Sam shut the door and lifted a finger to her lips. She walked to the front window and pulled the drapes.

“What . . .”

She motioned him quiet again and led him to the garage. “If we talk quietly here, we won’t be heard.”

“Slater? The car up the street’s FBI.”

“I know. Which is why I parked two blocks up and came in the back. You don’t think Slater’s going to see them?”

“He didn’t say no FBI.”

“Maybe because he is FBI,” she said.

“What?”

“We haven’t ruled it out.”

“We? Who’s we?”

She held his gaze for a moment. “Just an expression. They find anything else here?”

“No. Some footprints by the oil rig up the hill. They took a bunch of fingerprints, the milk jug. Jennifer didn’t think any of it would help them much.”

Sam nodded. “She told me about the tattoo. You never told me about the tattoo.”

“I didn’t tell you anything about him after that night, remember? He was gone. End of story.”

“Not anymore. They’ll find the warehouse, and when they do, they’ll find more—who knows, maybe the boy.”

“Actually, I went back four months later.”

“What?”

“He was gone. There was blood on the floor and his bandanna, but he was gone. They won’t find him.”

Sam looked at him for a few moments. He wasn’t sure what she was thinking, but something wasn’t quite right.

“You said, wehaven’t ruled it out,” he said. “You’ve always been straight with me, Sam. Who is we?”

She looked into his eyes and put a hand on his cheek. “I’m sorry, Kevin, I can’t tell you everything—not now, not yet. Soon. You’re right, I have always been straight with you. I’ve been more than a friend. I’ve loved you like a brother. A day hasn’t gone by these past ten years that I haven’t thought about you at least once. You’re part of me. And now I need you to trust me. Can you do that?”

The revelation made his head spin. She was somehow involved, wasn’t she? She’d been onto Slater before yesterday. It was why Slater knew her!

“What . . . what’s going on?”

Her hand slid down his arm and took his fingers. “Nothing’s changed. Slater’s the same person he was yesterday, and I’m going to do my best to get to him before he hurts anyone. I’m just not at liberty to tell you what we know. Not yet. It wouldn’t make any difference to you anyway. Trust me. For old time’s sake.”

He nodded. Actually, this was better, wasn’t it? The fact that she had some inside track and wasn’t just blindly feeling her way around this case—that was good.

“But you think the FBI is involved?”

She put her finger on his lips to seal them. “I can’t talk about it. Forget I said it. Nothing’s changed.” She reached up, kissed him on the cheek, and released his hand.

“Can I trust Jennifer?”

She turned. “Sure—trust Jennifer. But trust me first.”

“What do you mean, first?”

“I mean if you have to choose between me and Jennifer, choose me.”

He felt his pulse thicken. What was she saying? Choose me.Did she think he would ever choose Jennifer over her? He wasn’t even sure what he felt for Jennifer. She had offered to ease his pain and confusion in a time of vulnerability and he had let her. That was all.

“I would always choose you. I owe my life to you.”

She smiled and for a moment he imagined that they were kids again, sitting under an elm with a full moon on their faces, laughing at a squirrel’s inquisitive head poking through the branches.

“Actually, I think it’s the other way around. I owe you mylife,” she said. “Literally. You saved me from Slater once, didn’t you? Now it’s my turn to return the favor.”

In a strange way, it all made perfect sense.

“Okay,” she said. “I have a plan. I mean to flush the snake from his hole.” She winked at him and glanced at her watch. “The sooner we get out of here the better. Grab your toothbrush, a change of clothes, and some deodorant if you want. We’re taking a trip.”

“We are? Where? We can’t just leave. Jennifer told me to stay here.”

“Until what? Did Slater tell you not to leave?”

“No.”

“Let me see the phone.”

He fished out the cell phone Slater had left him and handed it to her.

“Did Slater tell you to keep this on?”

Kevin considered the question. “He said to keep it with me at all times.”

Sam pushed the power off button. “Then we’ll take it.”

“Jennifer will have a cow. This wasn’t the plan.”

“Change of plans, my dear knight. It’s time for a little cat and mouse of our own.”

13

THE WAREHOUSE was less than a hundred yards from Kevin’s old house, two rows back from the road, an old wooden storage facility that had been white before flaking paint revealed its gray underbelly. From the side entrance, none of the houses on Baker Street was visible.

“This it?”

“It’s abandoned. Looks like it has been for a while,” Milton said.

“Show me.”

Two uniforms stood by the door, watching her. One of them handed her a flashlight. “You’ll need this.”

She took it and turned it on.

The warehouse smelled of a decade’s worth of undisturbed dust. Beyond the side door was a single stairwell descending into blackness. The rest of the three-thousand-or-so square feet of concrete sat vacant in dim light filtered by a dozen cracks in the walls.

“Don’t they tear these things down?” she asked.

“They used to hold all kinds of goods in these warehouses before the navy moved in just south of here. The government bought this land and hasn’t seen fit to rebuild yet. I’m sure they’ll get around to it.”

A lone cop stood at the bottom of the stairs, shining his flashlight on the threshold. “The door was locked from the outside—took some jarring to get it loose.”

Jennifer descended. A steel door led into a ten-by-ten room, concrete, empty. She played her torch over the pitted walls. Exposed floor joists held the ceiling. Most of it. One small section had rotted through.

“The blood’s over here,” Milton said.

Jennifer directed her light to where he stood looking down at two large dark stains on the concrete. She squatted and studied each.

“The splatter’s consistent with blood.” The basic position of the stains also matched Kevin’s story—both he and the boy had bled. “At this age we probably won’t get any reliable DNA evidence, but we can at least verify species. I knew Kevin was hiding something the first time I talked to him.”

She glanced at Milton, surprised by his tone.

“And this isn’t the last of it. I guarantee he’s hiding more,” he said.

Milton was a first-class pig. She stood and walked over to a small, almost unnoticeable hole in the ceiling. “The boy’s way out?”

“Could be.”

So, assuming this read as fact, what would it mean? That Kevin hadn’t killed the boy? That they had fought and that Kevin had locked the door from the outside, but then the boy had managed to crawl out through the rotting ceiling? Who knew why he hadn’t come back to terrorize Kevin until now?

Or it could mean that the boy actually had died in here, only to be discovered by some passerby years later, body disposed of. Unlikely. Unless a drifter or anyone else had reason to hide the body, it would have been investigated. She’d already run a search for reports and found none.

“Okay, we need to do a bloodstain distribution analysis. I want to know what happened down here. Assuming it is blood, did anyone lie in it? Any blood on the walls or up through the ceiling? I want species identification and, if possible, blood type. Send a sample to the FBI lab immediately. And this stays out of the press.”

Milton said nothing. He looked up at the corner and frowned. A shadow passed over his face. It occurred to her that she might actually hate the man.

“Don’t get any ideas, Detective. Everything goes through me.”

He looked at her for a moment and then walked for the door. “Sure.”