“There’s this spot under the train trestle along the Steel Bridge. It’s like a crawl space right under the tracks. You have to crawl over some of the timber trestles and get over one set of tracks—it’s between the two lines. It’s not big enough to get all the way into, but we used to store beer up there sometimes, when we had it. But it wasn’t worth the hassle. D.K. thought someone might be living under there.”

“Why?”

“He found this toy. A Star Wars figure. It was outside the opening. He tried to crawl in, but you can’t see into the space more than a few feet, and it’s so loud up there under the bridge that you can’t hear anything. This crawl space? It’s small. Like only big enough for a kid.”

Archie’s mind went to the toy they’d found in D.K.’s pocket. “Darth Vader,” he said.

“Yeah.”

“He thought it might belong to the kid you were looking for,” Devin said.

“He didn’t tell us until after you’d left,” Nick said.

Kristen chewed on a nail. “D.K. left K-Falls when he was twelve. His stepdad used to beat him up really bad. He thought maybe this kid had run away, too. He didn’t want to narc on him.”

“D.K. went to look for him,” Archie said.

“He was going to ask him to come with us,” Devin said. “He was worried the kid was up in there. That he’d drown or whatever.”

“We waited,” Nick said. “But the van from the Mission came, and the people for the dogs. D.K. didn’t always do what he said. He’d get distracted.”

“He’d get high,” Sister, the older woman, said, wiping her nose with her fist. It was the first thing she’d said since she’d spelled her name for Archie.

Nick was shaking his head, eyes fixed to that spot on the floor again. “We shouldn’t have left him.”

They could have waited all night. D.K. wasn’t coming back.

Archie put the tip of his pen to his notebook. “Where exactly is this crawl space?” he asked.

Nick described how to get to it, and Archie wrote it down.

“Don’t blame yourself,” Archie said when he left them. But he knew Nick would. Archie and Nick were alike that way.

Archie called the task force as soon as he was out of the building. The sooner someone got to the boy’s hiding place, the better.

Chapter 35

CHAPTER

35

Something was happening. Susan heard a raised voice coming from the task force office’s main room. Not yelling; more the sound of someone relaying urgent information. She got up from Archie’s desk and hurried out there.