The Foster Family, page 18
The officer made a noise and I glanced up at him. “You don’t need to know that.”
“It’s all right, Mr. Grey. Continue, please.”
I nodded. “I was pouring. The shattering was so loud and I had no idea what it was, where it came from. Something hit my leg.” I felt the sore spot on my calf, and a shiver ran through me. I pulled Charlie’s jacket closed. “This foster home I was in once, it was… pretty terrible. I mean, the neighborhood. You always heard shots, right? Off in the distance. But when they’re close, you hear the glass first, because the glass is close, and you never even know where the bullet is. It’s the weirdest thing.” That sounded mixed-up. Something about the memory twisted out of shape, and it slipped my grasp.
Officer Karl nodded and made a soft noise that brought my attention back to him. For an instant, he didn’t look like I expected. He was younger, meatier, and then he was himself again, and I blinked. “This morning, Mr. Grey,” he said. “What happened this morning? Was it a bullet that shattered the window?”
“What?” I stared at him and struggled with the memory of him as another person as I tried to curl deeper into Charlie’s scent.
“Was it a bullet that came through your widow today?” the policeman asked.
“Malcolm’s window.” Was he confused? This was Malcolm’s house.
“Yes. Malcolm’s window,” Karl agreed, and abruptly the situation jolted back into focus. “Was it a bullet that came through Malcolm’s window?”
“No.” I got up and searched the floor, eventually spotting the stone and picking it up. “It was a rock. See?”
“Please put that down,” Karl said evenly, and I knew I’d done something terrible by the flat, even tone of the policeman’s voice.
I set the stone gently on the table. “Sorry.”
“It’s all right. You didn’t know.” He pointed to the chair I had been sitting in. “Have a seat, Mr. Grey, and let’s hear the rest of the story.”
“Okay.” I sat and reached back in my memory to the morning, careful not to go too far this time. “I guess maybe I thought… for a minute, that it was something else. I panicked and”—heat flushed up into my face—“I hid under the table.”
“He called me,” Malcolm interjected. “I heard the first rock come through from the bedroom, then Kerry called me and I came running. The second one came in before I got here. I ran into the room and he was under the table. He tried to stop me walking through glass, but I was a bit… slow on the uptake.” He lifted the foot Charlie had finished disinfecting and covering with spray-on bandage. “I got a look out the window, though, and saw a blue sports car speeding away around the corner. It was newish, I think. Kind of big and boxy.”
“License?” Karl asked hopefully.
“Sorry, no,” Malcolm told him.
“Make?”
Malcolm looked a little bit chagrined. “I’m not really a car guy. Sorry.”
“Too bad.” He turned back to me. “Anything you’d like to add?”
The heat of humiliation coursed through me. “I hid under the table,” I managed. Even to myself, I sounded small and wounded and weak.
“Nothing wrong with that,” Karl said, tone still as matter-of-fact as always. “Logical thing to do. I’m going to go call this in and see if we can maybe get some sort of information from the stones or the ground outside.” He took a moment to study me.
His look was so devoid of anything other than professional curiosity, and yet sweat collected and dripped down my sides under my T-shirt. “What?”
“You don’t know who might have done this?”
“I don’t know.” I wished I did. If I knew they could stop it. “I just—”
“Officer,” Malcolm said, pushing himself upright and ignoring Charlie’s protests that he should keep his feet up, “you and I know this has to be his ex. Andrew Bishop. We filled out the paperwork for the restraining order—”
“Shelton,” I interrupted. “Andrew Shelton-Bishop. His mother remarried. They moved to a better neighborhood.” I looked up and everyone was staring at me. “When we were nine,” I explained, “his mother got married and they moved, so I didn’t know him anymore. ’Til high school when he came back….”
Malcolm frowned, then turned back to the police officer. “The restraining order,” he said again.
“It’s been filed. Your attorney has been contacted, and as soon as a court date is set and all the parties notified, you’ll have your piece of paper.” He closed his notebook and set his pencil neatly across the black cover. “Between you and me, a guy who tosses rocks through a window is not a guy who’s going to pay any attention to a piece of paper.”
“Andrew walks up to a guy and punches him in the face,” I interjected. “And laughs.” I touched the side of my face. “He doesn’t throw rocks through windows and run away. The court order is a waste of time. He won’t ignore it. His stepfather’s lawyers will make it go away so his spot on the football team doesn’t. He wouldn’t go to this much trouble over me. He tried to get me to go back, and I said no. He beat me up and walked away. He’ll find some other shmuck to be his bitch.”
“Kerry,” Malcolm said softly.
“It’s true,” I said, not looking at the other man, though I was perfectly well aware that tone of voice had been a command to do just that.
“You are no one’s bitch, Kerry.”
“Whatever.”
“Kerry.” Charlie’s tone forced its way through the fog like Malcolm’s had not, and I lifted my gaze to meet his eyes. “What did Mal say?” Charlie asked.
I swallowed and tried to climb out of Charlie’s deep, chocolaty, warm gaze, out of the sense of him surrounding me, from the smell of him and the look in his eyes and the control. I couldn’t. “I’m no one’s bitch,” I replied finally.
“Not Andrew’s, and not ours.”
I chewed on my lower lip and swallowed, but after a moment more, nodded. “Okay.”
“Okay.” Charlie squeezed my shoulder and turned to the officer. “Now what?”
“Now we take what we have and hope they find something, if the lab ever gets around to working on this case. To be completely honest, the fact you’re gay”—he looked from Malcolm to Charlie—“is a point in our favor. We say this looks like a hate crime, and it gets more attention.”
“This is about Kerry,” Charlie said, laying a hand on my thigh as I began to shake again.
Karl looked chagrined, but he was adamant. “Making it about Kerry makes it a lover’s quarrel. Domestic at the most. It’ll never make it to the top of the list until he’s in the hospital.” Now he looked right at me, and there was real anger in his expression. “Or the morgue. If we want answers and lab work and a chance at actual, concrete evidence, we play both angles and hope for answers before media attention.”
“Here.” Malcolm held out his phone, interrupting the exchange. “It’s not the same car, but the color is right.”
Officer Karl peered at the tiny screen. “Well, it’s not a factory finish, at least.”
“Is that good?” Malcolm asked.
“We can ask around at the body shops and find out if anyone has done a custom paint job on a late-model sports car, I guess.”
“Will that find him?” I asked, heart skipping a few beats.
“Don’t get your hopes up. This is a college town. Kids from around here going to the college are the ones who can’t afford to go elsewhere. They probably can’t afford a custom paint job on any car, never mind a brand-new one. The kids who drive those cars are from all over the country. No telling where that car was painted.”
“Oh.”
“It’s worth asking a few questions,” Karl said, and I heard the attempt to sound reassuring.
“But it probably won’t lead anywhere.”
“We’ll explore all avenues, Mr. Grey. I can assure you of that.”
I studied him for a moment, noticing the lines on his face curling around a mouth more used to laughing than most. “Why are you being so helpful?” I asked.
“It’s my job, Mr. Grey.”
“I know cops,” I said. “They’re all over the system, and they don’t get involved. You’re involved. Why are you involved?”
It was Steven Karl’s turn to study me. “I suppose because my kid brother could have used someone around to have his back, and no one was there. Because my own son deals with this shit every day.”
“I’m not your kid brother.”
Karl smiled. “No. But I can’t help him now. I can help you. I can try and change things, make them better for my own son, before he becomes a statistic too.”
“Say thank you, Kerry,” Malcolm said softly, “and let the man get to work.”
I looked back to the police officer. “Thank you. Sorry to—”
“It’s fine. You’ve done very well. If you think of anything else”—he glanced to Malcolm and back again—“either of you, call my voice mail or my cell.” He handed Malcolm another card. “Number’s on the back.”
Malcolm nodded. “Thank you.”
“I’ll go call this in.”
Charlie walked him to the front door and halfway to his cruiser before coming back to the kitchen. “Kerry, help me move Mal out of the way so the police can do their work when they get here.”
“I can manage,” Malcolm said and set a foot on the floor. He couldn’t hide the pinched look, though, and Charlie glared at him. “Stop being tough,” Charlie admonished softly.
“Fine. Help me up.”
Charlie smiled softly. “As you wish, Master, my Master.”
He bent to help Malcolm up but stopped when Malcolm cupped his face, closed his eyes, and breathed a few deep breaths. Charlie rested his head against Malcolm’s for a moment, and I watched them, aching to have even a fraction of that sweet comfort.
“Come,” Malcolm said, holding out a hand toward me as though he could read my mind.
I gravitated to them without thinking about it, for once not trying to understand them, just reaching for what I wanted. Both of them wrapped their arms around me, and I let the warmth seep into my bones where cold had seemed to have taken over.
“We’ll figure this out,” Malcolm said softly.
I almost smiled. Hadn’t I said that very thing not so long ago?
After a few more steadying breaths, Charlie patted me and backed out of the little huddle. He mostly lifted Malcolm from his chair, and between us, we helped him down the hall toward the bedrooms.
“Put me in the living room on the couch. I am not having those people traipsing all over my home unsupervised.”
“Yes, Sir,” Charlie said, his voice mocking but only partly.
We deposited Malcolm on the sofa, and I fetched for him until he had everything he thought he might need.
He looked up once he was settled with water and a stool, his phone and a book and the TV remote. “You can start cleaning up the glass once the police have finished.”
“Yeah.”
“You okay now?”
I shrugged. “Better.” I hadn’t relinquished Charlie’s too-big jacket, and I didn’t want to be far from where one or the other of them was.
“It’s a start,” Malcolm conceded after studying me for what felt like an eternity.
“Mal,” Charlie broke in, “call your carpenter guy and see if he has a crew who can come and replace the windows.” He knelt and picked up Malcolm’s foot that wasn’t yet bandaged and set to work cleaning and covering the cuts. “And if Mick doesn’t have anyone available, I’ll see if I can find someone else. Kerry, you might as well get started on your room. You were going to paint. No reason you shouldn’t do that. Nothing we can do about the mess until the cops are done.”
“Look who’s got it all together,” Malcolm said softly, and my shoulders crawled with sudden tension. Seemed every other thing Malcolm said was designed to bait Charlie.
Charlie looked at him and offered only a tense smile. “Forget what I do for a living, Mal? I organize shit. Call your pretty carpenter and get our windows fixed.”
“Bossy,” Malcolm said, still softly.
“For now. Someone has to be.” Charlie bent his head to his task, Malcolm picked up his phone, and I headed for my room to get started on the painting job. At least it was a direction. Malcolm didn’t seem inclined to offer that kind of guidance, and I didn’t seem capable of thinking straight at the moment. I might have to redo the paint job another day, when I wasn’t so shaky, but at least I had something to do now.
“Kerry,” Charlie called when I had reached the door. “Bottom drawer of my dresser, there’s an old sweatshirt. Go put it on. Leave the coat on the bed.”
“Yes, Sir,” I said, probably too quietly for either of them to hear. At least it was a direction.
Chapter 14
MALCOLM DID make Charlie move him to the chair where he could see into Kerry’s room as well supervise the goings-on in the kitchen. He couldn’t see the younger man the whole time, but he needed glimpses when he could get them to reassure himself Kerry was fine. Or at least reassure himself that he was working through toward fine.
“You’re worried about him,” Charlie said, settling on the arm of the chair after the forensics team had left and the kitchen had been cleaned. Kerry hadn’t emerged from his room to do the cleaning, but neither Charlie nor Malcolm had bothered to call him. Maybe they didn’t want to chance overbalancing whatever equilibrium he’d managed to find.
“You didn’t hear him, Charlie, calling like he was three. So scared.”
Charlie pulled in a deep breath and let it out. “Guess it was startling, the window shattering unexpectedly like that.”
“Yeah.” But Malcolm wasn’t convinced that startled was what Kerry had been feeling, crouched in that tiny ball under the table, back pressed tight to the wall.
He would have said more, but his phone rang, and Charlie got up to give him privacy to answer it.
“Hello?”
“Mr. Holmes.” Officer Karl’s voice was clear and crisp over the line.
“Yes. What can I do for you?”
“More like what I might be able to do for you. I did a little digging into our young man’s past.”
Malcolm’s hackles rose instantly. Not just at the unwarranted prying into Kerry’s life, but at his presumption to include himself in any way in Kerry’s ownership.
“Why?” he asked, stiff, carrying the anger like a weapon in his voice.
“Because of how shaken he was. I thought a reaction like that had more behind it than being startled by a rock through a window.”
Dammit that he was probably right and had come to the same conclusion Malcolm had. And double damn that he had gone and done something about his concerns while Malcolm pretended he was content to spy on Kerry through a half-open door.
“And?” he said at last.
“How much has Mr. Grey told you?”
“Not a lot. He was a foster kid. Charlie and I spent time in the system, so we know how it is. We don’t pry. Speaking from experience, most of those memories are best left where they lie.”
On the other end of the phone, Officer Steven Karl drew in a deep breath and let it out slowly. “You’ve got that right, Mr. Holmes. Did Kerry tell you how he ended up in the system?”
“I assume the same way most of us did. Deadbeat parents.”
“Sadly, not all kids end up in the system that way. According to his records, both his biological parents were only children. His mother was sixteen, his father a college student from out of state. The night he was born, February 13, a snowstorm whited out half of Washington. His mother was rushed to the hospital in an ambulance. His father, paternal grandmother, and both maternal grandparents were killed in a crash on the way to meet her there.”
“Jesus,” Malcolm whispered.
“She did all right, alone,” Karl said quietly. “Found an apartment. Finished high school by correspondence, worked evenings in a high-end restaurant. She was doing okay.”
“But?”
“Stupid fluke shot,” Karl muttered. “Her place was a pretty seedy corner of Seattle. Lots of violence. Gangs. She was victim of a drive-by shooting in her own home. Bullet ricocheted off an iron railing outside, through her kitchen window when she was washing dishes, and hit her in the neck. Killed her quickly. She bled out. When she didn’t show up for a shift on a Tuesday evening, a coworker went to her place. Found her dead and her son huddled near her body under the kitchen table.”
“Jesus,” Malcolm said again. “How old was he?”
“Eleven months. A baby. Barely walking, and he’d been shut in that house with his dead mother three days before anyone found him.”
“He never said anything.”
“It’s all on paper, Mr. Holmes. CPS reports say he never talked about it. The official records say that he knew, from reading the report and being told, when he was older, but never said anything about when it happened. I’d be surprised if he consciously remembers any of it.”
“Best keep it that way,” Malcolm said.
“But it explains his reaction today, even if he doesn’t realize why he was so affected.”
“Yeah.” Malcolm pulled in a breath and couldn’t, for some reason, force it out again. “So why wasn’t he adopted if he was that young? I would have thought some desperate family would have snapped him up.”
“One did,” Karl said softly. “But he was a troubled little boy. He didn’t speak when he should have. He never interacted with the other kids in his day care. The mother quit her job to stay home with him, apparently. They did everything right. Or tried to, but he never bonded with any of them. He just never really came out from under that proverbial table. By the time he was three, the marriage was over, the mother pregnant by some other guy, and the father a workaholic. They gave up.” Malcolm could hear a low rumble of anger in the officer’s voice as he spoke. “The bastards actually gave him back. Do you believe that?”
“Jesus. Poor kid” was all he could think of to say. What kind of people give away a child, essentially a baby no matter what his age in years, because he hurt so badly he couldn’t speak? Who just gives up because it’s hard? “Thanks for the information,” Malcolm said at last.
