by TA Moore
“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 might be him.”
“Fuck off,” Morgan said with a snort.
“Still want a lawyer?” Bennett asked.
“With this bullshit?” Morgan asked. He scratched his head with his free hand. “Yeah. Get me a lawyer.”
She nodded and left. The photo still lay faceup on the table. Morgan glanced down at it for a second, at the lifted chin and shadowed eyes of a probably dead—let’s be fucking real—boy.
Bullshit.
He flicked the photo off the table with an angry swipe of his hand. It slid off the metal and floated to the floor. Morgan knew who he was.
More or less.
He braced the ball of his foot against the ground and bounced his knee in a nervous tattoo. It hit the bottom of the table every few jitters. His head was full of black, sour anger and old sutures, but this was fucking bullshit.
Just some cop bullshit.
He jittered his knee and drummed his fingers against the table hard enough that he could feel the impact in his knuckles. On the wall, behind a heavy grille, the clock ticked off the minutes since Bennett had left.
It had gotten to twenty when the door opened again. Bennett stuck her head in through the crack, as though he might have gone anywhere, and then stepped back to wave someone else through the door. Halfway through, anyhow, as the guy hesitated on the threshold to stare at him.
Morgan’s fingers missed a beat as he saw the stranger and flattened his hand against the table. Damn. He gave the guy a look from his dark, cropped hair to the battered desert boots under those tight gray trousers. Other than his thick-rimmed black glasses, he didn’t look much like a public defender. In Morgan’s experience, hot lawyers worked for people with money. It was usually the pasty nerds who turned up for legal aid. They had a social conscience, but never shoulders like that.
“You’re my lawyer?” he asked skeptically.
The guy blinked, opened his mouth to answer, and then glanced over his shoulder as though he needed a prompt. Morgan snorted to himself. Maybe he was a public defender, then. It would be just Morgan’s luck to get the hot idiot.
“Not a hard question,” Morgan drawled.
Dumb and pretty blushed. It crawled up from under the heavy five o’clock shadow on his jaw and aimed at the sharp angle of his cheekbones.
“My name’s Boyd,” he said and paused. From the expression on his face, he expected that to mean something to Morgan. It didn’t.
“Yeah, what’s it short for?” Morgan asked as he hooked his free arm over the back of his chair. His eyes flicked over hot and dumb from shoulders to lean thighs since he might as well appreciate the view while he had it. “Body of Evidence?”
Smooth, Morgan thought wryly as Boyd gave him a confused look. He should know better by this point than to try to flirt sober. He did best when he was in that sweet spot of too many beers but before whiskey seemed like a good fight-provoking idea.
“No. I’m not a lawyer. I’m…. Hell, I don’t know,” Boyd admitted. “They asked me to fly in, but I’m not sure what I’m supposed to do.”
He stepped out of the way to let Bennett into the room and leaned back against the wall, his hands shoved in the pockets of his trousers. The thin fabric pulled tight over his lean hips and the soft but perfectly acceptable bulge of his package, but from the wary animal-in-a-zoo look he had aimed Morgan’s way, the display wasn’t on purpose.
Irritation crawled over Morgan’s shoulder blades, a prickle of frustration where he couldn’t reach. It wasn’t that he cared whether he got to bang this one hot nerd or not. He just knew Boyd would have given him a very different look if they’d met in a club. If Morgan weren’t chained to a table like a bad dog or a pedophile, it would be Boyd who’d itch for his attention.
“Look, Husband Material here is more fun to look at than the fucking walls,” he said flatly. “I’ve still got nothing until my lawyer gets here.”
“He’s on his way,” Bennett said. She pulled a key out of her pocket as she walked over and unlocked the cuff. “Until then I thought you might want to talk to Boyd.”
Morgan sat back and rubbed his wrist. His fingers itched as the blood seeped back into them. “What about? His dog? Where he sees himself in five years’ time? What he’s looking for in a man?”
“I’m assigned to missing persons, not the small-talk police,” Bennett said as she stepped back. She folded the cuffs together neatly and tucked them into her pocket. “But I’d suggest Sammy Calloway. I’ll get you both coffee.”
She closed the door behind her as she left, which meant there was probably someone who still had eyes on the room. Boyd gave the escape route a rueful glance and stayed where he was.
“I don’t bite,” Morgan said. He pushed the quick, intrusive flash of fantasy—bruises chewed on Boyd’s throat and down his shoulders as he squirmed under Morgan—out of the way. That could wait. He kicked the chair opposite him out from under the table hard enough that it banged into the beige wall. “Sit down and tell me what the fuck’s going on?”
Boyd studied him for a second. Then he pushed himself off the wall and walked over to grab the chair. He spun it around so he could straddle it, arms folded over the back.
“I….”
Morgan leaned forward into Boyd’s space and braced his arms on the table. “Yeah?”
He’d just done it to be a dick, but this close, he could see Boyd’s eyes behind those glasses. They were so ridiculously pretty—with thick lashes and pale-brown, almost whiskey-colored irises—it distracted him. It didn’t hurt that Boyd’s pupils expanded with clear, immediate awareness of Morgan’s presence in his space.
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 obviously not this 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 COFFEE had 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. Boyd was for Sammy Calloway, and that left Morgan to fend for himself.
“Do it,” he said. “As long as you don’t tell them I am, you can let them think I’m this Sammy kid.”
Chapter Three
“BOYD. EXCUSE me, Boyd,” a woman Boyd didn’t know stuck a square recorder in front of his face as he stepped out of the hotel. “Is it true that the police have found Samuel Calloway? Did Mark Gail tell them where to find him? Do they think that Samuel was one of his victims?”
Boyd sidestepped her. A camera flashed from the side, and he grimaced as he turned his head away.
“… friend, Boyd Maccabee.” A woman walked toward him and narrated for the camera held by the man who walked backward in front of her. “As yet there’s been no sign of the missing boy’s family—his mother and older brother.”
Another flash dazzled Boyd, this time from an iPhone held up in his direction.
“Boyd. Mr. Maccabee,” a man panted into Boyd’s personal space as he fell into step beside him. “Were you aware that Deacon Hill, your old teacher, spent a year teaching in this very area?”
Despite himself, Boyd faltered a little at that news.
“We haven’t kept in touch,” he said in a dry rasp that hurt his throat.
It was a mistake. He knew that. The key to this gauntlet was to keep his mouth shut and give them nothing but photos as you walked away. If you spoke to them, that opened a dialogue, and they felt entitled to another answer, a secret, and maybe a confession of something.
The man lifted the iPhone to catch Boyd’s face as he asked, “Do you still believe that Deacon Hill had something to do with Sammy’s disappearance? Was he a pedophile?”
Boyd kept walking. He was used to this. Every year someone would find a sad little skeleton in a shallow grave that could have been Sammy’s. Or they’d arrest some pedophile or murderer who passed through Cutter’s Gap at around the right time that year. Dead ends, usually, but they churned up old interest like silt among the blogs and journalists.
In the beginning it was Donna and Shay at the morgues and in the interview rooms as they appealed to some pervert to tell them if he’d killed Sammy. It was too much for D
onna, though, and Shay had punched the last man who asked him a question like that about Mr. Hill. So these days Boyd tried to step in when he could, vet the claims so the Calloways only had to deal with the most likely ones.
This wasn’t bad, just the loyalist and the locals, but if the information got out about Morgan, it would pick up.
The guy didn’t grab Boyd—he knew better—but he ducked in front of him. For a schlubby guy in his forties, he had good footwork. He held his iPhone thrust out to the side, and out of the corner of his eye, Boyd could see his own face captured on the screen.
“Tell me, Boyd, was Mr. Hill only interested in Sammy?” the guy asked eagerly. “Or did he molest you too?”
There was a right way to react to that. Boyd knew it. Unfortunately his brain was about a second behind his body. In the time it took to decide to walk away with dignity, he’d already grabbed the reporter’s tie and wrenched him up onto his toes.
The tie dug into the reporter’s throat, and red flushed up into the sweaty, pale face, But his outstretched hand kept the iPhone steady as he gagged. It wasn’t quite far enough away to capture the whole confrontation, but it was probably enough for a tweet.
One good punch would probably make them both feel better about their morning. Boyd would get somewhere to vent all the staticky energy that crawled under his skin, and the sweaty, red-faced man dangling from his own tie would get a good shot of it.
“Maccabee, that’s enough.”
Habit made Boyd loosen his fingers at the order from the familiar voice, and the reporter squirmed free. A thin, mean smile twisted the guy’s lips as he tugged the tie loose from his collar.
“That’ll look great online,” he said as he stuck his phone in his pocket. “I’ll tag you.”
He flicked off a quick mockery of a salute and left.
Boyd watched him go and then turned to look at Mac. “You should have let me hit him,” he said. “What are you doing here?”
Captain Joe Macintosh of Cutter’s Gap smiled thinly as he slung a leather jacket over one broad shoulder. Out of uniform he looked more like a belligerent farmer than a cop, with callused hands and a wind-burned tan over his close-cropped beard. His eyes were dark gray and steady.
