Kindred in Death (In Death #29)(74)

“I never saw her again, never saw Vance or the boy again until that day Mimi called me home. I hired a private investigator to try to find them, but I couldn’t afford him for very long. Never came to nothing, but I wanted to try. I don’t know if he was mine, the boy, but back then, he felt like mine.”

“You did the best you could.”

He smiled at Mimi, but his eyes were damp. “It felt like giving up. I guess it was. I was mad a long time, and then, well, I met Mimi. I put it behind me, until they showed up here a few years back. And I don’t know where they went from here. We got an e-mail from Darrin about three years ago. He said he was in college, in Chicago. How he was making something of himself, studying hard. He sounded . . .”

“Sincere,” Mimi put in.

“I guess he did,” Vinnie said with a sigh. “He asked if we could maybe help him out a little. Money. Knowing Vance, I checked it out. And he was registered at the college like he said. So I sent him a thousand dollars.”

“And never heard a word back,” Mimi finished. “But right after that? Somebody accessed our bank account. That was just our emergency account, thank the Lord, where Vinnie got the money he sent Darrin. It only had another five thousand in it. He took four of it. He did it, Vinnie,” she said when her husband looked ready to protest.

He sighed, nodded. “Yeah, I expect he did.”

“Vinnie wouldn’t report it to the police.”

“If he’s mine, he’s entitled to something. And I could be finished there. It’s all he’s entitled to. I tried to contact him through the college, but they said he wasn’t registered. They had no record of him. I argued, because they damn well had two weeks before. But I didn’t get anywhere.”

How much were they entitled to? Eve wondered. “We believe the man you know as Darrin Pauley is and has been in New York. We believe he has committed various cyber crimes and engaged in forms of identity theft.”

Vinnie lowered his head to his hands. “Like Vance. Just like Vance. What do I tell my parents? Do I tell them?”

“Mr. Pauley, there’s more. There’s harder, and within the next forty-eight hours it’s going to be in the media.” He lifted his face to meet her eyes, and his were full of fear. “The man you know as Darrin Pauley is the primary suspect in the rape-murder of a sixteen-year-old girl. The daughter of a decorated police officer.”

“No. No. No. Mimi.”

She put her arms around him, and though her face registered shock and horror, it didn’t show disbelief. Her eyes met Eve’s as she held her husband, and she nodded. “I was afraid of him. When he looked at me, I was afraid. That girl, we heard about it. We heard about it this morning on the bedroom screen when we were getting dressed. They said your name. Lieutenant Dallas. I’d forgotten.”

“I need anything you can remember, any detail you can give me on Darrin, your brother, Inga Sorenson.”

“I think they may have hit my parents up for money a few times.” Vinnie rubbed his eyes again. “We don’t talk about it, or them, but it’s hard to say no to your own.”

“Let’s find out.”

“Let me do that. Let me talk to them, explain . . . somehow. I’ll just use the other room. Is that all right?”

“Go ahead.”

“What do we do now?” Mimi asked. “What should we do? If he comes here—”

“I don’t believe he will. You’ve got nothing he wants. But I’ll talk to your local police. If he contacts you, you should stay calm, behave naturally. And contact your local police, and me immediately.”

“We’re going on vacation tomorrow.”

“And you should,” Eve told her. “Go exactly as you planned. Get out of this.”

“Enjoy your daughter,” Roarke added. “You have a good family. This isn’t part of it.”

On the drive back to transpo, Eve stared up at the sky. “Just more victims.”

“She’s a sensitive. At least she has a whiff of it,” he added when Eve turned her head to study him. “Just a sense I got from her, and one I think could explain why she saw what’s inside that boy. Maybe he wasn’t as adept at hiding it, but I think she saw inside, and it frightened her.”

“She was right to be.” Settling down, she started a standard run on Vance Pauley. “And she was right when she said Vance was a bad man. Lots of trouble here. The juvie’s unsealed, so somebody beat me to that along the way. He had trouble starting at nine. Truancy, theft, destruction of private property, cyber bullying, hacking, assault, battery.”

“At bloody nine?”

“I’m moving through. Twelve on the first assault. It was the ID fraud that had him in during the Inga period. Then he drops off, just like that. He’s got a mile-long sheet from childhood to the age of twenty-one, then nothing.”

“Got smarter.”

“Or Inga was smarter, and ran the games, taught him. And I’ve got nothing on her, nothing on that name that corresponds to the age, the description Pauley gave me, the location she lived when she was with him. She’s listed on Darrin’s records as his mother, DOD, May sixteen, 2041. He’d have been four. But there is no death record corresponding.”

“She’ll be in MacMasters’s files. Not under that name, necessarily, but she’s the motive. The reason for the plan he had even seven years ago.”