Danielle didn’t answer for a few beats. “But what do they know? They haven’t spent the last fifteen years hoping to see Sarah, that’s the thing.”
That didn’t exactly help her cause. “I spoke to her myself,” I said. I got up and cracked the window in my office and then, remembering what had happened last night, closed it again just as quickly. “The resemblance is very, very real.”
Danielle sighed. “So you don’t believe me either. Great.”
“It’s not about believing you. It’s about what we can prove.”
“So that’s it.”
“No, not necessarily,” I said. I filled her in on the murder of Mallory Evans, leaving out the parts about her brother’s name in my father’s notebook for now, until I had even the slightest clue what it meant.
“And you think all this might have something to do with my brother?” she said, somewhat incredulously.
“Well, not exactly.” I chewed and looked up at the ceiling. “I don’t know. Did you know her?”
“Me? No,” Danielle said. “I mean, she had a reputation as trouble. In middle school she got busted for drugs in her locker and had to go to this boot-camp program that the city runs for messed-up kids. And I remember she was kind of wild. Like, lots of boyfriends. But I didn’t know-her-know-her. I was two years behind her, I was a freshman when she dropped out. I heard she was pregnant.”
“Did Brad know her?”
“Probably just from being in class together.”
“I’m just thinking, Belmont’s an awfully small town to have two—well, three—murders less than a year apart.”
“I guess I never really thought about it like that.”
“Really,” I said.
“Mallory … I don’t know. That was different. I heard all kinds of things about her. Like I heard that she would have sex in exchange for drugs. And I’m not saying anyone deserves what happened to her, but you have to wonder. How careful she was. People didn’t really talk about it when she died. When Sarah’s parents were killed though, the whole town was just completely shaken. Listen, I have to say, this isn’t really what I expected when I hired you,” she finished. “I thought you’d, I don’t know, be talking to the police, talking to people about Brad.”
“I did,” I said. “I am.” I sounded defensive. On top of that, I sounded exhausted and clueless. I didn’t know what else to tell her. I opened my laptop and Googled Columbus city schools Pamela. It was ridiculously easy, like all things that don’t matter. Pamela Gregorio. Tom’s new girlfriend. She was tagged in a photo on the Web site for an annual fund-raiser, caught in a camera-ready embrace with three other women and their glasses of wine. She was a pretty redhead with a coy smile, wearing those hip tortoiseshell glasses and a V-neck sweater. She seemed all right. I was disappointed. “This is just how I usually work.”
“And how is that?”
“Exploring whatever comes up,” I said as I searched on Pamela’s full name: thirty-eight next month, owned a condo in Grandview.
“My brother doesn’t have time for you to explore whatever comes up,” she said next, and I winced again. She had a point. She was quiet for a bit before adding, “But he did tell me that he liked you.”
I slammed the computer closed. “Did he,” I said.
“He doesn’t like much these days.”
“Danielle, I promise you, I’m trying.”
She sighed. “I guess I just imagined this would be more like The Rockford Files or something.”
I would have thought that fifteen years of visiting her brother in jail would have disabused her of any idealism about criminal cases, but maybe it was a coping mechanism of some kind. “What, a fistfight and a resolution in forty-five minutes flat?”
“Something like that,” she said, but I could hear a smile in her voice now. “Just please remember. I hired you to help Brad, not anybody else.”
“I’ll keep you posted,” I told her.
When she didn’t tell me not to bother, I assumed that meant I was still employed.
*
Joshua Evans exuded unhappiness. He was a big guy, fortyish and tired-looking, wearing a faintly grease-stained polo shirt from the car dealership where he worked as a service advisor. He looked like he hadn’t shaved recently and hadn’t smiled in way longer. It was clear he hadn’t had an easy time since his young wife was murdered; even after sixteen years, the pain of it was still fresh on his face, evident in his body language and the state of affairs in his small bungalow house: a haphazard mess, the carpet around his chair barely visible for all the old mail, fast-food wrappers, dog toys, shoes. I was hoping he could give me something to go on as far as Mallory’s murder, hopefully something other than Brad Stockton, but I wanted to ease into that particular topic. So I went with a spiel about my father’s death prompting me to look into some of his old cases.
“He seemed like a good guy, your dad,” he was telling me. “He called me every December. Just to check in, to tell me he hadn’t forgotten about her. I talked to a lot of cops when Mallory died. And I realized, cops are just people, doing a job, and some of them aren’t great at it. Frank though, he always made me feel like I had his full attention. When I heard about him on the news, I couldn’t believe it. I’m real sorry.”
I forced a smile. “I’m glad he was kind to you,” I said. “It’s good to hear.”
“But you want to talk about Mallory.”
“If you don’t mind.”
He nodded slowly. “I’m going to need a beer for that. You want one? Or maybe it’s too early.”
It was four in the afternoon, and not too early by a long shot. “No, a beer sounds great,” I said.
He heaved himself out of his beat-up recliner and shuffled off to the kitchen. “Mallory and I met at this bonfire party,” he said. I heard the refrigerator door open and close and when Joshua returned, he handed me a bottle of Miller Lite. “She told me she was the same age as me. I was twenty-two then. She looked it, and she sure acted like it. I didn’t know she was only seventeen till she and her mother were on my doorstep with an ultrasound photo.”
“So her age wasn’t the only surprise.”
“Nope,” Joshua said. “And I was not pleased. But I wanted to do right by her. Take care of her. That’s why we got married. She didn’t want that, but her parents did, and I did. She wanted to, you know, get an abortion. She didn’t want to be a mom, she said she’d be awful at it. I thought she’d change, the first time she held Shelby, like maybe all that mothering stuff is supposed to kick in automatically.” He took a long swallow of his beer. “Long story short, it didn’t. We were married for about a year, all told, and it was not an easy year. But I was doing my best, for Shelby.” Here he smiled, and some of the gloom vanished from his face. “Light of my life.”
I remembered how Danielle had described Mallory in middle school: wild. “How about Mallory?” I said. “Was she doing her best?”
Joshua shook his head. “She couldn’t handle it. She didn’t like staying home with the baby, she didn’t like cooking, cleaning. She didn’t even like me all that much, I don’t think.”