“I have incomplete memories of the years before my abduction. The trauma—”
“What was your favorite book? What color are the walls in your grandparents’ living room? Where did you have your ninth birthday party?” Morales continued. “You can’t answer any of these questions because you’re not Daniel Tate. I bet you didn’t have a clue who Daniel Tate was until you decided to start impersonating him, or you would have done a better job of it.”
“That’s not—”
“Want to see something?” she said. She pulled a sheet of paper from her folder and placed it in front of me. There was the name of a laboratory at the top and a long string of numbers I couldn’t make sense of. Morales pointed to a section at the bottom.
Probability of relation: <.0067%
“This is a DNA test we ran on samples from you and Nicholas Tate,” she said.
The ball in my stomach contracted painfully, becoming tighter and hotter, and a bitter taste flooded my mouth.
“We didn’t give you any samples,” I said.
“No, but you did both have bottles of water with your lunch the day I came to see you at school,” she said with that calm, terrible smile. She was enjoying this.
“You can’t do that—”
“You abandoned the DNA,” she said. “It’s perfectly legal.”
“You must have gotten the wrong bottles from the trash.”
“It’s possible,” she conceded. “This could all be some horrible mistake. Lynch and I could be dead wrong about you, and you could be exactly the miracle you seem to be. We don’t really have any solid evidence.”
“That’s right,” I said. “So I think I’ll be leaving.”
“Okay,” she said.
“Okay?”
“Sure, just as soon as you tell me”—she reached again for a sheet in her folder—“who this is?”
She slid a photocopy across the table to me. The image was small, taking up just a corner of the sheet. On it was a boy with a gap-toothed smile holding a T-ball bat, his name printed in block letters at the bottom.
? ? ?
It was over.
? ? ?
Morales, unaware that the world had just ended, was still talking.
“This was found in your locker when the school coincidentally conducted a random drug spot search on the day we happened to be visiting,” she said. Just hours before I’d taken the picture home, because her presence at the school had spooked me and I was worried the picture wasn’t safe there anymore. “Now, this is a pretty common name, and it’ll take me a while to track down every boy in Canada who has it, but what do you want to bet that I’ll do it and that eventually I’ll find him?”
I could barely keep my head up, and my voice was faint even in my own ears when I spoke.
“What do you want?” I asked.
She smiled. “To put you in prison.”
“You’ve got nothing,” I said. “Some picture and a water bottle you can’t even prove was mine.”
“That’s true,” she said. “I don’t have anything now. But in about ten minutes I’ll have a court order for an official DNA test.”
She could be bluffing, but I doubted it. As soon as they got my DNA, the game was over.
I had only one chip left to play. If I could do it.
Morales didn’t want me, some two-bit con artist. She wanted a win in this case, the one that had been hanging over her head for six years. She’d let me go if I offered her the bigger fish she was really after wanted: Danny’s murderer. Patrick. I couldn’t give her bulletproof evidence that Patrick had killed Danny, but I could set her on the right path. The only reason she hadn’t cracked this case already was that she’d been looking into the events of the wrong day all of these years. As soon as she knew that Danny had died on Friday afternoon and not Saturday evening, she’d find some evidence—cell phone logs, surveillance at the Hidden Hills gates, something—that would show what had truly happened.
All I had to do was tell her the truth.
I tried to tell myself it was the right thing to do. That Danny deserved to have his fate known and his killer brought to justice.
But I knew, if I did it, it wasn’t because I gave a damn about Daniel Tate. It was because I wanted to save my own skin. If I told Morales, I was no better than I’d ever been taught to believe.
“You don’t want to expose me,” I said, hating myself with every word. “You want to know what I know.”
Morales cocked her head at me. “And what is that?”
“You give me unqualified immunity and let me leave,” I said, “and I’ll give you Danny’s killer.”
“How?” she said. “Have you got proof?”
“Ironclad, no,” I said. “But I know things. Where you should look, who you should talk to. You’ll finally be able to nail Patrick.”
“You’re going to have to be more specific than that,” she said.
I clenched my jaw shut hard, until it hurt. But it didn’t stop me speaking. “I have an audio recording. Someone explaining how Patrick had them create him a false alibi for the time Danny went missing. It’s on my computer at home.”
“You bring me that,” she said, “and then you’ll get your immunity.”
? ? ?
Lynch drove me home to collect the evidence, while Morales stayed behind to get started on the paperwork. He stopped his car down the street from the Tate house, close enough that he could see the front gate at the end of the driveway, but not so close that anyone could see him. He didn’t want to accidentally tip Patrick off that the net was closing in around him.
“You’ve got ten minutes,” he told me.
“It might take longer than that,” I said, “especially if my mother or sister is home.”
Lynch’s lip curled in disgust, and it took me a moment to realize why. I’d called them my mother and sister, and I hadn’t thought twice about it.
“Just don’t fuck around,” he said. “I’ll be here watching, so you’ve got nowhere to go.”
“Believe me,” I said. “I just want to get my immunity and get the hell out of here. I’m not going to do anything to screw that up.”
He checked his mirrors to make sure no one was coming and then motioned for me to get out of the car. I walked back to the house slowly, casually, my head down and my hands in my pockets. I reached the gate and entered the code that would open it. As soon as the gate was closed behind me and I was out of the sight of Lynch’s car, I began to run.
? ? ?
“Hey, lover,” Ren said when she picked up the phone. “Where are you?”
“Can I ask you something?”
“Are you running?” she asked. “Your breathing is weird.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Will you run away with me?”
“What?”
“Ren, listen to me.” I tried to keep my voice calm. “I have to leave Hidden Hills, the States, everything. Today. Now. But I don’t want to leave you. For the first time in my life there’s something I don’t want to lose and it’s you, so I’m asking you to come with me.”
“What’s going on, Danny?” She sounded alarmed.
“Just say you’ll come with me,” I said. “Even if it’s only for a little while. I’ll tell you everything.”
She was silent a moment and then whispered, “Okay.”