Kindred In Death

“Why don’t you tell me when you last saw him or spoke with him?”

“I guess maybe six years ago, or seven.”

“Seven,” Mimi confirmed. “Early spring because I was putting in the bedding plants out back, and Je

“Them?” Eve repeated, and saw Mimi slide her gaze toward her husband.

“Darrin, and the man who may be his father,” Vi

“There’s no brother listed on your records, Mr. Pauley.”

“No. I had him taken off. It cost me a lot of money, and it’s illegal, I guess, but I needed to do it. I needed it before I could ask Mimi to marry me.”

“He’s a bad man. A very bad man. Vi

“Lieutenant. Dallas. How is he a bad man?” Eve asked.

“He does what he wants, takes what he wants, hurts who he wants,” Vi

“We were?” Roarke repeated. “You’re twins then?”

“Fraternal, not identical.” The distinction seemed an important point for Vi

“I’d never mistake them. There’s something scary in his eyes.” Mimi shivered. “Something mean, just not right in them. And I’m sorry, Vi

“Maybe it is. Anyway, they weren’t here long. They wanted to stay a few days. God knows why, or what they’d done they needed to put up here. I said Darrin could stay, but Vance had to go. He wouldn’t stay without Vance. I asked him about his mother, why wasn’t his mother with him. He’s the one who said she was dead. He said she’d been dead for years. Murdered he said.”

“How?”

“He didn’t tell me. I was shocked, and I asked him, how, when, who? All he said was he knew who was responsible. And he had plans. Mimi’s right. Something not right in his eyes, when he said that I could see it. He had plans. I wanted them both away from my family.”

Vi

“We’re yours,” Mimi whispered. “That’s what matters.”

Vi

“That’s all right.” Mimi took his hand, gave it a hard squeeze. “So am I.”

He brought their joined hands to his lips, pressed them hard to her knuckles. “You sure are. You sure are.”

“Go on and tell them about it,” Mimi prompted. “Stop worrying yourself and tell them.”

“All right. I fell for her, for Inga. For who I thought she was. I don’t know if she’d run away from my brother, or if they pla

“Nobody’s going to give you grief over that, Mr. Pauley,” Eve assured him.

He nodded. “Well, that’s good to know. Anyways, Inga left when Darrin was a couple months old. Took whatever wasn’t nailed down in my place, my car, cleaned out the savings I had, even the little account I started for the boy before he was even born. All there was was this video cube from my brother, laughing, telling me thanks for filling in for him. I found out he’d been arrested near to a year before. For some kind of fraud or something. I guess maybe he sent Inga to me, so I’d… fill in. And when he got out, he took them. Just like that.

“I never saw her again, never saw Vance or the boy again until that day Mimi called me home. I hired a private investigator to try to find them, but I couldn’t afford him for very long. Never came to nothing, but I wanted to try. I don’t know if he was mine, the boy, but back then, he felt like mine.”

“You did the best you could.”

He smiled at Mimi, but his eyes were damp. “It felt like giving up. I guess it was. I was mad a long time, and then, well, I met Mimi. I put it behind me, until they showed up here a few years back. And I don’t know where they went from here. We got an e-mail from Darrin about three years ago. He said he was in college, in Chicago. How he was making something of himself, studying hard. He sounded…”

“Sincere,” Mimi put in.

“I guess he did,” Vi

“And never heard a word back,” Mimi finished. “But right after that? Somebody accessed our bank account. That was just our emergency account, thank the Lord, where Vi

He sighed, nodded. “Yeah, I expect he did.”

“Vi

“If he’s mine, he’s entitled to something. And I could be finished there. It’s all he’s entitled to. I tried to contact him through the college, but they said he wasn’t registered. They had no record of him. I argued, because they damn well had two weeks before. But I didn’t get anywhere.”

How much were they entitled to? Eve wondered. “We believe the man you know as Darrin Pauley is and has been in New York. We believe he has committed various cyber crimes and engaged in forms of identity theft.”

Vi

“Mr. Pauley, there’s more. There’s harder, and within the next forty-eight hours it’s going to be in the media.” He lifted his face to meet her eyes, and his were full of fear. “The man you know as Darrin Pauley is the primary suspect in the rape-murder of a sixteen-year-old girl. The daughter of a decorated police officer.”

“No. No. No. Mimi.”

She put her arms around him, and though her face registered shock and horror, it didn’t show disbelief. Her eyes met Eve’s as she held her husband, and she nodded. “I was afraid of him. When he looked at me, I was afraid. That girl, we heard about it. We heard about it this morning on the bedroom screen when we were getting dressed. They said your name. Lieutenant Dallas. I’d forgotten.”

“I need anything you can remember, any detail you can give me on Darrin, your brother, Inga Sorenson.”

“I think they may have hit my parents up for money a few times.” Vi

“Let’s find out.”

“Let me do that. Let me talk to them, explain… somehow. I’ll just use the other room. Is that all right?”

“Go ahead.”

“What do we do now?” Mimi asked. “What should we do? If he comes here-”

“I don’t believe he will. You’ve got nothing he wants. But I’ll talk to your local police. If he contacts you, you should stay calm, behave naturally. And contact your local police, and me immediately.”

“We’re going on vacation tomorrow.”

“And you should,” Eve told her. “Go exactly as you pla

“Enjoy your daughter,” Roarke added. “You have a good family. This isn’t part of it.”

On the drive back to transpo, Eve stared up at the sky. “Just more victims.”

“She’s a sensitive. At least she has a whiff of it,” he added when Eve turned her head to study him. “Just a sense I got from her, and one I think could explain why she saw what’s inside that boy. Maybe he wasn’t as adept at hiding it, but I think she saw inside, and it frightened her.”