More to that point, why was Tobias the only one of the kids who still had his original last name?
It was an anomaly.
Sullivan dug deeper.
Tobias had graduated from a Catholic high school in a district equitable with two doctors’ salaries, albeit a year and a half later than normal students would’ve. That time in the residential treatment facility, Sullivan supposed. Tobias didn’t have a criminal record, and for the past four and a half years he’d been a student at Metro State University of Denver, studying Cell & Molecular Biology. He was likely to graduate this upcoming winter.
There was nothing concrete about Tobias’s adoption. He found a few mentions in local papers of a teenage girl with the same last name abandoning a baby back in the day, but he couldn’t tell for sure that she was the birth mother in question. If she was Tobias’s mother, though, it was pretty fucked up.
After staring at the results for a long while, Sullivan decided he wasn’t going to be sympathetic. Tobias’s adoptive parents might be decent human beings who liked to help others, but whether or not they’d gotten around to giving their kids the whole don’t-blackmail-people lecture didn’t matter. This rested on Tobias’s shoulders and didn’t buy him any slack.
He got out the Nathalie Trudeau case file and tapped a finger against the photograph of the girl. She couldn’t have been a more storybook representation of innocence, with her slightly bucktoothed grin where her adult teeth had come in too big for her face.
“What happened to you?” he muttered.
When he was tired of feeling maudlin, he put the photo aside and got to work.
He ran searches for every variation of Yalena/Yellena, Seryozha, and Yasha Krayev that he could think of, then realized he’d skipped ahead and did some research into Russian names. When he went back to Google, he changed Krayev to Krayeva for Mama’s searches because Russians used gendered last names. He wished he had their patronymics—Russian children had a middle name denoting their father’s family—because that would really help narrow things down, but he couldn’t find anything.
He was able to nail down a mug shot photo that made it clear that Yasha’s real name was Yakov, and there was a woman named Yelena Krayeva who’d done a charity thing for abused women at a local restaurant a few years back, but there was nothing conclusive, and there were no pictures attached. He couldn’t be sure that Yelena was the same person as Mama.
Unfortunately, whoever Mama was, she’d covered her tracks well.
Next, he went through the list of Ghost’s contacts. The text messages and code names marked almost all of them as clients, but Sullivan checked them anyway. He used online reverse directories mostly, and ran the unpublished numbers through a PI database that private citizens couldn’t access, and probably wouldn’t want to, since they charged about fifty bucks a number. For now, the only nonpublished number that he was willing to pay for was the cell phone of the mysterious K.
But he got nothing. The number was unassigned, belonging to a burner phone. A dead end.
After he’d gotten everything he could from Ghost’s phone, he started some searches for his actual job, quickly getting what he needed to serve one of his dirtbags with a bright, shiny subpoena.
The answer was just sitting there. Waiting. Like the universe had cleared every potential obstacle out of his way.
It kind of pissed him off.
“How’d it go?”
Sullivan jerked his head up, finding Raina in the doorway. He blinked at her, wondering where the hell she’d come from—she was damn sneaky for someone who wore heels all the time—and she clarified, “With the concerned citizen?”
Right. Sullivan shrugged and let some of his annoyance show. A half-lie was always more believable than one made up wholesale. “He’s kind of an asshole.”
She pulled a yogurt out of the fridge. “A useful one?”
“Maybe.”
“I hope this isn’t the report so comprehensive I’ll die that you mentioned earlier, because it leaves something to be desired.”
He explained everything up to the point where Tobias had requested to play assistant, instead saying that he was sure that Tobias knew more, and that with some finessing, Sullivan might be able to get the break he needed. He also pointed out that he wasn’t behind on his regular work.
Raina made doubtful, noncommittal noises, but she did that a lot when Sullivan said things, so he didn’t read too much into it.
Not long after, he was following Jasper Giff, a disability-hosing loser in his forties, into a grocery store. Sullivan made his move in the freezer aisle, and barely had time to say, “Jasper Giff?” before the guy dropped his toilet paper and margarita mix and ran for it. Giff managed to make it through the parking lot and behind the wheel of his car before Sullivan caught up, and proceeded to laugh at him through the windshield as he fumbled to start the engine. “Too late!” he called.
Sullivan slapped the packet of paper down on the hood and called back, “This counts as being served, and it’ll hold up in court. Have a nice day, dickhead.” He left the packet on the hood and, with Giff’s furious curses ringing in his ears, crossed the lot to where he’d left the Buick.
His irritation didn’t fade with the success of the chase. As he filled out the form he would send to the district attorney’s office to show that he’d delivered the papers, he was tempted to do something juvenile, like punch the dash.
All too easy. The usual channels, the usual answers, the usual outcome. Giff had been right where any other disability-hosing jerkwad would be hiding—at his girlfriend’s house. All it had taken was waiting for the idiot to come out where Sullivan could get to him, and bingo. Four hours from start to finish, and not an original thought required or a single challenge found at any point
