It wasn’t the first time the mismatched pair had eaten hotcakes together at the highway diner, an ageing private investigator with Texas good ol’ boy charm and a teen who’d made global headlines after vanishing from his mother’s San Antonio home – then resurfacing years later in Spain with a different accent and different eye colour.
It was March 1998, and PI Charlie Parker stared across the table at the person calling himself “Nicholas Barclay”. He didn’t believe for a second that his dining companion was the boy who’d disappeared from Texas in 1994, and he’d spent months trying to prove it, not only tailing the teen but also repeatedly pressing him for information over meals at the diner.
