Page 9 of I Will Find You

“Yes.”

“Okay, sure. I’m supposed to know that some boy in the background is your son Matthew who died when he was, what, three?”

I say nothing.

“And let’s say, I don’t know, that I did. I can’t. I mean, it’s impossible, even you admit that. But let’s say it’s somehow the spitting image of Matthew. You said Rachel checked it with age-progression technology, right?”

“Right.”

“So how do you know she didn’t just photoshop his age-progressed face into the picture?”

“What?”

“Do you know how easy it is to doctor photographs?”

“You’re kidding, right?” I frown. “Why would she do that?”

Philip Mackenzie stopped. “Wait. Of course.”

“What?”

“You don’t know what happened to Rachel.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Her career as a journalist. It’s over.”

I say nothing.

“You didn’t know that, did you?”

“It doesn’t matter,” I say. But of course, it does. I lean forward and pin the man I’ve known my whole life as Uncle Philip with my eyes. “I’ve been in here for five years now,” I say in my most measured tone. “How many times have I come to you for help?”

“Zero,” he says. “But that doesn’t mean I haven’t given it to you. You think it’s a coincidence that you ended up in my prison? Or that you got so much extra time in the isolation wing? They wanted you back in regular population, even after that beating.”

It was three weeks after the start of my incarceration. I was in general pop, not here in the isolation wing. Four men whose bulk was only outsized by their depravity cornered me in the shower. The shower. Oldest trick in the book. No rape. Nothing sexual. They just wanted to beat the hell out of someone to feel some sort of primitive high—and who better than prison’s new celebrity baby-killer? They broke my nose. They shattered my cheekbone. My cracked jaw flapped like a door missing a hinge. Four broken ribs. A concussion. Internal bleeding. My right eye only sees fuzzy images now.

I spent two months in the infirmary.

I pull the ace out of my deck. “You owe me, Philip.”

“Correction: I owe your father.”

“Same thing now.”

“You think his marker passes down to his son?”

“What would Dad say?”

Philip Mackenzie looks pained and suddenly weary.

“I didn’t kill Matthew,” I say.

“An inmate telling me he’s innocent,” he says with an almost amused shake of the head. “This has to be a first.”

Philip Mackenzie rises from his chair and turns toward the window. He looks out into the woods past the fence. “When your father first heard about Matthew…and even worse, when he found out you were arrested…” His voice trails off. “Tell me, David. Why didn’t you plead temporary insanity?”

“You think I was interested in finding a legal loophole?”

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