“Fun years,” I said.
“It tells a story, Mort,” Jeri said. “Clair was Jonnie’s girlfriend in ’73, then it was Sarah Jean in ’74. And Clair was with Milliken that year.” She stared at me. “You ever swap girlfriends, Mortimer?”
“Do I look like the type?”
“When’d you graduate? Ninety, ninety-one?”
“Ninety-two.”
She nodded. “Drugs rampant in the schools, like they are today. Getting up a good head of steam in Sjorgen’s day, all that hippie-era stuff, especially when he was a freshman. You ever get into any of that?”
“What, tie-dye, the hippie culture, free love? All of that was way before my time.”
“I mean drugs, Mort.”
“Uh-uh. Football. Half a six pack of Bud on the weekends. That was about it.”
“Regular Boy Scout, huh?”
Kayla had said almost the same thing. When you hear something like that more than once in a decade it’s like a trumpet call, time to take notice. Coming from Jeri, though, I had no idea what to make of it.
She found another photograph of Sarah Jean, this one in a gym class with a girl we identified as Meredith Boyle—nickname “Merry,” what else?—even though her hair was different in the senior pictures. From their pose it looked as if they were friends. They were giving the camera peace signs with both hands. An odd echo of the Vietnam War. Hell no, we won’t go. Maybe it meant something else in ’74.
We accumulated names, keeping at it until nearly five o’clock when Mrs. Nordmeyer came in to tell us the school was locking its doors in a few minutes.
Jeri got her license back, thanked her, and we left. I wondered if Jeri’s approach to the yearbook information had been different to that of the police, or CNN, or any of the others. No way of knowing, of course, but I felt as if we’d been knocking on old back doors, listening to whispers, catching glimpses of long-departed ghosts. On the way back to her office I said, “Think you can track down any of those people?”
“It’s possible. The girls’ last names have probably changed. Odds are they’ve changed more than once, in fact, but there are ways.”
She did it via the Internet. She got into Washoe County records and pulled up marriage info from the middle seventies to the early nineties. I stuck the moustache to a potted plant when Jeri wasn’t looking and hung the wig on an old-fashioned coat rack. All that hair was bugging the hell out of me. I felt like I’d spent the day wearing spiderwebs.
“Forty years ago this would’ve been impossible,” Jeri said. “It was all tons and tons of paper, microfiche, basements and warehouses crammed full of records. Then along came computers, scanners, software that could read typewritten text. You probably did stuff like this with the IRS, right?”
“Not personally, no.”
“But you have heard of the Internet?”
“Sort of rings a bell. Me, I was more a go-through-the-shoebox and total-up-the-receipts kind of guy. I wasn’t a techno-agent. But anything that helps the IRS hunt down tax evaders is a tool. The Internet is like one big playground to the backroom boys. We had guys who did nothing but target blogs, if you can believe that. Idiots paying taxes on an income of fifty thousand dollars who brag about their seventy-foot yachts.”
“So you’re not completely illiterate.”
“Not completely, just the next best thing.”
Jeri nodded at the screen. “Thing is, they scanned all the old records, which must’ve been a boring-ass minimum-wage job, but there wasn’t any easy way to check the results for accuracy, so now the records are full of weird errors, like Smith coming out Zmith or Smifh, things like that. Better than nothing, but it sure ain’t perfect.”
In less than fifteen minutes, however, she’d found Clair Albrecht, who’d said yes to a Carl Schembri one year out of high school, and Meredith Boyle, who had married Richard Young. No record of Sarah Jean Humbolt.
So many names. My stomach growled. The Haight-Ashbury was long gone. We were light-years from Jonnie’s killer and speeding around in circles, chasing our tails.
“Hang it up?” I suggested.
“That’s not how it’s done,” Jeri replied.
“You get hold of that bone and gnaw it to splinters, huh?”
“That’s right. You’re making hungry references. Want a sandwich or something?”
“Or something.”
She nodded toward a door, not the one to her gym. “Kitchen’s back that way. Go have a look.”
I went. Down a hallway and into an arboretum of fruit hanging in wire baskets. Strainers and copper pans dangled from a pot rack hanging from the ceiling, wooden spoons sprouted from jars, spider plants, ivy, prayer plants. Afternoon light spilled in through windows that were as clean as the ones at my house.
Either she was a cook, or she liked the ambience.
I found sprouted wheat bread in the refrigerator, eight kinds of cheese, brie, gorgonzola, sliced turkey. I went out front and asked Jeri if she wanted anything. She shook her head, concentrating on one little dead-end cul-de-sac of the information superhighway. I made up a three-layer Dagwood slathered with low-cal mayonnaise, Grey Poupon, a dash of oregano, and came back. Jeri stared at it, then at me.
“Clair Albrecht-Schembri divorced Carl Schembri and married Alan DeMeo back in ’78,” she said.
“Uh-huh. Good deal. Schembri didn’t last long.”
Exasperated, she said, “DeMeo’s not a common name, Mort.”
“Neither is Schembri.”
She looked at me, amazed at the sheer length and breadth of my density. “But her name is DeMeo. The point is, it’s not Jones or Smith or Johnson. And both times she got married here in Washoe County, so she might’ve stuck around.”
I picked up a phone book. A few DeMeos, but no Alan, no Clair or C.
Jeri got into the DMV database. No Clair DeMeo in their records either.
“Dead end?” I asked.
“Not necessarily, but it’ll take more work.”
“Why bother?”
She shrugged. “You never know which lead will take you through that golden door.”
“I suppose that’s in the PI manual, too.”
She ignored me and consulted her notes. “Now
