“Do you? Do you really? How could you possibly understand when you have no relationship with him, when you haven’t worked for him for more than a decade and seen him in action on a daily basis? You have no earthly idea how I feel. How would you feel if I insinuated that your beloved uncle Joe was capable of murder?”

Touché. “Look, I hear what you’re saying, and what I meant to say is I know how difficult it is to hear this, but the fact remains that his son was scared shitless that his father was coming after him and was convinced that if Troy caught him, he’d kill him. He told us Hamilton used him as a punching bag every chance he got when Josh was a kid.”

“Hamilton said the kid is mentally ill and off his meds.”

“Yes, he said that.”

“You don’t believe it?”

“I spent hours with him on Friday. Detective Cruz was with him Friday night through this afternoon, and not for one second in all that time did we pick up on anything that smacked of mental illness. Cruz’s father is bipolar. As he said, if the guy was mentally ill, he’d have noticed. There were no indicators of that whatsoever.”

“Having a bipolar father doesn’t make him an expert on mental illness.”

“Granted. But it does make him more acutely aware of certain behaviors that might indicate an underlying issue. The only underlying issue we detected from Josh Hamilton was abject fear.”

Avery ran a hand through his hair, as he processed what Sam was telling him. “If you accuse him of this, and you’re wrong, the nightmare you’ll bring down upon yourself and your department, not to mention the implications for your husband, will be epic. You know that, right?”

Sam had to admit she hadn’t given the first thought to how this situation might affect Nick, but he would tell her to do her job and not worry about him. “I get it. Don’t shoot the messenger. I’m only passing along the facts as they’ve been presented to me.”

“Fucking hell,” Avery muttered. “I can’t believe we’re even having this conversation.”

“We’re waiting on DNA before we accuse anyone of anything. In the meantime, we’re looking for Josh because he was concerned for his welfare, not because we necessarily think Director Hamilton is going to have him killed.”

“This whole thing is nothing short of preposterous.”

“Unless,” Skip said, “the DNA is a match for Taylor Rollings and the director raised a kidnapped child as his own. Then it won’t seem so preposterous.”

Avery’s face reddened. “You can’t honestly believe that Troy Hamilton kidnapped someone else’s child and raised him as his own!”