“No, no, sorry—no news there, not exactly.” He looked me over. “Have you had some news?”
I should tell him about Ray. Ray, for God’s sake. Of course Ray. I had been using more magical thinking. And now: one name. One name, and I’d call down the power of the nation’s security forces to retrieve my son quickly and quietly. But that seemed . . . oily. As Kent had said, if I went out and yanked him back, I’d get back the boy I deserved. I couldn’t begin to explain that, or what it cost me to say Ray’s name again. What it would cost me to explain what he’d done and how much I’d let him get away with.
“Can we go inside?” he said.
I looked up, then away.
“Oh.” He turned his head down the street, watched a car coming at us too fast. The driver slowed down when he spotted Russ. He stared after the car until it turned a corner. “I guess I can tell you here, then. Nothing bad, now, nothing bad, but it’s not that helpful, either. Just. Just a mystery solved.”
“Aidan?”
“No—”
“Nothing? Even with Leila home again?”
He grimaced. “I can’t really talk about it.”
“Oh.”
We stood uncompanionably for a moment.
“We got a match on that . . . that threat.”
I couldn’t understand him, but then I remembered the envelope, the flyer, the mean, bold letters: I know about you. The memory of that day rose to meet me; pieces fit together.
“Joshua,” I said.
“Found a photo file of it on the hard drive of his game thingy. Does that surprise you?”
I could no longer be astonished by anything Joshua knew, said, or did. He’d signed me up for the Sweetheart Lake travel mag, too. No one else could have done it. No one else could have been as cruel.
“It would take a lot to surprise me at this point,” I said.
We stared at one another for a long moment, until I felt we were deciding something I hadn’t realized we were going to decide just now.
“OK,” he said. After a few seconds of silence, he started down the sidewalk to his truck. That day in the barn was over and now tainted.
“Wait,” I said, and hated the sound of my voice and the chiseled impatience I saw in his face when he turned back. “The handwriting—”
“I can’t talk about that case, I said.”
“No, not Aidan’s note. Those evidence forms.”
He wouldn’t meet my eyes. “What about them?”
“I couldn’t figure it out for a long time,” I said. “They were all blending together. I couldn’t get a handle on it. But I think all the signatures are signed by the same person.”
Now I had his attention. “That can’t be right. The techs—”
“Well, no, before the samples go to the lab,” I said. “By the time the evidence goes off for testing, it’s too late. That’s where they’re finding the problem, right? They come back from the lab as—something else, not drugs.” I paused to make sure we were talking the same language.
“Listening.”
“The arresting officer in each, and then the person who logs it into your storage, and then the person who claims the sample back to send to the lab. Sometimes they might be the same person, right, but on your forms, they’re many names, all different—but all signed by the same hand. He tried to make them look different, pretty successfully, actually. Does that make sense to you? Is that—”
“Well, it would explain some things,” Russ said. “Is there no way to tell who’s doing it?”
“I could—don’t take this the wrong way, but we’ve had this talk already. I need the originals,” I said. He rolled his eyes. “Sheriff, the copier you used has dust or nicks on the glass, for one thing. It shows up as little black dots all along the page, right where the signatures begin. It’s distracting. Get me the originals and I’ll see what I can do.”
He nodded once, curt. “Yes, ma’am. Anything else?”
I was telling him how to do his job again but was too tired to argue. What were the other questions I’d had for him? I didn’t think I’d ever see this man or this place again, and saw no point to having this conversation. But maybe really pissing him off would keep him and his security service away from the apartment for the night. I only needed one night. I grasped at any of the threads from my notes that had been left untied. “When the drugs come back from the lab and it isn’t what it’s supposed to be . . . what is it?”
“Why does that matter?”
“It doesn’t,” I said. “Not to me. Just wondered. Missing cocaine, missing crystal meth.” I paused, looking for the worst thing to say. “I would have thought it would matter to you. Enough to ask, anyway.”
“We’re working on it, Ms. Winger.” His tone was as clipped as the click of a typewriter key. “And—I think I’ll be using more traditional methods to solve my evidence leak from here on out, so don’t worry about any further calls from me. I thank you for your service to your community.”
For a moment I recalled the slanted doorway of the barn and my arm sticking out of the shadows into the daylight as we parted. Don’t leave it here, he’d said, when it had never happened, when the place we’d gone had never existed.
“Of course,” I said.
I turned to go but when he called after me, I stopped and looked back.
“You know, for a while I wondered what team you were on,” he said. “It seemed to me that you had a dog in this race when you couldn’t possibly.”
“Meaning?”
“I thought you wanted Leila Ransey to be innocent. Tell me I’m crazy.”
“No,” I said. “I wanted Leila Ransey to get away. It’s not the same thing.”
I turned and walked toward the door, fighting the urge to look back again. I knew what I would see if I did, and I meant what I said. I had wanted Leila to get away. I wanted us all to get away.
Chapter Twenty-seven
I packed as though I would never return.
Clothes. Shoes. A jacket. I packed a few towels, a blanket. I threw pillows on top of it all. I might have to sleep in the car. My computer. I dragged the collapsed boxes from under the bed but didn’t begin to fill them all. Light. We had to travel light this time.
I packed a bag for Joshua: underwear, socks, T-shirts, his winter coat, his snow boots. I began to see what was missing, what he’d taken with him. I developed a theory as I sorted through his things. The first time you run, you don’t know what to take. You leave behind what you need and cart along what you don’t. The first time I’d run, I had nothing but the clothes I’d stolen from the woman in the next hospital bed, but that hadn’t been my choice.