Bones Never Lie (Temperance Brennan, #17)(41)

“Sabine Pomerleau.”

“Anique’s mother is still alive?” Whipping sideways to look at him.

Sun glinted from the aviators as they swiveled my way, then recentered on the road.

I settled back. Of course my question was stupid. Though desperate, we obviously couldn’t interview a corpse.

But Ryan’s words surprised me. The Pomerleaus had married late, tried for years to conceive. After prolonged anguish and much priestly counsel, Anique, their miracle child, finally had been sent by God in 1975, when Mama was forty-three and Papa was forty-eight. Thus Sabine told the story of her daughter’s birth.

I did the math. Sabine would be eighty-two now, her husband eighty-seven.

“Is Jacques still alive?”

“Kicked in ’06.”

I wondered if the miracle child’s infamy had contributed to her daddy’s demise. Kept the thought to myself.

We’d just parked in front of a two-story gray stone semi-detached in the Notre-Dame-de-Grace neighborhood when my iPhone buzzed. As I dug it from my purse, Ryan pantomimed smoking by placing two fingers to his lips. He got out of the Jeep, and I clicked on. “Brennan.”

“I coulda better spent the time flossing.”

An image of Slidell working his teeth at a mirror was not one I welcomed. “You talked to Tehama County?”

“The high sheriff himself. Willis Trout. The guy’s got the brainpower—”

“Did Trout remember Angela Robinson?”

“I doubt he’d remember how to sneeze without prompting.” I waited.

“No. But once I convinced fish boy I wasn’t a crank, he agreed to look for the file. I just got a callback. You’re gonna love this.” Slidell allowed another theatrical pause. “It’s gone.”

“Gone?”

“Robinson disappeared in ’85. In those days everything was still on paper. When the case chilled, the file ended up in a basement. Which turns out to be real bad planning, since the Sacramento River gets frisky every few years and floods the whole friggin’ county.”

“The file was destroyed?”

“The basement took hits in ’99 and ’04.”

“Did you ask Trout about Menard and Catts?”

“Let’s see. How’d he put it? Given that both are dead, have been for years, and will remain so in the future, he couldn’t waste time researching their bios.”

For a very long moment, empty air filled the line. Through the windshield, I could see Ryan talking on his mobile. Then Slidell shared the only good news I’d heard in a while.

“We may get lucky with Leal’s computer. The IT guy’s using some sort of mojo recovery software, getting fragments, whatever the hell that means.”

“Pieces of the browser history.”

“Yeah. He says the deletions were amateur-hour. Thinks he might be able to nail some sites the kid visited.”

“That’s fantastic.”

“Or a big waste of time.”

“I have a feeling something is there. Otherwise why would somebody want the child’s Internet history destroyed?”

“Eeyuh.”

I told Slidell what Ryan and I were doing.

“The media’s screaming for blood down here. So far it’s staying local.”

“How’s it going with Tinker?”

“You gotta go ask that and wreck my day?”

“Keep me in the loop,” I said.

I joined Ryan on the sidewalk. He’d finished his call and was surveying our surroundings. The block was a quiet one shaded by large trees, now bare, and lined with what appeared to be single-family homes. Each home was fronted by a well-kept lawn, now brown, and burlap-wrapped bushes and shrubs. Several had the portable plastic garages that les Montrealais call abris tempos.

I looked at the conjoined structure at our backs, then at Ryan.

“The place was converted into a nursing home back in the eighties,” he said.

“The PC term is ‘assisted living.’ ”

“More like assisted dying.”

Nothing like witty repartee to buoy one’s soul.

Steps rose from a short walk to a wooden door at the left end of a porch spanning the width of the building. On the porch were six Adirondack chairs, each painted a different color, probably at the time of the home’s conversion. A second-floor balcony provided overhead shelter from rain or snow. The upper balcony held four more weathered chairs. In one, bundled like an Inuit hunter, was an elderly man with his face tipped to the sun.

Ryan and I climbed up and let ourselves in.

The house’s interior was cloyingly warm and smelled of disinfectant and urine and years of institutional food. To the right was a small waiting room, once a parlor, to the left a staircase. Ahead were a dining room and a hall leading straight back to what looked like a sunroom. Doors opened off both sides of the hall, all closed.

A signal must have sounded when Ryan opened the door. As he closed it, a woman was already coming toward us. Her skin was chocolate, her hair thick and silver and braided on top of her head. She wore a generic white uniform, size large. A small brass rectangle above her right breast said M. Simone, LPN.

“Puis-je t’aider?” May I help you? A broad smile revealed teeth way too white to be real.