LITMIR.BIZ

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name someone else from that time you were there. Use another girl’s name. Say you’re her.”

      “I—maybe Talia . . . O’Conner.”

      Auggie nodded encouragingly. A moment later Liv stumbled through the voice mail giving Talia’s name while Auggie quietly whispered his cell number in her ear and she repeated the digits into the phone.

      After she hung up she handed Auggie back the cell, which he tucked into a pocket. Then they just looked at each other.

      “You’re good at this,” she observed.

      “Eight percent of the time,” he answered. Then, “What about your birth certificate?”

      “What about it?”

      “Why was it in the package?”

      Liv cocked her head and frowned. “I have no idea. It just listed my birth parents, but I always knew I was adopted.”

      “Well, maybe your mother just wanted you to have it,” Auggie posed, “or maybe there’s something else there. Some other meaning. She had a purpose in keeping these things together, setting it up for you to receive them at twenty-five.”

      “You’re thinking she was getting ready to take her own life,” Liv said tiredly, looking away.

      “Nope. I’m going with your theory that something else happened. Maybe something that set up what happened at Zuma. Or, maybe something your mother knew or suspected that put her in danger. She sent this to you, just in case. Your brother didn’t get anything, did he?” he asked as an afterthought.

      “Not that I know of.”

      He shrugged. “You were the oldest.”

      “I was adopted and Hague’s theirs.”

      Auggie gave her a long look. “Now there’s a difference we haven’t explored. Your mother put your birth certificate in the package, and not your brother’s. So, who are your birth parents?”

      “I don’t know them. My father never mentioned them, so I doubt he knows who they are,” Liv said.

      “Let’s look at that birth certificate again.”

      “It’s the hospital certificate,” Liv said, as she dug into her backpack, pulled out the package and slid the contents onto the table once again. “The one with the impressions of my feet. My parents’ names are written on it.”

      “How did your adoptive mother get this?” Auggie wondered aloud, picking it up. “Father, Everett LeBlanc. Mother, Patricia LeBlanc.”

      Liv took the paper from him. “Malone General Hospital. The closest one to Rock Springs.”

      “So, maybe your mother knew the LeBlancs,” Auggie hazarded a guess. He pulled out his cell and tried the white pages for Rock Springs and some of the neighboring towns. “There’s an Everett LeBlanc in Malone,” he said.

      Liv inhaled and exhaled, her eyes huge. “Okay.”

      “Want to call?”

      “Who should I say I am this time? If I tell them Olivia Dugan, they could know I’m their daughter. And even if they don’t, my name’s been all over the news the last couple days.”

      “We don’t know what they know,” Auggie said. “I’d be honest but a little careful. Tell them you’re Liv Dugan, not Olivia, just in case they’ve been listening to the news. Say you’re looking for the Everett and Patricia LeBlanc who gave up a girl baby for adoption twenty-five years ago.”

      He punched in the numbers and handed her the phone again. She listened as it rang and rang and then left a voice mail almost verbatim to what Auggie had told her. Auggie quietly repeated his cell number and she echoed it into the receiver. She handed him back the cell and he clicked off.

      “Now what?” she asked.

      “We wait.”

      September got the call from Channel Seven just after five-thirty. Luckily, it wasn’t Pauline Kirby but an underling, trying to find out information, and since there was really nothing new to report, their conversation was over in a few minutes. When she was off the phone, September assessed her feelings about the whole thing and decided she hadn’t liked being asked question after question by someone who was basically reading a script and hurrying her through the answers. She filed that aspect of the job under the heading of Try To Avoid.

      It was getting later and she fooled around at her desk until nearly seven before she finally left. She would have stayed on, for lack of anything better to do with her time, but perversely she didn’t want her coworkers to think she was a loser without any social life. It wasn’t like she hadn’t dated. She just hadn’t dated in a while . . . a very long while.

      She’d texted Auggie numerous times since his abrupt phone line cutoff. So far he’d been singularly unwilling to respond. How like him to play the cowboy and just run off with the investigation anyway he liked. Her investigation. Well, hers and Gretchen’s. She kinda wished Wes Pelligree were a part of it, too, but he was busy with other things, cases that were wrapping up and a court appearance where he was a witness for the prosecution against a man who’d faked his own death for the insurance money, which his wife then promptly absconded with and he’d run her down and shot her and now they were both having separate trials and heading toward prison terms.

      On her way out she passed Wes’s empty desk and noticed the picture of Sheila Dempsey—something from her high school days, September guessed—which was propped up against his desk lamp. Dark-haired, in her thirties, slim and attractive, Sheila’s body had been found in a field just outside the city limits, in Winslow County, though her place of residence was an apartment complex not all that far from the station. She’d been strangled and the flesh on her torso had been scored with lines that resembled letters, but maybe weren’t. It wasn’t Wes’s case, it was county’s, but he’d met her once at a bar sometime recently and her death bothered him.

      Or, at least that was the word around the office. Wes hadn’t said anything about her himself, but September had kept her ears open on the subject and had queried George about it a bit, at least until George had given her a look that said, “What the hell is it to you?”

      There was no way September was going to admit she had a mild attraction to Wes, especially since he was deeply invested in his own relationship with a woman from his days as an athlete at a junior college. Their relationship was solid; that was fact. So, September kept her case of “the warms” to herself.

      Liv lay on the couch in the darkness, staring at the ceiling once more. She moved onto her side and punched up the pillow, squeezing her eyes closed. Auggie was back in the bedroom and they were waiting for morning. Maybe someone would call them back.

      There’d been an awkward moment or two when neither of them knew what to do. Auggie had finally said he was going to bed, but he was taking a shower first. Liv thought that sounded like heaven, but was too uneasy to strip off her clothes and spend a few moments naked with him around. Maybe in the morrow.

      But then, before he’d gone to sleep, he’d actually walked past where she was sitting on the couch, removing her shoes. He was wearing boxers and nothing else as he strolled into the kitchen and poured himself a glass of water.

      He stopped by the couch briefly, made a comment about trading places with her, the bed for the couch. She’d vehemently shaken her head, and he’d shrugged and moseyed on.

      She, meanwhile, had lain back on the sofa cushions fully clothed, her mind caught on the smooth muscles she’d seen moving beneath the skin of his shoulders, the hard curve of his back, his taut, hair-dusted thighs.

      She was shocked at herself. In the midst of her terror and anxiety, this was the overriding emotion quickening her blood? Desire? Lust? Sex?

      With an effort, she dragged her feminine attention away from him and concentrated on the more urgent problems at hand. Dr. Yancy. Think about Dr. Yancy.

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