Page 4 of Trapper Road

He gestures to the car. “I’m going to make a store run,” he says quietly.

I keep an arm around Lanny as I lead her into the house and to the couch, where I grab a box of tissues and push them toward her before taking the seat next to her. “What happened?”

“I said something stupid,” she mumbles. “I didn’t think it would set him off, but he’s so sensitive these days. He gets defensive over the stupidest little things.”

“Is he here?” I ask.

She shakes her head. “He went to play video games at Kevin’s house.” She puts a weight on the name. Lanny does not like Connor’s friend Kevin. In truth, I don’t feel wholly great about him, either; the boy seems a little too closed in, and I have the strange feeling he’s always hiding a smirk.

More than a few times I’ve caught him somewhere unexpected when he’s been over visiting. Once he found him slipping out of my office, and when I called him on it he apologized profusely and claimed to be looking for blank paper for a project he and Connor were working on. Another time I caught him in my bathroom rifling through my drawers, but he told me Connor had said that’s where he could find a Band-Aid.

All reasonable excuses that I normally wouldn’t think twice about if something about the kid didn’t cause a gut-level uneasiness. In the past I might have listened to my gut in a situation like that, but after my instincts led me so wrong with Jonathan Watson, I’ve had trouble trusting myself.

Plus, Connor likes him, and Connor’s never had an easy time making friends. At least not since the move from Stillhouse Lake. He doesn’t trust easily, though he’s come by that reluctance honestly. He hasn’t had an easy life the past couple of years. Another lasting legacy of being the son of an infamous serial killer.

I worry that if I voice my concerns about Kevin to him it will just cause him to retreat, and that’s the last thing I want to happen. I remind myself of what my therapist likes to tell me: sometimes you have to give people space to make bad decisions. It’s the only way they’ll learn how to make good ones.

But damn, it’s not easy.

I put my arm around my daughter. “You want to talk about it?”

She pulls at a tissue, tearing off small pieces before shaking her head. “Not really.”

I resist the urge to press for more information and give her a side hug. “Fights happen. It’ll be okay.”

Lanny gives me a smile and starts mopping at her face with the tissue, smearing the mess even worse. Her phone buzzes in her pocket, and she pulls it out, snorting at whatever she reads before starting to tap away.

She settles deeper into the couch, pulling up her legs and bending over her phone. Apparently, both her conversation with me and the fight with Connor have been forgotten. I give her a pat on the knee which she distractedly acknowledges, and then I stand and make my way to my home office at the back of the house.

Once I’m settled at my desk, I text Connor. When he doesn’t respond, I pull up the app that tracks his phone’s location and verify that he’s at Kevin’s. At least I know he’s safe. In the past his not responding would have raised my radar and had me instantly on edge, but lately he’s gotten slack about things like that. I know I need to talk to him about it, but I also know it will likely lead to another fight that I don’t have the energy for right now.

His argument is that none of his other friends are treated like children who can’t be trusted, and my argument is that none of those kids have had active threats against their lives like he has.

As a teenager, he will always believe he’s invincible, and as his mother, I will always worry.

I debate calling Kevin’s mother and having her send him home, but I know that will only make matters worse. Instead, I set an alarm on my phone to text him again in half an hour and then try to distract myself with work.

I run through the remaining background checks on my to-do list with boring and predictable results, except for one who turned out to have all the hallmarks of a sociopath, which I appropriately flag.

I’m just finishing when my boss calls. “Hey, J.B.,” I say. “Sending the last of those backgrounds now.”

“Good,” she says briskly, and I can tell she’s already moving on. “So, how’s your fitness?”

“Great,” I say. Fake it ‘til you make it. “Got something more for me?”

“It’s a missing persons case.” She pauses, and there’s a rare beat of silence between us before she adds, “The family asked for you specifically.”

I’m not surprised. Somehow I’ve stumbled into a reputation for finding lost kids, the ones that look like they’ll be lost forever. The hopeless cases.

The problem with the hopeless cases, however, is that oftentimes there’s not a happy ending. I’ve been lucky to find a few kids still alive: a couple of girls from Wolfhunter, TN, a young man who’d been kidnapped by a cult.

Given the odds, I’m due for a failure, and I’m not looking forward to it.

“Who’s missing?” I ask without committing to taking on the case.

“A girl named Juliette Karin Larson from Gardenia, North Carolina.”

The name’s familiar, and it takes me a second to place it. Of course. It was the same case Sam had been reading about in the paper earlier this morning. I shake my head. If I didn’t know better, I’d think my boss and my partner were conspiring to get me back into the field.