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We’re both quiet, staring at each other, until Dozier sighs. He walks toward me, finally, and sits on the edge of the couch, taking care to keep a few feet of distance between us. Like I’m a disease he doesn’t want to catch.
“It’s highly unlikely that man saw anything on the night of the disappearance,” he says, his hands on his thighs. “He doesn’t live there.”
“How do you know that?” I ask, a prickle in my chest. “Do you know the man who does?”
Dozier is quiet, staring at me, and I can tell he’s keeping something from me. Something big.
“I can find out on my own,” I continue. “It’ll just be easier if you tell me yourself.”
The detective sighs, pinching the skin between his eyes. Finally, he speaks.
“The man who owns the house is Paul Hayes,” he says at last. “We know who he is because he’s out on parole—but he’s been a perfectly law-abiding citizen for years. His parole officer visits him once a month, and I can assure you: He lives alone. There is nobody else in that house. I don’t know who you saw, but he doesn’t live there. He wasn’t out there the night Mason was taken.”
“Paul Hayes,” I repeat, testing the name out on my tongue. It sounds vaguely familiar again, probably from when I met him last year. A forgettable name for a forgettable person. “What’s he out on parole for?”
“Nothing violent. Some drug offenses.”
“Can you go talk to him?” I ask, remembering what Waylon said about the case he solved. That girl found in the basement; the proof hiding in his own house. “Maybe get a warrant—?”
“No, I can’t get a warrant,” he snaps. “Jesus, I can’t just question anybody about a kidnapping without some kind of probable cause. Andseeing someoneon his porch at night is not probable cause.”
I don’t like the way he said that—seeing someone—as if it belonged in air quotes. As if it didn’t actually happen; as if I’m just making it up, or worse, as if I somehow imagined it.
“Is there anything else?” he asks.
“Yes,” I say, my voice sharp. “There is something else. The email I sent you—”
“Right,” he says, standing up from the couch with a groan. “I took a look at the article and didn’t see any suspicious comments.”
“Well, that’s the thing,” I say, standing up, too. I walk over to the table and sit back down, grabbing my laptop and pulling the article up. “The one I wanted you to look at… it disappeared. Why would someone write a comment and then delete it?”
“What did it say?”
“It said‘He’s in a better place.’”
Detective Dozier eyes me quietly before letting out a sigh and walking into my dining room. I avoid his eyes as he takes in the wall, the pictures and map and article clippings cluttering up every surface.
“Christ,” he mutters. It’s probably triple the size it was the last time he saw it, expanding slowly like a bleeding stain.
“Why would someone write that?” I ask again, ignoring him. “Why would someonesaythat?”
“There are a lot of reasons,” he says at last, leaning over the table to look at my screen. “Maybe it was some well-meaning religious fanatic who realized how insensitive their comment was and deleted it. Or maybe you misread it. Was this it?”
He points at the screen, to the very last comment:Such a bizarre case.
“No,” I say, shaking my head. Remembering. “I didn’t misread it. It said ‘He’s in a better place.’”
“Look,” he says, straightening back up again. I watch as he walks over to the entryway, scratching Roscoe’s ears with one hand as he opens the door with the other. “There’s nothing I can do about any of this. You’re inventing clues where they don’t exist, and you’re pulling resources away from other angles. Do you have any idea how many times you called me last week?”
We’re both quiet. I can feel my cheeks starting to burn, the mental image of Detective Dozier seeing my name on his cell phone screen and willfully ignoring it searing in my mind.
“Leave Paul Hayes alone,” he says at last. “And as always, I’ll call you with any developments.”
He’s decided that this visit is over, then. That, once again, I’vewasted his time. He’s made it halfway out, pulling the door shut behind him, when something comes over me that I can’t control, rising up from the pit of my belly like stomach acid.
“I didn’t kill my son!” I yell after him. “I didn’t hurt him.”
I don’t know why I say it, but in this moment, it feels like I have to. It’s the same way I feel every time I’m standing onstage, taking in all those looks from the audience: doubtful, distrusting. Like they’re just waiting for me to fail, cameras out, ready to document it for their own sick pleasure and plaster it across the internet for the world to see. Or maybe it’s the way this man has been dismissing me for over a year—the way he looks at me with smug eyes and a smirk, like he knows something I don’t—or meets all my questions with groans and sighs instead of actual answers. Like he doesn’t believe he’ll ever catch the person responsible—because, in his mind, the person responsible isme.
