“Anything missing?”
“Dunno. Wasn’t looking for that.”
The sharp downwards flick of the kid’s eyes tells Cal what he was looking for. A note, with his name on it. Here’s where I’m going, or I’ll be back, or anything at all.
“Find any money?” he asks.
That makes Trey’s eyes snap up again, hot with anger. “I wouldn’t’ve taken it.”
“I know,” Cal says. “Find any?”
“Nah.”
“You expect to? Brendan normally keep cash at home?”
“Yeah. Envelope stuck to the underneath of his jumper drawer. Sometimes he’d give me a fiver out of it, if he’d done a nixer. See? He knew I wouldn’t rob it.”
“And the envelope was empty.”
“Yeah.”
“When was the last time you saw cash in there?”
“Coupla days before he went. I came in, he was counting it on the bed. Few hundred, maybe.”
And the day Brendan disappeared, so did his savings. Trey is no dummy. There’s no way he’s missed where that points.
Cal says, “And you think someone took him.”
Trey bites down on his lip. He nods.
“OK,” Cal says. “Is there someone you’ve got in mind, who might do something like that? Someone around here who’s dangerous, who’s maybe done sketchy stuff before?”
Trey stares at Cal like the question is beyond an answer. In the end he shrugs.
“I don’t mean pissant crap like shoplifting or moonshining. Anyone who’s ever kidnapped someone before? Hurt someone real bad?”
Another shrug, this one more exaggerated: How would I know?
“Anyone your mama tells you to stay away from?”
“Gurny Barry Moloney. He tries to get kids to come with him for sweets, and if you say no he cries.”
“He ever try that on you?”
Trey blows air scornfully out of the corner of his mouth. “When I was a kid.”
“What’d you do?”
“Legged it.”
“How ’bout Brendan, he ever have trouble with this guy when he was little? Or any of your other brothers and sisters?”
“Nah. Gurny Barry’s not . . .” Trey’s lip curls in disgust. “He’s pathetic. People throw things at him.”
“Anyone else you’ve been warned about?”
“Nah.”
Cal puts down his pen and leans back in his chair, rubbing mattress ache out of his neck. “You gotta spell it out for me, kid,” he says. “How come you think your brother’s been kidnapped? You’re telling me no one had any beef with him, he wasn’t mixed up in any bad stuff, just a regular guy. How come you’re so sure he didn’t just take off?”
Trey says, with absolute bedrock certainty, “He wouldn’t do that.”
Cal reached the point a long time ago where those words make him tired for all of humanity. All the innocents say that, and believe it to the bone, right up until the moment when they can’t any more. My husband would never do that to our children, my baby ain’t no thief. Cal feels like he ought to stand on a street corner handing out warnings, little pieces of paper that just say: Anyone could do anything.
“OK,” he says. He closes his notebook and goes to slide it into his breast pocket, out of habit, before he realizes he doesn’t have one. “Let’s see where we get. How do you get from here to your place?”
That gives Trey’s head a wary backwards tilt. “Up past Mart Lavin’s about a mile, then there’s a road goes off that way, to the mountain. We live a coupla miles up there. Why?”
“Your mama know you come here?”
Trey shakes his head, which comes as no surprise. “No one,” he says.
Cal is less confident about that than Trey is, given Mart’s view of his backyard, but he decides not to bring this up. “For now,” he says, “let’s keep it that way. So if I show up at your place and start visiting with your mama, you never saw me before. Can you do that?”
Trey looks less than delighted at the idea of Cal showing up at his place. “You want me to do this or not?” Cal asks.
“Yeah.”
“Then do what I say. I know how to go about this. You don’t.”
Trey acknowledges this with a nod. He looks wrung out and loosened, like he just made it through having a tooth pulled with no anesthetic. He says, “Is this how you did it when you were a cop?”
“Near enough.”
Trey watches him and turns things over, behind those gray eyes. “How come you became a cop?”
“Seemed like a good steady job. I needed one of those.” Alyssa was on the way, and the fire department wasn’t hiring.
“Was your dad a cop?”
“Nah,” Cal says. “My daddy wasn’t a steady man.”
“What’d he do?”
“Little bit of this, little bit of that. Traveling around selling things, mostly. Vacuum cleaners, for a while. Another time it was toilet paper and cleaning supplies, to businesses. Like I said, he wasn’t steady.”
“But they let you be a cop anyway.”
“Sure. They didn’t care if my daddy was a billy goat, long as I could do the job right.”
“Was it fun?”
“Sometimes,” Cal says. His feelings for the job, which started out wholehearted and powerful, gradually got tangled enough that these days he prefers not to think about it. “Sounds like Brendan’s good with electrical stuff. He ever do anything like that for people on the side, pick up a few bucks?”
Trey looks baffled. “Yeah. Sometimes. Fixing things, like.”
“Could he do some rewiring in this place, if I needed it?”
Trey gives him a look that says Cal has lost his mind.
“This isn’t like my badge days,” Cal says, “when I could wade on in asking any questions I wanted. If I’m gonna go around bringing up your brother’s name in conversation, I need a reason.”
Trey considers this. “He fixed the wiring in our sitting room before. He’s gone, but. People know that.”
“Yeah, but I might not,” Cal says. “I’m just a stranger that hasn’t got the hang of who’s who around here. If I hear a name mentioned as a guy who did some electrical work, how’m I supposed to know where he is or isn’t?”
For the first time that day, a small smile lands on Trey’s face. “You’re gonna act thick,” he says.
“You think I can pull that off?”
The grin widens. “No problem to you.”
“Smartass kid,” Cal says, but it pleases him to see the drawn look dissolve. “Now get outa my hair. Before your mama wonders where you’ve gotten to.”
“She won’t.”
“Then get before I change my mind.”
The kid bounces out of his chair with alacrity, but he grins at Cal again as he does it, to show he’s not worried. He takes for granted that Cal, his word once given, won’t go back on it. Cal finds this both more touching and more intimidating than he would have expected.
“Can I come back tomorrow? See what you’ve found out?”
“Jeez, kid,” Cal says. “Give me time. I don’t want you expecting anything for at least a week or two. Maybe never.”
“Yeah,” Trey says. “Can I come anyway?”
“Yeah, you can. You got an appointment with a desk and a toothbrush.”
Trey nods, a single definite jerk, making it clear he takes that seriously.
“Come in the afternoon,” Cal says. “I got places to go in the morning.”
The kid’s ears prick up. “What’re you gonna do?”
“Less you know, the better.”
“I wanta do something.”
He’s all charged up and fizzing with energy, practically bouncing on his toes. Cal likes seeing him that way, but at the same time it makes him wince. He’s already pretty sure what he’s going to find. Brendan is textbook runaway, ticks just about every box: a bored, restless, underachieving kid with a shitty home life, no job or girlfriend or close friends to root him down, no career plan, in an area that offers him no prospects and no fun. On the other side of the scales, there’s apparently nothing: no serious criminal activity, no serious criminal associates, no mental illness, nothing. Cal puts this at about five percent chance of an accident, five percent suicide, ninety percent up and gone. Or maybe eighty-nine percent up and gone, one percent something else.