Page 30 of What’s Left of Us (What Left #3)

I wait until the coughing subsides before meeting his gaze again. His eyes are watery, and I pick up the box of tissues before helping him wipe them away. His fingers shake when I help, and as I sit back again he huffs and looks away.

Mom told me he hates the help. It embarrasses him, but at this point I think he needs it, and it’s painful to watch.

“Constantine died,” I tell him, and even as my heart tightens at the reminder, Dad turns to look at me with an ugly grin. It destroys any worry I have over his care, reminding me he always hated Alastair.

“Good,” he says, looking towards the far wall instead of at me, “about time he was executed.”

“Lance Wallsburg shot him in the hospital while he was restrained,” I snap, his eyes drifting back to me. “It wasn’t via Death Row. Wallsburg went rogue and shot him before he was killed too.”

“Lance did that?” dad asks, cocking his head. He really does sound surprised. “Huh. I know he always had his opinions on Porscha, but he had no reason to shoot Constantine if she was still alive.”

I blink, processing that in my head before responding. He’s never told me something like that before. “What do you mean he had opinions on Porscha?”

Dad scoffs. “He was sweet on her, and went mental when she died. Of course she wasn’t dead, but he went and talked to the ME a few times about her after her death.

I remember he was always there chatting with Dr. Whitmore and I had to shoo him away so I could ask questions.

Lance always spoke poorly about the CGS, but he would speak fondly of Porscha. I assumed he was soft on her.”

I shift back, thinking it over. That would’ve been useful to know before Lance died.

If he liked Porscha at all, and was under the assumption that Alastair killed her just like the rest of us, his hate for Alastair might make a bit more sense.

If his hate was strong enough it could extend to his son, and Kyle had deep seeded hate for Alastair as well, Sounds like it was a familial trait.

Lance didn’t have a wife, so there’s no immediate family to question. With both Lance and Kyle gone, I’m not sure what I can do with what Dad just shared.

But visiting Whitmore? That would complicate things, and I don’t know right now where I would start investigating that. I’ll have to share with the team and think about it when we aren’t supposed to have the day off.

Even if I knew about Lance’s fixation with Porscha apparently, I’m not sure it would help me save Alastair’s life.

No one predicated that Lance, a decorated officer, would choose to shoot up the hospital after the death of his son months before.

We should’ve paid more attention to him, but he fell through the cracks.

“Sterling,” Dad says, and I meet his gaze again. He looks… disappointed? I’d think he’d choose anger over disappointment, but his face isn’t tense. “You’re not upset that a killer is dead, are you?”

“I’m upset that one was killed instead of letting the law handle things,” I lie. Every word tastes bad but he doesn’t need to know that. “Wallsburg had no business bringing a gun to the hospital.”

“In Citrus Grove?”

I narrow my eyes. He really has no idea this happened? “At a hospital in Tallahassee. You didn’t see the news report?”

He huffs. “Your mother won’t let me watch the news anymore. She says it’s bad for my health. I get too worked up.”

My father is obsessed with the news, so I’m kind of impressed Mom could pull off something like that. She probably hid the remote. In that case… “Porscha’s alive.”

He nods, and we stare at each other. And stare. And stare. “So.”

Blinking, I try to figure out what the hell is happening.

When I talked to Dad last, he was all about getting Alastair nailed down for everything we could.

He suggested amping up the jealousy, sticking him with whatever we could, and even mentioned getting him booted back to the Supermax in Illinois if enough got pinned on him. “What the hell do you mean by ‘so?’”

Dad shrugs. “We never fully proved the body found was Porscha Surwright. There was speculation that it was someone else. Teeth were missing right? Hands too? Could have been a fake body.”

I’d considered that with the rest of my team before Porscha returned. Dad shouldn't be acting like it’s no big deal though. This case was his baby. I expected a big blowup reaction to hearing Porscha was still alive, and not just alive, but now in prison. We haven’t even gotten that far yet.

My phone buzzes, and I glance down at the caller ID. “Excuse me for a moment.”

He grumbles as I get up and leave the bedroom. “Soto, I’m pretty sure you’re supposed to be off work today.”

“I understand that, sir,” she says, and I can hear the nervousness in her voice. “But I set my system at work to keep running scans while I was off for any associates in Porscha’s past and I got an alert a few minutes ago.”

“And?” I prompt.

“Well,” she begins, and I can hear the glee in her voice.

“Porscha attended a high school in Montgomery, Alabama. We already knew that. But she got pregnant when she was sixteen, so even though she was enrolled it was only part time and she did a lot of extra credits and homeschooling until she dropped out and eventually got her GED.”

“Okay.” I sit down in the little room at the top of the stairs.

It’s mostly empty now, and there are hinges against the wall where there used to be a door.

You could ignore this spot when walking up the stairs since it's opposite the stairwell, and after Dad left the FBI but before the cancer, this was his office.

“Well she did all those extra classes, right? Guess who one of her classmates was? They didn’t keep an official register since these were extracurriculars or summer activities for a lot of students, so I had to do some digging. Guess.”

“Who?”

“She was in the same class as Ylonda Artemits - ergo, Professor Artemis.”

“What was the class?”

“Psychology,” Soto says, the glee back in her voice. “It was like a weird, outdoorsy summer session to connect students with different careers. They would meditate then talk about different psychological tendencies. It was held every Wednesday for twelve weeks.”

“How did you find out they attended that class together?” I ask. “This would’ve been in the early nineties. Is there a record someplace?”

“The class used to have a website,” she explains. “Do you want to take a wild guess who the professor was?”

“Am I going to like the answer?”

“It took a while to find because the guy running it only used his first name. It took place at one of the local parks in Tallahassee, but since Porscha and Ylonda both decided to take the class as an elective it doesn’t appear that where the class was held mattered.”

“Porscha lived in Montgomery until just before she gave birth,” I recall. “Then she moved by herself to Citrus Grove.”

“And her parents died shortly before Jo was born because of that car accident,” Soto agrees, still throwing information at me.

“But Porscha’s father, Dr. Zimmerman, regularly taught classes at different universities.

He traveled to Florida and Georgia all the time for lectures.

This guy brought his kids until they aged out. ”

“Porscha probably learned about the class on one of her trips,” I agree. Now I wish I wasn’t sitting in Dad’s house, because this would be a great time to speak with my whole team. “Was Porscha behind in school before she got pregnant?”

“Always truant,” Soto reports. “Her parents had to appear in court the year before she got pregnant because she missed so many classes. Jensen was right when he found out about her hobbies. She liked to go to trade shops like locksmiths, contractors, even repair shops, and hang out.”

“People likely let her in because she was a young teenage girl showing interest in the trades,” I groan. There’s plenty of other reasons they might’ve been okay with an unaccompanied minor hanging out during the day, but I don’t say it out loud. “Who was the Professor, Soto?”

“Ah, I’m glad we circled back,” she says, and I can hear her fingers flying across the keys. I’ve only seen Soto’s residence once, and her setup for her computers was impressive. “He just called himself Professor Jim. He mainly taught teenage girls in the park, and when I did some digging-”

“Was it James Nunes?” I ask.

“He was indeed. I matched his photo online to his last ID card from the DMV. He ran the class by himself. His wife, Diana, was a homemaker who did odd and end jobs, including paint touch ups and minor repairs. I can’t find much else about her online.

As soon as she married James she basically disappeared.

They were wanted for tax evasion in the early 90s.

The house they lived in is paid off, but there’s no reports on Diana since way back then. ”

I run that over in my head. If James used Jim as his professional title, it would take a little longer to find but shouldn’t be off our radar. “Why didn’t that show up before?”

“Professor Jim,” Soto says sarcastically, “wasn’t a registered teacher.

He was a psych student who decided to offer alternative class options to high school and college students.

And get this: Professor Jim did a rotating bi-monthly group session at Citrus Grove Penitentiary in the late eighties and early nineties until his disappearance. ”

“He worked with CGP?”

“As a contracted worker,” she agrees. “You know how they let people come in with the students now for a graduate program? The prison always had unusual treatment regiments like that. Until early 2000, they kept up with the bi-monthly group sessions for inmates. It had certain parameters that the inmates had to meet to qualify for a group session, but they mainly used it for inmates who were close to release from prison.”

I frown. James working for CGP has nothing to do with the case. That would be before Porscha killed anyone as far as we know -

“There’s one other thing, boss,” Soto says, drawing my attention again.

“James met Porscha for those classes before or around the time she got pregnant, if we count backward from Jo’s date of birth.

I’m going to send you everything I pulled on him, and I know I’m not a profiler, but I think you should look into him. ”

“Why?”

“He did something locksmithing,” she says. “Under the table as far as I can tell, or maybe as a hobby. There’s nothing I can find about payments, business details, or anything else. But, there is one thing that popped up when I started looking into his weird psychology classes.”

I wanted to ask how this tied into locksmithing but I knew Soto – she would have a point or she wouldn’t have called.

“At the end of his classes he gave each student a custom key. He would paint them and cut different designs into each one.”

I think of the picture Serenity handed me with Porscha wearing a gold key, like the ones similar to the keys found at some of the crime scenes. That’s a detail that never carried over to the new cases. “Send the pictures of the keys to the team.”

“It’s not the individual keys,” Soto says.

“They would take a group picture at the end of the class as part of their celebration for passing. He took tons of these pictures. Even with the inmates. He obviously couldn't give keys, decorative or not, to the inmates. But he did give them to the students in his classes. That’s how I can tell Porscha knew James before he disappeared.”

“That’s good work, Soto,” I tell her. “Now take the day off like you’re supposed to. Let the system keep running everything and see if we can find any other crossovers. We can look into it tomorrow.”

“But, sir,” she says, and I pause before standing. “Ylonda Artemis is why I called you. She took the class, too.”

“Right?”

“She was also in Illinois briefly with Porscha when she was going by Char Rowths-Spurig.”

I grit my teeth. “Wonderful.”

“The other little thing I figured out,” Finley says, and she sounds sheepish as she speaks. “Looking at their files, Beverly Heather is Ylonda Artemis’s niece.”

By the time I start to leave my mind is fried.

I asked Dad more questions, but I fully expected that he would dodge most of them.

If he’s still hiding anything about the case, he's not giving it up.

I don't know if he is or not, but the fact that Porscha slipped away from the FBI all this time when her death was this much of a mess bothers me. How did she fool people that hard?

“Honey,” Mom says, stopping me in the kitchen. “This came. I think maybe it came to the wrong address.”

Glancing down, I eye the envelope. Agent Gideon. There's no return address.

“Mom, someone dropped this off.” I glance up at her, at the stack of papers. “How long has it been since you collected the mail?”

Mom hesitates, ringing her hands. “Well, I don't know. The medical bills and everything else is automated so it's mostly just junk. But it doesn't make sense that it would be for your father. He hasn't been an agent in years.”

“People will seek someone out if they are determined enough,” I grumble, looking up the steps. All it says is Agent Gideon, so they had to know where Dad lived.

“Open it,” she says, reaching up to press a hand over her mouth. I don't know if Dad's ever gotten weird mail like this before, but neither of my parents ever mentioned it.

I tear open the envelope, and part of me hopes it's mine. If it’s Dad’s, I worry about what that means. Inside there’s a single page of college ruled paper, and only a few words scrawled on the folded page.

I couldn’t live with it anymore. Lance