Counterfeit Son (2 page)

"So you came here," Detective Simmons said, leaning back in his chair.

Cameron shook his head. "Not right away. I was scared. I thought about it for a while first. I mean—I'm fourteen. I thought maybe I could get home to Freeport on my own, but I was afraid to try."

The detective stared hard at him, his eyes narrowed.
He doesn't think much of me,
Cameron realized, flushing helplessly.
He thinks I'm a major wimp. Well, I guess I am.

After a few moments Detective Simmons nodded, and the rumpled officer brought in another man, a young officer in a crisp uniform. This man looked like he'd gotten some sleep, not like the others. He must not have been in on the raid.

"Do you recognize this man?" the detective asked.

Cameron stared harder at the officer. He did look familiar. … Then Cameron started. "I—yes, I do."

"When did you see him before?"

"He—he came to the house," he stuttered, remembering the young officer and his questions about Cougar, who had once been Pop's friend. Cameron felt as though he were going to throw up the Coke he'd drunk. "He asked me questions."

"Why didn't you tell the officer who you were then?" the detective asked, his voice hard. "Why did you say you were Hank Miller's son, Cameron?"

"He—Hank always said to say that—he told everybody I was his son—he said not to say anything to the cops—he told me they'd lock me up and punish me—he said he'd kill me—"

"Why did he keep you alive?" Detective Simmons demanded. "He killed over twenty boys—why were you special?"

"Ease up," Investigator Colbert said, but no one paid any attention to him.

"Because I did what he said," Cameron whispered. He wanted to tell them he'd bought the right to stay alive, bought it with nights of white-hot pain and days of aspirin-choked silence. He'd paid the price because he'd dreamed that someday Pop would finally tell him he was good, and the nightmare would stop. But he couldn't say that to these men. They'd see how bad he was and know he was lying, and he'd never get his chance to sail free.

The angry face swam in front of his eyes. "Are you Cameron Miller?" Detective Simmons asked.

Cameron pushed his chair back from the table and stood up unsteadily. The room spun around him.

"I'm Neil Lacey," he said, through lips that felt numb and swollen, as though Pop's fist had smashed his mouth. He slid into blackness as the table edge slipped away from his fingers and the floor rushed up to meet him.

In the dream, he lay on a hard bed in a darkened room.
You've been bad,
the man told him.
Now be good, and everything will be all right.
The man lay down beside him and drew a single sheet over the two of them. Don't cry, the man said.
Don't make a sound.

He lay on his side and felt the man pressing close to his back, strangely comforting but also threatening. He willed himself not to shudder as the man reached one arm around to hold him and turn him face down on the mattress.

Don't cry,
the man repeated, his voice low and his breath coming in hot jabs against his ear.
Don't struggle. Be good.
And he lay still, wide-eyed in the dark, the wrinkled sheet dry beneath his face, his teeth clenched, and he let the man do what he wanted.

Cameron made himself wake up when he felt the damp pillow under his cheek. Pop would beat him, he thought wildly, or worse—the cellar! He never cried—

Then he remembered that Pop was dead. Cameron lay there rigidly in the strange bed, his eyes closed, the damp pillowcase pressed against his face. The empty space inside him that Pop had left seemed to swell like a balloon, pressing against his lungs until he could barely breathe. He wished he could slip back into the familiar dream, and he wished he could forget it forever. Suddenly he realized he could hear voices, and he strained against the ache in his chest to make out what they were saying.

"I think we'd better call his parents right away."

"Are you sure they
are
his parents?" Cameron recognized the hard voice. That was Detective Simmons.

"Everything he said rang true," the first voice said.

"And the scarring and other physical damage is consistent with his having endured six years with Miller," a different voice added. "He's got eleven different bones that were broken and left to heal badly. He's suffering from—"

"Why only six years?" Simmons interrupted. "Why not his whole life? He said he was Cameron Miller before. Maybe he
is
Miller's son."

"Then why say he's Neil Lacey?" the first voice asked.

Someone, probably Detective Simmons, snorted. "Obviously he wants a fancy home, well-off parents. Look, Colbert, you're new to this business. I've seen too many hysterical parents and too many unhappy endings. If this were a fairy tale the kid would be Neil Lacey, but this is real life."

There was a heavy thud, as though a meaty fist had slammed into a wall or something. "These serial killers make me sick!" Simmons went on, his voice thick with disgust. "Miller was a monster who tortured kids, and that boy went along with it. Now he doesn't want to be charged with being an accessory."

The detective's harsh voice seemed to pulse with a controlled fury. Cameron shuddered inside. The tone sounded like Pop's when he was explaining why he was about to use the belt. "Look, Colbert, we're talking about a crime here. What Miller did—that had nothing to do with sex or love. We're talking kids—the youngest was just seven. It's not love at that age—it's not a gay man who's trying to find someone to love—it's a man who hates and despises and uses someone who's weaker than he is! That's why they call it abuse—it's about being in control, it's sadistic violence, it's torture, and it's criminal! And this kid was part of it. Even if he gets off juvenile detention, he'll be stuck in the child welfare system and given potluck with foster parents."

Cameron winced and forced himself to lie motionless. The sheets were smooth and smelled like the fresh air in the woods behind Pop's house. He couldn't remember sleeping on smooth, cool sheets like these.

"Whoever he is, he's a victim, not a criminal," the first voice, Colbert's, said mildly.

"He stood by and let Miller kill over twenty kids!" Detective Simmons said, his voice barely below a shout. "Don't tell me he didn't know what was going on—he probably even participated in the torture! He could have told someone, a teacher at school, a cop—but he didn't."

The hate in Simmons's voice swept over Cameron. The aching emptiness in his chest was dwarfed by the weight of his guilt over the boys, and that weight seemed to press him into the clean hospital sheets. It was no different from Pop's weight crushing him into the sagging mattress back home. He wanted to scream out,
It was Pop who hurt them, not me! I was in the cellar—I never hurt one of them.

But Cameron knew he was guilty anyway. He couldn't have told anyone, not told and survived, but he should have tried harder to make the boys be good. If they had only listened to him … He dimly remembered one boy who had tried to do what he said. The boy had been obedient and let Pop do what he wanted, and he'd stayed with them for more than three weeks. Cameron had thought he'd have a brother, and things might not be so hard. But then the boy cracked. He began screaming and throwing things, and Pop shoved Cameron into the cellar, where he squeezed himself into the far corner of the little room and covered his ears and still felt deafened by the boy's cries. How could he ever explain that to Detective Simmons?

"He was afraid," Colbert was saying. "He was tortured, himself, from the day Miller kidnapped him. Those scars—"

"Those scars are something else," Simmons said. "They date back six years, right, Dr. Oshida? Well, why not seven? Can you positively say that those early scars couldn't date back seven years, to before Neil Lacey disappeared?"

"Of course not," said the other voice. So he must be a doctor. "There's no way to be sure."

"I'm sorry, Simmons, but you've got nothing to prove he's Cameron Miller," Colbert said. "Personally, I think he's Neil Lacey. He looks exactly like the latest computer-enhanced projection of what the Lacey boy should look like at this age."

Cameron nearly sighed aloud in relief. He'd thought from the photographs in the magazines and newspapers that he was a good match, and now he was sure. How could they argue with a photograph?

"Brown hair, hazel eyes, short, and skinny?" the detective scoffed. "Couldn't be more ordinary. Am I right, Dr. Oshida?"

"Ordinary, yes," the doctor said. "But his facial features are consistent with the Lacey features."

"Look," Colbert said urgently, "if we hold him and don't inform his parents, his father could slap us with a lawsuit so quickly—"

"To help Cameron Miller?"

"To make us release Neil Lacey."

"I say we don't trust those happily-ever-after maybes you'd like to believe in," Simmons insisted. "Wait for positive identification."

Cameron lay rigid. How could they identify him positively?

"If we wait," Colbert said coldly, "and the hospital prints match, his father is going to break you to a beat. And I'm not going with you."

"Fine! Okay! Call them," Simmons told him. "Tell them their son is back from the dead. They'll believe it because they'll
want
to believe it. Then when the prints come back and say he's not their boy, you take the rap. Because then the father sure as hell
is
going to sue!"

There was a pause, and Cameron's thoughts raced. He hadn't figured on prints. Why would anybody print a little kid?

"How long will it take to hear from the hospital?" Colbert asked.

"It will be quicker if we inform the parents," the doctor said. "I explained that from the beginning. You can't very well send a routine inquiry to every hospital in Knoxville asking if Neil Lacey was born there and would they fax his toeprints to us. If the mother tells us what hospital he was born in, and authorizes the inquiry, we can have the data within twenty-four hours."

"This is a serial killer investigation—" Simmons started.

"This is a child," the doctor said. "Whoever he is, he's not your serial killer. You've already taken care of Hank Miller."

The voices were silent for a few heartbeats. Then Colbert said, "I'm going to call his father."

There was a loud crash, as though a door had been jerked open violently and slammed against a wall. "You do what you want," Simmons said, and his footsteps faded into the distance.

"Is he awake?" Colbert asked after a moment.

"I doubt it," the doctor said. "I gave him a sedative, and he should still be out. Who do you think he is?"

"I think he's Neil Lacey," the special investigator said flatly. "He's got to be. How in the world could he get away with walking into a strange family and pretending to be their long-lost son? He'd be caught the first time they expected him to know something and he drew a blank."

"Not necessarily," the doctor said. "Complete or partial amnesia is perfectly consistent with the sort of trauma this boy has lived with. Considering his age at his abduction, he may well have only the vaguest memories of his life before Hank Miller took him. His family isn't going to get back the eight-year-old they lost, you know."

Amnesia,
Cameron thought, feeling strangely relieved. That would explain a lot—not only how he could deal with the Laceys, but a lot about himself, too. He'd never had a very good memory. Other kids at school remembered all sorts of weird things—birthday parties when they were four or five, how they fell off their two-wheeler learning to ride it without training wheels, the first time they camped out or went fishing.

Of course, he'd never done any of those things, or at least he didn't think he had. Cameron definitely didn't have any memories of that sort of specific moment in his life, and that bothered him sometimes. He especially didn't like the fact that he couldn't remember his mother. But the doctor said people could tell what Pop had done to him by the marks on his body. And he said that the beatings, and the other things, could cause amnesia. Maybe it was because of Pop that Cameron couldn't remember things like other kids could.

"You mean," Colbert said slowly, "all he has to do is say he can't remember anything he used to know?"

"Well, I'm sure he'll find memories resurfacing," the doctor said. "His family will certainly try to stimulate his memory. What I'm saying is that if someone wanted to pretend to be Neil Lacey, and if he had enough nerve, he could probably pull it off."

"
Could
he be Cameron Miller?" the special investigator asked.

"Right now he could be anybody," the doctor said. "But not for long. As soon as we look at those toeprints from the hospital we'll know for sure. If you have a gut feeling, I'd advise calling the parents now."

The door opened again, and closed. Cameron listened to the silence for a while, then cautiously opened his eyes. He was lying on a hospital bed with metal railings on the side. They didn't make him feel caged. The railings made him feel curiously safe.

There was a second bed in the room. A boy lay on it with tubes hooked up to his arms and his nose. He seemed to be unconscious.

They had thought Cameron was sleeping, too. He was glad of that. But what could he do about these toeprints? He hadn't realized anybody would take prints of a kid. What would they do with him after they compared the prints? Lock him up, like Simmons had threatened?
Punish you,
Pop's words whispered in his memory,
because you've been so bad.

Cameron forced himself to lie quietly, something he was good at. Maybe they had known he was awake. Maybe they were trying to bluff. Maybe they didn't know who he was, and they knew they couldn't find out, so they were trying to scare him into falling apart. But if he just stuck to his story he'd be all right.

At least they were going to call Neil's parents. The cops had said his father was a lawyer, and Cameron remembered that from the newspaper articles. Detective Simmons said the parents would want to believe in him. Once the Laceys got there, they'd protect him. He felt a wrench of guilt at the lie he was handing them. Could he really use the Laceys like this after they'd lost their own boy?