Grave Truth

Chapter 5

5

I slipped my arm through Roger’s free one as we crossed the parking lot. He didn’t object. When we reached the car, he turned and leaned against its metal body.

Roger is not the leaning on cars type. Not even his own immaculate BMW.

I stared at his profile, trying to make out his expression in the fading light. “Your dentist is going to have words with you the next time you see him.”

“You think?” he asked absently, before he resumed grinding his teeth.

Roger turned to me, dark brows pinched together, stark against his pale face. Determined. That was the word I was looking for.

“You sure you want to be part of this?” he asked. “You don’t owe him—or me—anything.”

“Really?” I said, trying to make my voice light. “I’ll remember that the next time I call, asking for a favor.”

“I’m serious, Sydney,” Roger said.

“I know,” I said. “Don’t be a dumbass.”

He glared at me, pretending anger. Well, mostly pretending. I raised a brow, and he gave in, mouth curling. To my surprise, he pulled me close and pressed me to his chest. Roger is not a huggy person. Neither am I particularly. But for novices, we faked it pretty well.

Face against his dress shirt, I decided Roger did have a gym membership after all, and he got to the gym much more regularly than I did (if you can properly make a comparison between any number and never). The silk of his tie was cool on my cheek. And he smelled good. Not organic hippie deodorant exactly, but not the manufactured chemical fakery of cologne, either.

“Are you sniffing me?” he asked.

“Would that be inappropriate?”

“Just a little,” he said, releasing me.

“Then no, of course I’m not,” I said.

Once in the car, he proffered a notebook his father had given him before we left. It was thin, spiral-bound and lined, the kind you see on sale in office supply stores at the beginning of the school year. I held it to the window for better light, but only got as far as the first page. Dear Roger, it began. I slapped the thin cardboard cover closed, thankful the darkness had kept my eyes from taking in any more, and handed it back to him.

“This is not for my eyes,” I said.

Roger turned on the dome light to read. His breath caught, and I looked away. But I heard him flipping through the pages. A few seconds later, he said, “Here.”

It took a while for my eyes and brain to calibrate to Mr. Weber’s cursive handwriting, slightly slanted with distinctively simple capital W’s, like inverted McDonald’s signs. Maybe because it was one of the letters Mr. Weber had to capitalize the most. It was a list of names and titles, and the first name was Wilbur something (was that a T or an F?). Wilbur was identified as the Director of the Florida Youth Reform School. Next to his title in block capital letters was noted: DEAD.

We didn’t have a name for the boy or, decades after his death, any easy way to get one. We did have a date of death, or at least an approximate one. Mr. Weber had remembered the day they’d lost their second child, as well as the first one. “How do you want me to start?” I asked.

He laid his head against the rest and closed his eyes. “I don’t know,” Roger said. “But we have to prioritize.”

“Like a death warrant,” I said. I hadn’t worked many, but Roger had done plenty, and it was a shared context for a case short on time and high on stakes. Still, I regretted the words as soon as they left my mouth.

Roger opened his eyes, calmly met mine (determined), and said, “Exactly.”

“Okay, then. I’ll hit the newspaper archives, public records—the usual. See if I can get a line on the kid. And I’ll work my way through the personnel list, from the top down. When I do find someone, you want me to approach or wait for you?”

“I’ll do it myself,” he said. “You just track them down.”

Uh-huh, I thought. That’s what you think. But I nodded, and Roger drove me back to my office.

It was true dark by the time we arrived downtown. Roger pulled off the street, up my office driveway so he was blocking my car. “You want to wait while I copy the list?” I asked.

“No,” he said. “I have some other things to take care of tonight. I’ll get the notebook from you later.”

I opened the door, but paused when he spoke again.

“Listen,” he said, “about our runaway.”

I wasn’t sure when she’d become our runaway, but I prompted him, “Yes?”

“The next time you talk to your client, ask if they’d like to file for custody.”

I blinked in the cool air that rushed in through the gaping passenger door. For someone with no background in family law, Roger was awfully eager to open up a big, stinking can of it. “He said they’d like to give her a home. But why file for custody now?”

“It’s a long-game strategy, helps us cover our asses,” he said. “Gives us a little more control, or at least makes it so we’re not the ones reacting.”

Pleadings and hearings popped into my head, each one replaced by another, and another, but there was no way I could follow them to Roger’s endgame. I didn’t need to; I trusted him. But I also knew him.

“And what else?” I asked, leaning toward him.

His head backed away automatically, and he came dangerously close to blushing. Or so it appeared in the harsh, artificial light inside the car.

“And it sounds like it’s the best thing for them and the kid,” he admitted.

I patted his retreating face a tad harder than necessary. “Roger Weber, I do believe you’re getting soft in your old age.”

“You’re not exactly made of granite yourself,” he countered.

I shrugged, then shivered as I stepped out into the chilly night and watched him slowly back down onto the street, probably on his way back to his office. Not that I could talk. I was now working two cases on a short clock, with two kids on my mind. It was time to find the living one.