Lake on the Mountain: A Dan Sharp Mystery by Jeffrey Round Read Free Book Online

voices outside Dan’s office. For a firm that performed feats as miraculous as raising the dead, it might have had a colour scheme to match — beatific tropical shades, joyful rainbow hues. Instead, the offices were battleship grey — dull and cheerless as a December morning. Still, Dan consoled himself it was nothing so invidiously depressing as bubble gum pink or mustard yellow. It was simple, utilitarian, functional. Perhaps that precise shade of grey had been chosen to remind them of the dreary perseverance with which so many of the firm’s clients spent their days.
    After fourteen years, Dan was one of the senior investigators. Some came and went in the space of a few years after finding more prestigious placement, while others burned out from the perennial themes of human misery that befell so many whose lives they tracked and whose stories were all that was left to record.
    Dan had an impressive record of finds behind him and no reason to leave. There were always bigger firms and more prestigious appointments, but he’d made a decent life for himself and Ked. And he hadn’t lost interest in his work, which had always been his biggest concern. He didn’t need to feign enthusiasm or be admired. He was, despite the predictions of others, unaccountably successful. After all this time watching the others come and go, he had to ask himself: what else was there for him to do?
    Dan was on his third cup of coffee, but the caffeine stubbornly refused to kick in. What he really wanted was a drink, but it was only ten thirty — far too early. A bottle of Scotch lay wrapped in a Sobey’s bag in the bottom of his desk. He’d hidden it like a schoolboy tucking cigarettes and condoms in the back of his socks drawer. In his mind’s eye he watched little feet duck outside and scrabble around the corner to the bar. Let them stay there then.
    He tried Bill’s number and got the answering service. Bill never slept in, even after a late night, which meant he’d already left for the hospital. If he’d made it home the night before.
    “Hiya,” Dan said into the phone. “We missed you last night.” His voice was gravely with fatigue. He tried to make himself sound jovial. “Give me a call about the weekend. I still don’t know who’s driving.” The plan had been to drive to Glenora on Friday and stay overnight with Bill’s friend Thom, the groom. As usual, Bill had been so hard to pin down that basic questions like whose car they were taking were still up in the air. “I’ll wait to hear from you. Ciao.”
    He took another hopeless sip of coffee and opened the file on Richard Philips, the missing fourteen-year-old. The boy’s birthdate caught Dan’s eye — he was exactly one year less a day older than Ked, which meant that he was now a fifteen-year-old runaway. Happy birthday, Richard .
    He read on. The boy had been missing for two months. There’d been no body recovered and thus no closure. At the end of August, an anonymous caller phoned Toronto police to say the boy was fine, giving details only someone close to him would know, and adding that Richard had no intention of returning home. He’d been labelled a runaway, plain and simple. Until the police had anything further to go on, the case was shelved.
    Dan flipped through the pages to the transcript. The call had been traced to a diner on Church Street in the heart of the gay ghetto. That narrowed the possibilities drastically. Unless a kid had friends to turn to in the city — preferably with money — then hustling was a likely avenue. It was a choice Dan wouldn’t wish on anyone, but it was a direct source of income if a kid decided to disappear. It happened often enough, though the parents just couldn’t understand why their kids would choose sex with a stranger over the “love” they found at home. Dan could.
    He’d had plenty of time to think about it before leaving Sudbury at seventeen. The issue had been simple — why stay where you weren’t