Tessa’s expression was shadowed as she nodded, and guilt swam through me for making her relive painful memories. However, when she looked up at me she had a smile on her face. She has my back, I reminded myself.
“You really only need to check out four of them,” she said, “since you already know about Peter Cerise and your grandmother. Your best bet will probably be the married couple. I’m blanking on their name, but I seem to remember something in the news about them being survived by a son.”
“I’ll head back to the office and pull up the report.…” I trailed off, frowning as Jill grinned and pulled a ridiculously small laptop out of her purse.
“The lab gets all the cool new toys first,” she said as she opened it and set it on the coffee table. “Remote access to the database. I can pull up the report from the fire here.”
“That’s not fair,” I pouted. “Why can’t the detectives get some of the nice shit?”
“Because you don’t know how to use it,” she retorted.
I hmmfed and plopped into a chair. It didn’t help that she was right.
“Okay, according to the report the victims were Robert Lamothe, Frank McCreary, Cherie and Keveen Bergeron, Peter Cerise, and Gracie Pazhel.” At my grandmother’s name she glanced up at me with a slight grimace before returning her attention to the screen. “Now I’ll run a check on them through my various people search functions.”
I felt a bit silly just watching her work, but Ryan and Zack watched her just as intently.
“Got something!” Jill crowed. “The married couple did indeed have a son. Gerald Bergeron. He lives in Baton Rouge at—” She grimaced. “Nope, scratch that. He died several years ago.” She continued to click the touchpad and finally exhaled. “Ah, but he had a kid. He’d be in his late twenties now.” She looked at me. “Could be?’
“It’s our only lead so far,” I said with an answering shrug. “Gimme everything you have on him.”
Her brow puckered in concentration as she worked the search. “Well, I have a name—Raymond Bergeron.” Her forehead puckered. “But no DL, no passport. No pics that I can find anywhere.” She clicked a few more keys. “Oh, here we go. Raymond was reported as a runaway when he was fourteen.”
The back of my neck prickled, and I sat up. “This sounds promising. Maybe he changed his name.”
“What about the parents?” Ryan asked. “What else do you have on them?”
“Lemme get back to that screen,” she said. “Plenty of stuff on them.” She fell silent, her eyes flicking across the screen. “The mom died about two years before Raymond ran away.” Jill winced. “Suicide. Shut herself in the garage, stuffed blankets under the doors, and left the car running.” Pursing her lips, she clicked through some more screens. “And the dad, Gerald Bergeron, passed away from a heart attack about five years ago.”
“Crap,” I muttered, frustrated. “This kid, Raymond, has to be our guy. I just know it. There are no pictures of him anywhere?”
“Not on any databases I have access to, but…” she trailed off and tilted her head, frowned. “Oh, wow.…”
“What?” I demanded, fighting an urge to rip the laptop away from her.
She exhaled. “Well, no pics of Raymond. But I do have a DL pic of his dad.” She turned the laptop toward me.
I stared. I couldn’t have been more shocked if she’d shown me a picture of the Pope. “There’s no way,” I said.
Jill shrugged. “It might not be,” she said. “This is a picture of the father, after all, so any similarity in appearance could be nothing more than coincidence.”
“I don’t understand,” Ryan said, frowning. “Who do you think it is?”
“Well,” I said, “unless this guy has a double running around, this is the father of one Officer Tracy Gordon.”
Chapter 20
“He was in my house. In m