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couldn’t have been too acute or he’d have attracted attention. Seems like it might have happened once he was in the car. Of course, maybe something started outside the car, but, being a man, he didn’t want anyone to witness him having a weak spell or something, and he hid it until he got in the car.”
    “That’s possible,” Boyd acknowledged. “Have you gone back to the scene around that eleven to twelve time frame to try to catch the people who frequent the park?”
    “Every day for a week,” he confirmed. “We talked to everyone coming or going or just hanging around during that hour, hoping to find someone who saw something.”
    “It came to nothing, I guess?”
    Morgan shook his head. “Nothing. Unless you count the tip about the man who is supposedly practicing mind control on the ducks.”
    Boyd snorted. That was a new one on him. There were always a few reality-challenged folks who surfaced when you talked to a broad cross section of people like that. He knew better than to dismiss them, as did Morgan, no doubt. Just because they saw things a different way didn’t negate that they saw things. But it sounded like the guy’s attention was firmly fixed on the duck pond, not the parking lot or the trails.
    “What about Josh’s car?”
    “Like I told you in one of our earlier conversations, we had it examined to make sure there was nothing wrong electrically, but everything checks out.”
    “What about friends, associates, coworkers? Have you talked to them?”
    “A few key people,” Morgan said. “His landlord, Sylvia Stratton, some friends, coworkers who shared adjacent space. No one saw any hint of a health issue.”
    “Anyone think Josh had made enemies here? Or that his search for his birth parents might have stirred up a hornet’s nest?”
    “No known enemies. But the other thing—the fact that he was trying to find your parents—doesn’t seem to have been a secret. I think just about everyone we interviewed knew that. Nobody raised it as something potentially risky. Since we’re not working a homicide per se, we didn’t go too hard after people. We asked if they knew about his investigation, and, if so, had he told them anything about recent developments. No one seems to have known he figured it out.”
    “Or if they did, they’re not saying.”
    “Right.”
    Boyd tried to relax his jaw before he cracked a molar. “Did any of them know our adoption was an illegal one?”
    “A couple of them know about the . . . uh . . . irregularities.”
    “Irregularities? I’ll say. As in no actual record of our birth having been lodged with vital statistics, at least not in the name of Holbrook, which was the surname on the birth certificates our adoptive parents were given.”
    “I still can’t get over that,” Morgan said. “Kinda defeats the idea of a closed adoption.”
    “Exactly. Ella and Frank McBride should never even have seen those documents, let alone been given copies of them. And when Josh petitioned the courts to open any sealed adoption records pertaining to the infants Holbrook, there was no record to be found under that name. Presumably because those birth certificates were forged in the first place.”
    “Why do you suppose your parents were given those birth certificates? They certainly wouldn’t have needed them. New birth certificates would have been issued in the McBride name when the adoption was approved, and the original birth record sealed, right?”
    “My best guess is that it was to misdirect us, to prevent us from ever finding our birth parents if we decided to look.”
    Morgan shook his head. “Either some horribly incompetent civil servant made the mother of all screwups or the adoption was outright illegal.”
    “The latter, I’m sure.” Boyd’s jaw tightened again. “And I appreciate your department’s discretion. The last thing I want to do is embroil our adoptive parents in a serious investigation three and a half decades later, one they