by Sidney Bell
“I’m aware.” He reached into his pocket for a piece of nicotine gum. He chewed with purposeful disinterest, trying to project hard-nosed-detective vibes, and she eventually scrawled the case number on a Post-It note.
“Cross your Ts, Sullivan. If you find evidence of criminal misconduct, you’d better be able to testify with ironclad precision.”
“No problem.” He tried to take the Post-It, but she held on to it.
“Be discreet.”
“Well, I was planning on shouting Klein’s name at anyone who would listen, but...” When she only stared at him balefully, he sighed. “Of course I’ll be discreet. He’s Bruce Wayne. No word of his secret identity will cross my lips. The facts of the case will only be shared as necessary to meet the needs of my client, and I will present my client with options in the event of a murky, slimy ethical gray area. You know that I know how to do stuff, right?”
“The stakes are higher when you’re doing more than shoving a file into someone’s face. Deadbeat dads are one thing. If there’s foul play here and you fuck it up, someone could get away with murder. And you can forget asking Klein for his opinion on murky, slimy ethical gray areas. He’s not with the DA’s office. He’s not even an attorney, and you can’t trust him to uphold the law.”
“Right, sure. That’s what I meant.”
She finally released the Post-It. “I better not be the last one to know if things start to fall apart on you.”
“I’m going to be so well behaved you won’t believe it,” he promised. “Altar boy style.”
With Raina’s gaze hard on his back, he headed for the kitchen. He grabbed some food—turned out to be a Mountain Dew and a piece of bread—from the gurgling fridge (which he was going to investigate one of these days, and possibly even fix), slid into a chair, and opened his laptop.
Sullivan didn’t make a lot of money, and what he did make went primarily to one of three things: his savings, his sex life, or his electronics. As such, his laptop was top of the line, less than a year old, and faster than Usain Bolt. Came in handy, since the first major steps in finding someone all took place online.
He put his earbuds in and got a little BtMI rolling—it was a happy day all of a sudden—and got to work.
First he read over the notes he’d taken during the meeting, then the police reports and witness interviews in the case folder.
On February 2nd, 1992, the home of a midlevel, wannabe criminal badass, Lawrence Howard, was invaded by the thugs of an unidentified, actual neighborhood badass, who’d apparently had strong feelings about Howard’s attempts to infringe on his business. Howard was murdered in his bed, along with two bodyguards and his housekeeper, Margaret Trudeau, who lived on the property with her ten-year-old daughter, Nathalie, who vanished. This was pre-Amber Alert, so the response had been unforgivably slow, and though the Denver Police Department and the media fanned the flames of the search as high as possible in the following days, she’d never been located.
It was assumed—sadly, if reasonably—that the girl had been taken by one of the killers, probably for horrifying purposes, and murdered later.
Two years later, with the case largely forgotten in the public consciousness, Nelson Klein, the Devoted Uncle, brother to the murdered Margaret, had gone to a local private detective agency to fund a search of his own. Eighteen years after that, when Raina bought the agency from the retiring owner, the case had fallen into her hands, and she’d worked it solo for the past five. And now, finally, it was Sullivan’s.
He looked at the scanned photograph of the girl, clearly taken on a school picture day back in 1991, and studied the blond hair, pale blue eyes, and gap-toothed smile. She looked cheerful and puckish in her pink blouse with the black piping on the collar, her hair curled for the special occasion. Sullivan couldn’t help imagining the things she might’ve witnessed or suffered, and a pulse of pity welled up in his throat.
He tucked the photo out of sight in the file, and blew out a breath.
The obvious steps had been repeated every time Klein had come in, but Sullivan went through them again because you never knew. If he was lucky, he’d find out that her body had already been located in a nearby jurisdiction in the past twelve months, the info kept from her family by some state employee’s incompetence.
He started by checking the Social Security Administration’s Death Master File with different variations on the girl’s name—Natalie Trudeau, Nat Trudeau, Nathalie Martine Trudeau, Nathalie M. Trudeau, and several misspellings of each, just in case.
No joy.
This wasn’t proof she was alive, obviously. The records of the Death Master File became scantier the further back you went, and the SSA erred on the side of caution when it came to listing missing people as dead. However, it did give Sullivan a chance to double-check that he had her correct Social Security number and date of birth, which he would need for his other searches. Now it was time to use the process of elimination.
The foundational rule investigators used in cases like this was that living people left marks. If no man was an island, there was always a road you could follow to find him. People needed jobs and places to live and banks and friends and phones, and everything left trails. Sullivan might not be able to prove that Nathalie was dead, but if he checked all the normal places where the living showed up and she wasn’t there, then death was the only possibility left.
He started with a simple Google search, using all the same derivatives of her name that he’d used in the Death Master File. He spent an hour combing through results, and came up with squat.
Next he searched the Federal Bureau of Prisons, in case she’d miraculously lived long enough to get arrested as an adult. When that didn’t give him anything, he went to each of the local jail and state prison websites, and spent a couple hours searching for her by name and SSN. Some of those sites let him search for parolees and those on probation, too, and he took full advantage.
Nothing. If she’d been incarcerated, he couldn’t find it.
He took a break to get Siouxsie started on his iPod and eat a sandwich—accidentally using the last of Raina’s peanut butter, whoops—before tackling the long process of checking with the different branches of the armed forces. Nothing. He went through the online court records for alimony, bankruptcy, and the property appraiser’s records, and managed to kill another hour finding exactly zip. He would have to actually go to the courthouse to check more deeply, but that was a job for tomorrow.
His phone buzzed, and this time he checked the caller. Caty. And the earlier text message had been her too: don’t think I won’t sic Lisbeth on you.
After a brief hesitation, he set his phone aside with both the call and the text unanswered. He wasn’t in the mood to let her bully him into talking about his damn feelings again. Caty was an excellent friend, and he cared about her a lot, but Jesus, he needed some damn space. It was enough to make him want to go into hiding to avoid the hounding.
Wait. Wait a second. His hands went still over the keyboard.
While the vast majority of the time Sullivan was searching for shitty people hiding from taking responsibility for something they’d fucked up, every now and again, a search would turn up someone hiding for good reason—usually women on the run from abusive exes. Maybe that line of thinking was applicable in some way here.
It was almost certain that Nathalie Trudeau was buried in a field somewhere or resting under a river’s worth of water, but what if she hadn’t vanished because someone had taken her? What if all these years of silence weren’t because she had no voice, but because speaking up would be dangerous?
What if she’d run? What if she’d never stopped running?
She would’ve needed help. No ten-year-old was going to disappear off the grid without an adult’s aid, and Sullivan couldn’t begin to imagine who might’ve played that role for Nathalie, but if the girl was gone by c
hoice, whoever had helped her knew their stuff.
Sullivan tapped his finger on the table as he considered.
He went back to the original police file and reread the section about wannabe badass Lawrence Howard, the unidentified local thugs who’d taken him out, and the poor housekeeper who’d been an innocent bystander, probably killed because she’d seen something she shouldn’t have.
Howard had lived in an expensive section of Denver, the kind of neighborhood where cops would respond quickly to reports of gunfire. That didn’t leave much time for the murderers to hang around. Maybe they hadn’t searched the house thoroughly after taking out Howard.
Maybe they’d missed a ten-year-old hiding in a closet or under a bed.
Maybe he was grasping at straws.
He scrubbed his hands over his face. He needed to keep his head on straight—he was prone to flights of fancy on the best of days because he liked things interesting more than he liked things honest, and that could get him into trouble here. He needed to be ice-cold and by-the-book, not indulging himself in pointless questions about a could’ve-been that he had zero evidence to support.
He read himself the riot act for several more minutes, nodded definitively to prove that he’d gotten the message, and then promptly ignored all of that and went online to do a search for Nathalie’s mother’s name.
And okay, on the surface that seemed like a left-field kind of thing to do, but there was method to his madness. It was impossible to hide in modern America without changing your name, and there were different levels of competence when it came to fake IDs. The worst meant you wouldn’t be able to buy beer without someone calling you on your bullshit, while the best would carry you through pretty much anything except for a deep background check by a government agency.
The best new identities used names and SSNs stolen directly from the Death Master File, usually those of infants who’d died soon after birth, because there was less of a chance that the deceased’s old life would overlap with the thief’s new one. All it took was a few forged documents to complete the transfer.
Yes, it would be incautious for someone to help the daughter by using the mother’s name, thereby providing a link to the case, but...
But.
What real estate agent or employer or insurance adjuster was going to run a client or applicant’s ID against the SSA’s Death Master File to make sure that the person breathing in front of them wasn’t using a dead child’s name? Who looked up family members who had passed to make sure their names weren’t being used by thieves? No one. The chances that someone was going to look were infinitesimal. He was only looking because he was the kind of guy who didn’t mind wasting five hours following up a nonsense train of thought for a case from two decades ago because he thought it would be cool if it turned out to be right. If someone had helped hide Nathalie under a new identity, was there really that much risk in using the mother’s name? Even the Devoted Uncle wouldn’t think to start searching for his dead sister as a way of tracking down his niece.
A memorial, of sorts. A last tribute to a dead mother, maybe.
He double-checked that he had Margaret Trudeau’s correct SSN and date of birth, and tooled around a little, fiddling through Google and old websites, running haphazardly through the steps he’d taken with Nathalie, not really expecting anything. He found a marriage license for Margaret Trudeau in the online Denver Courthouse records and her maiden name did match her brother’s—Klein. Sullivan did a search for that name too, and found a birth certificate but little else.
He got up to piss, found an old bag of trail mix somewhere, and ate it standing up at the counter. The sun took on the orangey tint of late afternoon while he told himself over and over that nothing would come of this. It was the stupidest waste of time ever.
Then he sat down and typed the name Peggy Klein into the courthouse records database because Peggy was, for some bizarre reason, an old nickname for Margaret.
And got a relatively recent hit.
He sat back in his chair, stunned. He made himself take a deep breath and double-checked the dates and the Social Security number, because there had to be a couple hundred Peggy Kleins in the world, but Jesus. It was her. The same Margaret Trudeau who’d been murdered in her employer’s house in 1992 had bought a condo twelve years ago under the name Peggy Klein and dutifully paid the taxes on it annually.
Strange behavior for a dead chick, he thought, and had to force himself to calm the fuck down. He’d stumbled onto something here, and maybe it’d been a flight of fancy that led him to this spot, but now was the time to rope everything into some semblance of rationality. He needed to document every step, make sure he had proof to support every decision he made. Plus, if he wasn’t careful, he took the risk of driving Nathalie or whoever it was using the name of Nathalie’s dead mother further underground.
He needed to verify.
He also needed to move. He was climbing out of his damn skin here. He popped another piece of nicotine gum into his mouth, looked up Riviera Condominiums online, and realized he was barely a fifteen-minute drive away. The clock read 4:28 p.m. There was time, perhaps, to do a quick drive-by, maybe snap a couple pictures from the car.
Maybe he’d see a blonde woman in her mid-thirties.
He grabbed his laptop and jacket and headed down the hall to Raina’s office. She was on the phone, making inquisitive noises, and he went to her desk, ignoring the way she slapped at his hands as he opened the long, shallow drawer above her knees.
“I’m taking your kit,” he mouthed, and she held up a finger to tell him to wait. Her nonverbal noises into the phone became impatient. He grabbed the huge lockbox she stored in the bottom drawer of her file cabinet and hauled it out, gesturing toward the door. She shook her head and mouthed, “Wait.”
He made the universal gesture for “call me,” gave her an apologetic grimace, and darted out, hurrying down the sidewalk toward his beat-up black 1974 Buick Regal.
He had a living dead girl to find.
Chapter Three
The letter rested on the dashboard, the white paper faintly malodorous and stained pink from the rank salade de betteraves his manman had thrown out earlier in the week, the torn-open top ragged. The return address, written in a loopy, almost childlike hand, read Ashley Benton. Tobias spun the orange plastic lighter in his hand over and over while he stared at it, wondering what the pages inside might say.
The interior of the car was sweltering even with the windows down; the metal spark wheel was hot against his thumb. He imagined, for one satisfying moment, lighting the letter on fire right there so it turned black and curled into itself, watching the flames billow orange, the plastic of the dash scorching and melting, the air filling with smoke. He flicked the lighter several times, testing himself, tempted.
Finally, he sighed and shoved the letter into the front cover of his biochemistry textbook on the passenger seat. The lighter went into his pocket.
He looked out the windshield at the two-story gray building he was parked in front of. Riviera Condominiums was nicer than his friend Ghost’s old cramped armpit of an apartment by a mile. Everything there had been worn, from the cracked parking lot to the threadbare carpet to the cheap windows, and the residents had been the same.
This new place was downright shiny. There was a pool with blue water and two tennis courts and the grass was neatly clipped and very green, especially considering it was the first day of August in a semiarid state. Flowerbeds overflowing with geraniums lined the sidewalks leading from the parking lots to the buildings, and interspersed between those buildings were small communal gardens thick with tomatoes and peppers. The patios and balconies were bordered with black wrought iron balustrades.
No way could Ghost afford to live here.
If Ghost even lived here anymore.
Contact between them had been spotty lately, text messages
would go hours without a reply, if one came at all, invites ignored, emails answered with a handful of words. It wasn’t necessarily personal; sometimes Ghost simply disappeared for days at a time, and he always reappeared with as little fanfare as when he took off. In the past, Tobias had respected those bursts of antisocial behavior and stayed away, letting Ghost come back when he was ready.
But this was different. This was nearly two weeks of complete silence. It was different because of the favor.
Eight months ago, in order to bail their friend Church out of trouble with some local thugs, Ghost had agreed to do a favor for a woman no one should owe. Tobias didn’t know the specifics, but he knew enough to worry.
He and Ghost had been friends since that horrible day in Woodbury when Tobias had been jumped by some guys in a badly lit bathroom, and a pale slip of a kid had bailed him out with nothing more than a dangerous rep and a half-mad smile. Tobias still wasn’t sure why Ghost—selfish to an extreme, frequently oblivious to the suffering of others—had put himself at risk to save someone he didn’t know, but that kindness was one Tobias would never forget.
Not that everything in Woodbury had been bad. That time had been good for Tobias in certain respects. He’d put earnest effort into therapy, and while he hadn’t been particularly successful at implementing the changes his therapist had encouraged him to make, he’d come out of it with coping skills that’d kept him stable ever since.
But there’d been a darker side to the facility, a side born of limited funding and political disinterest, where therapists cared but had too many patients, and people slipped through cracks the size of ravines. Ghost lived and breathed that same aura of struggle and poverty and violence, and worst of all was the way he’d never questioned his place there, the way he’d seemed so indifferent to the unhappiness emanating from every brick.
Tobias got out of the car and put his backpack in the trunk before heading down the sidewalk to Ghost’s condo. It was on the first floor of Building 18, tucked as far away from the clubhouse as possible, a corner unit abutting the line of trees at the edge of the property that blocked the noise of the traffic from the street beyond. He knocked hard—Ghost was a daytime sleeper—but when there was no answer, he stepped over a low row of bushes to reach the nearest window and put his hands up to block the glare so he could peer inside.
