“Did you visit them out there?”
“No. I never knew them. They had a small farm. They died in a mudslide when my mom was little. It swept the entire property away, the house, barn, everything. Her parents’ bodies were never found. She was at school or she would have
been killed too. After that she went to an orphanage. Then came east when she was an adult.”
“How did your parents meet?”
Jules’s features softened. “It was sort of romantic, actually. My dad was working in Maryland, right out of college. My mom worked as a waitress at a café near there. She was putting herself through college. Some of the people at Dad’s work would go there for breakfast and lunch. She would wait on him and they struck up a friendship. Mom was a knockout back then and I’m pretty sure she had plenty of suitors. When she got off work one night he was waiting in the parking lot with flowers and tickets to a play at the National Theater. Needless to say, they hit it off. The rest is history.”
“Very nice. So your mom didn’t come from money?”
“From money? No, not that I know of. Why?”
“Just something somebody said. It’s not important.”
He closed the album.
“Anything else?” asked Jules.
“Have you heard from Natalie?”
Jules nodded. “She sounded okay. She said she was so sorry for everything.”
“And what did you say to that?”
Jules shrugged. “I hate what she did. I mean, it totally destroyed our family. But she’s still my sister.”
“I get that. Family is family.”
He rose.
She said, “Have you found who killed Cissy?”
“Not yet. Still working on it.”
“I don’t understand any of this, I really don’t.”
“Well, you wouldn’t be alone on that.”
Decker left the house, then turned around to look at its exterior.
He should have seen this before, he knew. He had two possible conclusions. Now he just had to see which one was right.
CHAPTER
66
“EIGHT HUNDRED and forty-nine thousand dollars,” said Milligan. “They closed on the property a little over thirty-five years ago. Tax tables show it’s worth probably four times that now, and even more on the open market. Wish I had that kind of asset in my retirement future.”
Decker looked over his shoulder. They were in Milligan’s office at the WFO.
Decker had returned home the previous night and apologized to Jamison for walking out. She had, in turn, apologized to him for her comments.
“We’re all under a lot of pressure,” she’d said. “But you probably more than anybody else. I didn’t mean to add to your burden.”
And they had left it at that.
Decker looked at the computer screen and said, “Thirty-five years ago. Couple years after Jules was born.”
“Right.”
“And Dabney was still working at the NSA?”
“I think you might be on the right track, Decker.”
“On the other hand, Dabney couldn’t have killed Cecilia Randall. He was already dead.”
“We don’t know for sure that her murder is connected. It might just be a random killing.”
Decker shook his head. “I don’t think so.”
“If he has been a spy all this time, it’s not going to be easy for his family to learn this, not after everything else they’ve been through.”