“So for the last week I’ve been trying to find out what he was doing,” Pete says. “He usually took notes when he was out on a case, but there were none found on his body. No one thought anything of it at the time, but now it seems that maybe the killer took them.”
“What have you learned?” I ask.
“Let’s wait for Nancy.”
Nancy Adams will be worth waiting for. She is absolutely beautiful, with long jet-black hair, a magnetic smile, and legs that would reach the floor no matter how low that floor happened to be. Lookswise, she’s in Laurie’s class, which is an honors class all the way.
Whenever I see her I’m reminded of that old quiz show, What’s My Line? If panelists had to guess what Nancy did, spending her time cutting up dead bodies would rank last on the list of possibilities, except for maybe sumo wrestler.
There’s one other thing I want to talk to Pete about, while he is in a relatively helpful mood. “I need a big favor,” I say.
“That’s a real news event.”
“I need a list of missing persons reports, starting a week before the fire up through a month afterward.”
“Just for Paterson?” he asks.
“No, I need to cast a slightly wider net than that.”
“New York, New Jersey?”
“I was thinking the United States. Continental would be fine.”
“You’re insane,” he says.
“Okay, I’ll make it easier for you. Do you get notified when a person reported missing is subsequently found?”
“We’re supposed to, but I’m sure it doesn’t always happen.”
“Anybody that was found, you can leave them off the list,” I say.
“What’s this about?”
“The people that were unidentified in the fire. I want to find out if any of them could have been the target,” I say. “I admit I’m grasping at straws here.”
“I’d like to help, but there’s very little I can do,” he says, surprising me once again with his cooperative attitude.
“Why?”
“Because there are thousands of localities; I can’t contact every one. You need to attack this nationally.”
“I will,” I say. “But for now, whatever you can do would be great.”
He nods. “I’ll do what I can.”
“You can give the information to me as it comes in; then I can get my people started on it.”
“Thanks a lot.” He sneers. “You have people now?”
“I’ve got plenty of people. If you work really hard, one day you could be one of them.”
Nancy shows up precisely at seven-thirty and we go into her office. I haven’t seen her in a while, so we make small talk for a few minutes, until Pete grunts his displeasure.
“Tell Andy about your talk with Kyle Holmes,” Pete says.
She nods. “Kyle came to see me, a few days before he died. He wanted to talk about the Hamilton Village case, so I had the file in front of me. Not that I needed it; there are some things you don’t forget.”
“Were you here at that time?” Nancy had moved here from Boston a while back, but I don’t remember if it was before or after the fire.
“It was one of my first cases when I took over the office,” she says. “Not a great way to start.”
“What did Kyle want?” I ask.
“First a little background, though I’m sure this is in the discovery documents,” she said. “The fire was unbelievably intense, and it caused the second and third floors to cave inward. So the bodies were incinerated, not cremated but not too far off either. And because the building caved in on itself, the remains, such as they were, were mixed together. It was a horrible, horrible scene, by any standards.”
I don’t say anything; the information she’s providing was in the discovery documents in excruciating detail. Reading them once was painful, and I was obligated to go over them a bunch of times.
She continues. “I’m embarrassed to say that there was very little science involved. We could independently identify very few of the bodies; it was really guesswork based on secondary evidence, like testimony of people who claimed they knew who was in there.”
“But some of the bones were intact,” I say.
She nods. “Yes, but keep in mind we never had DNA samples of these people to start with, so even if we were able to extract some from the remains, there was nothing to compare it to.”
“Okay, I understand the situation you faced.”
“Good, because I never tried to hide it. It’s in all my reports. And those reports are what Kyle came to talk to me about.”
“Something specific?” I ask.
“Yes. He was interested in one of the victims. Roger Briggs.”
I’m familiar with the name; he was the grandson of Jesse Briggs, whom Laurie and I interviewed. The child’s mother, Jesse’s daughter, was killed as well. “What about him?”
“Well, keep in mind that we did not attempt to put too much information about the victims in our report. We just couldn’t do so from the remains alone, and the rest would be more of an investigative effort, which is not really what we’re geared to do. We basically just listed each victim that we knew about by name, sex, and age.”
“Roger Briggs was on the list,” I say.
She nods. “Yes, but there was a mistake, and information was not transcribed correctly. It said Roger Briggs, male, eight. The fact that he was eight months old was not clear; it appeared from the list that he was eight years old.”
“So?”
“So nothing about the remains listed in the report corresponded to the size of a victim of that age. Kyle was asking me about that.”
“What did you tell him?” I ask.
“Well, I spent some time studying the report, and my backup notes from the examinations. It confirmed what I thought; there was nothing intact that corresponded to an eight-month-old. Of course, that isn’t necessarily conclusive; those remains could have been burned too badly.”
Pete speaks for the first time since Nancy started relating the story. “So bottom line, what do you think?”
Nancy pauses for a moment, seeming to weigh her words. “I don’t think there was a baby in that fire.”
It seemed significant when Nancy said it, but the possibility that there might not have been a baby in the fire is not exactly a case solver. First of all, we can’t be sure it’s true. Second of all, if it were true, we don’t know where the baby is, or what he or she has to do with anything.
What is important is the knowledge that Kyle Holmes was working the case, and that he thought he was on to something. What might be more important is that someone else thought he was on to something, and killed him for it. Then, if my theory is correct, the frame of Noah that was kept in reserve was finally unveiled, to stop anyone else from following up on what Kyle was learning.
At this point, the threat to Becky, which was clearly a way to stop the trial, might even be logical. The perpetrators might have been banking on the case being so strong that Noah would have pled it out, and not gone to trial.
Once I convinced him to do so, and the trial date came so quickly, the entire matter would automatically be subject to intense scrutiny, which the bad guys clearly would not want.
So now, in addition to having no idea who the significant adults are in this case, we have added a baby to be in the dark about. But at least it’s starting to make a little sense, and at this pace we should have the whole thing nailed by Noah’s thirtieth parole hearing.
I ask Laurie to focus as much time as possible on learning whatever she can about Natasha and Roger Briggs. Roger was the only baby listed among the victims of the fire, and they lived on the third floor, which I have always considered worthy of special investigation. The fire would have consumed the entire house from the first floor up, yet special attention was given to spreading the mixture on the third floor.