Mother May I(64)
He finished law school. He came home to Georgia and passed the bar. He started his job, working crazy hours to earn his partnership. He realized Maura had meant it the thousand times she’d said she never wanted kids, and they began letting go of each other, working toward an amicable split. By the time he met me in the High Museum, Lexie Pine was a lost night that had happened more than a decade in his past.
He left her there, and there she stayed. Until right now. He set the whole story down before me, every detail, bleak and ugly. Then he looked at me, ashamed and sorry, afraid and defensive, to see if I still loved him after this.
17
On the way back to Atlanta, with Bree driving, Marshall began calling in markers and burning stored-up favors. Before he was done, he might be in favor debt. But this was Bree. This was her baby. No regrets.
The first thing he did was call his old partner on the ATL PD to give him Lexie Pine’s name and approximate age. He asked him for any and all information, as fast as possible. Then he called Gabrielle to update her so she wouldn’t waste more time on Trey and Spencer’s old case files. She moved to tracking down the family that had owned Funtime, back when it was open. The Dentons. She agreed with Marshall that the mother had picked Funtime for a reason. The Dentons might know her, even have good guesses about where she’d go to ground.
“If you find them, tell them you’re a lawyer and you’re looking for her with news about an inheritance,” he said.
“But I am a lawyer. Which means I probably don’t need help coming up with a good story,” she shot back, tart.
“Of course not,” he said. “Sorry.”
She blew all her breath out, slow. “No, I am. It’s a good idea. I’m just . . .”
Tired, probably, and stressed out and horrified.
“Me, too,” he assured her, and they got off the phone.
By then his partner had sent back an email with several files attached. Lexie Pine’s prison and arrest records. She’d gone off parole seven months ago. That was a disappointment. He did have her last known address, though, plus a list of known associates and family.
Father, Preston Early Pine, deceased. And then her mother. Now he had the enemy’s real name. Coral Lee Pine, age seventy-two, address unknown.
Marshall’s investigator’s license gave him access to some powerful search engines, but they couldn’t provide everything he needed. Not legally. He had a contact number for a pair of computer “researchers” who were willing to operate outside those constraints. James and Tiana Weaver. He’d never used them. Marshall was a straight shooter, and the Weavers’ brand of back-channel info was seldom admissible in court. But he’d heard that they could find out almost anything.
With a faint shock of irony, he remembered that Spence had given him the number. The connection was a sour taste in his mouth.
Favors weren’t their currency, but Bree had Venmo. Marshall called James, offering twice their normal rate for answers on a timer. James seemed hesitant until Marshall mentioned that he had worked for Spencer Shaw. He said that even though Spence, as they might have heard, had passed away quite suddenly, his cases went on.
James did a brief confab with his wife. Marshall could hear the low buzz of his voice and then her keys clacking in answer. Spence had told him that Tiana was an autist, nonverbal, who could play a QWERTY keyboard “like Bootsy Collins played the bass.”
James fell silent, but the keys kept clicking. He wondered if they were checking him out. Then James came back and agreed to take the job, but asking for triple if they got what he wanted in less than an hour. Marshall agreed.
While he waited, he had a too-brief, surreal checkin with his daughter, all sunshine and stories about getting to drive a Jet Ski, and then went to Google Earth to survey the area where Coral Lee Pine had set the meet. What he saw confirmed his instinct. She must have history with the place. She had to know its layout, intimately. Because it was perfect. For her. Not them.
First, it was private. There was nothing, literally nothing, left nearby. It was a dead zone from the highway exit all the way to the small park’s entrance, which was ten miles down a rural road lined in fields and forests. He saw no houses or gas stations or small, open stores that might make the sagging carousel or ticket booth tempting to squatters. There would be no electricity, no plumbing, no access to food or clean water.
A single turnoff led to Funtime’s rectangular parking lot. It had maybe thirty spaces. All of them were dead empty, or had been the last time the satellite had passed over. A wide concrete staircase led up the steep hill to the entrance where mossy Funtime Jack and Baby loomed. The ruined carousel was just beyond, on a peak; Coral would see them coming long before they saw her.
He tried to imagine that old woman at the top of the steps with a sniper’s gun, aiming down to take out Trey, but that was soldier stuff. Old country people had shotguns and pistols. Even with a deer rifle, Trey would be out of range, unless she was an Olympic-level marksman. He couldn’t see it; this woman was a poisoner. She’d put a baby in the water. His spine shuddered at the memory of the hunger that had leaked into her voice when she’d understood that Bree had witnessed Spencer’s death. She’d wanted details. If he had to guess, and he did, she wouldn’t have the skill. She was a close-in kind of killer.
He went back through his notes. Nothing Coral Lee Pine had said gave him a single clue to their location now. If they met her without anything to trade—Lexie or Trey—her plan would work. They could have her arrested, put on suicide watch and interrogated, but if she kept her mouth shut, there was no way they’d find Robert. Not in time.