It could just be nerves—at this point Boyd probably thought Morgan was some sort of serial killer—but the hint of a flush under his skin and the soft, wet noise in his throat as he swallowed nervously suggested otherwise. That soothed Morgan’s bruised ego a little. It needed it.
Boyd leaned back and glanced toward the door, his jaw tight with irritation. “Right now I’d like to know that too,” he muttered. “Look, when the police called Shay—Sammy’s brother—they just said that they’d found a DNA match for Sammy. It’s been fifteen years. We thought it would be a body. Not—you.”
It was Morgan’s turn to pull back. He could respect the suspicion in Boyd’s eyes, but the thready squirm of hope made him uncomfortable. People who looked at you like that wanted something from you to feed that worm in their head. Usually that you were someone else, although never quite as literally as this.
“This is fucking sick,” Morgan said as he pushed back his chair and stood up. He pointed his finger at the camera in the corner. “What sort of game are you bastards playing here?”
“You don’t believe it?” Boyd asked.
Morgan whipped around to glare at him. “Of course I don’t.” He spread his arms, his booze T-shirt pulled tight over his shoulders. “Do I look like an idiot? What are you, some undercover cop? Am I meant to fall into your arms and unburden myself of some shit Bennett thinks I did? Because you’re of luck there. I have nothing to do with this.”
Anger flickered over Boyd’s face, a quick glimpse of something dark and sharp under the cat eyes and careful demeanor. Pretty boy had a temper after all.
“If this is a setup, I’m not in on it,” he said. “But what are you supposed to be confessing to? Did you kill someone? Have a rich man locked in the trunk of your car? Because unless it’s something like that, this seems a really complicated scenario to set up.”
“Then it’s a mistake,” Morgan snorted as he dropped his arms. He tucked his hands in his pockets and paced restlessly back and forth. “I’m obviouslynotthis dead kid. So stop looking at me like he’s gonna unzip my skin.”
Boyd got up. He was shorter than Morgan, although not by much. There was something very tired about his sharp-boned face as he nodded.
“Okay,” he said.
Morgan faltered midstep and looked over at him suspiciously. “Okay?” he said. “That’s it? You’re just going to let this go? Not going to try and convince me the cops know what they’re talking about?”
“About who you are? That sounds like a dick move,” Boyd pointed out. “Besides, all you have to do to prove it is produce one childhood photo from here or a vacation in Disney or anywhere that wasn’t within fifty miles of Cutter’s Gap, really.”
Yeah. That would be easy, wouldn’t it? At least it would for someone else, someone like Boyd, who probably had boxes of childhood memorabilia and went away with his family during school vacations. Fuck, who’d even gone to school.
“Shut up,” Morgan snarled at Boyd, suddenly unreasonably angry with him. He stalked over to kick the door. “Get me a lawyer. And either charge me with something or cut me loose!”
THE COFFEEhad gotten cold. Morgan drank it anyhow. There was something perversely satisfying about how bad it tasted, the sour film it left on his tongue. Boyd was gone, hustled out of the room by Bennett, and the nerd from the Public Defender’s Office was finally there.
Kelly Hagen. It could be worse. She was pasty—too much time spent under the cheap fluorescent lights of the police station would do that to you—but she’d been at this long enough that the mean had worked through her idealism. Her hand didn’t need to be held through the disillusionment of you being a criminal.
“They’re right,” she said as she set down the file. “The DNA matches.”
Morgan leaned back and snorted, the edges of the plastic chair hard against his shoulders. “And DNA never lies? You’ve heard of the Innocence Project, right?”
“They aren’t trying to convict you of anything,” Kelly said. She picked at the rime of almost-gone lipstick on her lower lip. “It looks like the sample was pretty degraded from the match. It’s over a decade old, and it’s some Podunk, dead-end town that probably keeps their DNA sample in the fridge with their sandwiches. But it’s not exactly in your best interests to argue that right now.”
“Unless there’s a reward or a rich uncle who’s really missed this kid,” Morgan said. “I don’t see what’s in it for me.”
Kelly absently twiddled with her earrings. The row of neat silver studs that marched in almost militaristic precision down the outer curve of her left ear glittered as she turned them.
“Don’t play naïve,” she told him. “With your record, you can’t afford to be. Little Sammy Calloway is a tragedy and an unsolved mystery wrapped into one, with a waiting list of talk show hosts eager to pounce on the first sign of a miscarriage of justice. Morgan Graves punched a cop and resisted arrest. That’s a couple of years in prison, even though you hadn’t done anything to justify the arrest. Under the circumstances, I know who I’d rather be.”
No, she didn’t.
“Fuck’s sake,” Morgan muttered as he ran his hand through his hair. “This Sammy kid had family. His brother. His parents, I guess. Boyd. I’m an asshole, but even I’m not enough of an asshole to crash into their lives and give them false hope that he’s alive.”
“Neither am I,” Kelly told him quellingly. “I’m not going to give you a cheat sheet of this Sammy’s life so you can pass yourself off as him. Just shut up, don’t disprove the theory yet, and let me do my thing. Deal?”
Morgan drained his coffee. A hit of sweetness made his teeth ache as he sucked in a sludge of half-dissolved sugar. He licked the grit of it from his mouth as he chewed over his options. It didn’t take long. There weren’t that many.
“I don’t like it.”
“And I didn’t say you had to, but if you don’t want to go to jail, then you’ll do it.”
For a second, Morgan thought of Boyd and the cautious hope in his pale eyes. But that was for Sammy Calloway.Boydwas for Sammy Calloway, and that left Morgan to fend for himself.
