“Did you feel better afterward?” he asked curiously.
She tilted her head sideways, trying to remember. “I was pretty shaky and upset, but maybe I did. The only person to blame in all this was Charlie. But, at the same time, it took two to tango, and Trudy definitely had tangoed with Charlie. If she hadn’t been so two-faced, I wouldn’t have said anything. But, once she approached me, I let her have it. She is married too, by the way.”
“Ouch.”
“I know,” she said. “I think that’s one of the biggest things—you’re taken for a fool, and everybody else is laughing behind your back at you.”
“Trudy won’t be laughing anymore,” he said gently. “Or her poor husband. He probably ought to get a checkup.”
That got a giggle out of her, which was what he was hoping for.
“Sometimes I feel like Charlie’s up there, laughing at me, for the way he got to walk away from it all. He created all this chaos. He spent a ton of money at the end, which I could have used, and then he just happens to drive off the road.”
“The whole thing was a real shit move on his part,” he said. “It sounds like he was only about Charlie at the end, not about you and Sari at all.”
“No, that’s exactly what it was,” she said. “It was pretty distressing to see how little he cared about us.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “That’s not an easy thing to deal with.”
“No, it isn’t. But I’m quite prepared to find a way to get past it all,” she said. “It’s just not that easy.”
“No, none of this is easy,” he said. “But you are a braver person than I am.”
She laughed at that. “I don’t think so.”
“Oh, I do,” he said. “Through all this you’ve maintained your same ethical and moral standards, and you’ve held your head high. You’ve done what’s right, and you’ve looked after Sari at the same time. There isn’t a whole lot more that can be asked of you.”
Weston thought about her words and the situation she’d gone through for the rest of the morning. It kept popping back up as he did research on the lawyer, on Angel, and on Ginger and Grant. Weston was no closer to finding any answers, and it was starting to irritate him. He stared out the window, wondering if he should just get out and take another look around Ginger’s place. Not that it was likely to show him anything, particularly if Grant was there, but he wouldn’t mind taking a better look at the crash site.
He doubted if the police had done much. A vehicle that’s off the road can look like murder or an accident.
He sent the detective a text, asking for any updates, and got a fairly quick answer back, saying there was nothing. That just pissed off Weston more. He picked up the phone and called Badger. “Hey, any updates?”
“Yes,” Badger said, his voice light. “I was just going to call you.”
“Oh, what’s up?”
“We paid for a rush on the DNA,” he said. “Sari is definitely yours.”
He sank back. He hadn’t really wanted to consider it until he knew for sure; yet, at the same time, it was a huge relief. “Well, that’s good to know,” he said warmly, twisting to look down at the little girl. To think, she was actually his flesh and blood. And though he’d known it before, he hadn’t really known it. Not like this.
“Does it change anything for you?”
“It just confirms what we had already hoped,” he said. Sari was lying on her back playing with her toes, Shambhala right beside her. “Shambhala has definitely taken to her as well.”
“That is a really good thing potentially,” Badger said.
“Potentially,” he said. “I’m just not so sure about the future.”
“The future doesn’t have to be secure right now either,” Badger said. “Remember that. One day at a time.”
“Did you have any luck tracking down Angel’s whereabouts for the last eighteen months?”
“She worked in Vegas at one of the casinos for about six months. She lost her job and was at a different casino for another few months after that. She seemed to have a pattern of a job every couple months and then leaving.”
“Any reason for why she left the jobs?”
“She was fired from the first one for drug abuse,” he said, “and she’s got a history of gambling, drugs and even prostitution.”
Weston winced at that. “That sounds like a spiral that’s hard to get out of.”
“I would say so. Yes.”
“So I wonder what she’s doing back up here,” he asked.
“The only reason theoretically would be you and the baby,” Badger said.
“She didn’t know I was here, until I spoke to her on the phone recently, as she made one of her calls to Daniela,” he said, as his fingers drummed the top of the table. “But then there’s also the case of the murdered lawyer.”
“Right. We’re having trouble getting any cooperation from the police on that one.”
“I’m not surprised. I sure would like to get into that law office though.”
“We did access his computer files. Nothing suspicious is there, except for the fact there is no file on Sari.”
As soon as Weston heard that, his heart sank. “Seriously?”
“Yes. If there was one, it’s been deleted. Although I’m beginning to suspect there wasn’t one.”
“Like no digital copy but strictly a paper copy?”
“It’s quite possible somebody other than the murderer could have deleted any digital materials,” Badger said. “Somebody like Angel.”
“So there would be no record of the adoption.” Weston shook his head in disgust.
“It was registered in the US system though. According to the adoption registry, Sari officially belongs to Daniela.”
“If that’s the case, then she doesn’t have
