I look at Viktor. Is this guy not sane?
“Joke,” Karl says. “Coming in here loaded for bear like that? Suits and ties? What hornet’s nest did I hit?” He sends a mischievous glance toward the orderly.
“We have questions,” Viktor says.
Karl smiles. “You’re Russian. This the Russian mob?”
“It’s not your concern,” Viktor says.
Karl glances again at the orderly. “I only ask because, you got any booze?”
Viktor pulls his flask from his pocket and hands it over.
“Got any cigars?”
“Just questions,” I say. “We’re here about the savage boy. The wild boy. You went asking around about him two years back.”
“Savage Adonis? Yup.” He takes a swig from the flask. The orderly sits up with a jerk. Karl sniggers and hands it back to Viktor.
“Tell us about this boy and you can have it all,” Viktor says.
“Don’t mind if I do.” Karl sucks down a bit more. “You probably saw what was online about him. That boy caused quite a stir up in Rhone Rapids. Campers found him half-dead and portaged him out of there. Dressed like the fucking Nanook of the North, this kid.”
He wipes the back of his mouth. “They gave him something to cut the infection, the fever, bandaged him up. Cut his hair and fingernails. But once he came to, he went crazy and wrecked the place. I’m talking, a wild animal. Had to call the cops to subdue him. Lotta property damage. It was clear pretty fast that he wasn’t a normal teen. He was one of these kids they find existing in the wild every once in a while, bottom of their feet thick as leather. Killing with their bare hands. Eating raw meat and roots. Impervious to cold.”
“You saw him. Could this be him?” Viktor hands over some of the photographs we took from Lila and Ronson.
Karl studies them, one after another. “Yeah, that could be him. Probably. A lot older, but this is the look of him. He a relation of yours?”
“Brother,” I say.
“I could see it. He had the look of you two.”
“Where’d he go?” I ask.
“After the clinic, he was brought to the psychiatric unit in East Webster. Lockup in the psych ward. You had social services trying to find his origin, you had the media pounding down the door, because, let’s face it, a photogenic wild boy—and we’re talking raised by wolves here—that business sells papers. They gave him that ridiculous name.”
“Wolves?” Viktor says.
“That’s what the professor believed,” Karl says. “He’s the one who hired me. Louis Jourdan, PhD. He was petitioning hard to get custody of the boy. Professor Louis Jourdan, PhD, wanted me to exhaust all possible leads. He wanted custody pretty bad.”
I kneel down. “Did he get it?”
Karl fixes me with a sharp gaze. “Here’s the thing, I felt like Professor Jourdan… I didn’t like him toward the end, let’s just say.”
A sense of alarm rises up through me.
“Didn’t trust him. Instincts, you know? I felt like he was having me on the case to make sure nobody would ask after the boy once he took him or maybe he was involved in something off-color.” He wipes his mouth with his sleeve.
I glance over at Viktor. He’s not loving this, either.
“I don’t know what his PhD was in—psychology, maybe,” Karl continues. “Behaviorism. Some such shit. He always struck me as one of those fellows who might raise a kid in a wooden box just to test out a theory. So I didn’t like him having that kid, though I didn’t like the media or the system having at him any more. And there were fights over his age. He could understand English perfectly, but he couldn’t much speak it. Or he didn’t want to speak. And then one day he was gone from his room, and that was the last anyone heard of him.”
“Gone?”
He nods. “An attendant was knocked unconscious. Boy was gone.”
Viktor swears.
“They said it was a hoax. Covering their asses. In truth, the wild kid disappeared.” Karl sighs. “If you were to accept that he was eighteen, could take care of himself, and wasn’t a danger to himself or others, he had every right to take off, so they dropped it. A lot of people covering their asses at the end is what it was.”
“They said it was a scam to get the media off their ass.”
“Yeah.” He looks us over, back and forth. “Definite family resemblance,” he says.
My heart swells.
“The question in my mind was always, how did he get out to knock out that attendant? The attendant said he was knocked from behind outside in the hallway, so who unlocked the kid’s padded cell?”
“You think he had help?”
Karl takes another drink. “Kid was a real looker, once he was cleaned up. The nurses were fascinated with him. He could get them to give him things. He had that kind of charisma. But in my gut, it’s the professor. The professor was obsessed with this kid. How he had lived, how he’d gotten through the winters. Wolf society shit.”
“Where does this professor teach?” Viktor asks.
Karl shakes his head. “Here’s the problem. Jourdan is a real professor in Madison, a specialist, but this guy wasn’t him.”
“You’re a P.I., and a man fooled you like that?” I ask.
Karl fixes me with a hard stare. He would’ve been a badass in his day. “Man paid me big money to identify a savage kid. That’s who I was looking at. Not my employer. You like your private eyes looking into you?”
I frown. “What else? We need to find him.”
“I’d start with the man posing as Professor Jourdan. The psychiatric hospital up there has an image of the fake professor—I know they do, and you could try and get ahold of it and run facial recognition. They have logs of who visited, too. They’re going to be very cagey about letting that information out, considering there were some major fuckups made.”
He points at my piece. “Going in like this—no. There’s a better way. There’s an LSW—a social worker—there who you could lean on. Noel Tucker. He would sell that information to you. It would take a bit for him to bird-dog it because he has to get into other people’s computers, but I used him a few times. He’s where I’d start.” He looks up, shaking the flask gently back and forth as if to evaluate how much might be left.
“How did the wild kid seem to you? Your impressions. Was he…okay? Or…” I barely know what I’m asking. How does a kid spend ten years in the wild?
Karl shifts in his chair. “He seemed powerful. Pretty fucking angry. Well, a straitjacket doesn’t make a man feel so cooperative, you know?”
A straitjacket. I grit my teeth.
“The kid made people nervous because he could get loose so easy and they’d have to be on him with five orderlies armed with needles full of tranquilizer. Smart, too. More than smart—brilliant, really, in how he’d get out of restraints, or get people into his thrall. Your brother was beautiful, brilliant, and completely violent.”
“Bratik,” Viktor says softly, eyes like deep, dark pools of emotion.
Karl eyes Viktor’s gun. He seems drunk. “Yeah, I imagine you’ll all get along just fine.”