“True. My cousin Janis fell out of a tree when she was about seven. Broke her arm, knocked herself out. She doesn’t remember even climbing the tree, much less falling.”
“Which is more likely? A woman maintains a fake name, a life, a family for sixty-odd years without, as far as we can tell, a hitch, or the woman doesn’t remember the life that came before?”
“Amnesia? I sure hadn’t gone there. It’s kind of, you know, vid of the week.”
“I’m going there.” Because vid of the week or not, she’d been there herself. “Trauma. Some john beats the crap out of her, she OD’d and they pull her back, she wrecks the car, sells the kid—something. Maybe an attempted suicide—it’s the way she went out in the end. She might have tried it before. In any case, she’s blank—just like the name she gave herself. What do they call it—tabula rasa. And maybe that suits her just fine. Maybe there’s enough in her to see it as a second chance.”
Switching glides again, she angled toward Peabody. “Now you’ve got a doctor—ER doc—who by all accounts is compassionate, dedicated. He tries to help her. You don’t get the kind of fake ID she had without a lot of money. Maybe she paid for it by selling the kid. That would do it. Or maybe the rich young doctor who fell for her financed it.”
“I can see how maybe.”
“There’s nothing in her background that makes me believe she could run a solid con—dupe the doctor into marrying her, financing her. She was a loser, a drifter, an addict. But if all that’s gone, if she doesn’t remember it, you can reinvent yourself.”
They got off on the Homicide level, and Eve pointed. “Conference room. I want to see it all laid out, one big picture. She lives a happy life,” Eve continued. “A good life. She is Violet Fletcher. Maybe she gets flashes now and then of McKinney, of the kid. You get flashes, but they don’t stick. Can keep you up at night, bring on hard dreams and cold sweats, but you shove them aside, and get on with your life. Because you’re not ready or not willing to go back.”
When they walked into the conference room, Peabody cleared her throat. “Do you want coffee?”
“Not yet, and stop worrying. It’s useful to have some personal experience, and I’m thinking about this angle because I know how it works. Print out her ID shot—the license for McKinney. Print out Violet Fletcher’s first and last ID shot with it. I want them on the board.”
She started to pace. “Nobody looks for McKinney—why would they? She’s been drifting with the kid for a year or two. Nobody knows the kid. She’s all he’s got.”
“Maybe we should ask Mira to come up.”
“Not yet,” Eve said again. “I didn’t try to get out because how do you know what’s on the other side of the door isn’t worse? Especially if they keep telling you it is. Maybe she did that. Or maybe, maybe because she had it in her, she did her best to take care of him. Maybe she loved him, and he felt that. Don’t you know when they love you just like you know when they don’t?”
“Yeah. Yes, I think you do.”
“She left him, and gave that love to other kids. Left him and didn’t come back. Maybe she left him when she worked the streets or the pole. Maybe gave him a little something to make him sleep, or hired another stripper to watch him a few hours. But she always came back. Until she didn’t.”
Eve stepped to the board, tapped the photos. “She went from this, to this, and ended here,” she said, tapping the final ID shot of a pretty older woman with happy eyes and an easy smile.
“Trauma. The man she loved for more than half a century, the one who helped her become Violet, gave her a home, a family—all the damn wishes in the genie lamp—is gone. So the foundation breaks under her, her world crumbles. And so does the block. She remembers. She remembers it all, and the child she left.”
“She went to Hilton Head—to their vacation house for about a week. She checked in every day, and I followed up. She did book a shuttle from New Orleans to Hilton Head.”
“A quick trip. I checked from there while you were creeping your way back to Central. She booked another shuttle from there to New York City, leaving the night she arrived in Hilton Head. Return trip three nights later. She spent three days in New York.”
“She came to New York.” Eve’s theory started to gel for Peabody. “I never thought to look for that.”