Chapter 13

I TELL OFFICER McBeardFace I’m happy to give a statement right now, and no, I don’t need a parent present because I’m an adult. I tell the second officer who comes over to try his luck the same thing. By the time they take me into the deputy chief’s office, I’ve got my story on lock.

“I understand you’re refusing to give us your parents’ number?” he asks me.

“I’m not a minor.”

“Kid,” he says. “Come on.”

“Really,” I insist. “I’m not.”

“Do you have any proof of that? Like . . . a driver’s license, for instance?”

Okay. Time for a new tactic.

“Am I under arrest, Deputy Chief”—I check his name tag—“Garcia?”

You don’t have to stay if you’re not under arrest. But I guess that might be different if you’re a kid. Which I’m still not copping to.

“You could be, you know,” he says. Which means I’m not. “You were trespassing.”

“The door was unlocked.”

“Breaking and entering would be a different charge.”

“Well—if I’m not under arrest, then why can’t I go home?”

“I’m trying to send you home,” he says. “With a parent.”

I say nothing.

“Listen.” Garcia puts both hands on the table. “You’ve reached the end of the line, here. Give me someone to call for you, or you can hang out in there until either you change your mind, or someone reports you missing.”

He gestures out the window with his chin. I turn around in my seat and consider the single holding cell in the corner. On the one hand, I won’t have to talk to anyone, and I might get to spot Officer O’Hara again. On the other hand . . . it’s a cage. A very literal, steel-bars-and-locked-door kind of cage.

“So. What’s it going to be?”

I swallow. “He’s going to kill me.”

“Who, your dad?” he asks. I nod. “You broke city curfew to hang out in a half-built brewery and then contaminated a crime scene. He should kill you.”

“He won’t even pick up,” I try to explain. “He’s a chef, it’s dinner service, his phone’s off—”

“What restaurant? I’ll call the hostess.”

Before I can come up with some lie for why that won’t work, the door bursts open.

“Garcia, what the hell’s taking you?” The police chief swaggers inside. “I could use you with Phoebe, she’s about to give me a migraine—”

Garcia nods toward me. “Just finishing up with a witness.”

I keep my eyes on the desk and my head turned away from the door, because the only way this night could possibly get worse is if . . .

“Well, no shit,” the chief says, and the door frame squeaks as he leans on it. “Boy Detective.”

. . . he recognizes me.

“I—” Garcia looks across at me, then up at the chief. “What?”

“Yeah, I guess you hadn’t started yet, had you? It was a few years ago,” the chief says to Garcia. Then to me: “So what dumbass thing did you do now?”

My face burns. “Nothing.”

“He found the body,” Garcia clarifies. “Him and a friend.”

“Oh, Garcia, you’ve got to watch out for this one. You know how at the academy they teach you about serial killers wanting to insert themselves into the investigation?” He spreads his hands out wide. “They’ve got nothing on this kid.”

“I’m not a serial killer,” I tell Garcia.

“Good to know,” he replies.

“Serial pain in the ass, more like it,” the chief says to Garcia. “First time I ever heard of this kid, it was because he wouldn’t stop harassing the 911 operator. He was like eight—”

“Ten.” I was short for my age, but still ten.

“He kept going on and on about how there had been a robbery. Eventually the operator girl flagged the number. But what do you know, not four hours later we get the call from the neighbors. Some expensive diamond set.”

“Sapphires.”

“So we go over and talk to him, and he’s got the whole case figured out. Knew who the perp was—clocked that the perp was a perp—and told us exactly how to track him down. Easiest bag of my entire career. Weirdest little kid you’ve seen in your entire life.”

I want to correct that, too, but I don’t know how.

“Anyway, we thought it would make a cute PR thing—so we bring the kid in, do this whole faux award ceremony, let someone from Channel Five come and film. I put on my dress blues and personally pinned the little medal on him.” He grins at me. “Remember?”

As if I’d forget the best day of my life. Not even this day, which has to be one of my all-time worst, could make me forget that.

“And you’d think that would be the end, right?” he’s asking Garcia. “He gets his award, he gets on TV, everyone goes aw, and the world keeps turning. But not for Boy Detective, here.”

He’s not really going to do this, he’s not really going to tell this part of the story—is he?

“Maybe two years later, we start hearing from him again. Only this time, it’s not about a necklace, it’s about some teacher at the high school.”

It’s official: this is the third-worst day of my entire life and now he’s really, really going to make me relive the second.

“So Boy Detective somehow got it in his head that the photography teacher at Presidio was selling fake IDs to some of his students—”

I didn’t get it in my head. Everybody had heard that rumor, even at my middle school. I was just the only one who decided to investigate.

“And, you know, we told him we’d check it out”—he looks down at me—“which we did, by the way, though there was plainly nothing going on and nothing to see. But he kept calling, and calling and just would not let it go.”

I thought if I could replicate that first real case—do it all over again, but bigger and better this time—everything would go back the way it was. My agency would have clients again, Lily would be my friend again, people would take me seriously again.

But the longer the chief tells this story, the more I’m realizing the truth I refused to see before: they never took me seriously at all.

“And again, you’d think that would be it. He’d get the hint, move on. But what Boy Detective did—” He stops, like he’s just realizing I’m still in the room. “Do you want to tell it?”

I’ve changed my mind. This is the second-worst day of my life, and it’s not even over yet.

The chief misreads whatever murderous expression is on my face. “No? All right. Well, not getting the support he was hoping for, I guess, he goes down to the high school one weekend and tries to climb through a classroom window and go looking for evidence. And then—I shit you not—he got stuck.”

Through the office window, I see Lily walk past the rows of desks, both of Priya’s arms wrapped protectively around her as they make a beeline for the Exit sign. Lily doesn’t see me. She isn’t looking.

“Some neighbor calls it in, so we show up with the fire department, and then one of the news channels shows up, because they’d heard the scanner and thought it was a real break-in, and it got maybe ten seconds on the news that night.”

They never said my name or showed my face. It didn’t matter. All it took was one parent hearing the report about a kid in a trench coat and a fedora and the whole seventh grade knew. It spread like wildfire. Or syphilis.

I’d been so upset over being ignored, I hadn’t considered it might be worse to be laughed at instead. But I could handle that.

What I couldn’t take was being pitied.

“It was a shit show,” the chief says. “I guess I can’t be surprised that wasn’t the end of it. Trouble just finds you, doesn’t it, Boy Detective?”

“That’s not my name,” I say, biting off each word.

“Finally.” Garcia sighs. “So what is it?”

“It’s a color. Brown?” The chief snaps his fingers. “No. Green.”

Action heroes might fight to the death and cowboys might go out guns blazing, but this isn’t that kind of movie. Detectives know how to accept defeat. I look Garcia right in the eyes.

“My name is Gideon Green and the restaurant you’re looking for is called Verde.”

The drive from Verde to the police station should take fifteen minutes, minimum. Dad makes it there in nine.

“Hi,” he says as he bursts through the door, “I’m George Green, I got a call, I’m looking for—” When he spots me, his shoulders drop, and he sighs for two full seconds. “Him.”

I’ve seen him pull all-nighters perfecting a new menu item and drag himself home after a Mother’s Day lunch/dinner service combo. But I’ve never seen him look more exhausted than he does right now.

Deputy Chief Garcia gestures to the chair next to me. “Come in, Mr. Green.”

Dad walks over, but he doesn’t sit right away. He touches my head, then seems to scan my whole body. I don’t know what he’s looking for, exactly, but at least he isn’t yelling yet.

“Are you okay?” he asks me, low and serious.

“I’m okay.”

“Are you sure?”

There might be a bruise on my arm courtesy of Officer Friendly, but it doesn’t seem worth mentioning. “Yeah, Dad, I’m fine.”

He nods and then finally sits down next to me.

“Thank you for coming down,” Garcia starts off.

“Of course.”

“I’m sorry to have to pull you away from work. Your son said you’re a chef?”

“Chef/owner, yeah,” Dad says. “I just opened a new place, Verde.”

“It’s a clever name,” Chief Garcia says. “Mexican food?”

“Mexican fusion.”

I wait to see if Dad will drop his favorite canned line here, which is that—with a Mexican mom and a white dad—he is also a result of Mexican fusion. He doesn’t.

Garcia spreads his hands on the tabletop. “So here’s the situation.”

By the time Garcia is wrapping up his story with give a statement and not charging him, but, I can feel Dad’s eyes burning a hole in my skull. I stare at my hands. It’s the same basic theory as surviving a bear attack. No sudden movements, climb a tree if it’s available, and pray to the god of your choosing.

“Gideon, what on earth would possess you?” Dad demands.

There’s no answer I can give that would make this situation better. If I told the truth, they’d freak out, drag Lily into it again, and ruin the investigation. If I lie, they’ll think I’m—what did Ellicot say? Just a dumb kid.

Maybe it’s better, sometimes, to be underestimated. Even if it hurts your pride.

“I don’t know,” I say, and it comes out a whine. “We were bored.”

“We?”

“I didn’t mention—he was with a girl,” Garcia says.

Dad’s eyebrows shoot up. He turns back to me. “A girl, what girl?”

“Not a girl girl,” I say, feeling my face get hot. “It was just Lily.”

This only seems to confuse Dad more. “Lily? How did you talk her into this?”

Telling the truth about that would require telling the truth about a lot more things, so I look down at my shoes and shrug.

“You were bored,” Dad repeats. “Of all the stupid things! I can’t believe you.”

You shouldn’t believe me, I think. I’m lying my ass off.

Garcia, maybe sensing how close Dad is to flipping his shit, leans across the desk and catches my eye.

“I’m very sorry you stumbled on this accident,” he says to me. “I hope that will convince you not to go wandering around construction sites in the future.”

For a split second, the condescension prickles, but then—an accident?

I thought he knew.

“It wasn’t an accident,” I say.

That throws him for a loop, which throws me for a loop. He really doesn’t know. “Yes, it was,” he says, recovering fast. “That area has been a site of several overdoses and the deceased was known to use. We found a bag with paraphernalia on the catwalk, not to mention the tourniquet on his arm—”

“Okay,” I agree, because I don’t know the dead guy. I’ll take his word for it. “But this wasn’t an accident.”

“What are you talking about,” Dad says, low and urgent. Less of a question, more of a desperate plea for me to shut up.

“It was murder,” I say simply. “He was murdered.”

For a moment, they both stare at me in silence. Then Garcia sighs deeply. “He fell from the catwalk. It would be very easy to do, in his altered state. You didn’t see a murder.”

“Why would you even say that?” Dad asks.

“Mr. Green, it’s all right,” Garcia assures him. “This is a perfectly normal response to seeing something traumatic.”

“I’m not saying it because I’m traumatized. I’m saying it because it was murder.”

“Stop,” Dad says to me.

Garcia clears his throat. “I’m sure you’d like to get out of here and deal with all of this privately.”

“Yes. Thank you,” Dad says to him.

“But—”

Dad cuts me off. “No.”

“We’ll need him to give a statement about what he saw,” Garcia says. “And we’re going to have to fingerprint him, to exclude any prints he left at the scene.”

Dad looks grim but nods. “Of course.”

“But once that’s done, you can take him home.” He looks to both of us. “Any questions?”

Dad shakes his head no.

“Yes,” I say.

“Gideon,” Dad warns.

“Will my fingerprints go into the national database or just a state one?”

“Gideon!”

Garcia looks baffled. “Are you . . . planning on committing crimes in the future?”

“I guess if I did, I’d wear gloves—Ow!” I rub at the spot on my ribs where Dad just elbowed me.

“I don’t even know how to respond to that,” says Garcia.

Dad raises both hands in defeat. “Welcome to my world.”