Did You Miss Me? (53 page)

She grabbed her handbag and followed him back to his room, her breakfast forgotten. Kerr and McManus had arrived and were eating the doughnuts. On the phone were Bo, JD and Brodie. Kate wasn’t able to get to a secure place to call, and Hector still stood watch over Ford.

‘Good morning,’ Joseph said. ‘We’ve got a lot of new developments so let’s jump in. First up, a possible ID for Doug. One of the neighbors of Odum’s house in Timonium reported seeing Doug try to buy superglue at the local drugstore. We weren’t able to get any photos from the store’s surveillance video, but we forgot about the superglue itself. Dr Brodie?’

‘Local uniforms are at the store now,’ Brodie said. ‘JD and I are about five minutes away. We’re hoping the package Doug touched is still in the store. If it’s not, the store has a record of anyone who bought superglue in the past two weeks, since everybody who buys it is carded. If someone’s bought that specific package, we’ll try to track them down. Hopefully they’ll still have the packaging in their possession. We’ll keep you up to date.’

‘Thanks. We’ll keep our fingers crossed. Second.’ Joseph glanced at Daphne, saw her jaw set grimly. It grew tighter as he explained the situation concerning Beckett’s death certificate and the non-existent Claudia Baker.

Bo cleared his throat. ‘Can you tell us
exactly
how you were contacted by the woman claiming to be Baker?’

‘I wrote to the FBI to ask whether they ever provided security for the families of informants whose information about a killer could endanger other members of the family. I said it was for a school project, a paper I was writing. I put the letter with all the outgoing mail at the Elkharts’ DC house. A few days later I got a visit from Agent Baker.’

‘Why did you write a letter?’ Bo asked. ‘Why didn’t you call or go in person?’

‘I didn’t call because I didn’t know who was listening to my calls. I’d just moved into my ex-mother-in-law’s house in Georgetown. She was very strict and didn’t let me have any contact with the outside. I had a tutor and a doctor, that was all.

‘When Agent Baker showed up, I was terrified that Nadine – my ex-mother-in-law – would find out. But she was taking her daily nap and my tutor was out sick so nobody saw me talking to the agent at the front door. I didn’t want Nadine to be angry. I was pregnant and fifteen and she had promised my baby a good life. I wasn’t about to get thrown out for breaking the rules. The agent said she knew who I was, that she’d searched the files and had finally found my story.’

‘How did she say they found out?’ McManus asked.

‘She said that my letter sounded like more than a school project, so she checked unsolved cases, found Daphne Sinclair and Kelly Montgomery. She said it didn’t take a rocket scientist to do the math. Plus, she could see my resemblance to the newspaper photos she’d found of me at eight years old.’

‘Plausible,’ Bo admitted.

‘Thank you,’ Daphne said sweetly, but Joseph wasn’t fooled. She was pissed at having to defend herself.

As well she should be
.
‘
What happened next?’ Joseph asked her.

‘She told me she’d wait for me in the park the next day if I could get away. My tutor was still sick the next day, so I slipped out during Nadine’s nap and met Baker in the park. I told her the story. I even gave her Beckett’s name. She said she’d see what she could find out and for me to meet her again the next day. I did, and that’s when she told me that Beckett was dead, that there was no reason to proceed.

‘I wanted to believe her, but I was afraid for my mother and then for my baby. I wanted to be sure that Beckett really couldn’t hurt them, so I contacted the state records department in West Virginia. They sent me a form to fill out and return by mail to get the certificate. I had one more follow-up with Baker and told her I’d requested the death certificate, but that the records office said it would be a month. She got it for me faster. Later the copy from the records office arrived.’

‘Do you still have the death certificate?’ Bo asked.

‘I have the original one I was given by Baker in my safety-deposit box.’ She opened her handbag and took out her silver makeup compact. From it she withdrew a folded piece of paper, so worn it was falling apart. She gave Joseph a quick glance. ‘I have a copy with me. I’m giving it to Agent Carter right now.’

Joseph stared at her for a moment before taking the worn piece of paper. ‘It’s a photocopy of a death certificate, Bo. It says Wilson Beckett, gives his date of death as the year before Daphne made the request. There appears to be a seal, looks like it’s raised on the original. It’s signed by the county coroner. Says cause of death is myocardial infarction. Beckett had a heart attack. It looks official.’

Joseph passed it to McManus, keeping his eyes on Daphne’s face. She wasn’t looking at him and that bothered him.

‘We’ll check out the county coroner who signed this,’ McManus said, ‘but I think I recognize the name from other documents from that period. Why do you keep a copy with you, Miss Montgomery?’

Yeah
, Joseph thought.
I want to know that too
.
And why you didn’t mention it when we were talking about this last night
.

Her cheeks had grown flushed with embarrassment and she kept her eyes on her hands. ‘I don’t carry a copy with me all the time. I have nightmares. Most of the time they’re about Beckett. When I wake up I have panic attacks and sometimes I get them in the daytime too. I have various methods of controlling these attacks. When they get really bad, I look at that death certificate to prove to myself he’s really dead. That he
was
anyway. I’ve got several properties and often decide to sleep at one versus another on short notice. I needed to keep that certificate handy, wherever I was. I hid the copy I kept at the farm in this compact. It was in the makeup bag that Maggie packed for me yesterday. I didn’t know I had it with me until I was putting on my makeup this morning. That’s all.’

‘Okay,’ Bo said. ‘We’ll need a description of Baker, if you remember.’

‘I’m happy to. It has been twenty years, but I’ll do my best.’ She finally met Joseph’s eyes and he saw apology. She hadn’t wanted to surprise him with the copy of the certificate. He wondered why she had. ‘Can we talk about the gas man now?’

‘In just a minute,’ he promised. ‘First we need to figure out who knew you were planning to reveal Beckett to the FBI, because somebody didn’t want you to do it. Beckett himself would have a reason to keep you from talking, but he had no way to know your plans. We have to assume your mail was intercepted by someone. Who would have had access?’

‘Nadine, Travis. My tutor. Any of the servants.’

‘Hal Lynch, too?’ Joseph asked and she frowned.

‘Yes. He was my bodyguard at the time. But he didn’t.’

‘How do you know?’

‘He wouldn’t, any more than Scott would.’

‘Was Scott there?’

She frowned harder. ‘Yes. Part time, but yes. Part of the agreement my mother and Nadine signed was that I’d have access to horses. It was . . . therapy.’

‘For the nightmares?’ Agent Kerr asked kindly.

‘Yes. Scott would trailer them up from the estate a few times a week for me to ride. If I had to guess, I’d say it was Nadine. She was hypersensitive to scandal.’

Joseph remembered Maggie’s story of Ford blackmailing his grandmother. He wondered what the boy had known. He sure as hell planned to ask.

‘None of those people are Doug, though,’ Joseph said. ‘At some point Doug intersects with Beckett, but Doug isn’t even thirty. He was a baby when you and Kelly were abducted. Somehow he had to find out about your history with Beckett, and if the woman posing as Baker was the only one you told that has to be the intersection point.’

‘What about sons?’ Deacon asked. ‘Does anyone have a son Doug’s age?’

‘Hal doesn’t,’ Daphne said firmly. ‘Scott has three, but none of them would do anything like this.’

Joseph leveled her a steady look. ‘Grayson, are you still there?’

The speakerphone hummed as Grayson un-muted his line. ‘I am. I’ll check out the sons, too. How about the tutor, while I’m at it?’

Daphne’s brows shot up. Her annoyed expression said,
Too?
‘My tutor’s name was Joy Howard. I have no idea where you’d find her after all these years.’

‘I’ll see what I can dig up,’ Grayson said.

‘
Now
can we talk about the gas man?’ Daphne asked. ‘Heather could still be alive.’

‘Yes.’ Joseph briefed the team on Daphne’s idea and McManus sat up straighter.

‘Do you remember the name of the company?’ he asked.

‘No. But there was a cat on the driver’s door. Like a bobcat.’

‘What about the driver, Daphne?’ Joseph asked.

‘He was about my father’s age, black hair. That’s all I remember.’

Deacon took out a note pad and sketched an outline of a man, giving detail to his shirt. He added a round oval where a name tag might be, then sketched a bobcat above the oval. He slid the sketch to Daphne. ‘Take a look,’ he said quietly, ‘then close your eyes and see if you can fill in the oval.’

She gave him a puzzled look, but did what he asked. She closed her eyes, her brows crunching as she tried to remember.

‘What color was his shirt?’ Deacon asked softly.

‘Blue.’

‘Good. Now I want you to picture his shirt. Can you see the oval?’

‘Yes.’ She opened her eyes, dismayed. ‘But I can’t remember his name.’

‘That’s okay. Just close your eyes. Picture the oval and I’m going to read you some names. Think about how big the letters were, how curvy, how straight. How many. Are they wide or skinny. Ready?’

She frowned. ‘Okay.’

Deacon looked at his laptop screen. ‘Dave,’ he said and after a moment she shook her head. ‘Jim. John. Bob. Mark. Bill. Tim. Chuck.’

Her chin lifted and her eyes flew open. They shone with satisfaction. ‘Mark. It was Mark, with a k. I remember the cursive k at the end. But the letters were bigger – there were fewer of them. So Mark. My best guess.’

McManus looked suspicious. ‘Where did you get the names?’

‘Social Security website,’ Deacon said. ‘You can search the Social Security administration’s website for names in order of popularity by state and birth year. Daphne said he was about her father’s age. I input that plus West Virginia and that list was generated. Getting the name of the company might be trickier, although your Better Business Bureau may have a list of companies doing business back then. You can ask your state income tax department, but they’ll put a yard of red tape around it.’

‘Or you could check the old phone books,’ Daphne offered. ‘I’ve searched old phone books for individuals before. The local library might have an archive.’

‘So we have to find the company and a guy named Mark,’ Joseph said. ‘Not a needle in a haystack, exactly, but not a simple Google. What else do we have?’

‘General contractors,’ JD said. ‘I’ll be checking with local contractors and hardware stores today to see if anyone matching Doug’s description has bought any HVAC supplies.’

Joseph frowned. ‘HVAC? You lost me.’

‘Heating, ventilation, air conditioners?’ JD said tentatively.

‘I know what HVAC stands for. Why are you looking at them?’

‘Because Doug does HVAC work. It’s how he got into all those cops’ houses to plant cameras to watch them open their safes. He put flyers in cops’ mailboxes offering a free duct cleaning. The cops’ who took him up on the offer said he did good work, so he’s had training of some kind. If he’d been in the business, he’ll need supplies. Also, you said your sister Holly heard Kimberly say that he needed to bring his GC.’

‘“General contractor,
”
’ Joseph murmured. ‘I remember now.’

‘GCs and HVAC operators are advertised together in the phone book,’ JD said. ‘Wait . . .’ There was a long pause with a muffled conversation, then a very clear, ‘Shit.’

‘What?’ Joseph asked, afraid he knew.

‘Brodie and I are at the drugstore. She just checked with the clerk and all of the superglue inventory has been turned over. But we have a list of people who bought it, so that’s where we’re going. We’ll be in touch.’

Joseph bit back a curse of his own. ‘Anything else?’

‘Yeah,’ JD said. ‘Brodie wanted me to tell you the paternity test came in for Marina’s baby. George is the daddy.’

‘You’re kidding.’ Joseph shook his head, still trying to shake off the superglue disappointment. ‘I’m really stunned. Speaking of daddies, how much longer do you think we’ll have you in the office? How is Lucy doing?’

‘Don’t ask. We’ve been at “any day now” for a week. I’m losing my mind. Brodie and I are headed off to the names on this list. We’ll call when we know anything.’

‘Do you have any more questions, Bo?’ Joseph asked, when JD had hung up.

‘No, not right now. Daphne, I’m sorry if you were upset with me, but I couldn’t assume you were telling the truth off the bat.’

‘Actually you could have,’ Daphne said quietly. ‘The questions would have been much the same, but the way you asked them would have been different. Tell me when to expect the sketch artist. I’ll be happy to try recreating the woman’s face.’

Good for her
, Joseph thought. He’d wanted to charge to her aid with Bo, but she’d handled herself with dignity. ‘If there’s nothing else, we’re adjourned. We’ll regroup by phone at noon.’ He turned to McManus and Kerr. ‘Tell us what you need and we’ll support you. You have the necessary resources to find Mark the gas man.’

‘Assuming he’s still alive,’ McManus cautioned. ‘And if he is, that he knows what the hell we’re talking about.’

Agent Kerr took a map from his briefcase. ‘This is the area we covered last night with the canine teams, tracking Ford’s path. Maybe it’ll jog his memory.’

‘Or maybe he has invoices or an old file of clients,’ Daphne said. ‘The company might still have route records. Let’s find him first and see what happens.’

When Kerr and McManus moved off to the side to plan, Joseph turned to Deacon. ‘I’m impressed with how you brought that memory out of Daphne’s mind.’

Deacon shrugged. ‘We’ll see how impressive it is when we find him. If it’s okay with you, I’m going to catch a little more sleep. I take over for Hector at noon, standing watch over Ford.’