The Naturalist (The Naturalist #1)

A balding man in his early thirties gets out of a faded Honda Civic and enters the restaurant. Although Robert Moorhen doesn’t share the same last name as his mother, he has the same eyes.

I wave him over to the booth, and he takes off his well-worn parka and has a seat across from me.

He eyes the folder sitting in front of me. “Is that about my mother?”

I’m hesitant to reply because there are autopsy photos in there. “Some of it. Thank you for meeting with me.”

“Yeah. Sure. I had today off. What can I do for you?”

“First, you understand I’m not a cop, right? I’m just a researcher?”

He nods. “I’d tell you anything, anyway. If I knew much. She died when I was five. My grandparents raised me.”

“What about your father?”

“He wasn’t around much. He was an oil worker who spent most of his time in Alaska and Canada. Mom and him didn’t last very long. They split before I was three.”

“This isn’t easy to say, but you know your mother had a troubled past . . .”

“The prostitution thing and the drug stuff? Yeah, you can say it. My grandparents never mentioned it, but when Dad got drunk, he’d go off on her history. I don’t want to believe it, but I guess I accept it. You just have to understand that wasn’t the woman I knew. I don’t have a lot of memories about her, but she was always there for me. A real good mom.” Robert points to a corner booth. “After preschool I used to sit there and color. She’d check on my ABCs between serving customers. Then . . . well.”

Robert’s memory is a sharp contrast to her mug shots, but I believe him.

“When your mother passed away, the doctors noticed some odd scars. Do you remember these?”

Robert thinks it over. “Maybe? Like dog scratches or something?”

“Yes. Something like that. Did she ever mention how she got them?”

“I was five. You kind of just accept the world as it is at that point. Maybe she said something. Like she got them when she was younger?”

“Younger? How much?”

“I don’t know. When you’re a kid, you just assume your parents were always grown-up. It’s weird—I’m older now than she was when she died. Yet she still feels like my mom.” He pauses and stares out the window. “The scars. Maybe she got them playing?”

“Playing?”

“I don’t know. She just didn’t talk about them. She never talked about her childhood.”

“I can’t find much about it. What do you know?”

“She left the home when she was sixteen or seventeen. That’s about it.”

“The home?”

“Yeah. The foster home where she lived. She never talked about that. She’d been in and out of the system since she was a baby.”

“Do you know anything about this foster home? Who her foster parents were?”

“No. It wasn’t far from here. I know that. She grew up in this area.”

Interesting. I need to ask Mead if she can get me any information on that. If that’s when Sarah got the scars . . .

“Do you have any suspects?” asks Robert.

“No. As I said, I’m not an investigator. I’m just doing academic research.”

“I hope you get the guy who killed her.”

“I hope so, too . . .” I stop when I realize what he just said. “Wait . . . your mother died of an overdose.”

“Right. But she didn’t put that needle in her arm. Somebody else did and gave her a lethal dose.”

I slide the police report out of the folder and read through it again. The cause of death is listed as accidental overdose. This might be too much for Robert to cope with, although he said that with so much conviction.

“You don’t think your mom had a relapse?”

Robert points to the table where he sat as a child. “Last time I saw her was right there. She finished her shift and went outside to grab a smoke. She never did that around me. And she never came back. Two days later they found her twenty miles away in a motel room.” His voice begins to rise. “My mother may have been a lot of things—hooker, junkie, thief—but she was a good mother, damn it. She adored me. If she wanted to run off with some old boyfriend and shoot up, she would have dropped me off at my grandparents’, not abandoned me.”

His face is filled with rage. Not just at me but at the injustice the world did to him.

“I’m sorry, Robert. I didn’t mean to suggest otherwise.”

He stares out into the parking lot and calms down. “Sorry. It’s something that I think about every day. When you called, I just assumed it was about that. That they’d solved the . . . what do they call it? The cold case. I guess it was too much to hope for.”

“No, it’s not. Why do you think someone would want to kill your mother?”

“I don’t know. As a kid, I thought it might be like a crime movie, where she saw something she shouldn’t have. Now? I don’t know. I couldn’t imagine anyone hating her.”

“What did your father say?”

“Nothing. We don’t exactly have a close relationship. Maybe he mentioned something once about her going to shoot up with a junkie boyfriend. But ask anyone here that knew her and they’ll tell you she wouldn’t have just left me here like that. Not unless it was against her will. I mean, who would leave a kid here, all alone?”

“I don’t know, Robert. I don’t know. But I’ll look into that.”

It’s not an empty promise. But to get to the bottom of it, I need to start at the beginning of Sarah’s darker life—and possibly where she first encountered the killer.





CHAPTER SIXTY-THREE


HOMESTEAD

Julie Lane greets me at the door with a warm smile on her worn face. There are a few traces of gray in the dark hair she wears pulled back in a turquoise band, making estimating her age difficult.

From the late 1960s to the early ’80s, she and her husband ran a foster home out here on this farm at the edge of Red Hook. Her large house, set against the Montana mountain backdrop, is surrounded by tall fir trees that stand out in the otherwise flat grazing land.

“Mrs. Lane, I’m Theo Cray. We spoke on the phone? I’m doing some research on Montana history.”

“Yes. Yes, of course.” She opens the door and ushers me in.

A faded-orange couch sits in a living room that seems trapped in time from the 1970s. About the only modern concessions are a flat-screen television and an iPad with a crossword puzzle on it.

I take a seat on the couch next to her easy chair. “As I said on the phone, I’m doing some genealogy research and wanted to talk to you about some of the children that came through here.”

“Right. To be honest, I don’t know a whole lot about where they came from. We had all kinds of children here. White, brown, Indian, mixed. It didn’t matter. We just wanted to give them a good home, and we did the best we could.”

I want to jump right in and ask if any of the children were potential homicidal maniacs but have to ease my way in.

“What were their ages?”

“We specialized in teens. Troubled teens, as my husband used to say. But they were good.”

“No behavior problems?”

She laughs. “They were teenagers. They all had behavior problems. But it was just acting out.”

“I see. Do you remember a girl by the name of Sarah Eaves?”

Lane’s expression changes for a moment; then she makes a small shake of her head. “No . . . not really. Maybe? Was she one of ours?”

“She was here in the early ’80s. For two years, until she left home. She ended up not too far from here.”

“Possibly. Perhaps if I saw a picture?”

I show her a photo Sarah’s son gave me. “This would have been her around twenty.”

“Yes,” she says after a looking at it for a while. “I remember her now.”

“Do you remember anything about her?”

“No, I can’t say that I do. Like I said, I don’t remember all of them. So many faces. You know how it is.”

It’s quite obvious to me that this woman is holding much more back than she cares to say.

“I just spoke with her son. He was quite interested to know what his mother was like as a child.”

“Her son? Sarah had a boy?”

The way her face lights up at the mention of a baby and the way she said “Sarah” tells me she’s much more familiar with her than she’s let on.

“Yes. Nice guy. He gave me the photo.”

“May I look at it again?”

I hand it back to her. She cradles it with both hands. “How old is the boy?”

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