No Time for Goodbye Part 36

"It was a horrible scene. The guy denied up and down that he was her brother, he acted like she was a crazy person, and she was was acting like a crazy person. So I took the guy aside, said I was sorry, said maybe, if he showed Cynthia his driver's license, if he could prove to her he wasn't who she thought he was, she'd leave him alone." acting like a crazy person. So I took the guy aside, said I was sorry, said maybe, if he showed Cynthia his driver's license, if he could prove to her he wasn't who she thought he was, she'd leave him alone."

"He did that?"

"Yeah. I saw the license. New York State. His name was Jeremy Sloan."

Vince took the clipping back from me, looked at the name attached to Todd Bigge. "That's pretty f.u.c.king curious, isn't it?"

"I can't figure this out," I said. "This doesn't make any sense. Why is Todd's picture in an old newspaper clipping with this different name?"

Vince was quiet for a moment. "This guy," he said finally. "The one from the mall. He say anything at all?"

I tried to think. "He said he thought my wife should get help. But not much other than that."

"What about the license?" Vince said. "You remember anything about that?"

"Just that it was New York," I said.

"It's kind of a f.u.c.king big state," Vince said. "He might live across the line in Port Chester or White Plains or something, and he might be from f.u.c.king Buffalo."

"I think it was Young something."

"Young something?"

"I'm not sure. s.h.i.+t, I only saw the license for a second."

"There's a Youngstown in Ohio," Vince said. "You sure it wasn't an Ohio license?"

"I could tell that much."

Vince flipped the clipping over. There was text on the back, but the clipping had clearly been saved for the picture. The scissors had gone through the center of a column, cut a headline in half on the back side.

"That's not why he would have saved it," I said.

"Shut up," Vince said. He was reading bits and pieces of stories, then looked up. "You got a computer?"

I nodded.

"Fire it up," Vince said. He followed me upstairs, stood over me as I pulled up a chair and turned the computer on. "There's bits of a story here, involving Falkner Park and Niagara County. Throw all that into Google."

I asked him to spell "Falkner," then typed in the words, hit Search. It didn't take long to figure it all out. "There's a Falkner Park in Youngstown, New York, in Niagara County," I said.

"Bingo," Vince said. "So this is most likely from some paper from that area, because it's just a p.i.s.s-piddly story about park maintenance."

I turned around in my chair, looked up at him. "Why is Todd in a picture in a paper from Youngstown, New York, with a bunch of basketball players from some other school, and he's listed as J. Sloan?"

Vince leaned up against the doorframe. "Maybe it's not a mistake."

"What do you mean?"

"Maybe it's not a picture of Todd Bigge. Maybe it's a picture of J. Sloan."

I gave that a second to sink in. "What are you saying? That there are two people? One named Todd Bigge and one named J. Sloan-Jeremy Sloan-or is there one person with two names?"

"Hey," said Vince, "I'm just here because Jane asked me."

I turned back to the computer, went to the White Pages website where you could look up phone numbers, entered in Jeremy Sloan for Youngstown, New York.

The search came up empty, but suggested I try alternatives, like J. Sloan, or the last name only. I tried the latter, and up came a handful of Sloans in the Youngstown area.

"Jesus," I said, and pointed to the screen for Vince. "There's a Clayton Sloan listed here on Niagara View Drive."

"Clayton?"

"Yeah, Clayton."

"That was Cynthia's father's first name," Vince said, just wanting to be sure.

"Yeah," I said. I grabbed a pencil and paper from the desk, wrote down the phone number off the computer screen. "I'm going to give this number a call."

"Whoa!" Vince said. "You out of your f.u.c.king mind?"

"What?"

"Look, I don't know what you've found here, or whether you've found anything, but what are you going to say when you call? On this phone? If they've got caller ID, they know right away who it is. Now, maybe they know who you are and maybe they don't, but you don't want to be tipping your hand, do you?"

What the h.e.l.l was he up to? Was this actually good advice, or did Vince have some reason for not wanting me to call? Was he trying to keep me from connecting the dots because- He handed me his cell phone. "Use this," he said. "They won't know who the h.e.l.l is calling."

I took the phone, flipped it open, looked at the phone number on the monitor, took a breath, and entered it into Vince's phone. I put it to my ear and waited.

One ring. Two rings. Three rings. Four rings.

"There's n.o.body there," I said.

"Give it a little longer," Vince said.

When it got to be eight rings, I started to pull the phone away when I heard a voice.

"h.e.l.lo?" It was a woman's voice. Older, I thought, sixties at least.

"Oh, yes, h.e.l.lo," I said. "I was just about to hang up."

"Can I help you?"

"Is Jeremy there?" Even as I said it, I thought, and what if he is? What am I going to say? What on earth am I going to ask him? Or should I just hang up? Find out if he's there, confirm that he actually exists, then end the call.

"I'm afraid not," the woman said. "Who's calling?"

"Oh, that's okay," I said. "I can try again in a little while."

"He won't be here later, either."

"Oh. Do you know when I might be able to reach him?"

"He's out of town," the woman said. "I can't say for sure when he'll be back."

"Oh, of course," I said. "He mentioned something to me about going to Connecticut."

"He did?"

"I think so."

"Are you sure about this?" She sounded quite perturbed.

"I could be wrong. Listen, I'll just catch him later, it's no big deal. Just a golf thing."

"Golf? Jeremy doesn't play golf. Who is this? I demand that you tell me."

The call was already spiraling out of control. Vince, who had been leaning into me as I made the call and could hear both sides, drew a finger across his throat, mouthed the word "abort." I folded the phone shut, ending the call, without saying another thing. I handed it back to Vince, who slipped it into his jacket.

"Sounds like you got the right place," he said. "You might have played it a bit better, though."

I ignored his critique. "So the Jeremy Sloan Cynthia found at the mall is very likely the Jeremy Sloan who lives in Youngstown, New York, at a house where the phone is listed under the name Clayton Sloan. And Cynthia's father had kept a clipping in his drawer, of him with a basketball team."

Neither of us said anything. We were both trying to get our heads around it.

"I'm going to call Cynthia," I said, "bounce this off her."

I raced back downstairs to the kitchen, dialed Cynthia's cell. But as she'd promised, her phone was off. "s.h.i.+t," I said as Vince came into the kitchen behind me. "You got any ideas?" I asked him.

"Well, this Sloan guy, according to that woman-maybe she's his mother, I don't know-is still out of town. Which means he may still be in the Milford area. And unless he has friends or family here, he's probably in some local motel or hotel." He got the phone back out of his jacket, brought up a number from his contact list, hit one b.u.t.ton. He waited a moment, then said, "Hey, it's me. Yeah, he's still with me. Something I need you to do."

And then Vince told whoever was on the other end of the line to round up a couple of the other guys-I suspected this crew consisted of the two guys who grabbed me and their driver, the ones Jane called the Three Stooges-and start doing the rounds of the hotels in town.

"No, I don't don't know how many there are," he said. "Why don't you count them for me? I want you to find out if there's a guy named Jeremy Sloan, from Youngstown, New York, staying at one of them. And if you find out he is, you let me know. Don't do anything. Okay. Maybe start with the Howard Johnson's, the Red Roof, the Super 8, whatever. And Jesus, what the f.u.c.k is that horrible noise in the background? Huh? Who listens to the f.u.c.king Carpenters?" know how many there are," he said. "Why don't you count them for me? I want you to find out if there's a guy named Jeremy Sloan, from Youngstown, New York, staying at one of them. And if you find out he is, you let me know. Don't do anything. Okay. Maybe start with the Howard Johnson's, the Red Roof, the Super 8, whatever. And Jesus, what the f.u.c.k is that horrible noise in the background? Huh? Who listens to the f.u.c.king Carpenters?"

Once the instructions were relayed and Vince was confident that they were fully understood, he put the phone back in his coat. "If this Sloan guy is in town, they'll find him," he said.

I opened the fridge, showed Vince a can of Coors. "Sure," he said, and I tossed it to him, got one out for myself, and took a seat at the kitchen table. Vince sat down opposite me.

He said, "Do you have any f.u.c.king idea what's going on?"

I swallowed some beer. "I think I might be starting to," I said. "That woman who answered the phone. What if she's this Jeremy Sloan's mother? And what if this Jeremy Sloan really is my wife's brother?"

"Yeah?"

"What if I just spoke to my wife's mother?"

If Cynthia's brother and mother were alive, then how did one explain the DNA tests on the two bodies they'd found in that car they'd fished out of the quarry? Except, of course, all Wedmore had been able to confirm for us up to now was that the bodies in the car were related to each other, not that they actually were Todd and Patricia Bigge. We were awaiting further tests to determine a genetic link between them and Cynthia's DNA.

I was trying to get my head around this increasingly confusing jumble of information when I realized Vince was talking.

"I just hope those boys of mine don't find him and kill him," he said, taking another swig. "It'd be just like them."

37.

"Someone phoned here for you," she said. she said.

"Who?"

"He didn't say who it was."

"Who did it sound like?" he asked. "Was it one of my friends?"

"I don't know who it sounded like. How would I know that? But he asked for you, and when I said you were away, he said he remembered you saying something about going to Connecticut."

"What?"

"You shouldn't have told anyone where you were going!"

"I didn't!"

"Then how did he know? You must have told someone. I can't believe you could be that stupid." She sounded very annoyed with him.

"I'm telling you I didn't!" He felt about six years old when she spoke to him this way.

"Well, if you didn't, how would he know?"

"I don't know. Did it say on the phone where the call was from? Was there a number?"

"No. He said he knew you from golfing."

"Golfing? I don't golf."

"That's what I told him," she said. "I told him you don't golf."

"You know what, Mom? It was probably just a wrong number or something."

"He asked for you. He said Jeremy. Plain as day. Maybe you just mentioned it to somebody in pa.s.sing, that you were going."

"Look, Mom, even if I did, which I didn't, you don't have to make such a big deal about it."

"It just upset me."