I left to track Peter down before the jackal called for backup. If Peter was the one who had smacked Virginia around the first time, he was a more violent, treacherous person than he appeared. He could have sent someone to kidnap Ethan to hurt Virginia. It was unlikely, but I had time to kill, and I suspected he must know something about the first incident.

I put a handful of blocks between myself and the cops before I found a phone on a vacant stretch of road feeding into the freeway. A drum roll of raindrops fell on my windshield as soon as I stopped, and it turned into a respectable drizzle by the time I made it into the booth.

The glass coffin kept the rain off me, but I was exposed inside it, illuminated by a wan streetlight on the side of the road. A few cars buzzed past, but none slowed for me. I jumped a few times, but I didn’t need to look out for black Cadillacs anymore. At least, not that one.

First, I tried the direct number I had written down for Peter. The phone rang and rang, so I tried the front desk of Shady Eaves Motel, where he had been staying after Virginia gave him the boot. A cheery young woman answered and identified herself as Rebeca. Her tone clashed with my dour surroundings.

“Peter Calhoun in?” I asked once we’d gotten through the standard greetings.

“Uh… I’m not sure if I can…” Rebeca said. “I can transfer your call to his room.”

“I already called up to 304, but he didn’t answer.”

“Uh…” Rebeca said, expressing a great depth of doubt in the single stretched-out syllable. “I’m not supposed to share any information about our guests. We have a very strict privacy policy.”

“That’s great.” I put some extra gravel in my voice to set the tone. “But there’s a kid’s life on the line here.”

“A kid’s…” Rebeca almost had her mind around the idea, but her grip broke with the shattering sound of a gasp. “Oh my God! Are you Detective O’Howell?”

I took a deep breath, but Rebeca didn’t wait for me to respond.

“You are, aren’t you? I’d recognize that voice anywhere.”

“Yeah. That’s me.” I cleared my throat. “Jonathan O’Howell. Delinquency Dog.”

“No way! My friends used to love your commercials. Jason even has a grinder with your… Oops. Never mind.”

“It’s fine,” I said. “Mr. Calhoun. You know where he is?”

“Geez, Detective O’Howell. I wish I could tell you, but my manager would throw a fit if he knew I was blabbing about our guests.”

“Ma’am, listen. This is bigger than policy. I’m looking for Peter’s missing kid, and I think he might know something.”

Rebeca hummed deep down in her throat, a subconscious sound that meant she was thinking about it. I scuffed my feet, hoping she’d come around on her own. When she didn’t, I steeled myself against the debasement, then let slip one of the canned phrases the public safety board drummed up for my character. “Remember kids. If you see something suspicious, tell an adult.”

I didn’t like the advice. Sometimes it’s better to keep your head down and your eyes on your own work. Sometimes I wondered if those words were the last words running through Growl’s mind before—

The girl in the motel five miles away laughed. I gritted my teeth against the high-pitched noise mutilated by a cheap microphone, speaker, and countless coils of copper wiring between us. She finished her laugh with a deep sigh that came up from the soul.

“I’m sorry, Detective, but there isn’t much I could say if I wanted to.”

“Have you seen him since he came back to town?”

“Um…” I could practically hear the girl twirling her hair as she decided what to do. In the end, she did the right thing. “Yeah. I saw him. He passed through the lobby a few hours ago.”

“Coming or going?”

“Going I think. He had this huge case with him. Looked like the right size for one of those big violins.”

“Big violin?” My eyes went down to my notes and I remembered he played in a jazz band. “You mean a bass?”

“Yeah! That’s what it’s called. He was lugging one of those.”

I pictured the primate dragging the case across a parking lot, heaving and sweating under a heavy and unbalanced load. Dead weight.

“Where was he heading?”

“I don’t know,” Rebeca said, taken aback by my forceful demand. “He put it in his van and drove away. I guess he had a show.”

“The same night he got back from tour? While his son is missing?”

“Yeah. I guess.” Rebeca sounded distant. Her mind had moved on. “Hey, if you wouldn’t mind… Could you call back and leave a message on the answering machine?”

The request derailed my thinking, and I stuttered. “Why?”

“So I can prove I talked to you. My friends won’t believe me if I just tell them. If you could call and say one of your catchphrases, my friends would. Freak. Out.”

I grunted into the receiver, then put it down on the hook. A pair of coins rattled down the coin return, their jangling hardly audible over the rush of rain against the glass walls.

Peter could be anywhere, and there could be any number of things in that case. My mind jumped to a child-sized body, destined for a drainage ditch, but my mind wasn’t always reliable. Especially not when it was stressed out. The most obvious answer was the truth—that Peter had packed up his instrument and headed out to play in some shitty dive.

I started there; it was easier than driving along the Gutter and investigating every van stopped by the river.

I didn’t know any jazz clubs, so I consulted the booth’s phone book. When the shoulder I’d tweaked putting Guy down twinged, I gave up trying to bend over to read and ripped the book off its chain.

With the flashlight clamped in my teeth, I used both my hands to flip through the pages. I found entertainment venues and kept on flipping until I saw jazz clubs. There were a few marquee style ads on the page, but I skimmed past those as well as any with an address above The Fold. If it was in a fancy part of town, it was too high class for Peter. Jazz was a dying art, with barely enough interest from niche groups for him to pay the bills.

I started making calls with the small fistful of coins I had. I could tell most weren’t right just by the tone of the person who answered the phone. I had neither the time nor the energy to be polite and slammed the handset down as soon as the host or bartender who answered confirmed Peter wasn’t there.

My pocket was almost empty, and I got more frantic with each dial, but I got lucky. I knew as soon as the ringing stopped and I heard a strain of smooth jazz. The snippet was slow and sultry and sad. I smelled the cigarette smoke and felt the morose tingle of gin making my head light.

“Velours Noir,” a gruff voice said. He made no concessions for the French origin of the club’s name and let it spew out in his thick east coast accent. “What’re you after?”

“You got live music?”

“Whadda you think?” The music got louder as the bartender held the phone toward it. I focused on the steady plunk of the low notes, giving a strong backbone for the saxophone to riff over.

“The guy playing the bass. Is he a slow loris?”

“Eh… He ain’t particularly fast.”

“He have a kid with him?”

Another voice rumbled through the phone lines. Someone far from the receiver was talking. The sounds muffled as the bartender covered the mouthpiece. I heard a short back and forth before he came back.

“Huh? Whassat? A kid? You better not bring kids around.”

I hung up the phone, started copying down the address of Velours Noir into my notepad, but gave up and tore the page out of the phone book instead. I kept my head low to keep the sudden deluge out of my face as I sprinted back to Delores. There was nothing I could do about the water soaking into my socks through the holes in my shoes.

Dolores’s bald tires spun on the wet concrete as I pulled out and got on the freeway. I lost control of the rear end on a few of the turns and fishtailed around like a drunk in a snowstorm, but I didn’t slow down any more than I absolutely had to. Just because Peter was working didn’t mean he hadn’t done something to Ethan.

The jackal at the crime scene had planted a simple yet dubious seed in my mind, but I had let it flourish. The only thing that kept me pushing on was thinking the worst. I was exhausted and in shock. I needed the motivation to stop myself from rolling up and shutting down.

I made the turn into the Velours Noir’s parking lot at close to forty miles an hour. Dolores turned ninety degrees and slid into a row of empty spots, stopping with her rear tire an inch from the concrete plinth of a light pole’s base. Most of the cars in the lot were parked near the rear entrance of a brick building, the only one in the row with a neon “Open” sign glowing in the window.

I got a hold of myself and drove with a modicum of caution toward the light that had drawn the other cars like moths to a flame. There were a couple beaters like Dolores and some newer, sleeker cars, but they were all dinged up and scratched. The van was a beige box with wheels, but its size made it stick out.

I pulled up behind it, straddling the lines of the open spaces across the aisle, and threw open the door. A gust blew cold rain drops in my face and shocked me into a moment of clarity. Either I was being crazy or I was walking into an immense amount of danger. I felt the gun weighing down my shoulder holster and pulled it out.

When I swung out the cylinder, I saw six dimpled primers. I turned the gun over and shook it, letting the casings fall on my floor mat. One shell tinked off the lip under the open door, but I couldn’t hear over the sound of rain and muted music if it landed on the pavement or inside the car.

I reloaded the chambers from a box of cartridges at the back of the glove compartment. I put the rest of the box in my pocket just in case and kept the gun out as I crossed the lot.

All I heard from the van was the concussive prattle of pelting raindrops on its roof, and when I tried to look in the back window, I couldn’t make anything out. I pointed my flashlight inside, braced for the worst.

The stripped interior wasn’t painted red with blood, or brown with mud. It wasn’t loaded up with shovels and garbage bags. I jumped when I saw a long lumpy shape opposite the sliding door, but when I looked closer, I saw it was a nest of shipping blankets, dusty and threadbare where mice had nibbled at them.

I wasn’t satisfied yet, and I crept along the side of the van, looking into the cab through the wing mirrors as I approached. Before I got to the passenger window, I saw a flash from near the building. I turned toward it, but the lack of a report was enough to keep my gun down, so the only thing I blasted the ram by the door with was my flashlight’s beam. He was dressed in a gray suit with a matching fedora, an anachronism that placed him as one of the club’s patrons.

He blinked as he turned, putting up his hands to show he was unarmed. In one hand, he held the lighter that had made the spark that got my attention and there was a lit cigarette between his lips. He cursed as he smoked, but didn’t bother me about what I was doing snooping around the van. I withdrew my light and watched him walk to his car.

I darted up and flashed the inside of the cab. The seats were at least as tattered as the shipping blankets in the back, but they were empty. The door opened when I tried the handle, but I left it cracked. Getting the jump on Peter was more valuable. I don’t think catching me in the act of ransacking his van would put him much in the mood for talking.

The sound of rain on sheet metal faded as I approached the door, and the squawk of a saxophone, swish of brushed cymbals, and hiss of the neon sign got louder. I opened the door to a waft of smoke and music I had to swim through. Each dangling bulb created a bubble of diffuse light in the heavy fog and gave the sullen drinkers masks of shadow to hide behind as they wallowed in their ennui.

I walked past the bathrooms and into the main room of the architectural shotgun style establishment. The band was pressed up against the back wall to my left, lit by a row of powerful incandescent spotlights, which were turned low so the filament burned orange. The band was in the groove. The saxophone sang softly as the drummer gave him a beat and Peter filled out the sound and tossed in the occasional short runs to bridge the gaps in the saxophonist’s solo.

The opossum wielding the burnished brass sax squeezed his eyes shut and leaned back to open his lungs. His cheeks puffed and pulled taut with his breathing, and a gleam of sweat rolled down his temple. The iguana on the drums leaned forward, hunching his shoulders and keeping low, his eyes locked on the top spire of the cymbal stand, intensely focused and in the moment.

Peter went the other way. He looked into the void of the floor, but his vacant eyes didn't blink. His left hand moved up and down the neck of his bass like a scuttling crab and his right plucked at the strings like an experienced bank teller counting money. His mind was elsewhere, but his heart was in the oversized violin.

Peter’s case lay open behind him. An oiled cloth was draped over the side and a bow poked out of a compartment filled with loose sheet music and crumpled song books. There wasn’t enough room in there for the bass and a corpse—even a child-sized one.

The polished brass and half-full bottles at the bar grabbed me like a shepherd’s crook and dragged me over. Now that I had Peter in my sight, he wouldn’t get out without talking to me first.

I paid the bartender a substantial portion of my remaining pocket money for a scotch. It arrived just as the opossum on the saxophone reached an understated crescendo that brought Peter’s bleary eyes off the floor.

I raised my glass at him and took a sip. His fingers didn’t stutter, but he held my gaze. He knew what I wanted and knew I wasn’t leaving without it.

He got his band mates’ attention, and the three communicated in facial expressions and what pantomime was possible using only shoulders. They pulled things together into a dreamy finish that hung in the air just under the blanket of smoke. The ethereal echo covered the transition as the iguana took a drink from a beer bottle that lived beside his bass drum and the opossum moved over to the obsidian black baby grand at the side of the stage.

Peter laid his instrument down in its case. I tensed up, ready to chase after him, but he waded toward me, through the small tables packed in the pit in front of the stage. Compliments drifted up over the lips of raised glasses and around the stems of long cigarette holders, and Peter accepted them mutely.

Once he was through, he signaled the bartender, then looked at me and hooked his thumb toward an open booth. I joined him there, and the bartender was right behind me with a Manhattan cocktail for Peter.

Peter picked the orange twist off the rim and took a drink. His eyes closed as it went down and when they opened again, he focused on the glass. He rolled it back and forth on the table, watching it slosh.

“Virginia told me you’d come looking,” he said at last. “Guess I thought I’d have a minute to myself first.”

“Sorry to disappoint, but I’m working against the clock here. You two amicable?” He looked at me curiously. “You and Virginia. You on good terms.”

“Where Ethan’s concerned, we are.”

“You talk to her tonight?”

Peter shook his head. “I tried to call before I left my room, but she didn’t answer. I thought about going over, but I didn’t want to bother her. I wasn’t going to get any sleep anyway; that didn’t mean I had any right to keep her and Tommy up. Besides…”

He had needed to vent his emotions. They didn’t show on his face, but they had poured out through his instrument and his music. Coming here tonight hadn’t been about the money, the booze, or fucking around with his friends; it was therapy.

“Wait. Why are you asking? Did something happen to her?”

“Something happened near her. She’ll be all right. Not sure how much Tommy saw though.”

His mouth gaped open until he washed his horror down with a splash of whiskey.

“You see her about a month ago?”

“Not sure what you’re after. We broke up around then, and I spent some time away.”

“Why did you break up?”

“I don’t know. Incompatible, I guess.”

He was dodging the question, had to take his eyes off me so I didn’t see the truth.

“You sure there’s nothing more to it? Maybe you had a hard time keeping it in your pants?”

Some men would get riled up at an accusation like that. Not Peter. He only snorted into his glass and took another drink.

“What’s so funny about that?” I asked, watching him carefully. “Maybe she was the one stepping out.”

He downed his drink in one gulp.

“This game of twenty questions would be a lot easier on your liver if you used your words.”

Peter signaled the bartender and peeked over at the opossum tickling the keys on stage before turning back to me.

“Who’s the other guy?”

“As far as I know, there is no other guy.” He blushed and turned his face down toward his empty glass. “Might be a girl, though.”

“She’s gay?” I said as flatly as I could. I wanted my words to be a canvas for Peter to paint with his response.

“I don’t know. Maybe. Maybe not. Something like it, at least. Our sex life had been rocky for a while.”

The candor coming from such a timid creature surprised me. Must’ve been the liquid courage.

The bartender swept in and replaced his empty glass with a full one. I leaned in while Peter was distracted, closing the distance between us so I could pounce as soon as he looked back.

“You catch her with someone else? Maybe someone with a more vengeful husband?”

“No. I don’t think she actually did anything with anyone. We were adventurous in the early days. Sometimes we’d invite others in, if you know what I mean.” I nodded. I didn’t need the Rosetta Stone to decrypt his words. “She always seemed a bit more interested in the other participants than she was with me. Maybe I should have known back then, but who was I to question a good thing like that?”

Peter’s fingers drummed on the glass. “You think this wouldn’t have happened to Ethan if I had just kept my mouth shut and stayed with Virginia?”

I shrugged. I’d only know that once we found out what happened to Ethan. For now, all I had was speculation, but Peter could help refine it.

“What was the inciting incident?” I asked. “What finally tipped you over the edge and made you decide living in a motel beat shacking up with Virginia?”

“I don’t know,” Peter said, shifting in his seat. “Guess with Ethan getting work and Tommy starting school, I figured it was an okay time to make a change.”

“So it wasn’t the cancer?”

“It wasn’t the what?” Peter said, jerking upright. His glass dropped to the table so fast rye whiskey sloshed over the sides and rained back down on the already sticky wood.

“I followed her to a clinic today. She’s got meds. Sounds like she started on ’em a little before you two broke up. Maybe you noticed her losing weight and getting frail. Maybe you thought she was just getting ready to put herself on the market.”

“I noticed she was distant… I thought she was just— Oh God, that’s where she was going?”

“I take it you two weren’t the best at communication.”

Peter’s eyes flew around the room, trying to find firm footing. His hand tightened around the glass. “I was always on the road… I could have been a better father.”

I let him sit with the revelation a moment, but I didn’t wait too long. I wasn’t his therapist, and I still had a lot of questions that needed answering. “You know someone by the name of Guy Urban? A fuck-off big wildebeest? He wears a suit and drives a fancy car, probably professionally.”

Peter’s head was still rattling. He converted the directionless lolling into lateral motion by shaking his head.

“That’s fine. Don’t think you’ll have the pleasure now. He’s on the way to the morgue. He was at your wife’s home tonight, giving her the strong arm.”

“Tommy!” Peter yelled. He stumbled halfway up to his feet before I caught his swinging arm and pulled him back down.

“Tommy’s fine. Virginia too. I already told you that.”

“Jesus. How the hell am I supposed to keep anything straight when you keep throwing more and more at me?”

“Calm down, Peter,” I said. “I’m just trying to find your son. There are still a lot of unknowns. I’m hoping you can help with one or two of them.”

Peter rubbed his face, took a drink to settle his trembling, then nodded at me.

“Last time someone busted into your house and roughed Virginia up…” I said. “Police think you had something to do with it. Now that I met you, I’m thinking they’re probably off the mark.”

“I didn’t even know about it until they called me on the road and started questioning me.”

“Clearly she was hiding something from you. Let’s go back to why you broke it off. You’ve given me some of it, but I need the whole truth. It wasn’t just because you were drifting apart. I get the feeling you’re a man highly subject to the laws of inertia. You’d need a strong push to get you to make a change like that.”

Peter’s fingers beat against his glass again. He looked back at the band. “I thought it came out of nowhere. Now I guess I know she was coming clean in case the cancer…”

“Come on Peter. You’ve got to tell me. It could be the difference between finding Ethan alive and finding him floating face down in the river. Help me find your son.”

Peter’s face turned green and tears brimmed in his eyes. “That’s the thing. He isn’t—” His voice broke, and he had to collect himself before he tried again. “He isn’t my son.”

I had meant to keep my response neutral so I could keep milking him for information, but that took me by surprise. I needed to steady myself with a drink.

Now that the leak had sprung, it would take more than a gasp from me to plug it back up. “I always thought the timing of his birth was tight. Didn’t stop me from raising him like he was my own. I love him every bit as much as Tommy. It’s just hard…”

“The other man?” Peter looked at me, abjectly confused. “If you’re not the father, who is?”

Peter rubbed the back of his head and sucked air through his teeth. “I don’t know. Someone important, I guess.”

“Anyone stand out from the time you and Virginia got together?”

“We started seeing each other when she was still working for Barnyard, still going to Heifer’s parties. Don’t think you could narrow it down to just one man. I couldn’t really hold it against her, seeing as I started out as one of those men. I just wish I would have known.”

“Must have been some big shot. Important enough to send someone around to bully Virginia thirteen years after the fact. Important enough to take Ethan out of the picture.”

Peter turned a paler shade of green. His second cocktail was gone, but alcohol wasn’t the only thing he had had too much of.

He disassociated as things clicked in my mind. Virginia didn’t have any interest in reclaiming her fame at all. It was about money for treatment and coming clean in case it didn’t work. She couldn’t die without telling Peter the truth.

She had been desperate enough to go to Heifer and beg. What if she was desperate enough to go to Ethan’s father? She might have offered any number of things in exchange for some cash, but I couldn’t imagine the father seeing it as anything but black mail.

The father had sent Guy—or someone like him—that first time a month ago to make sure she shut up. Maybe Virginia didn’t listen and he had to ramp up the stakes by taking Ethan. She didn’t know who had him when she came to me, but had figured it out by Al’s funeral. That’s why she was so resistant to me helping with the case, even pro bono.

Someone had keyed the father into the fact that I was still on the hunt and assumed Virginia had asked me to keep digging. It was my fault Guy had gone over to intimidate her.

I had barely finished the one drink, but my head spun like I had drunk five shots back to back. My stomach lurched, ramming my liver into my heart. If the father did something to Ethan in retribution it would be my fault, too.

“What do you know about him?” The way my voice squeezed through the steel trap of my throat made it hard to hear over the light music and conversations around us.

“I don’t know,” Peter said. “I really don’t. All Virginia said was that I wasn’t Ethan’s father. I couldn’t stand to hear more.”

“God damn it, man!” I slapped my hands on the table and stood up.

Aside from a little neglect, Peter had done nothing wrong, but I couldn’t look at him anymore. I wanted to throw him against the wall and wring him out for answers, but I knew it wouldn’t solve anything. Instead, I left him wallowing and stormed out. I’m sure he made some real mournful music after I left.