What I knew from Cleo's message: Margaret Callahan's name appeared in the Thomas Reyes case files as an identified but never-interviewed witness. The case was 2000. my mother died in March 2001.
What I did not know: what my mother had witnessed. Why I had not been called. Why the prosecutorial strategy had changed.
What I was beginning to suspect: that the timing was not coincidental.
* * *
I spent two hours in the Louisiana public records database.
The death certificate confirmed what I already knew. No additions. No amendments. I searched for the name of the responding officer, found it, traced his subsequent career -- retired 2009, no disciplinary record, nothing that indicated anything other than the ordinary trajectory of a competent civil servant. I searched the Route 90 accident in March 2001 and found a brief item in the Times-Picayune archive: single vehicle, late night, wet road, no further inquiry warranted.
I searched Margaret Callahan's name in every public database I could access with my existing credentials.
I found three things.
A marriage record. A birth record -- my own, which I had encountered before and which produced the specific sensation of looking at evidence of yourself from the outside, the mild vertigo of seeing your existence documented in the passive voice. And a 1999 notarial record from Orleans Parish: a document in which Margaret Callahan had served as a witness to a real estate transaction.
The property in the 1999 notarial record was on Tchoupitoulas Street.
The owner was listed as the Reyes Family Trust.
I sat back from the laptop.
Outside, the city was waking up. I could hear it through the window I had opened an inch when I got up -- the particular texture of New Orleans at this hour, delivery trucks on the riverroad, the first birds, someone already playing music somewhere below. The city did not adjust its behavior to the weight of what you were thinking. It simply continued.
I looked at the notarial record for a long time.
* * *
At seven I heard movement in the kitchen.
I closed the laptop carefully -- not abruptly, not in a way that would indicate anything -- and sat still until I heard the coffee machine. Then I waited five more minutes. Then I got up, walked to the kitchen doorway, and stopped.
The coffee was already on the counter.
He was reading something on his phone, one shoulder against the refrigerator, already dressed and jacketed for wherever he was going this morning. He did not look up when I came in.
I took the coffee. I sat at the kitchen table. He finished whatever he was reading, pocketed the phone, and moved toward the door. He stopped.
"I will be back by ten," he said, to the room rather than to me directly. Then he was gone -- the door closing behind him with the specific quiet of someone who understood the acoustic weight of exits.
I drank my coffee.
I thought about the 1999 notarial record.
I thought about the Thomas Reyes prosecution and the witness who had been identified and never called.
I thought about my mother's handwriting on a document from 1999, two years before I died on a wet road outside the city.
* * *
By nine I had the shape of a hypothesis.
I was careful, always, about the difference between a hypothesis and a conclusion. A hypothesis was a coherent structure -- internally consistent, testable in principle, capable of being falsified by new information. A conclusion required evidence sufficient to close the question. I had nothing close to a conclusion. What I had was a structure that held together.
Thomas Reyes had been prosecuted in 2000 for money laundering connected to narcotics distribution in the Gulf Coast region. The prosecution had stalled midway through, restructured around a plea agreement that resulted in a sentence significantly reduced from what the original charges warranted. A witness had been identified and not called. The public record indicated the Moreau family had cooperated with the prosecution as witnesses -- this was the version of events I had been able to verify.
My mother had witnessed a transaction involving the Reyes Family Trust in 1999. Had been listed as available to testify in 2000. Had died in March of 2001.