“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…”