Prodigal Son | Page 4

right. Cheap enough that Burlenbach could put it together on his own, but enough of a payoff to justify the risk. "How long have you got?"
"Until eight tonight. Listen, Sloane, I'm sorry about this morning." He went quiet for a second and I thought he was finished, then he started again in a voice thick with emotion. "I loved that boy. When we lost him, it almost killed me. We never tried to have another child. We just never got over it. And when you found him again, I couldn't trust it." Another pause. "And it looks like I was right not to." He took a breath and plowed on. "Anyway. I hope you'll accept my apology. And help us find him."
"Okay," I said. "But I haven't got much to go on."
"You've got as much as anybody. You spent time with him. Maybe you can come up with something."
"I'll do what I can," I said, and made him go over everything with me, what the kid had said and done, the kidnapper's voice, everything I could think of By then the cops were at his house and he turned me over to a Lieutenant Rogers, who I vaguely knew. I got Rogers' okay to work on the case and then I hung up the phone.
I put my head down on my folded arms. By now I had a long list of things I didn't like about this case, and at the top was the fact that Andy had set me up. It was obvious now that he'd sent the kid to me because of my publicized work on the kidnapping ten years ago, which meant I wouldn't miss the connection with the Burlenbachs. So much, I thought, for getting my name in the paper.
Then there were the nagging questions. Why wouldn't a two-and-a-half year old kid know his own name? Why did Andy wait so long to make his move? What was he doing with the kid in the meantime? Child porn? Some other kind of hustle?
Finally I sat up and went through it again, from the moment the kid had walked in the office. I took it slow and careful, and after about fifteen minutes I said, "Donniker."
I took my dictionary of American slang off the shelf and looked it up. The book said donniker was circus or carnival usage for "a restroom, esp. a public facility." I threw the book on the desk and looked up the date of the original kidnapping in Burlenbach's file. It was the first week in August, AquaFest week. Carnival week.
I was on a roll. I called my poker buddy Dutch at the cops and told him I needed a favor.
"So what else is new?"
"A couple years ago you said something about the carnivals that play here. You said something about what a pain in the ass it was to get a list of all the booths in the show, but you had to because of some kind of goddamned red tape."
"The language sounds familiar."
"Do you think you could maybe find the list from ten years ago and maybe a copy of this year's list?"
"Jesus, Danny, I'm supposed to be working for the City of Austin."
"I knew you could. I'll be over in half an hour."
When I saw the size of the lists, with over two hundred names on the old one and over three hundred on the new, a little of my enthusiasm wilted. What if he's not with the carnival anymore, I thought. What if he never was, and it's all a coincidence?
But detectives don't believe in coincidence, and the list, thank God, was alphabetical. In under an hour I had an index card with twenty names that had been on both lists.
It was twelve noon. The carnival was open.
*
I felt dirty the minute I walked onto the midway. It wasn't just the heat, not just the pressure of all those booths crammed into the asphalt lot behind the Coliseum. It was the smell of greasy pots full of melted cheese to pour over nacho chips, the sticky puddles of dried coke under my feet, the recorded calliope and disco blaring out of metal horns, the lurking carnies in baseball shirts and gimme hats that sized me up as I walked by.
"Hey, gotta girlfriend? She'd love this Snoopy doll! Hey, where ya going? No girlfriend? Got a boyfriend, then?"
The big rides, the Merry-Go-Round and the Tilt-A-Whirl and the Ferris Wheel and something called a Dragon's Lair, were in the center of the lot. Around the edges were the shooting galleries and fortune wheels, concessions and fortune tellers, cooch dancers and freak shows, all the booths trying to look like anything but what they really were, the back ends of custom tractor-trailers.
One by one I crossed the booths off my list, the