“That’s why I’m the boss. We’ll run a search on hotels, but the question is, did she go to see him, talk to him? At the very least she found him and checked to see what kind of life he had, how he looked. She’s his mother, she had to at least look at him, at the man he’d become.”
She wanted coffee after all, gestured to the AutoChef. “Is mine still in there?”
“Yeah, Jamie programmed it for as long as we have the room. I’ll get it for both of us.”
“According to their statements, she seemed better when she got back. I don’t see that if she’d found him, and he’d been some lowlife, scraping by, or another addict, another loser.”
“She sees him, a grown man, doing okay. He did okay without her.” Peabody passed Eve her coffee. “Do you think she contacted him then, went to see him, told him what happened? Apologized?”
“I don’t know, but she did before she took the pills and ended it. She’d have to. She couldn’t end it, claim she was at peace, until she made some sort of amends to her first child. And that’s what snapped him. Whatever she told him, he could find out all the rest, the life she’d led without him, once he had her name. And rather than giving him comfort or settling his mind, it woke the rage. It was always in there, but now she’s gone—way beyond his reach.”
“He has to re-create her.”
“That’s right. Down to her goddamn fingernails. We’ve got a little time to push that now. Let’s hit the ’links. Any venue that’s closing,” Eve continued as they left the conference room, “we nag their asses to stay and check the records. Otherwise, we dig into the online angle from home.”
“Jenkinson and Reineke didn’t hit yet, but that doesn’t mean they won’t.”
“If it’s not a residence, maybe a business. Maybe one he owns and has an area he can block off. A warehouse, a storage facility.”
Too many possibilities, Eve thought. And time wasn’t on Covino’s side.
“I’ll take the first three we have left, you take the next. We’ll run over end of business day by the time we get through them, if not before.”
In her office, Eve sat, called up the list, and got to work.
She ran up against close of business when she reached the third, and pushed hard against the unfortunate clerk.
And got nothing for the effort.
“I appreciate your time. You have my contact. If you find or remember anything, please contact me.”
She clicked off as Roarke walked into her office.
“Are you supposed to be here? Do we have a thing?”
“We have many things.” He crossed to her, tipped up her chin, kissed her. “And there’s one. But I had a meeting in the area, chanced my luck on catching a ride home with you. But I see from this, and Peabody at her desk, you’re not done.”
“Pretty much am. We thought we caught a major break with fingernails. Fake fingernails. But we’re crapping out.”
“There’s considerably more on your board for crapping out.” He looked closer. “You found her.”
“Yeah, Lisa McKinney, who became Violet Blank—ha ha—who became Violet Fletcher when she married a rich doctor. She spent the last sixty years as Violet, living in a big old house outside New Orleans, raising a family—one of her sons is Senator Edward Fletcher of Louisiana. I’ll fill you in on the rest, but she died—swallowed pills—last fall, six months after her husband died in a car wreck. Her other son—got a doctor daughter, too—is some writer dude, and he’s living in the big old house with his family now.”
“Chasen Q. Fletcher? He’s excellent.”
“Yeah, fine.” Frustrated, she swiveled back and forth in the chair. “She had to contact her firstborn, had to. I’m thinking maybe she blocked her former life—something happened, big trauma, blocked it, forgot about the first kid. I’ve got reasons, and I’ll go into them later. But she had to. And now I’m just thinking, big old house. You live in the same place for over half a century. That’s a lot to go through, a lot of stuff. Maybe there’s something there that connects. She wrote notes to her three kids—with the doctor. Maybe she wrote one to her first kid from before. Maybe there’s a copy. Or she talked to him. Maybe they still have her ’link.”
She hissed, pushed up, paced. “I don’t want to take the time—Covino doesn’t have any to spare—but maybe we should go down to New Orleans after all.”