Page 14 of Go Alone

Apparently the search engine was a member of that tribe the viewed every place in the Midwest as exactly the same. Either way, the Linus Varne that once lived in Columbus, Ohio remained a mystery.

Or he didn’t exist. If portions of this document were fabricated, then there was no reason the name wasn’t fabricated either.

She crossed her arms and shook her head. What did you take that house for? Did you kill Linus Varne? Is that why? Did he have something on you, maybe something about the other properties, so you killed him and took his property?

She could see the holes in this hypothesis even as she made it, but there was no doubt that something untoward had occurred. She spent another hour searching for Linus Varne but found him nowhere. Not even another hidden message buried in other legalese somewhere in a fabricated legal document. Linus Varne, if he existed, remained only as the memory of the former inhabitant of the mysterious third property rezoned from RESIDENTIAL to COMMERCIAL-OTHER.

Finally, Anita called it quits. One upside to reaching the wrong side of forty was reaching a time of life when she understood that she wasn’t going to solve anything by beating her head against a wall.

She forwarded what she had to Kate, then submitted two records requests: one to the City of Columbus for the records pertaining to the Linus Varne decision and another to the Ohio Bureau of Motor Vehicles for address and registration records for Linus Varne of Columbus.

With that done, she pushed away from the computer and spent a moment pondering her new partners. Kate was a serious type, quiet, focused, haunted. She had a sharp mind and a good eye. She'd find threads that passed Anita by and she'd know how to pull them. Maybe she'd find the thread that would lead to Linus Varne.

That haunting in her eyes would be a problem for her the longer she stayed in this game, though. Ghosts had a tendency to grow real if one stared at them long enough. Wayne County was a quiet locale, and Anita had never seen anyone break here, but she’d seen the aftermath of that breaking in the form of stooped men and women who landed in Wayne County from bigger departments, crushed by their experiences but not prepared to let those specters fill the long emptiness of retirement. She hoped Kate would find a way off that road before she got lost.

Marcus Reid, his name uncovered when Anita looked up Kate Valentine during a brief respite from poring over Greer’s past and discovered Reid was already haunted and probably would be the rest of his life. Not from law enforcement, and probably never from something so mundane as a murder or even a serial murder.

Anita’s uncle had served a tour in Desert Storm and come back missing a part of himself. His eyes, once bright and kind and filled with the sort of wholesome joy that belonged exclusively to children who grew up knowing wide open spaces and bright blue skies, were hollow and staring, filled with images of bodies sticking up through the sand, rent by machine guns, torn apart by bombs, slain en masse in the name of freedom.

Marcus seemed to be doing okay, though she had only the briefest of impressions to go off of. Some people came back all right. They either came to terms with the horror or locked it in a box, sank it in the deepest ocean of their mind and let the current carry it to the bottom somewhere far away.

Anita’s eyelids drooped. She rubbed them and rubbed away the need to pick apart the mental states of two people she would know for only a few days.

She headed upstairs and found James asleep. She chuckled to find herself a little disappointed at that. Oh well, there would be time. As her mother said, the seeds would sprout come rain.

CHAPTER SIX

Thursday, March 11th

Kate woke to a message from Anita. Found info on Greer. Two persons of interest in Columbus. Third at large. Sending info. I’ll stay behind to follow up on Linus Varne (at-large POI).

She texted back a thumbs up, then a thank you, and rolled out of bed. “Marcus. Got something.”

Marcus, with the uncanny ability to wake to instant alertness no matter how deep his slumber, was on his feet before the end of that sentence. “What is it?”

“I’ll forward it to you. Anita found some leads.”

“Outstanding. I knew there was a reason I liked her.”

Kate smiled as she scanned the file Anita sent. “Sure it wasn’t the way she patted your stomach?”

“What can I say? Physical touch is my love language.”

That earned a real laugh from Kate. “Well, you’ll have to look elsewhere for your tummy pats. She’s married.”

“All the good ones are.”

They made coffee to go rather than stop somewhere. In the morning, the coffee tasted just as terrible, but the presence of a lead made up for it.

The drive to Columbus took an hour and a half, the first half of which was spent cruising easily down the one- to two-lane north-south highway that ran through Millbrook, and the latter half of which offered a reminder of why Kate liked living in not-quite-a-city Portland.

“This is nothing compared to New York,” Marcus felt a need to say. “If this was Midtown during rush hour, we’d be in park right now.”

Kate rolled her eyes. “Well, I’ll tell you what. Why don’t I drop you off at this bus stop, and you can take the bus to Carla Finch’s house? Women like you better anyway.”

“Women like you fine.”

Kate thought of telling him she was joking, but really, he should know that by now. And it was true that Marcus had a way of getting women to trust him. Something in his eyes and the way he carried himself made it clear that he was safe and they were safe as long as they were around him.