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“I’ll head back to the office and pull up the report.…” I trailed off, frowning as Jill grinned and pulled a ridiculously small laptop out of her purse.
“The lab gets all the cool new toys first,” she said as she opened it and set it on the coffee table. “Remote access to the database. I can pull up the report from the fire here.”
“That’s not fair,” I pouted. “Why can’t the detectives get some of the nice shit?”
“Because you don’t know how to use it,” she retorted.
I hmmfed and plopped into a chair. It didn’t help that she was right.
“Okay, according to the report the victims were Robert Lamothe, Frank McCreary, Cherie and Keveen Bergeron, Peter Cerise, and Gracie Pazhel.” At my grandmother’s name she glanced up at me with a slight grimace before returning her attention to the screen. “Now I’ll run a check on them through my various people search functions.”
I felt a bit silly just watching her work, but Ryan and Zack watched her just as intently.
“Got something!” Jill crowed. “The married couple did indeed have a son. Gerald Bergeron. He lives in Baton Rouge at—” She grimaced. “Nope, scratch that. He died several years ago.” She continued to click the touchpad and finally exhaled. “Ah, but he had a kid. He’d be in his late twenties now.” She looked at me. “Could be?’
“It’s our only lead so far,” I said with an answering shrug. “Gimme everything you have on him.”
Her brow puckered in concentration as she worked the search. “Well, I have a name—Raymond Bergeron.” Her forehead puckered. “But no DL, no passport. No pics that I can find anywhere.” She clicked a few more keys. “Oh, here we go. Raymond was reported as a runaway when he was fourteen.”
The back of my neck prickled, and I sat up. “This sounds promising. Maybe he changed his name.”
“What about the parents?” Ryan asked. “What else do you have on them?”
“Lemme get back to that screen,” she said. “Plenty of stuff on them.” She fell silent, her eyes flicking across the screen. “The mom died about two years before Raymond ran away.” Jill winced. “Suicide. Shut herself in the garage, stuffed blankets under the doors, and left the car running.” Pursing her lips, she clicked through some more screens. “And the dad, Gerald Bergeron, passed away from a heart attack about five years ago.”
“Crap,” I muttered, frustrated. “This kid, Raymond, has to be our guy. I just know it. There are no pictures of him anywhere?”
“Not on any databases I have access to, but…” she trailed off and tilted her head, frowned. “Oh, wow.…”
“What?” I demanded, fighting an urge to rip the laptop away from her.
She exhaled. “Well, no pics of Raymond. But I do have a DL pic of his dad.” She turned the laptop toward me.
I stared. I couldn’t have been more shocked if she’d shown me a picture of the Pope. “There’s no way,” I said.
Jill shrugged. “It might not be,” she said. “This is a picture of the father, after all, so any similarity in appearance could be nothing more than coincidence.”
“I don’t understand,” Ryan said, frowning. “Who do you think it is?”o;Remind me to stay on your good side,” he said with a wink, then he stepped back into his office and we continued on out.
Chapter 19
We raced back to my aunt’s house, ready to finally figure out what the deal was with the portals, but the triangulation hadn’t been as miraculous as we’d hoped, mostly due to the margin of error that Ryan had mentioned.
“The problem is that each location you triangulated from is fairly far apart,” Jill explained as she showed us the map. “And there’s no way to know if you were holding the compass exactly in the direction where you felt the pull. Therefore, I went ahead and charted it for the bearings you gave us, then with a two-degree margin for error, and also a five-degree margin.” She grimaced. “Even with only a plus or minus of a couple of degrees, it still gives us a pretty large area.”
She’d drawn colored cones extending from each triangulation point, giving us an intersection of what looked like a diamond several blocks long, located on the northeast end of town in what looked like a mix of homes and businesses. “Crap,” I said. “There’s something in there that I’m supposed to open or activate or find or whatever.”
“I’m betting it’s more than just a portal,” my aunt said as she peered at the map.
“I concur,” Eilahn said. “This summoner made the effort to have you drugged, most likely because whatever is in this location requires someone with extensive aptitude or innate talent in utilizing potency.”
“Great,” I muttered. “So what could it be?”
“I would imagine it’s something that uses the portals,” Tessa said, lifting her shoulders in a light shrug. She straightened. “But no matter what it is, I think it’s best if you don’t go anywhere near it.”
“Again,” Eilahn said, “I concur.”
“Look, I’m cool with that,” I said, then fell silent. Something about the whole thing was bugging me, and I needed a minute to tease it out. “This drug,” I said finally, “it’s not just making me point in a particular direction. My impulse control seems to be shot to hell. And I think it might have been the same with the victims as well.” I thought back to what Pellini had said about Barry getting into his face. Maybe his impulse control had been slipping? Why else would an ex-con take a chance on antagonizing a cop?
