“I understand.”
“Do you?”
“I do.”
She stopped and took his measure, the raised freckles bunching high on her copper-colored cheeks. Then she blew out a breath, deflating. “Look at us, acting like we on different sides. I’m sorry, Mr.…?”
“Wayne.”
“Mr. Wayne. I know you’re just trying to do the best you can, too. I guess it’s…” Her not-insignificant bosom heaved. “I guess I’m embarrassed we can’t do better by them. I use my own salary for Christmas and birthday gifts. The director, too. He’s a good man. But good isn’t enough sometimes.”
“No,” Evan said. “Sometimes it’s not. Which room was he in?”
“Fourteen,” she said. “We group the kids with less severe conditions in the C Hall. We’re talking ADHD, dyslexia, visual-motor stuff.”
“And Jesse’s condition was…?” Evan flipped through the pages.
“Conduct disorder.”
“Of course.”
She waved a hand adorned with hammered metal rings. “C’mon, I’ll walk you.”
The walk took longer than Evan would have liked, but he held her pace. They passed a girl sitting on the floor picking at the hem of her shirt. Her fingernails were bitten to the quick, leaving spots of blood on the fabric.
“Hi, baby doll, be back for you in a second, okay?” the nurse said.
The girl turned vacant eyes up toward them as they passed. She had beautiful thick hair like Joey’s, a similarity Evan chose not to linger on.
The nurse finally arrived at Room 14, knocked on the door once briskly, and opened it. The three boys inside, all around the age of thirteen like David Smith, lounged on bunk beds, tapping on cheap phones.
In another time, in another place, Evan had lived in this room.
“This is Mr. Wayne,” the nurse said.
The oldest-looking kid shot a quick glance at Evan and said, “Lucky-ass us. Another social worker.”
“Respect, Jorell, or I’ll notch you down to red on the board again.”
Evan asked, “Did any of you see Jesse Watson run away?”
They all shook their heads.
“He didn’t talk about it before? No planning? Nothing?”
“Nah,” Jorell said. “That fool was bent. For a skinny white boy? He was nails. Could fight like a mofo. He had things his own way.”
“Jorell,” the nurse said wearily.
It wasn’t the first time she’d said his name like that. Or the hundredth.
“Where were you guys before bed check?” Evan said.
“Still in the caf,” another kid said. “Mindin’ our bidness. Jesse come back to the room early, do push-ups and shit. He say he gonna be a marine.”
Evan stepped inside, pointed. “This his bunk?”
“The very one,” Jorell said.
Jorell was a smart kid. Smart kids in places like this tended to have worse outcomes. A nice dumb boy could toe the line, graduate with C’s, get a steady job at a fast-food joint, live to see thirty.
On the radiator by the empty lower left bunk rested a Lego version of a Star Wars rebel commanding a Snowspeeder. Evan recognized it from one of Peter’s comic books. He picked it up. “This was Jesse’s?”
“Yeah. Ain’t that some white-boy shit?”
All three kids laughed, even the Caucasian one.
The charge nurse said, “You just dying for me to level you down tonight, ain’t that so, Jorell?”
He silenced.
Holding the Snowspeeder, Evan stepped back to her, said quietly, “I’m guessing this was one of the gifts that came out of your salary.”
She nodded.
Evan said, “It’s probably the only thing in the world he has that’s actually his.”
Her mocha eyes held the weight of all forty lives she’d been charged with. “That’s probably right.”
“I doubt he’d run away and leave it behind.”
“What are you saying, Mr. Wayne? The boy broke out. Happens all the time.”
Evan set the Lego rebel back on the radiator and stepped toward the sash window. It rattled up arthritically. He leaned out, noted the fresh gouge marks in the paint on the sill.
“They usually break out from the outside?” he said.
The charge nurse came over and looked at the window, and her hand pressed against her neck. Seeing her expression, he regretted his phrasing.
“I’ll call the police again,” she said quietly.
The boys had silenced; even Jorell had sobered up.
Evan started for the door. “Like you said, it’s in their hands now.”
As he hustled out, he passed that girl in the hall, forgotten, picking at the hem of her shirt with bloody fingernails. In his mind’s eye, he pictured Joey sitting in her place.
He blinked away the image, banishing it from his thoughts, and kept on.
50
The Best Hat Trick
Evan sat in the passenger seat of the minivan, the Virginia sun pounding the windshield. Joey had taken the news of David Smith’s kidnapping stoically, though he’d noticed her fists whiten on the steering wheel as he’d filled her in.
“One hour,” she finally said. “One hour earlier and we could’ve saved him.”
“We don’t know that he’s dead,” Evan said.
“Orphan J. Orphan C. Orphan L. All the other names on that file are dead. Except me. If Van Sciver kidnapped David Smith, he already killed him.”
They stared up the block at the crumbling façade of the McClair Children’s Mental Health Center. It radiated a kind of despair that resonated in Evan’s cells. He thought of the boys he’d grown up with in Pride House. Andre and Danny and Tyrell and Ramón. Every so often Evan checked in on them from the safe remove of the Vault, searching them out in the databases. Danny was serving a dime for armed robbery at the Chesapeake Detention Facility, his third stint. Ramón had overdosed in a by-the-hour motel in Cherry Hill. Tyrell had finally managed to join the army, KIA outside Mosul on his first deployment.
Any one of their fates should have been shared by Evan. He was them and they were him.
Until Jack.
Searching for hope here on this block was hard, but Evan tried. David Smith was owed that much.
“If Van Sciver wanted him dead, why didn’t they just shoot him in the room?” Evan said.
“Because that would be a big public thing,” Joey said. “A runaway’s just another story.”
“When a kid gets killed in a neighborhood like this, it’s not a big public thing. It’s two lines of print below the fold. Everyone would think it was gang retribution. Remember, no one in the world knows who David Smith is.”
“Except Van Sciver,” Joey said. “And us.”
Evan felt it then, the first ray of hope, straw-thin and pale, not enough to warm him but enough to lead the way. “The smart move isn’t to kill him. The smart move is to use him for bait.”
“So what do we do?” Joey asked.
“Swallow the hook. Let them reel.”
“And if he’s already dead?”
Evan stared at the sign above the security gate of the facility’s front door. A number of the letters were smashed or broken.
He said, “It’s a chance I have to take.”
“That sounds less than strategic.”
“The Tenth Commandment.”
“‘Never let an innocent die,’” she quoted. “So where do we start?”
Evan took out the Samsung Galaxy cell phone he’d lifted off the dead man in Portland. He called up Signal, the encrypted comms software that led directly to Van Sciver. He was about to press the icon to call when he realized that his emotions around this place and these foster kids were infecting him, making him reckless.
He thumbed the phone back off.
“We need to gather more intel before I make contact,” he said. “There’s an ATM at the gas station two blocks that way, facing the street. Maybe we can get the security footage, see what we see.”