the Julia Strange murder file, then remembered what Gideon had been like on the day his mother had gone missing. She could see every detail of the boy’s living room, the furniture and the paint, the detectives and the crime-scene techs that drifted like smoke from the kitchen. She remembered Adrian Wall—pale as a sheet—and the feel of the boy’s hot, squirming body as he’d screamed in her arms and other cops tried to calm his wild-eyed, wailing father.
“Is he alive?”
“Surgery,” Beckett said. “I don’t know any more than that. I’m sorry.”
Elizabeth was dizzy, the sun too bright. “Where was he shot?”
“The high right side of his chest.”
“No, Beckett. Where did it happen?”
“Nathan’s. The biker bar.”
“I’ll be there in ten minutes.”
“No, you won’t come anywhere near this. Dyer was specific. He doesn’t want you around Adrian Wall or this case. Obviously, I agree.”
“Then why did you call me?”
“Because I know you love the kid. I thought you’d want to go to the hospital, be there for him.”
“I can’t do anything at the hospital.”
“You can’t do anything here, either.”
“Beckett…”
“He’s not your son, Liz.” She froze, the phone painful against her ear. “You’re just the cop who found his mother dead.”
That was a hard truth, but who else was closer to the boy? His father? Social services? Elizabeth had been the first on scene when Gideon’s mother went missing. It might have ended there, but she’d also found Julia Strange broken on the altar of Elizabeth’s father’s church, the body so vulnerable in its desecration she’d almost wept. They’d never once met; and yet Elizabeth, even now, felt a kinship between them, a thread that twisted through thirteen years and found its embodiment in the small boy left behind. A man such as Beckett would never understand that. He couldn’t.
“Go to the hospital,” he said. “I’ll meet you there, later.”
Beckett hung up, and Elizabeth handed the phone back to Carol, who said a good-bye that barely registered. There was a blur of face, a cough as the car started and made a brushstroke of color in the road. When it was gone, Elizabeth walked to the bathroom, kept her eyes down so as not to see her face, and used the sink to rinse spray from her hair. She was numb, her mind spinning on images of Gideon as a toddler, and then as a boy. She thought she knew everything about him, his wants and needs and secret hurts.
Why was he at the prison?
Elizabeth shied from the answer because deep down she knew that, too.
Sitting on the sofa, she opened the murder file and pulled a photograph taken by a crime-scene tech less than an hour after Julia Strange was discovered missing. In the shot, Elizabeth stood in uniform with a red-faced infant in her arms. The Stranges’ kitchen was in disarray behind her. Gideon had the fabric on her shirt balled in his tiny fist. As a rookie and the only woman in the house, she’d been given the child to take care of until social services arrived. She didn’t know then how she’d react to such need and helplessness. She was a kid herself. She couldn’t have.
Elizabeth leaned back, remembering all the days and months she’d spent with the boy in the years that followed his mother’s death. She knew his teachers, his father, the friends he kept at school. He called her when he was hungry or scared. At times, he walked to her house, just to do homework or talk or sit on the porch. For him, too, the old house had been a sanctuary.
“Gideon.”
A single finger touched his face, and when tears rose in her eyes, she let them run unheeded down her cheeks.
“Why didn’t you talk to me?”
But he had tried, she remembered, calling three times in one day, then again, and then not at all. She’d known that Adrian was getting out, and that Gideon knew it, too. She should have anticipated his distress, known he might do something stupid. He was such a feeling, thoughtful boy.
“I should have seen it.”
But she’d been at the hospital with Channing, then talking to state police and roaming the halls of her own private hell. She hadn’t seen a thing. She’d not even thought of him.
“You poor, sweet boy…”
She gave herself that minute to be soft, to feel the guilty fullness of a mother’s love when she was not, in fact, a mother; then she put the file away, pushed a pistol into her belt, and drove