She met with Kirk Peterson for a very late lunch at a Tex-Mex place just twenty minutes away from the field office. It was ideal because she hadn’t really eaten much of anything over the last day or so, just snacking on pastries whenever she managed to get coffee. When she entered the place and saw Peterson sitting in a booth in the back, she joined him.
She was glad to see that he had been telling the truth about his current state. He did indeed look better. The five o’clock shadow on his face looked intentional rather than neglected. He was wearing casual clothes—a hoodie and a pair of jeans with a baseball cap—but still looked clean. Mostly, though, the recovery she saw came from his eyes and the expression he gave her when she sat down across from him. Whatever had been bugging him when she’d last met him (the death of a vagrant child, if he was to be believed) had apparently been handled.
“You’re looking much better,” she said.
“Thanks. It wasn’t hard. Anything would be better than the miserable state you saw me in a few weeks ago.”
“What changed it?” she asked.
“I made myself stop drinking, first of all. And then I realized that the only way to escape the things I’ve seen and the ways I’ve failed was to do something about it.”
“So you’re picking the case back up?” she asked.
“Not exactly. And honestly, I think if I tried, the bureau would likely roadblock me based on the way I had been behaving. And maybe that’s for the best.”
“Then why call me?” she asked.
“Because while I may not really want to delve back into the depths of the case, there is some information that I think might be pertinent. And honestly, I’d much rather you have it than Penbrook. He’s a good agent but….well, I know how close you are to this case. And it could just be a coincidence, anyway…”
“Seems like you’re stalling.”
“I might be,” he said. “Order something. Let’s eat.”
She wanted to push him, to get the information right away. But she also knew that if he was recovering from a way in which this case had affected him, she needed to act with kid gloves. She figured she could allow him a few minutes of just feeling normal—of enjoying the feeling that he had someone he could vent to.
They ordered their food and Mackenzie even allowed herself the rare daytime beer. For the next twenty minutes, over a burrito and a Dos Equis, she caught him up on where she was in the case. She did her best to not get into the details of how McGrath had worked behind the scenes to make sure she got it and Peterson seemed to pick up on that, leaving all of the obvious questions unturned.
He seemed genuinely interested in her stories and, though it made her feel a bit conceited, she was fairly certain he was also just interested in her. It was in the way he looked at her, the way he leaned in a bit across the table when he responded to things she said. It was nice to know that despite the mess she felt she kept herself in, men still found her attractive. Of course, she felt that way with Ellington most of the time—something she hoped was not on the line after the way she’d been acting. So appreciating the attention of another man might complicate things even more.
It was that feeling (and her now-empty beer) that pushed her toward getting the information out of him. Besides…he seemed to practically be bursting at the seams to share what he knew.
“Okay, so coincidence or not…what do you have, Peterson?”
“Kirk, please,” he said.
“Fine. Kirk.”
“Well, after I met you the first time, when you and I went out to Jimmy Scotts’s residence and then to the house where you grew up, I found myself eyeing the case with you in mind. I started seeing you as a next of kin rather than an agent that was investigating the case. And when I did that, it seemed that a lot of other doors in my head opened up and I was able to dig a little deeper.
“So, about four days after you came by last time—when I was in my wrecked state—I started from square one with these vagrants. I got together every piece of information on them I could find. Some of the information was easy to come by while some of it was being held like some closely guarded secret by the bureau. But thanks to some old friends on the State Police, I was able to get most of what I wanted.”
“Good to see that the State Police haven’t changed much since I was dealing with them as a detective,” she said.
“Yeah, some things stay very much the same,” he said. “Anyway…one of the things I started looking at were phone records. Homeless or not, I’m sure you’ve noticed that a big part of the homeless community have those shitty burner phones. It’s like ten bucks for a month of service on this plastic phone. Better than any deal I ever got from my provider.”
He’d been going for a laugh but when he saw that she was strictly in work-focus mode, he shrugged the failed attempt off and carried on.
“The phone records of the vagrants were quite easy to go through. Of the deceased, only three had those phones. Of the three, one only made calls to his sister and one of those late night AM radio conspiracy shows. The other guy, though, had a pretty extensive calling history. This was a guy by the name of Clarence Biggs. I looked back through the two months he’d had the phone and there were calls to seventeen different people. One of those people was a man named Trevor Black. That name mean anything to you?”
“No. Should it?”
“I don’t know. But I think it will by the time you leave here. See…I ran down fourteen of the seventeen people that Clarence Biggs had called. A few were family. Another was some sort of welfare program he had applied to. But in the mix of all of it was a guy named Trevor Black. At first when I talked to him, it seemed like a dead end. But I then did some digging on him and three other people I spoke with who had been on Clarence Biggs’s call history. And when I dug far enough into Trevor Black, I came up with a pretty solid connection.”
“A connection to what?” Mackenzie asked.
“To you.”
“That name doesn’t ring any bells,” she said, frantically searching her mind.
“Maybe not. But I bet it would ring some bells for your sister. She dated Trevor Black for about six months. They broke up less than a year ago.”
“My sister?” Mackenzie asked, incredulous. “Are you sure?”
“Yeah. According to Trevor anyway. When I reached out to your sister, she was pretty fucking rude.”
“Yeah, that’s Stephanie. Did you lead in with the fact that you knew me?”
“I did.”
“That’s probably why she was so rude.”
“Now here’s where it gets messed up,” Kirk said. “Trevor Black spoke to me a single time. It was a fruitful conversation but I’m sure you could have an even better one with him. If you could, that is.”
“And why can’t I?”
“He was killed last week. He lives out in California, out near Napa. He died in one of those freak forest fires. Crappy luck on your part, huh?”
“And his,” she conceded. She found that she liked interacting with Peterson in this unofficial sort of way. There was a nice banter here, making her think that in his heyday, he might have actually been a damned good detective.
“Anyway, his story checks out. He did date your sister. When I asked for proof, he was sort of crude. He talked about a scar…”
“On her upper left thigh,” Mackenzie said. “Yeah…a motorcycle accident when she was nineteen. What else did he say about her?”
“That she wasn’t really into commitment. He left her because she was having sex with someone else at the same time. Also, I think her…um, her career got in the way.”
“She’s a stripper,” Mackenzie said. “Or, she was the last time I spoke with her. Which has been about a year or so.”
She sighed and tried to keep her mind on track. Surely it couldn’t be a coincidence that her sister had been dating a man who had apparently been in contact with one of the murdered vagrants, right? It seemed even less like a coincidence when she considered that Dennis Parks had also been recently killed—a man who had once known her father quite well.
You’re going to have to talk to her, she thought. First your mom and now Stephanie. Man…this really did turn out to be one hell of a homecoming, didn’t it?
“I’m right to have shared this with you, aren’t I?” he asked. “I mean…there’s a fine line between work and personal life on this sort of thing…”
“Absolutely,” she said. “It just means I’m going to have to finally break down and talk to my damned sister again. Did you get anything out of her?”
“No. She literally refused to talk to me. I tried telling her I knew you and then that I had been working towards finding the man that killed her father and—”
“Oooh, yeah, not good. She’s never dealt with it.” She shrugged and chuckled, tempted to have another beer. “It’s an interesting family dynamic. What about Trevor Black? Did he tell you why he was in contact with the vagrant?”
“He claimed he got a call from the number and didn’t recognize it, so he called it back. When he found out it was apparently a wrong number, that was that. But I don’t buy it because the call he made back to the number lasted about five minutes. And you don’t call a wrong number and just chat, you know?”
“That is weird. I mean, I don’t mind conceding a few things here and there to being just coincidental, but this goes a bit beyond that point.”
“Trevor did say the homeless guy was pretty chatty. That makes sense, I guess, as maybe a homeless guy was just happy to have someone to talk to. But…five minutes?”
“Yeah…it’s strange.”
“I thought so, too,” Kirk said. Before he could say anything else, a waitress came by. He ordered another beer and another taco and then resumed when the waitress was gone. “Your sister…where does she live?”
“The last I heard, she wasn’t too far away from here. Kansas City. Been there for a few years. It was like she wanted to get away from home, but not too far. She was never one to fully separate herself from drama.”
“You think you might pay her a visit?” he asked.
She nodded but then shrugged, not sure how to respond. She reached into her wallet, grabbed a twenty, and tossed it on the table. “I need to get going. This is…well, this a lot to process.”
“After you’ve talked to her, do you need someone to process it with?”
She smiled at him and had to admit to herself that she did like the attention. “I sort of already do have someone like that.”
He nodded and looked down at the table. “I figured. But hey…worth a shot, right?”
“Always,” she said. “Thanks for the information.”
“Anytime.”
She left, feeling disconnected and a little chagrined. She wasn’t at all surprised that a visit back to Nebraska was going to lead to a visit to her estranged sister. She’d like to think that after meeting with her mother, it might not be so bad. But she wasn’t that naïve when it came to her family.
When she got into her car, she also realized that family drama was about to get in the way of the case. And not only was that unprofessional, it was a great way to veer her mind away from the central point—and that was closing this case once and for all.
With no clear path to take and several open-ended questions still waiting for closure, she saw no better approach than to head back to the field office to reconnect with Ellington. With her head and her heart in chaos, she headed in that direction. She felt herself sliding toward despair—about things with her sister, with the case, with Ellington. It was just all too much to handle at once.
She started to wonder what a nervous breakdown felt like when her phone rang. Seeing that it was Harrison, she answered it at once.
“We got him,” Harrison said before Mackenzie could speak a word.
“You’re sure?”
“Pretty damned positive,” Harrison said. “Yardley brought him in and is about to take him into interrogation with McGrath. McGrath wants to know if you’re in a place where you might be able to live-stream it. He wants your take on it.”
“I’m about ten minutes away from the field office. Set things up on your end and I’ll call as soon as I can.”
She ended the call, pressed the gas harder, and sped toward what she hoped would be one of many forthcoming answers.