No Time for Goodbye - Linwood Barclay [104]
“He did that?”
“Yeah. I saw the license. New York State. His name was Jeremy Sloan.”
Vince took the clipping back from me, looked at the name attached to Todd Bigge. “That’s pretty fucking curious, isn’t it?”
“I can’t figure this out,” I said. “This doesn’t make any sense. Why is Todd’s picture in an old newspaper clipping with this different name?”
Vince was quiet for a moment. “This guy,” he said finally. “The one from the mall. He say anything at all?”
I tried to think. “He said he thought my wife should get help. But not much other than that.”
“What about the license?” Vince said. “You remember anything about that?”
“Just that it was New York,” I said.
“It’s kind of a fucking big state,” Vince said. “He might live across the line in Port Chester or White Plains or something, and he might be from fucking Buffalo.”
“I think it was Young something.”
“Young something?”
“I’m not sure. Shit, I only saw the license for a second.”
“There’s a Youngstown in Ohio,” Vince said. “You sure it wasn’t an Ohio license?”
“I could tell that much.”
Vince flipped the clipping over. There was text on the back, but the clipping had clearly been saved for the picture. The scissors had gone through the center of a column, cut a headline in half on the back side.
“That’s not why he would have saved it,” I said.
“Shut up,” Vince said. He was reading bits and pieces of stories, then looked up. “You got a computer?”
I nodded.
“Fire it up,” Vince said. He followed me upstairs, stood over me as I pulled up a chair and turned the computer on. “There’s bits of a story here, involving Falkner Park and Niagara County. Throw all that into Google.”
I asked him to spell “Falkner,” then typed in the words, hit Search. It didn’t take long to figure it all out. “There’s a Falkner Park in Youngstown, New York, in Niagara County,” I said.
“Bingo,” Vince said. “So this is most likely from some paper from that area, because it’s just a piss-piddly story about park maintenance.”
I turned around in my chair, looked up at him. “Why is Todd in a picture in a paper from Youngstown, New York, with a bunch of basketball players from some other school, and he’s listed as J. Sloan?”
Vince leaned up against the doorframe. “Maybe it’s not a mistake.”
“What do you mean?”
“Maybe it’s not a picture of Todd Bigge. Maybe it’s a picture of J. Sloan.”
I gave that a second to sink in. “What are you saying? That there are two people? One named Todd Bigge and one named J. Sloan—Jeremy Sloan—or is there one person with two names?”
“Hey,” said Vince, “I’m just here because Jane asked me.”
I turned back to the computer, went to the White Pages website where you could look up phone numbers, entered in Jeremy Sloan for Youngstown, New York.
The search came up empty, but suggested I try alternatives, like J. Sloan, or the last name only. I tried the latter, and up came a handful of Sloans in the Youngstown area.
“Jesus,” I said, and pointed to the screen for Vince. “There’s a Clayton Sloan listed here on Niagara View Drive.”
“Clayton?”
“Yeah, Clayton.”
“That was Cynthia’s father’s first name,” Vince said, just wanting to be sure.
“Yeah,” I said. I grabbed a pencil and paper from the desk, wrote down the phone number off the computer screen. “I’m going to give this number a call.”
“Whoa!” Vince said. “You out of your fucking mind?”
“What?”
“Look, I don’t know what you’ve found here, or whether you’ve found anything, but what are you going to say when you call? On this phone? If they’ve got caller ID, they know right away who it is. Now, maybe they know who you are and maybe they don’t, but you don’t want to be tipping your hand, do you?”
What the hell was he up to? Was this actually good advice, or did Vince have some reason for not wanting me to call? Was he trying to keep me from connecting the dots because—
He handed me his cell phone. “Use this,” he said. “They won’t know who the hell is calling.”
I took the phone,