“That’s crazy. How would he get the idea that was Misty de Seroux?”
“I don’t know.” She was stuck on the kidnapping. If it was him—and she felt sure it was—why did he kidnap the girl when it was Misty he was after?
He was attracted to young girls. That had to be the reason. Maybe he went looking for Misty. And then he saw her daughter.
He’d gone looking for Misty. It was the only thing that made any sense. “If you thought you’d been lied to, that the girl you were in love with got away, how would you track her down?” Laura asked the chief.
“It’s too unbelievable.”
“I know. But remember that story about Anastasia, one of the Czar’s daughters? A lot of people believed she escaped. They made a movie about it. If you thought Misty had somehow gotten away, what would you do?”
“I guess I’d get in touch with her people—if she had any left.”
“Do you know where her family were from?”
“I have no idea. I know they moved here from somewhere else. But they weren’t from too far away. Their accents.”
“Why’d it take him so long?” Laura said.
“What?”
“Why did he go after her in 1998?”
She looked down at the scrapbook. That was the last page. It was as if he’d abandoned it. Or started a new one.
She stared at the sunflower. It sat in a turquoise water can. Behind it, through a window, a man stooped behind a plough. She thought that Jay Ramsey could have used his image recognition software to pinpoint the water can, the man, the mule, the plough.
“The Internet,” she said.
“What?”
“He found Misty on the Internet.”
“How would he do that?”
“He did a search on Google or another search engine. Probably found himself a bunch of Mistys, then whittled them down.”
“How would he do that?”
She shrugged. “Age, coloring, height—maybe he knew how to get information from driver’s licenses. Maybe he hired a private investigator. For whatever reason, he zeroed in on this Misty. Maybe because of the name. Patin.”
“Makes sense. Patin’s French. De Seroux’s French.”
“Maybe he found a Misty Patin, found out she once lived here in this part of the country.”
“That’s crazy.”
“He was there in 1998. He took her daughter.”
“You don’t know that for sure.”
“No, I don’t.”
Redbone scratched his head. “You think he was the one who killed her?”
“It says in the article her boyfriend killed her. I think that’s probably true. Lundy wouldn’t hang around. He wouldn’t kill her two years later. He would have moved on by then.”
To preteen girls.
“Found something here!” yelled Officer Oliver from somewhere else in the house. He sounded excited.
Laura didn’t like being dragged away from her thoughts. Hard enough to keep track of them—they kept doubling back on themselves, trying to make sense of Dale Lundy’s actions.
“In here!” Oliver called again.
She left the scrapbook and made her way to the kitchen.
The kitchen was utilitarian, with a round-shouldered refrigerator and sunny yellow, chintz drapes and matching covers for the kitchen chairs. The large hooked rug in the center had been pushed aside to reveal a trapdoor in the old floorboards.
“Want me to open it?”
“No,” Laura said.
He gave her a hostile look. “What do you want me to do?”
“Nothing for now. We’ll get to it later.”
He scratched his head. “I don’t see why …”
“Because she told you, is why,” Redbone said behind her. “Leave it be.”
Oliver shot him a look of undisguised contempt. He was the son of a city council member, probably felt he was
