Kent and his partner exchanged a look. Jim slid a notebook out of his jacket. Kent leaned forward on his knees. “How do you mean?”
“I was distracted that day, I think. It’s hard to think about it. Was I distracted enough that I missed something, and this man’s family has to bury him?” I took in a deep, shaking breath and looked at each of them in turn. “I left something out of the analysis. I didn’t mean to. It was a mistake. But I don’t know how much of a mistake, and if hearing the entire analysis might help now.”
“I’ve seen the write-up,” Kent said, glancing at Jim as though he wished he’d come to talk to me alone. “It seemed like sturdy work.”
“No, there was nothing wrong with what I said. It’s what I didn’t say.” I watched the other man jotting down notes. “This is all from memory, Mr. Kaleb. I hope you’ll put that in. I don’t trust my—current state of mind.”
“Of course,” Kent murmured. “Do the best you can. Do you remember what it was that you left out?”
I tried to call back the moment when I’d meant to finish off the analysis but had been distracted by my personal life. I remembered exactly what I’d left out and why. It had seemed to me that the letter writer’s secrets were being exposed when they didn’t have any bearing. Those damn dangling y’s and p’s. But I knew better. Something that seemed unconnected might be the connection that mattered.
“Based on certain indicators in his handwriting, particularly in the descenders, I would say that the letter writer had some—” I paused, watched Jim’s hand scratching across the page. “Sexual shortcomings.”
Jim lifted his eyes to mine and tipped his notebook away.
“That’s interesting,” Kent said. He rubbed at his cheek. “I’ll have to think about that. Was there a reason why you left it out?”
“Like I said, it was a mistake. I meant to include it in the end, but—well, I was distracted. Like I said.”
“Joshua?”
I swallowed hard. I was pretending to be myself, sitting here and talking in a code I’d already started to forget. But I hadn’t forgotten for a moment that he was gone. His empty room seemed to ring silence down the hall. My phone, in my pocket, was a brick. I was as distracted as I’d ever been. Talking about murder—and the only thing that mattered to me was the silence.
“Yes,” I croaked.
Kent and his partner exchanged looks again. Jim flipped his notebook closed and stood. “I’ll be at the car. Thank you for your time, Mrs. Winger.” He fidgeted with the notebook. I noticed he left it in his right hand to avoid having to shake mine or to avoid having to decide if he should. That was fine. I was tired and didn’t want to be touched anymore today. “I hope your boy gets home. Soon. And safe.”
I remembered those words, used for another boy. “Thank you,” I said.
Kent waited for the door to close. “I have a son about Joshua’s age.”
“You do?”
“How long have we known each other, and you had no idea our kids were the same age?”
“I wouldn’t say—”
“What?” he said.
“I wouldn’t say we know each other.”
Kent nodded. “I guess I wouldn’t, either. But I know thirteen-year-old boys.” He took a wallet out of his jacket and flipped through a few photo holders. “This is my third, my runt.”
I leaned in to take a look. I didn’t want to. The snapshot was of all three boys, all tall and thin like their father, standing in a patch of grass with the sun in their eyes. The youngest had pronounced ears and a military haircut. His arms, dangling at his sides, were painfully thin. “Good-looking boys,” I said, with effort. “Three. I can’t imagine.”
“No one can imagine your life very well.”
I stared at him.
“I mean—no one can imagine another person’s life very well.”
If Kent weren’t here, I would have checked my phone for reception already. Four times. “Did any of your boys run away from home?”
He cleared his throat and put his wallet away. “No. No, you’re right. I don’t know the first thing about what it’s like from that side.”
We sat in silence for a minute. Finally, he said, “Impotence, then? Is that what you meant?”
“Do you think it has any significance for your investigation?”
“It was significant to my investigation,” he said with raised eyebrows. “But now that it’s a homicide—”
“Right, of course. Different investigation.”
“But it might mean something. I don’t think you have to have testicles—pardon me for the bluntness—to know that a man’s sexual health can affect the rest of his self-worth. We’ll have to throw that piece into the mix and see what comes up. It could be nothing.” He folded his hands over his crossed knee and stared at his own fingers for a moment. “It could mean nothing.”
“But you don’t think so.”
“Everything means something to someone, right? Some kid gets rapped on the knuckles by the nuns in grade school and a quiver shows up in the handwriting two decades later?”
I granted him a small smile. “One of the Booster Club moms suggested I set up a sort of kissing booth for handwriting analysis. She wanted me to find the quiver in her handwriting.”
His mouth twisted into a hesitant smile. “Did you find one in Joshua’s?”
I was caught off guard, even so. I nodded, unable to speak.
Kent stood up and ambled to the window, his hands in his pockets. “I always wonder what my kids really think about it all.”
“He hid from me, wouldn’t write anything down.”
“Doesn’t mean he was doing anything illicit,” he said. “Normal thing for a teenage boy to want privacy.”
“He’s gotten in with a bad crowd.”
Kent considered this and the street outside the window. “But then what do the parents of those in the bad crowd tell themselves?”
A stone seemed to lodge itself in my throat. Kent knew better than anyone living where Joshua had come from. “What are you trying to say?”
He left the window. “Your son’s not the bad crowd or the good crowd. He’s not much of anything but thirteen. They have tempers outsized for their bodies. And desires you don’t even want to know about. Pent up like firecrackers, and just as dangerous to themselves. He’s just a boy.”
“I just want him home.”
“He’ll be back soon. But that will only be the beginning. If they bring him home kicking and screaming—” Kent looked away, and I had to wonder if he had not lived through something, too. “If they bring him home before he’s come to some conclusions on his own, he might be hard to handle. He might not be the boy you raised.”
I imagined the scene. I’d rush to Russ’s office or to the juvenile hall in Indianapolis or wherever they had him. I’d run to him, elated at the sight of him again, and he would shrug his shoulders. He would let the fringe of hair shadow his eyes. This was what I expected, even as I realized how little I’d come to expect.