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I said, “Was he still in New Orleans five years ago?”
“Let’s see…as a matter of fact, he was, another assault, pled down to misdemeanor battery, four days of jail time. Why? Oh. The bartender.”
“Nicole Fontenot.”
Twisting and stretching, he reached back and retrieved the March/Aggiunta murder book from the rear seat, found what he was looking for, and switched back to the phone.
“Dates match. He beat up a guy in a bar two weeks before Fontenot got shot in the heart. Not the same bar she worked at but on the same street, looks like…two doors away.”
He sat back. “The favorite child grew up to be anot-nice person.”
—
Back in his office, he pulled up the same files he’d viewed on a tiny screen and printed.
As each page entered the bin, I picked it up and read.
Rooney Gilmore’s first mugshot, taken in Gainesville, Florida, at age eighteen, showed a chubby, pasty-faced, long-haired adolescent sporting a minimal sprig of sandy fuzz on a less-than-assertive chin.
Sullen expression, flat eyes. Subsequent photos revealed the evolution you often see with career criminals: premature aging and a steady accumulation of crude tattoos. Rooney’s expression remained uniform: barely suppressed rage coexisting with theatrical nonchalance.
Like his sister, he’d moved around the country with no apparent geographic order. Staying for a while, as Kathy Bookbinder hadrecalled, in Florida, then shifting to Louisiana for a twenty-six-month stay. After that the pace picked up and the sojourns were shorter.
Brief stays in Georgia, Alabama, and Tennessee were followed by a two-month return to Florida, this time in Miami. Then frequent back-and-forths between that state and Alabama followed by a stretch in Arkansas.
Each locale had been commemorated by at least one arrest, charges frequently pled down because that’s the way the system works. And Rooney’s nomadic life offered an additional fringe benefit: law enforcement tends to think locally so by shifting locales criminals avoid piling up too much iniquity in any one jurisdiction.
The youngest Gilmore’s most recent booking had been eighteen months ago, possession of methamphetamine and larceny. Back in the Sunshine State: Tampa.
This mugshot revealed a bloated, sagging face with tendrils of black ink scaling a stumpy neck and sweeping upward to a soft jawline. He’d grown progressively bald and now sported a skinned head. One constant: eyes that continued to lack depth or sparkle. His sentence after pleading to both charges: three weeks in county lockup.
One thing struck me: none of the states where he’d operated criminally matched any his sister had called home. If he’d been looking for her, he hadn’t come close.
Until…
I continued reading until something at the bottom of the Tampa bust caught my eye: his vehicle had been confiscated, no explanation offered.
I said, “His last ride of record was an eight-year-old black Honda Civic.”
Milo took the sheet. “Meth and larceny and he gets twenty days, unbelievable. Actually, believable. For all we know, official compassion included keeping his wheels safe while he enjoyed the local hospitality.”
He ran a search on the Honda, pulled up traffic fines stretching from Kansas to California. Unsafe lane changes, failures to stop, a couple of speeders, but mostly parking tickets.
Each one paid up promptly.
On that trip Rooney Gilmore had displayed clear geographic intention, taking an arrow-straight route that drew him across Missouri, Colorado, and Nevada. No way to know where he’d entered California but he’d been pulled over four months ago in Fresno for a broken taillight. That fine remained unpaid but it hadn’t been marked delinquent or stimulated any police action.
Milo said, “So we’ve got clear verification of his being here.” He scrawled in his pad.
I said, “Why no alert on the unpaid fine?”
“Penny ante. Paperwork’s probably stuck in some file, still unprocessed.”
“Or,” I said, “a taillight crack was too ticky-tacky for Fresno to bother with, seeing as he’d paid all his previous tickets.”
“Mr. Law-Abiding.” His laugh was bitter.
“At first glance,” I said. “But not because he reformed. When you’ve got a goal in mind, keep your head down. His was go west young man and kill your sister.”
