Abandoned in Death (In Death, #54)(87)

“There’s nothing in her background that makes me believe she could run a solid con—dupe the doctor into marrying her, financing her. She was a loser, a drifter, an addict. But if all that’s gone, if she doesn’t remember it, you can reinvent yourself.”

They got off on the Homicide level, and Eve pointed. “Conference room. I want to see it all laid out, one big picture. She lives a happy life,” Eve continued. “A good life. She is Violet Fletcher. Maybe she gets flashes now and then of McKinney, of the kid. You get flashes, but they don’t stick. Can keep you up at night, bring on hard dreams and cold sweats, but you shove them aside, and get on with your life. Because you’re not ready or not willing to go back.”

When they walked into the conference room, Peabody cleared her throat. “Do you want coffee?”

“Not yet, and stop worrying. It’s useful to have some personal experience, and I’m thinking about this angle because I know how it works. Print out her ID shot—the license for McKinney. Print out Violet Fletcher’s first and last ID shot with it. I want them on the board.”

She started to pace. “Nobody looks for McKinney—why would they? She’s been drifting with the kid for a year or two. Nobody knows the kid. She’s all he’s got.”

“Maybe we should ask Mira to come up.”

“Not yet,” Eve said again. “I didn’t try to get out because how do you know what’s on the other side of the door isn’t worse? Especially if they keep telling you it is. Maybe she did that. Or maybe, maybe because she had it in her, she did her best to take care of him. Maybe she loved him, and he felt that. Don’t you know when they love you just like you know when they don’t?”

“Yeah. Yes, I think you do.”

“She left him, and gave that love to other kids. Left him and didn’t come back. Maybe she left him when she worked the streets or the pole. Maybe gave him a little something to make him sleep, or hired another stripper to watch him a few hours. But she always came back. Until she didn’t.”

Eve stepped to the board, tapped the photos. “She went from this, to this, and ended here,” she said, tapping the final ID shot of a pretty older woman with happy eyes and an easy smile.

“Trauma. The man she loved for more than half a century, the one who helped her become Violet, gave her a home, a family—all the damn wishes in the genie lamp—is gone. So the foundation breaks under her, her world crumbles. And so does the block. She remembers. She remembers it all, and the child she left.”

“She went to Hilton Head—to their vacation house for about a week. She checked in every day, and I followed up. She did book a shuttle from New Orleans to Hilton Head.”

“A quick trip. I checked from there while you were creeping your way back to Central. She booked another shuttle from there to New York City, leaving the night she arrived in Hilton Head. Return trip three nights later. She spent three days in New York.”

“She came to New York.” Eve’s theory started to gel for Peabody. “I never thought to look for that.”

“That’s why I’m the boss. We’ll run a search on hotels, but the question is, did she go to see him, talk to him? At the very least she found him and checked to see what kind of life he had, how he looked. She’s his mother, she had to at least look at him, at the man he’d become.”

She wanted coffee after all, gestured to the AutoChef. “Is mine still in there?”

“Yeah, Jamie programmed it for as long as we have the room. I’ll get it for both of us.”

“According to their statements, she seemed better when she got back. I don’t see that if she’d found him, and he’d been some lowlife, scraping by, or another addict, another loser.”

“She sees him, a grown man, doing okay. He did okay without her.” Peabody passed Eve her coffee. “Do you think she contacted him then, went to see him, told him what happened? Apologized?”

“I don’t know, but she did before she took the pills and ended it. She’d have to. She couldn’t end it, claim she was at peace, until she made some sort of amends to her first child. And that’s what snapped him. Whatever she told him, he could find out all the rest, the life she’d led without him, once he had her name. And rather than giving him comfort or settling his mind, it woke the rage. It was always in there, but now she’s gone—way beyond his reach.”

“He has to re-create her.”

“That’s right. Down to her goddamn fingernails. We’ve got a little time to push that now. Let’s hit the ’links. Any venue that’s closing,” Eve continued as they left the conference room, “we nag their asses to stay and check the records. Otherwise, we dig into the online angle from home.”

“Jenkinson and Reineke didn’t hit yet, but that doesn’t mean they won’t.”

“If it’s not a residence, maybe a business. Maybe one he owns and has an area he can block off. A warehouse, a storage facility.”

Too many possibilities, Eve thought. And time wasn’t on Covino’s side.

“I’ll take the first three we have left, you take the next. We’ll run over end of business day by the time we get through them, if not before.”

In her office, Eve sat, called up the list, and got to work.