He tugged at his jumpsuit, trying to get comfortable. “Okay. And you found something you needed to tell me about in person?”
“I did,” she said and sighed. Then it dawned on him.
“You found her.”
“I believe I found the last place she lived before she came back here. I also found a trail, or bits and pieces of one, from the early ’80s until a couple of years ago.”
Joe felt a coldness slide through him. Through the echoes of decades, across thousands of miles, somehow among the cobwebs of cyberspace, she had found Lois DeSantos. This was like pulling back a curtain on something he wasn’t sure he wanted to see. “But how? I never had a social security number for her. I wasn’t even sure of her birthdate. Was she in a database somewhere?”
“No. The ME’s office uploaded her DNA into a national missing and unidentified persons database, but nothing came up. Lois never had her blood pulled for DNA. It’s not surprising. She had an arrest record—I’ll get to that—but it ended before they were taking DNA samples the way they do fingerprints now. The DA may try to establish that she was your mother, which helps them with motive. They don’t need to prove that, though. They have a human body, and they have evidence as to who, well, you know.”
“Right. They don’t need to prove that she was Lois DeSantos to prove that I killed her. Anyway, you found her.”
“It took some doing, but ultimately it wasn’t very hard.” She looked up at him. “I didn’t cheat either. No help from any of Ben’s friends still on the job. I did it the civilian way—on my laptop late at night.”
“I should have done this,” he said. “Years ago, I should have.”
“She was born Lois Ann Carroll,” Aideen started, as if she hadn’t heard him. “Born March 7, 1944, in Staten Island.”
“The Staten Island part I knew.”
“Sure. And the details of her early life—her marriage to your father and the births of you and Robbie—are things your uncle Mike probably filled in for you, right?”
“Some things. We really didn’t talk about it very much, to be honest. But, yes, I saw some wedding photos, and I knew some of the background by the time I left for college. My uncle acted like there was more to tell me, actually. He had some things he planned to show me when I turned eighteen, is what he said. We never got the chance, though.”
“We’ll talk more about that,” she said, jotting a note down. “For now, I’ll tell you what I found. I also printed out a few things to leave with you. Are you ready?”
He shrugged. “As I’ll ever be.”
“She was really dark for a while after she left you two.” From her briefcase, Aideen drew a yellow envelope stuffed with paper. “I mean, untraceable. The first thing I found on her was in Reno, Nevada. That was 1980. She was a waitress for a while. And she drove a cab.”
“Huh,” he said. He could think of nothing else to say. His last image of her, cold and dead at the OCME, was still in his head, but now he was picturing her at thirty-four, driving past sleazy little casinos with a jaunty cabbie’s hat and a Winston Red between two fingers out the window.
“She was in Reno until around ’85, then she went dark again. I picked her up in Las Vegas. She was in jail for a while on drug possession. She was in a rehab program and graduated, but she was arrested a few times after that. Mostly, she held a job, though. Different stuff.”
“Any other family?” He had always wondered if he had a half brother or sister out there someplace. It was a hopeful thought.
“No, not that I found. No marriages, no other children. Just work records and signed leases. A car purchase. Some criminal records. That kind of thing all through the ’90s. She was mostly in Nevada. Around ten years ago, she relocated to Sacramento, California. Same pattern. There were drug arrests and . . . a few for prostitution. I’m sorry, Joe.”
“She was lost to us a long time ago.” The word sank into him anyway. Prostitution. He had been certain that no detail about Lois could hurt him, but that one did. He knew what prostitution was, at least much of the time: a desperate, addicted woman working the parking lot of a motel or a truck stop, always for someone else. He closed his eyes.
“Things got a little better a few years ago,” Aideen said, as if rushing in to make up for that detail. “She found a woman’s program run by a church and got involved. She turned seventy there, in 2014. I think she had friends there.”