And Now She's Gone(58)
“Stomach.”
“Ew. T.M.I.”
“You asked.”
“What if I told you…” Clarissa plopped into the guest chair. “What if I told you that Kevin Tompkins is, like, totally shifty in everything except disappearing Isabel Lincoln?”
“I’d say spill it.”
Clarissa launched into all that she’d found. Like Kevin Tompkins enlisting in 1995. Like how, in 2009, he had been arrested for public drunkenness but found not guilty. He had been charged with trespassing a year later, but the case was dismissed.
“He totally has great credit, though.” Clarissa faked a smile and offered a thumbs-up.
“With those dings on his record, how is he working at the recruitment center?”
“Also, he was stationed up in Seattle the last part of May up until July third.”
“I’d kinda eliminated him as a suspect,” Gray admitted. “I think Isabel is alive and that she’s the one texting me. What about Noelle Lawrence? Find anything out about her?”
“Noelle is, like, literally one of those children of the corn,” Clarissa said. “If it’s something worth stealing, she’s stolen it. She spent more of her childhood in juvie than in school. She just got out of jail jail back in November and … no job, no degree, and literally thousands and thousands of dollars in debt.”
“She’d said Isabel was up to something.”
“Duh. Weren’t you supposed to meet her?”
“I left a message and haven’t heard back. One more thing: find out if there’s a marriage license registered to…” She handed Clarissa a sticky note with the names Omar Neville and Elyse Miller. She’d told herself that she didn’t care—and she didn’t. But Negro Nancy Drew couldn’t completely ignore a mystery.
Clarissa tapped at the keys. Her brows crumpled. “No licenses in the County of Los Angeles. Shall I try Orange, Riverside, and San Bernardino?”
“And throw in Clark County—they could’ve tied the knot in Vegas.” She twisted in her chair, eyes on Clarissa.
Finally, the younger woman shook her head. “Nothing. Sorry.”
Maybe they got married …
Occam’s razor. Simplest explanation. They’re not married.
Gray called Rebekah Lawrence and told her that she and Noelle had connected briefly and that Noelle hadn’t called Gray back as promised. Rebekah sighed and said, “That’s what she does. Welcome to my life.”
Rader Consulting housed the creatives and the geeks on the other side of the floor. Their space had been designed with broad entryways flanked with fancy lights or twisting wreaths of iron. There was a pool table alongside the Ping-Pong table, and that’s where Gray found Sanjay, alone, pool cue in hand, not responding to her voice mail from yesterday.
“I was just about to call you,” he said. “I’m working today and not coming in Monday.”
Gray followed him into his office, where foam cups mixed in with ceramic mugs, magazines, comic books, and design manuals. “So, the picture you sent…” He plopped in front of his Mac and brought up on the screen the shot of Isabel Lincoln standing in the Westin Kauai’s breezeway. He then threw a bunch of words at Gray, and each syllable chipped away at a nerve and at her patience until she finally squeezed shut her eyes. “Sanjay, ohmigod, stop.”
He said, “Sorry,” then clicked, and hummed as he clicked. “It’s a frontal shot, but the position of her head doesn’t match her neck. The face is off. The color’s weird—this up here is bright sunlight but this down here … Saturation, curves, levels, all of it. Off.”
“Could it be two pictures merged into one?” Gray asked.
“Probably.”
“Can you unmerge it?”
He made a noise that meant “Maybe.”
“Anything else?”
“So, I looked at the metadata to see where and when this picture was created: July twelfth at eleven twenty-two a.m. in Los Angeles.”
“Yesterday in Los Angeles? You sure?”
“Yep.”
Gray returned to her office. It didn’t take long for her to find Christopher and Hope Walters Lincoln in People Finder. Isabel’s real parents lived off Central Avenue, not far from downtown. Gray typed one name and then the other into the Social Security database—if she was planning to visit someone one last time before heading home, she wanted to be sure that at least one of them still walked God’s green earth.
Christopher Lincoln had died in October 1987, not long after Isabel’s birth.
Hope Walters Lincoln died in August 1992, a month after Isabel’s fifth birthday.
Talk about dead ends.
She tabbed back over to People Finder for any other relational links.
Nothing came up—the Lincolns had died before computers captured every sneeze and strand of hair.
Isabel had attached herself to random people like the Lawrences—she had become an orphan before her sixth birthday. Maybe she, too, had been trapped in the foster system.
Gray brought the proof of life photo to her computer screen. It had been taken in Los Angeles, a damn big place—503 square miles. If she created this photo in L.A., where would she do it? Gray sat still for several moments, and then one name popped in her head.