Let the Devil Out (Maureen Coughlin #4)(52)

“I don’t know,” Maureen said, lying, and not sure why she was doing it as she did it. “They don’t tell me these things.”

“But you knew the other detective had been removed. You knew that.”

“Police station gossip,” Maureen said.

“But no one gossips about who gets the case?”

Gage took his glasses off, looked at them as if wondering where the moving images had gone. He put them back on. He waved his hand back and forth over the table. “And we’re supposed to believe it’s not intentional.”

“What’s that?”

“The lies, the confusion, the manipulation.” Gage picked dead skin from his bottom lip, studied it, flicked it off the tip of his thumb. He leaned back in his seat, crossing his arms over his sunken chest. “Did you know that it took the coroner three weeks to find me, to tell me that my son had been murdered?” He pinched his bottom lip. “The little bits, the specks of information we get, so that we think we’re getting answers, that we’re being paid attention to. They toss us crumbs, like we’re birds at the park, and call it a meal. Call it a courtesy.”

“I can tell you why it took so long to find you,” Maureen said.

“Sometimes I’m shocked they looked for me,” Gage said. “I’m surprised Clayton didn’t go right to the incinerator like some homeless nobody.”

Maureen took a deep breath. She needed to settle him down if she wanted to control the conversation. “I’m sorry it’s so frustrating, especially in a time of such grief. Believe me, I empathize. I work in the system. It can be infuriating.”

“It’s built to be infuriating,” Gage said, “for anyone who has a thought in his head. That’s my point. That’s its power. It’s the power the tar pits had over the dinosaurs.”

“And the rest of us, those of us without thoughts?”

Gage didn’t think she was funny. “For the thoughtless, for the passive, it offers enough to pacify. I often wish I was one of them.”

“Right,” Maureen said. “The crumbs.”

She slid her coffee mug aside, folded her hands on the table.

“We couldn’t find you, Mr. Gage, because Clayton didn’t carry a single valid form of ID. His driver’s license wasn’t only out of date, it was fake. We had no access to any records of him. We had to use the truck, registered to you, at an address you haven’t lived at in years. A house that was condemned and torn down.” Maureen paused. “A lot of effort was in fact expended trying to find you. You’re a hard man to track down. And that doesn’t seem to be accidental. You can’t dodge the system and then complain when it doesn’t serve you.”

Gage looked away, taking a deep breath, using the moment to collect himself. He smoothed his tie with one hand and turned back to Maureen. “When y’all find a car, abandoned, stolen, whatever, and you need to find out about it, what do you use?”

“The license plate,” Maureen said, “the registration. If that’s no good, like in your son’s case, we go to the VIN. We can get a lot from that usually.”

“And a gun,” Gage said. “You recover a gun used in a crime, or take one off a criminal, you look for the serial number, run it through your computers, see if that gun has a history.”

“True. That’s why people try so hard to destroy the serial numbers. Destroying that number can hide a lot of bad things.”

“When you were born,” Gage said, “you got your name, Maureen, which your parents gave you, based on their desires and their histories. Do you know the history of your name?”

“Of the name Maureen? I have no idea. I know my mom wanted me named after her mother, Morrigan, which is the name of some war goddess from Irish mythology. My father thought it was too … aggressive. And he worried it was too weird for where we lived. He was a soft, uncreative man. Maureen was a compromise. Another battle my mother lost to my father’s charm, to hear her tell it. Or maybe that was Grandma Fagan who said that, the Morrigan of the story.” She shrugged. “That’s the history as my mother tells it. My father isn’t around to argue.”

“So, as I said,” Gage said, “your name is the product of your parents. Well, the next thing you got when you were born was your Social Security number, which the government gave you. Now why was that?”

Maureen sighed. She had every confidence Leon Gage would answer his own question if she let him. She resisted the urge to check the time on her phone. Why had she agreed to this meeting? This was the guy Detillier had pinned his hopes on? Good luck with that. He carried his share of rage, that was for sure, but she was having a hard time imagining him cutting someone’s throat in a cemetery. He seemed like the kind of man who yelled at the television news. Maybe that was why he kept throwing glances at the TV.

“We pay into the system when we start working,” Maureen said, “and then we get paid by it when our turn comes. I guess. Sounds pretty simple and fair to me. You give, then you get. I haven’t thought about it much.”

Gage chuckled. “That’s exactly the way they want you. Thoughtless. Oblivious.”

“Ah,” Maureen said, nodding. “The ominous they. I was wondering when they would show up.” Maybe, somehow, she thought, this conversation would get entertaining.