Bloodlines

In one of the photos, I saw that she was holding a cigarette.

“She smoked?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said, his brows drawing together. “Every now and then. I don’t remember her being a chain smoker. Smoking was thought to be sexy then, you know.”

“Do you remember her brand?”

“No, but Lillian might.”

He reluctantly gave me Lillian’s number, which he knew by heart, and I used the phone in the conference room to call her. She was understandably upset by the news of the past twenty-four hours, but seemed, if anything, grateful to me. I was surprised by this, until she explained that she had spent the last twenty years not really knowing what had happened to Katy. “Perhaps someday her killers will be punished. Co

I agreed that he was and gradually worked my way around to asking about the cigarette brand. “Chesterfields,” she answered without hesitation.

Another thought struck me. “Did she use a lighter or matches?”

“She had a special lighter. A gift from Jack. Gold, and it had a Celtic design on it-rather unusual then.”

“Her initials on it?”

“Just the letter K, surrounded by a Celtic knot.”

After I hung up, I told O’Co

O’Co

I moved to another stack. These seemed to have been taken in the 1940s and 1950s, and some were obviously taken without the subject’s awareness. Men and women dressed in the styles of the time. Twenty years changes nothing so much as cosmetics and hairstyles. I didn’t recognize anyone in the photos.

O’Co

“This is the closest I could find to the time,” he said. “But it will help us.”

It was hard not to get caught up in the novelty of seeing what the city looked like then. For one thing, about half the current streets were missing- the housing tracts of the 1960s and 1970s hadn’t been built yet. O’Co

“ ‘All things must change to something new, to something strange,’” he said.

I looked up at him.

“Longfellow,” he said.

“Oh.”

He seemed disappointed that I couldn’t quote the poet back at him. “Did you study poetry a lot when you were in college?” I asked.

“Never went to college,” he said. Without another word on poets or education, he used the old map to point out the place in the marshes where Jack Corrigan had been found, and where later, not far away, O’Co

“He’s one of the ones who beat up Jack?”

“I doubt he had to do anything at all,” O’Co

O’Co

“No wonder you couldn’t figure out where Jack had seen the car. The farm is nowhere near the marsh, and there’s nothing around that spot for miles.”

“Back then, the whole of that area was farming,” he said. “But I wish I had looked a little harder. If I had found the place then…”

“Then you probably would have been buried with the car, too,” I said. “Will the DMV have records of the car registration?”

He shook his head. “Not going back that far.”

I thought about what he had written in the article. “Katy didn’t drive a Buick, right? She drove a little roadster?”

“Right. It was found at Thelma and Barrett Ducane’s home. And the elder Ducanes’ car was at the marina. Todd drove an old Hudson that was in the driveway at his own house. I saw it there that night.”

“So among all the people who might be co

He frowned. “I don’t know.”

I pointed to the stack from which he had taken the photo of Jergenson. “Who are these people?”

“Gus Ronden and friends, if you can call them that. I learned who most of them were in the weeks after Jack was attacked.”

He also showed me a couple of photos of Gus Ronden-including a set of mug shots. “I know you said his gun was in the Imperial, and was the one used to kill Jergenson. Was his gun found in the trunk, with his body?”

“No, under the front seat. It wasn’t used to kill Gus-the weapon that was used to kill him hasn’t been found.”

I started looking through the photos. “Some of these look as if they were taken with a telephoto lens.”

“Yes. Anytime I learned of anyone who had been known to hang around Gus Ronden, I tried to get a photo. Some photos I took myself, but the telephotos were ones I talked a former staff photographer into taking. There are some here that were given to me by friends of the subjects, or their families, because that was the only way to get a picture of them at all.”

“What do you mean?”

“The Ducanes weren’t the only ones who disappeared that night. A number of the people in these photos seemed to vanish from Las Piernas- although I think most of them left voluntarily and with money in their pockets.”

“Show me the ones you couldn’t find.”

He sorted a few out of the stack.

“Who made them disappear?” I asked as I looked through them.

“I can’t say with any certainty.”

I looked up. “But you have a guess.”

“Let’s just say that around this time, Mitch Yeager seemed to distance himself from some of his former friends. But I haven’t a shred of evidence to co

I moved on to a photo of the yacht. “Do you think the Ducanes were ever out on the Sea Dreamer?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, what you wrote was that the yacht was abandoned, but there was no sign of violence on it, right?”

“Right.”

I looked up. “So whoever attacked them-let’s call them the pirates- would have to overpower four adults. One with an infant. Okay, that’s possible, I suppose, assuming they came aboard with weapons. But the pirates would have to control the Sea Dreamer, and the Ducanes, and whatever boat the pirates returned to shore on. The pirates had to get the two elder Ducanes overboard, then take Katy and Todd and the baby with them on the getaway boat-no, that’s not right. The infant wasn’t with them. The baby was taken from the house by Ronden. Wait, how does Baby Max Ducane get from the house to the Buick?”

“Maybe Ronden met these pirates somewhere, after he left Todd and Katy’s house,” O’Co

I frowned. “That seems so odd-kidnapping a child just to bury it in the trunk of a car with its parents?”