Boone née Johnson née Gilmore now sported teased-up honey-blond hair, and assertive, challenging eyes rimmed by shadow and fringed by press-on lashes. Makeup was caked on so heavily an apathetic bureaucratic camera had picked it up. The overall effect: a mask with great bone structure.
Paper-clipped to the Iowa license was a pink pearlescent business card.
American Dreams Gentleman’s Club.
Toll-free number, address on North Fifteenth Street in Council Bluffs.
I said, “Finally, the Midwest.”
Milo said, “She takes the time to get a serious degree, lands a decent job in Idaho, ends up stripping in Iowa?”
He ran a map search. “Nearly thirteen hundred miles away. You know what I’m feeling.”
“Maybe she got in trouble in Boise and lammed. Pilfering from the rehab center, even embezzling.”
No arrest records on Martha Erika Johnson popped up on NCIC. If she’d committed an offense, it had been too low-level for the feds to care about.
But serious enough for her to morph to Lori Boone, pack up quickly, and land in yet another state.
Milo cold-called Boise PD, spoke to a series of cops far too young to have any idea. It took a while but he finally connected to a civilian records clerk able to direct him to the open-sesame that unlocked their internet cave.
Two years into her employment at Bright Life, “Erika Johnson” had been arrested for prostitution during a raid by Boise vice cops at Sweet Orchid Massage Therapy, Ltd. Five-hundred-dollar fine, no jail time, supervised visits for a year that never materialized.
I said, “Moonlighting.”
He said, “Different type of physical therapy to make more money. If you’re right about the Persephone angle, why would she want to go near a place like that?”
“To achieve control.”
He thought about that. “Horny guys on the table instead of on her... guess so.” Long sigh. “Okay, let’s see where our poor girl traveled next... okay, here we go.”
If the records she’d left were complete, Lori Boone had remained uneventfully in Iowa for four and a half years until acquiring a Nevada driver’s license as Meagin Jones and listing her age as thirty-three.
Sleek, shoulder-length, red hair styled skillfully. Less conspicuous makeup allowed natural beauty to shine through. Small smile; confident. An eye-catching woman.
Address on Highway 95 in Amargosa Valley.
No deceased child by that name.
Milo said, “Now she’s used to being Ms. Enigma, no need for a formal name change.”
I said, “Once she switched to dancing and living off tips, no need for documentation.”
He typed, stopped, pointed to his screen. “Address matches a place called The Fantasy Farm. Legal brothel in Nye County... still in business... looks as if it changed hands a few times since then... gets high marks for cleanliness, security, good-looking hostesses.”
He sat back. “From waiting tables to legit massage to not-so-legit bodywork to stripping, then full-time sex work. Which according to Rikki Montel, she stuck with in Vegas.”
He peered at the Nevada license. “So many women enter that world and deteriorate. If this can be believed, she matured and got healthier-looking. Guess taking control can do that to you.”
I said, “Emotional and physical control. You know where most of the deterioration comes from.”
“Dope and pimps.”
“Nothing we’ve seen or heard says there was ever a substance issue. She also had the physical and intellectual assets to work in a high-end, protected environment.”
“Which,” he said, lifting the final piece of paper, “she left just after three years.”
We’d reached the topmost level of Meagin March’s pocket biography. Several sheets of fine print that had led me to suggest we start at the beginning.
At age thirty-six, Meagin Jones had left the brothel, moved to Las Vegas, and leased a house in the Tule Springs neighborhood. The documents she’d held on to listed the rent as twenty-two hundred dollars a month. She’d paid a year in advance and had repeated it for two additional years.
Milo said, “Almost eighty grand. That’s serious cash on hand. Why do you think she held on to this?”
I said, “Point of pride. After living frugally at The Fantasy Farm and saving her tips, she’d put herself in a strong financial situation. Someone with a strong sense of self-preservation.”
“Too bad that petered out.” He looked up the property, found it on Zillow, now for sale for five hundred twenty-six thousand dollars.
Twenty-four hundred square feet of tile-roofed pink stucco in one of the city’s safest neighborhoods. Two stories, three bedrooms, three baths, a family room that looked out to a kidney-shaped pool surrounded by a concrete deck.
He groaned and I knew why.
The pool and the decking were freakishly reminiscent of the place where Meagin March and Gio Aggiunta had been slaughtered.
Placing the lease back on top of the stack, he said, “So why’d she leave all this with Irma? It’s not like she’s telling us who killed her.”
I said, “It wasn’t about that. She’d been hiding and dodging her entire adult life, wanted some sort of legacy — letting the world know who she was and how she got there.”
“A pocket bio left with a maid? No way this was random, Alex, she musta known her past could catch up with her. Why not come out and say who she was afraid of?”
I said, “Don’t know... unless at some level she is telling us.”
I took the box and fished out the Texas I.D. card.
Persephone Gilmore.
Yet another find-a-grave search revealed no matches. No surprise.
I said, “I’ll lay odds this was her real name and she figured someone could trace her past using it.”
He chewed on that. “Making me work for it?”
“She operated illegally for most of her adult life, may have developed low regard for law enforcement. But someone who bothered to follow up would be more likely to be thorough.”
“Testing the cops? I don’t know, Alex... okay, nothing else to look at, what’s the name of that town near the swamp?”
“Copeland.”
Another map search.
He said, “She took an even longer trip the first time out. Over sixteen hundred miles to Midland.”
I looked at the map. “Dallas would’ve been simpler, it’s a nearly straight, westerly trip, so she was clearly avoiding it. Same for veering south to Houston and Austin. Big cities can be easier to hide in but if she was a country girl, she could’ve found them intimidating. We’ll never know why she stopped in Midland or how she got there but back then you could buy bus tickets anonymously so my bet’s on Greyhound, hitchhiking, or both. And it’s an oil town, trucks coming in and out.”
“Hopping semis.”
“Doing what it took to escape.”
He shook his head. “Eighteen years old and moving halfway across the country.”
No surprise to me. I’d made my escape from Missouri to California at sixteen, fleeing the rages of an alcoholic father and a chronically depressed, apathetic mother.
Milo knew about that in general terms but I’d never gotten into the core of the experience. He read something on my face that made him turn away from me and back to the box.
Tapping the top, he said, “Abused so she runs. You think whoever she ran from found her and killed her all these years later? That’s... oh, man, that’s so evil.”
His hand traveled to his gut and massaged, as if sick to his stomach.
I said, “Maybe it didn’t start out as a murder. What if the abuser found out she was rich and tried to take advantage?”
“Blackmail? I raped you twenty years ago so pay me off?”