Gone(14)

Jesus, she was abrasive. Or maybe she was just candid, and he was being oversensitive. “No. But I’ve liaised with missing persons’ cases. I worked with Ninth Street a lot.”

“Ninth Street?”

It had slipped out. So much for thinking before I speak, Rondeau thought. “Just what I call the FBI. Term of endearment. In the District, and this is late 90s, FBI headquarters was located on Ninth Street. So that’s what we called them.”

“You were a cop in D.C., huh?”

“A detective. Same as now, yeah.” She knew the lingo — people who lived in D.C. often called it the District.

“Why you up here?”

Oh boy. That was a long story. He really wanted to get to the part about her brother’s documentary footage. He’d indulge her first. He supposed it was the least he could do.

“My sister got sick. And she passed.”

Addie set the beer down, folded her hands. “I’m sorry.”

“It was a while ago.”

“So you came up here to . . . help her? When she was sick?”

“Yes.”

“That was good of you.”

He decided to tell Addie the story. For one thing, he was thinking of getting Addie to do a polygraph. Too many red flags in his mind to just take her at face value. Maybe if he shared a little about himself, he’d earn some trust. He explained to her how his sister, Jessy, and her husband, Millard, had finally gotten pregnant with their one child after trying for many years. Jessica had been a later mother — forty-one at the time Gabriel had been conceived, the long-awaited gift. My geriatric pregnancy, she would refer to it as, and laugh. Jessy was often laughing, except maybe late in the term, when the pregnancy had encountered problems. She had developed ovarian and cervical cysts. Due to the cysts and other complications, the pregnancy had been an ordeal. Baby Gabriel hadn’t made it.

“Oh,” Addie said and made a face. “Oh my God. I’m so sorry.”

“Millard took it really hard. I mean it was devastating to them both, but my sister . . . she was tough. Kind of like you.”

Addie blushed and looked away.

He didn’t tell her any more.

“What happened to her?” The question shocked him back into the moment.

“After the baby . . . Jessy was diagnosed with full-blown cancer. It spread quickly.”

“I’m really so sorry. Must’ve been so hard for them. For you.”

He nodded and looked around the room, unable to meet her eyes for a moment.

“What about your brother-in-law now?”

He shrugged. “Well, from what little I know about mental health, adults don’t usually just slip into delusional personality disorder. Millard experienced an event once in his past, and maybe that set a tone. After Jessy and the baby . . . Millard became really paranoid, I guess. Delusional. I don’t know how credible that diagnosis is, like I said, I’m not a—”

“It’s Don Quixote.”

He found her gaze. “How’s that?”

“Don Quixote? One of the greatest novels ever written?”

He shook his head. “I don’t know it.”

She glanced away. Then something flickered in her eyes. “What sort of delusions?”

“Oh, I guess you could say ‘conspiracy theories.’”

“Like?”

“Mostly the old chestnuts; how President Kennedy was assassinated because he’d signed a bill to empower the Treasury, and the Federal Reserve killed him. Or, how the CIA funneled seizure money from the crack-cocaine epidemic in Los Angeles during the 1980s to the Contras who were fighting to destabilize Nicaragua.”

“I remember that. Wasn’t the Iran-Contra scandal about selling weapons to Iran and using the money to fund the Contras? I hadn’t heard about the drug-CIA thing. Makes sense to me.”

He paused, thinking about his assessment of Addie as someone who was only interested in hard facts. Maybe she was just humoring him, because he detected a lie in her last statement. He really wanted to poly her.

He shrugged again. “Millard’s got ’em all under his hat. I think he has what you call a ‘persecution complex,’ too — he thinks people are following him.”

“Really.”

Rondeau gave a nod. “He’s seen men dressed in black hiding in the shadows. When he stopped driving one night and ran out in the road, ranting and raving at another vehicle he was convinced was following him. He doesn’t drive anymore.”

“I was gonna say . . .” She turned on a full smile and leaned back. She’d finished her vegan dish, and his steak was long gone, along with the roasted red potatoes with the rosemary garnish, the side of asparagus and cooked carrots. Down the hatch. He put his hands on his stomach, leaning back, too. They held each other’s gaze for a moment.

Rondeau said, “Can you tell me about what you saw on your brother’s footage?”

“You think he’s got shots of planes flying into towers?”

“No, of course not, but . . .”

“I’ll do you one better,” she said. “You can look at it tonight.”

He sat up straighter. “You have footage with you?”

“I thought it was at home, or I would have brought it up myself. I could’ve sworn he’d mailed me a flash drive. He did, but that was family stuff. The footage he’d sent me — I thought more about it after you called and checked my Vimeo account. He sent me a password-protected video. Eyes-only kind of stuff.” She waggled her brows. “Real conspiracy shit, what with landfill workers talking about how fast their trash cells filled up.”