Chapter Four
By the time Shane was kicked out of the records building, the sun was a lick of fire on the horizon but he’d gotten most of what he wanted. He’d spent the entire afternoon following a paper trail through birth certificates, deeds, utility bills and voter registrations. At 5:30 p.m., he called his client, Patricia Collins, with good news. After eleven months of waiting, Collins was the proud daughter of a new mother.
The biological one she never knew.
He gave her the last known address and, thanks to some help from a contact at Pacific Bell, had tracked down a recent phone number. No guarantees but it was a start. Though he wished her the best and was glad to provided a chance to fill what she had described as a life-long void, he slid the pay phone receiver back into the cradle with mixed emotions. It had been his search for his own parents that spurred him into private investigation years earlier. And while that decision had changed his life’s trajectory for the better, there was no small irony in the fact that it was the same void Collins felt that had set his early life on a much different, self-destructive path.
As a young man moving from foster home to foster home, he had struggled finding a sense of identity or belonging. He filled the void with anger one bitter shovel full at a time, eventually burying himself deep enough that no one could reach him. Deep enough that he didn’t need to feel anything.
For anyone.
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