Chapter 10: Your Badge, Captain

"You ran it when she was two," I said.

Sawyer stood in the chapel doorway with the caseworker's paper in his hand.

"She had a fever. They took blood for a panel." He shrugged. "Her type didn't fit mine."

"And you told me nothing."

"I went through the hairbrush and a cup she'd drunk from. I sent the samples to a private lab."

"For what?"

"For the truth, Hannah."

"And what was the truth?"

He looked past me at his brother.

"The truth had gray eyes," he said.

Terrence did not move.

I stood up.

"Come out here," I said. "All of you."

I walked past Sawyer into the corridor, and they followed me.

The fire chief sat on a plastic bench outside the chapel in her white uniform shirt.

Two men from the crew sat beside her.

They had been waiting to give me the statement.

The young firefighter stood up when he saw my face.

"Chief," I said. "Please hear this."

She rose.

"Sawyer," I said. "Say it again."

"Hannah, this isn't the place."

"You picked the place yourself. You picked a street with a camera on it."

He looked at the chief.

He looked at his own men.

He had talked his way out of a hundred rooms.

I watched him find that this one had no door.

"All right," he said.

His voice went flat.

"She isn't mine. She never was. I found out when she was two."

"And?" the chief said.

"I had a son, and I had a daughter who was my brother's." He lifted his hands.

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