Abandoned in Death, page 23
“You got something on the unsub’s mother.”
“I got her.” Nadine reached into her ten-gallon bag and pulled out a disc.
“Son of a bitch. Peabody.”
Peabody hustled over to take the disc.
“I expect coffee, and not the bullpen sludge,” Nadine told Eve. “And my young apprentice prefers Coke.”
“Just wait a damn minute.”
As she spoke, Jamie swaggered—no other word for it—into the conference room. “Score! Hey, Dr. Mira.”
“Scored what?”
“Got your tattooed mom.” He held up a disc.
“Jesus. Peabody.”
“Got it, got it. I can run simultaneous, split screen. Need a second. Holy shit,” Peabody said.
“Hi, Nadine Furst, right? Really like your books. The vid topped it out,” Jamie gushed.
“Thanks. Quilla, this is Jamie Lingstrom. Captain Feeney’s godson.”
“Hey,” Jamie said in response. “The hair’s chill.”
Quilla reached up, skimmed fingers through the oak brown with its candy-pink bangs and crown. “Thanks, I’m, ah, Nadine’s intern.”
“Yeah? Also chill. I’m interning up in EDD.”
“About that coffee.”
“Just wait!” Eve snapped. “I don’t know how to get it from my AC to this one, and Peabody’s busy.”
“I can do it. What? You want Dallas’s high-test?”
“Yes, please, with a little cream,” Nadine said to Jamie. “And a Coke for Quilla.”
“Coming up.”
“How did you find her?” Nadine asked him.
“Well…”
Dallas gave him points for not blurting it out, but looking to her for guidance.
“Go ahead. She found her, too.”
“Yeah? Good work. Took some doing with the thin data to pull on. Had to go back to 1994.”
“Busted for solicitation at age sixteen, Arcadia, Tennessee. Expunged and sealed after completion of court-mandated counseling and community service.”
When Quilla rolled off the data, Jamie offered her a Coke and a grin.
“She already had the tat,” he continued. “And this little bumfuck town actually preserved the records from the way back.”
“How’d you get the data?” Eve asked him.
“Had a hunch on it—the when, the where—and when I dug up a photo of her—driver’s license—the look of her. So, I did a search, found a judge down there, gave him the what’s what. He didn’t decide until this morning—wanted to review the file and all that—but he unsealed the records, and bang. They had the tat listed as identifying mark.”
“You?” Eve asked Nadine.
When Quilla started to speak, Nadine put a hand on her arm. “Something like that,” she said. And fluttered her lashes.
“Say no more. Peabody, for Christ’s sake,” Dallas snapped.
“It’s coming. The unit’s having a moment doing the duet.”
“I’ll get it.” Jamie strolled over, tapped a few commands. The split screen—identical—came on-screen.
The mug shot showed a thin-faced blond girl with defiant eyes. The mascara and whatever else she’d piled on those eyes had run, leaving clumpy shadows under them.
The profile shot revealed the multiple ear piercings.
“And there you are, Lisa McKinney. Younger here than our age range, but yeah, fits the type he’s grabbing. Height, weight, coloring. What else do we know?”
Jamie started to speak, then gestured to Nadine. “You can take it.”
“That’s sweet. Actually, as part of the research team on this, Quilla has a report.”
“I can start, and then you can pick it up,” she said to Jamie.
“Good deal.”
“Okay, Lisa Evangeline McKinney, born in Bigsby, Alabama, September 8, 1978, to Buford McKinney and Tiffany Boswell McKinney—both eighteen, which is just whacked. The Tiffany came from Arcadia, but moved to Bigsby when she was a kid. So they busted up in 1984, quelle surprise, right? Anyway, dead now, but both got hooked up again—her twice—and he had two more kids with the second wife.”
She took a second to gulp down some of her Coke.
“Tiffany went back to Arcadia in 1991—took Lisa—that’s where she hooked up with husband number three in ’93. That busted in ’95, but in the meantime, Lisa has some sketchy attendance in school, did the runaway thing a few times, got busted. She finished high school—barely—and worked a series of jobs, nothing more than a few months. Then in November of 1998…”
She paused, looked at Jamie. “You can take it.”
“Thanks. That’s when she had the kid,” Jamie continued. “Baby boy. No name, no father listed. Did you get the car wreck?”
“What? No.” Quilla blew annoyance at her pink bangs. “What’d we miss?”
“She was in a vehicular accident in ’99. She wasn’t driving, but the driver—a Marshall Riggs—was charged with DWI. She ended up with a concussion, a dislocated shoulder, a busted wrist, and a couple of cracked ribs. She lived—maternal grandmother’s address—in Arcadia until 2000, then it looks like she took to the road. What employment I found—again sketchy—bar work, cocktail waitress, did some stripping. No address or employment I could find from early 2002 on. But she had a car registered in her name—had to be a beater.”
“Anything on her or the kid from Child Services?” Eve asked. “Social Services?”
“Nothing I found. And there’s nothing, Dallas, like poof, after 2002. I got this picture—ad for a strip club, Nashville, 2002. Computer, display doc McKinney 3-A.”
Working. Displayed.
She had her head thrown back and her arm around a pole. She wore a G-string, pasties, and looked worn around the edges to Eve.
“Magnify her face.”
When Jamie had, Eve studied it. “Yeah, a resemblance, a type, more pronounced with the shorter hair. She’s on something. I can see user on her. She’s what—damn math.”
“Like twenty-four,” Quilla said.
“Yeah, like that, has a kid about three or four, and she’s riding a pole, living off the grid to stay ahead of Child Services, doesn’t stay in one place long. She tried selling herself at sixteen, so there’s probably that. But she either took the kid with her when she hit the road, or paid him regular visits.”
Mira nodded. “While he could have become obsessed due to the absent mother, and formed the illusion, there are too many details to his re-creation attempts. The trauma occurred sometime after she left Arcadia. They had a relationship. And I would say, in her way, she loved her son. Easier, by far, to have walked away, left him with the grandmother.”
“Let’s be sure she didn’t.”
Nadine set aside her coffee mug. “According to Lisa’s half brother—who still resides in Bigsby, she didn’t. I contacted him first thing this morning. He remembers Lisa’s mother calling his father when Lisa left and took the child. He doesn’t remember the name of the child—the son of the half sister he didn’t really know wasn’t part of his life. But he remembers hearing his parents arguing about it, as his mother was very upset about the situation.”
“You’ve got more. What else does he know?”
“His mother didn’t like the fact that his father had, essentially, cut ties with his daughter. And his father didn’t like the fact that his mother kept pushing him to try to reach her—Lisa, and his grandson. His father claimed Lisa was a junkie whore, and he was done with her. He remembers that clearly, as his father didn’t use that kind of language. So I’d say you’re right, and she was on something in Jamie’s photo.
“I also have his sister’s contact information, but haven’t contacted her as yet because she lives in Oregon, and it’s too early.”
“Is the info on the disc?”
“It is.”
“We’ll take it. This is good work, all around.”
“And my one-on-one?”
“We’re trying to save a life here. That life.” She pointed to the board and Covino. “If we go public with this before we find her, he’ll kill her. You’ll get it, and if I were you, when this is wrapped, I’d do a segment on how a couple of young interns helped break a case, save a life, and find a killer.”
Nadine smiled. “Already on my agenda. You’ll have an on-air conversation with Quilla, won’t you, Jamie, about how the two of you assisted in finding information that led to an arrest?”
“I—yeah, I guess.” He managed to look surprised, delighted, and embarrassed all at once. “Yeah. Could be frosty. I’d want a go on it from the captain.”
“I could interview him,” Quilla suggested. “I think, maybe, as a journalist, I shouldn’t be part of the story, and discussing the research on our end comes too close to revealing a source. Sort of.”
“Listen to you, telling me exactly what I’d hoped to hear. What’s like a fish without gills, Quilla?”
“A journalist without integrity. They both sink to the bottom of the tank—but the journalist had a choice.”
Nadine draped an arm around Quilla’s shoulders. “That’s my girl. Let’s go be journalists. One-on-one,” she said to Eve, and, “Intern interview,” to Jamie. “Catch that bastard,” she said to the room at large, then started out with Quilla.
Quilla threw a look at Jamie over her shoulder. “Nice meeting you and all that.”
“You, too. I gotta get back. So you’ll keep me in the loop, right?”
“You’re in it. You did damn good work, Jamie. Now beat it.”
“Beating it.” He swaggered out.
“Quilla gave him the flirt eye,” Peabody commented, and Mira laughed.
“Yeah, I saw it. She’s just a kid.”
“She’s a bright, healthy teenage girl,” Mira corrected. “If I were a bright, healthy teenage girl, I’d give him the flirt eye. He’s adorable. However.”
She rose to stand with Eve at the board. “A sad life. Lisa McKinney, that’s a sad life. Her parents married, according to the data, six months before her birth. Some that young and in those circumstances make it, build a solid life. Most won’t. The mother moves out of state with the child, with no recorded custody battle there. They’d have found it if there’d been one.”
“Yes, they’d have found it.”
“He had another wife, other children. For whatever reason he closed the door on his oldest daughter. She makes bad choices, a pattern of them. Her addiction? Possibly, even probably, began or escalated after the car accident. Painkillers, from that era oxycodone would be my first guess.”
She glanced at Eve. “You could compare it with street Bliss. In any case, Lisa’s mother went from man to man, and—as she lived with the grandmother—that relationship wasn’t strong, unlikely healthy. History of truancy, of running away, then pregnancy. An unhappy young woman.”
“But she didn’t terminate the pregnancy.”
“Someone—her own—who’d love her.”
Eve looked over at Peabody.
“Keep going.”
“Just from everything we’ve got now, it seems like she might have wanted the child because it would be hers. The kid would love her. Her father didn’t—or not enough. Her mother, there’s something there, too. A kid may run away once in a snit, but she was a repeater. And she’s busted for prostitution in her own small town.”
“Wanted to get busted,” Eve concluded.
“A cry for help. It may have been,” Mira agreed, “and one she didn’t feel—right or wrong—was answered. I think she and the child loved each other, in their own ways. But she was a troubled woman, an addict, estranged, it seems, from her own family. Just the two of them.
“The trauma happened sometime after 2002, sometime when he was still dependent and attached. Just the two of them,” Mira repeated.
“If she OD’d, there’d be a death record. She could’ve ended up dead and dumped, and her body not found or ID’d, that’s possible. Or, addicted, she chose her drug of choice over the kid, dumped him.”
“If any of those, there should be a record of him—his name—taken into the system. Not by a relative from what we know.”
“I’m going to confirm that. Maybe he was too young to know her name. She’s just Mommy, or the trauma wiped it out for him. But we’ve got enough here to dig. We know his age—he’ll be sixty-three this November. Let’s see if Yancy can do another projection, since we have the mother’s face now.
“I’m going to contact the half sister in Portland, see if she can add anything. Peabody, contact Norman to catch him up, start working the brick-and-mortars for the nail thing—and give Dawber a push on the details.”
Eve turned to Mira. “Thanks. Between this, and you, I’ve got a clearer picture.”
“As do I. I think we’ll find there’s a history of mental illness here, and that it likely went untreated. Something triggered a violent aspect of his.”
“He’ll get treatment when I stop him.”
And she would, Eve thought. Before he claimed another victim.
She went straight to her office, tagged Yancy.
“I’m sending you a mug shot—age sixteen—of the suspect’s mother. Can you age it? Say, ages thirty-five, fifty-five, eighty-five.”
“I can start that, sure.”
“Send me what you have when you have it—don’t wait for all of them. I’ll start running them.”
“No hits on the others?”
“No, but you’ll see there’s distinct differences. They’re a type, you might think cousins at best.”
“Send it on. I’ve got some clear time this morning.”
“Thanks. I owe you.”
She sent the file, then pulled up the information on Lisa McKinney’s half sister.
Irene Jasper, age seventy-four, married to Phillip Jasper, two offspring. Freelance photographer.
Irene answered on the second ring, a sharp-featured woman with a disordered crown of maroon hair. “Police,” she said in a raspy voice with a lot of drawl. “New York. This must be about Lisa and her boy.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“My brother just filled me in. Good thing I’m an early riser, but I don’t know how I can help you. I met Lisa exactly once, when my mother insisted we drive up to Tennessee so Harry and I—he’d have been three, I guess—could meet our half sister. I don’t remember much of it other than a lot of shouting, and hearing words I was, at that time, unfamiliar with.”
She smiled a little. “I do remember we stayed in a motel that had a swimming pool—the height of luxury for me. And that my mother cried that night when she thought Harry and I were asleep. He was, I wasn’t.”
“You never had contact with her again?”
“I didn’t, no. My mother pushed for it off and on later, when Lisa had the child, but my father was adamant. And, to be honest, I was fine with that.”
“Do you know her son’s name?”
“I don’t. If I ever did, it’s long gone. My father died ten years ago, and Mama left us this past winter. They might have known, I suppose they did, but there’s no asking them now. I can tell you, it’s clear—from what I heard growing up, and the usual gossip in a small town where I grew up—that my father’s first wife was a wild one. Trouble in school, liked the fast times, the fast boys, and drank and used as much as she could get when she could get it. About the opposite of my own. Mama was a rule follower, as softhearted as they came. My daddy’s estrangement from his oldest child troubled that soft heart.”
“Did Lisa ever try to exploit that?”
Irene pursed her lips. “Now, that’s a thought, and I’ll admit it would have been easy enough. I don’t think so. Mama would’ve told me. Maybe not when I was a young thing, but later on. Now, I do know Lisa’s grandma divorced her grandpa before Lisa was born. He liked his drink, and chasing the ladies, wedding ring or not. He even did some time for beating some guy—and this is after, the story goes, he gave his wife a taste of it more than once.”
Irene lifted a bright red mug of something, chugged as she angled her head and thought back.
“I heard tales of Big Beau Boswell plenty, as when they locked him up a second time—for putting his hands on a woman who objected—he got himself beat to death in prison.
“Lisa would’ve been a baby, I expect, when her grandma married again and she moved back up to Tennessee. So when my daddy divorced Lisa’s mama—and she married and divorced right quick after—she moved on up there, too. Shook small-town Bigsby off her high-heeled shoes. Married again, I’m told, and that didn’t take. Don’t suppose it’s a wonder Lisa was a wild one.”
Irene paused. “I expect you’re thinking her boy’s more than wild.”
The boy, Eve thought, had over six decades under his belt. “He’s a suspect in two murders and at least three abductions.”
“I’m sorry to hear that. I’m sorry to know that somebody who came from my daddy would turn out so wrong. My daddy was a good man, a good father. Funny and hardworking. Could be stern, but could be sweet, too. I know that first marriage had some ugly moments, things he never spoke of—but small towns have big ears and bigger mouths. And I’ll tell you, word was maybe the baby was his, maybe not. She was wild, Lisa’s mama, and enjoyed the back seat of many a car, so the stories say. But Daddy married her, and was a father to that girl until they took off.
“I believe Daddy’s first wife died some thirty years back or more. Pills and liquor, word was.”
“Do you know if there were any photographs of Lisa and her son?”
“I never saw any. The fact is, I couldn’t tell you what she looked like, even from meeting her that one time. I remember that swimming pool, and my mama crying that night, but I can’t get myself a picture of that girl’s face.”
“Any other family you know of? Aunts, uncles, cousins?”
“I don’t know of any other family, so I don’t know what would have become of photos or anything else. The last I knew, Lisa took off with the boy. He couldn’t have been but three or four, I guess. It’s been a long time. She was ten years older than me, Lieutenant Dallas, and if her name came up, a cloud fell over our house.”
Now she sighed. “I’m gonna confess. When my daddy got sick, and we knew he didn’t have long, Mama wanted to try to find her. She even talked about hiring a private eye and all that. I took Daddy’s side—or what I knew would be his side if he knew what she was thinking. I told her no, and I told her flat, and I said some hard things. And she let it go. Maybe I should be sorry for that, but I’m not.”
