“But the identification, the necklace?”
“They ran Ava’s dental records against the burned girl’s,” my wife said. “Not even close to a match. Ava had congenitally missing teeth. The dead girl had a full set.”
Relief washed over me like a wave and I felt tears welling to match Bree’s. Ava Williams was still alive.
Nana Mama took Ava in when she was fourteen, an orphan and runaway from a foster home. She’d lived with us almost a year. For a time, life in our house seemed to have been good for Ava. Or at least it seemed that way to us. She’d bonded with Bree and seemed to tolerate the rest of us.
But then Ava had started hanging with the wrong crowd. We suspected drug use, maybe alcohol, and quicker and sadder than you’d think, she was gone, until a burned corpse was discovered in an old, abandoned factory in Southeast that was also a reputed hangout for junkies and the homeless. Ava’s silver bracelet, which she’d worn constantly, was on the dead girl’s wrist. So was a necklace my grandmother had given her. The news had been devastating.
“Isn’t that wonderful?” Bree asked.
“Better than wonderful,” I said, and wiped at my eyes. “But where is she? And who’s the dead girl?”
“Jeannie said no match on her yet. But Jane Doe is definitely not our Ava.”
Tired as I was, my mind has been conditioned over decades of police work to think a certain way, whether I want to or not. The relief I’d felt at learning that Ava was alive was replaced by a colder sensation as I considered the idea that the young runaway who’d found shelter under my roof could have killed another young woman, planted phony identification on her, and then set her on fire.
But because my wife and Ava had become so close, I said nothing.
“We have to find her,” Bree said. “Bring her home.”
I thought about Pete Francones and the other victims at the massage parlor and wondered how I was going to make time to search for Ava.
“Let’s start tonight if you get home at a reasonable hour,” Bree insisted.
“I don’t think there will be any reasonable hours for me for a long time,” I said. “The Francones case is going to be a media circus.”
“Already is,” she said. “And I get what a slam this is going to be for you, Alex. I really do. But don’t worry. I’ll start looking for Ava myself. When you can, you pitch in. Okay?”
I stroked her cheek, said, “You’re such a good person, Bree Stone.”
My wife kissed my hand, said, “You are, too, baby. The best man I know.”
Chapter
11
Outside the front entrance of the Four Seasons in Georgetown, security guards flanked Marcus Sunday as he waited for the valet to bring him his car. The maître d’ coldly handed him a doggie bag containing his breakfast.
“You guys have zero sense of humor,” Sunday remarked, making a show of stroking his flaming-red Abe Lincoln beard.
“Harassing our patrons and posing as a guest are not funny matters, Mr. Mulch,” the maître d’ seethed.
“I was checking in later today,” the writer replied with great indignation. “Or thought about it, anyway. But now? No chance, gentlemen. No chance.”
A two-hundred-and-fifty-thousand-dollar Bentley Continental GT Coupe convertible rolled up. The writer went around, took the keys, and gave the valet a fifty before donning driving gloves and climbing in. He glanced over at the shocked maître d’ and the guards, scratched at his fake beard with his middle finger, and drove out from u
nder the hotel’s portico onto Pennsylvania Avenue, heading east.
That had to have made an impression, Sunday thought, and felt very happy. That breakfast room had been the height of absurdity: a place of power plagued with so many rules, customs, and mores that any creativity, any resourcefulness was impossible.
But if anything, Marcus Sunday was a very, very creative and very, very resourceful man. Take the driver’s license in his wallet that identified him as Thierry Mulch of Boise, Idaho. The bogus ID had cost him $145, purchased from a kid he met in Boston who catered to the underage drinking crowd at the local colleges. The fake license was flawless, like the six other Thierry Mulch driver’s licenses he carried from time to time, so good that he’d used them to get past TSA agents at the airport, blue-light watermarks and all.
TSA: The Stupid Administration.
Turning north onto Rock Creek Parkway with a triumphant grin on his face, the writer thought of the quality of those fake licenses as more evidence in support of one of his long-held theories. Sunday had heard politicians claim that corporations were people, but the writer took it a step further:
People are documents, my friends!