Her hair long and brindle-brown and gray, Mrs. Parker was dressed in a dark red-plaid suit, a white blouse. She was in a den or study. Books filled the background. Many were about decoration and interior design.
“Hidden for years,” she continued. “Hid the drinking too. Until he didn’t care.”
Nilsson stared at the screen unemotionally but he believed her eyes flickered at this comment. Shaw wondered if the ex she’d referred to had behaved this way as well.
Mrs. Parker wore a stern gaze. “What kind of man hurts a woman? A husband cheats and you find out. It’s terrible.” She pausedfor a sliver of a second. “But it’s not physical. What Jon did to her last November...” Her eyelids dipped briefly.
Shaw supposed the laundry list of familial grievances was long, but to him it was irrelevant. They needed to start their search for mother and daughter now.
Harmon had introduced Shaw as a “personal protection expert”—which, in a way, he was. Mrs. Parker accepted this without asking more.
Shaw opened his notebook and turned to a fresh right-hand page, leaving behind his account of the S.I.T. theft, and uncapped the fountain pen. “Her emails? What did they say exactly?”
They were similar, telling each recipient about Merritt’s release and how she and Hannah were going away until he was caught for violating the restraining order and returned to prison. She was concerned he’d use the contacts he’d made as a cop to find her, and so they were staying off all social media and not using their phones or email any longer.
“Are you both sure they came from her?”
“How do you mean?” Harmon asked.
Sonja Nilsson: “It’s her email address and server?”
They both said that it was.
Shaw asked, “And language, punctuation?”
The two seemed perplexed.
Nilsson said, “We’re worried that Merritt sent it himself.”
“You mean he might’ve hurt her already?” Harmon asked, alarmed.
But Ruth said, “No, it was Alli, I’m positive. Her phrasing, you know. And she signed ‘OXOX,’ backward from normal. It was a joke just between us. Jon wouldn’t know that.”
Harmon scanned the email he’d received. “Yes, it sounds like her, the way she writes her memos and emails.”
Nilsson asked, “You emailed back?”
They both had, but she hadn’t responded.
Shaw asked, “Does Allison see her father?”
The woman’s fractured marital status was an easy deduction from her earlier comments.
“Once a year maybe. Not involved. Never was.”
Though, cheater that he had been, he’d never hit his wife.
“So she wouldn’t go stay with him?”
A laugh was the response.
“Any siblings?”
“No, Alli was an only child.”
Taking notes, Shaw pressed on the matter of friends. Success in the reward business—or in tracking in general—relies on people. Web history and car tags and video cams can be helpful but there’s nothing like a human for a source of information. Even if someone lies and swears the missing soul has gone east, if you read people carefully enough, you know he’s headed west.
Ruth thought for a moment and recited the names of several people her daughter had mentioned to her. The information was sketchy. She had no addresses or phone numbers and wasn’t even certain of the last names. Harmon could only offer a few; he and Parker did not socialize much, he explained.