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“Derrick,” Erica said gently. “We’ve found her.”
At first, I didn’t know what she meant. I think it was my brain’s last ditch effort to avoid insanity, but it only lasted for a split second before my hand started to squeeze the phone and my jaw began to ache. My heart thumped erratically in my chest. I felt a cold sweat bead out on my forehead, and all I can remember thinking is finally. Finally we’ve found you. It wasn’t a relief born out of need; well, not the need of Julie McKenna. It was more the necessity of finally knowing where she was, that I could look at a map and point and say, “There she is. She’s somewhere right there.” It took away a layer of the mysteriousness off it all, but I didn’t know how much further I wanted to dig.
“Where?” I croaked out.
Erica hesitated. “Bear, you should know that this doesn’t really change anything, okay? We’re still going to move forward like we had planned, we’re still going to push and pull and fight until we get what we want.
Nothing is going to change that. The only thing this means is now we know where she is, so we won’t necessarily have any surprise
s coming down the road. We’ve already sent a process server out to her with the paperwork showing your intention of gaining custody of Ty, in addition to supports for her to sign if she is willing to relinquish custody of him to you.”
“Dammit, where is she?”
“Coeur D’Alene.”
“Coeur D’Alene? Where’s—wait. Idaho?”
“Yes.”
“You’re fucking telling me that she’s only four hundred miles away?”
“Yes.”
I saw red, and I heard Otter call out my name in a worried tone from his little office down the hall. “How long has she been there?”
“Bear, does it really matter? What matters is that we know. For some reason, she decided to apply for a checking account through Idaho Fidelity, and it pinged back to us off the skip-trace search.”
“How long!”
Erica sighed. “It looks like she’s been there the whole time, Bear.”
Otter came up behind me and wrapped his arms around my chest, pulling me back into him, resting his chin on the top of my head. I felt him breathing behind me as he rubbed his thumb against my sternum, and I was able to rein in my anger, at least for the moment. I glanced back up at him, and he must have seen the fear and anger in my eyes because his brow furrowed, and he took the phone from my hands and pushed a button to bring it on speakerphone. He set the phone on the counter and gathered me in his arms again, like he was trying to shield me from her words.
“Erica, it’s Otter. I’ve put you on speaker.”
“Is Tyson with you?” she asked cautiously.
“He’s outside. I assume that you’ve found her?”
“Yes. In Idaho. There’s… something else you should know.”
“Will it affect the outcome of the custody petition?”
“It may, though I can’t quite decide if it would be in our favor or not, especially if she decides to attempt to get custody of Tyson. Though, obviously, her absence would play heavily against her. Probably to the point that no court would award custody to her. Visitation rights, maybe, but not custody.”
For the life of me, I couldn’t think of what it could be. “What is it, Erica? Stop being vague and just fucking tell me.”
“The guy she moved out there with? Frank Taylor? They still live together in a sort of common-law relationship. They are not married, as far as we can tell, and that would have popped up almost immediately as she would have a marriage certificate on file. But… there’s a… a third person in the household. And we were able to verify it through hospital records. Even though we couldn’t access them in their entirety due to privacy laws, we were able to confirm dates.”
“Dates of what?” Otter asked, even though I already knew. I closed my eyes and wished it wasn’t so.
“Julie McKenna gave birth in May of last year at the age of forty-four to a baby girl. Frank Taylor is the father listed on the birth certificate. The child was not put up for adoption, and the process server said that when Julie answered the door, she was carrying a little girl in her arms.”
“You’ve got to be shitting me,” I whispered.
Erica sounded miserable. “I wish I was, Bear. You’ve got a half-sister now. Isabelle Jade Taylor, born May 26. There’s no records of Child Protective Services ever having been out to the house for any reason, no records of any time police have been called to the address in Coeur D’Alene, which are lower middle-class apartments.”
Only one thought crossed my mind. “We can’t tell the Kid,” I said, my voice barely sounding like my own. “We can’t tell him about her. Any of it.
