Now she went outside, where it was starting to rain. She drove to the one restaurant in the area, went inside, and ordered a coffee.
The rain picked up and she gazed out the window as it poured down. She sipped her drink and saw in the rain nothing positive. Not one damn thing. On the one hand, she had made tremendous strides in tracking down what had happened to her sister. Mercy had been abducted by Ito Vincenzo and given to the Atkinses, and then Len Atkins had passed her off to Joe and Desiree Atkins. At some point—Pine didn’t know exactly when—Mercy had gone from the room in the house to a locked cave.
As Pine sat there, her mind wandered deeper and deeper into terrifying thoughts. Instead of finding her sister alive and well, or at least being able to locate and identify her remains, she now had to contemplate the possibility that her sister had killed one and maybe two people and was out there somewhere, doing God knew what. Pine knew that after her years of brutalization at the hands of the Atkinses, there was little possibility that she would even be able to recognize her sister, either physically or emotionally.
She closed her eyes, and the image of her sister in that video returned to haunt her.
Pine had had her sister with her every day of her life for six-plus years. And then for thirty years, nothing. Until now. And she could not reconcile the woman on that video with the little girly-girl who loved her tea parties and stood up for her little sister whenever Pine had gotten in trouble.
I just want to find her. I want to help her. I want her to . . . have the life she should have had.
Her ringing phone was a grateful distraction. She didn’t recognize the number, but she answered it anyway.
“Hello?”
“Hey, Agent Pine, this is Darren Castor from Trenton. You talked to me about when I worked for Ito Vincenzo.”
“Yes, Mr. Castor, what can I do for you?”
“Well, you said to call you back if I remembered anything. And I do. See, I got my dates wrong.”
Pine stiffened. “Excuse me? The dates wrong?”
“I told you that I started working for the auto body place in 2001.”
“Yes.”
“Well, I was wrong. I started working there in 2002, not 2001. It was during the first week of June. Should have known it wasn’t 2001. I mean, three months later 9/11 happened.”
“You’re sure?”
“Yep. I checked my pay stubs and some other records I’d kept around.”
“You said the summer. Do you have a specific date? That would be really helpful.”
“I do, as a matter of fact. The day he didn’t show up was June first. I remember that because my wife’s birthday is the second of June.”
Birthday?
“Well, hope that helps,” said Castor.
“What, oh yes, thank you very much, Mr. Castor. It was a big help.”
She clicked off and stared down at the phone. A terrible thought, a truly bizarre piece of speculation, was making the rounds in her head like a bullet caroming around.
She called Blum. “We need to go see Jack Lineberry. Right now.”
CHAPTER
77
PINE DROVE FAST AND MOSTLY IN SILENCE. She had not explained to Blum why they needed to see Lineberry. She could not bring herself to even say out loud what she was thinking. If it turned out to be true, it would be horrendous.
Yet nothing will surprise me anymore.
She had called ahead and they were let in at the gate after identifying themselves. They drove up to the house and were surprised to be met by Lineberry at the front door. He was using a walker but ambling around pretty well.
“You’ve made progress,” said Blum.
“I feel much better,” said Lineberry. “I was just about to have some lunch if you’d like to join me.”
Before Pine could say anything Blum said, “Well, I’m hungry.”
They went to a glass-enclosed conservatory with views of the rear grounds where the construction crew was now framing the cottage. They were finishing the fourth wall and would probably start putting up the roof joists after that.
“I hope to never have another explosion at my house,” said Lineberry as he also looked out at the crew working away.
Lunch was served by a maid in uniform and was delicious, though Pine hardly touched hers, something noted by both Blum and Lineberry. When Lineberry gave Blum a questioning glance, she shrugged.
They finished their lunch and made their way to the library, where they had coffee in front of a crackling fire. A light rain had started to fall and it was chilly outside; the warmth from the flames felt good.
“Have you found out any more information?” said Lineberry. “You were going to Taliaferro?”
Pine said, “We found out a lot, and none of it is good or pleasant to hear.”
Lineberry looked stricken at her blunt words. Blum glanced at Pine in surprise.
“My God. Mercy, she’s not—?”
“No, she’s not dead. At least that we know.”
“What then?”
“She was held prisoner by a family in Taliaferro. Not the Atkinses I mentioned to you, but his son and daughter-in-law.”
Lineberry leaned forward and put down his cup of coffee. He looked pale and distraught.
“Did you say, ‘held prisoner’?”
“Yes. In a locked cave that I wouldn’t let a dog live in. It was filthy, terrible, appalling.”
“Agent Pine,” said Blum in a remonstrative tone. “Jack is still not well.”
Pine didn’t appear to hear her. “She was living like an animal, Jack. No one to help her. No one to save her. So she ended up saving herself.”
“How . . . how do you mean?”
“I mean, she broke out of her chains, busted down the door of her prison, and tried to flee.”
“Tried to flee?”
“This is obviously speculation on my part, but I think that as she was escaping, Joe Atkins caught up with her. Maybe he was going to try to bring her back. Maybe he was going to kill her.”
Pine was squeezing the wooden arm of her chair so tightly that her knuckles were red and her limbs were shaking.
Blum observed this and said, “Agent Pine, are you all right?”
Again, Pine did not seem to hear her; she kept her gaze on Lineberry. “But Mercy turned the tables. She went after him. I can only imagine all the years of pent-up hatred she rightly had for him and what that couple had done to her. She beat him up, struck him so hard he had blunt force trauma to his head. She was big, taller than me, and she was strong. She would be a force to be reckoned with even if her strength hadn’t been turbocharged by her emotions. Joe Atkins was a small man. She quickly overpowered him. Took his knife . . . and . . .”
Lineberry was leaning so far out of his chair that he was in danger of toppling out of it.
“And what?” he said in a hushed voice suffused with an underlying terror.
“I think she stabbed him in the back, severed his aorta, and killed him,” finished Pine.
Lineberry fell back in his chair and started breathing heavily.
Blum grabbed a glass off the sideboard, poured out water from a pitcher, and hurriedly carried it over to Lineberry. He drank half of it down and handed it back to her, thanking her with a look, though his features were still full of horror.
Blum gave Pine an annoyed glance and sat back down.
Pine continued, “I have no idea what happened to the wife, Desiree. She has been described to us as weird, and she has been observed to be violent toward animals. I have no doubt she was cruel to a staggering degree with Mercy. She branded her, Jack. Like she was an animal.”
“Oh my God!” bellowed Lineberry.
“Agent Pine!” exclaimed Blum.
“She might have killed Desiree, too, or the bitch saw the predicament she was in and just fled on her own. She would have gone to prison for her crimes against Mercy.”
Lineberry covered his face with his hands and muttered, “My God.
My God.”
“Yes, my God,” parroted Pine in a fierce voice.
Lineberry uncovered his face and stared at her, realization spreading across his features. “Is there something else? Something you haven’t told me?”
“Yes, Jack, there is. A definite something.”
There was a bite to the woman’s words that made Blum glance sharply at her.
Pine said, “I got a call from a man who used to work for Ito Vincenzo. He had given me dates for when Vincenzo had gone missing. He went back and looked at some old pay stubs he’d kept and gave it some more thought, and it turns out he was off by about a year. Ito didn’t disappear in 2001. He vanished in 2002. And Castor was able to give me the exact day that Ito didn’t show up for work.” She paused here and studied Lineberry, who stared dully back at her. But there was something in the eyes that heralded the man had a premonition about where this might be going.
“Turns out,” continued Pine, “that Castor remembered because his wife’s birthday is the day after Ito didn’t show up at the store.” She paused again. “June second.”
Blum exclaimed, “But that’s your birthday, too.”
Pine kept her gaze on Lineberry. “That’s right. And on June second, 2002, on my birthday, my father took his own life at his apartment in Virginia, not in Louisiana like my mother told me. And you were there, conveniently. And you identified the body for the police.”
Lineberry started to gum his lips, like an elderly gent with no teeth might do.
Pine leaned forward in her chair so that her face was maybe a foot from his.
“I want the truth, Jack, and I want it now,” she barked.
As though he were a snowman melting under a scorching sun, Lineberry collapsed against the upholstered chair and slumped down. He covered his face with his hands once more, but Pine pulled them away.
“Now, Jack.”
Lineberry sat up straighter, glanced at Blum, and then stared directly at Pine.
“I didn’t know the man who tried to kill your father that day was Ito Vincenzo, that I swear. And I still have no proof it was.”
“Wait a minute,” said Blum sharply. “What man who tried to kill him? I thought Tim Pine killed himself.”
Pine said, “That’s what I was always told. By my mother. And by you, Jack. And you lied to me. Just like she did.”
“What are you saying, Agent Pine?” said Blum. “You can’t mean—”
“I mean that Ito came to kill my father, and probably my mother, not knowing that they were separated. But my dad killed Ito instead. And Jack was there, not by coincidence, but by plan, and he identified my father as the dead man. And with a probable suicide and a positive ID by a close friend and later the man’s ex-wife, there would be a limited investigation.” Pine stopped speaking and seemed to marshal herself. “So now I know what happened to Ito. Now I want to know where my father is. Is he with my mother? She abandoned me while I was in college to go to him, right? He supposedly died on June second. I went back to college in July of that same year because I was competing in weightlifting. When I got back in August my mother was gone and all she left was a note saying basically nothing.” She paused, struggling mightily to retain her composure. “Their divorce was a sham, wasn’t it? They always planned on ending up together. And leaving me.”
Pine had slowly stood, and her voice had risen along with her. “Isn’t that the truth, Jack?”
Lineberry looked up at her with a helpless expression. He said, “The divorce was a sham. But they separated to keep you safe.”
“Bullshit.”
“It’s not bullshit, Atlee. It’s the truth.”
“How would you know anything about the fucking truth?”
“I will tell you what you want to know, if you will just listen to me.”
“Please, Agent Pine, it’s for the best. You need information,” added Blum.
Pine slowly resumed her seat and waited expectantly, but every one of her limbs was still quivering with anger.
“I didn’t know where you and your family had gone when you all left Andersonville. We were frantic. We looked, but it was like you all had disappeared into a dark hole. And back then there wasn’t the internet or smartphones where everybody was taking photos and video of everyone else. People really could vanish.”
“And then?” said Pine.
“And then, many years later, I got a frantic call out of the blue from your father.”
“How could he reach you?”
“I had given your parents a special number. It was one that I maintained all those years just in the hopes that . . . Anyway, he told me he was in Virginia and that a man had tried to kill him, only he had killed the man instead. A shotgun blast to the head.”
“If he was living in an apartment building, how come no one there heard it?” said Pine.
“Because he wasn’t living in an apartment building.”
“So that was another time you lied to me?”
Lineberry hurried on. “I flew there right away. The man’s face was missing. I didn’t know who it was and Tim said he didn’t, either.”
“How could he not recognize Ito Vincenzo?” interjected Pine. “He had fought the guy in Andersonville?”
“Over a decade before, Atlee. And people do change. Anyway, Tim told me he didn’t recognize him, and I certainly couldn’t have with the damage to his face. We hatched a plan that would substitute Tim for Ito, if it really was him. That way the world would think Tim was dead.”
“So Ito Vincenzo is buried in my father’s grave. And my mother?” Pine added in a trembling voice.
Lineberry broke off eye contact. “She . . . understood what was at stake. She played along. That allowed your father, and her, to safely disappear.”
“And then she joined him a couple months later,” said Pine bitterly. “And left me by myself.”
“They . . . thought it best. They thought you would be better off, I swear. She left you money to finish college and—”
Pine barked, “Where are they now?”
“I don’t know.”
“Jack!”
“I don’t know,” he said sharply. “That was by design. People kept tracking them down. There had to be a leak. At that point no one was above suspicion, not even me. It was thought best that no one knew where they were going. I haven’t seen them since then. No contact at all. None.”
“And I’m supposed to believe that, considering how often you’ve lied to me?”
“I can’t make you trust me, Atlee. And I haven’t earned that trust anyway. But I also didn’t have to tell you what I just did.”
“So why did you?”
“Because you deserved it. You’ve earned it. And I’m tired of not telling you what you need to know.”
His words didn’t mollify her, but she sat back and tapped her fingers on the wood of the chair. She stared off for so long that she had almost forgotten that Blum and Lineberry were still in the room.
“Why do they need to keep running and hiding?” asked Blum. “It’s been, what, thirty years now. Is there anyone around who would still be after them, or even care?”
Lineberry shook his head. “I don’t know, Carol. The Mafia has a long memory. But they’ve been on the run and off the grid for so long now it’s probably all they know anymore.”
“But they left me, as a sitting duck,” pointed out Pine. “Ito took my sister and nearly killed me. So my parents run off and leave me to face the people coming after them?”
“I think they believed you were effectively off the radar by the time you were an adult,” said Lineberry.
“Ito found us. Who’s to say someone else couldn’t?” she countered. “It wasn’t like they had changed my name. I was still Atlee Pine. How many of those are there?”
“I don’t have a good answer for that. I really don’t.”
“And you could have found me, if you had really wanted to. I have my own Wikipedia page someone set up when I was competing for t
he Olympics. I became an FBI agent. My name appeared in the news from time to time.”
Lineberry wouldn’t meet her eye. “I . . . I guess by then I had just stopped looking. And your father didn’t tell me where you and your mother were when I went to help him.”
“Sure he didn’t. Ignorance is bliss, right, Dad?”
“What . . . what will you do now?” asked Lineberry, who was looking paler by the minute.
Before answering, Pine stood. She looked down at the fragile Lineberry.
“I came here to find my sister. I’m a lot closer than I was. And now I’m going to do all I can to bring her home, even if you won’t.”
“What are you saying? I want that, too. She’s your sister, but she’s also my daughter,” said Lineberry.
“Oh really?” she snarled, her face contorted in fury. “You don’t give a shit about either one of us.”
“Atlee, of course I do,” he said, stunned by her reaction. “How could you say that?”
Pine closed her eyes and when she reopened them she stared out the window at the cottage. Something seemed to occur to her, and she turned and stormed out.
“Where is she going?” said Lineberry.
Blum said nothing.
A minute later they both saw Pine on the rear grounds, marching resolutely toward the cottage.
CHAPTER
78
THE RAIN WAS STARTING TO FALL more heavily as Pine neared the cottage construction site. There were five men framing away, two on ladders and three on the ground.
She stopped in front of the cottage and called out, “All of you leave now.”
The men glanced curiously at her but continued to work.
Pine pulled out her gun and her FBI shield and called out, “FBI, everybody leave. Now!”
Now the men all stopped what they were doing and looked at her, and then glanced at each other nervously.
Pine knew they probably thought she was unhinged.
And maybe I am.
A large man in a construction hat gingerly headed over to Pine.
“Ma’am, we got a job—”
Pine pointed her gun at the sky and fired two shots. “Now!” she screamed.
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