“We’re looking at him, Mr. Mosebly.”
“All right, okay. This is Mary Kate’s work space. It reflects her.”
“Does it?”
“Organized, efficient, but not rigid.” He brushed his fingers over a paperweight that showed a cow jumping over a crescent moon.
Other than that and her D and C, there sat a placard that read:
WORK SMARTER.
BITCH LESS.
“Her motto. And, as you can see, she kept her area clean—another motto.”
“We’d like to have her comp and any devices in her desk taken in to EDD for analysis.”
“You’ll need to clear that with Linny—she’s the boss—but I can’t imagine her standing in your way. Let me round up Alistar and Holly for you. And if there’s anything else I can do, please let me know.”
“Appreciate it. Do you live close by?”
“Actually, I live downtown. Mary Kate and I often took the subway together. Just give me a minute.”
“Run him, Peabody,” Eve ordered when he walked away.
“Yeah, on that. He checks some boxes.”
They talked to coworkers, arranged for the electronics pickup, and left with a suspect on the list.
“He’s awfully invested in a coworker under his supervision who’s young enough to be his granddaughter.”
“And checks more boxes,” Peabody said as they settled into the car.
“Lives alone, a couple of blocks from Elder’s apartment. No marriages, no children. No criminal.”
“Tell me about his mother.”
“Getting there. Adalaide Mosebly, née Rowen, died last February at the age of a hundred and six. She’d been a resident/patient for the last sixteen years at the Suskind Home, on Long Island. That’s a retirement and elder care facility. Full medical care, including mental and emotional.
“Prior,” Peabody continued, “she was a homemaker and church secretary and helpmate—it says helpmate—to her husband, Reverend Elijah Mosebly—deceased November 2038. They lived in Kentucky until his death. Two years following that, she moved to New York—James Mosebly’s address.”
“She doesn’t sound like someone who’d dress up like our first victim. But Kentucky’s not all that far from Tennessee, where that spangly top came from. And maybe she lived a different kind of life before hooking up with the reverend. When did they hook up?”
“Married May 1985. Ah, so she’d have been about thirty. Could’ve lived a different sort of life in her twenties—which is where our victim falls, and the abductions.”
“Theory.” Eve played it out as she navigated traffic. “Little Jimmy loves Mommy. Mommy’s pretty strict—preacher’s wife. Maybe they even—what’s the expression?—use the rod, control the child.”
“Spare the rod, spoil the child. Either way, it’s nasty.”
“Maybe he blames Daddy for it, or maybe it’s just how life is. But sometime in there, he learns Mommy liked to dress up and party. How does he feel about that? Excited, appalled, interested? However he feels, she’s the center. Maybe she indulges him, spoils him—or the opposite, because some kids learn to love the boot when it’s all they get.”
“He moved to New York in 2004—at eighteen. I’ve got sketchy employment and residence until 2008. Enrolled in community college, add night school, part-time work at what looks like a pizza joint. Got a degree in marketing with a minor in sociology. Took him five years. Landed an entry-level at someplace called Adverts Unlimited, five years there, and he bounced to Young and Bester Marketing, seven years, climbed up to junior exec before shifting to Digby—that’s where he’d have met and worked with Dowell—where he kept climbing to department head until he left to join Dowell’s start-up. Wait, there are a couple of gaps.”
Eve pulled into Central’s garage. “What and where?”
“Three-month gap, from what I can tell. From April through August of 2031, then another in ’38.”
“When his father died. We’ll look, but maybe the father got sick in ’31, he went back home to help out. Then he goes back when his father died.”
“Digby hired him back, both times, but again what I’m seeing? He took a salary cut. Talk about sharks.”
“And when did Dowell start up?”
“In 2046.”
“We’re going to take a deeper look at the parents, get a good round picture. He hits too many points not to push on it.”