Page 31 of Bad Mother

“Also, for someone who might want to get caught, he’s been extremely careful about not leaving fingerprints or DNA,” Kat said, referencing the report they’d received from the lab on the first two notes, right before they’d left for lunch. A secondary report had let them know there were also no helpful fingerprints or DNA on the fast-food packaging brought to Trevor Keeling.

Sienna sighed and then popped another greasy chip in her mouth.Trevor Keeling.“I called the social worker on Trevor’s case this morning,” she told Kat. “Just to check in.”

“How’s he doing?”

Sienna shrugged. “She said he’s okay. Quiet.” She still couldn’t get him out of her mind, kept picturing him sitting in that dirty apartment all alone, in the small nest of blankets and stuffed animals he’d set up. The only comfort available. Comfort he’d had to provide himself.

“Hey, Sienna,” Kat said, her tone gentle. “He’ll be okay.”

Sienna nodded, looking up as their meals arrived. They both ate distractedly for a few minutes, talk of Trevor Keeling causing her mind to travel to the trailer park where she’d grown up, to the ragtag groupof kids she’d hung out and played with. They had lived in close enough quarters that they all generally knew each other’s circumstances. Most of them had decent parents, though not very educated and obviously poor, but there were a few, like her, whose parents were down-and-out losers in every sense of the word. It was a wonder she’d done so well for herself, really. And perhaps without Mirabelle, she wouldn’t have. “There was this cat who gave birth to kittens under someone’s porch in the trailer park I grew up in,” Sienna said, staring into space, picturing the tiny black-and-white faces.

Kat tilted her head as Sienna met her eyes. “Sadly, their mom was killed, and the babies were still too young to take care of themselves. A group of us kids each took one and used droppers to feed them for the next several weeks. They all survived, but later, the one Timmy Lauden took would suck on the edge of blankets and clothing and even his own tail sometimes. We all knew him because he had this chronic pointy wet tip on the end.” She looked off behind Kat’s shoulder again, the vision of that tiny cat trying to find comfort in any way it could front and center in her mind.

“That’s both gross and pitiful.”

“It was.” Sienna shrugged. “Other than that, he was a sweet, playful cat. None of the others did that, just him. They’d all been removed from their mother too soon, but for whatever reason, that little guy never adjusted.”

Kat was looking at her knowingly. “Sienna, people aren’t cats.”

She gave her head a small shake, breathing out a smile. “No, of course not.” She paused, picturing that needy cat again. “They’re far more complicated,” she murmured.

The mariachi music played softly over the speakers as they continued their meal, Sienna making a concerted effort to move her mind away from motherless boys and motherless kittens, a line of thought that was less than productive. “Any more information on the dealer on Reva Keeling’s phone?” she asked after a few minutes.

When they’d run him, they’d learned he had been in jail for the past week and a half. Which eliminated him as the killer. Of course: it couldn’t have been that easy. Then again, in Sienna’s experience, drug deals gone wrong never ended with the victim posed elaborately under an overpass. The scene didn’t fit that particular crime, and she wasn’t surprised it had turned into what was most likely a dead end.

“He’s a low-level dealer, in and out of jail since he was fourteen. Mostly possession, a few stolen cars. No violent crimes on his record, though. When he’s not dealing, he’s out getting women pregnant. He has four kids from three different women and doesn’t pay child support on any of them.”

Sienna sipped her tea. The fertile women of Reno who might be—inexplicably to her mind—attracted to that guy were better off with him behind bars, even temporarily.

“We can plan to have a word with him when he gets out, which should be in the next few months, but my bet is there’s no connection at all between him and what happened to Reva Keeling,” Kat said.

Sienna nodded.

“What did you find out about the house on Allegra Street?” Kat asked.

“It belongs to a bank,” Sienna said. “Before that it was owned by a woman who died with no known relatives. Unfortunately, there aren’t any neighbors on that block to ask whether they remember her. Almost all of the houses on that street are foreclosures. There was some talk about a strip mall a few years back that never came to fruition.” She paused as she took a bite of food, chewed, and swallowed. “I think we can assume it’s simply an abandoned house chosen because of its deserted location among other abandoned houses. It must have been easy for our suspect to enter, swap out door hardware, plant evidence for us to find, leave, and not worry about being caught on any cameras in the area or having some vagrant find what he’d left there before we did.”

“So another dead end,” Kat said.

“It appears so.”

“Damn.” She paused for a moment. “Any new insight about what Decker was able to give you as far as the notes?”

Sienna shook her head but removed the copies of the notes that Gavin had marked with highlighter.

“He only saw these two minor things.” She’d said as much to Kat and Ingrid when she’d gotten back from meeting with Gavin the day before. Since then, she’d read the notes about a hundred times, and though there were a few things that sort of stuck out to her, on their own they didn’t mean a thing.

Kat wiped her hands on her napkin and pushed her plate aside. “Let me look at those again, and with a full night’s sleep.”

A full night’s sleep. Well, that makes one of us,Sienna thought. She handed the copies over and picked at the last of her burrito as Kat read through the notes one more time. When Kat was finished, she set the two pages Gavin had marked side by side. “Texas Hold’em without thee,” she murmured as though to herself. “Do you recall any other misspellings in any of his notes?”

Sienna thought about it, wiping the corners of her mouth. “No. But I’m not the world’s best speller. I could have missed one or two.”

“Well, I’ve never won any contests, but I’m a pretty good proofreader in general. It’s why Ingrid usually asks me to go over her important memos. As precise as she is about everything else, the woman can’t spell worth shit. Anyway, my point here is that we’ve read four of his notes already, and this is the only misspelling that’s been found.”

“To be fair, it’s more an abbreviation than a word. Anyone might make the same mistake and not consider it a spelling error.”

Kat raised a brow. “Our game master doesn’t know how to spell the name of a game, abbreviated or not?”

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