Abandoned in Death (In Death, #54)(78)

“I also have his sister’s contact information, but haven’t contacted her as yet because she lives in Oregon, and it’s too early.”

“Is the info on the disc?”

“It is.”

“We’ll take it. This is good work, all around.”

“And my one-on-one?”

“We’re trying to save a life here. That life.” She pointed to the board and Covino. “If we go public with this before we find her, he’ll kill her. You’ll get it, and if I were you, when this is wrapped, I’d do a segment on how a couple of young interns helped break a case, save a life, and find a killer.”

Nadine smiled. “Already on my agenda. You’ll have an on-air conversation with Quilla, won’t you, Jamie, about how the two of you assisted in finding information that led to an arrest?”

“I—yeah, I guess.” He managed to look surprised, delighted, and embarrassed all at once. “Yeah. Could be frosty. I’d want a go on it from the captain.”

“I could interview him,” Quilla suggested. “I think, maybe, as a journalist, I shouldn’t be part of the story, and discussing the research on our end comes too close to revealing a source. Sort of.”

“Listen to you, telling me exactly what I’d hoped to hear. What’s like a fish without gills, Quilla?”

“A journalist without integrity. They both sink to the bottom of the tank—but the journalist had a choice.”

Nadine draped an arm around Quilla’s shoulders. “That’s my girl. Let’s go be journalists. One-on-one,” she said to Eve, and, “Intern interview,” to Jamie. “Catch that bastard,” she said to the room at large, then started out with Quilla.

Quilla threw a look at Jamie over her shoulder. “Nice meeting you and all that.”

“You, too. I gotta get back. So you’ll keep me in the loop, right?”

“You’re in it. You did damn good work, Jamie. Now beat it.”

“Beating it.” He swaggered out.

“Quilla gave him the flirt eye,” Peabody commented, and Mira laughed.

“Yeah, I saw it. She’s just a kid.”

“She’s a bright, healthy teenage girl,” Mira corrected. “If I were a bright, healthy teenage girl, I’d give him the flirt eye. He’s adorable. However.”

She rose to stand with Eve at the board. “A sad life. Lisa McKinney, that’s a sad life. Her parents married, according to the data, six months before her birth. Some that young and in those circumstances make it, build a solid life. Most won’t. The mother moves out of state with the child, with no recorded custody battle there. They’d have found it if there’d been one.”

“Yes, they’d have found it.”

“He had another wife, other children. For whatever reason he closed the door on his oldest daughter. She makes bad choices, a pattern of them. Her addiction? Possibly, even probably, began or escalated after the car accident. Painkillers, from that era oxycodone would be my first guess.”

She glanced at Eve. “You could compare it with street Bliss. In any case, Lisa’s mother went from man to man, and—as she lived with the grandmother—that relationship wasn’t strong, unlikely healthy. History of truancy, of running away, then pregnancy. An unhappy young woman.”

“But she didn’t terminate the pregnancy.”

“Someone—her own—who’d love her.”

Eve looked over at Peabody.

“Keep going.”

“Just from everything we’ve got now, it seems like she might have wanted the child because it would be hers. The kid would love her. Her father didn’t—or not enough. Her mother, there’s something there, too. A kid may run away once in a snit, but she was a repeater. And she’s busted for prostitution in her own small town.”

“Wanted to get busted,” Eve concluded.

“A cry for help. It may have been,” Mira agreed, “and one she didn’t feel—right or wrong—was answered. I think she and the child loved each other, in their own ways. But she was a troubled woman, an addict, estranged, it seems, from her own family. Just the two of them.

“The trauma happened sometime after 2002, sometime when he was still dependent and attached. Just the two of them,” Mira repeated.

“If she OD’d, there’d be a death record. She could’ve ended up dead and dumped, and her body not found or ID’d, that’s possible. Or, addicted, she chose her drug of choice over the kid, dumped him.”

“If any of those, there should be a record of him—his name—taken into the system. Not by a relative from what we know.”

“I’m going to confirm that. Maybe he was too young to know her name. She’s just Mommy, or the trauma wiped it out for him. But we’ve got enough here to dig. We know his age—he’ll be sixty-three this November. Let’s see if Yancy can do another projection, since we have the mother’s face now.

“I’m going to contact the half sister in Portland, see if she can add anything. Peabody, contact Norman to catch him up, start working the brick-and-mortars for the nail thing—and give Dawber a push on the details.”

Eve turned to Mira. “Thanks. Between this, and you, I’ve got a clearer picture.”