City of the Sun by David Levien Page B

gotten out there several times a month for the first few years after they’d separated, but couldn’t win her back with anything he’d said or tried. Tim’s death was a chasm between them he couldn’t leap, no matter how much of a run-up he took. To do that, both of them needed to jump, to meet in the middle, in the dark space between. He knew that now. Knew it even though he’d failed and it was too late and he’d given up. She’d told him on that January 6 that she’d started seeing a man who owned a quick lube shop and a convenience store nearby. Behr had stopped going then, ceased trying. He’d heard they were living together now.
    “He’s not a better man,” she’d told him. “He just doesn’t remind me of things.” This was intended as consolation, Behr supposed, but it felt like the opposite.
    After he’d eaten, Behr drank three cups of coffee to blunt the beers’ effect and began to outline a plan of action in his mind.
    Step one. After Donohue’s, Behr rolled over to Market Square. He trolled through the darkened streets, coasting slowly in the Toronado like a fisherman trying to catch the big one on the first cast. He hoped to run across the boy on the streets, hungry but fine, ready to go home. He looked out his windows at the city that had been his home for two decades.
    Indianapolis, the Circle City, was the twelfth largest in the nation. Because of the convergence of important roads, waterways, and railroads, it had long been known as the “Crossroads of America.” It was the Hoosier capital, host to the national track and field championships, home of the Indy 500 down at the Brickyard. Taxes were manageable, schools were good, real estate was valuable but still gettable. Behr was aware of the Chamber of Commerce patter, and perhaps it had mattered to him twenty years earlier when he had just graduated from the University of Washington with a degree in criminology and had found openings on the Indianapolis police force down at the school’s placement office.
    But as he drove, all that fell away and instead he began to see the predators, scumbags, and wasters who populated the city at night. Street cops, if they were going to last at all, quickly developed a sense of what is out there. Where regular people saw a guy in a tight leather jacket, a homeless man panhandling, a nervous woman, a cop saw a monster carrying a gun, a junkie ready to snap, a woman who’d just killed her husband. It was a skill you needed desperately at first, one that didn’t seem to come quickly enough. Thing was, Behr thought, you could never turn it off once it was there, no matter how much you wanted to.
    He got into the streets named after states: Maryland, Washington, Georgia. He saw long-coated figures standing and talking, sitting in doorways, huddling, but no one whose age or size allowed them to be the boy he was looking for. He cruised past the Fieldhouse, dark and hulking, with no event tonight. He wound around Delaware and South, parked and walked through the Amtrak/Greyhound terminal and Union Station. The National Guardsmen were there, rifles slung, and some groups of older teenagers heading back to the suburbs. No kids. Behr showed the photos to some of the Reservists, who shook their heads.
    He got back in his car and circled the RCA Dome before cutting across West Street. Like most times he’d been fishing, he’d come up empty. Tomorrow he’d have to start a real investigation. It was what the Gabriels were paying him for. It was what the kid deserved.
     

NINE
     
    BEHR BEGAN EARLY, lowering himself into the blizzardlike maze of details. The Gabriels’ bank accounts came up modest and tidy, as he expected they would. He went in and talked to the teacher, Ms. Preston, combed through newspaper archives for reported stories on the case, and then went to interview the soccer coach. Behr sat in his car a distance away and staked out a practice, checking to see if anyone was hanging around near the