“There’s been no sign of him since?” Rodney asked.
Simon shook his head.
“Has he ever contacted you?”
“No,” Simon whispered in a clipped tone.
“Where is your foster mother?”
“I have no idea,” he said. “And I have no recollection of a foster mother.”
Kate’s heart slammed against her chest. It helped her understand why he was so elusive and so much of a loner. Self-made in whatever direction he’d gone in, and not because of someone behind him giving him a helping hand.
“Your foster father didn’t mention her?”
“Not that I remember at this time.”
“Was he ever married?”
“That’s for you to find out.”
She watched as Owen started taking notes. They didn’t have data, and a lot of research needed to be done. In a way, this was to Simon’s benefit. It was good that he’d shown up this morning because, in another few hours, they would have been armed with a lot more information and likely would have a lot more questions. This went on and on, and the more questions that they came around to and repeated, the less cooperative his response. By the end of an hour, he was down to yes or no answers.
Lilliana looked over at her. “What do you think?”
“His patience is thin. His tolerance is less than thin,” she said. “But I’m not hearing or seeing any signs of deception.”
“I hate to say it, but I agree with you. It’s not giving us anything to go on.”
She looked over at her coworker. “What did you think he would have to give?” Kate asked curiously. “He was picked up as a sexual abuse victim at the age of six. Luckily his blood grandmother found him somehow, and he was with her until age ten, when she died. Simon went back into the system and, as should surprise no one, was a handful and was moved through a series of foster homes before he walked away at eighteen. And that was after running away many times and being hauled back. What could he give us that we shouldn’t have on file already?”
Lilliana nodded. “It’s hard when the children have been through the system like that.”
“I just wonder what the system did for him—or to him,” she said. “That hard edge to him isn’t showing any sign of relaxing.”
“No, he probably built up the barriers as a little child and kept them in place the whole time,” Lilliana said. “If he has no idea where his foster father is, doesn’t know anything about his foster mother—or his biological parents—never met any other family members, then it’s up to us to start doing the genealogy.”
Just then Owen made a request that caused everyone to freeze. “We’d like a sample of your DNA,” he said calmly. “Do you have any objection to that?”
*
Simon stared athim, knowing that this question would come. He looked at the smoked mirror behind him, knowing perfectly well that people were back there, that Kate would be among them. He looked back at the detective and said, “No objection, that’s fine. But you shouldn’t even have to ask me, it’s already in the system.”
Owen looked down at his notes and said, “They collected a lot of forensic evidence back then, didn’t they?”
“They did.”
When asked whether he was ever tested with modern and up-to-date DNA testing, he replied, “I have no idea.”
“Maybe that’s something we need to put some money back into,” Rodney said, frowning. “We have a lot of cold cases that were never solved.”
“In this case, you’re looking for my foster father, who is who-knows-where,” he said. “For all I know, he’s living a happy life on an island somewhere.”
“But somebody else in your life might have some idea of what’s going on or who was involved back then,” he said. “Do you have any memories of that time in your life?”
He took a slow deep breath and let it out. “A child between the ages of four to six doesn’t remember much, except for the really bad stuff he went through.” His patience was already clawing away at him to get out of here, to run, but he didn’t dare show any outward sign of it. Any sign of weakness was something they’d jump on. No way he could let these men know how hard this conversation was for him. “And none of that I care to remember,” he said coolly. “To be honest, most of it is a complete blank at this point.”
He watched as a grimace whispered across one man’s face, revealing that at least one of these two had enough empathy to understand what he, as a child, had gone through. “There were other men,” Simon said suddenly.