“No, you dumbass.” I grab the remote and switch it off, begrudgingly—on this round, I was going to zoom in on her notice board and get the name of her doctor’s office from the appointment card pinned near the top. “Why the fuck has Harvey sent my sample back? Does he know how many chocolate buttons it took to convince a one-year-old to let me take a proper swab?”
She frowns. “Are kids that young even meant to have chocolate buttons?”
“He’s still alive—don’t get your panties in a twist. I need the DNA test, Tuij.”
“He can’t run it.” She glares until I take my feet off the sofa, and then sinks down beside me in a cloud of floral abuse that I suspect is meant to be perfume. “His contact for the national database fell through.”
I scrunch a handful of chips to little splinters that grate at my palm. “So tell him to get another one.”
“Gosh, why didn’t I think of that? Oh, wait—maybe because I’m not a patronizing ass? If you ask me, it was a stupid idea hiring security with no FBI contacts in the first place.”
“I didn’t ask you. Mind your mouth.” I hired Harvey precisely because he wasn’t ex-government; the problem with people who’ve worked within the FBI, NSA or even the local police department is that they have a tendency to become informants somewhere down the line. Harvey’s father is an ex-police force PI with his own business, and Harvey worked with him after college for several years. He prefers discrete hookers to girlfriends, and his only family is his brother and niece, which minimizes his vulnerabilities significantly. He has connections, but not obligations—I liked that. And so far, he’s come through…until now.
“Turns out people are really funny about who goes nosing through DNA,” she says, not without irony. “We’re not gonna get in here. You need to go back to your mom or something, get other stuff on this guy.”
I roll my eyes. “She won’t tell me anything. Hence having to DNA test my own brother to get his father’s identity. It’s a fucking joke.”
“Maybe he’s real famous or something, and he paid her off.”
“I sincerely doubt it.”
“Or maybe she doesn’t know his name either, and just doesn’t want to admit it.”
“She knows. He was around more than once.”
I take a big gulp of beer, and focus on Miss Michigan’s nipples to calm myself—she’s frozen mid-pinch. Enlarged on the screen, the caramel peaks almost as big as my hand. Heh. On the downside, this level of magnification also treats me to the sight of her mauled, dry cuticles. Jesus. Maybe I’ll send her a manicure voucher; I like how I’d be creeping her out and doing other dudes a favor at the same time.
“It’s not like this was guaranteed to work, anyways,” she goes on. “I mean, it relied on him being in the database in the first place. Didn’t you say your Ma likes clean-cut types? He’d need to be a criminal to be in the database, right?”
“I said she liked pretentious assholes. And yeah, this was hardly fool-proof, but I can’t see you pulling any other helpful suggestions out of your ass. So go find someone who’ll take money to play with CODIS, and I’ll wait here with my co-ed for company.”
“I already tried that, remember?” She pulls a compact out of her coat pocket and assesses the state of her glossy lipstick, tipping her chin to different angles in order to catch the light. “Nobody can find this guy. Your brother was officially sired by a ghost. If he wanted money, he’d have already come to us with his blackmaily knuckles dragging along the floor. You need to let this one go.”
“People don’t just disappear,” I say bluntly. “They go someplace, and they leave shit behind.”
She pauses. Deliberately looks into her little mirror, rather than me. “But your dad did. Didn’t he?”
“That was different.” He didn’t really disappear; they just never found him. I know exactly where he is.
Or what’s left of him.