Known Associates

by Halfpenny

If Richard had to put his finger on it, it was more like he was a costly experiment Conan was expecting something specific from, and he wasn't delivering very promising results.

9. Chapter 9

IMPORTANT: NEW AND REISSUED TRIGGERS - Many mentions of child abuse/neglect, welfare cases, missing children and missing children cases; canon-typical instances of violence/murder/suicide, dysfunctional marriages and spousal arguments.

Case in this chapter referenced from episode 27, "Jack Attacks!"

---

.

Benoit rang him up while he was trying to jimmy open his bathroom door around a blockade of unwashed laundry. "Got a minute?"

"Hey." Richard was sort of mentally halfway between a frantic need to piss and finding more alcohol to compound his piss problem. He gave up on both for the moment and wedged his hip on the desk to reach past his lamp for a cigarette. "It's good to hear from you. I was starting to think I'd gotten it wrong and was supposed to be calling you."

"Nah, just didn't want to feed you jack-shit or bullshit. Are you in a position to take notes? Got some intel but I don't want to fax them over if there's noise in the room."

"No noise. I'm ready."

The machine in the corner immediately started burping. Richard stored the cigarette in the corner of his mouth and stretched the landline cord enough to let him peer over to the tray. "Not so much good or bad news as much as neutral news," Benoit said. "Don't have a name for you, but I got a contact over at HQ to do some digging into some missing persons cases. I'm sending those over now. I lobbed the kid's photo over to another contact who used to work with the NPSC and he ran it through some of their databases, including the ones over at the MSA, but there weren't any direct hits. The technology is still young and apparently the glasses got in the way."

"It's all right, I wasn't expecting much from the photo."

"Once we expanded the search radius, 'Edogawa' brought up about sixty more hits. Apparently it's a more common name over on the eastern seaboard."

Richard saw the missing posters began to print and wondered if Rachel had replaced the ink recently. "How far back do these go?"

"About three years. Kid's got a pretty unique look with those ears and eyes, but the handful I'm sending could easily be him in the right light. There should be about fifteen coming your way."

"I don't think he's been missing that long. Kid might be a mutant but he only metastasized seven years ago. He'd have had a hard time navigating himself over here over that kind of distance."

"Four or five's old enough to get out of dodge," Benoit said. "Based on what you've told me, I wouldn't put much past him. It's easy enough for a kid that size to smuggle himself away in luggage. There's plenty of trains and buses that come out of that area and plenty more small-time charter planes that could've taken him on."

The fax kept spitting. "How much do I owe you for this?"

"I'm retired, my wife is cooking beets, and rabbits vacuumed up half my goddamn garden again last night, what the hell else do I got going on," Benoit said. "Have your daughter send me some sustenance in the mail and we'll call it even."

"You mentioned digging in a few other places when I was there. Any of that turn up any leads?"

"You got paper?"

Richard again leaned over his desk to scrape up a notepad and a pencil nub, sending can tabs skittering. "You mentioned that your list of known associates included Hershel Agasa," Benoit said. "Turns out Agasa does a lot of shoulder-bumping not only with the international scientific community, but is in tight as new dress shoes with a whole slew of foreign ambassadors as part of his outreach work."

"Outreach?"

"Guy engineers ecological impact studies for development companies and apparently has spearheaded some efforts to build wells in places hard-up for water. It's earned him some international kudos. He does a lot of convention hopping on top of that: he was over in Switzerland three months ago. Some sort of big tech push having to do with particle accelerators. Apparently a whole cadre of foreign leaders have tried to woo him overseas to come work on atomic development. Always turns them down, but in terms of the list of people he knows and who knows him, the list of people who don't know him is shorter."

"Particle accelerators?" His brain kind of rolled around in that one for a second. "Like Hardon Collisions?"

Benoit's brutality was tender. "'Hadron Collidor, you absolute fucking idiot."

"So what, are you saying he got together with some other quacks and cobbled together this kid?"

"I'm saying that this guy is everywhere and in everything. He might be locally known as a quack, but it's a persona. He's about as much of a 'quack' as Archimedes. If the kid's not actually related to him, there's a chance that one of two things happened: either the kid's a science freak and ran away to meet up with him out of idolatry, or – more likely – the kid's facing some kind of domestic trouble and figured a super-genius like Agasa would be the only one who could help him out of his problem."

"Kind of limped across the finish line at the end there," Richard said. "Plenty of kids get belted and run off. Seems a little farfetched he'd pick a scientist to tattle to."

"A kid's thought process doesn't have to be linear," Benoit said. "Could be he was getting hit at home, got real into that science shit as a means of escape, and started to project a kind of heroic image onto Agasa. He might've cooked up an ideal scenario about becoming Agasa's lab partner and getting to become a famous scientist himself – maybe some kind of superhero and sidekick fantasy. My guess is that he probably intended to get to Agasa first and was just intercepted by your daughter when he collapsed in the park."

The memory of that first night flickered unbidden past his peripheral guard. Richard stilled, pencil tucked across his mouth, recalling the resentful eyes as Conan had tried to hide his bruises from Rachel in the bath. I'm not a baby. He'd slept that first night in Rachel's room and had woken up yelling twice, twisting the blankets up in his bandaged fists. Rachel's eyes had skewered Richard across the table at breakfast the next day as she'd poured Conan an extra glass of milk. Her expression hadn't needed subtitles. Do something.

Richard was suddenly cold-cocked by nausea. He set the pencil down, picked it back up, set it down. He scrubbed at his eyes until lights ricocheted under his lids.

It took him a beat too long to realize Benoit was still talking to him. "Sorry," he said, picking the pencil back up. "So if what you're saying is true, why hasn't he tried to hit up Agasa? That's the reason he came this far afield, right?"

"I'm saying I don't know for sure. It's speculation," Benoit said. "All I know is that if Agasa claims to know him, and the kid doesn't have traceable roots in Beika, it either means Agasa was in on it from the start or the kid's convinced him to play along."

"You think Agasa's the one enabling him?"

"Hershel's pretty eccentric but he's not an idiot. If the kid's tale had been bullshit, I don't think you'd be in the position you're in right now. Chances are whatever he's running from was hurting him and Hershel got it in his head to mitigate the best he could."

"Why not go to the police?"

Benoit was to the point. "Why didn't you?"

Rachel smoothing hair away from the bruise on Conan's temple in the cab. Her ferocious, barely-lidded anger as she'd bandaged his forearms with a smile fixed on her face. Do something, Dad. She'd clung to Richard's arm so hard that night he'd walked away with his own bruises. Do something. "Look, I don't want to be in your business any more than you want me in it," Benoit said. "But either way you slice it, it's probably best you stop pretending it doesn't mean anything to you. This is gonna hurt. One way or another, the truth always comes out. His family's gonna find him. It's going to be up to you to decide whether or not they get him back."

Richard realized he'd never bothered to light the cigarette. He took out the soggy remains and discarded it. "Anyway, that's all I got for now," Benoit said. "If you want, I can keep turning up the heat – maybe get some more noses on Agasa. Or I can let it sit. It's up to you."

The missing kids posters smiled at him from the fax's tray.

"Hey," Benoit said.

"I'm all right." Richard needed to piss. He slid off his desk. "Thanks. I mean it. I'll give these a look and get back to you."

"We can let this sit," Benoit said. "He's safe there. Joseph knows he's with you. We don't have to push this any faster than we need to. Or at all."

Back to back with the chasm of a door and two generations between them. Do you want to stay, brat.

"He doesn't belong here." Richard took the sheets out of the fax before they could make Rachel bawl. He put them in his top drawer and then felt his skin crawl to lock them away. He took them out and placed them upside-down by the phone. "Sooner he can go home the sooner things can go back to normal."

"I'll keep digging and let you know if anything else is turned up."

Conan's halting whisper from the other side of the door: Yes.

"Thanks." Richard hung up. He fished out the blockade of dirty clothes with a coat hangar and dumped them out in the stairwell for Rachel to scream over before locking himself in the bathroom. The missing posters had sliced him a paper-cut across his thumb. The soap he slathered in it stung a little more than his betrayal, so that was good.

---

.

He'd thought the McMullins debacle would tailspin her and had prepared some halfway-decent parenting to deal with that, but Rachel woke flight-ready the next morning, rustling up a breakfast quiche and chatting with Conan about his upcoming art exhibit. The clouds had cleared up at some point in the past night, leaving Beika windy but sun-soaked in their wake. "Have you given any thought about what you want to make for it?" Rachel pressed, guiding another piece onto Conan's plate. "I know it seems like you've got a lot of time, but it'll pass by faster than you think. You really don't want to be up all night right before the exhibit trying to finish your project."

"I'm not really the artistic type," Conan said. "I was thinking of maybe just doing a diorama of the planets or something."

"For an art project?"

"I mean, I'd make them pretty, I guess. Put some glitter on them or something. Most of the kids are just drawing or working with clay anyway. It's not like it's going to be a Van Gogh exhibit, it's just a bunch of six and seven year-olds fingerpainting."

"You'd be surprised," Richard said around his mouthful, bored, searching around for any leftover sausage on his plate. "Competition's cutthroat these days. Ten to one you'll be required to show your project'll at your first job interview. Your future wife's gonna want to see it too. Just don't be the best one there – they always sacrifice that artist to the volcano gods in Waikiki for a bountiful virginal harvest."

"Dad, stop," Rachel said. "God, you're not even drunk."

"What? Kid's right. It's a first grade art exhibit. Half of the sculptures'll probably be made out of boogers and cornflakes."

"It's not about the quality, it's about him trying his best and practicing things he's not good at. Not everything's about exams and getting good jobs. He needs to be well-rounded."

"Look, art's just not something I'm all that worried about, that's all." But Conan looked resigned as he speared a mushroom from the mass of egg on his plate. "I mean, I get that it's important to try your best and everything, but I don't have anything to prove. I would've sat it out if Ms. Takara had let me."

"Oh, but Conan, it can be so fun," Rachel said earnestly, setting down her fork. "There are so many things you can do to express yourself. It's not just painting. You can sculpt, you can build models, you can knit things…"

"I don't know how to do any of that stuff."

"Then we'll help you. You just have to decide what you want to do."

Conan shuffled the tines of his fork silently through the smears of cheese. "Gosh, this is really bringing back memories," Rachel said. She set her chin on her palm and went distant a moment, fond. "Everyone's projects were so cute. Serena made a suncatcher out of beach glass she'd picked up from her trip to Hawaii. I can remember being so jealous about how pretty it was. And then of course there was poor Jimmy."

"Huh?" Conan's fork paused halfway to his mouth. "'Poor Jimmy'?"

"Jimmy didn't like art either. He tried so hard to make a horse sculpture out of nuts and bolts, but he couldn't get the metal to stick together and ended up accidentally supergluing his fingers. He had to go to Dr. Agasa to get a solution to unstick them. By the time Dr. Agasa had managed to get him free, Jimmy only had enough time left to paint a picture."

Mostly invested in mouthing sausage-burps against his wrist, Richard was startled into a laugh. "I remember that."

"God, it was so heinous," Rachel said. "I pretended I liked it because I didn't want to hurt his feelings, but it was… well, let's just say that it's a good thing Jimmy is good in other subjects."

"It couldn't have been that bad," Conan said.

"It was supposed to be a horse, but Jimmy can't draw. Pretty much at all," Rachel said. "Worse, he waited so long to start that it was too late to buy the colors he needed at the art store, so he had to mix and match what he had in his house and color in the rest with crayons. It was honestly the most atrocious thing I'd ever seen. But he was so proud of it, and when he asked me what I thought, I couldn't bear to tell him the truth. So I told him I loved it and that I hoped he'd paint one for me one day. I still have it somewhere."

"Well that…" Conan seemed to be at an honest loss for words. He blinked at Rachel from behind his glasses, mulish, agitatedly tapping his fork against the side of his plate. "That kind of seems a little harsh, don't you think? I mean, maybe you should've been more honest with him if you hated it that much."

"I didn't hate it," Rachel laughed. "He's so brilliant in so many things, Conan – it's really not a big deal that he's not a good artist. But that's my point. He wasn't good at art, but he ended up really being proud of what he made anyway. That's why I think you should branch out and try new things. Maybe you won't be the very best at it, but you might discover things about yourself that you wouldn't have learned if you hadn't tried. Dad, you remember my first grade art project, right? That cute patchwork blanket? Remember how proud I was when I finished?"

"Yeah, you remember how proud you were when you finished," Richard said. "All I remember was late nights and screaming tantrums when it wasn't turning out exactly the way you wanted it to."

Rachel looked taken aback. "I didn't throw tantrums in first grade."

"Six tantrums over the blanket alone. I almost set it on fire but the bitch downstairs already thought I was abusing you. Fire would've just proved her point."

"Well, maybe it was just because I'd worked too hard and I was tired. I didn't normally throw tantrums."

"One time you sat down on the sidewalk outside the bakery and bawled when I wouldn't buy you a donut."

"Probably because I was hungry," she snapped, ears reddening. "Stop exaggerating."

"You threw one of your shoes. It hit a kid on a bike and knocked him over into a fire hydrant."

"No I didn't!"

"I had to apologize to the parents while you sat there screaming about frosting. Four cars slowed down to watch."

"Conan, don't listen to this," Rachel said. "He's lying. I probably just had low blood sugar because he forgot to feed me breakfast."

"Four slices of cinnamon toast that morning," Richard told Conan. "Four. She ate like a baleen. Entire empires fell because she sucked their naval fleets down into that oceanic maw."

Rachel wrestled her fork down into his knuckles until it wrung a curse out of him. He grabbed her braid and jabbed her eyeball with the puffy end of it. "I'll think about it." Conan's voice hiked half an octave across the table above their squall. "Okay? I'll think about it! I promise!"

"That's all I'm asking." Rachel plucked her weapon of mass casualty out of Richard's skin and scooped up his plate before he could eat the rest of his cheese. "And don't be shy. If you end up thinking of something, tell us what it is and we can make sure you have everything you need. I'm going to clean up. Can you check you and Dad's room for dirty dishes?"

Conan thumped to the floor and ran. "Oh, and Dad, just a reminder that today's my visitation with Mom," Rachel added, taking Richard's and Conan's glasses and setting them on top of the pile of plates. "I'm going to be gone most of the afternoon. There's leftovers in the fridge from last night and I'm going to wrap up the rest of the quiche. Make sure you feed Conan, okay?"

"That's today?" He admittedly stored his head up his ass most of the time to keep it warm, but this gave him an honest jerk of surprise. "Didn't you just have one?"

"I mean, sure, a few weeks ago. They're monthly, remember?"

"You're seventeen now. They're probably optional at this point. You don't have to go."

"I want to see my mother." Rachel didn't stop, continuing to stride to the kitchen with a glance towards their wall clock. "And apparently I throw tantrums, so I'd suggest you think real hard about whether or not you want to keep me from getting what I want."

He was a grown-up or whatever so he didn't sulk. He loitered around the kitchen as she hummed over the dishes, loitered between obnoxiously loud TV stations as she arranged last-minute details with Eva on the phone, and loitered in front of the shoe rack mining his nose with his pinky until Rachel gave up and whapped him with an umbrella to get him out of her way. "Look, if she's got something on you that she's strong-arming you with, we can get agents on it," Richard said. "You're living with the greatest detective in Beika. Whatever incriminating naked baby photos she's threatening you with can be back in our possession within the hour."

"Dad, move." Rachel's elbow targeted his spleen as she scooped up her boots. "This might be news to you, but I like spending time with Mom. She's been so busy it's been hard to find the time lately. I've been looking forward to this all week."

"You don't have to put up a brave front. This apartment is basically a witness protection program at this point. We can just throw a wig on you and call you Molly or Susan until she loses the scent."

Rachel finished putting her boots on and straightened.

He'd half-expected some physical rearrangement from her, but to his surprise her eyes had gone soft. She straightened his tie and jacket before folding him in a hug. "Dad, we go over this every single time," Rachel murmured. "I'm coming back. It's just a visit."

Richard stared over her head. He kept his fists in his pockets. "I need you to stop worrying so much about it," Rachel said. "I know it bothers you, but I… sort of want to be able to see my mother without having to know you're freaking out at home. That's not fair to me."

"I'm not freaking out."

"You always freak out. You don't need to."

He hoped Conan was out of earshot. He could feel something gnawing around in his stomach with greasy little teeth. "Make sure you eat something today too," Rachel said, giving him a final bracing squeeze before letting go. "Mom and I will probably be going out shopping and then getting a snack at the café, but I'll be home in plenty of time to make dinner."

"Fine."

"I love you, Dad," Rachel said.

Richard smoked a calculated dose to stop half his jitters, downed a shot to drown the other half, then went to fetch enough paperwork from the office to convince a jury he wasn't manslaughtering his own career. The money from his background checks had come in the mail that morning; just before noon he threw on his jacket and went out to deposit them, then poured himself some coffee and went over the upcoming expenses in the living room while his yoga program played in his peripherals. McMullins' money would've helped but honestly Richard had done more with less. Provided neither kid burped up a kidney or burned anything down, they were projected to stay out of the red another month.

He was just starting to think about dozing off on the sofa when Conan came from Rachel's room, a notebook tucked under his arm and a pencil behind his ear. He made a beeline for the kitchen. "What were you doing in there," Richard said.

"Rachel said I could use her bed while she was gone." Conan set his notebook on the table and pulled a kitchen chair over to the refrigerator in order to reach the jug of milk on the top shelf. It took both small hands to lift it. He set it next to his notebook and climbed back up on the chair, this time hesitating as he regarded the overhead cupboards. He was clearly calculating the distance between his hands and all the glasses he was about to break.

The clock was angling past two. Richard blinked drowsily at the muted television before hauling himself up.

Conan didn't squall when Richard ambled into the kitchen to hook the back of his shirt, moving out of Richard's way the instant his feet touched down. Richard moved the chair aside with a directional knee and opened the cupboard himself to grab two glasses. "Quiche or leftovers."

"Leftovers."

He got both the quiche and the leftovers out and scrounged up two plates from the dish rack. Behind him, Conan climbed up into the kitchen chair and had opened his notebook again.

Richard lost himself for a while in the ambient noise, halfway between the hum of the microwave and the quiet scribbling of Conan's pencil. He portioned out the curry and set it down in front of Conan, rescuing the milk once Conan had finished pouring himself an illegal second glass. The combination of rich food and sunlight had created a non-alcoholic haze in him that he reinforced with an after-lunch cigarette. "Hey, Richard," Conan said.

He grunted behind his lighter.

"Can I ask you something?"

The northern window was closed. Richard inhaled and held it, walking over to crack the window open before shifting the smoke out between his teeth. The trail made a break for the sky. "What."

"It's a question about school. For my homework, I mean."

"What."

Conan's thumb drummed his notebook page lightly. Richard couldn't see what he'd written from that angle but got the gist of columns and numbers. "Ms. Takara is having the class practice graphs," Conan said. "We all have to walk around the room asking each other questions. They're just dumb ones, like 'do you like dogs', and then you have to make an X in the 'yes' or 'no' column when they answer. Part of our homework was to make our own graphs and ask our families questions to help fill them in."

Richard parked his shoulder up against the window frame. Unbidden, he wondered where Eva had taken Rachel out to shop. Last week he'd had to sneak repairs on two rips that'd opened up inside his best jacket and while he probably could've used Eva's child support to buy a new one, the thought of leaning on her finances nearly slow-roasted him to combustion. He'd rather staple his own wounds shut. "We're also working on point graphs," Conan said. "She's teaching us to plot data. It's kind of a whole unit."

"This got a point?"

"Would you mind if I asked you a few questions to help fill out my graphs? I was going to use Rachel and Inspector Meguire and Dr. Agasa too, but Ms. Takara says we'll get more points if we include more people."

Richard blew out another plume. "Sure."

"Really?" Conan brightened. He hurriedly rescued his pencil. "You're serious? You'll really answer them?"

"You said it's for school."

"It is."

"It's fine."

"Wow. Okay. Okay, great." Conan was hurriedly making some notes in his margins. "Great great. Um, okay, first question. How tall are you?"

"I dunno, five eleven, somewhere around there."

"Blood type?"

"O."

"Same as Rachel, huh." Conan marked it down. "What's your weight?"

"I dunno."

"Really?"

"I haven't taken it in a few years."

Conan regarded him a moment. He began to speak, stopped, and gave Richard a careful once-over. "Just write something down," Richard said. "It's not like it really matters anyway."

"It's actually… kind of the most important one," Conan said. He glanced around the kitchen and seemed to recalibrate. "Rachel's got a scale she keeps in the bathroom cupboard. If I brought it in here, is there a chance you could step on it? Just to make sure my data's accurate?"

"Look, the whole point is just to teach you how to graph, right? It's not like Takara's going to check. Just bullshit an answer."

"But I…" Conan trailed off. He fumbled down at his page a moment, drumming the eraser in agitated staccato. "Can't you at least give me a ballpark?"

"300 pounds."

"… a realistic ballpark," Conan said.

"I weigh less than a truck and more than a kidney stone. I said I'd answer a few questions, not sit for an interrogation."

Conan looked like he was biting his tongue. He opened his mouth, sighed, and erased whatever he'd written. "Are you allergic to eggs?"

"What the hell kind of question is that for a first grade math assignment," Richard said. "Are you sure she's not selling this information off to some mafia boss? If she wants me dead all she needs to do is wait for like a week. Somebody'll get to it."

"These are questions I made. I know a lot of people have allergies, so I thought I'd ask."

"But why eggs."

"Because they're a common allergy."

"So why not just ask about normal allergies?"

"… so can I take this to mean that you're not allergic to eggs?" Conan asked.

Richard ground his cigarette out in the ashtray on the windowsill. "Wait wait wait wait," Conan said hurriedly. "I'm almost done."

"Just how many graphs do you have to do anyway?"

"Just two more, I promise. I promise!"

Mostly operating on solar-powered masochism at this point, Richard eyeballed him. "… I actually do kind of need food allergies now that we're on that," Conan said sheepishly.

"Then why did you ask about eggs first."

"I don't know, I just like eggs."

"So you're using this graph and the egg graph?"

"It depends on whether or not you're allergic to eggs."

Richard geometrically measured the distance between himself and the street outside and how far sideways he'd have to launch to make sure he splattered on impact. "Shellfish. Not eggs. We done?"

Conan marked it down. He set his teeth lightly on his lower lip, rummaged them around, tapped his eraser against the spiral binding.

He looked up at Richard with an incandescently brilliant smile. "How about medication allergies?"

Richard left the kitchen and went downstairs to the bakery to buy some assorted post-lunch pastries. "Are you always eating all of these yourself or are you saving any for those poor sweet children?" the harpy behind the counter frowned at him, bagging him up.

"I sold them to buy pastries," Richard said, and ate the peanut butter one in front of her. It almost certainly had egg in it, which meant he was still a child-neglecting bastard but a child-neglecting bastard who wasn't allergic to eggs.

---

.

Rachel came home just past four in the afternoon with two department store bags and three slices of blackmail pie. "Try not to freak out, Dad, but I have really good news," she said breathlessly. "There's a super beautiful woman waiting in your office downstairs. I told her I'd tell you that she's there."

Richard launched into several flight patterns simultaneously. "What is she," he demanded as he sprang for his tie and his coat, banging his knee off the phone stand. "What number, girl."

"Oh gosh, easily a ten."

"Age?"

"Around your age, but it looks like she takes care of herself. She looks really pretty and youthful. I'm telling you, I think this might be the one you've been waiting for."

He tried unsuccessfully to jam on his shoe and realized it was failing because it was one of Conan's. "If I hang the tie on the door handle it means we're playing a competitive game of golf and you're not allowed to interrupt because it'll mess up my backswing," he said, throwing it across the room and shoveling on his own. "Don't eat my pie. Save me dinner."

"Hurry!"

He banged his elbow into the door frame and nearly tripped on the stairs. Rachel dumped her bags by the shoe rack and raced after him, straightening up his jacket for him on the way down. The office was shut but the blinds on the opposite end of the room had clearly been opened, the slim silhouette of a woman visible through the frosted glass of the agency's door.

Richard burst inside libido-first. "Good afternoon ma'am, you've found the agency of the world-famous detective Richard—"

"Forty-seven seconds," Eva said to Rachel, wrist turned as she studied her watch. "That might be a new record."

"I think it's because he's lost weight," Rachel beamed. "He gets a lot more exercise now that he's out on so many successful cases."

Richard emergency-ejected at the threshold only to be blocked by Rachel. He went for the open window and was again blocked by Rachel, who'd presumably gained spontaneous teleportation powers out of pure sadism. "After all I've done for you." Richard seized her shoulders and shook her. She wobbled but her brilliant smile didn't. "I didn't sell you to the highest bidder for ten years and this is how you thank me."

"Richard, don't be a toddler," Eva said. "Rachel, let go of your father. At the very worst he'll either slosh on impact or burst into a cloud of drunk bats."

"Get out of my office!"

"Dad, she just wants to talk," Rachel pleaded, manhandling him away from suicide and closing the window with an inhumanly flexible descending heel. "Can't you just play nice with her for a little while? She came all this way to see you."

"She came all this way to issue a zoning permit straight up my ass," Richard said. "What did I tell you about bringing home strays. The last one wasn't enough for you? I didn't kick Benji out, so now you bring home Medusa?"

"Dad." Rachel finally managed to shovel him into a more manageable bundle and then propelled him away from the window with her foot. "For god's sake, you act like she's some gross anaconda or something. I mean, you're married, aren't you? Can't you just talk to her for a few minutes?"

"Oh, don't force the man, sweetheart," Eva said. She was still examining her watch and looking criminally bored with the proceedings. "This is how he reacts to all his responsibilities. Scapegoating, screaming tantrums, denial, and running. I could write a book."

"Yeah, you read to me from your book about running," Richard said. "While you're at it, how about you bookmark all the chapters where I ditched my daughter because my spouse told me dinner was gross one time."

"Deal, provided you read to me all the chapters where my preteen daughter had to clean up my vomit after a slew of midnight binges."

"Guys, come on." Rachel was wringing her hands. "Mom, you promised you weren't going to fight with him. You said you'd play nice. Remember?"

"I know," Eva sighed. She dropped the pretense of distance and leaned her hip against his desk. He knew for a fact that the area would smell like her now and was already viscerally resenting it. "In my defense, Rachel, he makes it very hard. His flight patterns are hard to keep up with. It's enough to test anyone's patience."

"I hop flights to outrun the fallout of your nuclear dickery," Richard said. "Don't pin that long-suffering martyr act on me. If you wanted to keep things civil you should've called ahead. I don't just show up on your doormat expecting to be welcomed with open arms."

"If I had called ahead you would have never agreed to meet."

"Damn straight I wouldn't have agreed to it, anything we can discuss can be done over the phone!"

"I wanted to discuss my concerns face to face, which you routinely make impossible," Eva said. "Blame me for whatever malicious intent you please, but at least do me the courtesy of owning up to your own shortcomings. I don't make meeting difficult – you do. Is it any surprise I have to work against you in order to communicate properly with you?"

He was keenly aware of Rachel wren-flitting behind him. Suddenly more cornered than angry, he roughly made distance, raking his hand through his hair and pacing to the other end of the room to give himself space to breathe. "Maybe this wasn't such a good idea," Rachel murmured to Eva. She sounded defeated. "I guess I kind of thought it might be different now. Maybe I shouldn't have tricked him."

"Don't." Richard spun to Eva with a thrust of a forefinger. "Don't you dare let her mop up your fuck-up. You know this was all you."

"I never said it wasn't." Eva was cold but composed. She seemed to have regained her equilibrium before he had, which wasn't new. Ice was easier to walk on than fire. "If the sight of your wife is truly that repugnant to you, I'll remove myself and we can navigate this conversation by phone, but I'm warning you: don't expect me to play nice with you if you continue to escalate in this way. We've kept this out of the courts so far and I'll continue to keep it out of the courts if you hold up your end of the bargain, but whatever else we have between us, we agreed to be civil when it comes to matters involving our daughter. Especially in front of our daughter."

Richard couldn't look at either of them. He finished raking through his hair and tightened his grip on the back of his neck and thought about the window just to lock the impression of flight and space in his head. Most of the claustrophobia was guilt. They had made a deal. Him being thrown off by her unexpected arrival wasn't a good enough excuse for him to puncture holes in Rachel's sails.

He let his hand drop and faced her. Eva met his gaze coolly on the other end of the room, still propped against his desk like she wasn't aware of exactly how much he resented the image of her propped against his desk. The upturned stack of missing children's posters was by her hip. He wondered how much she'd managed to unearth in his office in the forty-seven seconds it'd taken him to interrupt her.

He was debating whether to launch sugar or bullets when thumps came down the stairs. Conan was chewing on something when he opened the door; he hung off the handle a bit as it swung inwards, letting the weight of the door carry him the rest of the way in. "Hey Richard, is Rachel home?" he said, peering around into the space for him. "I thought I heard—"

Richard watched him stop dead as he registered Eva across the room. "Oh, sorry," Conan said. "I didn't realize Uncle had a client."

"I was just leaving," Eva said. She unhurriedly straightened from the desk, gathering up her purse from the edge of Richard's chair. "It doesn't appear this agency has what it takes to help me with my problem after all. It's probably best I be on my way."

Richard's eyes slid to Rachel. She'd walled herself off completely, hands gripping the opposite elbows as she faced the window, not reacting to Conan's entrance. "Really?" Conan blinked a little at Eva. "Detective Moore couldn't help you at all?"

"I'm afraid not."

"Are you sure? He's really good. Has he sat down and talked to you about your problem? If you give the agency a chance, I think he'll surprise you."

"Unfortunately, I think I'm past the point of being able to be surprised by him anymore." Eva shouldered her bag and strode past both Richard and Rachel on her way to the door. Richard held his silence as she skirted his orbit, but the scent in her wake reached down in him and rattled something ugly loose from its cage.

Eva stopped by Conan on her way out the door. She looked down at him, glasses slipping a bit on her nose. Conan blinked under the scrutiny, hand straying out to the wall for support as he craned his neck back to meet her gaze across the long distance. "You must be the little boy who's staying here at the agency," Eva said.

Conan crinkled his nose at her. "You've heard of me?"

"Of course. You've made quite a name for yourself."

"Huh?"

"I've seen your exploits in the paper. The 'Junior Detective League', wasn't it?"

"Oh, that." Conan relaxed a bit. "That's just for fun. I mean, we did solve a case, but it was mostly just a matter of being in the wrong place at the right time. It was kind of a huge mess."

"Still, it was very impressive you managed to pull out a victory against full-grown adults. It must have been very scary for you."

"Not really. They were sort of idiots. Idiots usually end up catching themselves."

"I see." Eva hummed a bit in her throat. "Well, I think Detective Moore is quite fortunate to have such a capable assistant by his side. You even help him promote his agency."

"Oh, no, I don't do anything," Conan laughed. "Mostly he just lets me tag along. Detective Moore does all the work. I just learn from him. I'm super lucky to get to see a real detective in action."

"And do you like living here? At the agency with Detective Moore, I mean?"

Conan's mouth closed slowly.

Richard watched Rachel. Her back was to them all, her shoulders drawn taut as a primed bow. "Sure," Conan said cautiously. "I mean, it's just for a while. It's not like it's anything permanent."

"But you feel safe here?" Eva said. "This is where you want to be?"

Conan let go of the door frame.

Occupied with filial storm tracking, Richard didn't realize another had come his way until it was under his nose. Conan hid around behind his leg like a shy toddler, clutching his pant leg and peering at Eva from behind it. "What," Richard said.

Conan hid his face against the back of his knee and mumbled something. Long-buried muscle memory had Richard reflexively setting a hand on his head and shifting it back a bit to get a look at Conan's face. "She's scary," Conan whimpered.

"Yeah, she bites," Richard said. "That's part of the reason I turned her down. I don't like being bitten on weekdays."

"She keeps asking me questions."

"Well then don't answer them, moron. Any halfway decent kidnapper would've already had you halfway across the city by now. Why do you think I keep telling Rachel to buy a leash?"

Conan hid his face again.

Richard suffered, in that instant, an intense and unwelcome sensation that stole his follow-up. He stared down at the sight of Conan sheltering behind his leg, vaguely aware of keeping his hand on Conan's head as his mental landscape rearranged itself. Rachel had done this as a kid too many times to count. It was impossible to tell how much from Conan was manufactured and how much of it was legitimate, but in that moment it almost didn't matter. The response Richard had to it had been programmed into him long ago and apparently the coding was still viable.

He realized Eva was looking at him again. He brought himself back to attention to deal with it, but Eva's eyes had gone soft. It was such a direct echo of Rachel's about-face that morning that it left him winded for the second time in a row. "Forgive me," Eva said to Conan, much gentler. "Just some prying from a nosy stranger. I didn't mean to make you uncomfortable. I'm leaving now."

Conan didn't respond. "Thank you for your time, Detective Moore," Eva said to Richard. "My apologies for inconveniencing you when you clearly have clients lining up at your door. I'll leave you to navigate your rush hour traffic."

Flickers of red entered his periphery. He held his tongue. Eva's sensible shoes sent demure little clicks echoing back to them before fading to street-level.

Rachel broke and ran for the stairs. "Go up after her and make sure she doesn't drown herself in snot and Superscoop," Richard said to Conan, giving him a nudge with his knee on his way across the room. He grabbed his jacket from the rack. "I'll be back in a bit."

"Who was that?" Conan asked behind him, but Richard was already out the door. Eva's perfume clung to the mess she'd left behind for him to fix. He took irritable gulps of it as he thumped down the stairs past the bakery and burst into sunlight, blinking tersely to locate her. She was already a block down and making brisk pace for the nearest metro station.

He excused himself around a young mother and her stroller and jogged until he caught up with her. Eva didn't slow even though he knew she was well-aware of him. Occupied with not tripping like a jackass over the curb dodging a fire hydrant, he instead ran like a jackass into a yield sign, which at least held more comedic potential. "You're impossible, Richard," Eva said tersely. She kept walking. "You make things so needlessly difficult."

"Hey, you started it."

"All I needed was a few minutes of your time. Instead you had to make a scene, upset our daughter, and now I'm the villain of the story. As always."

"You make yourself the villain when you break the rules. It's not my fault you dragged her into this."

"She thought you'd be happy to see me. God only knows where she got that archaic idea."

Richard reached out to snag her elbow. She didn't embarrass him by Judo-flipping him over into traffic but the flash in her eyes spelled out the story of his near-death experience for him. "Look, you can't just waltz into my space and expect me to be fine with it," Richard said. "We have these checks and balances in place for a reason. I give you a heads up, you give me a heads up. We don't just spring in like a knife to the ribs."

"We were in town and she wanted to show me the decorations she'd put in the office windows. It would have been ridiculous to drop her off and then go hunt for a payphone when I could just give you my message in person."

"It doesn't matter if it's ridiculous, it's what we agreed on. You want to come over, you make sure she's not there and you call ahead. You wanna talk about me holding up my end of the agreement, start looking at your own. You blew it, not me."

"Heaven forbid I give you and your call girls a warning before I stick my head into your den of depravity," Eva said tightly. "I never said you weren't allowed to visit me unannounced. That was something you decided on."

"Yeah, me. And that's why you don't care about it. All you care about is you. Your life, your boundaries, your rules. You don't give a shit about mine."

Eva moved.

Richard felt the redirection and prepared himself to meet traffic grill-to-grill, but Eva merely swung him into the nearest alley between a mom-and-pop bookstore and a bicycle repair shop. Richard allowed himself to be dragged down it, well out of the eyes and earshot of passersby, and then pushed against the side of the building as Eva squared up on him. It was the exact kind of spicy romantic set-up he'd enjoyed during episode fourteen of Torrential Hearts except the soaring romantic soundtrack was passing commuter trains and cranky toddler-infested foot traffic and backfiring cars, and also this wasn't romance. It was stale cigarette smoke and clammy brick under his shoulders and the feeling of something broken and mutating under his skin.

Eva was as dry-eyed as when he'd bandaged up her bullet wound. She pressed a hand against his chest to hold him there and he was acutely fucking aware of every inch of her from the top of her head to the feet she used to walk all over him. "I hate you, Richard," she said quietly. Sincerely. "If you didn't intend to commit to an apology, you needed to let me go. Don't chase after me unless you have something to give."

He reached up to close a hand around her delicate wrist and she let him. She could break his nose with the other. "Don't punish me for worrying about you," Eva said. "Stop treating me like a foreign power. We can't be this petty. There has to be some things that transcend that pettiness – our daughter included."

"I know that."

She reached up with her other hand.

He'd more or less stopped noticing it a while ago, skirting over it when he shaved and cinching neckties under it when he suited up. Eva's thumb found the faded scar from Maya's wire and traced it back to his ear. There wasn't a single perfumed ounce on her that wasn't deadly and for a moment he found himself suspended between her dualities. There were hidden freckles on her nose that would pop up like constellations in the summer and a birthmark hidden by her collared shirt that he'd used to mouth promises against in bed. He'd seen her flip a full-grown man into a hot dog cart when the man had tried to feel up her skirt during a high school field trip. There was a reason Richard couldn't hold down a relationship with anyone else. Eva had already ruined him by the time he was eight years old. There was no one else who could fill the trench she'd carved in him.

He only realized he'd been holding his breath when she withdrew her hand from his neck and it came out in a rush. "I'll admit I had an ulterior motive," Eva said, to no jury's surprise. "I wanted to see with my own eyes that little boy you've been fostering."

"Yeah, you weren't real subtle about that part," Richard said. "Scared the grapes right off him."

"I didn't mean to. He's surprisingly shy."

"He's full of shit."

"Then he'll fit into the family nicely," Eva said. "It might be enough that Joseph knows he's here, but Richard, if you end up needing legal representation for this, I have to know what I'm going to be getting into. That means ascertaining the well-being of the child ahead of time."

"If shit hits the fan in that way, there's no chance they're going to let you represent me."

"I have my ways," Eva said. "But the visit was logged; I didn't give you any warning or any time to prepare. He's clearly happy where he is and seems to trust you. I'm not sure how you did it, but against all odds, you seemed to have endeared yourself to a child not blood-obligated to tolerate you."

"Fuck off," Richard said. "Kid sucks up every last coin I have in my account while I'm left with carrot shavings and carpet lint to eat and you want to talk to me about him 'tolerating' me. He thinks he's in a school of hard knocks, he can enroll somewhere else."

Eva's hand remained on his chest.

In some arena in his head where memory and reality squared off, Richard wondered what they would've done with this same situation twenty years earlier. There'd been plenty of empty Judo rooms and sports sheds and parks at twilight. She'd remained an expressionless gargoyle throughout his entire sweaty introduction to her parents and then later had kissed him stupid behind the jungle gym in the park on his way home. She made having two faces look easy. He could flip a coin on her a hundred times and it'd still be more accurate than trying to guess her intentions himself.

Reality won. Eva pulled away but not before he caught the last fading scent of her. Tea on her breath, lilac under the collar of her shirt. "Joseph told me you've been having consistent health problems," Eva said. "I was glad to confirm for myself that you're feeling better. I'm going to walk to the park and call a taxi from the kiosk there. I'll call you later this week to confirm the date of the next visitation."

"I can just call you one from the office."

"I want the walk." Eva adjusted her purse to lay cross-body instead of on one shoulder. "Go home and make sure she's all right. Tell her she can call me if she needs to talk to me."

"Fine."

Eva ran a tight ship both on and off the court. She was halfway up the alley and well out of the reach before half-turning to give him the streamlined view of her profile. "By the way, I bought the blackmail pie," Eva said. "Since that fact will no doubt sour the taste for you, I gave permission to Rachel to eat yours if you choose to dine on alcohol tonight instead. I'll leave the choice to you."

Richard covered the sensation of being kneecapped by lighting a cigarette and inhaling too early. He waited until her storm had passed from the alley and the cigarette smoke had permeated every inch of his surroundings before grinding the butt under his heel. The scent of lilac still won.

---

.

Rachel was cross-legged atop her bed knitting a red scarf when he knocked a knuckle against her door. "I forgive you, I'm fine, and I'll make dinner in an hour," she said, not looking up from the complicated printed pattern perched by her knee.

"That's not mine, is it?"

"It'll look handsome on you."

"I don't wear scarves."

"You'll wear this one," Rachel said too sweetly.

"Don't you think I'm already enough of a target without wearing a red circle on me?"

"You'll be fine. It's a nice warm color that'll match your new tie. Unless you want me to make it pink."

He did look good in pink. Richard shifted his weight against the doorframe and massaged a kink out of his shoulder with the unyielding edge while he thought about it. "I'm sorry."

Rachel exhaled. She carefully set her knitting down in her lap. "Let's go out," Richard said. "My treat."

"Oh, Dad," Rachel sighed.

"It's not a bribe. I just don't want tears and snot in my steak."

"I already told you I'm okay. And we don't have steak, we have fish and potatoes."

"I don't know why you think that's going to change my mind about tears and snot," Richard said. "C'mon. Let's hit Bernard's before the rush. We can be in and out and stuffed within the hour."

Rachel's mouth firmed a bit. She reached for her yarn to resume, hesitated, then sighed again and moved it off to the side.

Richard waited until she was within arm's length to push himself off the frame. She willingly folded into him when he lassoed her with a forearm. "Sorry I was a dick to your mother," Richard said. "Usually we don't dick in front of witnesses."

"Gross," Rachel moaned.

"We talked it out. It's fine. She says to call her later if you need some follow-up. Just don't run up the phone bill."

"If you were planning to talk to her the entire time, why not just be civil with her in the first place? Why did you have to blow it all up like that?"

"Because people draw property lines and build fences for a reason,," Richard said. "She hopped that fence and she knew it. She owned up to her shit and I owned up to mine. It's fine. Scrape up the brat from whatever wall he's boogered himself against and shake the rest off."

He felt the sigh rock out between them, but to her credit Rachel apparently mapped boundaries better than her mother. She disentangled herself and wiped her cheeks. "Yeah, point proven," Richard said. "Let's go. We can still snag a cab before the rush."

"Hold on. Let me get Conan so we can both change."

Richard counted out the bills in his wallet as he waited for them by the coat rack. Conan raced out of Richard's room a few minutes later, Rachel on his heels, dressed in his suspendered shorts and a short-sleeved shirt. "Kid's gonna freeze and so are you," Richard said, eyeballing Rachel's sleeveless shirt. "Where do you think this is, Laos?"

"No offense, Dad, but old people are always complaining about how cold it is," Rachel laughed. "Conan and I will be just fine. Isn't he adorable in that? I had it tailored for him last week."

"Yeah, nice bowtie, squirtopolis," Richard told Conan, who looked back up at him in soulless deadpan as he shoveled on his shoes. "You get that out of a cereal box or off a ventriloquist's dummy?"

"I just wanted to look like you, Uncle," Conan said. "You're always so snazzy with your ties, but I'm too little to wear one. Maybe when I grow up I can wear cool clothes like yours."

Richard was aware of the rich slathering of bullshit but also pleased it smelled nice for once. He took the keys off the rack and slipped them into his palm. "Let's hurry. We can still make it before five."

They ended up flipping a last minute coin between Bernard's and the Italian place kitty-corner on the main drag. Richard was briefly enticed by the thought of garlic breadsticks and nearly pulled rank when the coin flipped wrong-side up for it, but Rachel reminded him that Bernard's desserts were better and the entrees were cheaper. "Never let it be said that Richard Moore doesn't fairly compensate the help," Richard said through his mouthful of steak. "Most dads would take the easy way out and grease up their kids' wheels at a burger joint. Remember this next time you want to mouth off about how cheap I am."

"Dad, I think it's time you admit that what you're really after is no-strings-attached pie," Rachel said. "I'm grateful and all that you're spending the money on us, but let's not pretend there aren't any mercenary angles at play here."

"The best detectives can multi-task," Conan said. He'd originally requested the cheapest dish on the menu and Richard had surprised himself by bullying him into something he actually wanted. He was now happily vacuuming spaghetti and meatballs, apparently unaware or uncaring of the sauce on his chin. "He's probably placating us and fishing for pie. It's a two birds one stone kind of thing."

"Can it unless you both want to eat your backsass for dessert." Richard flagged down the waitress. "Hey, miss, would it be all right to get the dessert menu early?"

"For you, anything." Their pretty twenty-something waitress had already walked away with three of his signatures for her friends and all of Rachel's eye-daggers clustered in the center of her back. "My manager says your desserts tonight are on the house, and he's real stingy, so I'd take advantage of it."

"I want the giant cookie." Conan had already pounced on the greasy pamphlet. "Or the sundae. Do you think they'd put the cookie in the sundae?"

"You can get the cookie but not the sundae," Rachel sighed, gently taking it away and swiping Conan's chin clean with his napkin. "They're really big, Conan. At least we can halve the cookie and take it home with us so you don't get sick."

"Richard, can't I get both?" Conan pleaded. "The waitress said it would be free."

Richard choked on all the ancestors of the animal he was eating. "Since when am I good cop?"

"Dad isn't alpha dog at meal time, I am," Rachel told Conan, which actually wasn't a lie so Richard let her own the flex. "And I say a giant cookie is plenty for a little boy. I'm going to use the bathroom. Dad, will you order me a meringue pop to go?"

"That really all you want?"

"I had pie earlier with Mom. I'm going to put on weight if I keep eating all these sweets and a tournament is coming up."

He snarfed down the remains of his baked potato. At this point Bernard's was well into its rush hour swing, the room a comforting cacophony of scraping chair legs and tipsy laughter and the occasional screaming tantrum from a toddler who'd missed naptime. Conan had finished his spaghetti and was now back to studying the dessert menu, legs swinging in the booster seat. He'd balked like a spooked horse when the waitress had offered him crayons and a kid's menu, but in the end attitude couldn't make up for altitude. It'd either been the booster seat or a doggy bowl on the floor. "Hey, Richard?" Conan said, tipping the menu down a bit so he could look over it. "Who was that lady in the office earlier?"

Richard grunted into his water. "Did you know her?" Conan asked. "Because it seemed like she knew you. Rachel was acting weird around her too."

"Don't worry about it."

"Was she there for me?"

"No."

Conan was quiet a moment. His gaze had refocused on a toddler across the room being lifted out of her own booster chair by her mother. The toddler waved her collection of crayons in a pudgy fist and laughed delightedly as her mother tickled under her arms in transit. "Okay."

Richard ordered the desserts and pushed the plate aside to make room for his wallet. Rachel came back in time to help Conan hop down, and Richard ended up walking away from the restaurant fatter in pounds and lighter in cash. "Ahh, that was so good," Rachel sighed blissfully, turning her pointy nose up to the moon to let the light wash over her. "What a treat."

"Ehh?" Richard prompted, elbowing her until she rolled her eyes and batted him away. "Well? Where are my kudos?"

"Thank you, Dad," she said tolerantly. "For the eighth time. It was lovely of you."

"Your pie didn't even survive the trip out of the lot," Conan said to Richard. "Aren't you going to be disappointed when you get home and don't have anything to snack on?"

"Word on the street says someone's still got half a cookie in Rachel's handbag," Richard said. "Odds are I'll survive. Rachel, you sure you want to walk? It's a hike."

"It's a beautiful night and I think we could all use the exercise after that meal. Conan, if you get tired, I can give you a piggy back ride," Rachel said. "Just let me know."

"I'll be fine." Conan was already skipping out of range. There was zero physical indication that he'd taken down a buffalo-sized portion of carbohydrates and sugar but plenty of evidence that Richard was going to suffer vicariously for it for at least the next hour. "Is it okay if I go ahead a little? I'd like to check something out."

"Just stay in sight."

"Okay!" Conan took off with a scrape of sneakers on the pavement.

Rachel took Richard's arm and hugged it tightly as they walked. Expensive high-rise estates blotted out the starscape over their heads, throwing shadows so deep they nearly dwarfed the illumination of the street lights. Richard could see the gleam of brass nameplates as they passed by each house. "Thanks, Dad," Rachel said again quietly. "This was really nice."

"Better than that hoity-toity pastry garbage that got shoveled into you at brunch, right?" Richard was pretty pleased with himself. Leveraging favoritism with food always put him in a good mood. "The more high-profile cases your famous dad gets, the more often we can eat out like this."

"I noticed something at the table," she said. "When you were talking about other dads skimping on meals for their family. You called us your 'kids'."

"It was one of the conditions the gene scientists set when we brought you home from the test tube," Richard said. "It was either that or sign the contract for a guinea pig. For the record, the guinea pig pooped less."

"Kids. Plural."

"Because there's two of you and I don't need an engineering degree to count, and don't make it a thing. Don't get any ideas."

"It was just sweet, it's all I'm saying," Rachel said. "It's the first time I didn't hear you differentiate. Even if you didn't mean anything by it, even if it was just a slip of the tongue… it was still sweet. That's all."

Richard opened his mouth to navigate the sudden cul-de-sac and was interrupted by a shout up ahead from Conan. "Are you okay?" Rachel called up ahead of them, releasing Richard's arm to peer forward into the darkness. "What did you find?"

"This is the place!" Conan jogged back. He pointed excitedly over his shoulder at one of the hulking estates. "That dog Jack lives here!"

Richard blinked and craned his neck to look. The building was as impersonally opulent as the others on the block, the low lighting inside giving the massive arched windows a rosy tint. The façade was a militant grey under a sharply sloping roof, the yard fenced in by an imposing iron grate. It looked about as welcoming as a penitentiary.

Rachel stepped up beside him to follow his gaze. "Hey, I know about this house," Rachel said wonderingly. She rocked on her feet a bit to secure a better angle on it. "When Jimmy was a little kid he would always stop by here on his way home from school."

"This house?" Richard looked doubtfully up at the austere angles. "You sure you're not turned around?"

"No, Conan's right, this is the place. You know, it was actually really cute," Rachel added, laughing suddenly. "Jimmy used to save scraps of bread from lunch to feed to Jack through the bars. He always had such a soft spot for dogs."

"Charles Peterson," Richard read aloud from the plate. He slid his hands into his pockets and squinted up at the sky as the name poked him out of his postprandial coma. "If I'm not mistaken, I've heard that name before."

"He says he's a lawyer," Conan said.

He kept his attention between the stars until all the drowning neurons in his head surfaced for air. Peterson. That'd been the name he'd tried to dredge up back when Meguire had mentioned the barking dog complaint back at the station. If Rachel was right, the dog that lived here was the same dog as the one in the photo of Jimmy he had in his wallet. Through indifference or chemical self-sabotage or both, Richard had retained Jack's name but had forgotten the name of his owner.

That wasn't all, Richard realized, stomach dropping as his brain continued to cross-reference the name and the address. Peterson's name had popped up when Richard had started probing into the missing children's cases a month ago. He hadn't made the connection until now that 'Peterson' was the same lawyer that had been on the list of names Eva had sent to him for reference. Not only that, Richard could vaguely remember an accident happening on the property that had thrust the neighborhood into the news cycle for a while. It'd been part of the reason Eva had gotten squirrely about Rachel going over there to play with the dog unsupervised.

He realized Rachel was looking at him. "He's that lawyer in town that only works on cases involving kids," Richard said by way of summary. There was no point in getting into it with pointy ears at their feet. "I see him in the paper a lot."

"Hey, Dad." Rachel was quiet. "Wasn't this the house where that teenage boy committed suicide years ago? I think I was in the third or fourth grade at the time."

He saw Conan grow alert at this. Kind of wishing he'd engineered her with a few more zippers over her teeth, Richard was shifting his weight to deal with that when a man's terrified shriek rent the silence. A split-second later a woman's scream followed on its heels.

His reflex was utterly unscripted. His feet were running before his head gave them direction, nearly cartwheeling around the bend to slam open the weaker wooden gate at the side of the property. Conan and Rachel booked it alongside him, and the single corner of his brain that wasn't devoted to answering a distress call remembered to signal them to wait behind him on the path as he finished the sprint to the door. "Open up!" he roared, giving it several thunderous thuds with his fist to let a possible intruder know he was there. "We're here to help!"

A couple of things happened simultaneously but only one of them was relevant. Richard received a religion-shattering blow to his face that snapped his head back against the side of the alcove, and for a while he was suspended in a quiet purgatory with his hands over his nose as his brain decided whether or not to shut off. He vaguely heard Rachel talking soothingly to the woman collapsed on the pathway and was able to bring himself to bear in time to hear Rachel suddenly gasp, "Conan, wait!"

A blur rushed past the other blurs between Richard's fingers. "Conan!" Rachel scrambled upwards, hand lingering on the sobbing woman's shoulder, clearly torn between bolting after Conan and comforting the victim. She was colorless with terror. "Dad, he went in there, you have to go after him before he gets hurt!"

His nose was throbbing but his famous hard head had apparently absorbed the brunt of the hit. Still reeling a little, Richard flailed out a hand and snagged the door frame to launch himself in, letting his watery eyes adjust in transit. The hallway was sparingly lit by floor lamps and segued into an opulent sitting room flanked by a wooden staircase.

He spotted the man crumpled on the landing in the same instant Conan's foot hit the bottom stair. Once again hardwired instinct moved his body for him. He snatched the back of Conan's shirt just in time to prevent Conan from fouling up the crime scene and tossed him back rougher than what was probably warranted. Conan went sprawling onto his hands and knees and looked up at Richard with fire in his eyes. "You're in my way," Richard snapped. "Stay in the other room."

Rachel was hovering at the threshold of the sitting room, one eye on Conan and the other half of her attention turned towards the front door to keep watch over the woman on the porch. Richard was busy. He'd pushed up his cuffs and had taken a knee to check for vitals when Conan called tersely, "Jack. Come here, boy."

Richard wasn't proud of what he did next. Of all the instinctive reactions he should have had with two children in the room, mortal cowardice dictated the one he actually had, which was to throw himself flat against the wall as Jack tore down the stairs towards Conan. There was no time to fix the mistake. The dog threw itself at Conan and the scream Rachel let out was so intense it strangled itself in her throat and came out a broken wail. Richard pushed himself off expecting to see a pool of blood and missing limbs. Instead Conan was sputtering with laughter under Jack's giant slobbering tongue and Jack was wagging his tail so ferociously that his entire body was dancing from side to side.

Richard had to sit down. He heard his ass thud to the stair in front of the body at the same time he heard Rachel sob out another choked scream against her hands, this time in relief. Conan, bowtied descendant of feudal shitlords, ignored the trauma he'd caused and hurriedly rolled out from under Jack when the orphaned phone receiver crackled beside him. "Ted!" the man on the other end was yelling. "Ted, can you hear me? What happened?"

"Mr. Peterson, it's me, Conan!"

There was a beat of startled silence. "Conan?"

"Yes, where are you calling from?"

"I'm… out of town on a business trip. What's going on over there? I heard Ted screaming and now you're on the phone."

Rachel was still slumped against the threshold with tears streaming down her face. Richard staggered back upwards to check the body. The angle of the neck was pretty definitive but he did his rounds, feeling for first breath and then a pulse. Bones shifted under his exploration.

He saw Conan glancing over his shoulder for confirmation. He shook his head. "Mr. Peterson, come home right away," Conan said tightly. "Something bad has happened with Jack."

Richard left the body behind for the moment and backtracked across the sitting room to Rachel. She unthinkingly resisted him at first, hand still dazedly pressed to her mouth as she tried to lean around him to keep Conan in sight. Richard dissuaded her and eventually managed to gather her in, shielding her from the sight of the body as Conan hung up and dialed the police. "Need you to pull it together and go collect the witness while I take stock of the scene," he murmured for her ears alone. "Bring her in here and then find whatever you can in the kitchen to get her over her shock. Tea, coffee, soda, hot chocolate, whatever's there. We have to tide her over until the medical team can get here. Can you do that?"

"I thought he was dead." Rachel was muffled and haunted. "I thought I'd open my eyes and he'd be in pieces on the floor."

"Dog's got better sense than to choke on something that stringy." Richard used his thumbs to move the hair out of her tear-streaked face. "Get on it. There's still people left to save. Got it? Can you handle this?"

Rachel took a hold of his wrists for support and nodded. She stumbled only once on the way back to the entrance, catching herself on the wall before pushing herself off of it and propelling herself into a clumsy half-jog.

Conan was examining the body by the time Richard made it back across the room. He bristled like a hosed-off cat as Richard approached, but this time Richard's ire wasn't for him. "Hey." Richard whistled to Jack, who amicably swished his tail on the carpet in response. "C'mere."

"He doesn't bite," Conan said, scrambling down from the landing to return to the ground floor. "He couldn't have done this."

"Come here," Richard ordered, and Jack finally wandered over to investigate him. It was a over-the-counter dose of numbness and nihilism that allowed Richard to do what he did next, which was to take a knee in front of the dog and work its manslaying muzzle around in his hand to check for blood. Jack patiently withstood it, only beginning to squirm when Richard popped his mouth open to catch a glimpse of his teeth. "The hell is this," Richard muttered, letting him go. "Why was this guy in Peterson's house?"

"Maybe he was dogsitting," Conan said. "If he's on a business trip and wasn't allowed to bring Jack, he would've needed someone to come and let Jack out and feed him. That's probably what this guy was doing."

"So you think this was an accident?"

"It looks that way. We can't know until we can get a witness statement out of the girl."

Richard made sure he was at the door to meet Meguire when the cruisers began clustering on the street. He could see rubberneckers in pajamas leaning out of their windows to catch a glimpse of the commotion. "What did I tell you about going literally anywhere unsupervised," Meguire snapped, already fed-up as he steered Richard around at the door and shoveled him in front of the entourage. "Shouldn't you be tits up in a sea of booze this time of night?"

"Why do you keep acting like this is how I want to end my day? I paid out the nose for steak and pie, it's not like I needed extra helpings of bullshit on my plate."

"You hurt? The kids all right?"

"Just rattled."

"Walk me through it." Meguire and his team made brisk work of the scene as Richard reviewed what had led them there, tagging the evidence before setting the photographers on it. The victim was revealed to be Ted Growban, a college student who lived next door and had been hired to care for Jack in Peterson's absence. Sarah Shugman, the girl Rachel had brought in from the yard and apparently the only witness to the accident, was identified as the brainless tart that'd apparently been brought over to soothe Ted's existential boredom. "Great," Meguire said. "Classic 'throw a party while the owner's away' maneuver. What could go wrong."

"Inspector, this all just can't be right." Conan had thankfully maintained a perimeter once the police had arrived, parking himself out of the way beside Rachel on the sofa with the dog between them. Jack looked interested but increasingly sleepy, tongue lolling out in contentment as Conan scratched his ears. "Jack is the most non-aggressive dog I know."

Sarah had been wavering in the center of the room as the police questioned her. At this she spun back to them, a wild look in her eye. "Are you saying Ted did something to provoke him?"

"No, just that maybe he unintentionally did something to trigger a response. Jack would've already been stressed out because Mr. Peterson was gone. Maybe the phone looked like a weapon when Ted held it out. It could even be that Jack was excited and jumped on him and pushed him down by accident."

"Hasn't anyone been listening to anything I've said?" Sarah escalated into a shriek. "Ted loved that dog. He was going up the stairs to let Mr. Peterson talk to him. Who would do that for a dog they hated?"

Meguire fumbled around in his pocket for his handkerchief and held it out. Sarah seized onto it and buried her mascara-stained face against it, heaving with renewed sobs. Conan looked a little abashed but not discouraged, folding in on himself as he visibly mulled over the information. "Inspector." In contrast to Sarah, Rachel was dully composed on the other end of the sofa. She'd refrained from touching Jack thus far but didn't shy away from him when Jack nosed the side of her knee. "What's going to happen to Jack?"

Meguire didn't mince words. "Difficult to say at this point, but if the dog attacked without provocation, he's likely to be put to sleep."

Rachel blanched. Richard watched her hand flinch to the scruff of Jack's neck. Jack abandoned his inspection of the crook of her knee and looked up curiously. "Oh," Rachel breathed.

Richard caught Meguire's eye. "At any rate, we're not going to be getting much else until we talk to Mr. Peterson," Meguire sighed, backing down a bit, scratching the back of his neck gruffly. "Nothing'll be done with Jack until we get his perspective on it. How about you all head home and get some shut-eye. We'll take it from here."

"We can't just leave Jack here," Conan protested, seizing onto the dog's collar. "Who's going to take care of him?"

"The dog'll be fine. Let the police handle this." Meguire caught Kay's attention and motioned. "Kay'll drive you the rest of the way home. Try not to get too hung up on this. You all did good. You locked down the situation, helped the witness, and made sure nobody else got hurt. It's hard, but try to let this go for tonight. We'll let you know when we have more information."

Rachel didn't fight Richard as he leveraged her up. She held out her hand for Conan, and after a beat he took it without protest. "Let's go," she told him quietly.

Conan's gaze was on Jack. "Okay," he said, and for the first time in the longest two months of Richard's entire life, shut his trap and didn't open it for a goddamn thing peep for the rest of the evening.

---

.

Meguire came to the agency with fresh information and reheated exhaustion the next morning. He graciously accepted Rachel's offer of coffee and nursed it while Richard cat-scratched shorthand on his memo pad. "So let me summarize, and stop me if I'm wrong," Richard said. "Michael – Petersons's son – was the teenager who committed suicide in that house eight years ago. Ted was the one who bullied him, but Peterson forgave him and forged a father-son relationship with him after Ted apologized at Michael's funeral. He hires Ted to watch Jack when he's gone on business trips."

"More or less the gist," Meguire said.

"Then it's obvious what happened," Richard said. "There's no way Peterson got past a grudge that deep. Forgiveness I can understand, but there's no way the parent of a child who committed suicide is going to cozy up to their kid's bully."

"It's not unheard of. Some people just have that in them."

"He set Ted up to take that fall and he used Jack to do it."

"Man may have a long reach in the circuit court but he's not a magician. You'll have a hard time proving he's got his hands in this when he's got alibis somewhere else, Moore."

"It's not about his alibi. It's obvious how he did it." Richard tapped the pencil against the side of his head. "He used the cordless phone to direct Jack remotely. That way he didn't need to be near the crime scene and could just blame it on the dog. What Sarah saw was real. Jack's real nature is docile, but Peterson's been secretly training him to attack with a specific set of commands. He activated those commands that night. His only mistake was not realizing Ted had company over. If he hadn't, it would've looked like the accident he intended it to be. Since Sarah was there and saw the dog's demeanor change, the whole plan was blown out of the water."

"Ehh, you're forgetting something," Meguire said. "When I was questioning Peterson about the phone call, he repeated what he said in the phone call word for word. I watched the dog and there wasn't even the slightest reaction there. I get what you're angling at, but we've tried all that already."

Richard didn't sulk because grown men didn't sulk. He malingered around the kitchen that afternoon until Rachel pushed him out to make lunch, then chainsmoked like four separate industrial steel factories in his office while his morale steamed out of him in ribbons. "Dad, enough," Rachel sighed, shoveling his elbows off his desk so she could reach the piles of trash underneath. "I'm just as upset as you are, but maybe we just have to face the fact that it really was an accident."

"I know Peterson did it," Richard said tightly. "I just can't prove how he did it."

"Are you still on that phone theory?"

"It's not a theory. It's a fact."

"You have to prove facts, though," Rachel said. "I mean… it's not like I can't see why he'd want to get revenge on his son's bully, but why go about it in such a roundabout way? Phones, secret code phrases… you have to admit it all seems just a little farfetched."

Richard pushed himself up out of his chair and paced to the window, trying to shove his hands in his pockets before realizing he was still holding a lit cigarette. He tossed it out the window like a complete dick. "Okay, just… walk me through it, then," Rachel sighed. She abandoned her garbage bag for the moment and sat on the edge of his desk to face him. "Why do you think it has to be murder? Why couldn't it have just been an accident?"

"Because no parent is that forgiving. I don't care what kind of saint that kid transformed himself into after bullying a classmate to suicide, he wouldn't be coming in my house and eating at the same table my kid ate at. Something's screwy."

"But Meguire said that some people just have that in them. Maybe Mr. Peterson figured it was healthier for himself in the long run to forgive Ted instead of holding a grudge for the rest of his life. Just because you react a certain way to being hurt doesn't mean everybody reacts the same way, Dad."

"Rachel, I don't pull this card out on you a lot, but poop out a kid and your biology rearranges itself for you," Richard said. "You can make all the pretty speeches about forgiveness you want, but that's different than welcoming your dead kid's bully into your house with open arms to babysit your dead kid's dog. You maybe get two parents out of two million who can do that and it's usually for the good press."

"But why the phone, though," Rachel pressed. "Why do you keep coming back to that? If Mr. Peterson truly did… did program Jack, couldn't it have just as easily been something Ted did or said?"

"Rachel, you have to admit the phone part of this is really weird." Conan had been on the edge of the couch and was apparently eating the last of Richard's potato chips from the upstairs cupboard, which made Richard hate him on a sub-atomic level. "Remember how I said he'd switched the cordless phone with the corded one from his study when I went to visit him today? Don't you think it's kind of weird that a man who just had another man die in his house would care enough to switch phones around? You'd think he'd have other stuff to focus on besides interior decorating."

"Makes sense to me," Richard said sourly. "The entire plan would fall on its ass if he didn't have a cordless phone to carry it out. Of course he'd temporarily switch it to the sitting room if he was going to off Ted that way and then switch it back once the dirty work was done. The man's guilty. I just can't prove how."

Rachel looked like she was waffling between consternation and concern. To Richard's surprise Conan wasn't. He'd lowered the bag and was regarding Richard with unreadable eyes. "Listen." Richard was exasperated with the trajectory of the discussion. He set his palm flat on his desk and leaned forward to emphasize. "If just an ordinary phone were being used, there'd be no way for Ted to carry it to the top of the stairs. That's where Jack had to be in order for the plan to work out. He didn't train the dog to bite– he trained the dog to jump. There was no blood anywhere on Jack's muzzle. The plan was foolproof because all Jack had to do was push Ted down those wooden stairs and let gravity do the rest."

"But how, Dad," Rachel pleaded. "Meguire said he already tried repeating the commands. They called the house phone, they had Peterson speak into it, and he said the same words. They had to be the same words he said before Ted died because Sarah heard them all the way down the stairs, so we know Peterson isn't lying. If all that didn't work, what more do you think is missing?"

"I don't know. Some sound, some code, some hour of the day, some… some lining up of the planets, I don't know. I know he did it. I just can't prove how he did it."

Rachel began to speak, stopped, and sighed slowly. She moved him again, gently this time, to pick up his ashtray from the windowsill and empty the ash into her garbage bag.

Conan was still watching him. He took a chip from the bag, crunched it, and swallowed.

He said, "Hey, Richard."

"What."

"Does our wall clock ring on the hour?"

Richard threw himself down into his desk chair and rummaged around for a cigarette had hadn't already massacred. "What are you on about."

"Well, Mr. Peterson had a really cool clock," Conan said. "It rings every hour on the hour! Bong bong bong! It's so old-fashioned and awesome. And it's really loud. I'll bet you can hear it from every room in the house. I was just curious if ours could be that cool too."

Richard thought, more or less sandwiched inside a considerable list of other relevant thoughts, well, shit.

He didn't pass out solving that case either.

---

.

"Richard, I gotta know something," Meguire said. He didn't take his eyes off Peterson, watching the man drop to his knees on his perfectly manicured lawn to beg his dog for forgiveness. Jack happily licked the tears off Peterson's face. "What unholy malfunctioning matrix in your brain makes you able to ignore the laws of reality while the rest of us are stuck working nine to five in it?"

"I'm not even getting paid for this, so feel free to do the overtime in my place to figure it out." Richard hooked a finger in Rachel's collar and propelled her towards the front gate. "Let's go. You too, brat."

"It's really terrible," Conan murmured. His unblinking eyes were still fixed on Jack and Peterson, his stance rigid as he jammed his hands deep in his pockets. "Using his son's dog like that. No matter who adopts him, Jack will always have that stigma following him around. We might've saved him only for him to wind up in a shelter."

"Let animal control figure that part out." He was too emotionally winded for hypotheticals. He shoveled Conan with his foot until Conan at last moved with the tide. "We've done our share."

Rachel was silent as he led them to the gate. She only stirred out of her daze when Conan tugged her sleeve to slow her down. "What," she began, then stopped when she realized Jack was squiggling out of Peterson's grip to bound across the yard to them. "Oh, sweetheart," Rachel murmured, dropping to her knees in the grass to gather him in. Jack loved her up at close range, ruining her hair with a crop-dusting tail. "You poor thing. First Michael and now Mr. Peterson. You're losing everybody you love."

"Mr. Peterson doesn't deserve him, but it's hard to think of what's going to happen to him," Conan said. "I guess there's not a lot we can do. Even if we could take him in, our apartment's too small for a dog this size. He wouldn't be happy in our neighborhood."

"I would if I could," Richard said honestly, tiredly, figuring now probably wasn't the time to posture with a fictional dislike of dogs. He watched Jack flit between Conan and Rachel and a part of him that wasn't freeze-dried in cigarette smoke ached. "Just wouldn't be possible."

"My good boy." Rachel looked into the dog's eyes. She was breathing unsteadily but the last twenty-four hours had apparently sapped her of the energy needed for more tears. "Be happy. I love you, Jack, and so does Jimmy. I know if he could be here he would want to say goodbye. I promise it'll be okay."

Jack nosed her eyeball and then goosed her ear when she turned her head away. His tail whapped Conan on the back of the head as he turned to trot back to the more interesting-smelling policemen on the other end of the property.

Rachel covered her face. Conan slowly returned to his slouched posture, hands balled into fists inside the pockets of his shorts as he watched Jack with flint in his eyes.

Richard poured everything left in his nearly empty liquor cabinet into a glass that night and spread out the pictures in his wallet. The one with Jimmy and Rachel playing with Jack had recently suffered some rain damage but flattened back out after he worked at its edges a while. Now that he examined it more closely, he wondered how he could have ever forgotten where Jack had lived. Peterson's house was clearly visible in the background of the shot even after nearly a decade of wear and tear.

He shifted them aside and took Conan's school picture out of its frame to set it side by side by each missing children's poster. Over the next hour he gradually sussed out twelve duds and three possibilities; he poured over them in a sea of cigarette smoke, comparing and contrasting the features under his lamp until their features blurred together.

Rachel woke up screaming near one in the morning and this time wouldn't take separation from him for an answer. After making sure Conan was settled back into his bedroll, Richard allowed her to come down to the office with him and bundle herself up like a skinny burrito on one of the sofas to watch a history documentary on the office TV. It took nearly a half hour for her panicked breaths to even out into sleep.

Richard's eyes finally mutinied. He folded the discarded posters in half to be shredded later and stored the rest in his top drawer to examine more comprehensively under daylight. He then sat at the desk and ventilated the worst of his habits out the window, listening to his daughter's breath hitch in her sleep across the room from him.

Eva picked up on the second ring. "You're up late."

He watched the stars disappear behind converging clouds. He inhaled a last drag, gathered up the remains of his pride, and breathed it out with the last trail of smoke. "I need a favor."

---

.

Rachel and Conan romped their goodbyes with Jack in every goddamn mud puddle in the goddamn dog park while Richard spoke with Peterson's childhood friend in the parking lot. "Sure is a shame what happened to Charlie," Ben murmured, leaning against the wheel well of his pickup and adjusting the brim of his cap down to insulate himself from the fizz of rain. Across the park Rachel shrieked under Jack's muddy tackle. "Never would've thought he'd be capable of that."

"The man's son was killed. Suicide or not, no matter how you slice it, Ted took Michael from him. It leaves a mark."

"Still, to use Jack…" Ben trailed off and left it. He squinted over at Richard again with greater interest. "Never did ask you how you found me. Did he have me on some kind of emergency contact list?"

"Something like that. My wife worked down the hall from him for a while when they were employed by the same start-up firm. Apparently she's going to be on the prosecution team so she got access to those records. Just a heads up, you'll probably end up getting called by the defense as a character witness at some point."

"Yeah, I figured." Ben craned his neck to follow the action in front of them. He laughed outright when Conan was completely flattened into a puddle under the dog's weight, surfacing a moment later to sputter and howl. Richard had no idea what taxi service was going to pick them up but was banking on approximately none of them. The long-distance hike home in muddy clothes would probably be the better teaching moment anyway. "They sure do love that dog," Ben murmured. "Makes me feel kind of bad I'm taking him."

"Don't. It was either this or the shelter, and nobody's going to be lining up to adopt a dog implicated for murder."

"Hell of a backstory, isn't it," Ben laughed again. "Chances are he would've been someone's cup of tea. Want my address? You can drive them out to visit anytime. My wife won't mind. Our kid's off to college and I know she gets lonely out in all that acreage. Talking with the farm hands just isn't the same. She's counting down the days until grandkids."

Richard was about to decline on reflex but masochism stopped him. "Sure, I'll take it."

Ben ducked back into his truck to fish for a pen and paper. Richard watched Rachel shriek with helpless delight as Jack dug in a puddle under an elm, sending chunks of mud flying. Unbidden, he wished Eva were next to him to ruin this occasion. Happiness always felt more authentic under opposition. "Here you go." Ben handed the scrap of paper over and Richard pocketed it. Ben tucked his lip in and whistled; across the park Jack perked up at the sound, squirming out of the mud and bounding towards them. "I should take off," Ben told Richard. "It's a long way back and I'll need to get the dog hosed off before I bring him into the house."

"Thanks again." Richard held out his hand and Ben shook it. "Especially on such short notice. It's a hell of a thing you're doing. I know it'll make all the kids in the neighborhood happy to know how much room he's going to have out there."

"Well, if it takes the sting out. And it's really not a problem at all," Ben said. "Jack's always had a good temperament and he's got a few good years left on his clock – I'm sure he'll get right along with our older collie."

Richard wasn't particularly looking for a clammy dog embrace in that moment, which is why the cosmos hand-delivered one to him in his blind spot. Jack's momentum knocked him flat against the side of Ben's truck and for an indeterminate epoch Richard was struggling with slobber and tail and paws and mud down his stomach and legs. "Jack." Rachel arrived too late to pry him off. Jack immediately turned his villainy on her, knocking her down and then climbing all over her in excitement. She laughed and hugged him and the sheer abandon on her face nearly made up for the fact that there was no way Richard could resurrect his suit now without a demonic contract. "Goodbye, Jack." Conan caught him and gave him his own sopping hug. "Good luck. Chase all the rabbits, bark at all the squirrels."

"Would you two quit being so maudlin?" Richard said. "He says you can go and see him whenever we feel like hoofing it out there in the boonies. Look, you've had your fun. It's freezing out here. Let's wrap it up and let the man get on his way."

"Thank you," Rachel told Ben fervently. "For everything. I'll make sure to tell everyone that he went to a good home."

"Tell them to come by whenever they like. I'm sure Jack'll love to see them." Ben started the truck and the dog leapt off Rachel to race around it, sniffing the wheels.

Richard unsuccessfully swiped at his ruined jacket as he stepped out of tire-slinging range. Conan plopped to his knees as Jack made the rounds toward him and received him one last time, vigorously scratching Jack's soaked fur. He looked up at Richard, still laughing, and this time Richard didn't have to superimpose memory with reality. The coexisted in matching blues and greys. A dog and a brat and an open sky. Photographs and wide, fearless smiles.