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Sloan offered a here-I-am smile. “That would be me. So why did you come all the way from Nevada to track me down?”
“The FBI told me next to nothing. I’m looking for information about the case.”
“So you came all the way to North Carolina for information?”
“I did, and I’d be happy to fill you in on my motives if you’d be willing to share what you know.”
“About what?”
“The missing Margolis family.”
Sloan nodded slowly as she contemplated the sheriff’s quid pro quo offer.
“I don’t know much, but the way this whole thing started was that I did one of those online ancestry searches for a wholly different reason than finding distant relatives. My DNA profile came back indicating that I’m a missing kid from 1995. Once we figured out how big of a deal this whole thing was, my parents . . . my adoptive parents and I called the cops. The cops called the missing persons detectives. The detectives called the FBI. Now, here we are, about a week or so later. My parents are on their third day of interrogations, the FBI is chasing down old case files, and a sheriff from Cedar Creek, Nevada, is sitting in my kitchen.”
Eric cocked his head, took a deep breath, and put the bag of ice back over his face. “That answers a few questions for me.”
“Your turn. Why did you come all the way from Nevada to track me down?”
Eric leaned forward, keeping the ice pressed to the right side of his face. “My father worked the Margolis case when he was sheriff of Harrison County. His name was Sandy Stamos.”
Sloan remembered the name from the articles she had read.
“Your father investigated . . . my disappearance?”
Eric nodded. “He started to, but . . . he died under suspicious circumstances just after you and your parents went missing.”
“What happened?”
“The official line?” Eric sat back in his chair. “My dad was high on heroin, drove his cruiser into Cedar Creek, and drowned.”
“That’s . . . terrible.”
“It’s also complete bullshit. My father was no junkie. Christ, the man never took a sip of alcohol in his life. I don’t believe for a second that he was a heroin user.”
“So . . .” Sloan chose her words carefully. “You think his death was something other than an accident?”
“I think he was killed.”
Eric took the ice away from his face again.
“I think my dad was close to figuring out what happened to Charlotte Margolis and her parents. Someone didn’t want the truth to come out, so they killed him and made it look like a heroin overdose.”
Sloan searched for a question to ask but too many ran through her mind. She finally settled on the most obvious.
“Why do you think that? I mean, do you know something about my birth parents disappearing?”
“No. And until just recently, I never thought much about my father’s death. I was nine years old when he died, and I never really understood any of it at the time. When you lose your dad that young, you sort of tune out the rest of the world. I certainly never explored too carefully how he died, I only knew that my dad was gone. I come from a long line of law enforcement. My father was the sheriff of Harrison County, and my grandfather was sheriff before him. It was my grandfather who started me down this road of looking into my dad’s death. My grandfather never believed the official narrative about what happened to his son.”
“Wasn’t there an autopsy? I’m a pathology fellow and my first thought is that your dad had to have had a postmortem exam.”
“He did.”
“Was there heroin in his system?”
“There was. But I don’t believe any part of that autopsy report.”
“You don’t believe an official autopsy report?”
