Willing to Die (Alvarez & Pescoli)

She was already climbing up and hoisting herself onto the unfinished floor.

“I didn’t mean to do anything wrong or anything illegal. I just wanted to see what it was like, y’know.” Mays took a step closer, then stopped as he focused on the gun still in Santana’s hand. “I never got to be a real son to my dad, you know. I never even met him. Mom and him, it was like a one-night stand or something. She, um, she never would talk about it much.”

“You asked her who your father was?” Santana looked threatening in the harsh light.

“All my life, but she wouldn’t say. It was weird, y’know. She wanted me to call this other guy Dad, Harold Mays. She took up with him when I was twelve. But it never felt right, not even when he adopted me. After college I just started looking around—they’ve got all those tests you can take. DNA. Where you spit into a test tube and send it to a lab and they link it up. Turns out I matched with some relative of Brady Long’s and, through the process of elimination and some digging, I got hold of people here, and I figured it out.”

“Just like that,” Santana said, still skeptical. But if Garrett Mays was acting, he was putting on a performance worthy of an award. Then again, it was all so far-fetched.

“There’s a legal process,” said Pescoli.

“I knew Brady. He never said he had a kid,” added Santana.

“He didn’t know. That’s just it.”

&n

bsp; Pescoli put in, “Why wouldn’t your mother have come forward? Tried to collect child support?”

“I don’t know.” Garrett shook his head.

“Ask her,” Pescoli told him. “Now that you have all this new ‘evidence,’ put it to her.”

“I did. But, it was kinda too late. She’s got early-onset dementia. Can’t remember shi—anything. She’s only fifty-three and . . . and it’s awful. She still knows me, and Harold, but it’s iffy. Sometimes she’s clear as a bell, the next time she looks right through you.”

Convenient, Santana thought. But the family resemblance was strong.

“This is the story you expect us to believe?” Pescoli asked.

“Why would I make it up?”

“The fact that Long had money played no part in that decision?” Santana asked.

He flushed. “Well, sure it did. But, man, I also really wanted to see what it’s like out here. I’m from Chicago and this is waaay different, all the cowboy, Wild West shit, er, I mean stuff.”

“Including that belt buckle,” Santana pointed out as he’d spied Brady Long’s favorite silver buckle, cut into the shape of Montana, a gold star not exactly where Helena, the state capital, was, but fixed more to the left side of the buckle, the western edge where a lot of the Long family copper mines and logging camps were located.

The kid had the decency to look sheepish. “I saw it downstairs and thought, ‘well, he’s not using it anymore, ’ right?”

“Enough!” Pescoli said, and he actually jumped back a step. “What do you know about our son? Our baby?”

“What?”

“He’s missing. Someone stole him out of his nursery last night.”

He blinked rapidly. “You think I had something to do with it?” he said, his mouth dropping open. “What would I do with a little kid?”

Pescoli started to advance, but Santana put a hand out, caught her by the elbow.

“Is there anyone else here?” Santana asked.

“Just the maid. And you, sometimes.” He was looking a little frantic now. “I mean it, I’m sorry about your kid and all, but I had nothing to do with it.” Then he stopped. “Well, but . . .”

“What?” Pescoli demanded.

He licked his lips. “This morning I thought maybe I heard someone downstairs. It was still dark so I just stayed up here. I hoped they’d go away and they did.”

Santana’s pulse jumped, and beneath his fingertips he felt the muscles of his wife’s upper arm tense.