Chapter 6: The Name Garrett Foss
Detective Rhea Solis arrived forty minutes after I called it in.
She was compact, quick-eyed, with the particular stillness of someone who had learned to make people forget she was in the room.
She read the note from Foss without touching it, using a pen to hold the edge flat.
"Garrett Foss," she said.
"You're sure that's the name?"
"That's what Carla told me.
And the note is signed G."
Rhea set the pen down.
"We know that name."
"How well?"
"Well enough that this is no longer a welfare check." She looked at me.
"Dale Mercer — you said no missing persons report?"
"Nothing on file."
"Because she never filed one, or because someone closed it before it opened?"
I hadn't considered the second option.
Rhea pulled out her phone and stepped into the front room.
I heard her speaking quietly, the clipped shorthand of someone calling someone who picks up immediately.
Carla was in the bedroom with the children.
I could hear Brenna's voice, high and thin, asking something I couldn't make out.
Then Carla's voice, low and steady, answering.
Rhea came back.
"Foss has been on a financial crimes watch list for fourteen months," she said.
"Unlicensed lending, coercion, two prior complaints that were withdrawn before they went anywhere.
Both complainants relocated out of state shortly after withdrawing." She looked at me.
"Dale Mercer is not the first person connected to Foss to go quiet."
The kitchen felt smaller suddenly.
"How many?" I asked.
"Three that we know of.
One turned up in Tacoma six months later — said he'd been hiding voluntarily, that Foss had given him a way out if he disappeared quietly and stopped talking.
The other two—" She paused.
"Still open."
"So Dale could be hiding."
"Or Dale could be one of the two."
We stood with that for a moment.
"Carla doesn't know any of this," I said.
"No.
And I'd like to keep it that way until we know more." Rhea picked up her bag.
"I need to talk to the boy.
Radley.
He's been in that room for forty-three days.
He may have seen or heard something before Dale left that he doesn't know is important."
"He's ten."
"I know how old he is." Her voice wasn't unkind.
"I also know that ten-year-olds notice things adults don't think they're paying attention to.
I'll be careful."
She was.
I watched through the open door as she sat on the floor of Radley's room — not on the bed, not in the chair, on the floor — and talked to him at his level for twenty minutes.
At the end of it, Radley got up, reached under the mattress again, and pulled out something that was not the wallet.
A folded piece of paper.
Small, the kind torn from a notepad.
He held it out to Rhea with both hands, the same way he had held the wallet out to me.
"Dad left it in my shoe," he said.
"The morning before he went.
I didn't show Mom because it has her name on it and I thought she'd be sad."
Rhea unfolded it carefully.
I saw her face change.
"Radley," she said quietly.
"Did you read this?"
"No," he said.
"I can't read Dad's writing very well.
It's too small."
May you like
Rhea looked up at me over his head.
Whatever was on that paper, it had just changed the shape of everything.
