“No problem.” He tried to take the Post-It, but she held on to it.
“Be discreet.”
“Well, I was planning on shouting Klein’s name at anyone who would listen, but...” When she only stared at him balefully, he sighed. “Of course I’ll be discreet. He’s Bruce Wayne. No word of his secret identity will cross my lips. The facts of the case will only be shared as necessary to meet the needs of my client, and I will present my client with options in the event of a murky, slimy ethical gray area. You know that I know how to do stuff, right?”
“The stakes are higher when you’re doing more than shoving a file into someone’s face. Deadbeat dads are one thing. If there’s foul play here and you fuck it up, someone could get away with murder. And you can forget asking Klein for his opinion on murky, slimy ethical gray areas. He’s not with the DA’s office. He’s not even an attorney, and you can’t trust him to uphold the law.”
“Right, sure. That’s what I meant.”
She finally released the Post-It. “I better not be the last one to know if things start to fall apart on you.”
“I’m going to be so well behaved you won’t believe it,” he promised. “Altar boy style.”
With Raina’s gaze hard on his back, he headed for the kitchen. He grabbed some food—turned out to be a Mountain Dew and a piece of bread—from the gurgling fridge (which he was going to investigate one of these days, and possibly even fix), slid into a chair, and opened his laptop.
Sullivan didn’t make a lot of money, and what he did make went primarily to one of three things: his savings, his sex life, or his electronics. As such, his laptop was top of the line, less than a year old, and faster than Usain Bolt. Came in handy, since the first major steps in finding someone all took place online.
He put his earbuds in and got a little BtMI rolling—it was a happy day all of a sudden—and got to work.
First he read over the notes he’d taken during the meeting, then the police reports and witness interviews in the case folder.
On February 2nd, 1992, the home of a midlevel, wannabe criminal badass, Lawrence Howard, was invaded by the thugs of an unidentified, actual neighborhood badass, who’d apparently had strong feelings about Howard’s attempts to infringe on his business. Howard was murdered in his bed, along with two bodyguards and his housekeeper, Margaret Trudeau, who lived on the property with her ten-year-old daughter, Nathalie, who vanished. This was pre-Amber Alert, so the response had been unforgivably slow, and though the Denver Police Department and the media fanned the flames of the search as high as possible in the following days, she’d never been located.
It was assumed—sadly, if reasonably—that the girl had been taken by one of the killers, probably for horrifying purposes, and murdered later.
Two years later, with the case largely forgotten in the public consciousness, Nelson Klein, the Devoted Uncle, brother to the murdered Margaret, had gone to a local private detective agency to fund a search of his own. Eighteen years after that, when Raina bought the agency from the retiring owner, the case had fallen into her hands, and she’d worked it solo for the past five. And now, finally, it was Sullivan’s.
He looked at the scanned photograph of the girl, clearly taken on a school picture day back in 1991, and studied the blond hair, pale blue eyes, and gap-toothed smile. She looked cheerful and puckish in her pink blouse with the black piping on the collar, her hair curled for the special occasion. Sullivan couldn’t help imagining the things she might’ve witnessed or suffered, and a pulse of pity welled up in his throat.
He tucked the photo out of sight in the file, and blew out a breath.
The obvious steps had been repeated every time Klein had come in, but Sullivan went through them again because you never knew. If he was lucky, he’d find out that her body had already been located in a nearby jurisdiction in the past twelve months, the info kept from her family by some state employee’s incompetence.
He started by checking the Social Security Administration’s Death Master File with different variations on the girl’s name—Natalie Trudeau, Nat Trudeau, Nathalie Martine Trudeau, Nathalie M. Trudeau, and several misspellings of each, just in case.
No joy.
This wasn’t proof she was alive, obviously. The records of the Death Master File became scantier the further back you went, and the SSA erred on the side of caution when it came to listing missing people as dead. However, it did give Sullivan a chance to double-check that he had her correct Social Security number and date of birth, which he would need for his other searches. Now it was time to use the process of elimination.
The foundational rule investigators used in cases like this was that living people left marks. If no man was an island, there was always a road you could follow to find him. People needed jobs and places to live and banks and friends and phones, and everything left trails. Sullivan might not be able to prove that Nathalie was dead, but if he checked all the normal places where the living showed up and she wasn’t there, then death was the only possibility left.
He started with a simple Google search, using all the same derivatives of her name that he’d used in the Death Master File. He spent an hour combing through results, and came up with squat.
Next he searched the Federal Bureau of Prisons, in case she’d miraculously lived long enough to get arrested as an adult. When that didn’t give him anything, he went to each of the local jail and state prison websites, and spent a couple hours searching for her by name and SSN. Some of those sites let him search for parolees and
