Delusion in Death (In Death #35)(71)

“He retired an army captain. He saw considerable combat, but there’s no record of him being involved in any of the Red Horse operations. I don’t know if there would be.”

“The mother’s mother.”

“Barely started there. Give me some time. I’m picking through decades here, and all matter of records.”

“And I’m holding you up. It’s good data. It fills in some blanks. Callaway’s an insular man, a loner by nature. Competitive. His mother married a much older man at a difficult point in her life and chose professional mother status, homeschooled her son. Kept him close. Lots of moving, no real chance to form outside bonds. Father’s likely the dominant. Changing jobs, uprooting the family when it suits him. Maternal grandparents dead, and he hasn’t maintained close ties with his parents as an adult. But now he goes to them several times in a few months. It’s good data to chew on. Get me more.”

“I live to serve, Lieutenant.”

She went back to it and sent Roarke’s data to Mira with a request for an eval asap. She moved through more names, let her mind circle.

On impulse she called up Callaway’s parents’ ID photos, studied them. And began the slow, painstaking process of pulling up abductee photos, aging them.

She got more coffee, considered, then rejected, a booster when the caffeine didn’t eliminate the growing fatigue.

Then …

“Wait a minute.”

“Eve.”

“Wait. Wait. I think I’ve got something.”

“So do I.”

“Look at this. Give me your take.”

He came around to study the screen and the images on it. The first he recognized now as Callaway’s mother; split-screened beside it was a computer-generated image.

“They appear to be the same woman, or very close. Different hair color and style, but the face is the same.”

“The aged image is of Karleen MacMillon, an abductee at the age of eighteen months. Never recovered. But she was recovered and raised by the Hubbards as Audrey, because there she f**king is.”

“The record of Audrey Hubbard’s live birth is fake. It’s a good one, but it’s fake.”

“Because she wasn’t born to the Hubbards. She was one of the taken. But never listed as recovered.”

“Hubbard retired from the army and moved from England to the U.S. with his wife and four-year-old daughter. His wife had a half-sister. Gina MacMillon. I’m still digging there.”

“Gina and William MacMillon, listed as Karleen’s parents, both killed in the raid where the kid was abducted. It’s the link. It links him to Menzini and Red Horse. Not enough for an arrest, but enough to put a tail on him.”

She walked to the board. “He found out his mother was an abductee, and it set something off. But how did a four-year-old kid get the formula, or have knowledge? Maybe Hubbard was in on the raid that took Menzini down, or in on interrogations. They have something—or had it—and Callaway kept going back to find it, to find everything he could, or interrogate his mother. I need to talk to her.”

“Are we going to Arkansas?”

“No, my turf. Teasdale’s got the HSO muscles to get the mother here. She told Callaway what she knows. Now she’s going to tell us.”

“You need to sleep. I’ll put the run on the half-sister on auto. We’ll both catch a few hours. You’ve done what you set out to do tonight,” he told her when she hesitated. “You’ll want to gear up for tomorrow.”

“You’re not wrong. I want to get this data to Whitney, get a couple men on Callaway tonight. I don’t want him hitting some twenty-four/seven while I’m sleeping.”

“Fair enough. Get it done, and I’ll put what I have together for your briefing tomorrow. Then we’ll go to bed.”

“That’s a deal.”

14

In the dream she knew for a dream, the world exploded. Fire plumes of murderous reds, virulent orange, greasy black lit the night sky to the east as blasts shook the ground and punched like fists through the smoke-stung air.

She heard the boom of explosives, the crack, crack, crack of what she recognized as gunfire. There’d been a time, too long a time, she thought, when people had lived and died by guns.

Now they found other ways to kill. But she wasn’t in the now.

The canyons and towers of New York thundered with the sounds of war. The Urbans.

A dream, she thought, just a dream. Still, she made her way carefully, weapon drawn, down the deserted street. Maybe dreams couldn’t kill, but they could damn sure hurt. She’d woken far too often with phantom pain screaming to travel unarmed, even in her own subconscious.

But sometimes dreams showed you what you needed to know and didn’t recognize in the busy business of the day.

So she’d look, she’d listen.

She stopped by a body sprawled over the sidewalk, crouched to check for a pulse. And found the bloody slice across his throat. Barely more than a boy, she judged. They’d taken his shoes, and likely his jacket if he’d had one—and not long before as his body still held some warmth.

She left him where he was—no choice, just a dream. But checked her weapon. And saw it wasn’t her police issue but a .38 automatic. She recognized the style from Roarke’s gun collection, checked to make certain it was loaded, tested the weight.