The Searcher

NINE

Cal has always liked mornings. He draws a distinction between this and being a morning person, which he isn’t: it takes time, daylight and coffee to connect up his brain cells. He appreciates mornings not for their effect on him, but for themselves. Even smack in the middle of a temperamental Chicago neighborhood, dawn sounds rose up with a startling delicacy, and the air had a lemony, clean-scoured tinge that made you breathe deeper and wider. Here, the first light spreads across the fields like something holy is happening, striking sparks off a million dewdrops and turning the spiderwebs on the hedge to rainbows; mist curls off the grass, and the first calls of birds and sheep seem to arc effortless miles. Whenever he can make himself, Cal gets up early and eats his breakfast sitting on his back step, enjoying the chill and the earthy tang of the air. The doughnut Trey brought him yesterday is still in pretty good shape.

The Wi-Fi is in an obliging mood, so Cal pulls up Facebook on his phone and pokes around for Eugene Moynihan and Fergal O’Connor. Eugene is dark and narrow, with a semi-arty shot of him in profile on a bridge somewhere that looks Eastern European. Fergal has a big grin, a moon face with spit-shined red cheeks like a kid’s, and a raised pint.

Brendan has a Facebook account, too, although his last post was a year ago, some like-and-share attempt to win tickets to a music festival. His photo has him on a motorbike, grinning over his shoulder. He’s thin, brown-haired, with the kind of sensitive high-boned features that are good-looking in some moods and not in others, and that imply quick changes. Cal sees Sheila in him, in the cheekbones and around the mouth, but he can’t find any look of Trey.

If Eugene is a student and Fergal is a farmer, then Cal has no doubts about which of them is more likely to be up early on a Saturday morning. He walks down through the village, where Noreen’s and Seán Óg’s and the decorous little ladieswear boutique are still shuttered and asleep, and the road is empty: only an old woman putting flowers in the Virgin Mary grotto at the crossroads turns to say good morning. Half a mile on are a set of broad fields full of fat, feisty sheep, and a sprawling white farmhouse. In the yard, a big young guy in a fleece and work pants is unloading sacks from a trailer and hauling them to an impressive corrugated-iron shed.

“Morning,” Cal says, at the gate.

“Morning,” says the young guy, hefting the next sack. He’s a little out of breath. The exercise has given his face the same shine it has in the pub photo, and he has the same look of pleased expectation for Cal as he had for the camera, like Cal might be here to bring him a surprise snack.

“That’s a fine bunch of sheep you’ve got out there,” Cal says.

“They’ll do,” Fergal says, hoisting the sack more firmly onto his shoulder. He’s chubby, with soft brown hair and womanish hips. He looks like most things might take him a while. “Oughta be more of them, but sure, we’ll make the most of what we’ve got.”

“Yeah? Why’s that?”

That makes Fergal pause and give Cal a wide-eyed look, like he’s startled anyone might not know this. “The drought last summer, sure. We’d to sell off some of the flock because we couldn’t feed ’em.”

“That’s a bad blow,” Cal says. “Plenty of rain this summer, though.”

“ ’Twas better, anyway,” Fergal agrees. “Last year the drought went on right through breeding season. Hurt the lamb crop something fierce.”

“I wasn’t here for that,” Cal says. He squints up at the sky, which is mottled in pearly whites and grays. “Hard to imagine this place getting more sunshine than it can handle. That’s not what they sell on the tourist websites.”

“I love the sunshine, so I do,” Fergal confesses, with a bashful grin. “It was a mad feeling last year, hating the sight of it. I didn’t know if I was coming or going.”

Cal likes this kid, he likes this conversation, and he would be perfectly content to continue it along these same lines. He feels a jab of aggravation at Trey and his dumbass brother.

“Cal Hooper,” he says, holding out his hand. “I’m in the old O’Shea place, out the other side of the village.”

Fergal clumps over to him, readjusting the sack so he can free up a hand and shake. “Fergal O’Connor,” he says.

“Well, look at that,” Cal says, pleased. “I heard you might be the man I need, and here you are. Can I give you a hand with that while we talk?”

While Fergal is working his way through this, Cal goes in the gate, closes it carefully behind him and pulls a sack off the trailer. He gets it up on his shoulder, appreciating the realization that four months ago he would probably have ripped half a dozen muscles trying. The sacks have a line drawing of a sheep and the words QUALITY RATION underneath. “These go in the shed?” he asks.

Fergal is looking perplexed, but he can’t come up with anything reasonable to do about Cal, so he goes along with him. “They do, yeah,” he says. “Sheep feed.”

Cal follows Fergal into the shed. It’s clean, high-roofed and airy, divided into long rows of metal-barred pens; bales of hay and sacks of feed are stacked along one wall. Up in the rafters a couple of fledgling swallows are swooping around their nest. “You got some lucky sheep,” Cal says. “This is a nice place.”

“We’ll be needing it soon enough,” Fergal says. “The aul’ fellas are saying it’ll be a bad winter.” He keeps looking over his shoulder, but he can’t work out what question to ask.

“The old guys mostly get it right?”

“They do, yeah. Mostly, anyway.”

“Well then,” Cal says, dumping his sack on top of a neat pile, “I sure hope you can help me. I’m aiming to get my house in shape before that winter hits us, and I’m looking to rewire my kitchen. Some guy in the pub, he mentioned that Brendan Reddy was the go-to guy for that stuff.”

He glances over to see how Brendan’s name strikes Fergal, but Fergal merely blinks at him, perplexed.

“I went looking for him,” Cal says, “but Miz Sheila Reddy told me he’s not around these days. She said you might be able to help me out.”

Fergal’s bafflement deepens. “Me?”

“That’s what she said.”

“Sure, I haven’t a clue about electrics. Brendan does, all right. But he’s not here.”

Cal notes the does. “Well, shoot,” he says. “Looks like I got it wrong. Don’t I feel like the idiot.” He grins ruefully at Fergal, who grins back, obviously familiar with that feeling. “Sorry to have disturbed your work. Least I can do is finish these up with you, to make up for it.”

“Ah, no. You’re grand, sure. Sorry I’m no good to you.”

“Now I’m wondering if Miz Reddy was just trying to get rid of me,” Cal says, as they head back towards the trailer, “and you being Brendan’s best buddy, you were the first person who popped into her mind.” He hefts another sack onto his shoulder and makes way for Fergal to do the same. “See, I think I put my great big foot in my mouth there. I just waded right in, asking where I might find Brendan. I didn’t know the story, then.”

The speed with which Fergal’s head turns towards him is what gives Cal his first inkling that Brendan Reddy may not just have run off to the bright lights. It comes to him with the clarity of a sound, a neat small chink like metal hitting stone.

Fergal says, “What story?”

Cal looks mildly into his round, startled blue eyes.

“What’d his mam say?”

“Well, it’s not so much what she said,” Cal explains. “It’s more what I gathered.”

“What . . . ?”

Cal waits a little, but Fergal just stares. “Let’s put it like this,” Cal says in the end, picking the words carefully and letting the care show. “When people say Brendan’s not around, they don’t mean he packed his things and kissed his mama good-bye and found himself a nice little apartment in town, and he comes back every Sunday for a home-cooked dinner. Now do they?”

Fergal is looking wary. His features aren’t constructed for this, and it gives him a comical frozen look, like a kid with a bug sitting on him. “I dunno,” he says.

“Here’s the thing,” Cal says. “Brendan’s family’s pretty worried about him, son.”

Fergal blinks at him. “Worried like what?” He hears himself, figures that was a stupid question, and goes redder.

“They’re afraid he might’ve been taken.”

That leaves Fergal utterly astounded. “Taken? Ah, God, no. Taken? By who?”

“Well, you tell me, son,” Cal says, reasonably. “I’m a stranger around here.”

“Dunno,” Fergal says, eventually.

“You’re not worried about him?”

“Brendan’s not—sure, he . . . He’s grand.”

Cal looks surprised, which doesn’t take much doing. “You’re telling me you know this for a fact, son? You’ve seen him in the last six months? Talked to him?”

All this is considerably more than Fergal was prepared for, this morning. “Ah, no, I haven’t— I haven’t talked to him, or anything. I just think he’s grand. Bren always is, sure.”

“See,” Cal says, shaking his head, “this is how I know I’m getting old. Young folks always think old folks worry too much, and old folks always think young folks don’t worry enough. Your buddy’s been missing for months, and all you think is, ‘Gee, I guess he’s OK.’ To an old guy like me, that sounds downright crazy.”

“I’d say he just got spooked, is all. Not taken. Sure, what would anyone take him for?”

“Spooked by what? Or by who?”

Fergal shifts the weight of the sack on his shoulder, looking increasingly uncomfortable. “I dunno. No one.”

“You said he got spooked, son. Meaning someone musta spooked him. Who would that be?”

“I just meant . . . He’s like that, sure. My mam says all the Reddys suffer terrible from their nerves. He’ll be back once he’s settled.”

“Miz Reddy’s wearing herself to a thread,” Cal says, “worrying about him. How would your mama feel, if you were gone this long without a word?”

This gets to Fergal. He throws a hunted look towards the house. “Not great, I’d say.”

“She’d be down on her knees day and night, sobbing her heart out and praying for her boy to come home. Not to mention,” Cal says, pushing on the weak spot, “what would she say if she knew you were keeping another mama in that kind of pain, when you could ease her mind?”

Fergal glances wistfully at the shed. Clearly he’d like to go in there, either to sit down on a stack of feed sacks and think this over, or else to stay hidden until Cal gives up and goes away.

“If anyone can help her out, son, it’s you. You’re the one Brendan went to meet the evening he headed off. You give him a ride somewhere?”

“What? He did not!”

The astonishment on Fergal’s face seems as genuine as any Cal has ever seen, but Cal looks skeptical anyway.

“He wasn’t meeting me. The last time I saw him was two or three days before. He called in looking to borrow a few quid. I gave him a hundred. He said, ‘Sound, I’ll get it back to you,’ and he went off.”

“Huh,” Cal says. If Brendan was planning on taking off, then every little bit would help, but Cal does wonder why the sudden rush. “He say what he needed it for?”

Fergal shakes his head, but there’s a very slight shifty dip to it, and he blinks too fast. “And I didn’t see him after that,” he says. “I swear.”

“I musta misheard that part,” Cal says. “My point is, if you know where Brendan’s fetched up, you need to say something to his mama. Right away.”

“I haven’t a notion where he is. Honest to God.”

“Well, the part you don’t know isn’t gonna be much help to Miz Reddy, son,” Cal points out. He doubts it will occur to Fergal to wonder why some stranger is getting so exercised about Sheila Reddy’s feelings. “What’s the part you do know? Brendan told you what he was planning, is that it?”

Fergal moves his feet in the dirt like a restless horse, trying to get back to work, but Cal stays put.

“I dunno,” Fergal says, in the end. His face has smoothed out; he’s retreated into vacant blankness. “I just think he’ll come back in a while.”

Cal knows that look. He’s seen it on plenty of street corners and in plenty of interview rooms. It’s the look you get, not from the kid who did it, but from his buddy, the one who can convince himself that he knows nothing because he wasn’t there; the one who just got told about it, and is determined to prove himself worthy of that little bit of secondhand adventure by not being a snitch.

“Now, son,” Cal says, lifting a tolerant eyebrow. “I look dumb to you?”

“What? . . . No. I didn’t—”

“Well, that’s good to hear. I’m a lotta things, but I’m not dumb, at least not so far as anyone’s told me.”

Fergal is still holding on to the vacant stare, but it has little twitches of worry going on around the edges. Cal says gently, “And I was a wild kid myself, once upon a time. Whatever Brendan’s been up to, I probably did worse. But I never left my mama scared out of her wits for months on end. I don’t blame you for not wanting to deal with Miz Reddy yourself, but she has a right to know what’s going on. Any message you’ve got for her, I’m willing to pass it along. I don’t need to tell her where it came from.”

But he’s run into a barrier in Fergal’s mind, a mixture of confusion and loyalty that’s set like concrete. “I dunno where Brendan went,” Fergal says, more solidly this time. He’s planning to keep on saying it, and nothing else. Like most people just quick enough to understand that they lag a little behind, he knows he can beat all the quicker ones with this.

Cal has ways of chipping away at this barrier, but he doesn’t want to use them. He never liked rubbing dumb people’s dumbness in their faces. It feels too much like playground picking on the weak kid, and besides, once you do that there’s no going back. He’s not looking to make an enemy in this place.

“Well,” he says, with a sigh and a shake of his head, “that’s your call. I hope you change your mind.” He can’t work out whether Fergal actually knows something that needs keeping quiet, or whether this is just reflex. He allows for the possibility that he’s overthinking things, out of professional deformation: back on the job that was always one of the main time-wasters, people keeping their mouths shut for no good reason, but Cal didn’t expect to run into it here in the land of the gift of the gab. “When you do, you know where to find me.”

Fergal mumbles something and heads off towards the shed as fast as he can go. Cal ambles along after him and asks a question about sheep breeds, which are what they talk about while they finish unloading the sacks. Fergal has relaxed a fair amount by the time they get done and Cal heads back towards the village, turning over Fergal and Brendan in his mind.

Being nineteen didn’t sit right with Cal. He thought it did at the time, when he was running wild in Chicago, giddy on freedom, working as a bouncer at skeevy clubs and playing house with Donna in a fourth-floor walkup with no air-conditioning. It was only a few years later, when they found out Alyssa was on the way, that he realized running wild never had suited him. It had been a lot of fun, but deep down, so deep that he’d never spotted it there, Cal yearned after getting his feet on the ground and doing right by someone.

He feels that nineteen-year-olds, almost all of them, don’t have their feet on the ground. They’re turning loose from their families and they haven’t found anything else to moor themselves to; they blow like tumbleweed. They’re unknowns, to the people who used to know them inside out and to themselves.

The people who know a nineteen-year-old best are his buddies, and his girl if he has a good one. Fergal, who knows Brendan’s mind a lot better than his baby brother or his mama or Officer Dennis, thinks Brendan is in the wind by his own choice, and that he’s running not towards something but away from something, or someone.

This place has one thing in common with the tougher neighborhoods Cal used to work: in fine weather people spend much of their time outside, which is handy when you want to run into them by chance. In the driveway of the big yellow house with the conservatory, just on the edge of the village, a dark-haired young guy in skinny jeans is waxing a motorbike.

The bike is a weedy little Yamaha, but it’s pretty near brand-new, and it wasn’t cheap. Neither was the giant black SUV parked beside it, or the famous conservatory, come to that. The front garden has neat flower beds around a water feature shaped like a stone pagoda, with a lit-up crystal ball on top that keeps changing color. Cal knows from pub talk that Tommy Moynihan is some kind of big shot in the meat-processing plant a couple of townlands over. The Moynihans—like the O’Connors, although in a different way—are a whole lot better off than the Reddys.

“Nice bike,” he says.

The guy glances up. “Thanks,” he says, favoring Cal with a half smile. His features are finely modeled enough that plenty of people, himself included, probably consider him good-looking, but he’s got a skimpy jaw and no chin.

“Gotta be tough to keep it looking good, on these roads.”

This time Eugene doesn’t bother to look up from his microfiber cloth. “It’s not a problem. You just have to be willing to put the time into it.”

This guy doesn’t give Cal the same urge to hang around shooting the breeze as Fergal did. “Hey,” he says, struck by a thought. “You Eugene Moynihan, by any chance?”

At that Eugene does take the trouble to look at him. “I am, yeah. Why?”

“Well, that’s a piece of good luck,” Cal says. “I was told you were the man I should talk to, and here you are. It was the bike that gave you away. I heard you had the prettiest bike in these parts.”

“It’s all right,” Eugene says, shrugging and giving the glossy red paintwork an extra swipe. He has a light, pleasant voice with most of the local accent scrubbed off it. “I’m planning on trading up soon enough, but this’ll do for now.”

“I used to have a motorcycle,” Cal says, leaning his arms on the big stone gatepost. “Back when I was about your age. Little bitty fourth-hand Honda, but man, did I love that thing. Just about every cent I made went straight into it.”

Eugene isn’t interested, and isn’t going to bother pretending. He lifts his eyebrows at Cal. “You were looking for me?”

Cal, who is coming to agree with Trey’s assessment of Eugene’s personality, brings out his story about the rewiring and Brendan and Sheila Reddy giving him Eugene’s name. By the end Eugene doesn’t look wary, like Fergal did; he just looks mildly disdainful. “I don’t do electrical work,” he says.

“No?”

“No. I’m doing finance and investment. In college.”

Cal is suitably impressed. “Well then,” he says, “you’re right not to waste your time on odd jobs. I ain’t an educated man myself, but I know that much. If you done earned yourself an opportunity like that, why, you gotta make the most of it.”

He can see the look, wry and guarded, that Donna used to give him when he did that, slouched into the thick backwoods drawl of his granddaddy’s buddies. Rednecking up, she called it, and she hated it—she never said so, but Cal could tell. Donna was a Jersey girl from the hood, but she never leaned on her accent, or hid it either; people could take her or leave her. She thought Cal was lowering himself by playing to people’s dumb preconceived ideas. Cal has his pride, but it doesn’t run in that direction. Acting like a hick can be all kinds of useful. To Donna, that was beside the point.

Donna’s opinions don’t change the fact that Eugene’s glance has just the right dismissive flick to it. “Yeah,” he says. “I’m planning to.”

“Looks like I got the wrong end of the stick,” Cal says, taking off his baseball cap so he can scratch his head thoughtfully. “But Brendan Reddy does wiring, doesn’t he? I got that part right?”

“He did, yeah. But I don’t know where he is these days. Sorry.”

This puzzles Cal. “You don’t?”

“No. Why would I?”

“Well,” Cal says, readjusting his cap, “nobody else seems to. It’s a mystery, seems like. But folk keep on telling me you’re the big genius around these parts. I reckoned if anybody would have an idea where Brendan went, it’d be you.”

Eugene shrugs. “He didn’t say.”

“He got himself in hot water some way or other, didn’t he?”

Another shrug, one-shouldered. Eugene concentrates on buffing his paintwork, squinting along it to make sure there’s not a single streak.

“Oh,” Cal says, grinning. He isn’t going to bother trying the mama-guilt card, not with this kid. “Now I get it. A smart guy like you, it’s easy for me to forget you’re still a kid. You still think you can’t tell tales or you’ll get beat up in the playground.”

Eugene looks up sharply at that. “I’m not a kid.”

“Right. So what the heck did your little buddy do?” Cal is still grinning, propping himself more comfortably on the gatepost. “Lemme guess. He spray-painted bad words on a wall, got scared he’d catch a whipping from his mama?”

Eugene doesn’t lower himself to answer that.

“Knocked up some girl, had to get out of town before her daddy found his shotgun?”

“No.”

“Then what?”

Eugene sighs. “I don’t actually know what Brendan got mixed up in,” he says, tilting his head to examine the sheen from a fresh angle, “and I don’t care. All I know is, he isn’t as smart as he thinks, and that’s a great way to end up in hassle. That’s all.”

“Huh,” Cal says, his grin widening. He registers the isn’t. “You’re telling me this kid Brendan came up with some shenanigans fancy enough that you can’t make head or tail of ’em, but he’s the dumbass here?”

“No. I’m telling you I don’t want to make head or tail of it.”

“Uh-huh. Right.”

“What do you care?”

If Cal had ever talked that way to a man old enough to be his daddy, he wouldn’t have been able to sit down for a week. “Well,” he drawls, “I guess I’m just nosy-like. I’m from a little backwoods town where people like knowing each other’s business.” He scratches something off the back of his neck and examines it. “And back home there were plenty of people who talked like they knew it all, only when you got down to it, they didn’t know shit from Shinola. Guess that’s the same all over the world.”

“Look,” Eugene says, irritated. He sits back on his haunches, preparing himself to explain this in small words. “I know Brendan had some plan to make money, because he’s always skint, and then all of a sudden he was going on about how this summer we could go to Ibiza. And I know it was dodgy, because a few days before he left we were hanging out here and a couple of Guards went past, and Brendan freaked out. I thought maybe he had some hash on him, so I was like, ‘God, chill out, they didn’t come all the way down here just for your spliff,’ but he was all, ‘You don’t get it, man, this could be bad, like really bad,’ and he took off like his arse was on fire. So I’m very happy not having a clue about the details, thanks very much. I’m not interested in spending days in some interrogation room answering pointless questions from some half-wit Guard. OK?”

“Right,” Cal says. He finds himself despising Eugene a little bit. He understands that Eugene and Brendan were friends due to happenstance and habit rather than to choice. Cal has those childhood friends, some of whom grew up to do various things that landed them in prison, or to do nothing at all except sit on their porches drinking 40s and make kids they can’t support. He still stays in touch with them, and when their needs get urgent he still lends them a few bucks he’ll never see again. It seems to him that the least Eugene could do is care what kind of mess Brendan got himself into. “What were the Guards here about?”

“I haven’t got a clue,” Eugene says. He drapes his cloth neatly over his bumper, picks up a can of lube and starts carefully spraying his cables. “I doubt it was anything serious. I saw them leaving like twenty minutes later. But knowing Brendan, if the Guards weren’t after him that time, that would just make him figure everything was grand and go right back to his big plan, instead of doing the smart thing and dropping it before they actually did come after him. That’s what I mean about Brendan not being as smart as he thinks. He’s intelligent enough, but he doesn’t think things through. If he’d used his brain in school instead of mitching off to get stoned, he could have got into college. And if he’d used it to think through his brilliant idea, he wouldn’t have ended up so terrified of the Guards that he’s probably sleeping in a doorway somewhere.”

Cal says, “He wouldn’t get in touch with you, if it came down to that? Borrow a few bucks, sooner than sleep rough?”

“Oh,” Eugene says, considering that for the first time. “I mean, obviously I’d, if he really needed . . . But he wouldn’t. Brendan’s ridiculous about money. Like, you can’t even offer to buy him a pint, or he gets the hump about charity and storms off home. It’s like, fuck’s sake, we’re all just trying to have a good night out together here, what’s your problem? You know?”

Cal figures Eugene’s manner of offering might be the kind that would have sent him storming off home, too, at nineteen. He wholeheartedly agrees with Brendan’s decision to go to Fergal, rather than Eugene, for extra cash. For him to do even that, the need must have been urgent. “Well, some folks are touchy that way,” he says. “He didn’t say nothing to you that day, about where he was headed?”

“What day?”

“The day he left. He was meeting you, wasn’t he?”

Eugene stares at Cal like he shouldn’t be allowed out alone. “Um, no? What with me being in Prague with the lads from college? It was Easter hols?”

“Right,” Cal says. “Easter hols. Sounds like I can’t count on Brendan coming home any time soon, huh?”

Eugene shrugs. “Who knows, with him. He could take a notion and be home tomorrow, or he might never come back at all.”

“Huh,” Cal says. “There anyone else that might be able to help me out?”

“I wouldn’t know,” Eugene says. He dabs away a trickle of excess lube and leans back to examine the bike. “Think I’ll take this for a spin, get it properly dried out.”

“Good idea,” Cal says, straightening up off the gatepost. “If you hear from Brendan, tell him there’s work waiting for him.”

“No problem,” Eugene says, picking up his helmet from the drive and flicking a speck of something off it. “Don’t hold your breath.”

“I’m an optimistic kind of guy,” Cal says. “Nice talking to you.”

He watches Eugene roar off up the road, weaving the Yamaha neatly around potholes. Only a little bit of the motorbike made it into Brendan’s Facebook shot, but he’s pretty sure it was this one. Eugene was at least generous enough to give his buddy a ride on his bike. Either he doesn’t share his helmet, or Brendan was too much of a dumbass to wear it.

Cal heads back through the village, which has its Saturday up and running now. The aging blond woman who owns the boutique is decking out her window mannequin in an outfit running riot with ferocious tropical flowers, Noreen is polishing the brasswork on her door, and Barty the barman is giving the windows of Seán Óg’s a wipe with newspaper. Cal nods to them all, and picks up his pace when he sees Noreen whip round with her polishing cloth raised and a gleam in her eye.

He walks the lanes for a while before he heads for home. In his mind, he’s spreading out and arranging what he’s got so far. If Eugene is right and Brendan is on the run from the police, then at the top of the list of potential reasons has to be drugs. Brendan had contacts, even if they were just low-level ones, and he wanted cash. Maybe he wanted to start selling, or actually had started selling, but he didn’t have the constitution for it. The first time the police came sniffing around—or maybe the first time his suppliers got a little bit scary, and Cal knows suppliers can get plenty scary—he panicked and ran.

Officer O’Malley up in town didn’t mention anything about a drugs op focused on the village, or about Brendan Reddy being in anyone’s sights. But then, Officer O’Malley might not know.

Or Brendan’s business plan might not have involved drugs at all. There are plenty of ways for a kid to pick up some cash on the wrong side of the law around here: running stolen cars across the border, helping out the guys who launder agricultural diesel. And those are only the ones that run close enough to the surface that even a stranger can see them. A kid like Brendan, with ideas and an entrepreneurial streak, could have come up with a lot more.

Another possibility, one that Eugene the boy genius hasn’t thought of, is that Brendan’s moneymaking scheme and his fear of the police were two separate things. Maybe he was planning on taking his odd-jobs business legit, or getting famous on YouTube. And meanwhile, unrelated, he was doing something bad.

And then there’s the possibility that neither the moneymaking scheme nor the bad thing was ever real. Brendan’s mind could have been misfiring. Everything Cal has heard puts him on the unsteady side: one minute on top of the world and spinning big plans, the next minute panicked and running away from nothing, the next minute blowing it all off. Nineteen is the right age for a lot of things that can start misfiring inside someone’s mind.

Among the cases Cal liked least were the ones where he was trying to pick up a trail that had never existed outside someone’s mind. If a guy ran to Cleveland because his favorite cousin was there, or his old cellmate, or the girl who got away, the trail was solid; Cal could find it and follow it. If he ran to Cleveland because a voice from the TV told him an angel was waiting for him in a shopping mall there, then the trail was made of nothing but wisps and air. Cal needs to find out whether Brendan’s mind was making things out of air.

He considers the possibility that Brendan is up in the mountains, living off the grid in some abandoned cottage, and coming down at night to slice sheep to rags. The image unsettles him a little bit more than it should. He sincerely hopes that he’ll never have to pass it on to Trey.

In fact, when it comes to Trey, Cal isn’t inclined to pass on any of the morning’s events, at least not until he finds out why Brendan was running scared of the police. He promised to tell the kid anything he found out, but he feels it would be allowable to wait until he has something real, rather than a foggy cluster of hints and possibilities. There are things Brendan could have done that the kid would need to be told carefully.

It occurs to Cal that this is the first time he’s made the decision to take on a case. On the job, he took cases because they got assigned to him. He never spent much time weighing up the intricacies of whether the people concerned and the wider society and the forces of good would be best served by him taking on the investigation; partly because he was going to do it anyway, but mainly because he believed that it was in fact the right thing to do in a general sense, if not necessarily in every particular instance. Most of the guys felt the same, at least the ones who cared one way or the other. There were exceptions—occasionally some short-eyes got himself beat up and the witnesses somehow never did get tracked down, or some pimp with a worse-than-average rep ended up shot and no one put too much effort into unraveling who had pulled the trigger—but on the whole, your name came up so you did your job. This is the first time Cal has been in a position to choose whether or not to take a case, and has made the choice to do it. He hopes, even more sincerely, that he’s doing the right thing.