The Vanishing Season (The Collector #4)(66)

“What does he do?”

“Remote technical support. Sunday afternoons he tutors.”

“Math,” Bran says suddenly. “He tutored math for any kids who needed it. Manny studied with him because he was having trouble with algebra.”

Gala and Yvonne walk in, both of them balancing carriers of drinks.

“Good morning, you wonderful ladies, can you please tell us everything you know about Mark Davies?” Mercedes says all in a rush.

Yvonne cocks an eyebrow, but Gala hands her entire carrier across to Mercedes to deal with and plops down behind her monitors. “That’s going to be a really common name, you know.”

“He rents a house one street over from Brooklyn.”

Yvonne hands out the drinks. Bran’s has a brownie balanced on top of the lid.

Cass looks at the brownie, then back at Yvonne. At the brownie, back at Yvonne.

“He’s having a bad week,” she replies pertly.

“DMV says he moved there in January,” Gala says. She sounds distracted, her eyes flying back and forth across the screen as she sorts through the information. “Transferred registration of a Subaru Impreza from . . . oh. Madison, Wisconsin.”

“Address?”

“Five houses down from Kendall Braun.”

Cass worms her way between me and Mercedes and sticks her head out the door. “Watts! I don’t have a protein bar to throw at you!”

“You’ve been off the team too long, Kearney,” calls back Johnson. “Watts is the one who throws the protein. We’re supposed to catch it before it hits us in the face.”

Watts, standing with Vic and Ian outside Vic’s office, ignores Johnson and looks over at us. “I was about to check in with you.”

“Well, come on then, and bring those two with you.”

Watts’s eyebrows threaten to disappear into her hairline, but she immediately walks our way.

Gala wriggles in her seat.

As soon as our three newcomers are in the room, Mercedes turns back to Gala. “Go.”

“Mark Christopher Davies,” she says immediately. “Sixty-nine years old, no surviving close family. Parents died when he was young; he got shuffled around between some distant family members. Started college but dropped out his first semester and applied for a marriage license. Seven months later, he’s listed on the birth certificate for a little girl, Lisa. A death certificate was issued for Lisa a little over ten years later, on October 30.”

“Cause of death?”

“Leukemia.”

“Can you find a picture?”

“Yes,” she says after a moment. “Turn on the TV.”

Bran reaches out to turn on the screen, as he’s closest. Once it’s awake, Gala casts the black-and-white photo that looks like it’s from a newspaper.

Little Lisa Davies had curly fair hair and light-colored eyes and a shy, gap-toothed grin. Her shoulders are hunched up around her ears, like she didn’t really want to be photographed, and her gaze is just a little off-center rather than looking into the camera. A parent next to the camera, perhaps?

“She was diagnosed when she was eight,” Gala continues, casting another picture up. It’s a scanned-in newspaper article. Local Girl Diagnosed with Cancer: Best Wishes to Lisa Davies for Her Recovery.

“Oh, fuck.” I sink back into my chair, staring at the screen.

“Eliza?”

“Two years. Holy shit.”

“Eliza.”

“Oh!” Mercedes claps a hand over her mouth. “Two years. He’s trying to replace Lisa. She was eight years old when she was diagnosed, so he takes an eight-year-old girl who looks like her.”

“Then why doesn’t he just raise the new girl as Lisa?” asks Yvonne. “If he’s taken a new daughter . . .”

“Because he lost Lisa. Gala, is he still married?”

“No. His wife, Laura, filed for divorce a year after Lisa died. It was finalized a year later. She remarried a few years later, and . . . from what I can tell, life got a lot better for her. They’re still together, have several kids, adopted a couple of others. She’s lived in North Carolina for over thirty years.”

Leaning back against the counter, Mercedes skims through my lists of names from the various files. “He’s on some of these. Kendall, Riley, Melissa, Joanna . . .”

Yvonne glares at her monitors. “He moved to Madison from Louisville.”

“Shelby Skirvin,” Vic says, looking at the ranks of photos on the whiteboard. “How long was he there?”

“Two years.”

“Which?” Watts asks. “Madison or Louisville?”

“Both,” Yvonne answers. “He moved to Madison in January 2016. He moved to Louisville in January 2014.”

“Everyone in the neighborhood knew he was only going to be there for two years,” Ian says. “I’ve got some notes about it. Said since his family had died, he didn’t like staying in any one place too long. Everyone knew he was moving in a couple of months, so no one thought twice about it when he left. They’d known since he moved in.”

“The mamás talked about it,” adds Bran, a little numbly. “They thought it was sad.”

“He moved to Louisville from St. Paul,” says Gala.