Jane
In an interview room, one hour later. “Thanks for coming, Mr. Lemoyne,” says Jane. “I hope your flight was okay.”
Albert Lemoyne, age sixty-nine, is a big, weathered guy with a full, ruddy face and deep-set, bloodshot eyes. A union man, a Teamster, with rough hands to show for it. He is overweight and aging, but Jane sees a man inside there who would have caught a woman’s eye back in his day. His skin is bronzed from the sun; he now lives in Scottsdale. “I flew home to bury my daughter,” he says, “so no, it wasn’t that great.”
“Of course. That was—”
“Did you find him? Did you figure out who did it?”
“We think we may be close, Mr. Lemoyne.”
“Shit, call me Al, everyone else does.”
“Okay. I need to ask you some questions about your daughter, Al.”
“You didn’t ask me enough questions when you called me on Tuesday?”
“Just a few more, sir,” says Jane.
—
“I knew they were getting a divorce,” he says. “She kept telling me she was fine, she’d be okay. She didn’t—she didn’t share a lot with her old man. She was much closer to her mother.”
Her mother, Amy Lemoyne, died four years ago from cancer. Al has since lived alone in the house Lauren bought them in Arizona.
“Do you know, Al, if Lauren had begun another relationship?”
He shakes his head no. “But I doubt she’d mention it to me unless it was serious.”
“Do you recognize the name Christian Newsome?”
“No, uh-uh.”
“Nick Caracci? Vicky Lanier?”
Same answer for each one.
“What about Simon Dobias?”
His eyes flicker, like a flinch. “The boy,” he says. “The son. The one accused her a stealing.”
“Yes.”
“He still live around here?”
“Why do you ask?”
He makes a fist with his hand, gently thumps it on the table. “I told her, I said, ‘You sure you wanna move back close to where they live?’ She said it wouldn’t be an issue. I mean, when she moved back to Chicago, I said okay, it’s a big place. But then she meets Conrad and moves to Grace Village and I said to her, I said, ‘You sure, honey? Being just the town over?’ But she said it was the father who worried her, and he was dead. She didn’t worry about the boy.”
Jane puts up her hands. “I need to unpack that. When Lauren married Conrad and moved to Grace Village three years ago, you were worried, because she was moving so close to Grace Park, where the Dobias family lived?”
He nods. “She said, there’s so many people in these suburbs, odds were she’d never run into him even if he still lived here.”
“Simon, you mean.”
“Right. The father, Ted? He moved to St. Louis after. And then I guess he died.”
She raises her eyebrows. “The father moved to St. Louis ‘after.’ After what?”