Dan Sharp Mysteries 4-Book Bundle by Jeffrey Round

away from the bleak mining town where he’d grown up.
    Two months later, Bob picked him up on the same corner. Only this time, Dan didn’t leave again for quite a while. The invitation to live in a place with a pool rather than the over-crowded mission was more than enough of an enticement. He stayed with Bob for three years, finishing high school while they lived together. Bob put Dan in charge of his domestic finances, along with housekeeping duties. They’d been more like a couple than an older man and younger hustler. Even then, Dan hadn’t admitted to being gay. Sharing Bob’s bed for three years hadn’t changed that. It was only when Bob died unexpectedly — an epileptic seizure in the shower one week shy of his fortieth birthday — that Dan realized he’d loved him.
    In a way, their last year together had been more like father and son than anything Dan had ever known. It would be another five years before he got up the courage to go home and confront his real father face-to-face. By then he had his own son.
    Dan looked over the missing boy’s photograph, scrutinizing the features. He wasn’t attractive, but he wore an air of toughness — probably as a result of the schoolyard bullying — that would go a long way to make up for not being a pretty boy. To survive on the city streets, you needed one or the other.
    Dan wondered what the parents were hoping for, information on their son’s whereabouts, a reassurance as to his mental and physical well-being, or the whole Corpus Christi? Usually they wanted their children back, even when it wasn’t in anybody’s best interest. In this case, it was too early to tell.
    Teenagers could be surprisingly elusive once they connected with other runaways to help them stay invisible. There was no paper trail of credit card purchases or personal cheques cluttering things up. No Welfare files or ROEs pinning them to specific addresses. Hand-to-mouth was a tough game to play, but it kept them off the radar. Sometimes Dan got lucky when a kid was picked up for shoplifting or vagrancy, though they often lied their way out before he got to them. A twelve-year-old he’d been searching for had stood in a police station two feet from a picture tagging her as a runaway. No one had noticed. Dan found this out later when she turned up half-dead of a drug overdose, alive thanks to emergency resuscitation procedures at the hospital after someone threw her into a cab along with a twenty-dollar bill and closed the door.
    He scanned Richard’s photograph into his computer and printed a dozen copies, jamming them into his briefcase. He’d put out a few calls — nothing official, just a guy making inquiries around the gay community. Maybe Family Services or Child Find Canada had come across him, though the police would have contacted the brigades of bespectacled middle-aged women wearing their all-weather skirts, hand-knitted sweaters, and freshwater pearls who tirelessly followed up unlikely leads and telephoned to tell you if they’d heard anything, anything at all. If the kid were still in town, someone would come across him sooner or later. Sooner was always preferable.
    He’d take the picture around the bars before going home tonight. The bouncers were scrupulous in keeping out underage kids in the evenings, but it was possible for a kid like Richard — half-man, half-boy — to sneak in undetected in the afternoon, especially if he was looking for a daddy. If he had, the bartenders would have noticed.
    The phone rang. It was 55 Division calling to say the coroner’s office had a possible match for one of his cases and could he come down for a look. They all knew him by name, though most of them called him Sharp, never Dan, except for a couple of female constables he suspected of hitting on him.
    He was put on hold. One of his co-workers entered and slapped a photo on his desk. He pointed at the