Free Mercy Street by Mariah Stewart Page B

said they should look for me, maybe I’d want him. Foster care! As if I’d let my flesh and blood grow up in foster care! Father Whalen—God rest his soul—got on the phone and talked to some people in the city, and the next day I had Ryan in my arms.”
    She looked up at Mallory and added, “I was determined that he was not going to grow up to be anything like his mother, and as God is my witness, he is not.”
    Mary grabbed Mallory’s wrist and gave it a tug. “I have lost everyone I have ever loved, you understand? You have to find my grandson and bring him home, and let him get on with the wonderful life he’s supposed to have. You have to find him before something terrible happens to him, and I lose him forever, too.”

SEVEN
    M allory took the steps leading from the county courthouse at a brisk pace, grateful to have completed her business without having run into anyone she knew but not wanting to push her luck. Though it pissed her off that after nine years on the force, she had to submit fingerprints and references and sign a consent form for a background check, she paid her two hundred dollars and tied up all the loose ends that had been required to apply for her private investigator’s license. If Mary Corcoran hadn’t grabbed her heart when she’d grabbed her wrist yesterday, Mallory might have said the hell with it all and told Father Burch to find someone else. But she knew there was no one else who would approach this case the way she would; no one else better at ferreting out the fine points and following up on the details. It had been a source of pride for as long as she’d been a cop, and while at first the thought of becoming a PI felt like a huge step down, after meeting with Mary, Mallory realized something very important: It didn’t matter what she called herself. She would search for the truth until she found it. Period. She’d never approached a case with lesser resolve and she wouldn’t do so now. Ryan Corcoran mattered. Courtney Bauer mattered. Chances are they were somewhere in or nearby the city, and she was determined to track them down.
    Hopefully, they’d both still be alive when she found them.
    The streets surrounding the square upon which the courthouse stood were narrow and one-way. Mallory’s low heels clicked on the concrete as she hurried to her car. Completing the paperwork had set her back by more than an hour after she’d left the diner, and she wanted to go back to the playground and finish the walk-through that had been cut short the other evening.
    And there was that matter of checking out the other side of the fence, the side facing the alley that ran behind the last row of town houses before Kelly Creek cut through. While the police report had indicated that the neighborhood had been canvassed the day after the shooting, Mallory knew that
how thoroughly
would have depended on who was doing the canvassing. She knew, too, that if she’d been assigned to this case, it wouldn’t have mattered to her who had done the preliminary investigation. She’d have gone over the area with a fine-tooth comb, and would have personally spoken to every resident who admitted to having been home from eight o’clock on the night of the shooting until the following afternoon. There was no telling who might have seen or heard something they weren’t aware could have been connected to the shootings. Getting the right answers more often than not depended on asking the right questions. When she was with the department, she was the one who usually did the asking, but who did they have now who was as thorough? No one that she could think of. Which was, of course, why Joe Drabyak was so quick to offer her name to Father Burch. He knew if he had to depend on his current staff to solve the case, it would go cold and stay cold, especially since the sniper gave no indication of turning himself in anytime soon.
    Joe had mentioned that he had someone new starting next week, Mallory recalled as