As usual, McCabe’s desk was a chaos of paper, none of it critical and all of it irrelevant to the Dubois case. He swept it, in a batch, into the left-hand drawer of his desk. The important stuff, files from a couple of ongoing cases, was already locked safely in the right-hand drawer on top of a pair of Casey’s ski mittens. The background on the Dubois case wasn’t among it.
He pulled the missing persons file on Katie Dubois and brought it back to his desk. He’d read it once, but he wanted to go over it more carefully now that he knew for sure her death was a homicide. As he sat, he glanced at Casey’s mischievous face, age seven, beaming up at him from within the confines of a metal picture frame. The simple fact that Casey was now just a couple of years younger than the girl dumped in the scrap yard somehow made this case more personal. Not more important. Just more personal.
McCabe opened the file. Right up front were three digital photos of Katie Dubois, alive. The first was a family shot from her last birthday. He checked Date Of Birth on her personal info data form. The birthday was two months earlier, July 14. In the picture Katie looked even prettier than he’d thought. She was sitting in front of a big white cake with two candles on it in the shape of a one and a six. Sweet sixteen. Her lips formed an exaggerated pucker, mugging for the camera, ready to blow out the candles. He wondered what she’d wished for. Whatever it was, it wasn’t what she got.
The second picture was the one they posted around town and gave to the media. A formal close-up, it had a Sears Portrait Studio look about it. The third one showed Katie, wearing a Portland High School soccer uniform, standing on the field with her mother. Probably just after a game. Other players and fans could be seen in the background. Both mother and daughter were smiling a little stiffly as if someone had asked them to say ‘cheese.’ Katie’s mother, Joanne Ceglia, looked younger than McCabe expected, probably under forty. Reddish blond hair. Freckles. He checked the file for her maiden name. O’Leary. He thought as much. A McCabe will always recognize an O’Leary. She had the same shaped face and mouth as Katie. There was a similarity in the eyes as well, but the energetic, fresh-faced prettiness of the daughter was gone from the mother.
He put the photos back and skimmed the file summary of the missing persons report. He’d read it before, and there wasn’t much that stood out. Katie was Joanne Ceglia’s only child. Katie’s father, Louis Dubois, was a commercial fisherman who’d drowned ten years back when the trawler he was working on capsized in an ice storm off the Georges Bank. All hands were lost, Dubois’s body never recovered. Two years later, in 1997, Joanne married Frank Ceglia. Ceglia made a good living as a union pipe-fitter, probably forty dollars an hour or more. The only thing to notice about him was the AutoTrack report Tom Tasco had recorded showing Ceglia had done a little time for petty drug dealing when he was a kid, followed by a couple of years on probation. He’d been clean ever since.
McCabe skimmed Tasco and Fraser’s interview summaries and case reports. They’d done a thorough job. They conducted scores of interviews. They grilled her boyfriend, Ronnie Sobel. They gamely followed up on every tipster’s call, and there’d been dozens. Despite these efforts, the department hadn’t come close to finding Katie or preventing her death.
McCabe put the reports back in their jacket. He tapped the computer to life and Googled the name ‘Elyse Andersen,’ getting 437 hits. He found the one he was looking for on page two. An article in the Orlando Sentinel, dated April 2, 2002. McCabe remembered reading it on a flight from Orlando back to LaGuardia.
He’d taken Casey down to Disney World for spring break. The idea had been to cheer her up after he and her mother, Sandy – the beautiful Cassandra, Casey’s namesake – had divorced. McCabe hadn’t thought about Sandy in a long time. The familiar refrain, ‘selfish bitch,’ came instantly to mind. He supposed Sandy’s new life, married to an investment banker, commuting between a fancy house in the Hamptons and a nine-room co-op on West End Avenue, suited her better than being the wife of a cop ever had. Still, McCabe wondered how comfortable she was having walked out not just on a failed marriage but also on her only child. She told McCabe the banker didn’t want to be burdened with kids. At least not somebody else’s kids. He’d forced Sandy to choose between having money and having a daughter. McCabe wasn’t surprised she’d chosen money. That’s just the way Sandy was. There was nothing anybody could do to change it. He wasn’t bothered for himself, but he’d never forgiven Sandy for what she’d done to Casey.