“The problem is we don’t have any other viable alternatives as to who could have done it,” Lonnie says. “Hollis is out, so is Alicia’s boyfriend.”
“Eddie Mae,” Jay says. “See if you can find in here the client records for Magnus Carr, his neighbors too, on both sides. He’s across the street from Elma, if I remember. There may have been someone else out there who saw something different. Plus, if I can get a look at his client file, I can get a better feel for the guy, what makes him tick, what might have made him susceptible to the D.A.’s suggestion that it was Neal out there, and not someone else.” Eddie Mae nods, pushing back from the table and smoothing her tight skirt as she stands; she’s the only one besides Jay who can make sense of their crude filing system, the boxes they never adequately unpacked in the move to this office. Jay’s client files are essentially mini dossiers on the individual plaintiffs, based on their answers to an extensive questionnaire that Jay designed himself. The files can grow to twenty, thirty, sometimes forty pages long, containing every detail of his clients’ lives, from birth dates to the names of spouses; those of their children and their ages; their parents; city and county of birth; their schooling, income, religious affiliation, political inclination; social clubs they belong to; how long they’ve owned their homes; previous addresses and places of employment; criminal history and/or any pertinent facts in regard to any previous involvement with the legal system–not to mention copious information about their medical history, including surgeries; and hospitalizations; and pregnancies, miscarriages, or forced terminations–all of it going back to birth. Clients are not obligated to answer every question, but most do. In civil suits, they’re not the ones with anything to hide. The forms help Jay get a more complete picture of the people he’s serving, who they were before and after the inciting injury, in this case, the establishment of the ProFerma chemical plant in Pleasantville’s backyard. “Carr’s a quiet one, what I remember, reluctant to get involved in the civil suit.”
With Rolly’s help, Eddie Mae lifts a banker’s box to the other end of the conference table from where she was sitting. With her plum-colored fingernails, she flips through the plastic tabs on the hanging file folders within.
Lon glances around the table. She has on black jeans, and her kneecaps are pressed against the side of the table. She tugs at her button-down shirt, pulling it closed over a lacy camisole underneath. It’s cool in here. One week before Thanksgiving, Houston has gone and got itself a cold, with thick phlegmy clouds overhead, gray and swollen, coughing a light mist of rain, and the glass replacement for the window is thin and cheap. “Don’t shoot me for saying it,” she says. “But anybody else got a hinky feeling about the girl’s stepfather?”
Jay, in particular, doesn’t want to touch this.
It brings back a host of bad memories of his own stepfather, nights he crept past Jay’s bedroom door, heading for Jay’s baby sister.
He draws another line down the paper on the board, writing in a third column the name Mitchell Robicheaux, followed by a question mark.
“Based on what?” Neal says.
“I may be reaching, but haven’t we wondered from the beginning why this one was different from the others?” Lon says. She reminds them of how badly Alicia was beaten, which Jay couldn’t forget if he wanted to, and the fact that she was found in a different location. “Maybe this one is different because it is different,” she says.
“Different killer?” Rolly speculates. He, as much as anyone else, had staked a resolution on the idea that one man had done all three girls, otherwise what in hell had he been chasing Alonzo Hollis for? He looks at Jay, to gauge his response. Jay is staring at the board, at the name Mitchell Robicheaux.
“Instead of a pattern, maybe it begins and ends with her,” Lon says, pointing to a photo of Alicia, the high school graduation photo from the Chronicle, which Eddie Mae had carefully cut from its pages, tacking the image to a corkboard to the right of Jay’s notepad. They all stare at her face.
“Which brings us back to what she was doing out there,” Rolly says.
“Where are we with the flyers?” asks Jay.
Rolly shakes his head. “We combed the north and to the east, south down to Pearland. We’ll push to the west next, but so far we haven’t found anything.”
Lon scrunches up the freckled flesh along the bridge of her nose, pondering something. “They found one in her purse, didn’t they?” she says, tapping a Bic pen against her right kneecap. “One flyer she’d folded up and saved. If she was out there to distribute Wolcott’s flyers–”
“Then why’d she keep one for herself?”
Jay is ashamed he didn’t see it sooner. “She called you that night,” he says to Neal. “You returned the call, leaving your number on her pager, not knowing whose call you were returning, but the point is she reached out to you.”
“You think she knew?” Neal says. “What Wolcott’s team was up to?”
“She had to,” Jay says. “They put her in a blue T-shirt, looking like one of Hathorne’s people, like a local, an insider who was concerned about Axel’s motives. She knew what they were using her to do. And she called Neal.”
“You think she was trying to tell me?”
“I think it’s possible.”
“We should subpoena the phone records, the campaign’s, your cell phone,” Lonnie says, pointing to Neal, who is shaking his head. Jay seems to agree. “It could backfire,” he says. “Any evidence of prior contact only bolsters the state’s claim that the two knew each other, that they were planning to meet.”