The evidence of Liam Byrne’s phoenix-like rise was less than scant. When Kyle quickly searched the rental car outside the Truscott mansion, his father’s luggage was gone, along with the cassette tape that he was recording off Kyle’s wire. When Kyle drove rings around the Truscott neighborhood shortly thereafter, he saw nothing on the dark streets but police cars. When he returned to the New Jersey motel room, there was no hard evidence that his father had ever been there, no toothbrush or strange pair of socks or discarded bottle of aftershave, only a few empty bottles of scotch and the light, lingering scent of cigarettes and Aqua Velva. But maybe he had drunk the scotch himself, and maybe the scents emanated from the guy in the room next door.

Oh, things had happened in the last few nights, he knew that. His house had burned down, his car had burned with it, he had recovered one of his father’s old files, and that file had led him to the bloody events at the Truscott house. And that it had all turned out pretty well for him in the end maybe meant that the spirit of his father had been looking out for him, just as it might have been the spirit of his father that had frightened Tiny Tony Sorrentino off his case. In a way it was a comforting thought, because it was considerably less crazy than what had passed for reality the last few days.

Kyle sat up in bed and took a deep breath. He wanted proof, he needed proof, and he knew where he might get it. The door to the motel’s office was locked, the lights off, but that didn’t stop Kyle from banging on the door like an escaped lunatic.

A pimply-faced kid, whose hair was sticking out wildly, as if he’d just been dosed with static electricity, straggled out of the back room and flicked on the light. He scratched the top of his head, scrunched up his face, opened the door.

“Yeah?” he said, eyes bleary and drool slipping down his slack mouth. “Did an old man come by and leave a message for room 207?” said Kyle.

The kid looked at Kyle with an uncomprehending stare, as if he weren’t sure which of the two of them was the idiot here. “No,” he said, having finally decided it was Kyle before starting to close the door.

Kyle stuck his foot in the gap and pushed the door open, shoving the kid back into the office at the same time.

“Do me a favor,” said Kyle, “and let me see the registration card for room 207.”

“I’m not really allowed,” said the clerk with a yawn.

“Dude, it’s my room. I’ve got the key, and I’m staying the night. Let me see the damn card.”

“There are rules.”

BLOOD AND BONE 379

“But if I happened to slip you a twenty?”

The clerk’s eyes brightened. “Well, you know, there are always exceptions.”

“Good, so here’s the way it’s going to work. I’m not going to slip you a twenty. But if you show me the card, I also won’t grab your nose in my fist and kick you in the head either.”

“Just a second, sir,” the clerk said as he made his way behind the desk with surprising alacrity.

The room was registered to a Byrne, all right, but to a Kyle Byrne, with the signature suspiciously like Kyle’s own, and paid for in cash. The son of a bitch hadn’t used his real name. If indeed the son of a bitch had signed the card, as opposed to Kyle himself in a fit of psychotic self-identity theft.

Back in the room, Kyle grabbed the little chair from the desk, put it on the cement walkway outside the door, and sat down facing the parking lot and the Target beyond that and the McDonald’s beyond that. He leaned back, propped his feet on the railing, tried to make sense of things.

Maybe he had made the whole thing up. Maybe his dead-father mania had grown like a spider to spread its hairy legs into his brain and drive him, finally, insane. Other than that lawyer at Ponzio’s, whom Kyle would never be able to find, or Robert Spangler, who now was dead, no one besides Kyle had seen him clearly. And without any physical evidence, to even broach the story to someone, anyone, even that Detective Ramirez, would be a no-win proposition. If he was telling the truth, she would mistakenly think him crazy; if he was relaying the cracked fantasies of a schizophrenic personality, she would correctly think him crazy. No, he’d keep it to himself, tell no one, except maybe Kat, only because he told everything to Kat.

But he wondered if the truth or falsity of his father’s reappearance even mattered. As he sat there, in the cool of the early dawn, watching the horizon lighten above the hard landscape of the asphalt parking lot and the cornucopia of crap beyond, waiting for his father to return and prove him sane, the years suddenly contracted like a clap of hands. And here he was, sitting on the porch of his mother’s house, waiting for his father. Or on the mound, waiting for his father. Or in a bar or at a softball game or in the heat of the night, waiting for his father. A lifetime spent waiting for his father.

Sitting there now, facing the coming of a new day, Kyle realized, whether the old man was a figment of Kyle’s own feverish imagination or a brutal and disappointing reality, that Liam Byrne wasn’t coming back. Not tonight, not tomorrow, not ever. And Kyle was okay with that. Surprisingly. Astonishingly. Okay.

Whatever had happened in these past few days had burned the need right out of him. It was as if the filial relationship he had craved for so long had happened in a matter of hours, moving swiftly from childish love to adolescent rebellion to a sort of blind adult mimicry to a declaration of independence. And he no longer felt deprived, he no longer felt gypped out of some grand paternal presence, he no longer harbored any illusions about how terrific his life might have turned out if his father had only been a father and not some detached presence that died way too soon for Kyle to cope. No, as the bright top of the sun rose above the cement boxes of New Jersey, he felt lucky. Lucky to have had his mother to himself for as long as he had. Lucky to be young and strong, with opportunities to seize and a future to mold. Lucky to be free.

He was certain that would be the end of the father sightings that had plagued him since the funeral fourteen years before, but he was wrong.

CHAPTER 59

SHE WASN’T DETECTIVE RAMIREZ on this night, she was Lucia,

her badge and gun worn not on the hip but stashed inside her bag, her hair up, her lips freshly glossed. She was wearing a silk blouse, a pleated skirt, spiky red high heels, and she didn’t need any leering Neanderthal to tell her she looked damn good, she knew it already.

Even as she had passed through the administrative and media whirlwind that accompanied the closing of the Laszlo Toth murder case, she couldn’t stop herself from thinking of this night with a visceral anticipation. She had imagined something romantic and intimate, something candlelit and soft, something leading to something, leading most definitely to something. And so she was keenly disappointed to find herself vastly overdressed while sitting at a Formica table at Bubba’s with Kyle and his motley crew, drinking from pitchers of Rolling Rock and just hanging.

“So is it heavy?” said Kyle’s squat friend with all the tattoos, who was named Skitch.

“I’m used to it,” said Ramirez.

“Can I see it?”