Maggie nodded once.
"Good."
Then her expression hardened.
"Now listen to me, every one of you."
"This is not a war party."
"We are not riding into Detroit to break things."
"We are riding in to find a child."
"The people who attacked me will be dealt with."
"But the boy comes first."
"Anyone who forgets that, anyone who lets pride or anger get in the way of the search, answers to me personally."
"Are we clear?"
"Yes, ma'am," the six men answered almost together.
"Good."
"Cyrus, get me a map of the city."
"I want every alley, every overpass, every abandoned building, every steam grate within five miles of Fifth and Main marked."
"Beau, go to the alley. Walk it yourself. He left tracks. Find them."
"The rest of you organize the grid."
"Go."
They went.
Beau lingered for a moment in the doorway after the others had left.
He looked at his wife sitting in the wheelchair with the uninjured side of her face turned toward the gray light from the window.
The bandage was white against her dark hair.
For a moment, he was not the president of the Detroit charter.
He was just a man looking at the only thing in his life he had ever been afraid of losing.
He looked at her the way men look at things they almost lost.
"Beau," she said without turning.
"Yeah, sweetheart?"
"Find him."
"I will."
He left.
Cyrus Boyd brought her the parka.
He set it on the conference table in front of her very gently.
It was a child's parka.
Oversized for the child who owned it, but absurdly small to be the only barrier between a human body and a Detroit winter.
The canvas was stained and torn at the elbows.
The zipper was broken halfway up.
The lining was thin synthetic fluff that had compressed years ago into something that was barely insulation anymore.
Maggie looked at it for a long time.
Then she reached out with her good hand and ran her fingers along the inside of the collar.
There was a name sewn into the lining.
She had not seen it the night before.
She saw it now.
The thread was white.
The stitches were uneven, the way a child stitches when he has taught himself.
The name was three letters.
ELI.
Underneath, smaller, in the same careful hand:
CARTER PROPERTY.
Maggie touched the letters with the tip of her finger.
Her face crumpled.
Cyrus looked at the floor.
She turned the parka over in her lap.
There was a small interior pocket sewn into the lining, the kind of pocket a child creates when he has almost nothing of his own and needs a place to keep the things that are his.
She slid her good hand inside.
There was something in it.
She drew out an old photograph.
Creased.
Faded.
A woman in her late 20s with wheat-colored hair and a laugh caught mid-flight.
Her arm was around a small boy of perhaps four.
The boy was grinning up at her with two missing front teeth.
Behind them, barely visible in the corner of the frame, was a man in a denim work shirt.
Grease on his hands.
A tired pride on his face.
Maggie Whitlock had seen that face exactly once in her life.
Eight years ago.
A hospital bed.