We’d gone from what I now knew was called Big And Chunky by will.i.am, to a song by Adele that she screeched along to. There was a Beatles song thrown in, and from there we’d made our way to Rick Astley—who was now waking me up in the middle of the night.
Seeing Alex’s name on the screen, I grunted and hit the green answer icon on the screen. “Wassup, Grandpa?”
In stark contrast to my just-woken-up tone, he sounded wide awake. “Move somewhere Naomi and Shanti can’t hear you.”
Given that Shanti wasn’t sharing a room with us, that wasn’t an issue. So, getting up, I walked through the house until I was out on the porch, staring at the patches of grass I could see with the moonlight.
“Okay, I’m there.”
“Barden MacGregor’s kid isn’t Ainsley Lewis. His wife gave birth at their house, and he and his mother helped her. How the poor woman didn’t die, I don’t know. I heard Tabby when she had Ash, and she had drugs and still sounded like she was possessed. Can you imagine giving birth in what amounts to an oversized shack in the middle of the boonies with no drugs? Jesus.”
“Somehow, no, I can’t imagine it,” I said dryly. “What else do you have? If MacGregor’s out, then where do we look next?”
“McGill. Hurst and Linda just left. She woke up earlier with a memory of something. Teddy McGill and Lyra McGill adopted a kid around the same time the Lewis boy went missing, but no one found out until roughly nine months later when they brought him to a Christmas fair.”
Christmas, shit. I hadn’t forgotten all about it, obviously, but we hadn’t put the tree up yet, and it was only a week away. Poor Shanti hadn’t had the exciting lead up to it because we’d had to leave.
I’d wanted to make a big deal of it because she hadn’t wanted to celebrate Thanksgiving in the usual way this year, so we’d had ‘Fishgiving.’ The day consisted of popcorn, pizza, s’mores, and trying to think up names for each fish.
Because the day hadn’t been celebrated the same way as I was used to, it hadn’t felt like the big holiday it normally did, so I guess my brain wasn’t quite in festive mode. Then again, it’s not like it would have done us much good, seeing as how we’d been here for just over two weeks.
I needed to sort that out ASAP. A kid her age deserved the massive celebration that Christmas was.
“You think they kidnapped the Lewis baby.” It’d been a possibility the gunman was the missing person we were looking for when we’d seen the similarities between him and Mr. Lewis, but it hadn’t crossed my mind it’d been McGill’s son who’d done it. “Wait, why would Ainsley Lewis rob his supposed dad’s business?”
“Maybe he put two and two together and got four? We started questioning people just before the robbery, and part of that consisted of us showing the photos of the Lewis’s holding the baby. It wouldn’t be too much of a push for Ainsley Lewis to see them and see the overwhelming similarities between him and Todd Lewis.”
Christ. I couldn’t even imagine what that’d feel like.
“So, where’s McGill now? Does Linda remember what they named the boy?”
“No, but I looked it up. The McGills sent him to school here, registered under the name Evan. Hurst called Principal Teller, and he sent over the transcripts. They’d gone as far as submitting copies of the adoption when they registered him. Guess who the judge for it was?”
“Who?”
“Ingleston.”
Judge Ingleston had been a crook who’d colluded and abetted with our corrupt former mayor.
“Wonder how much that cost McGill?”
“More than likely a cut of the profits from the gas station. We won’t know that for sure until we get a warrant to investigate McGill’s finances if this hunch is correct, but that’d be my best guess.”
“And where does Mrs. McGill tie into all of this?”
“Word on the streets is that the marriage had hit a rocky patch, so she’s been staying with her sister in Ohio for a couple of months. I woke DB up, and we’ve put in a request for her to be interviewed there ASAP, but she’ll likely request a lawyer immediately.”
“What does this have to do with Naomi, though? Was it the son who trashed her house?”
“Negative. A vehicle matching Teddy McGill’s was spotted near the house around the time the crime would have been committed, based on the comings and goings of Naomi’s neighbors. Maybe he wanted her to keep her mouth shut about what the guy looked like because he knew it was Evan?”
“And the woman behind the counter, Margaret? She saw him face on, so wouldn’t she be the one to threaten?”
Alex grunted. “Yeah, and given that no one’s seen her since the day Naomi’s house was vandalized, it looks like maybe he managed to do it right with her.”