“This place is a dump too.”
“The rate at which small businesses close in the first year alone—”
“Why is someone shoving these under your door?” Colt scooped up the faxes and rifled through them. “These are job applications. Like, resumes.”
“Throw them away.”
“They’re all from the same person.”
Hazard grabbed the stack and dropped it in the wastebasket behind the reception desk.
“Who’s Shaw Aldrich?”
“Don’t worry about it.”
“Why does he want to be your secretary so bad?”
“Who the fuck knows?” And then the frustration got the better of him, and Hazard added, “I don’t even know how he keeps sending those. I don’t have a fucking fax machine.”
Colt’s face suggested that a little too much emotion might have slipped into Hazard’s voice, so Hazard moved into the inner office. The single best piece of furniture in the whole place was located here: a massive desk of solid oak, polished to a glow. A comfortable rolling executive chair waited for him, along with his MacBook and four black ballpoint pens, lined up in a row. Hazard sat, powered up the computer, and checked that the pens were still lined up.
“I’m bored,” Colt said.
Hazard took out his phone. He placed another call to the family services offices and got, this time, a wailing jazz rendition of what he thought might be “Baby Got Back.” He disconnected and tried Ramona. He left another message, reminding her that this was an emergency, that this was his third call, and that she was nominally Rebeca’s friend. He managed not to add that he wasn’t sure what his tax dollars were paying for, but only because he’d heard that line too many times as a cop to find any satisfaction in it.
Without many more available options, he opened a browser. Before, when he’d been a police officer, he would have started with the Missouri Uniform Law Enforcement System (MULES) and the National Crime Information Center. Unfortunately, both of those were secured systems that were no longer available to him. Instead, he pulled up the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. He checked current ongoing AMBER alerts—at the moment, only two, one for a five-year-old girl from Tennessee, the other for an eight-year-old girl from Oregon. Then he checked the general database—a list of entries they called ‘posters’ for missing children. A search for the first named Colt turned up only one result, a Latino boy named Colton Esquivel, who had been missing since 2015 and whose current age was twenty-four. He tried Ares and got nothing.
“What are you doing?” Colt asked from the doorway.
“Working,” Hazard snapped. “Go away.”
Colt grumbled something and stomped back into the reception area.
After that one central location, his options became granular and, therefore, increasingly less efficient to sift through. He tried several message boards, forums, and chats, all of them dedicated to runaway or homeless youth. He searched for Colt, Colton, and Ares. He got random smatterings of results, but the posts were often years old, or they were clearly not related to the Colt who had shown up on Hazard’s doorstep—one of them was from a Colt in British Columbia who just wanted his dad, Todd, to “stop being such a wank.”
Eventually, Hazard reached the internet’s quicksand—Reddit—and began to trawl the site with combination searches of Missouri and Colt, or Missouri and Colton, or Wahredua and Colt, or—grudgingly—Hazard and Colt. He got nothing. He got worse than nothing—pages on pages of results that he had to scan in the hopes that he would find something. The only thing he learned that there were a lot of Mitsubishi Colts driving around the UK having problems with their hazard lights.
He even tried various searches on the name Colt had given him the night before—Mary McDermaid—and got nowhere. Too many results and, from a quick scan, none of them relevant.
“This place sucks.” Colt slumped in the doorway. “There’s nothing to do.”
Change of plans, Hazard thought. A new avenue of investigation. “Sit down,” he said, pointing to one of the chairs in front of the desk. “And tell me who you are and what you want.”
Instead, Colt leaned in the doorway. He still had crumbs—biscuit, most likely, not the right type of crumb structure for a McMuffin—at the corner of his mouth. He had a teenage boy’s stubble, bluing his jaw and chin and upper lip unevenly. Tall, yes. Malnourished, probably. But younger than Hazard had thought the night before. The amber eyes watched Hazard with wary hardness.
“I’m your son. I already told you. My mom was Mary McDermaid—”
“Not that crock of shit. Who are you really? And what do you think you’re going to get out of this? Blackmail? An exclusive story you can sell? Who would buy it? If you’re planning a burglary, you should be aware that I don’t let John buy that expensive underwear anymore, and you’d be better off targeting a home in a better neighborhood.” Hazard considered this speech and added, “I can help you pick one, if you’d like.”
Playing with the placket of the jacket, Colt studied with an unreadable expression. Then he asked, “Seriously, am I going to be a freakazoid like you? Is it, like, when you get old or something?”
“Who are you?”
“Colt Hazard. Your son.”
“Who are you?”
“Your son.”
“Who the fuck are you?”
“I’m your fucking son, shit for brains.”
“Fine.” Hazard pulled out a stack of fingerprint cards and an ink pad. The police had vastly updated their system, but in a pinch, the old ways still worked. “Both hands.”
When Colt came across the room without an argument, Hazard wondered, briefly, if he was having a stroke. Instead, he took the boy by the wrist and printed him. Colt watched the process intently, as though memorizing it.
“What?” Hazard asked.
“Did you do that to bad guys?” Colt flushed and spoke in a rush. “Criminals, I mean.”
“Of course.”
Colt squinted at the card.
“Do you need glasses?”
“No.” He was obviously trying to squint less, but he did lean closer to the card. “They’re all different, right?”
“In theory. So far, there have been no recorded identical fingerprint matches across individuals. I suppose it could happen, but it seems unlikely.”
“Is it hard?”
Hazard snorted. “Only if you’re incompetent. Or dealing with someone who is being uncooperative. Actually, yes, for many people it is frequently difficult. Go wash your hands.”
It must have been a second ministroke because Hazard couldn’t do anything but stare as Colt headed out of his office. A moment later, water ran in the bathroom. Then Colt came back, running paper towels over his fingers, which were still blue.
“I could do it.”
“Likely. As I said, it’s not difficult. You’ll have to get your own ink pad, though, because I’m not lending you this one.”