I kind of liked Meg. You could tell she was new enough to the job that she didn’t have her whole Bad Time vibe happening yet—or maybe my just being “poor Danny” made her switch it off. Either way, she was young and very hot, with long dark hair and shiny nails. Best of all, she never questioned anything I said. I think she liked it best when I didn’t say anything and just looked hurt or small or whatever. Her favorite thing to say was “We all want to make this work.” She said TV reporters and newspapers had been calling her office about me, and she’d deal with them if we wanted her to. “I’ll just say that it’s a private family time and that everybody is relieved and happy that you’re home.”
There were two cops, Swofford and Griffin. Swofford was a young guy with a cue-ball head, all steroids and golf clothes. Griffin was a bag of cement. Gray everything—sloppy suit, hair, tie, clipped moustache. Even his eyes were gray. The cops made Shan’s little front room feel even smaller. Meg perched on the stool that went with Brooklynne and Matt’s electric keyboard. You could see down her top when she leaned forward. Shan sat on the couch beside me. I could feel her wanting to hold my hand. Swofford had a chair from the kitchen. Griffin slumped in Roy’s recliner like he owned the place.
Constable Swofford had a little voice recorder and took notes. Griffin was a detective sergeant. “Retired, actually,” he said. He even had a cement voice. “But I handled your case when you disappeared. Wanted to see it wrapped up. Hope you don’t mind.” He asked Shan how she was, said he hadn’t seen her in a long time. She gave him a tight, one-millisecond smile. When he asked about Ty, she didn’t even give him that.
“He’s fine.” Good, I thought. Cops brought the Bad Time with them like crap on their shoes. I didn’t want Shan tight with them. Your enemy’s enemy is your friend.
Then Meg said, “We all want to make this work.”
Swofford clicked his pen and started the recorder. I gave them the same line I’d fed Josh.
Two guys in a white van offered me a ride. They gave me a drink—it must have had drugs in it. When I woke up I was in the place they kept me for a long time. There were other boys there too. Mostly everyone spoke a foreign language, Spanish maybe. The suckers changed the way we looked. They injected my eyes with something. Men came there and we had to do things for them. They kept us on drugs. We weren’t supposed to talk. The windows were barred and we weren’t allowed out, except to go in this little yard where it was always hot. A few months ago I escaped when a door was left open. I tried to get far away. I didn’t go to the police because I thought some of the men at the place I got away from were police. I don’t know how far I got. I didn’t even know where I was when the guy who died in the parking lot saw me. He said his name was Bill. He said he’d bring me up to Canada if I helped him do some stuff along the way, like what we were doing with the pin machines. I knew that was shady, but Bill said if I told the cops I’d go to jail too. I had to do what he said and hope I could get close enough to home to get away.
That was it. Simple. I talked low, looking away from the cops. Every so often I’d stop, as if it was too much for me. That part wasn’t hard: it almost was too much for me. The story had worked with Josh, but even he might not have believed all of it. He’d believed I was Danny, though, and that was what counted. Cops listen differently. Swofford nodded and wrote. Griffin just slouched until I got to the part about my eyes. Then he said, “That must have hurt.”
I nodded. “It was bad. I don’t like to remember.”
“What about your hands, Danny?” Griffin asked. “Did they do anything to your hands?”
Swofford looked up from his notebook.
I looked down at my hands. What was this about? Did he mean altering fingerprints? Harley had said he’d heard about guys trying to do that. If that’s what Griffin meant, he might be accidentally feeding me a big out. One I could use if they ever checked me against Danny’s prints—if they had them. It also meant he was buying my story. I wanted to scream “YES!” but I had to play it like everything else. It’s not what you say, it’s how you say it. I looked back up at him “I-I don’t know. It’s hazy from, like, the drugs. I think I remember them being wrapped up, but I thought that was so I couldn’t grab anything or try to escape.”
“Hmm,” Griffin said, staring at me. “We got some latent prints from your house after you disappeared. They’re in the file.”
My heart started revving. All I could do was look back at him and shrug.
There was a silence like glue. Then he shifted his bulk. The chair creaked and the mood snapped. “The prints are useless. Too faint. Till puberty really kicks in, there’s not enough oil in a kid’s skin for a print to last more than a few hours.” He slowly shook his gray head. “Eye color. God. When they find a way to mess with DNA, we’re done.”
Shan hugged me. “Well, nobody tampered with this guy’s DNA,” she said. “He’s just the same as he always was.”
I almost hugged her back.
Next, they asked a bunch of questions about Harley. I told the truth about where we’d been for the last while because it was too easy to check. When it was over, Swofford flipped his notebook shut and turned off his recorder and said he was glad I was back. He said he’d bring me a statement to sign for the files and that they’d be in touch with the FBI, who might want to talk to me too.
We all stood up. Meg bent to pick up her shoulder bag. I got another look down her top. Swofford looked too; I saw him. Griffin said, “Good to meet you.”
I nodded.
“We rarely get a happy ending.” He cocked a gray eyebrow. “Stay safe, huh?”
Stay away from you, I thought.