No Time to Wave Goodbye

by Jacquelyn Mitchard

  Detective Humbly said, “We have a good picture of them standing at the elevator, facing the camera, with her holding the baby. The baby’s face isn’t visible but the time stamp and the proximity to the room is exactly right, and the baby bag they brought is an unusual design. It has what looks like a fetus on it …”

  “It’s an ultrasound picture,” Candy said. “I bought it. It’s not an ultrasound picture of Stella but it’s somebody’s. It’s a black patent-leather bag …”

  “Yes, and there was also a green bag with some squiggles and question marks on it.”

  “Stella’s clothes were in the bag.”

  “They’re both blond and attractive and well-dressed.”

  “That should narrow it down in California,” Candy said, then quickly added, “Actually, I apologize. That level of composure is a good thing in this case … so is taking all the baby’s gear. It suggests that they want the baby to … keep. Not to rape and suffocate.”

  “Sure. That much is clear but …” There was a big “but” that Humbly wasn’t going to bring up unless she did.

  “And that there were two of them. A team. Like a husband and wife, although I’m sure they weren’t. Couples don’t kidnap children,” Candy went on.

  Humbly thought, but didn’t say, They do if they are well paid. Or threatened. “They do, once in a while,” he said. “Had a couple stole two kids from the same yard a few years ago. Instant family. We got them before they hit the freeway …”

  Looking down, searching for her cell phone, Candy noticed that in the process of ripping off her designer dress and pulling on her jeans, shirt, blazer, and holster, she had torn two of her nails deep down to the quick. She couldn’t even feel the pain. It was as though she were examining another woman’s hand.

  Candy and Humbly sat down on a pair of sofas across from the interview rooms. So far, the Amber Alert or a tip from someone who saw one of those photos was their best hope. Some experts griped about the alert system, which was named after Amber Hagerman, kidnapped in broad daylight in full view of a neighbor who heard her screams, and found days later, a few miles from her home, her throat cut. Skeptics said that an Amber Alert brought out more confessors and creeps than tipsters and wasted valuable time. Still, occasionally it actually worked. A caller to a radio talk show had suggested it: Now police issued the same kind of bulletin to the media for a missing child that was issued for severe weather. All fifty states used some form of it. In some places, a tone was played and programming was interrupted while the child’s picture was displayed.

  Humbly opened his notebook. “So you say you know the girl who was caring for the baby and you’ve spoken to her … before or after?”

  “Before and since … since we were all moved up to the Frank Sinatra Suite.” At the request of the management and the police, who wanted access to the room where Adriana had cared for Stella for two days, the family members had been given a series of rooms in the huge, glass-walled penthouse.

  “Was this while she had the baby with her?” Humbly asked.

  “Yes. Not the second time, obviously. But for the past two days, repeatedly. To her and her family.” Candy watched as nine of ten people who walked past the plainclothes standing around all but tripped to stare at them. They might as well have been uniforms, she thought. They would have attracted less attention wearing clown outfits. Candy believed that detectives in plain clothes should dress like detectives on TV, in slinky tops and tight jeans or leather jackets and khakis, like people. Like this Humbly here. But take them out of their blues and police invariably wore black and navy blue together, or shirts tucked in nice and tight or denim skirts with sensible shoes—like nuns without habits. “Why do plainclothes dress so bad?” she asked. Humbly stared at her as though she’d grown a beard. Why had she said that? Why did her mind keep slipping away from her, into weird corridors, and then Stella’s face come roaring back out at her, larger than life, larger than death? She took a deep breath.

  “I first met Adriana years ago,” Candy said. “She was a teenager in Chicago. Ben and his brother, the guy with the movie, they’ve known her since childhood. Eliza met her only yesterday. But she felt good about Adriana. She still does. My daughter expressed breast milk for the baby before she put on her evening dress and also purchased cans of formula as a backup. She put them all in the refrigerator. Stella’s extra diapers and clothing were on the tall dresser. The room should be covered with prints …”

  “It’s a hotel room, ma’am. It’s probably got prints from Tony Bennett. And for there to be a match, the people who did this would already have to be in the system. But we’ll try. Of course,” Humbly said.

  “What else did you say you were doing?” Candy asked Humbly.

  He said, “We’re going to use the press to the maximum.” News crews had set up—even foreign press, in town for the Academy Awards. Humbly explained that they invited full media cooperation, as well as volunteers who pushed the images of Stella’s face in close-up and the blond couple out even onto cell phones and pagers.

  Candy finally found her phone in an inside pocket and popped it open. Her gut coiled and nearly bent her double. How could so much time have passed?

  Stella had now been missing for the magic number.

  Three hours.

  Despite the fact that such technology as the Amber Alert had slightly improved the odds, most abducted kids—including the little girl from Texas after whom the system was named—were dead within three hours of being taken. Statistics proved it over and over.

  “Are you okay?” Humbly asked.

  “I’m not,” Candy said. “It’s been three hours. Not much has changed since the Lindbergh kidnapping. If a kid is found dead after an abduction, that kid was killed within three hours of being taken.”

  “I don’t go for that,” Humbly said. “This is my case and we will find her.”

  “That’s noble, but …”

  The two looked at each other for a minute that seemed to stretch out between them like a shred of molten glass. Humbly was afraid she could read his mind. The abduction was well organized and timed and the couple had moved down the hall with the ease of vacationers. Stella was pretty, round and cooey and racially desirable, still little enough for whoever got her to pretend that they’d given birth to her. California’s adoption laws were so ludicrous that anyone could find a scumbag lawyer with an Internet license who would make everything look tidy. If it weren’t for the publicity and if Stella had been brought to L.A. from Mexico—or Kansas—she would grow up as the daughter of some very nice gay couple up in the Swish Alps above Beverly Hills, drive a five-hundred-dollar pink toy Jeep when she was four, and have every lesson known to humankind. Humbly figured the couple was foreign—Canadian, French, Swiss, Dutch, German. Not Mexicans. Mexicans could have their pick of beautiful babies off the streets for what it would cost to buy a good meal in New York. Some shady “family lawyers” dealt exclusively with would-be parents who were Germans. Germans had plenty of money, were nearly neurotically discreet, and readily shelled out a couple of hundred grand to the attorney and ten grand to a couple of other shills for a few days’ work. Some of it went to a couple of young people who posed as the birth parents, who were often unrelated and met each other the day before. The real woman who’d given birth got five hundred bucks and a walk back across the bridge to Mexico. The wish to have a child was so huge and overpowering that couples would look the other way in circumstances that stank like five-day-old fish. With a fake certificate from the Ninth Circuit Court, City of Los Angeles, and enough breast milk and formula to get her to Berlin or Zurich or Toronto, Stella could be on a Swissair flight by now, with flight attendants competing to cuddle her. Stella had even come with diapers. Cute, expensive dresses. Like a dolly with a trunk. Full-service deal.

  Instead of saying this—he hoped devoutly Candy didn’t have the same sense—Humbly switched leads: “We don’t have any reason to like Adriana for this. She had no idea who the
people were … and Charles Ruffalo’s business interests are insignificant in this context. That guy just fell apart. Nobody can fake that kind of grief.”

  “But how could she give the baby to that couple? Even if she did think they were relatives?” Candy asked.

  “You said yourself you had a good gut about her,” Humbly answered. “She believed it was one of the other people with you. Like your friend, Betty …”

  “Beth,” Candy said. “The other grandmother. The father’s mother.”

  “So it’s not implausible. It’s Oscar night, worse than Halloween. Put yourself in the mind of a twenty-one-year-old whose brother was just part of the team who won an Oscar. If she believed Eliza called her for real.”

  So …

  Humbly snapped his fingers. “Wait! You! I just put this together and it embarrasses me that it took me so long! It should have hit me when I caught the call. Ben Cappadora. The Cappadora case. You found Ben Cappadora. You’re that person. I’ve been reading about the movie the brother made. I thought I might go see it with my wife. It happened when I was a kid.”

  “I didn’t find him. I talked to the perp, face-to-face, like your guys out here did with the Polly Klaas case, two days after the kidnapper took Ben. It could have ended right there. Instead, it took nine years.”

  Jesus, thought Humbly, how does she live with that? But he said, “I remember actually your case had some bearing on my wanting to be a cop. It’s funny how all the things in your life catch up.”

  “Kind of,” Candy said and asked, point-blank, “They’re pros who’ll sell her, right?”

  “Look,” Humbly said. “Look … no.”

  Humbly didn’t want to have to say what he had to say. He’d sooner have given up his middle name—Francis; he didn’t like it anyway—than tell this nice lady that she needed to stop being a cop and be a grandma starting right now. With her history, it would be like telling her to hold her breath until the little kid was found.

  “I intend to stay. I intend to help find her,” Candy said.

  “That’s the thing, though. I can’t control where you go, ma’am. But I can’t let you be part of the investigation.”

  “Why not? I have absolutely unique experience here,” Candy pressed him. “You’ll let an FBI agent in. Some suit! You don’t know my daughter. Or Ben. My daughter and my granddaughter are all I have. Just the job. And them. So you see …”

  Humbly stared at the ceiling. He scrubbed at his face. “That’s it exactly. You’re too close in. You’re way too close in. And ma’am, you know it.”

  “No!”

  “Yes, ma’am. Yes. You do.”

  Now I will have to go back there, Candy thought. I will have to walk back down the hall to the ornate bank of elevators and whoosh up to the eleventh floor and use the key to let myself into the room where they had tried to film Eliza pleading with the kidnappers to give her back her baby, but failed because, each time, Eliza got ten seconds into the prepared sentences and began to scream, I want my baby! I want to feed my baby! A nurse practitioner staying in the hotel had come to put hot compresses on Eliza’s breasts and wrap her in bandages, but Eliza pushed her away and insisted on expressing the milk. Don’t you think these people will find my daughter? This is America! They found my husband when he was little. Are you trying to make me act like my baby is dead? Why would you want my milk to go away?

  Ben, handsome and steady and calm, did better.

  But although his mouth moved, his eyes looked dead, like posthumous portraits from the 1800s. Would anyone sympathize with a young man who seemed to have no feelings at all? Ben was buried under mattress after mattress of coincidence. There was no way for him to be himself. But perhaps if he were to be the real Ben, he would be like Eliza, a writhing, desperate thing no amount of Valium could bring even close to down out of the tree she had clawed her way up.

  Candy would have to pass the room where Charley Seven wept in his wife’s arms. He would give his own life, he swore to God. He would give his right arm. And Pat? Pat had walked every floor of the eleven floors in the hotel, opened every door in the kitchen and the pantry. He walked as he had two decades ago, determined to prove that lightning didn’t strike twice … when it did, all the time. Blue pouches hung from Pat’s eyes and his hands and suit stank of the cigarettes he’d given up so long ago.

  No.

  Candy bent forward over her knees and began to cry. “Please,” she said to Humbly. “Please let me be a police officer.”

  Humbly saw the dark-haired, smaller woman running toward them and almost got up to get between her and Chief Bliss.

  “Ma’am,” he said, throwing out a hand. “Please wait there …” but by then, Candy had heard Beth’s voice.

  “I found you!” Beth said. “Oh honey.” Beth sat down and all but pulled Candy into her arms like a child. “Eliza needs you.” She held out her hand to Humbly. “I’m Beth Cappadora, Vincent and Ben’s mother.”

  “Who would think this could happen twice in someone’s life?” Humbly asked.

  “No one,” Beth said. “No one on earth.”

  Humbly’s partner came back just then. “Humbly,” Melissa Rafferty said. “It’s freaky but there are no reported stolens of black or dark Toyota SUVs …”

  “Doesn’t mean there aren’t any. People might be out of town. Not know their car’s gone yet,” Humbly said.

  “We have a gang of uniforms checking where the newly purchased are with their purchasers. There are about forty zillion of them,” said the small, bright-haired officer. “But here’s the thing, Humbly. We called all the rental agencies and one at the San Francisco airport has been expecting a return for three days. The kid who rented it thought the driver’s license was phony but he rented it anyway because the lady was adopting a baby … and he kind of liked her …”

  “What was the lady’s name?”

  “Patricia Fellows.”

  “Did you run her …?” Humbly began.

  “I know who Patricia Fellows is,” Beth said.

  “Me, too,” Candy said. “Can we go to a computer?” With a few strokes, she summoned up a photo that had the ink-block print quality of black-and-white photography of thirty or fifty years ago. “Patricia Fellows is dead. She died in Riverton, on the West Side of Chicago, forty years ago.”

  “I was a little kid then,” Beth said. “It happened right near the part of the city where I lived when I was small, before we moved to Chester. It was the most horrifying thing that ever happened. People didn’t kill children then. It wasn’t part of the news every day … no one’s boyfriend got hopped up and just …”

  “Slaughtered some baby or some teenager. Everybody our age knows about the Fellows sisters,” Candy said. “But not everyone knows that I didn’t grow up in Chicago like Beth and Pat Cappadora did. I’ve been there so long they probably assume I did.”

  “What happened to them?” Humbly asked. “The sisters?”

  “They were kidnapped and murdered. It can’t be a mistake.”

  “Candy,” Beth asked, “why would they use that name?”

  Candy said, “Oh, Bethie. I can only think of one reason. It could be to telegraph to us that this is personal.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  If the rental car took one more minute to come, Kerry would scream. Not that she had any confidence that she could make her way to LAX in time if it did: The Los Angeles freeway system fulfilled every exaggerated horror story she’d ever heard about it. But Kerry felt more confident taking a car of her own than a cab.

  In fact, for the three days since Baby Stella was taken, Kerry had longed for a car anyway, simply to be able to flee the atmosphere of mourning and tension in the penthouse suites. Once, she’d gone down to the pool and dived in but when she surfaced, a reporter was there, asking, “Is there any news of Baby Stella, Kerry? Are the police questioning your brother and his wife? Were they on the verge of a divorce?”

  And before she could stop herself, Kerry answered, “Tha
t’s crazy!”

  The police weren’t, in fact, “talking” to Ben and Eliza. After a cursory chat with Ben and Eliza, no one seemed to suspect anyone within the family. But the interview circle was widening like sound waves from a tower, to old friends and the people who’d been filmed for the movie, to Vincent’s ex-girlfriends.

  And then George arrived, just this morning, overnight on the redeye from O’Hare.

  When the whole atmosphere ignited, when Ben went nuts for no reason at all, and Beth ran from the room, Kerry had no idea that her mother would hop into a cab and head straight to the airport. Kerry hadn’t even seen it—had only heard the few things Pop told her. Kerry was asleep, which was how she coped when she couldn’t cope, and the rest of them were sitting with Detective Rafferty, George Karras burst into the living room—thankfully without the annoying wife, Elena, he’d married a few years after Cecilia Lockhart died. Eliza was lying on the bed with Beth, half-asleep, but she jumped up and, with Ben, rushed to George, who enveloped them in a huge embrace. In bits and pieces, Vincent told Kerry what happened next.

  George said, “This isn’t all so bad as it seems, Sam. The guy down there said they didn’t look like drug people or, you know, anyone who wants to hurt Stella. The airlines have these people’s picture….”

  “Dad, I never got it,” Ben said. “How you could love someone so much in just six months.”

  “That’s how I loved you,” George said. “Oh, my boy. My son. Oh, Sam, try not to give up. It looks like they have people here … top notch.”