and the long window. Then he looked back at Bennett.
“No,” he said.
“You didn’t look.” She tapped the paper with one short-nailed finger and raised her eyebrows. “Have you ever seen this boy before?”
“Have you ever seen due process? I want a lawyer.”
Bennett sat back and crossed her arms. She didn’t have much makeup on, and, instead of the usual female detective’s “just one of the boys” uniform of T-shirts and button-downs, she had on a high-necked cream sweater. It made her look like someone’s TV mom, which probably served her well with some perps. Not really Morgan’s thing, though.
“You’re not a suspect,” she said. “We just need to ask some questions.”
Yeah. He’d heard that before—never fallen for it but definitely heard it. Morgan lifted one hand and rattled the cuffs that shackled him to the table.
“I’m under arrest,” he said. “And I want a lawyer, and then you can ask me about this kid all you want.”
She pursed her lips. “If you haven’t done anything wrong, what do you have to hide?”
“Yeah, said every cop ever just before they frame you,” Morgan said. “Lawyer. Or cut me loose.”
“This is Samuel Calloway,” Bennett said as she picked up the photo and held it in front of Morgan’s face so he couldn’t avoid it. “He was only eight years old in this picture. It was the last time anyone saw him, that we know of.”
Despite himself, Morgan looked at the photo. It was of a tow-headed kid in a too-big camo jacket, with a bag on his back and a hard-to-read expression on his face as he looked around and up toward the camera. Something about the kid made Morgan think he was probably a dick and deserved whatever he got.
He slouched back in the narrow plastic chair, arm stretched out over the table, and waited. He absently tapped his fingers, and after a moment, Bennett lowered the photo and set it facedown on the table.
“A few months ago you were a person of interest in a carjacking, weren’t you?” she said as though she didn’t know. After a quick shuffle through her file, she pulled out a report, glanced at it, and nodded. “That’s right. If the driver hadn’t recovered, it would have been a murder investigation.”
Tap.
Tap.
Morgan could feel the pressure against his fingertips as they hit the table harder, but he couldn’t do anything to stop himself. He shifted in his chair, and the legs scraped against the tiles. “I was cleared.”
“But we did get a warrant for your DNA,” Bennett said. She tucked the report back into her folder and stood up with it tucked under her arm. “It didn’t get a match on the donation left at the scene of the carjacking, but it still went into our database.”
Shit. Morgan pushed his tongue into his cheek, against the scrape his teeth had left earlier. He racked his brain. Violence wasn’t his thing, not professionally, but he’d done his share of… off-the-books work, but nothing that would be worth this sort of trouble on the cops’ part.
“The last thing we expected was for your DNA to be flagged up in relation to a case in West Virginia,” Bennett said. “Samuel Calloway’s case.”
Morgan grimaced. “I never touched the kid.”
“We know,” Bennett said. “It was fifteen years ago. We don’t think you kidnapped Sammy Calloway. We think you mightbehim.”
“Fuck off,” Morgan said with a snort.
“Still want a lawyer?” Bennett asked.
