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How much were they entitled to? Eve wondered. “We believe the man you know as Darrin Pauley is and has been in New York. We believe he has committed various cyber crimes and engaged in forms of identity theft.”
Vinnie lowered his head to his hands. “Like Vance. Just like Vance. What do I tell my parents? Do I tell them?”
“Mr. Pauley, there’s more. There’s harder, and within the next forty-eight hours it’s going to be in the media.” He lifted his face to meet her eyes, and his were full of fear. “The man you know as Darrin Pauley is the primary suspect in the rape-murder of a sixteen-year-old girl. The daughter of a decorated police officer.”
“No. No. No. Mimi.”
She put her arms around him, and though her face registered shock and horror, it didn’t show disbelief. Her eyes met Eve’s as she held her husband, and she nodded. “I was afraid of him. When he looked at me, I was afraid. That girl, we heard about it. We heard about it this morning on the bedroom screen when we were getting dressed. They said your name. Lieutenant Dallas. I’d forgotten.”
“I need anything you can remember, any detail you can give me on Darrin, your brother, Inga Sorenson.”
“I think they may have hit my parents up for money a few times.” Vinnie rubbed his eyes again. “We don’t talk about it, or them, but it’s hard to say no to your own.”
“Let’s find out.”
“Let me do that. Let me talk to them, explain . . . somehow. I’ll just use the other room. Is that all right?”
“Go ahead.”
“What do we do now?” Mimi asked. “What should we do? If he comes here—”
“I don’t believe he will. You’ve got nothing he wants. But I’ll talk to your local police. If he contacts you, you should stay calm, behave naturally. And contact your local police, and me immediately.”
“We’re going on vacation tomorrow.”
“And you should,” Eve told her. “Go exactly as you planned. Get out of this.”
“Enjoy your daughter,” Roarke added. “You have a good family. This isn’t part of it.”
On the drive back to transpo, Eve stared up at the sky. “Just more victims.”
“She’s a sensitive. At least she has a whiff of it,” he added when Eve turned her head to study him. “Just a sense I got from her, and one I think could explain why she saw what’s inside that boy. Maybe he wasn’t as adept at hiding it, but I think she saw inside, and it frightened her.”
“She was right to be.” Settling down, she started a standard run on Vance Pauley. “And she was right when she said Vance was a bad man. Lots of trouble here. The juvie’s unsealed, so somebody beat me to that along the way. He had trouble starting at nine. Truancy, theft, destruction of private property, cyber bullying, hacking, assault, battery.”
“At bloody nine?”
“I’m moving through. Twelve on the first assault. It was the ID fraud that had him in during the Inga period. Then he drops off, just like that. He’s got a mile-long sheet from childhood to the age of twenty-one, then nothing.”
“Got smarter.”
“Or Inga was smarter, and ran the games, taught him. And I’ve got nothing on her, nothing on that name that corresponds to the age, the description Pauley gave me, the location she lived when she was with him. She’s listed on Darrin’s records as his mother, DOD, May sixteen, 2041. He’d have been four. But there is no death record corresponding.”
“She’ll be in MacMasters’s files. Not under that name, necessarily, but she’s the motive. The reason for the plan he had even seven years ago.”
“Yeah. And I’ll find her.”
She pulled out her ’link when it signaled. “Dallas.”
“Are you seriously in Alabama?” Baxter demanded.
“I’m on my way to transpo, and will be heading back.”
“Could you pick up some barbecue? There’s nothing like Southern barbecue.”
“Baxter, it’s your ass getting barbecued if you’re tagging me for nothing.”
“Can I have barbecue if I’ve got something? Jesus, Dallas, you’re going to scare my appetite away with that face. Okay, we got a hit. Girl working the bar at a club that caters to barely legal college types. She made the sketch. She says she had some classes with this guy. He really did go to Columbia. Better yet, she’s a grad student, working her way through her master’s, and says she saw him—you’re going to love it—at a party on New Year’s freaking Eve.”
