“Yeah, but what does your gut tell you?”
Andy makes a noise, taps his fingers on the steering wheel. He pulls their car into the parking lot outside the police station, kills the engine, and turns to her.
“My gut tells me he knows Vicky Lanier,” he says.
“For sure.”
“But we know nothing about her. I mean, if she’s in on this with Simon, if she was part of some plan to lure Nick Caracci into this plot, I highly doubt ‘Vicky Lanier’ is even her real name.”
“Probably not. The name itself is almost surely a dead end. We’ll run a background just in case, but you’re right—her name probably isn’t Vicky Lanier.”
“So we don’t know squat.”
“Not yet,” she says. “You processed all the prints from Lauren’s crime scene, right?”
“Yep. Sent them to CODIS yesterday. If there’s a hit on anything, we’ll know hopefully today or tomorrow at the latest.”
“And Cheronis sent prints from Nick Caracci’s apartment,” says Jane. “Maybe we’ll get lucky on a fingerprint. Forensics may be our only saving grace here. Simon can manipulate all he wants, but he can’t manipulate a fingerprint.”
97
Jane
In an interview room, one hour later. “Thanks for coming, Mr. Lemoyne,” says Jane. “I hope your flight was okay.”
Albert Lemoyne, age sixty-nine, is a big, weathered guy with a full, ruddy face and deep-set, bloodshot eyes. A union man, a Teamster, with rough hands to show for it. He is overweight and aging, but Jane sees a man inside there who would have caught a woman’s eye back in his day. His skin is bronzed from the sun; he now lives in Scottsdale. “I flew home to bury my daughter,” he says, “so no, it wasn’t that great.”
“Of course. That was—”
“Did you find him? Did you figure out who did it?”
“We think we may be close, Mr. Lemoyne.”
“Shit, call me Al, everyone else does.”
“Okay. I need to ask you some questions about your daughter, Al.”
“You didn’t ask me enough questions when you called me on Tuesday?”
“Just a few more, sir,” says Jane.
? ? ?
“I knew they were getting a divorce,” he says. “She kept telling me she was fine, she’d be okay. She didn’t—she didn’t share a lot with her old man. She was much closer to her mother.”
Her mother, Amy Lemoyne, died four years ago from cancer. Al has since lived alone in the house Lauren bought them in Arizona.
“Do you know, Al, if Lauren had begun another relationship?”
He shakes his head no. “But I doubt she’d mention it to me unless it was serious.”
“Do you recognize the name Christian Newsome?”
“No, uh-uh.”
“Nick Caracci? Vicky Lanier?”
Same answer for each one.
“What about Simon Dobias?”
His eyes flicker, like a flinch. “The boy,” he says. “The son. The one accused her a stealing.”
“Yes.”
“He still live around here?”
“Why do you ask?”
He makes a fist with his hand, gently thumps it on the table. “I told her, I said, ‘You sure you wanna move back close to where they live?’ She said it wouldn’t be an issue. I mean, when she moved back to Chicago, I said okay, it’s a big place. But then she meets Conrad and moves to Grace Village and I said to her, I said, ‘You sure, honey? Being just the town over?’ But she said it was the father who worried her, and he was dead. She didn’t worry about the boy.”
Jane puts up her hands. “I need to unpack that. When Lauren married Conrad and moved to Grace Village three years ago, you were worried, because she was moving so close to Grace Park, where the Dobias family lived?”
He nods. “She said, there’s so many people in these suburbs, odds were she’d never run into him even if he still lived here.”
“Simon, you mean.”
“Right. The father, Ted? He moved to St. Louis after. And then I guess he died.”
She raises her eyebrows. “The father moved to St. Louis ‘after.’ After what?”
His look turns severe, as if insulted. “After you know what.”
“Please, Al, I’m—”
“After the thing with the money. They said she stole their money. She didn’t. Ted gave it to her. I’m not saying it was the proudest moment of my daughter’s life, carrying on with a married man, but she was barely twenty, and he was a lot older. So who’s to blame, her or him?”