Lowboy by John Wray Page B

to the intersection of Amsterdam and Seventy-second. She waited until he’d made the turn onto Amsterdam, then said in a disinterested voice: “You’d have more luck with your witnesses, Detective, if you stopped treating them like political prisoners.”
    He let his eyes rest on the city bus in front of them. “You’re not a witness, Miss Heller. You’re a complainant. And I treat everyone who lies to me the same way.”
    She blinked at him. “What do you mean by that?”
    “You told me that your son had no friends but his grandfather, no interest in anything but comic books. When obviously he was spending time with that girl.”
    She tilted her head out of view.
    “Why didn’t you mention the girl to me, Miss Heller?”
    “I didn’t think she was important.”
    “I’d have to disagree. I think she is.”
    She started to answer him, then stopped herself. When she spoke again her voice was strangely muffled. “Will’s not a murderer, Detective. Will is a boy with an illness.”
    He frowned at her. “I wasn’t aware the girl was killed, Miss Heller.”
    “She wasn’t killed,” she said quickly. “Emily is fine.” Both her arms were braced against the dashboard. “Could you slow down, Detective? We’re practically up that bus’s muffler.”
    “We don’t have all the tea in China,” Lateef said gravely, but she didn’t seem to hear.
    “It’s incredible that Emily wasn’t killed,” she said after a time. “Her head came down an inch from the third rail. The 6 was less than a stop away, just a few hundred yards uptown, but they managed to get the signals switched somehow.” A taxi rolled past them and she watched it pass. “By the time they took Will away she was already in a bed at City Hospital.”
    “Did she testify at your son’s trial?”
    “She refused to testify. She told everyone she’d jumped of her own volition.” Violet shook her head. “No one believed her, of course.”

    She leaned forward and rested her head against the dash. Lateef kept quiet for the length of four full blocks, determined not to rush her. He knew the rest was coming and it was.
    “Try to imagine, Detective, what it’s like to have a child—” She stopped in mid-sentence and straightened in her seat. “What it’s like to have a child, only one, and to feed that child all of your own old ambitions. It’s wrong for other parents, of course, but you feel different, free to indulge yourself, because your child is very close to perfect.” She arranged her hands more precisely in her lap. “It isn’t only because you love him that you think of him this way. He’s gentler than most other children are, more self-contained, more independent. As far as anyone can tell—teachers, neighbors, even other children— he’s also a good deal smarter. He takes your life over completely.”
    They were coming up to Eighty-second Street, just three blocks from the sighting, but Lateef made a slow right and lifted his foot off the gas. She seemed neither to notice nor to care.
    “Then picture what came next,” she said. “Picture everything I’ve told you happening.”
    After that she stopped talking and dug the heels of her palms into her eyes. He circled the block at a leisurely pace and brought them back to Amsterdam without a word. Her crying didn’t alarm him; just the opposite. It was proof that something had fallen away between them. A barrier had been removed, not through anything he’d said or done, but simply because her son had been sighted alive. She’s saving her strength now, Lateef thought. Saving it for what’s coming. She knows better than to waste it all on me.
    “Emily was a remarkable girl,” she said when she was done. “She was taller than Will, the way girls that age often are, and she had lovely dark hair that always hung straight down into her eyes. A tomboy, I suppose you’d say. I never understood what brought the two of them together: it’s so odd for a fourteen-year-old girl