“…I know… I know…”
“You knew it was wrong, Mickey. You knew it was. You were raised better than that, too. I know your mother…”
The guy hung his head, and nervously scratched behind his ear.
“Jack, you are aware that half the police force from my precinct was fired over this. They had to get a bunch of new officers trained up fast. I wasn’t actively involved in the whole thing, so they let me stay. Some people blamed you, but I didn’t.”
“I don’t give a crap about who in the hell blamed me. Y’all put yourselves in this position. Some cops are good, some are crooked. You guys make all police officers look bad. You’ve got a scarlet letter on your backs.”
“I know that, Jack. Look… I’m saying it because…well, like I said, I’m leaving, and I want you to know something.”
“What, Mickey? Did you, Pluto, Goofy, Donald Duck and Minnie Mouse get into a scuffle at the Clubhouse?”
The guy rolled his eyes and grunted. “I’m serious, Jack. Please hear me out. You know that time you came down, and you and I got into an argument? You brought up how good Chad had been to me at the auto museum, when I had that little embarrassing accident?”
“Yes, I remember.”
“That haunted me long after you said it. It already bothered me how you kept coming there to the precinct, at first pleading for help, then you started getting mad, and it showed. I did something bad, Jack. But something I don’t regret.”
Jack shifted his weight from one foot to the other, wondering where Mickey was going with this.
“What did you do?”
The guy swallowed, then looked him dead in the eye.
“Your son’s case? Well, they hid a bunch of evidence from the scene in this box and stashed it away. One day, I went in it, and took out a knife. The knife I knew Brian had used, because I’d overheard them talking about what had happened a few days after Chad went missing. It was his knife, everyone knew it was his knife, because it had been passed down in the family, so, they didn’t want to get rid of it. They’d gotten rid of the gun but kept that knife. Sentimental reasons.” He shrugged. “Stupid on their part I guess, but I figured, even though I was scared—everyone was scared of Sweeney, Jack, except for you—I could do something about it. So I took the knife out of the box, went to that cabin late one night, and placed it on the floor inside. I was hoping you would find it. Hopefully be able to identify it. It had the letter, ‘B’, for Beau inscribed on it.”
“Why in the hell would you bank on me finding it? Anyone could have come there before me, gotten a hold of it, and it would’ve been gone forever.”
“I know, but something told me otherwise. I knew you’d come. This was my way of trying to help you, without getting directly involved. I have a family to protect, Jack, I’m sure you can understand that?” Jack bit his tongue. It was taking everything within him not to punch Mickey in the gut, but a part of him felt sorry for the man. He had tried to help in his own, messed-up way. That was more than most could say. “I knew that every other weekend, you’d go there and lay flowers where Chad died.”
Jack sighed, but waited for Mickey to finish.
“Nobody came up that way too often. It was too difficult a terrain to navigate, especially in the winter, Jack. On top of that, you said one time, that you were going to your son’s grave, as you always do, but not the graveyard. You were going to the place where he took his last breath. I figured that was the perfect thing to do. Return the knife to the scene of the crime so it could be found. When they were complaining about the FBI being involved, I was certain it would be discovered. Did you ever find it?”
“…Yes.”
“Let me tell you, Jack, I was sick about what happened.” The man’s eyes sheened over. “Chad didn’t deserve that, he was a good man, just like his dad, and I’m sorry for not speaking up sooner… I mean it.”
Mickey turned away, climbed back in his truck, and started the engine. Jack watched as the man drove away, until he could see him no more.
What Mickey didn’t know was that the FBI did confirm that the blood on the knife was human, just as he had, but they also found out it was a match for Chad’s. They couldn’t use it in the case since they couldn’t trace where it had been found, but it helped them piece the information together, especially when they got the original coroner notes before they were tampered with. Those transcripts in fact showed a small stab wound on the side of Chad’s body, which the police had conveniently removed from the copies of the report.