Chapter Text
Neal’s file said that as far as the FBI was concerned he wasn’t from anywhere.
He didn’t have any birth records or school records and no family members had ever been identified.
There was even a report from an FBI linguist who’d spent an afternoon in Peter's office listening to and watching tapes of Neal, stating that he displayed a learned accent and dialect, mixing features from several of the most common American regions, and that no trace of his natural accent or dialect was present.
Off the record, she had told Peter that people who went to the trouble to cover up their natural accents and adopted a high-class demeanor, like Neal, tended to come from poverty in rural areas. That was where Peter’s wild-goose chase after Neal’s origins finally got its second wind.
It had started when they were in-between leads. Chasing after Neal was so often like chasing the wind; when they lost his scent it could be months before he threw them a bone and the chase started again. Someone told Peter that if he wanted to catch a criminal he should try starting over, at the beginning, and lord knows he’d had no better ideas, so he did.
All his initial efforts, fully documented in Neal’s files, were fruitless. Not surprisingly, there were a lot of Caffreys and none of them sounded like Neal. Anyway, he’d always assumed that Caffrey was simply a very old alias and not his real name.
After the meeting with the linguist, who’d been his last shot in the dark, he decided to re-run welfare and Medicaid records for Caffreys from rural areas and, unbelievably, he got lucky. A woman whose name was Carol-Ann Blalock had attempted to commit welfare fraud in 1986 by filing under the false name of Caffrey. Peter almost passed out from the shock as the pages spooled off the printer.
Neal was from West Virginia, deep in Appalachia, a little hollow called Gifford’s Mill. He was in the middle of a dozen kids from different fathers all living with their mother in a two room shack. The welfare assessor generously described it as a “cabin;” next to “Running water Y/N” she’d written “Other: neighbor’s garden hose.”
Peter traveled south and spent two weeks hiking through the mountains, visiting Neal’s house and interviewing witnesses in the nearby town where he’d gone to school. Most of the widows’ Sunday school class who had delivered biweekly groceries to the family now resided in the nursing home in town. They told him stories about the children, but none could remember one named “Neal.” Peter had known it was a longshot.
There were so many children, they said, and they were all skinny and dark-haired. Their mother was an alcoholic and drug addict who didn’t look after them and had been dead for several years due to an overdose. By all accounts the children were practically feral. From the description of their living situation, Peter could see how that would happen.
What he couldn’t see is where the Neal he knows came from. There were plenty of crime reports of thefts and vandalism by the children, but they were all identified as “Blalock” only. Peter imagined he saw Neal’s signature on a few. There were also a handful of reports on file with the school district. Children coming to school with suspicious bruises, broken bones, blood, but even with grade levels it's hard to pin Neal down. It seems no one ever bothered to remove the children from their mother’s care.
The police were out at least weekly to break up fights between the mother and the children’s various fathers. They provided him with a list of names of the men in Neal’s mother’s life and he had Jones fax him their criminal records and mug shots. Nothing in their descriptions suggested which could be Neal’s father, but one, Tommy Dufresne, was grinning Neal’s grin in his mug shot. He’d died in prison ten years earlier.
It was around this point Peter decided to keep what he’d learned off the record. It didn’t seem right that anyone at the FBI who cared to look could know more about Neal than he probably did about himself.
The interviews drug on longer than would have thought possible and he ate so many meals at the little greasy spoon café that he pregnant waitress didn’t even have to ask his order anymore. But it finally paid off when one of the ladies at the nursing home was having a particularly lucid day.
Peter’s eyes nearly fell out of his head when she produced from her bible a yellowed, creased piece of paper with names and guesses at birth dates for the Blalock clan. And there he was:
“Michael –spring ‘85 - shirt size 6, pants size 6/7”
“Michael Blalock…” Peter mumbled.
“Here, you take it,” the woman said, pressing the fragile paper into his hands. “We was just tryin’ to take care of them back then, the best way we knew how; didn’t know no better way to do it. And I reckon you just tryin’ to do the same now. You tryin’ to take care of him…” she’d patted his hand and turned away to stare out the window with her normal, catatonic gaze.
Peter had flown back to New York with the yellowed paper folded carefully in his breast pocket and gotten back to the business of trying to catch Neal. For the next several years the woman’s voice, cracked and worn like that scrap of a page, had haunted Peter.
“Tryin’ to take care of him… the best way you know how.”