Nothing. If she’d been incarcerated, he couldn’t find it.
He took a break to get Siouxsie started on his iPod and eat a sandwich—accidentally using the last of Raina’s peanut butter, whoops—before tackling the long process of checking with the different branches of the armed forces. Nothing. He went through the online court records for alimony, bankruptcy, and the property appraiser’s records, and managed to kill another hour finding exactly zip. He would have to actually go to the courthouse to check more deeply, but that was a job for tomorrow.
His phone buzzed, and this time he checked the caller. Caty. And the earlier text message had been her too: don’t think I won’t sic Lisbeth on you.
After a brief hesitation, he set his phone aside with both the call and the text unanswered. He wasn’t in the mood to let her bully him into talking about his damn feelings again. Caty was an excellent friend, and he cared about her a lot, but Jesus, he needed some damn space. It was enough to make him want to go into hiding to avoid the hounding.
Wait. Wait a second. His hands went still over the keyboard.
While the vast majority of the time Sullivan was searching for shitty people hiding from taking responsibility for something they’d fucked up, every now and again, a search would turn up someone hiding for good reason—usually women on the run from abusive exes. Maybe that line of thinking was applicable in some way here.
It was almost certain that Nathalie Trudeau was buried in a field somewhere or resting under a river’s worth of water, but what if she hadn’t vanished because someone had taken her? What if all these years of silence weren’t because she had no voice, but because speaking up would be dangerous?
What if she’d run? What if she’d never stopped running?
She would’ve needed help. No ten-year-old was going to disappear off the grid without an adult’s aid, and Sullivan couldn’t begin to imagine who might’ve played that role for Nathalie, but if the girl was gone by choice, whoever had helped her knew their stuff.
Sullivan tapped his finger on the table as he considered.
He went back to the original police file and reread the section about wannabe badass Lawrence Howard, the unidentified local thugs who’d taken him out, and the poor housekeeper who’d been an innocent bystander, probably killed because she’d seen something she shouldn’t have.
Howard had lived in an expensive section of Denver, the kind of neighborhood where cops would respond quickly to reports of gunfire. That didn’t leave much time for the murderers to hang around. Maybe they hadn’t searched the house thoroughly after taking out Howard.
Maybe they’d missed a ten-year-old hiding in a closet or under a bed.
Maybe he was grasping at straws.
He scrubbed his hands over his face. He needed to keep his head on straight—he was prone to flights of fancy on the best of days because he liked things interesting more than he liked things honest, and that could get him into trouble here. He needed to be ice-cold and by-the-book, not indulging himself in pointless questions about a could’ve-been that he had zero evidence to support.
He read himself the riot act for several more minutes, nodded definitively to prove that he’d gotten the message, and then promptly ignored all of that and went online to do a search for Nathalie’s mother’s name.
And okay, on the surface that seemed like a left-field kind of thing to do, but there was method to his madness. It was impossible to hide in modern America without changing your name, and there were different levels of competence when it came to fake IDs. The worst meant you wouldn’t be able to buy beer without someone calling you on your bullshit, while the best would carry you through pretty much anything except for a deep background check by a government agency.
The best new identities used names and SSNs stolen directly from the Death Master File, usually those of infants who’d died soon after birth, because there was less of a chance that the deceased’s old life would overlap with the thief’s new one. All it took was a few forged documents to complete the transfer.
Yes, it would be incautious for someone to help the daughter by using the mother’s name, thereby providing a link to the case, but...
But.
What real estate agent or employer or insurance adjuster was going to run a client or applicant’s ID against the SSA’s Death Master File to make sure that the person breathing in front of them wasn’t using a dead child’s name? Who looked up family members who had passed to make sure their names weren’t being used by thieves? No one. The chances that someone was going to look were infinitesimal. He was only looking because he was the kind of guy who didn’t mind wasting five hours following up a nonsense train of thought for a case from two decades ago because he thought it would be cool if it turned out to be right. If someone had helped hide Nathalie under a new identity, was there really that much risk in using the mother’s name? Even the Devoted Uncle wouldn’t think to start searching for his dead sister as a way of tracking down his niece.
A memorial, of sorts. A last tribute to a dead mother, maybe.
He double-checked that he had Margaret Trudeau’s correct SSN and date of birth, and tooled around a little, fiddling through Google and old websites, running haphazardly through the steps he’d taken with Nathalie, not really expecting anything. He found a marriage license for Margaret Trudeau in the online Denver Courthouse records and her maiden name did match her brother’s—Klein. Sullivan did a search for that name too, and found a birth certificate but little else.
He got up to piss, found an old bag of trail mix somewhere, and ate it standing up at the counter. The sun took on the
