“Stop. She says she’s never killed anyone. At least not for fun, and only if they truly had it coming. At least not in a long time,” I joked back.

“All in the family,” Weiss said, and it stopped being a joke. “Did you know that forty percent of our behavior is genetically determined?”

I considered bantering, but the Beaufort thing was more interesting.

“One more thing,” I said. “Where was Beaufort born?”

“Pascagoula, Mississippi.”

“That’s funny, he told Carlo he was baptized in Kansas City.”

“That could happen. People move around.”

“Maybe not. In those days a good Catholic had a baby baptized within the first week so they wouldn’t end up in limbo if they died. I doubt they would have rushed him from Mississippi to Kansas for a baptism.”

We exchanged a few more pleasantries about budget cuts and politically motivated layoffs, who was still there. We didn’t say any names because you never knew when calls were being recorded. It went something like:

“Mr. Manhattan?”

“Gone.”

“Good, he was a dick. What about Rising Star?”

“Still rising and with considerable power. She’s with Homeland Security now, connections to the TSA. Not a big enough fish to get on anyone’s sonar for termination. It doesn’t hurt that she was always good at keeping her opinions to herself.”

“Plus that’s one department they won’t be defunding any time soon. Tell her I said hi.”

“Are you serious? She wouldn’t want me to know that you know her.”

Then we lied about how swell it would be to see each other again, and hung up.

With his prison record it was easy to find his mug shot; make that plural because of his several arrests. In shot after shot I could see him aging from his middle twenties to late thirties, and confirm my guy was Jeremiah Beaufort. After that it got harder. Try as I might, I couldn’t find any trail after he left prison three months before. No credit cards, no bank accounts. As Weiss said, this was a man who was flying under the radar, cash only, which made me wonder how much of it he had and how he got it.

His birth certificate corroborated Weiss’s finding that he was from Pascagoula, Mississippi, but records were scanty when I tried to access his background there. I kept coming up with one of those messages: Removed from public view in accordance with restrictions of Mississippi Privacy Act. There was something there they didn’t want me to see, probably a document that mentioned a juvenile.

What did you do, Jeremiah Beaufort? Or what was done to you?