“Doesn’t mean anything to me.”
“Don’t start that again.”
“Don’t start what again?”
“The year nineteen seventy-six,” she said in one of her exasperated growls, “what happened that year, why is it historically important, what did it represent?”
“Oh,” I said. “Bicentennial.”
“The light dawns. That’s right, it was the Bicentennial. And a lot of people, especially in small towns, young people all over the country, celebrated by wearing Bicentennial pins. The girl in this photo is wearing a Bicentennial pin. After nineteen seventy-six, when the Bicentennial ended, hardly anybody wore the pins because there was no longer any reason to. Quod erat demonstrandum.”
“What does that mean?” I said.
“Q.E.D.”
“Huh?”
“Gahh,” she said.
“What does that mean?”
She folded the sheet carefully, tucked it into my shirt pocket, glared at me, said, “You can be a pain in the ass sometimes, you know that?” and walked out of the room.
I sat down in my chair and tried to figure out what I’d done to set her off like that. Nothing, I decided. Chalk it up to the fact that women are emotional creatures. Emotional and volatile and unpredictable and often unreadable, not anything like men.
Give Tamara enough of a starting point, she can find out just about anything in what she calls cyberspace. Fast, a lot faster than by dint of the creaky old methods I’d relied on for so many years. First thing Friday morning she took the three slim leads we had — Mono County, the page from what Kerry insisted was a 1977 high school yearbook, and the only Dorothy on the two-sided page of photos — and by early afternoon she had made connections and pulled up facts that answered some questions and opened up a potential can of worms.
The page of photos was from the High Desert Municipal High School yearbook in Aspen Creek, a town of 2,500 residents not far from Mono Lake in Mono County. And Kerry had been right, by God, about the date being 1977. Dorothy Lightfoot had graduated that year, with honors.
Tamara checked public records on file in Bridgeport, the Mono County seat. No birth certificate for Dorothy Lightfoot, but a marriage license had been issued to her and a man named Anthony Colton in the spring of 1979. If the union had produced any offspring, the birth had taken place elsewhere.
There was another certificate on file in Mono, one that was a little surprising. On August 19, 1985, Dorothy Lightfoot Colton had died in Aspen Creek. The death certificate did not list the cause.
“Twenty-five years, six months,” Tamara said. “Dag, that’s my age, almost exactly. Twenty-five’s too young to die.”
“Any age is too young to die,” I said.
“I guess. But twenty-five...”
“Accident, maybe.”
“Let’s see if there’s an obit anywhere online.”
There wasn’t. Aspen Creek was too small to have a newspaper, and none of the other Mono sheets had the staff, time, or money to put their back issue files on the Internet.
I said, “Find out if Anthony Colton still lives in Aspen Creek or anywhere else in the county.”
He didn’t. Nor did anybody else named Colton.
“Try the Lightfoot name.”
While she was doing that, Runyon came in. We’d had him out doing legwork on the engineering employee case. He gave me a quick report on his findings, then I filled him in on what Tamara had learned so far.
He asked, “Big Dog picked up yet?”
“I checked in with Logan a little while ago. Still at large.”
“So it’s okay if I see what I can do?”
“Go ahead.”
Pretty soon Tamara said, “Two hits on Lightfoot, neither one in Aspen Creek. Robert in Bridgeport, George in Lee Vining.” She’d been using Big Hugs for that search, a website that had been created to help trace adoptive parents and then expanded into other search areas. Through a subscription to that site, you can find out, among other things, the addresses of ninety percent of the U.S. population.
Runyon said, “How about checking the Snow name?”
“Good idea.”
Very good idea, as it turned out. It produced a second surprise.
One Vernon Snow, age 64, had died in Aspen Creek on August 19, 1985 — the same day as Dorothy Lightfoot Colton.
“Dot and Mr. Snow,” Tamara said. “We got us a connection, for sure.”
“What we need now is the cause of both deaths,” I said. “One of the papers up there must have something on file — obits, a news story if the deaths were related or anything other than natural.”
“After three Friday afternoon. Not much chance of getting anybody to check files for us in a hurry.”
“With the weekend, it might take days.” Small-town newspaper offices were generally closed on weekends, and always seemed to be understaffed and too busy to respond quickly to out-of-town requests. The same was true of small-town, rural county libraries; their hours were shorter, their staffs even smaller.
Tamara ran a “death sweep” on Anthony Colton. That’s another of Big Hugs’ online search services: you can find out the date and place of death of ninety percent of American citizens deceased during the past fifty years or more, using the individual’s birth date and place of birth as a starting point. Anthony Colton of Mono County, CA, wasn’t one of them, however. Either he was still alive or among the ten percent whose deaths, for one reason or another, had gone unrecorded.
Running a criminal background check on the four names would’ve been easy enough if Tamara’s friend Felicia had been on duty in SFPD’s communications department. But she wasn’t. Civilians, in which class private detectives fall, can’t access National Crime Information Center computer files, and without specific details Tamara couldn’t pull up the information on her own without doing some illegal hacking. The check would have to wait until Monday morning, when Felicia was due back on the job.
Runyon said, “I could drive up to Mono County, see what I can find out over the weekend.”
Tamara and I both gave him a look. “Mono’s way up along the Nevada line,” I said. “Six or seven hundred miles, round trip. Three or four days altogether.”
“I wouldn’t mind, if you don’t need me on Monday.”
I considered it. “Well... it might save us some time, at that. Always easier to dig out details in person. But the client might not want to authorize the extra expense.”
“I could call him,” Tamara said.
“What’s the schedule look like first of next week?”
“Christmas week. Not much happening.
“All right. Call Steve Taradash, see what he says.”
Taradash said okay. So we said the same to Runyon. If the workaholic wanted to feed his habit with a twelve-hundred mile roundtrip drive, might as well let him do it. God knew I’d done enough of that kind of feeding myself over the long haul.
14
Tamara
She trudged up the stairs to Claudia’s flat, keyed open the door — and there was Horace, big as life, bigger, all duded up in a sport coat and tie, sitting on the damn sofa with her sister.
Tamara stopped short. Been a long day and she was tired, she was cold and damp from a two-block walk in the rain, and she was hungry. All she wanted was something to eat, a long hot bath, and a book that’d put her to sleep in less than ten pages. Instead, just as she was starting to drag herself out of the glooms, get her head together, she had this to deal with.
She said to Claudia, “Sister Judas.”
“Now don’t fly off the handle—”
“How many times did I ask you, beg you, don’t let no sweet-talkin’ longhair musicians come round here?”