by Kathi Daley
“That is because the commute into work is much easier without the snow to deal with. Plus, you have a lake and a hot tub that can be enjoyed under the stars. It really is a little piece of heaven.”
Tony opened the oven door and took a peek inside. “Okay, message received. How about a hammock, a firepit, and a small water feature for your deck instead? Low maintenance but very cozy.”
I smiled. “That sounds nice. Whatever you are making for dinner smells wonderful. I’m going to run upstairs and change out of my uniform. Can you feed Tilly? She is usually pretty hungry by the time we get done with our route.”
“I’ll take care of all the animals. Dinner won’t be ready for thirty minutes, so take your time. I’ll pick out a bottle of wine.”
Who would have thought that Tess Thomas would end up with not only the perfect boyfriend but her own personal chef?
After I washed up and changed into comfy sweats, I joined Tony and the animals downstairs. The blueprints were gone and the table was set. Tony had made a fire and the dogs and cats were curled up in front of it. I was going to offer to help Tony in the kitchen, but he seemed to have everything under control, so I accepted a glass of wine and curled up on the sofa in front of the fire too.
“I spoke to Shaggy today,” Tony said when he joined me on the sofa.
“And what has he been up to?”
“He has an idea for a video game he wants me to work on with him.”
I turned and looked at Tony. “In other words, he wants you to do all the work.”
Tony shook his head. “Not at all. Shaggy came up with the concept. He owns a video store and attends all the video game conventions, so he has an in when it comes time to market it. It is true that he will be looking to me for coding and funding, but I looked at his proposal and I think it is a good one. It has the potential to make us both a lot of money, but even if it doesn’t, it will provide me with a change of pace from the financial and security software I usually deal with. Besides, it will provide me with something to do right here in White Eagle, which will mean no traveling for the next six months.”
I smiled. “Well, that part sounds good. I know I give Shaggy a hard time because he usually acts like a twelve-year-old, but you know I like him, and the two of you have fun together. I think if this is a project you are excited about and you feel like you can afford to take the risk, you should go for it.”
Tony grinned in return. “I just might. Shaggy’s game is really different, which is not an easy thing to come up with in this day and age. I really think it will be a hit. Lord knows Shaggy and I have tested and offered feedback on enough prototypes that we have a feel for what will sell and what will flop. Our working together shouldn’t affect you too much, except for the fact that I will need to be home on my computers more often and Shaggy will be hanging around even more than he does now.”
“I like Shaggy just fine and don’t have a problem with him hanging around, and I think the worst of the snow is behind us. I’m fine with schlepping my stuff out to your place rather than you coming here during the week.”
“Maybe we should discuss bringing the cats out to my place on a temporary full-time basis so you don’t have to crate them back and forth all the time. And I can clear out additional closet space so you can bring more of your clothes over.”
“Works for me. If a storm blows in, I can always stay here for a few days if I need to.”
Tony pulled out his phone. “Great. I’ll text Shaggy to tell him we’re on.” He logged in, entered his password, and frowned.
“What is it?” I asked.
“I have an alert.”
I sat up straighter. The last time he’d told me he had an alert was when his facial identification program had located my dad. “What kind of alert?”
“According to this, my program tagged a photo of your dad at a truck stop in Billings.”
“Billings, Montana?”
Tony nodded.
I stood up, crossed the room, and held out my hand. “Let me see.”
Tony handed me his phone. The man in the truck stop café was definitely my dad. He looked older than he had the last time I’d seen him. There was gray in his beard and his face showed the first lines, especially near his eyes. He was sitting at a table with another man who looked to be about his same age. I didn’t think I’d ever met him, but he had the look of the other truckers I’d met over the years, who tended to be somewhat worn around the edges.
“I can’t believe my dad is in Montana.” Most of the other hits we’d received had been images captured at some point in the past. The only other real-time hit Tony had captured had been from a location in Eastern Europe. “I wonder why he is here.”
“I have no idea.” Tony looked at me. “I know we discussed ending our search for your dad. And I really haven’t worked on it at all since our trip at Thanksgiving. But I didn’t turn off this program, which has been running in the background. I can either turn it off now and we can forget we saw this photo, or I can increase the parameters and try to narrow in on where he will go next.”
I hesitated. After pretty much confirming what I already suspected—that my father was in witness protection and had faked his own death to protect his family—I had all but decided to give up the search. There were those who knew more than I who had tried to convince me that letting it go, ending my search for answers, would be what my father would have wanted. But to have him this close…to know that with a few more hits we might be able to pin him down and I could finally speak to him face-to-face and have all my questions answered…It would be a hard dream to let go of. “Let’s see if we can figure out where he is going. If we can pin him down, we’ll decide then what to do with that information.”
Tony nodded. “Okay. Now that I have a very specific starting place, I can adjustment the program. We should start getting regular hits. Not as many as we would if he was in a big city with traffic cams, but I’m confident we should be able to establish a pattern. If it looks like he is staying put, our next decision will be whether or not to make the trip to connect with him.”
He went to the table and logged on to his laptop. He pulled up a map and entered the GPS coordinates of my father’s current location. He then logged on to his program and tightened the search parameters. It occurred to me that if we could track him in real time, others with Tony’s level of expertise could as well. Not that there were many people in the world with Tony’s level of expertise, but there had to be some. I had to wonder if the fact that my dad hadn’t really changed his look after faking his death wasn’t putting him in danger from whoever he was hiding from.
Tony looked up at me. “I am going to have the program focus on hits in real time. That will mean that the program will no longer be looking for photos from the past, but it seems that now that we know your dad is alive, the most important information to gather is where he might be going rather than where he has been.”
“I agree.”
“Now that I have an actual GPS location to use as a starting point, the program is going to focus on additional hits from nearby places. This may or may not work. Unfortunately, there aren’t a lot of security systems in this part of the country connected to the internet, and as I said before, we don’t have the advantage of the traffic cams they have in larger cities.”
“I guess we’ll just see what we can find. To be honest, I’m not even sure whether I want to pin him down. If we do, I am going to have a very hard decision to make.”
Tony offered me a look of compassion. “There really are a whole lot of ways that continuing with our search could come back to bite us. I think that we should proceed with extreme caution.”
“Agreed.”
Tony logged off his computer. “Our dinner should be ready. I’ll set out the food if you want to refill our wineglasses.”
“I wonder if my dad has been alone all this time.”
Tony took the casserole out of the oven and set it on a hot pad on the counte
r. “I suppose if he really was concerned about others getting hurt based on proximity to him, he might have avoided relationships. He does seem to get around, however. I don’t have the impression of a man sitting alone in some little apartment. If I had to guess, I’d say he is involved in some sort of work that requires travel.”
“Like he did when he was a truck driver.”
“Exactly. Although it does seem as if he travels internationally and somehow manages to do so under the radar. Sure, he has a new name and identity, but he didn’t change his look, which means he is trackable. We’ve proved that.”
I set both wineglasses on the table, along with the remainder of the bottle. “Do you think he works for the government?”
Tony shrugged as he poured his homemade dressing over the salad. “Perhaps. Or he might work for a private firm or individual with connections in high places. His movements have the feel of the CIA or maybe even a black ops group to me, but unless we find something linking him to a specific organization, all we have is conjecture.”
I sat down at the table and waited for Tony to join me. There was one question in my mind that I couldn’t quite bring myself to voice, yet it was always in the forefront of my mind. Whatever my dad was in to, was he a good guy or a not-so-good one? I hoped that we would find that he worked for the CIA or some other government agency, but for all I knew, he might be a spy working against them.
“I should probably head home after we eat,” Tony said. “I can only do so much from my laptop. If we really want to tighten the net, I need to set up some precise parameters I can only do from my supercomputer.”
“Okay.”
“Do you want to come with me? I can drive you into town in the morning for work.”
“I’ll come with you, but I’ll drive my Jeep. It isn’t supposed to snow. I’ll take Tang and Tinder and leave them at your place. If I am going to be staying with you full time for a few months, we may as well start the migration.”
Tony put his hand over mine and gave it a squeeze. “I know the waiting will be hard.”
I smiled and looked Tony in the eye. “It won’t be hard. I have you and two other mysteries to focus on.”
Tony chuckled. “That’s true. I may have a new lead on the missing fiancé.”
I took a bite of the spicy Mexican casserole. “What did you find?”
“A man named Michael Patrick O’Malley the Third lived in New Jersey in 1959, but my research indicates that his family lived in Boston. He was twenty-four years old and the eldest son of Michael Patrick O’Malley Junior, who had recently inherited a dry-cleaning empire from his father, Michael Patrick Senior. The second Michael Patrick wasn’t interested in dry cleaning, so he sold the business his father built and opened a small neighborhood financial institution he called O’Malley’s Savings and Loan. His son, who went by Patrick, was sent to college to obtain the necessary business skills to eventually take over that business. As best as I can tell, Patrick came to White Eagle for the summer after he received his MBA. He was spending the summer with friends and then would be returning to school for a doctorate in finance.”
“Sounds like Patrick had big plans for his father’s little bank.”
“Actually, Michael O’Malley was the one who wanted to grow the institution. Patrick, from what I was able to uncover, seemed to want to study cooking. He wanted to open his own restaurant.”
I paused to let this all sink in. “Okay. I guess that fits with what Elizabeth told her granddaughter. She said that she and Patrick planned to run away and start a new life. That fits with the idea that Patrick wasn’t thrilled with the life he’d been planning before meeting her. What happened after he left White Eagle to go home?”
“I don’t know exactly. Most of what I have learned about Patrick was from a magazine article published years after his death by his sister Gwendolyn, who was a freelance writer. The article was actually about how the death of her brother had affected her and caused her to reevaluate her life. She wrote about a young man who longed for a life different from the one his father had envisioned for him, who never could work up the courage to defy his family and follow his dreams. She mentioned her brother’s decision to take some time off from school before entering his doctoral program, and how the trip he took seemed to have changed him. She shared with her readers the fact that he had told her about his intention to go after his own dreams, but that he had died before he’d had the chance to do so. She went on to write about the moment when it struck her that although it was too late for him, it wasn’t for her. That was when she decided to drop out of college and become a writer.”
“Do we know how he died?”
“Gwendolyn didn’t go into specifics about Patrick’s death. The article was more about how his death affected her.”
“Do you think Gwendolyn is still alive?”
Tony nodded. “She is living in New York and is quite a famous novelist. I think I can track down a way to contact her, but I decided that before I did that, I should speak to you. We should also probably try to confirm that Gwendolyn’s Patrick is indeed Elizabeth’s Patrick.”
“I’ll text Jennifer Anne to see if she has a photo of Patrick. I’d like to be sure we have the right man before we tell Elizabeth about his death.”
“I’ll see if I can’t dig a little deeper once we get back to my place. I should also be able to track down an obituary for Patrick now that we have more information. It may include details about his death.”
“Okay. Let me pack some stuff to get by for a few days. We can work on moving more of my stuff to your place this weekend.”
Chapter 7
Wednesday, March 20
I’d texted Jennifer Anne after we arrived at Tony’s place and asked if she had a photo of Patrick. She wasn’t sure if Elizabeth had one, but she would ask and let me know. Tony set to work creating a net that he hoped would help us narrow in on my father’s current whereabouts. In the event he was staying in Billings and hadn’t just been passing through, he hoped to come up with an actual location where we might find and confront him, if that was what I chose to do. Honestly, I wasn’t sure what I wanted, and I wasn’t sure what, if anything, I should tell Mike. If I knew my brother—and I did—if he thought our father was in Montana, he’d be on the next commuter flight south. In some ways, Mike was as much of a hothead as my dad, and I didn’t see a meeting between the two going well.
I was glad I had my route to take my mind off everything else the next day. I settled into a comfortable rhythm as Tilly and I delivered the mail and caught up on the latest news.
“Afternoon, Frank,” I said as we stopped by the police station to drop off the day’s mail. “Any news on Brick’s murder?”
“Not really, although I do have a new theory.”
“And what is that?”
“I’m wondering if the original sample isn’t from a crime of some sort. The person who committed the crime left behind DNA, but it didn’t match anything or anyone in the system. Brick had four suspects in mind, so he collected DNA from all the suspects and had it tested.”
“Wouldn’t you know about it if a crime had occurred?”
“Probably. But not all crimes are reported, and I’m just brainstorming at this point.”
“What sort of crime might not be reported that would leave DNA evidence?” I wondered.
“Rape comes to mind. Not every victim is willing to file a police report. Maybe one of Brick’s cocktail waitresses was the victim. Brick is pretty protective of his girls. What if one of them was raped, but she didn’t know for certain who had done it? Maybe it was dark, or maybe she was blindfolded so she couldn’t see who it was, but she suspected it was one of four men. Maybe Brick gathered evidence from them and had it compared to the DNA evidence left at the scene of the rape. Again, this is just a story I am making up right now, but it demonstrates a scenario that makes sense.”
I nodded. “It does make sense. Would that same sort of scenario work for crimes co
mmitted in the past?”
Frank shrugged. “Sure, I guess. Why do you ask?”
“I spoke to Sue Wade yesterday. She had her own DNA tested against other Wade family members after Austin admitted that he wasn’t a Wade by birth. She was the one who told Brick about Genocom. He asked her if it was possible to test old DNA samples, and she told him she didn’t know, though she didn’t think DNA had an expiration date. Sue imagined that perhaps Brick had something like an old brush with hair in it that he was trying to use to identify the owner.”
“Like maybe he was given the brush and told that it had belonged to someone he had been looking for, like a missing sister or a long-lost mother,” Frank said. “Maybe he had narrowed it down to four possibilities but needed confirmation of which of the three was the person he was seeking.”
“That works as well,” I said. “We are going to need to find additional clues to figure out who Brick might have been trying to identify through the testing.” I looked up as Mike walked into the reception area from the hallway. “Any luck getting Genocom to voluntarily give up the names associated with the DNA?”
“No,” Mike answered my query, “but I’m still working on trying to get to someone with the authority to make an executive decision and give me the information without a court order.”
“I still think the letter with the handwritten address might provide a clue,” I said. “It was delivered at around the same time as everything else. Did you ever figure out who turned the open box you found over to Brick?”
Mike shook his head. “No one is fessing up to it. It may not even be important, but given everything else that we are putting together, I sure would like to know what was in the box.”
“You said there wasn’t a return address, but if there was a tracking number or even a postmark, maybe we can find out where it came from. Do you have the box here?”