How much of that was her fault?
Twisting along the valley floor, she found the boy’s house on a stony patch beside the creek. It was smaller than most, a faded cube beneath a streaked, metal roof. Piled firewood made the porch sag on one side, and the cinder-block chimney leaned ten degrees out of true; but the stream was what made everything so stark in comparison, all that cold, clean water rushing off to better places.
Stepping from the car, she studied the slash of sky, the stream, the pale, pink house across the street. It was quiet in the shade, and hot. An old car rusted on flat tires. The yard was red dirt.
On the porch, Elizabeth knocked twice, but knew already that no one was home. The house had that empty feel. Inside, she stepped over liquor bottles and engine parts and old mail. She checked the boy’s room first. The bed was made, shoes lined against the wall. A single shelf was rowed with books and framed photographs. Elizabeth lifted a picture of Gideon’s mother taken on her wedding day. She wore a simple dress and a ring of flowers in her hair. She stood in front of the old church, her new husband young and clean-cut and handsome. The next two pictures were of Elizabeth and Gideon: a picnic in the park, one at the river. There were no other pictures of his father, and that felt about right. The last was of Gideon and Elizabeth’s parents. The boy enjoyed church and sang in the choir. Elizabeth would pick him up on Sundays and take him. She never went in herself—that was an old promise—but her parents loved the boy almost as much as she did. They’d have him for dinner once a month; ask after his grades; watch him in school plays. The reverend was determined to see Gideon through his childhood, and to remind the boy that his father had, once, been a fine man.
Moving through Gideon’s room, Elizabeth touched schoolbooks, a turtle shell, a jar of pennies. Nothing had changed, she thought, then she considered the outcome should Gideon die.
Nothing ever would.
Closing the boy’s bedroom door, she checked the rest of the house, then went looking for his father. Beckett was right about Robert Strange. He drank and was undependable, an otherwise broken man who loved the boy as best he could. He worked part-time for a shade-tree garage far out in the county. The owner was a drunk, which meant Robert could drink, too. He worked off the books, mostly on American cars, mostly for cash. That’s where he would be, she thought, at the garage and useless and drunk.
It took eighteen miles of country road to get there, the route twisting past the quarry, the gun range, the ruins of an old theater. She drove past dairy farms and plowed-under fields, turned left, and ran under heavy trees that swayed with the breeze. Two miles into the last stretch of gravel road, she turned onto raw dirt and followed the track to a corrugated shed that sat on a high bank in the last bend of the river. She turned off the engine and stared for long seconds through the glass. Hot cars and stolen tires weren’t the only illegal things this far out in the county. There were meth labs and cockfights and trailer-park brothels run by large men with long hair and swastika tattoos. People went missing this far out, and not too many years passed without hunters finding the remains of one poor soul or another. So, Elizabeth took a good, long look around and checked the gun at her back before she stepped from the car.
Even then, she didn’t like it. Dogs lolled in the shade. Beyond them, the river hissed along the bank, then flattened and slowed as it spilled across the county line. Elizabeth watched the dogs as she walked. Two of them stayed down, but one found his feet, his head low, a pink tongue hanging out as he panted in the heat. Elizabeth kept one eye on him and one on the shed. Ten feet from the bay door, she smelled grease and gasoline and cigarette smoke.
“Can I help you?”
A man stepped from beneath a truck on a hydraulic lift. He was in his late fifties with close hair and grease-stained shoulders. Six-four, she guessed. Two-thirty. He wiped thick hands on a dirty handkerchief and guarded his expression.
“My name is Elizabeth Black.”
“I know who you are, Detective. We do get the papers out here.”
Not aggressive, Elizabeth thought. Not helpful, either. “I’d like to speak to Robert Strange.”
“Never heard of him.”
“He works here four days a week. You pay him cash, off the books. That’s his moped under the pecan tree.”
She pointed at a yellow moped, and another dog stood up, a whine in its throat as if it sensed tension in the air.
The big man stepped out onto gravel, sunlight hard on his face. “Aren’t you suspended?”
Elizabeth counted five men, now, most of them holding back in the dimness of the shed. There’d be warrants out on a few of them: missed court dates, felony charges. “Are you going to make this difficult for me?”
“I’m not sure, yet.”
“I just want to talk to him.”
“Is it about his boy?”