Feet of Clay

Feet of Clay Prequel Short Story for Prodigal TA Moore

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Feet of Clay Copyright © 2019 by TA Moore All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations em- bodied in critical articles or reviews.

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organiza- tions, places, events and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

For information contact : tammy @tamoorewrites.com

First Edition: 2019

CONTENTS TITLE CHAPTER ONE 2 3 4 5 THIS COULD BE A SUBTITLE ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ABOUT THE AUTHOR

One Halfway through the nightshift the coffee in the break room tasted like something drained out of a truck’s oil filter. Mac poured himself a cup anyhow. If you added enough sugar, it was fine.

He took a drink and grimaced as the grit scraped the roof of his mouth. Well, it wouldn’t kill him. The writer sat at the table with her equipment laid out fastidiously in front of her. Every now and again she reached to check absently that it was still on.

“I don’t know what you want from me,” Mac said. “Anything I know is public record. If you read Maccabee’s book, then you know as much as me.”

The woman leaned forward and braced her elbows on the table, her hands under her chin.

“I’m not a journalist, Lieutenant MacKenzie” she said. “I’m not a writer, not like Sullivan, either. This is research for an academic paper that I’m working on. It’s about the possible epigenetic impact of this sort of community-experienced trauma on--” Mac held his hand up. “I get it,” he said. “You’re a professor not a paparazzi. That doesn’t change what I’ve got to say. Everything that happened back then--every decision, every clue, every dead end we slammed face first into--has been dissected a dozen times over. I’m bled

out on details, Dr Masterton. Sammy Calloway disappeared. We never found him. What more do you want.”

She rubbed her lip with her knuckle, smudged the toffee brown gloss she’d applied.

“Nothing,” she said. “I’m not a forensic scientist, Lieutenant, or a criminal psychologist. Maybe Cutter’s Gap PD did make a mistake back then, maybe something was missed that you could have used to bring Sammy home. But you didn’t, and that’s what I’m interested in. Not what happened after Sammy was taken, but what’s happened since you gave up on getting him back. That documentary that Netflix made for five year anniversary was called The Boy the Town Forgot, but what I want to know what it’s like to live in that town.”

Mac looked down into his coffee. It was black and vaguely oily, a smear of greasy creamer on top. How many of these cups had he held over the years? When the hunt had been on for Sammy he’d lived on cups of this and not much else. One day his stomach lining was going to have its revenge.

“Yeah,” he said quietly. “Me too.”

There was a pause for a second and then the professor turned the recorder off with a click.

“Your captain told you to talk to me,” she said. Mac’s shoulders tightened and the already sour taste in his mouth thickened. “I need you to want to talk to me, to get other people to talk to me.”

“Can’t the captain do that?”

The professor smiled wryly as she packed her equipment away. “Only to shut me, and because he knew you didn’t want to,” she said. “Think about it. I’m in town for the rest of the week. Let me know if you change your mind. I think you could help me a lot more than you realise. It might help you to.”

She stood up, slung her bag over her shoulder, and offered Mac a neat,

unadorned card. He took it and Professor Masterton left, her heels loud on the tiled floor as she headed for the door.

Mac hadn’t been raised with much, but he had manners. He waited until she was gone before he tossed the card in the trash.

He had a job to do and it wasn’t raking over the past.

Two “We have a 10-42 out at the old Jenkins’ place,” Nat said over the radio, his voice sharp with annoyance. “Again. We need a car to go and break it up. MacKenzie?”

Mac hastily swallowed a mouthful of burger and pineapple. He wiped BBQ sauce off his fingers onto a napkin and thumbed the switch on the radio.

“MacKenzie,” he said. “I’ve got it.”

He wrapped the grease-stained paper around the half a burger he had left and stuffed it back into the take out bag. It wouldn’t be the first time he’d eaten his food cold, or not at all. His trash at home was a graveyard of take-out that started out so hopefully.

The quickest route out of town swung Mac past the school. He would

have liked to blame the flicker of distraction as he glanced at the building on Masterton, but it was always the same. It was habit to play out one of the scenarios they’d had about what happened, to try and work out if there was something he’d missed.

If it had been Hill who’d taken Sammy from outside the school before his brother could get there, what would he have done next? The guy had no car, rode a bike to work -- had Sammy been somewhere in the school, been that close, when they started the search?

Or if Shay had collected his little brother…

Mac reached the end of the street and turned left. He left the speculation behind with the school, same as every time. It was the only way he could do his job. There were a dozen landmarks of the case, scattered through the town, that he couldn’t let go off. Someone, somewhere, had to have missed something and if he just...gnawed...at the facts long enough… But if they had, he would have too, and he couldn’t let it be all he thought of.

The Jenkins place had, briefly, been an alpaca farm.

It turned out that--like a lot of people--alpacas didn’t thrive in Cutter’s Gap. After a couple of lean years the Jenkins had tried to sell, gotten no buyers, and eventually just left the old farm to rot while they moved back up north.

These days it was a popular place for drug dealers and drunk kids.

Sometimes they were the same people. Cutter’s Gap could be a hard place to get a foothold in.

Mac pulled up at the gate up to the farm. It had been chained shut by the department last time he’d been here, but it hung open now. The metal bars were bent and twisted, scraped with paint, and the chains had snapped.

Someone either didn’t care too much about their truck, or it wasn’t their truck.

Mac drove along the rutted old road to the house. A trashed pick-up pissed oil and gas onto the gravel, and a handful of other cars and a couple of motorbikes were parked around it. Mac could ID half the kids there by the cars. Small towns, long shifts.

He opened the car door. The almost physical thump of music made him wince as it hit him, all bass and cheap speaker distorted vocals. He hit the siren and left it wail as he grabbed the handheld speaker from the back and stalked up the rickety steps to the house.

“LAST CALL,” he said into the handset. About twenty kids--a handful of teenagers, a couple of college students--flinched at the sound and turned to see what he was doing. “TURN THAT OFF AND GET OUTSIDE. YOU’RE ALL TRESPASSING.” The music cut out. A boy in a jeans and dreadlocks, voice cracked between baritone and tenor like he was three years younger than he was, yelled, “It’s the 12!”

Panic scattered the teens. They rolled off couches--and boyfriends-tossed down joints and raced for the door. Mac staggered as they hit him, a wall of weed and cheap whiskey sour youth, and turned to the side to them push past him. He walked over to stub out the joints on the carpet under his foot, a dozen new char marks on grey fibres, and registered the bag of pills spilled out on a coffee table.

Prescription bottles and blister packs, the loot from a raid on a dozen parental medicine cabinets. Ground up pills and broken open capsules littered the floor. Mac swore under his breath as he hooked the loudspeaker over his arm and pulled a pair of gloves out of his belt.

He carried the bag outside and held it up in the air.

“Anyone know anything about this?” he asked. A couple of kids shrugged. Most of them were trying to push his car out of the drive where it blocked their escape. Mac lifted the speaker to his mouth and barked, “HEY! WHO BROUGHT THESE TO PARTY?”

One lanky teenager slipped on the gravel and went down. A couple of the others turned around and looked shifty. Ben Anders there, Mac noted, was nearly twenty eight and definitely too old to be hanging out with high teenagers.

“Shay brought ‘em,” someone said. Everyone nodded. Two of them pointed as they added their agreement.

“Shay had them.”

“Shay brought the party favors.”

Aw, hell. Mac followed the fingers to where Shay Calloway was sprawled on the ground, shoulders braced against the flat tires of the wrecked pick-up. Twenty years old, nearly, and already such a screw up that everyone knew to blame him.

“You’re going to get your ass thrown in jail yet, Shay,” Mac said.

Shay shrugged and pushed his matted hair back from his face with the back of his hand. His t-shirt hung from a torn collar and his jeans were unbuttoned and barely hung up around his lean hips.

“Then at least you’ll have accomplished something with your career,” he said bitterly. Shay stuck both hands out in front of him, clumsily crossed at the wrist. “C’mon, Mackie. You’ve been dying to slap those cuffs on me for years. Take me away, for crimes against whatever…”

Shay tried to stand up and his jeans started to slide down. He grabbed at them to hitch then back up and measured the length of himself on the gravel. Grazes mottled his forearms red and shredded white as he folded them over the back of his head.

“Ow.” Mac liked being a cop, most of the time. He was good at it, despite what everyone in town thought. Sometimes, though, he missed being able to call an idiot a fucking idiot.

He crunched over the drive and bent down to grab Shay’s arm and haul him back to his feet. Or up off his face, at least. Shay got half way

there, on his knees with his hand cupped under his drizzling nose to catch the blood, when one of the handful of girls suddenly screamed.

“Lottie!” she screamed, voice shrill and nervous. Her heavy ponytail swung counterbalance as she tottered back and forth on wedge heeled sandals. “Where’s Lottie? I can’t find her!? Oh my god, Lottie! Where did she go?”

Three Panic throbbed in the air as the rest of Cutter’s Gap PD lined drunk kids up in lines and tried to get them to answer simple questions and parents shouted angrily in the background. It popped at ear drums and prickled sweat in armpits as it pressured you to move faster, act now, worry about mistakes later.

Except mistakes always came home to roost sooner than you’d think.

“Lottie. You mean Charlotte Beresford?” Mac asked the sobbing girl with cropped, pixie pink hair. “The editor at the Dispatch’s kid?”

The girl wiped her drip-black eyes with the tissue he’d given her and then blew her nose. She nodded shakily. “Lottie.”

Mac didn’t know every teenager in town, but he knew most of them.

He’d spent a lot of time at the school five years ago, followed up leads that ended at kitchen tables as he asked about Sammy or Shay. It was a shit super power, but it was what he had.

It helped that Lottie had kept herself fresh in his memory. She was fourteen and had run away last year, called for help from a suspicious hotel clerk’s office while her 50 year old boyfriend skipped the state. Six months ago she’d run away again and stabbed Kim—Patrol Officer Ford —with a fork when the search had caught her in the same guy’s car at a gas station.

“Beth. Bethie right?” Mac said. He snapped his fingers to get Bethie to focus on him. “Has she been talking to Leary again?”

Beth widened her eyes, lashes clumpy with tear sodden mascara, and retched violently. She clapped her hand over her mouth as she gagged, her shoulders hitched up to her ears as she turned to stagger away from him. The sound of her puking into an azaleas got the attention of one of the paramedics. He loped over to check her pupils with a desultory flash of his torch. She covered her eyes with both hands and the paramedic shrugged apologetically at Mac as she led Beth, who couldn’t quite decide if she wanted to sob or puke, away.

“Lieutenant MacKenzie, what the hell happened?” Captain Brennan asked he stalked over. “How can a kid go missing in front of one of my men?”

“She didn’t,” Mac said. He’d gotten that much from the other kids before the ambulance and half the shift arrived. “Nobody at the party has seen her for over an hour. This was just the first time that Beth, who was meant to be watching out for her, realised she’d not seen her for an hour.

The last person seen with Lottie was…”

Mac trailed off and waved a hand reluctantly toward Shay, who perched on the back of the ambulance with his long legs trailing the ground. His feet were bare and studded with sharp bits of gravel and his head hung forward until his chin nearly touched his chest.

“The Calloway boy,” Brennan said. He pinched the bridge of his nose.

“So damned if we do, damned if we don’t?”

It was one of the boys this time who suddenly doubled over and sprayed the ground with bile and puke. His eyes rolled back in his head and one of the medics had to run over with a basin tucked under one arm and catch him as he fell.

The sound of gravel sprayed out from under a car going to fast carried up the road to them.

“Same as always,” Mac said. “Let me talk to him?”

It was a nice car, a metallic navy Porsche splattered with mud all up around the wheels. A thin, man with a long, anxiously neurotic face tumbled out. His face was blotched red with worry under a prickle of shaved down ginger hair.

“Have you found her?” the man asked in a tightly pessimistic voice, as he expected the answer to be ‘yes, in bits’. “Lottie is only fifteen. What the hell was she doing at a party with a bunch of grown men?”

Mac faded into the background to let Brennan deal with the first parent. It was always the second parent that was hard-nosed, brittle.

First parent on the scene just thought you needed to know what the kid looked like. Second one wanted to know why you needed to know, especially when she worked for the paper and already had a good idea of how bad it could be.

I mean, they all knew. Everyone in Cutter’s Gap had watched how bad it could be play out once already.

Four “Drinking with teenagers really such a good idea?” Mac asked. He sat down on the back of the ambulance next to Shay, his feet braced against the gravel. “Nineteen is legally an adult.”

Shay wiped his nose on his forearm.

“They weren’t here when I started to drink,” he said. He wasn’t sober, Mac could smell the liquor sweat on him, but he’d been shocked functional. “I’m not a fucking idiot.”

“You could have left.”

Shay looked up at him from under his hair and smirked bitterly.

“What? Drive drunk, nineteen is legally an adult for that too. Besides...”

He nodded at the wrecked pick-up. Mac grimaced. The state of it suggested that Shay hadn’t been entirely sober when he’d gotten here.

He took care of his cars better than he took care of himself. Shay liked cars.

“You could have called the cops.”

“Sure,” Shay said. “Because you’re so fucking useful.”

“People said they saw you talking to Lottie,” Mac said. “Did she say anything?”

Shay hunched over with a pained laugh. His back was a long arch of bony spurs under tanned skin. Not enough meat for his own good. “So

what. I’m in the frame for this now? Something happens to a kid and first port of call, bet it was fucking Shay?”

“I didn’t say that,” Mac said. “But did you see her leave? Did she ask for a lift or--” “Crack,” Shay said. He braced his elbows on his thighs. “She asked me for crack, but...that’s not my scene. Just say no. Isn’t that right, Officer Mac.” “That’s what you told her.”

Shay shrugged, all bones and old anger. “I told her not to fuck up her life. I said she had one, unlike Sammy, and not to piss it away on some fucking pimp that told her she was special.”

“And?” Shay lifted his head and stared at the Captain and Lottie’s dad.

Fingers stabbed in Shay’s direction and he snorted tiredly. “She didn’t listen,” he said. “Don’t know why I fucking tried. I’m not up to saving anyone.”

Not in this state.

Mac swallowed the bitter knot of disgust and frustration in his throat and stood up. He knew why Shay hated him, why Shay hated himself, and he couldn’t fix that. Lottie might be a different story.

“Sober up,” he told Shay. “I’ll get someone to call your mom.”

Shay laughed bitterly at that and picked dried blood out of the pale stubble on his chin.

Mac had taken two steps when Shay called him back.

“There was a dirtbike,” Shay said as he rubbed one eye with his thumb. “Anders rode it up. It wasn’t his, so he’s not going to report it gone.”

Mac nodded. “Thanks.”

Shay shrugged. “I didn’t do it for you.”

Of course not. Mac turned to look for Anders and found him, all

greasy charm and bony good looks as he flirted with one of the cops.

“He’s not your friend, you know,” Mac said. “And he’s not good for you.”

Shay laughed, a tired huff of sound, as he lay back and stretched out.

There were bruises on his ribs and marks on his neck. “I never thought he was.”

Not, Mac reminded himself harshly, tonight’s problem.

Five “What about Hill?” one of the parents demanded. Her son was six foot three and a block of muscle, he’d had to be sedated before the paramedics could work on him when he had a panic attack. His mom clutched his hand--that Mac had seen palm a football on game night--in both of hers like he was still a child. “Do you know where he is? What if he’s back.”

“Fuck Hill,” a father interjected. He jabbed a work-thickened finger toward Shay. “What the fuck is he doing here? We all know what he did to his brother.”

The only one who didn’t have accusations to throw around was Lottie’s father, who stood with his arms crossed and an expression of exhausted shell-shock on his face. He’d gone through this so many times already, he didn’t have the energy for the group hysteria anymore.

“From what we’ve been able to gather, Lottie left the party on her own,” Brennan said. “We have a search party--” “Much good that’ll do,” someone spat. “Your men couldn’t find a cow in a field.”

The angry father pulled away from his daughter and started toward Shay, his fists clenched and face reddened.

“I’ll beat it out of him,” he snarled as Shay stumbled backwards away from him. “Do your damn jobs for you.”

Mac grabbed him by the collar to pull him back, and twisted one meaty arm up behind the man’s back. There was no point in trying to reason with him. After ten pm on a Friday night Kev Butcher was usually drunk. Since he’d been laid off he could technically get drunk on any day of the week, but old habits.

“That’s enough, Kev,” Mac said. “We’ll find Lottie. You take care of your own kid.”

Kev tried to wrench away, but most of his bulk was flesh not muscle these days. He didn’t get far and when he didn’t stop Mac kicked him in the back of the knee to make the joint fold under him.

“What do you care if I give the bastard a hiding?” Kev blurted out angrily. “You thought he was as guilty as any of us. What’s changed? Are you fucking him now or something?”

“My boyfriend wouldn’t like that,” Mac said dryly. He grabbed Kev’s other wrist and had his hands cuffed behind his back before he

remembered that was a lie. As of last weekend he did not have a boyfriend anymore. It just hadn’t quite sunk in yet. Mac dragged Kev back to his feet and shoved him toward one of the patrol officers. “Stick him in the back of a car, see if he calms down. If he doesn’t he can cool his heels at the station overnight.”

He got a quick nod. “Sir.” “What are you going to do?” the football player’s mother asked harshly.

“Our best,” Mac said. He didn’t know if she heard because Brennan talked over him, all promises and reassurances they really couldn’t follow up on. Mac dragged his hand down over his face and muttered, just to himself, “Again. It’s all we can do.”

Six When he wasn’t picking up underage girls, Leary was a trucker. Long haul, since no one local would hire him anymore. Twice he’d been caught with bales of drugs in the back of the truck, but he’d snitched on someone higher up than him both times. All told, with everything he’d been caught red handed doing, Leary had served maybe a year, in installments, in prison.

Mac got it. He hated it, but he got it. It was better to take out guy who ran Leary and five others like him, instead of just one courier. More drugs off the street, fewer deaths--the best result. Except there was always another dealer to step in, and when Mac thought about what he’d have to tell Lottie’s parents if Leary was involved again?

It just seemed like a result, not the best one.

Mac headed down the backroad towards the Interstate. If Leary was going to pick Lottie up anywhere it would be at the truckstop, so he could claim he wasn’t looking for her.

Two miles away from the interstate his headlights picked out the dirtbike in the road. It lay on its side, half the metal scraped off on the road.

“Shit.” Mac hit the brakes hard and wrenched the wheel to the side so he didn’t drive over it. The smell of hot rubber filled the car as it rocked

to a stop. He left the engine running as he jumped out and grabbed his torch off his belt. The bright beam picked out the pot-holed road and the battered, dark blue hatchback parked precariously on the shale verge.

Mac’s stomach hit his boots as a dread he’d never really allowed to be anything jolted ninety percent of the way to reality. He ran over to the car and found Donna Calloway, in bloody nurse’s scrubs, crouched by an unconscious girl’s side. She had both hands, scrubbed pink and the nails clipped short, around Lottie’s leg as she held the girl’s shredded lower leg up in the air.

“Jesus,” Mac said.

“Head injury and crush trauma,” Donna said in a clipped, exhausted voice. Her hands were steady, but her shoulders trembled slightly as she spoke. “It’s a fucking dead zone here. I couldn’t get through to anyone, and I wrecked my knee when I went off the road. I can’t get her in the car on my own.”

Mac called it in and then scrambled down over the edge of the road to spell Donna. The flesh under his fingers felt cold and he wasn’t sure whether that was the cold or the bloodloss.

This close to Donna he could smell beer on her breath. A yeasty smell that he might have missed in the sweat that soaked her if he’d not been looking for her. She sat back and lit a cigarette with shaking fingers, with a glare for him when he must have looked disapproving.

“Donna,” Mac said. “You been drinking?”

She drank, everyone knew that. She drove as well, but only out here on the empty backroads as she thought she might just...come across her son. A couple of times she’d just slept it off at the side of the road and a patrol officer had found her. Once she’d driven through a fence.

They should have charged her, but she was Donna Calloway. Her story was a tragedy, and why make it uglier?

“I didn’t hit her,” Donna said.

“That’s not what I asked,” Mac said.

“Go fuck yourself.”

They sat in silence for a while, as Donna checked Lottie’s pulse and Mac strained his ears for the sound of the ambulance.

“It was a coyote,” Donna said eventually. She pinched the cigarette out between her fingers. “They just run into the road. I’ve nearly hit one a couple of times. She just laid that silly little bike down and...she wasn’t wearing any gear. Poor kid. Just unlucky.”

Mac ducked his head to scratch the side of his nose on his shoulder.

“Actually, all things considered, maybe not.”

Professor Masterton had ordered for them both.

Mac slid into the booth opposite her and checked his burger. No pickles. Extra pineapple. She’d told Mary who was going to eat with her.

“This is my boyfriend,” Mac said. It was still his lock screen. All he had to do was tap the screen and slide it over the table. She took it and looked at the phone, Mac and Freddie at a bar somewhere as they laughed into the camera. “Two years. We broke up last week.”

“I’m sorry.”

She slid the phone back over the table and didn’t ask. She might not be a forensic psychologist, but she knew enough to let Mac finish his story on his own.

“Maybe it was stupid. He thought it was,” Mac said. “I found out he was subscribed to this podcast, Little Boy Lost. It was about Sammy, I think someone in town does it but I never wanted to find out. That was it, you know. Two years and I broke up with him because he listened to this podcast. Twenty episodes, right up to date.”

“It bothered you?”

Mac took a bite of his burger. He’d never gotten to finish his from last night. It was, now he thought about, still in the car somewhere.

“He wasn’t meant to be part of this,” he said. “He lives a few towns

over, he’s not law enforcement or anything. Then I find out he’s...all up in that. That he’d spent hours listening to this guy talk about Sammy and everyone in town. About me. That was it. We broke up. That’s the thing, Professor Masterton. I don’t think I can help you because no one’s forgotten anything.”

www.tamoorewrites.com

Acknowledgments To the Five, to my Mum, and to Lynn West who made me nail this world down and write it out.

About the Author

TA Moore is a Northern Irish writer of romantic suspense, urban fantasy, and contemporary romance novels. A childhood in a rural, seaside town fostered in her a suspicious nature, a love of mystery, and a streak of black humour a mile wide.

Coffee, Doc Marten boots, and good friends are the essential things in life.

Spiders, mayo, and heels are to be avoided. .

Title: Prodigal Series: Lost and Found Fifteen years ago Sammy Calloway disappeared on his way home from school. Now he’s back… or is he?

Boyd Maccabbee has spent his life secondguessing his actions on that fateful day. What if he’d done something differently? Maybe Sammy would have made it home safe and never become Cutters Gap’s most tragic famous son. Or would it have been Boyd who was never seen again? When the police find new evidence on the disappearance, Boyd hopes to finally get some answers The last thing Morgan Graves needs is to be dragged into some old case about a missing kid. He doesn’t know why police hit on his DNA, but he’s not Sammy Calloway. He thinks he’d remember being kidnapped.

He knows he’d remember firefighter Boyd.

Drawn into the complex web of suspicion, grief, and anger that has knit Cutters Gap together in the years since Sammy’s disappearance, Morgan struggles to hang on to himself when everyone already assumes they know him.

And somewhere, the truth about Sammy Calloway is waiting.

Cover Artist: Reece Notley Buy the Book: Amazon, Dreamspinner