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“Nothing we’ve seen or heard says there was ever a substance issue. She also had the physical and intellectual assets to work in a high-end, protected environment.”
“Which,” he said, lifting the final piece of paper, “she left just after three years.”
We’d reached the topmost level of Meagin March’s pocket biography. Several sheets of fine print that had led me to suggest we start at the beginning.
—
At age thirty-six, Meagin Jones had left the brothel, moved to Las Vegas, and leased a house in the Tule Springs neighborhood. The documents she’d held on to listed the rent as twenty-two hundred dollars a month. She’d paid a year in advance and had repeated it for two additional years.
Milo said, “Almost eighty grand. That’s serious cash on hand. Why do you think she held on to this?”
I said, “Point of pride. After living frugally at The Fantasy Farm and saving her tips, she’d put herself in a strong financial situation. Someone with a strong sense of self-preservation.”
“Too bad that petered out.” He looked up the property, found it on Zillow, now for sale for five hundred twenty-six thousand dollars.
Twenty-four hundred square feet of tile-roofed pink stucco in one of the city’s safest neighborhoods. Two stories, three bedrooms, three baths, a family room that looked out to a kidney-shaped pool surrounded by a concrete deck.
He groaned and I knew why.
The pool and the decking were freakishly reminiscent of the place where Meagin March and Gio Aggiunta had been slaughtered.
Placing the lease back on top of the stack, he said, “So why’d she leave all this with Irma? It’s not like she’s telling us who killed her.”
I said, “It wasn’t about that. She’d been hiding and dodging her entire adult life, wanted some sort of legacy—letting the world know who she was and how she got there.”
“A pocket bio left with a maid? No way this was random, Alex, she musta known her past could catch up with her. Why not come out and say who she was afraid of?”
I said, “Don’t know…unless at some level sheistelling us.”
I took the box and fished out the Texas I.D. card.
Persephone Gilmore.
Yet another find-a-grave search revealed no matches. No surprise.
I said, “I’ll lay odds this was her real name and she figured someone could trace her past using it.”
He chewed on that. “Making me work for it?”
“She operated illegally for most of her adult life, may have developed low regard for law enforcement. But someone who bothered to follow up would be more likely to be thorough.”
“Testing the cops? I don’t know, Alex…okay, nothing else to look at, what’s the name of that town near the swamp?”
“Copeland.”
Another map search.
He said, “She took an even longer trip the first time out. Over sixteen hundred miles to Midland.”
I looked at the map. “Dallas would’ve been simpler, it’s a nearly straight, westerly trip, so she was clearly avoiding it. Same for veering south to Houston and Austin. Big cities can be easier to hide in but if she was a country girl, she could’ve found them intimidating. We’ll never know why she stopped in Midland or how she got there but back then you could buy bus tickets anonymously so my bet’s on Greyhound, hitchhiking, or both. And it’s an oil town, trucks coming in and out.”
“Hopping semis.”
“Doing what it took to escape.”
He shook his head. “Eighteen years old and moving halfway across the country.”
No surprise to me. I’d made my escape from Missouri to California at sixteen, fleeing the rages of an alcoholic father and a chronically depressed, apathetic mother.
