The Naturalist (The Naturalist #1)(77)

“For crying out loud. Really?”

“I sent an e-mail to the police last night.”

“Great. Do you ever rest?” she asks.

“Do you?”

“Red Hook, you said?”

“Yeah. Does that ring a bell?”

“Maybe. Odd.”

“What?”

“When I first saw these bodies, it reminded me of something I examined years ago. A girl, a prostitute from near there. She had a claw mark across her back. Four, not five gashes.”

“Really? How long ago?”

“Going on twenty years.”

“And nobody connected her to this?”

“No. She died of an overdose. When I did the autopsy, I noticed the scars. She’d healed from them years prior. I just made a note of it and that was it.”

“There may be a connection.”

“Maybe. But at the rate the police are moving, I wouldn’t count on anything turning up for a while.”





CHAPTER SIXTY-TWO


NEXT OF KIN

Between being born and ending up on Dr. Mead’s autopsy table years ago, Sarah Eaves had a difficult life. Other than a hospital and date of birth, I can’t find out much about her childhood. There are arrest records for shoplifting when she’s eighteen and charges of prostitution and drug possession in her early twenties.

The three mug shot photos show a pretty, if sad, young girl aging too fast. There’s a five-year gap between her last arrest and when she was found dead in a motel room with a syringe in her arm.

This suggests that Sarah may have cleaned herself up but then had a relapse that killed her.

Dr. Mead was able to pull a few strings and get the address of her last employer, Darcy’s Hotcakes & Coffee, on the highway outside Red Hook.

As I sit here, sipping my coffee and using all my willpower not to eat the rest of my blueberry pancakes, I try to place the girl in the photo in a waitress uniform and imagine what could have transpired that would have caused her to regress to her darker past.

A balding man in his early thirties gets out of a faded Honda Civic and enters the restaurant. Although Robert Moorhen doesn’t share the same last name as his mother, he has the same eyes.

I wave him over to the booth, and he takes off his well-worn parka and has a seat across from me.

He eyes the folder sitting in front of me. “Is that about my mother?”

I’m hesitant to reply because there are autopsy photos in there. “Some of it. Thank you for meeting with me.”

“Yeah. Sure. I had today off. What can I do for you?”

“First, you understand I’m not a cop, right? I’m just a researcher?”

He nods. “I’d tell you anything, anyway. If I knew much. She died when I was five. My grandparents raised me.”

“What about your father?”

“He wasn’t around much. He was an oil worker who spent most of his time in Alaska and Canada. Mom and him didn’t last very long. They split before I was three.”

“This isn’t easy to say, but you know your mother had a troubled past . . .”

“The prostitution thing and the drug stuff? Yeah, you can say it. My grandparents never mentioned it, but when Dad got drunk, he’d go off on her history. I don’t want to believe it, but I guess I accept it. You just have to understand that wasn’t the woman I knew. I don’t have a lot of memories about her, but she was always there for me. A real good mom.” Robert points to a corner booth. “After preschool I used to sit there and color. She’d check on my ABCs between serving customers. Then . . . well.”

Robert’s memory is a sharp contrast to her mug shots, but I believe him.

“When your mother passed away, the doctors noticed some odd scars. Do you remember these?”

Robert thinks it over. “Maybe? Like dog scratches or something?”

“Yes. Something like that. Did she ever mention how she got them?”

“I was five. You kind of just accept the world as it is at that point. Maybe she said something. Like she got them when she was younger?”

“Younger? How much?”

“I don’t know. When you’re a kid, you just assume your parents were always grown-up. It’s weird—I’m older now than she was when she died. Yet she still feels like my mom.” He pauses and stares out the window. “The scars. Maybe she got them playing?”

“Playing?”

“I don’t know. She just didn’t talk about them. She never talked about her childhood.”

“I can’t find much about it. What do you know?”

“She left the home when she was sixteen or seventeen. That’s about it.”

“The home?”

“Yeah. The foster home where she lived. She never talked about that. She’d been in and out of the system since she was a baby.”

“Do you know anything about this foster home? Who her foster parents were?”

“No. It wasn’t far from here. I know that. She grew up in this area.”

Interesting. I need to ask Mead if she can get me any information on that. If that’s when Sarah got the scars . . .

“Do you have any suspects?” asks Robert.

“No. As I said, I’m not an investigator. I’m just doing academic research.”