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“I–I’m not sure. It would be like Didi, to want to make a big splash and go out with a bang, but not after all this time of being in hiding. And she would have played to the crowd more than . . . than the victim did. So, no, I don’t think it’s my mom, and I don’t want to think it.” She squared her slim shoulders. “But I want to see her. The body, I mean. I have to. And then . . . And then I’ll know for sure.”
“After all this time?”
“Yes.” Remmi Storm seemed more certain of that fact than of anything since she’d started talking.
“You have the name of that agency?”
“The Reliant Agency. Jennifer Reliant is the agent of record, but it seems pretty fly-by-night to me,” she admitted. “Everything about the book and the small publishing house seems off. And there’s not much about Jennifer Reliant or the agency on the Internet that I can find. Seems like a one-woman operation, if that.”
“Meaning you’re not sure it exists?”
“Meaning I have yet to talk to a real person or get a response from one, just some kind of answering service, I think, so that doesn’t say a lot.”
Brown had been lingering. His cell phone chirped, and Dani met his gaze. “I’ve got this,” she said and he took the hint and answered his phone as he walked away.
As he left, Remmi reached into the pocket of her jacket and pulled out two pictures, worn and faded, both of which she handed to Dani.
“These are of your mother?”
“Yeah, both of them were taken about a year before she left, I think,” she said, and there was a trace of bitterness in her tone. Settler hadn’t seen either of the photographs before. There were some black-and-white shots in the book, but not either of these. And she’d seen pictures of Didi Storm on the Internet; these were different, personal.
“When was the last time you talked to her?”
“The night she took off.”
“Twenty years ago?”
“She said she’d be back in the morning.”
“And she never returned?”
A shake of the head, ponytail bobbing, mouth even tighter. “She just disappeared.” Dani guessed the woman sitting so rigidly across her desk was in her mid-thirties. If that were the case, then she’d been a teenager when the mother had vanished.
Settler studied the two photos. One was of a Marilyn Monroe look-alike and the other of a woman of about thirty-five with darker hair and little makeup. With even features, devious eyes, and a little, almost naughty smile, she was staring at the photographer and hoisting a half-full martini glass.
Could this woman in the photo be the Jane Doe who was lying in the morgue, her body broken from a near twenty-story fall to hard pavement? There was a definite resemblance, but Settler didn’t think so.
“So, in the intervening years, you were with your dad?”
A quick shake of the head. “Nope. Out of the picture.” Her demeanor suggested the subject of her father was taboo. But Settler left it for now. She knew firsthand how messy family dynamics could be. She had a stepmother and a couple of half siblings to prove it. But if it was important to the case, Remmi and Didi’s relationship with Dear Old Dad would have to be put under a microscope—especially if the victim did, in fact, turn out to be the missing Didi Storm.
Which she was still betting against, despite the resemblance of the photographs to the victim. “What happened then? You had to have been in your teens when she left.”
A beat. For a second, Settler thought Remmi Storm was going to lie. “I went to live with my aunt. My mother’s sister, Vera, and her family. I hadn’t even met them before I moved in,” she added. “I hadn’t met anyone in my family. My mother and her parents weren’t close and never spoke, as far as I knew. Same with Vera, but since I was a minor, Social Services located Vera and her husband, Milo. They agreed to take me in, but I only lived with them for a couple of years.”
“And the rest of the family?”
“No. My grandparents were still in Missouri, a place called Anderstown; my aunt filled me in. She let me know that they’d passed on a few years ago. I have an uncle, too. Billy. He was in the military, I think, and is probably out by now. But I have no idea and really, no interest. They were all strangers to me.”
So far, Remmi’s story fit with what Settler already knew. She’d decided to keep her information on Didi Storm to herself and let the other woman talk and see if what she told deviated from what Settler believed to be fact. So far, Remmi Storm hadn’t outwardly lied. When Settler asked about the baby, her half sibling, Remmi corrected her and said there were actually two, a boy and girl, who would be going on twenty-one—nearly adults, if they’d survived. Talk of her infant brother and sister seemed to sadden her, and she insisted that one, the girl, Ariel, had been left in the desert with her father, though he thought he was getting a boy, for a quarter of a million dollars, which he had paid with what had turned out to be largely fraudulent bills. The boy had been left with Remmi, then stolen by Seneca Williams, a midwife who, too, had disappeared. Remmi feared the little girl had died in the desert when the car her father had been driving had exploded.
“I don’t know exactly what went down that night,” she admitted. “I heard gunshots, saw the explosion, and heard later from the police that a kid on a motorbike, Noah Scott, had been shot out there, too. Before they could interview him, he left the hospital. How it all ties in? I don’t know.”
“Where’s Noah Scott now?” Settler asked.
“I don’t know.”
“A whole lotta people just up and disappeared back then.”
