Lena needed to sit down. Bloom pointed to the table in the kitchen, but anywhere in the house would have been just as good. She needed time to compose herself and collect her thoughts. Time to let her emotions catch up to where she stood.
She wasn’t dead. She hadn’t been executed in the desert and left in a shallow grave for the coyotes to feed on. But there was more. Jane Doe No. 99 was no longer a Jane Doe living under the stolen identity of Jennifer McBride.
She had been Mike Bloom’s sister. And as they drove back to the house, he had given Lena her legal name: Jennifer Bloom.
Lena watched Bloom pour two cups of coffee and join her at the table. Although the sadness remained, his rough edges were gone. Even his voice had changed.
“I thought it was important that she keep the same first name,” he said. “I didn’t want her to blow it.”
“You mean you created the identity for her?”
He shrugged. “I’d been a cop, so I had access to the information she needed and knew how to use it. But finding someone with the same first name took some time. When I finally hit on Jennifer McBride, I had certain misgivings because the girl had been a murder victim in a bank robbery. But almost everything else about McBride was perfect, so we went with it. They didn’t look alike, and I saw that as an advantage. There was so much background information available. So many stories about McBride’s life on the Internet. It made the job much easier. It gave the identity detail.”
“What about your sister’s driver’s license? The DMV says it’s real. When we ran McBride’s name through the system, she didn’t come up as deceased.”
“I thought my sister needed one piece of identification no one could question. I had a friend at the DMV who agreed to work with me on McBride’s history. He made a few deletions. Then Jennifer walked into a DMV and had her picture taken, took the test, and walked out.”
Lena sat back in the chair, her head spinning. She looked around the house. It was an open floor plan not much different than her own house in Hollywood Hills. And she was surprised by the art on the walls and the number of books in the living room.
“I’m sorry,” Bloom whispered. “The way I spoke to you out there. The way I treated you. I didn’t know what was going on. I had to make sure you were okay.”
Lena took a sip of coffee, trying to steady her hand. Then Bloom pulled out his cell phone and showed her a picture that he had taken of Lena digging her own grave. After a moment he clicked to another picture of her that had been sent to his phone by whomever ran the background check. For a split second, but only a split second, she thought about cell phones again and how Bloom’s had saved her life.
She looked back at the man, taking in his brown eyes and sunburned skin. The emotion on his face that she had misread as madness less than half an hour ago.
“The question is why,” she said. “Why did you do all this?”
Bloom thought it over. “If you’d ever had the chance to meet Jennifer, you’d know. But I guess the answer is that she used to be married. She loved the guy and I did, too. He was with me when I lost my leg. He lost more than that. And she did, too.”
A moment passed. Jennifer Bloom had lost her husband in the war.
“It tore her up pretty good,” Bloom said. “But she was a strong-willed woman. Lots of spirit. The kind that lights up a room. Somehow she got past it and moved on.”
“Then why did she need to steal McBride’s identity?”
“Follow me.”
Bloom crossed the living room, then led the way upstairs. Lena could tell that his leg was bothering him again as they walked down the hall. When they reached the room at the very end, Bloom stepped aside. It wasn’t a bedroom. It was a nursery.
“She got past her husband’s death,” Bloom said. “But she couldn’t get past this one. I’m not sure any mother who loses a child ever does.”
It felt like the floor was moving beneath her feet, the air charged with electricity. Lena looked at the crib. The changing table. A mobile hanging by the window. Her mind was suddenly razor sharp. Jennifer Bloom had gone to see Dr. Ryan because she had a thyroid problem. Ryan believed that her patient had been pregnant, but didn’t carry it through because she didn’t want to talk about her child.
“Is something wrong?” Bloom asked from the doorway.
Lena shook her head. “Tell me what happened.”
He entered the room and walked over to a chest of drawers. Lena’s eyes zeroed in on a framed picture of Jennifer with her husband and baby. It looked like the photograph had been taken in the backyard by the windmill. Three people with their futures ahead of them-a moment in time when everything was good.
“She had a son,” Bloom said. “A little boy just a year and a half old. He had health issues though. He was asthmatic. It wasn’t constant. The attacks seemed to come and go. But they were scary.”
Bloom was having trouble talking about it. Remembering it. He became silent for a while, then reached for a plastic bag on the chest and handed it to her.
“This was the medication the doctor prescribed. He died about twenty minutes after his mother gave it to him. One minute he was breathing. The next minute he wasn’t. I guess a lot of kids have had the same kind of luck. The drug got pulled off the market, but it took a while. The FDA’s still trying to sort it out.”
Lena noticed the nebulizer on the chest, the child’s face mask, then examined the medication that had been sealed in the plastic bag. As she read the label, it felt like she was still standing over her grave in the desert. Like Bloom still held the gun in his hand and had just pulled the trigger. The drug manufacturer was Anders Dahl Pharmaceuticals. Dean Tremell’s name was even listed in the fine print.
Jennifer Bloom had never been a whore. She had been a mom. Another fallen hero like her husband. And the case was radioactive now.