Delusion in Death (In Death 35)

“I’ve done the father. He was nearly forty when he married Callaway’s mother. She was twenty-two.”

“Big age gap. Could be interesting.”

“He was doing some private nursing at that time, and came in to help her care for her father. The father had fought in the Urbans, had been wounded, and was suffering from complications of those wounds as well as depression. His wife was killed in a vehicular accident about six months before Russell Callaway met the then Audrey Hubbard. They married a few weeks after the father’s death.”

Eve went to her computer to check. “I don’t hav

e a Hubbard on my list of kids—recovered or not.”

“I’ve just started on the mother. I’ll be able to give you more shortly.”

“What about the father’s war record?”

“He retired an army captain. He saw considerable combat, but there’s no record of him being involved in any of the Red Horse operations. I don’t know if there would be.”

“The mother’s mother.”

“Barely started there. Give me some time. I’m picking through decades here, and all matter of records.”

“And I’m holding you up. It’s good data. It fills in some blanks. Callaway’s an insular man, a loner by nature. Competitive. His mother married a much older man at a difficult point in her life and chose professional mother status, homeschooled her son. Kept him close. Lots of moving, no real chance to form outside bonds. Father’s likely the dominant. Changing jobs, uprooting the family when it suits him. Maternal grandparents dead, and he hasn’t maintained close ties with his parents as an adult. But now he goes to them several times in a few months. It’s good data to chew on. Get me more.”

“I live to serve, Lieutenant.”

She went back to it and sent Roarke’s data to Mira with a request for an eval asap. She moved through more names, let her mind circle.

On impulse she called up Callaway’s parents’ ID photos, studied them. And began the slow, painstaking process of pulling up abductee photos, aging them.

She got more coffee, considered, then rejected, a booster when the caffeine didn’t eliminate the growing fatigue.

Then …

“Wait a minute.”

“Eve.”

“Wait. Wait. I think I’ve got something.”

“So do I.”

“Look at this. Give me your take.”

He came around to study the screen and the images on it. The first he recognized now as Callaway’s mother; split-screened beside it was a computer-generated image.

“They appear to be the same woman, or very close. Different hair color and style, but the face is the same.”

“The aged image is of Karleen MacMillon, an abductee at the age of eighteen months. Never recovered. But she was recovered and raised by the Hubbards as Audrey, because there she fucking is.”

“The record of Audrey Hubbard’s live birth is fake. It’s a good one, but it’s fake.”

“Because she wasn’t born to the Hubbards. She was one of the taken. But never listed as recovered.”

“Hubbard retired from the army and moved from England to the U.S. with his wife and four-year-old daughter. His wife had a half-sister. Gina MacMillon. I’m still digging there.”

“Gina and William MacMillon, listed as Karleen’s parents, both killed in the raid where the kid was abducted. It’s the link. It links him to Menzini and Red Horse. Not enough for an arrest, but enough to put a tail on him.”

She walked to the board. “He found out his mother was an abductee, and it set something off. But how did a four-year-old kid get the formula, or have knowledge? Maybe Hubbard was in on the raid that took Menzini down, or in on interrogations. They have something—or had it—and Callaway kept going back to find it, to find everything he could, or interrogate his mother. I need to talk to her.”

“Are we going to Arkansas?”