Page 48 of What's Left of Us

He grumbles as I get up and leave the bedroom. “Soto, I’m pretty sure you’re supposed to be off work today.”

“I understand that, sir,” she says, and I can hear the nervousness in her voice. “But I set my system at work to keep running scans while I was off for any associates in Porscha’s past and I got an alert a few minutes ago.”

“And?” I prompt.

“Well,” she begins, and I can hear the glee in her voice. “Porscha attended a high school in Montgomery, Alabama. We already knew that. But she got pregnant when she was sixteen, so even though she was enrolled it was only part time and she did a lot of extra credits and homeschooling until she dropped out and eventually got her GED.”

“Okay.” I sit down in the little room at the top of the stairs. It’s mostly empty now, and there are hinges against the wall where there used to be a door. You could ignore this spot when walking up the stairs since it's opposite the stairwell, and after Dad left the FBI but before the cancer, this was his office.

“Well she did all those extra classes, right? Guess who one of her classmates was? They didn’t keep an official register since these were extracurriculars or summer activities for a lot of students, so I had to do some digging. Guess.”

“Who?”

“She was in the same class as Ylonda Artemits - ergo, Professor Artemis.”

“What was the class?”

“Psychology,” Soto says, the glee back in her voice. “It was like a weird, outdoorsy summer session to connect students with different careers. They would meditate then talk about different psychological tendencies. It was held every Wednesday for twelve weeks.”

“How did you find out they attended that class together?” I ask. “This would’ve been in the early nineties. Is there a record someplace?”

“The class used to have a website,” she explains. “Do you want to take a wild guess who the professor was?”

“Am I going to like the answer?”

“It took a while to find because the guy running it only used his first name. It took place at one of the local parks in Tallahassee, but since Porscha and Ylonda both decided to take the class as an elective it doesn’t appear that where the class was held mattered.”

“Porscha lived in Montgomery until just before she gave birth,” I recall. “Then she moved by herself to Citrus Grove.”

“And her parents died shortly before Jo was born because of that car accident,” Soto agrees, still throwinginformation at me. “But Porscha’s father, Dr. Zimmerman, regularly taught classes at different universities. He traveled to Florida and Georgia all the time for lectures. This guy brought his kids until they aged out.”

“Porscha probably learned about the class on one of her trips,” I agree. Now I wish I wasn’t sitting in Dad’s house, because this would be a great time to speak with my whole team. “Was Porscha behind in school before she got pregnant?”

“Always truant,” Soto reports. “Her parents had to appear in court the year before she got pregnant because she missed so many classes. Jensen was right when he found out about her hobbies. She liked to go to trade shops like locksmiths, contractors, even repair shops, and hang out.”

“People likely let her in because she was a young teenage girl showing interest in the trades,” I groan. There’s plenty of other reasons they might’ve been okay with an unaccompanied minor hanging out during the day, but I don’t say it out loud. “Who was the Professor, Soto?”

“Ah, I’m glad we circled back,” she says, and I can hear her fingers flying across the keys. I’ve only seen Soto’s residence once, and her setup for her computers was impressive. “He just called himself Professor Jim. He mainly taught teenage girls in the park, and when I did some digging-”

“Was it James Nunes?” I ask.

“He was indeed. I matched his photo online to his last ID card from the DMV. He ran the class by himself. His wife, Diana, was a homemaker who did odd and end jobs, including paint touch ups and minor repairs. I can’t find much else about her online. As soon as she married James she basically disappeared. They were wanted for tax evasion in the early 90s. The house they lived in is paid off, but there’s no reports on Diana since way back then.”

I run that over in my head. If James used Jim as his professional title, it would take a little longer to find but shouldn’t be off our radar. “Why didn’t that show up before?”

“Professor Jim,” Soto says sarcastically, “wasn’t a registered teacher. He was a psych student who decided to offer alternative class options to high school and college students. And get this: Professor Jim did a rotating bi-monthly group session at Citrus Grove Penitentiary in the late eighties and early nineties until his disappearance.”

“He worked with CGP?”

“As a contracted worker,” she agrees. “You know how they let people come in with the students now for a graduate program? The prison always had unusual treatment regiments like that. Until early 2000, they kept up with the bi-monthly group sessions for inmates. It had certain parameters that the inmates had to meet to qualify for a group session, but they mainly used it for inmates who were close to release from prison.”

I frown. James working for CGP has nothing to do with the case. That would be before Porscha killed anyone as far as we know -

“There’s one other thing, boss,” Soto says, drawing my attention again. “James met Porscha for those classes before or around the time she got pregnant, if we count backward from Jo’s date of birth. I’m going to send you everything I pulled on him, and I know I’m not a profiler, but I think you should look into him.”

“Why?”

“He did something locksmithing,” she says. “Under the table as far as I can tell, or maybe as a hobby. There’s nothing I can find about payments, business details, or anything else. But, there is one thing that popped up when I started looking into his weird psychology classes.”

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