“I don’t know,” she said, visibly trying to come up with something. “He just wanted a new life.” Then something sparked on her face. “Maybe . . . You could try one thing. After I got pregnant, Marty and I once talked about what we’d do, if things ever got too hot. If we ever had to get out. I was thinking about the baby and worrying about the kind of life Marty was into. And he told me about this guy that Gary knew in the Marines. A real wizard for fake IDs. Marty said we’d use him before heading for the border. Maybe that’s what Gary did. Maybe he used the guy to get himself a new life.”
I shared a quick glance with Munro. This could be something. When people dropped off the grid they often used fake or stolen IDs, and knowing the source of the ID would be a huge boon.
“Did he tell you the guy’s name?”
She shook her head. “No. Maybe he did, but I don’t remember. Sorry.”
Another wall. Easy come, easy go, right?
“If you find him,” she added, “say hi from me. Tell him I think it’d be good for Naomi to get to know her uncle.”
She stood, smoothed down her jacket, and turned to go. After a second she looked back.
“Bear in mind, he probably wants to be found even less than I did.”
Then she headed for the escalator and was gone.
I called Villaverde and gave him the update. He needed to look for Marines from Walker and Pennebaker’s days who had done time for fraud, or had criminal records before they joined up. I also had another idea. Something more specific. Something that would fit with the two bikers’ feelings about the military. It was a long shot, but at this point we had to try anything that might move us forward.
“Look for soldiers over the past ten years that were listed as MIA, but then came back onto the grid. Start at Camp Pendleton and work out from there.”
Villaverde immediately grasped what I was suggesting. “So Pennebaker walks out of prison and somehow assumes the ID of a missing soldier?”
“Yeah. And most likely one with no living relatives. I get the impression that the new Pennebaker wouldn’t have wanted to hurt a soldier’s family, but would have no qualms about deceiving the government.”
“I’ll get my guys straight onto it. You coming back here?”
I said we’d head straight up to Aero Drive.
By the time we got back to his office, Villaverde was sitting at the main meeting room table with two other agents, going through army service records. I joined the party while Munro found an empty desk and put in a call to Corliss.
He told me he’d made contact with the USACIDC—the United States Army Criminal Investigation Command—at MCB Quantico and requested the service histories that we needed. With both the FBI and the DEA pressing for access—and adding into the mix that both San Diego PD and the SDSO wouldn’t back off until they found whoever killed Deputy Fugate—he hadn’t had to face any jurisdictional stare-downs.
There were seventeen soldiers who fit our profile. All of them had been listed MIA at some point over the past ten years, but only five of them had returned to the fold in one way or another in the last two, which was our window for Pennebaker. Of the other twelve, nine had been confirmed dead and three were still listed as missing.
We were trying to find someone born between 1970 and 1985 who looked enough like Pennebaker for him to assume his identity. There was one name that stood out. Marine Sergeant Matthew Frye. Born 1982. Listed as missing in 2003. Came back on the grid in 2009. Missed three psych evaluation appointments but had finally been discharged at the beginning of 2010. He still had his tags and had been identified by a sister, who was his only living relative. Placed side by side, Frye and Pennebaker could have been brothers, notwithstanding their choice of optional mustache.
“Where’s Frye now?”
One of the junior agents pushed a few keys on the laptop facing them, then spun it around to face Villaverde, who shared the details.
“Social Security has him in Los Angeles. Works at a private rehab clinic up in Montecito Heights. Sleeps there, too, by the looks of it. His work address and residential address are the same.”
Call it instinct, call it fifteen years on the job, but I knew this was our man. Pennebaker walks out of prison a changed man, but almost certainly still bitter about the past. Feels more like a soldier than anything else, but has seen and heard too much ever to go back to active service. Needs to leave his recent past behind because those years were notable for some serious criminal activity. We knew that Walker and Pennebaker had a reputation for getting the job done. Why else would someone want to hire them years after they last worked together? That kind of reputation works both ways. It all fit. The only way to know for sure was to meet him. Any kind of contact before then risked putting him back on the missing list.
I turned to Villaverde. “We need to get up to LA.”
“This time of day, you’ll need to go by air.”
He had seemingly crunched the facts the same way I had.
He picked up a phone and told the other end that he needed a chopper.
Twenty minutes later, we were airborne in an LAPD JetRanger on the way to have a chat with a man I hoped would turn out to be our own guru.
37
Tess hated waiting.
She was impatient from minute one, as her mom never failed to remind her, often adding that it was a small miracle that Tess had had the decency to stick around inside of her for the full nine months and not kicked and screamed her way out prematurely.
She was back at the hotel, with Jules and Alex. They’d gone downstairs for a light lunch, and they were now back in their rooms. Jules was on a conference call with her office while Tess was on the couch with Alex, reading Tikki Tikki Tembo with him. It was one of his favorites, one he’d asked her to bring back from the house. It was also a book she remembered reading to Kim years ago, but even with that added emotional kick, its charm and its amusing tongue-twisters still weren’t enough to drag Tess’s mind off the drawing or calm her bubbling impatience.
Then her phone rang.
She picked it up, saw a number she didn’t recognize, and her pulse vaulted. She never answered a call that fast.
It was Holly Fowden, Alex’s teacher.
Tess thanked her for getting in touch as she sprang off the bed and slipped into her bedroom, closing the door behind her. She then explained who she was and what had happened. Fowden also hadn’t heard about Michelle’s death, and her voice broke as she struggled to find the right words to say. Tess helped her by moving the conversation along and told her about what had prompted her visit to the school and her chat with the principal.
“Alex’s mom did come to see me,” Fowden told her. “She showed me that drawing.”
“Why?”
“She didn’t explain much. She just said Alex seemed to be troubled by something and wanted to know how he was in class.”
“And how was he?”
“Normal. Happy. I didn’t notice anything wrong with him.”
“But she did?”
“Well . . . yes.” She sounded a bit uncomfortable discussing it with Tess, but carried on. “She said he hadn’t been sleeping well and having nightmares . . . She also said he’d been saying things she didn’t understand, things she was surprised he knew. She seemed confused by it all and wanted to know if I’d talked about them in class.”