“A myth to scare the kids into bed.”
“Frightening when the myth hits home.”
“Yes.”
“This was a waste of time.” Ryan slipped aviator shades onto his nose.
“At least the Violettes know we’re not giving up.”
“I’m sure they’re popping the bubbly even as we speak.”
“Did you have a bad night?”
Ryan activated his turn indicator.
“You look like you spent it somewhere dark and dank.”
My attempt at humor drew no response. Ryan made a right, another, then a left. Loud and clear. The boy wanted distance.
Using a mitten to clear condensation from the glass, I looked out my window. Pedestrians streamed the sidewalks flanking Queen Mary and bunched at the intersections, impatient to cross. Students with backpacks. Shoppers with plastic or string-handled bags. Mothers with strollers. All wore clothing suited for Antarctica.
Undaunted, I tried again. “Did you locate Tawny McGee?”
“Working on it.”
“Is her family still in Maniwaki?”
“No.”
“The mother was on her own, right? Two kids?”
“Yes.”
“Wasn’t the sister somewhere out west?”
“Sandra Catherine. In Alberta.”
“She still there?”
“No.”
“What next?” When Ryan didn’t elaborate.
“Sabine Pomerleau.”
“Anique’s mother is still alive?” Whipping sideways to look at him.
Sun glinted from the aviators as they swiveled my way, then recentered on the road.
I settled back. Of course my question was stupid. Though desperate, we obviously couldn’t interview a corpse.
But Ryan’s words surprised me. The Pomerleaus had married late, tried for years to conceive. After prolonged anguish and much priestly counsel, Anique, their miracle child, finally had been sent by God in 1975, when Mama was forty-three and Papa was forty-eight. Thus Sabine told the story of her daughter’s birth.
I did the math. Sabine would be eighty-two now, her husband eighty-seven.
“Is Jacques still alive?”
“Kicked in ’06.”
I wondered if the miracle child’s infamy had contributed to her daddy’s demise. Kept the thought to myself.
We’d just parked in front of a two-story gray stone semi-detached in the Notre-Dame-de-Grace neighborhood when my iPhone buzzed. As I dug it from my purse, Ryan pantomimed smoking by placing two fingers to his lips. He got out of the Jeep, and I clicked on. “Brennan.”
“I coulda better spent the time flossing.”
An image of Slidell working his teeth at a mirror was not one I welcomed. “You talked to Tehama County?”
“The high sheriff himself. Willis Trout. The guy’s got the brainpower—”
“Did Trout remember Angela Robinson?”
“I doubt he’d remember how to sneeze without prompting.” I waited.
“No. But once I convinced fish boy I wasn’t a crank, he agreed to look for the file. I just got a callback. You’re gonna love this.” Slidell allowed another theatrical pause. “It’s gone.”
“Gone?”
“Robinson disappeared in ’85. In those days everything was still on paper. When the case chilled, the file ended up in a basement. Which turns out to be real bad planning, since the Sacramento River gets frisky every few years and floods the whole friggin’ county.”
“The file was destroyed?”
“The basement took hits in ’99 and ’04.”
“Did you ask Trout about Menard and Catts?”
“Let’s see. How’d he put it? Given that both are dead, have been for years, and will remain so in the future, he couldn’t waste time researching their bios.”
For a very long moment, empty air filled the line. Through the windshield, I could see Ryan talking on his mobile. Then Slidell shared the only good news I’d heard in a while.
“We may get lucky with Leal’s computer. The IT guy’s using some sort of mojo recovery software, getting fragments, whatever the hell that means.”
“Pieces of the browser history.”
“Yeah. He says the deletions were amateur-hour. Thinks he might be able to nail some sites the kid visited.”