me.’
Karim inhaled deeply from his cigarette. ‘I’ve got him wiggling on a fishhook. He thinks I’m sitting on something big, asked to speak to my source. He’s not going to wait for me. He’ll start sniffing around on his own.’
‘Who owns the building?’
‘Another limited liability company,’ Karim said. ‘This one is called Crowley Enterprises. David Crowley is listed as the LLC’s owner, and the address listed on the documents? Belongs to an undeveloped strip of land in Oregon.’
‘And the Baltimore plates I gave you?’
‘Both the Lincoln and the Lexus belong to ABC Property Management.’
‘The same LLC that owns the house in Dickeyville.’
‘Correct. So now we have two LLCs with phoney addresses: ABC Property Management and the one that owns these buildings you found, Crowley Enterprises. Two different lawyers filed the papers — one in Baltimore, the other in San Diego. Going after them is a waste of time — client confidentially and all that. I could use my own lawyers to press them, but the only thing we’d end up with is a physical description of our lady friend — and that’s if we’re lucky. Besides, I doubt she used her real name.’
‘I think she has a male partner,’ Fletcher said. ‘In addition to the king bed, I found an assortment of men’s clothing in the drawers. Someone lives with her.’
‘So we’re looking at a couple who kill together and sleep together.’ Karim stifled a yawn. ‘How romantic.’
‘And we know they employ at least two people — Jenner and his companion, Marcus. Have you spoken with Dr Sin?’
Karim nodded. ‘She told me about the missing kidney. What do you think that’s — ’ He cut himself off, looked at Fletcher sharply. ‘I didn’t divulge the doctor’s name to you, and I gave her explicit instructions not to — ’
‘She didn’t tell me,’ Fletcher said.
‘Did Boyd tell you?’
‘No.’
‘Then how do you know her name?’
‘I recognized her perfume.’
‘Her perfume,’ Karim repeated.
‘You asked for my assistance with her case. The home invasion that killed her — ’
‘Right, right. I completely forgot you handled that matter.’
‘The night I went through her home I found two bottles of Ce Que Femme Veut in the bathroom vanity,’ Fletcher said. ‘It’s quite rare. Last manufactured in 1965.’
‘When was that?’
‘The night I entered her home? Thursday, 19 October 1994.’
‘Your memory is goddamn remarkable.’
Fletcher said nothing.
‘There’s a name for your kind of memory, did you know that?’ Karim said. ‘It’s called “superior autobiographical memory”. A professor of neurobiology at the University of California, Irvine, coined the term. It’s very rare, this type of memory. This professor has found only a handful of people who possess this unique intellectual gift. He gave each person he tested a random date and they could go back in time and recall everything they experienced on that day — what meals they ate, the people they spoke to and the content of their conversations. What they read and the television programmes they watched. These people can remember almost every single detail of their lives going back years, the way an ordinary person remembers what happened yesterday, if he or she can remember it at all.’
Fletcher did not share Karim’s wide-eyed enthusiasm. He had been born with this type of instant recall. For as long as he could remember, he could pick a date at random, travel back in time and relive any memory as though he were experiencing it in real-time. He remembered everything and forgot nothing.
‘Were you able to uncover any information on Nathan Santiago?’
‘Yes, I have the information right here.’ Karim started to root through various loose sheets and pads of paper. ‘I didn’t run Santiago’s prints yet, thank God. That would have set off a firestorm of questions. Here they are.’
Karim handed him sheets of paper holding printed aged-enhanced photographs of Nathan Santiago. In the photos, the young man had black hair worn in a variety of styles, but the face was identical.
‘That’s him,’ Fletcher said, placing the sheets on the corner of the desk. ‘What happened?’
‘Nathan Santiago left his three-decker tenement home in downtown Lynn, Massachusetts, to visit a friend who lived four blocks away. The boy vanished into thin air, never to be seen or heard of again — until now.’
‘Boy?’
‘Teenager,’ Karim said. ‘He was seventeen when he disappeared, which would make him twenty-five today.’
‘He’s been missing for eight years?’
Karim nodded sombrely. ‘There’s more,’ he said, stubbing out his cigarette in a small and crudely shaped clay ashtray created by a child’s hand. Jason Karim, Fletcher knew, had made that for his father.
‘Nathan Santiago’s mother?’ Karim said. ‘She vanished too.’
47
Karim reached across the desk and handed Fletcher a thick sheet of paper. It was a colour picture of a round-faced, middle-aged woman with light brown skin and shoulder-length black hair. Her nose was crooked. Fletcher suspected it had been broken one too many times by a husband or boyfriend. The haunted look in her eyes brought to mind Dr Sin, the way the doctor had stared into space, wondering what she had done wrong for such horror to have entered her life.
‘Louisa Santiago was a single mother and a nurse,’ Karim said. ‘She left her job at Boston’s Massachusetts General Hospital, and that’s the last anyone saw of her. The police found her Honda Civic in Lynn, parked in the lot for the subway stop for Wonderland Station. Husband’s not in the picture, as far as I can tell. I won’t know anything further until I get copies of the police reports.’
Fletcher continued to stare at the photograph as his attention turned inward, his mind’s eye focusing on the eleven garment bags hanging inside the closet. He could recall each item of clothing, the rips and tears, the dried spots of blood. He saw himself turning to the garment bags hanging on the right-hand side — here it was, the second to last bag holding a green hospital smock and matching green scrubs. Sitting below it was a pair of white clogs with scuffed and worn edges.
He told Karim.
‘You’re sure?’
‘They were the only hospital clothes inside the closet,’ Fletcher said. ‘Did Louisa Santiago disappear before or after her son?’
‘After. Nathan Santiago was abducted on the evening of 5 November 2004. The mother, Louisa, vanished four years later, the day before Thanksgiving.’
Fletcher thought back to the research he had conducted inside his Colorado motel room — the names of the eight families who had a child disappear, followed months or years later by a parent. Eight families, and the closet contained eleven garment bags.
‘The list of the families I gave you in Chicago,’ Fletcher said. ‘I didn’t include single parents in my preliminary search.’
‘I know, which is why I asked M to expand her search.’
His office phone rang. Karim glanced at the caller-ID screen and with a grin said, ‘Speak of the devil.’
He answered the call. Karim didn’t speak for the first few minutes. He ended the conversation asking M to come straightaway to the house to deliver an evidence bag to the lab.
Karim hung up and said, ‘M looked into the medical records of the missing parents on your list. You’ll be
