All The Hidden Pieces

by Jillian Thomadsen

  She sat outside, on the concrete slate of steps that led from her backdoor to the backyard. Next door, she could hear the neighbor’s dog scuttling through the grass and yapping at birds.

  She took a sip of the wine and looked up at the sky. It was a pitch – black night with a smattering of stars – no clouds or light pollution. She took another sip and could feel her muscles relax. Greta was never much of a drinker, but sometimes a glass helped when she needed to divert her thoughts, to keep from thinking about her mistakes.

  By the time the drink was finished, a slight breeze was gusting into a draft, and she felt too cold to stay outside. Opening up the screen door, she paused for a moment to glance at the sky again and thought about something. She wasn’t making a wish exactly, but wordlessly expressing a few hopes.

  She hoped that the kids in class would quit teasing John – or at least that their stinging words would have no affect on his self-esteem.

  She hoped that Tuck would remain a fixture in their lives – not only for her sake but for John’s too. He had become so attached to Tuck already that she worried about what would happen if he departed as quickly as he’d arrived.

  And lastly, she hoped the right words would come to her the next time John asked about his grandmother Johanna. Oddly enough, he never did again.

  Chapter Twelve

  October 15, 2009

  The Edwardsville County Family courtroom was showing its age. Dimly lit, with saggy wood paneling and a broken bench in the back, it was in much need of repair.

  Griffin’s mother, Marcia Brock, was seated in front of the broken bench in one of the few spots available for spectators. She looked regal as always – gray rooted brown hair coiffed neatly into a bun, a silk scarf, wool suit and expensive shoes. She always wore just a touch of makeup and bright red lipstick, painted across thin lips. Her face always bore the same mask – a frown marking disapproval – critical. At least, that’s how it seemed to Greta.

  Aside from her soon to be ex-mother-in-law, Greta didn’t recognize anyone else in that area of the courtroom. She sat on the witness stand and looked past everyone – past Griffin and his lawyers, past her own lawyer, Lance Garcia – and stared at the clock in the very back of the room. The air felt thick and stifling and she willed time to hurry up while one of Griffin’s lawyers questioned her.

  The first several questions were easy – softballs lobbed with a graceful underhand. But after he’d gotten the banalities out of the way, Griffin’s lawyer -- a stiff man with white hair and a graying moustache –– changed his tune. He started pacing briskly and glowering at her while she answered. His questions seemed more like demands than queries.

  “When did you meet Griffin Brock?” the lawyer asked.

  “I met him about twelve years ago,” Greta answered softly.

  “Can you please be more precise? And speak up?”

  “I met him in 1997,” Greta said, in a louder voice. “I was eighteen years old.”

  “And were you single at the time that you met Mr. Brock?” the lawyer pressed.

  Greta could feel where this line of questioning was headed and she shuddered. She stared at Lance. His head was down and he was sorting through papers on the table. “Yes sir,” Greta said. “Well I was living in someone’s apartment – in a man’s apartment – but yes, I was single.”

  “You were living with someone but you claim you were single?” The lawyer repeated her words as though such an arrangement was preposterous. He half-smirked and then asked, “So let’s back up and talk about this other man who provided you with an apartment. How long after meeting him did you move into the apartment he provided?”

  “I moved in about two weeks after I first met him,” Greta answered. She could sense a shift in the courtroom, as subtle as the movement of air, but still palpable. The heat of everyone’s judgment washed over her. “But I can explain…” she started to say.

  “And just out of curiosity, how long did you know Mr. Griffin Brock before moving in with him?”

  “Again, it was a few weeks.”

  “So, you meet a guy, you move in with him. Then, two years later, you meet my client, decide you like him, and a few weeks later, you move from the one guy’s apartment to the residence owned by my client. Is that correct?”

  “Well…I…” Greta placed her palm on her cheeks. They felt like they were on fire.

  “You’re a fast mover, Ms. Brock.”

  Greta shook her head. “I’m telling you, the first guy, it wasn’t that type of relationship. And as for Griffin, I thought I was in love…”

  Griffin’s lawyer was pacing through the courtroom. He seemed unstoppable. “Let’s talk about this first guy – the one who gave you the apartment to live in. Can you tell us about him?”

  “You want his name?”

  “Yes, Ms. Brock. Please tell us his name.”

  “His name was…is…Steven Vance. And again, I wasn’t living with him – exactly. He just provided me with an apartment and he only stayed there occasionally. Very occasionally.”

  Greta looked around as though she expected a shocked response from the courtroom – a gasp, a murmur – some type of minor eruption. Steven Vance was a well-known figure in the small municipalities that skirted St. Louis. He was equally loved and loathed – depending on whether he was dodging the law or performing a favor. He was a big looming man – rounded shoulders, tall broad frame – the kind of guy who took charge of every room he walked into.

  Vance owned two hotels and a nightclub – all on the western bank of the Mississippi River. The hotels were small and luxurious – heavily advertised along the I-55 corridor from Chicago as a place one could find solitude, escape at the hands of massage therapists and yoga instructors.

  By contrast, the nightclub was loud and raucous. The Thirst, a two-story glass structure with dim lighting and a wraparound bar was seen by many as a stain on the quaint and quiet riverbed town where it was located. It drew its clientele from a college town across the river in Illinois, and the students were faithful patrons despite the thirty-minute drive.

  Young revelers started lining up at six-thirty p.m. on Fridays, waiting for the doors to open at seven. At two a.m., they piled out on the streets, inebriated, stumbling and slurring. They noisily staggered into car services and drove off only to appear again before the red velvet rope that evening, ready to repeat the ritual.

  If the townspeople were faintly irked by the noise and commotion of The Thirst, they complained very quietly. One reason for the calm dissent was economic. The Thirst provided tax revenues for the city, and it employed at least thirty townspeople as dancers, bartenders, waiters and bouncers.

  But another reason – the more pressing reason – was that everyone knew Steven Vance was behind the enterprise, and no one wanted to provoke him. In the past, those who took him on had been publicly criticized, condemned and embarrassed. Steven Vance knew no boundaries when it came to shaming his critics, and nothing was off limits. He protected his ventures with the ferocity of a mother cub, and the people living in the municipalities south of St. Louis learned to accept – and sometimes revere – him.

  Vance loved the limelight and embraced publicity. He wrote editorials in the local news, appeared on local television, sponsored local charities and chaired benefits. By the time Greta met him in 1995, he was already larger than life and untouchable.

  So she was shocked when he walked into her diner that hot morning in August, sat down in her section, and ordered a coffee and roast beef sandwich. She recognized him instantly and her hands trembled as she poured the dark blend into his cup. When she finished, he put his right hand over her left wrist and said, “Hey, it’s okay.”

  She had at first expected him to be gruff, and possibly flirtatious or charming. But she was surprised that he was none of the above. He was avuncular and kind. He left his business card along with the tip, and told her to call if she was ever in any trouble. She called him that evening.

  “How
would you characterize your relationship with Mr. Vance?” the lawyer asked.

  “He was like a father to me,” Greta answered. “When I met him, I was living in a homeless shelter for teens. He gave me a place to stay.”

  “How old were you?”

  “I was sixteen.”

  “And Mr. Vance? How old was he?”

  Greta coughed. “I think he was around thirty-five or forty years old at the time.”

  The lawyer’s voice boomed. “A sixteen year old girl! Living with a forty year old man!”

  “But, I’ll repeat it for the third time. It wasn’t that kind of a relationship. He was like a father to me. And he didn’t live with me full-time. I think he had a number of homes, and he only visited me every so often, to see if I needed anything.”

  “Were you in school?”

  Greta shook her head. “No, I dropped out after ninth grade.”

  The lawyer snickered, and got closer to Greta. She could see droplets of sweat forming above his moustache. “So, let me see if I get this straight. You are a high school dropout and former teen runaway who was living in a homeless shelter. In 1995, at the age of sixteen, you met and then moved in with the town’s most notorious…ahem, businessman…?”

  “I’ve already explained my living situation to you. And I don’t know what you mean by notorious---”

  “You don’t know what I mean by notorious? Let’s put aside the questionable businesses associated with Mr. Vance, and focus on this person who you say was like a father to you. Are you aware of any other endeavors Mr. Vance was involved with when you were living with him? Anything besides clubs and hotels?”

  Greta looked helplessly at her lawyer, at Griffin, at the judge. She answered in a small voice. “He…he sold drugs.”

  It was a matter of public record. In 1998, Steven Vance was arrested for drug distribution and trafficking. His arrest occurred one year after she had left Vance’s cushy penthouse apartment overlooking the river, piled her belongings into a friend’s van and moved into Avery Place with Griffin.

  Greta had known about Vance’s drug operation the whole time she lived at his apartment. She heard his instructions to associates when he was on the phone in the kitchen. She saw the boxes neatly lined with little baggies of plastic coated pills and white powder. At times, he moved the whole setup into the apartment. She would hang out in the back bedroom, while streams of people and their apparatuses came through. She could put her ear to the door and hear how it all went down. The Thirst was a venue for pushing narcotics, coke and weed. Greta was never a part of it, but she knew about it.

  In 1998, she was settled into her new life with Griffin, pregnant with John, when she heard about Vance’s arrest on the radio. The disc jockeys giddily speculated that a jilted ex-girlfriend had taken Vance down. Greta had never said a word to anyone about what she’d seen and heard in his apartment but she was certain at that moment that police would be banging on her door. She expected to be hauled into an interrogation room and questioned about her former life.

  To her surprise, Steven Vance accepted a plea deal, performed a marginal amount of community service, went back to his former life and no one in law enforcement one ever said a word to her about it. Not until eleven years after his arrest, when she sat stirring and sweating in a witness box in family court, with Griffin’s lawyer perched over her, pointing an accusing finger.

  “You lived with the town’s biggest drug dealer!” he exclaimed.

  “I know it seems that way to you,” Greta said. “But to me, he was family. The only family I had. He got me off the streets and into an apartment.”

  “Ms. Brock, you say he was the only family you had, but at the age of sixteen, where were your parents?”

  Greta looked down at her hands. She thought of Marcia Brock in the back of the courtroom, twisting her scarf and casting judgment. Marcia, who lived in a brick and stone mansion in one of the wealthiest counties in Illinois – a woman who had known privilege her entire life. Marcia had made no secret of her disapproval about her son’s marriage, and now – as Greta’s past was laid bare in the courtroom for all to critique -- came Marcia’s vindication.

  “My father died of lung cancer when I was small,” Greta said.

  “And your mother?”

  “My mother…” Greta sat back and tried to stem her tears. “My mother…um…I ran away from home when I was sixteen. We were arguing a lot and she told me that if I left, I could never come back…so I guess I never went back.”

  By now her tears were falling – thick droplets that moistened the wooden perch in front of her. Someone produced a tissue box and Greta wiped her eyes and blew her nose.

  “Ms. Brock…” the lawyer continued, “when you moved into the apartment provided by Mr. Vance, at the age of sixteen, did you work?”

  “Yes, I worked at a diner in St. Louis. I had the morning shift. I was a waitress. That’s how I met Griffin, actually.”

  “And in the afternoons?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “What did you do in the afternoons, Ms. Brock? While you were living in the apartment provided by Mr. Vance?”

  Greta wasn’t prepared for this and she froze. She took another tissue and spread it apart into a rectangle, fingering the softness while she thought of how to respond.

  “Were you doing drugs, Ms. Brock?”

  “What? No!”

  “But you were aware of Steven Vance’s drug operation?”

  “Aware of it? Yes I was aware of it. I was never involved with it though.”

  “Did you work in his hotels or nightclub?”

  “No, no, I just went back to the apartment.”

  “Well what did you do, during all of those hours to yourself in the apartment, Ms. Brock? You had no one around you, you weren’t in school and you weren’t working. And you yourself claim that Steven Vance wasn’t even there most of the time. What were you doing?”

  “Um…I was…” Greta looked at the judge but didn’t complete her sentence.

  At last, Lance Garcia came alive. He sprung from his seat and said, “Your Honor, I don’t see how revisiting the daily life of Ms. Brock twelve years ago is at all relevant.”

  “It’s entirely relevant,” Griffin’s lawyer countered. “Mrs. Brock is requesting full custody of a child. It’s important for us to know about her character, to fully understand what types of things John would be exposed to in her presence.”

  The judge nodded. “I’ll allow it.”

  Lance rounded his seat and took a few steps closer to the judge. “But Your Honor, this was twelve years—”

  “I said I’ll allow it!” the judge bellowed. His voice seemed deep and angry, and it filled the room.

  Griffin’s lawyer smelled the victory. He smiled at the judge and then at Greta. He walked slowly towards the witness stand, like a predator taking great aims not to perturb his prey before the kill. “Ms. Brock, for how long were you living at the apartment provided by Steven Vance?”

  “Two years. 1995 to 1997.”

  “So, I’ll repeat my earlier question. For two full years, Mrs. Brock, in the afternoons, what were you doing?”

  Greta looked up at the judge and gave him a pleading look. But whereas last time he seemed stoic, this time he looked aggravated at her hesitation, annoyed at the time it took for her to simply open her mouth and reveal secrets she’d sworn she’d never tell a soul.

  “Ms. Brock…” the judge said. “Please answer the question.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  September 19, 2017

  Tuesday morning, they were all seated around a conference table – Weaver, Martinez, Adams and Hobbs. Adams had the hospital report in his hands and was crumpling it slightly while he read aloud. Hobbs didn’t understand why he didn’t just distribute copies and let everyone read silently but she was too tired to argue. Adams had been the one to meet with the records department of Edwardsville General, to express the urgency of the situation. And Adams was the one who
got the call from the hospital once the office had located the medical file for John Brock. It didn’t require a warrant or a court order. It just required Adams to state quite plainly that John was considered a missing person and this file was critical to discovering what had happened to him.

  Adams cleared his throat and read. “November 1, 2015. Edwardsville Emergency Department Record Medical Chart. Name: John Michael Brock. Age: 16. Accident? Box initially checked No, then crossed off and someone checked Yes. Chief Complaint and Onset: Bruised ribs, swollen jaw. Patient complains of chest pain and headache. Breathing rapid and shallow with pain on inspiration. Physical Findings: Vital signs revealed BP 100/60, temp: 98.3. Tender chest wall over left pectoral muscle. Left sign is markedly swollen, with bruising. Closed fracture of other specified part of fourth rib. Cerebral contusions….”

  Adams continued but Hobbs was no longer listening. The list of injuries seemed impossibly long, the medical terminology unsettling – as though the injuries were less severe when described with an erudite vocabulary. There had been no accompanying police report – at least none that the grunts at the police station had been able to scrounge up. Hobbs could imagine the rookies’ frustration…sorting through file after file of unsequenced paperwork, looking for any spark of recognition under the dim track lighting and stuffy air of the precinct basement.

  As for Adams, Hobbs had thought he’d be one of those grunts, but now he was at the table with the rest of them. He’d apparently earned the respect of Captain Weaver – and Hobbs didn’t know whether that made her proud or uneasy…or maybe both.

  Weaver interrupted Adams with a raised hand. “Can you read from the police report, not just the medical report? At least then we’ll have a chance of understanding half of what you’re saying.”

  Adams looked up from the table and shook his head. “There is no accompanying police report.”

  The room was quiet for a moment. Every so often, they came across a case like this – usually a domestic violence victim, red-purple eyes swelling out of her sockets, scratches and bruises across the flesh, with an outlandish tale of personal responsibility that the hospital staff chose to take at face value.