Dearly Departed (16 page)

“Since when do you care about them?”

“I don’t,” I admitted. “But I’m the one who put them on the spot—at least Irene—and that makes me responsible.”

“If only I could believe that.”

“What?”

“I think you’re trying to find Alison because you want revenge.”

“Revenge?”

“Yes, revenge. When you thought she was dead, you acted like she was the great lost love of your life—”

“Stop it,” I told her.

“You kept staring at her photograph with such longing—don’t tell me you didn’t; I know you did—but then you discovered that she had an affair, and suddenly you don’t like her anymore. Taylor, you act like she had cheated on
you.
Well, she didn’t cheat on you. She didn’t do anything to you. She didn’t even know you. So why don’t you leave her alone? She was treated shitty enough in her life.”

“She gave as she got,” I told her.

“How do you know?”

“I know.…”

“You know nothing about her except what some people told you, and even then you’re only listening to the bad and none of the good. Why do you believe Emerton and that doctor? Why do you insist that they’re right about Alison and not Marie Audette and Alison’s other friend, the deputy?”

“Because—”

“Because you don’t want to.”

“Are you going to let me finish?”

“I’ll tell you what I think. I think you hope Alison really is dead. That way you can recast her as the virginal innocent in the fantasy you’ve created in your head.”

Something cold gripped my heart. Alison dead? No, I didn’t want that. I most certainly did not.

“You might find this hard to believe, Cynthia,” I said, working hard to keep my voice calm and level, “but I have no emotional investment in locating Alison.”

“Yeah, right.”

“If you want to argue that I’m trying to find her just to prove that I can, fine. Maybe there’s something to that. But it’s my job, you see. It’s what I do for a living.”

“It’s wrong,” Cynthia reiterated.

“Why? Why is it wrong? When I was trying to find her dead body, I was a good guy. Now, because I’m trying to find her live body, I’m a jerk. Why is that?” Cynthia didn’t answer, so I added, “It’s just a job, honey.”

“And if someone gave you four hundred dollars a day and expenses to investigate me, you’d do it, wouldn’t you?”

“Cynthia, please. This is not about you.”

“But it could be. That’s the thing. It could be. If somebody wanted to learn about my past, if they wanted to hurt me with my past—”

“I’m not hurting anyone,” I insisted.

“—me or anyone else on the planet, all they have to do is pay you four hundred dollars a day and expenses.”

And then I understood. Cynthia didn’t want me to find Alison because she didn’t want a detective to one day find her, the real her. The expensive clothes, the furniture, the store-bought manners, they allowed Cynthia to do what Alison was doing: hide. That was why she worked so hard at her profession, why she so enthusiastically embraced the media. She was building a life beyond reproach, strengthening her reputation against the day that someone—like me—would discover that Cynthia Grey, attorney at law, was once a drug addict, that she had danced topless for a living. I understood that, only I wasn’t thinking. Instead, I let my mouth do all the work, my brain just standing there leaning on a shovel while I talked myself into a hole.

“I ferret out people’s secrets,” I replied, trying to make my voice sound just as icy as hers. “I do it for money. And most of the people who hire me? They’re lawyers. You act like all this is new to you, Cynthia. But we both know it’s not. You’ve worked with PIs before; hell, you’ve worked with
me
. You want information you can take into court, you come to us. You want dirt you can use to help your clients and hurt your adversaries, you don’t even quibble about our fee. Well, what I’m doing now is no different than what you’ve hired done in the past. You’re no different than Hunter Truman.”

Cynthia had nothing more to say. She left the bed and dressed in the dark. The rustle of her clothes and the creak of floorboards told me she was near, but I couldn’t see her, and when I reached out, I caught only air. I wanted to say something to her, but what? I’m sorry? Yeah, right, that would cover it. I’m sorry, Cynthia, I was only joking. Sure.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to say that,” I told her.

She didn’t reply.

“Cynthia?”

The floorboards creaked again.

“Cynthia, if you loved me, you would ignore me when I say stupid things.”

“Taylor, you’re a jerk,” she answered softly. And then she was gone. I listened as she made her way down the stairs to the front door, slamming it behind her.

“Taylor, you are a jerk!” I agreed.

I
had run out of coffee beans and was finishing my last Dr Pepper when Hunter Truman called. He wanted an update. I told him I had nothing positive to report and asked if I should give it up. He said no, and I sighed my relief. I had no intention of quitting the chase, but it was starting to get expensive. That’s why so many skips and missing persons remain unfound because it’s not worth the cost of finding them. And I would rather hunt for Alison on Truman’s nickel than mine.

“W
hat do you want ’em for?” Stephen Emerton asked when I requested all of his and Alison’s canceled personal checks starting one year prior to her disappearance.

I convinced him that I was helping the Dakota County attorney strengthen his case against Irene Brown; told him that if she were convicted of killing Alison, the insurance company would be forced to pay off on Emerton’s claim. He gave me a box of canceled checks dating back eighteen months.

“W
hat do you want them for?” Sarah Selmi asked when I requested Alison’s complete employment history at Kennel-Up, emphasizing those days when she did not report to work, plus a record of all her business trips and a list of the long-distance phone calls she had made.

I was bound by Hunter Truman’s directive not to tell her the truth, and I couldn’t think of a viable lie, so I simply said: “Because it’s important that we have all the information correct for the trial.” It sounds absurd, I know, but it worked. It usually does. Half the time when you start a sentence with the word “because,” people don’t even hear the rest of it. They hear only the word “because,” which they translate to mean, “It’s all right, go ahead.” If you don’t believe me, try it sometime.

Sarah Selmi gave me everything I requested except for the phone information. Kennel-Up had a WATS line, and they had no way of determining which employees called where. She said it was an ongoing problem since her employees shamefully abused the service, dialing up long-lost relatives halfway around the planet.

I
got back to my office and started sifting through the information I had gathered. Kennel-Up promoted itself as a national company, yet in reality it was strictly regional, selling its products almost exclusively in North and South Dakota, Minnesota, Iowa, and Wisconsin. Alison had visited each of those states several times in the months before she went missing. However, she wrote no personal checks in any of them.

One personal check, though, did catch my eye. It was made out to Bosch Publications. The name sounded familiar, but I couldn’t place it. I closed my eyes and let it bounce around for a while, but nothing came of it. When I opened my eyes again, I was staring at my bookcase, specifically at the volume with the blue cover and the title
Minnesota Sex Offenders
on the spine. The book listed the names and offenses of nearly everyone who had been convicted of a sex crime in the state of Minnesota, along with the criminal’s current address and any other information that the author could secure. It was very popular among the “not in my neighborhood” crowd.

I went to the bookcase, slipped the volume out, opened it to the title page, and noted the publisher.

Bosch Publications, Minneapolis, Minnesota.

S
tephen Emerton was becoming increasingly annoyed by my presence in his life. But he did remember seeing a copy of the book I described. It was probably in one of the boxes he had stuffed with Alison’s belongings and stashed in a ministorage garage near the intersection of Highway 36 and I-694. And, yeah, he’d leave the key with his secretary if I wanted to take a look.

I did.

It turned out that Alison had a great many books. Maybe a thousand. At least it seemed like that as I rummaged through the boxes stacked inside the garage designated 54A. It took about two hours before I came up with
Minnesota Sex Offenders.

I took it out of the garage into the light, leaned against my Colt, and flicked through it. The corners of seven pages were turned down. Alison had circled the name of at least one sex offender on each of them. One of the names circled belonged to Fleck, Raymond G. The copy under his name listed Raymond’s offense, how long he had spent in prison, his record there, and his current address and place of employment.

Well, well. I put the book back, locked the storage garage, and returned to my office, stopping to drop off Stephen’s key on the way. Once inside my office, I examined the canceled check, the one written to Bosch Publications. Alison had bought the book two months before she left the health-care organization to work for Kennel-Up, Raymond’s employer.

She had known about Raymond’s record before she even met him.

I smiled.

“Mistake number two, Alison,” I said aloud. “You should never have kept the book.”

I continued to search through Alison’s canceled personal checks. Three more interested me. One was written for
Dog Universe
magazine and a second for
X-Country
, a magazine for cross-country skiers. I contacted both publications and arranged to purchase their subscription lists.

The third check had been made out to a print shop a few weeks before Alison began working for Kennel-Up. I guessed it was written to pay for copies of her résumé. I guessed wrong.…

T
he woman behind the counter at the print shop was confused, so she called on a co-worker for assistance. He was no help, so she summoned the manager. The manager inspected my photostat and the canceled check and asked, “Why do you need this information?”

“Because it’s vital that we compare it to other information that we have.”

Sounded reasonable to him.

After about ten minutes, the manager produced an invoice with Alison’s name on it dated seven months before she disappeared. The check hadn’t paid for the printing of résumés after all.

“It was a joke,” the manager said. “I remember now. Mrs. Emerton asked us to make a plate of her birth certificate, burn off the name and date, then run off a few copies; it had something to do with her parents’ thirtieth wedding anniversary.”

I almost said it out loud:
You should have paid in cash, Alison. Third mistake.

A
birth certificate is the cornerstone for creating a new identity. It’s the most widely accepted form of identification in the United States. And Alison had several on which she could print any name and date she desired.

Once she fills in the blanks, she leaves them in the backyard, letting the sun age them. She mails one stating that she’s fifteen to the Social Security Administration, along with a note written in longhand on ruled paper saying, “Daddy is making me get a job.” Wham, she has a bona fide social security number.

She brings a second birth certificate stating her age at anywhere between twenty-four and thirty, along with the social security card, to the Department of Motor Vehicles, pick your own state. If anyone should ask, she explains that after living overseas for ten years with her father, who is in the U.S. Air Force, she needs a valid driver’s license. She takes a test. Bam, now she has the second most widely used form of ID, accepted by grocery store clerks and traffic cops throughout the nation.

Now she can get a passport, a bank account, credit cards, insurance; she can get a job, start her own business, borrow money. All she needs is time and patience—and Alison had both.

Perfect. Just perfect.

S
purred by yet another hunch, I fired up my PC and began conducting a credit-bureau sweep and a vital-information trace against Rosalind Colletti, Alison’s erstwhile stage name.