Prodigal

by TA Moore

  Morgan exhaled.

  “Here and there,” he said. “We moved around.”

  Mac waited.

  “I don’t remember,” Morgan said. Old anger was like ashes on his tongue. “I was a kid. St. Louis. Around St. Louis. Trailer parks mostly. Why? No one cared that my childhood was shitty back then. Why would you give a damn now?”

  “Because if you were in St Louis, then you couldn’t have been here.”

  “We both know I wasn’t.”

  Mac nodded. “But if I have a school registration for you in St. Louis—picture of you in a scout troop, record of your birth, even—when we know Sammy was here? Then we won’t have to wait until we can get a sample from Shay, compare the two. You won’t have to stay in town. No more sleeping on Boyd’s couch.”

  Yeah, well, one way or another, Morgan had no intention of spending that many more nights folded up under a too-narrow blanket on a too-short bit of furniture. He wouldn’t have spent last night there if guilt hadn’t landed such a good haymaker on Boyd.

  That information probably wouldn’t convince Mac to open the damn door and let him out, though.

  “I’ll see if I can find anything,” Morgan said. “I can call some people. They might remember where I started.”

  “Any chance your mother might have anything?” Mac asked with the careful cadence of someone who knew he was on thin ice. “Could you ask her?”

  “No.”

  “If she knows something—”

  “She’s dead.”

  The words dropped flatly into the conversation. Morgan grimaced to himself. He usually thought about the consequences to a lie before he told it.

  Mac grimaced. “Fine,” he said. “I’ll see if I can track anything back through her contact with social services. And, um, sorry about your loss.”

  Morgan shrugged. “I remember her every time my jaw hurts in cold weather. Are we done?”

  There was a pause as Mac looked at him. “Almost,” he said as he stood and scooped up the coat. It ended up draped over his arm as he jerked his head toward the door. “Come on. I want to show you something.”

  “Last time I heard that, it was from a fat guy in a trench coat.” Morgan pushed himself off the wall without bothering to take his hands out of his pockets. “I laid him out. Just so we’re clear.”

  Mac opened the door and waved Morgan through it. “You’re not my type.”

  “Too good-looking?”

  “Too much of an asshole,” Mac said bluntly. “I get enough of that at work without taking it home.”

  Yeah, that was probably fair enough. Morgan glanced around the station as he followed Mac down the thin-carpeted halls. Sunlight squeezed into the building through slatted blinds, long strips of it laid over the MDF desks and white plastered walls. There was a drunk guy cuffed to a bench as he slurred abuse at the world, an irritated prostitute in skin-tight Lycra and six-inch plastic heels, and three sullen-looking slouching teenagers with inky fingers and defiant expressions.

  “I thought small towns were supposed to be wholesome,” Morgan said.

  “That’s just what we tell the tourists,” Mac said tiredly.

  He led the way to his office and opened the door to let Morgan go in first. It was dim inside, the only light from a half window tucked up high in a corner, and it smelled of paper and Tiger Balm. Morgan made a mental note to go for the knees if he ever got in a fight with Mac. There were framed pictures on the wall. Some of them looked as though they’d been there as long as the wall, old photos of the town in blurred sepia tones, while others showed Mac in uniform with various shades of gray in his beard.

  On the far side of the room, wedged under the wall to make the most of the small window, was a desk covered in paperwork, old photos, and files.

  “The Calloway file,” Mac said as he stepped around Morgan. He picked up a loose cassette from the desk and glanced at the label. “Interviews with Shay Calloway. Sixteen, and his mother threw him out because the captain back then convinced her he was involved.”

  “Was he?”

  Mac shrugged as he put the cassette back down. “We don’t know. That’s the thing about this case, Morgan, we don’t know anything. Was Shay involved? I don’t think so, but Sergeant Lawrence and the woman who lives down the street from him and calls us every week about how her kid saw him in the street… they disagree.”

  He unearthed a thick file held closed by rubber bands.

  “Deacon Hill was a teacher at the school and one of the first suspects, along with Shay. Never found any evidence, but these are the anonymous reports that people called in about who he had sex with and how, that he’d spoken to a kid in the supermarket, that he’d looked at a kid funny, that he was seen three blocks away from the Calloway house five months before this happened. In the end, he left town. I can tell you where he went because for years, every time anything happened to a kid in whatever town he was in, or, hell, whatever county, we’d get a call to see how we liked him for the Calloway case.”

  “Did you?” Morgan asked.

  “Some did. Some didn’t,” Mac said. He rubbed his hand over his face and up into his hair with a flash of exhaustion that broke through his facade. “I could never decide if he was a good liar or a good man. This case didn’t happen fifteen years ago, Morgan. It’s been happening for fifteen years, every day that someone asks Boyd if he really doesn’t remember anything or Donna wakes up and wonders if her son cried for her when he died. Fifteen years, Morgan. I want this to end. I hope you can help me with that.”

  The admission was heartfelt. Genuine. It made Morgan recoil as though it were salt on raw skin. Expectations and him had never mixed well. He turned and walked over to peer at one of the framed photos on the wall. Velvet drapes and bright lights filled the background while Mac posed awkwardly with some sort of plaque between him and an expensively dressed man with an asshole’s empty smile.

  “Yeah, well, I guess an open case like this doesn’t do your career much good,” he mocked.

  Mac’s sigh was a harsh exhalation that was nearly a groan. “I don’t think it’s done anyone in this town much good,” he said. “Shay’s a good man—”

  Morgan turned around. “Unless he killed his brother, right?” he interrupted.

  That made Mac wince and rub his eyebrow with one thumb. He pulled a rueful face. “That’s the question, isn’t it? The one I hope you can help me answer.”

  “And what if I’m telling the truth?” Morgan asked. “What if I don’t know anything more than you?”

  Mac’s face hardened. “Then what good are you to me?” He leaned over and pulled open a draw to lift out a plain white envelope with his name scratched on the front in pen. “There’s a room available in the Inn. And this time, do as you’re told and stay away from the Calloways. And Boyd.”

  Chapter Seven

  THEY WEREN’T supposed to call them trailers anymore. The proper term was manufactured home. Whatever you called them, they still burned like a bastard. It was like someone had set the fire to fast-forward.

  Hot yellow flames licked out through the shattered windows and blistered the aluminum siding. The porch was already burned down to charred sticks, the front door buckled and red-hot as the fire ate into it. The water from the tanker sizzled and spat as it hit the hot sides, and a cloud of steam condensed on masks and floated like fog in the air.

  Inside a cat or a baby screamed. It could be either. The neighbors who’d turned out to watch, lined up on the far side of the street or pushed up against the cordon around the truck, had been no help. Whoever lived here kept to themselves, worked late, didn’t socialize. Someone said they saw a kid hanging around, although they didn’t know who it belonged to, so the crew had to assume they could be inside.

  Boyd stood on the hood of an up-on-blocks old Camry and flexed gloved hands around the shaft of the ax to check his grip. He exhaled. Everything else—the fact that he still hadn’t gotten rid of his old couch, the fact that Mac had told him to
stay away from Morgan, wondering whether Mac knew he’d slept with him—dropped away as the situation finally got immediate enough to bully his brain into focus.

  “Breach it!” Harry ordered.

  Boyd swung, and the ax head cut through the thin outer wall like scissors through foil. Hot air and a foul cloud of smoke belched out at him. He squinted and swung again until he’d ripped a hole in the side of the structure.

  “Going in.”

  He grabbed the sides, hot even through his gloves, and climbed in. The floor felt compromised, bouncy as a dance floor but not dangerously so yet. He’d come in through the family room. There was a couch that had probably been pink before it was stained gray with smoke and ashes, and a TV with a shattered screen. It looked more like from a fist than from the heat.

  “Hey! Hello. Anyone hear me? Stay where you are. I’ll come and get you, but just yell. Let me know.”

  The squall got louder.

  Boyd followed it down into one of the back rooms. It was laid out like a kid’s bedroom, with an empty cot and pictures torn out of storybooks pinned up on the wall. The squaller, however, was a skinny gray cat hunched on the floor.

  “Hey, noisy,” he said. “C’mere.”

  He reached for the cat. It swiped at his hand with a grubby paw, hissed—all tiny white fangs and patchwork black-and-pink mouth—and skittered under the dresser at the far side of the room. It screamed at him from under there.

  “We got a cat,” he said as he went down carefully on his knees. “Kid’s room here, but—”

  “Oh damn, can you get it out?” Jessie asked over the radio. “Do cats still hate you?”

  “They don’t hate me,” Boyd said. “They just don’t—”

  He broke off as he looked under the dresser, ready to scruff the screaming cat. It was tucked up next to the body of an unconscious toddler, claws tangled in the Dora the Explorer pajamas as it wailed unhappily.

  “We have a kid too,” Boyd said. He reached in, ignored the cat’s attempt to bite him, and tapped the fat baby cheek. Nothing. The child’s lips were pale, almost gray, and their eyes bruised. “They crawled under the dresser to hide, but they’re not responsive now.”

  Kids always hid. It was surprising where they could squeeze into when they were scared enough. But if they went in, they’d come out. Boyd grabbed the collar of the kid’s shirt and pulled. The cat came along for the ride, tangled in the kid’s shirt and screaming.

  Shit. Boyd shoved up his mask with the back of his arm and pulled off his glove. He grabbed the cat by the scruff of the neck and peeled its claws free before it—she, from the fat belly on her—tore up the toddler. The cat twisted around and sank her teeth into the web of flesh between his thumb and fingers.

  “Shit,” Boyd swore as the pain stabbed up into his wrist. He yanked the cat free, shoved her into his pocket, and sealed the flap down over her head. The kid was still slack in his arms, T-shirt rucked up to show off a round, rash-spotted stomach. He pressed his bare fingers to the kid’s throat. The pulse fluttered fast and unhappy under the pressure, but it was going. “It looks like the kid is sick. Probably why they were left home. Coming out now.”

  He snapped his visor back down and cradled the kid against his chest as he dodged the spread of flames on his way back out. The floor was eaten through in spots now, and flames poked up through the holes in the curled-back linoleum like fingers. Boyd stuck close to the walls and carefully picked his way along.

  Jessie met him at the hole in the wall, curly black hair plastered to his head from the water, and took the kid so Boyd could scramble down. Danni clapped him on the shoulder and went in with Tom to finish the sweep. Boyd pulled off his helmet—even the hot afternoon sun a relief from the too-hot-to-sweat scorch inside the trailer—and followed Jessie over to the rig.

  It only took a couple of minutes of oxygen and cold cloths before the toddler stirred, coughed, and whined miserably as she snotted black. By the time the ambulance got there and they could hand the kid over, the sound of miserable baby pierced the air.

  The assembled neighbors—a couple of dog walkers, one guy who’d parked to watch—applauded and cheered. Boyd handed the cat, its whiskers curled from the heat and paws raw, to Jessie, and sat down in the mud to lean back against the tires of the truck.

  A flash went off the to the side of him, and he blinked, dazzled by the unexpected flare. He knuckled his eyes roughly and scrambled back to his feet.

  “A child was found inside the house,” a reporter said as he shoved a microphone into Boyd’s face. “Is this fire anything to do with the reputed new breakthrough in the Calloway case?”

  “Get out of my face,” Boyd said, “and get back behind the line.”

  The camera flashed again. Boyd held up a hand to block it as the reporter, handheld video camera in one hand, got in front of him.

  “We have sources that say Captain Macintosh is working on new information and that he’s confident he’s finally found who took Sammy Calloway. That he actually has someone in town to help with the case. A witness? A suspect.”

  Boyd hooked his fingers over his lower lips and whistled to catch the attention of the patrol officers on duty. The reporter glanced around too and realized his access was about to be pulled. His voice sped up as he hurried through his questions.

  “Fifteen years later you’ll finally know what happened to your friend. How does that make you feel? Will you miss being at the center of the story?”

  A lot. The angry, sharp words filled the back of Boyd’s throat until his jaw ached with them. Fuck off was right up there, and Trying not to think about it, thanks right after it.

  “No comment,” he said grimly instead. “Now get back behind the cordon with the rest of the… public. Before you get hurt.”

  It wasn’t a threat, but despite Boyd’s best efforts, it sounded a bit like one.

  The camera flashed again as one of the cops finally slogged over to grab the two men and escort them back to the pavement.

  Boyd rubbed his hand over his hair. The center of the story? Fuck, he’d never been the center of the story. He’d always been the stand-in, the understudy to his own life.

  At this point he didn’t know what it would be like to be in the spotlight of his own story. He wasn’t even sure he wanted to pay the price to get there… to actually know.

  BACK IN the station, Boyd leaned against the sink and scraped a blade down his cheek. He rinsed it under the tap, and short black hairs caught on the worn porcelain. In a couple of hours, the stubble would be back. By this evening it would look like he hadn’t bothered at all.

  Maybe he should grow a proper beard. Boyd stopped midstroke and considered his reflection as he imagined the scruff grown out. It would make him look like his dad. He grimaced and finished the stroke, hair scraped off down to the sharp angle of his jaw. Reason enough not to.

  Shay’s image was caught in the mirror as he slouched in through the door, shoved Jessie’s gear to the left, and sat down. He leaned forward and braced his elbows on his knees.

  “Good job today,” he said. “The kid going to be okay?”

  Boyd flicked his tongue over the scab on his lip. “Yeah,” he said. “Her dad’s probably going to lose shared custody, though.”

  “Serves him right,” Shay said flatly. “He should count himself lucky to see her at all. She could have died. I wouldn’t let him, if I was the judge.”

  It wasn’t entirely fair. The man had been devastated when he got back and found his house gone, his daughter in the hospital, and his ex-wife on the way. He’d had to work, and the day care wouldn’t take her with a fever. But he thought she’d sleep through.

  Boyd remembered that his mom had done the same, although he was older. He was dosed with Benadryl and left to sleep away the morning until Mrs. Jenkins from across the street made it over to watch him.

  The father had made a mistake, but when you didn’t have any good choices, you had to pick the best of the bad ones.
/>   That wouldn’t fly with Shay, not where kids were concerned. He’d never let himself off the hook, so why would he be kinder to anyone else?

  “What do you want, Shay?” Boyd asked as he finished his shave and wiped his face with a worn towel.

  Shay scratched his head, and his short-cropped blond hair stuck up in messy tufts. He made a face. “To apologize,” he said. “The other night I was out of line. I’m still not happy about it, but what you do—who you do—is your call. I shouldn’t have punched you.”

  “Took you a couple of days to work that out?” Boyd asked.

  Shay spread his hands in front of him. Both sets of knuckles were scabbed and swollen, and there were blue bruises under the skin.

  “Got drunk. Got in a fight….” Shay flexed his fingers and grimaced. “Maybe a couple. Woke up and it was Monday.”

  “It’s Tuesday.”

  “Yeah, well, I didn’t say I was sober Monday,” Shay said. He waved off Boyd’s look of concern as he tucked his roughed-up hands under his thighs. “I don’t have a problem with booze, Boyd. I have problems, and sometimes the booze helps.”

  “Tell the courts that if whoever you punch ends up dead or in the hospital,” Boyd said as he grabbed a shirt and pulled it on over his white T-shirt. “I’m sure it’ll make a big difference.”

  Shay snorted skeptically. “I’ve never won a fight when I was drunk,” he said. “Hell, for all I remember, I could have laid out a tree. We okay?”

  It would probably save Boyd a lot of heartache to say no. Instead he sighed and offered Shay his hand to haul him onto his feet.

  “What else we going to be?” he asked with a shrug. “But you knew that. What else, Shay?”

  Shay hung on to his hand, fingers rough from years of fights and being stuck in engines. “I need to talk to that guy,” he said. “The one you brought back.”

  “Morgan.”

  “Not calling himself Sammy?”

  “I told you, he says he’s not.”

  “And what do you think?”

  It was a good question. Boyd wished he had a good answer. Every time he decided one way, his brain threw a “what if” at him to chew over. If it was Sammy? Jesus, Boyd didn’t even know how’d they would all cope with that—what it would mean. And if he wasn’t? In that case Boyd had put his apartment up as the bond for a stranger on the basis of pretty eyes… and the rest.