Then he sat down and typed the name Peggy Klein into the courthouse records database because Peggy was, for some bizarre reason, an old nickname for Margaret.
And got a relatively recent hit.
He sat back in his chair, stunned. He made himself take a deep breath and double-checked the dates and the Social Security number, because there had to be a couple hundred Peggy Kleins in the world, but Jesus. It was her. The same Margaret Trudeau who’d been murdered in her employer’s house in 1992 had bought a condo twelve years ago under the name Peggy Klein and dutifully paid the taxes on it annually.
Strange behavior for a dead chick, he thought, and had to force himself to calm the fuck down. He’d stumbled onto something here, and maybe it’d been a flight of fancy that led him to this spot, but now was the time to rope everything into some semblance of rationality. He needed to document every step, make sure he had proof to support every decision he made. Plus, if he wasn’t careful, he took the risk of driving Nathalie or whoever it was using the name of Nathalie’s dead mother further underground.
He needed to verify.
He also needed to move. He was climbing out of his damn skin here. He popped another piece of nicotine gum into his mouth, looked up Riviera Condominiums online, and realized he was barely a fifteen-minute drive away. The clock read 4:28 p.m. There was time, perhaps, to do a quick drive-by, maybe snap a couple pictures from the car.
Maybe he’d see a blonde woman in her mid-thirties.
He grabbed his laptop and jacket and headed down the hall to Raina’s office. She was on the phone, making inquisitive noises, and he went to her desk, ignoring the way she slapped at his hands as he opened the long, shallow drawer above her knees.
“I’m taking your kit,” he mouthed, and she held up a finger to tell him to wait. Her nonverbal noises into the phone became impatient. He grabbed the huge lockbox she stored in the bottom drawer of her file cabinet and hauled it out, gesturing toward the door. She shook her head and mouthed, “Wait.”
He made the universal gesture for “call me,” gave her an apologetic grimace, and darted out, hurrying down the sidewalk toward his beat-up black 1974 Buick Regal.
He had a living dead girl to find.
Chapter Three
The letter rested on the dashboard, the white paper faintly malodorous and stained pink from the rank salade de betteraves his manman had thrown out earlier in the week, the torn-open top ragged. The return address, written in a loopy, almost childlike hand, read Ashley Benton. Tobias spun the orange plastic lighter in his hand over and over while he stared at it, wondering what the pages inside might say.
The interior of the car was sweltering even with the windows down; the metal spark wheel was hot against his thumb. He imagined, for one satisfying moment, lighting the letter on fire right there so it turned black and curled into itself, watching the flames billow orange, the plastic of the dash scorching and melting, the air filling with smoke. He flicked the lighter several times, testing himself, tempted.
Finally, he sighed and shoved the letter into the front cover of his biochemistry textbook on the passenger seat. The lighter went into his pocket.
He looked out the windshield at the two-story gray building he was parked in front of. Riviera Condominiums was nicer than his friend Ghost’s old cramped armpit of an apartment by a mile. Everything there had been worn, from the cracked parking lot to the threadbare carpet to the cheap windows, and the residents had been the same.
This new place was downright shiny. There was a pool with blue water and two tennis courts and the grass was neatly clipped and very green, especially considering it was the first day of August in a semiarid state. Flowerbeds overflowing with geraniums lined the sidewalks leading from the parking lots to the buildings, and interspersed between those buildings were small communal gardens thick with tomatoes and peppers. The patios and balconies were bordered with black wrought iron balustrades.
No way could Ghost afford to live here.
If Ghost even lived here anymore.
Contact between them had been spotty lately, text messages would go hours without a reply, if one came at all, invites ignored, emails answered with a handful of words. It wasn’t necessarily personal; sometimes Ghost simply disappeared for days at a time, and he always reappeared with as little fanfare as when he took off. In the past, Tobias had respected those bursts of antisocial behavior and stayed away, letting Ghost come back when he was ready.
But this was different. This was nearly two weeks of complete silence. It was different because of the favor.
Eight months ago, in order to bail their friend Church out of trouble with some local thugs, Ghost had agreed to do a favor for a woman no one should owe. Tobias didn’t know the specifics, but he knew enough to worry.
He and Ghost had been friends since that horrible day in Woodbury when Tobias had been jumped by some guys in a badly lit bathroom, and a pale slip of a kid had bailed him out with nothing more than a dangerous rep and a half-mad smile. Tobias still wasn’t sure why Ghost—selfish to an extreme, frequently oblivious to the suffering of others—had put himself at risk to save someone he didn’t know, but that kindness was one Tobias would never forget.
Not that everything in Woodbury had been bad. That time had been good for Tobias in certain respects. He’d put earnest effort into therapy, and while he hadn’t been particularly successful at implementing the changes his therapist had encouraged him to make, he’d come out of it with coping skills that’d kept him
