The Lure: a small town murder mystery (Frank Bennett Adirondack Mountain Mystery Series Book 2)

by S. W. Hubbard

  Frank had hit upon a brilliant strategy for getting Lt. Meyerson to do what he wanted: he’d sent Earl to do the dirty work. Try as he might, Frank could never manage to request anything from Meyerson; the words always came out sounding like an order. Then Meyerson would get his back up, and Frank would respond in kind, and they’d be caught in a ridiculous deadlock from which neither would back down.

  Earl, on the other hand, was genuinely terrified of the state police lieutenant. He couldn’t say good-morning to the man without it sounding like a plea for mercy. So Frank had sent Earl into the lion’s den with the letter from Brian and Eileen and told him to ask Meyerson to get the crime lab guys to dust it for prints. It was a long shot that a letter from some prospective adoptive parents would yield fingerprints that would match those in the system, but what else did he have to go on?

  Earl had been gone for well over two hours. Frank was just about to call the state police headquarters to inquire when the kid stumbled through the office door and collapsed into his chair.

  “How did it go?” Frank asked.

  “He said there was no clear indication any crime had been committed. He said the likelihood of lifting usable prints from a paper that had been handled so much was very slim. He said the lab was all backed up with important cases.” Earl paused for breath. “He said he’d have the results for us on Monday.”

  “Brilliant work, Earl! I’m proud of you.”

  “You owe me big time, Frank.”

  “Anything. Name it.”

  “You promised you’d help me study for the police academy entrance exam,” Earl reminded him. He’d failed the test the first time he took it.

  “Be glad to.”

  “And beer. Lots of beer.”

  Frank grinned. “All right—we’ll study at the Mountainside.”

  Chapter 6

  Number 12 Hawthorne Lane was in one of the new developments springing up on farmland all around Albany. Frank was on his way there, because, despite all of Meyerson’s protests, the letter to Mary Pat had yielded a print that matched on ten of sixteen points to one Brian Finn, a man who had a felony assault conviction twenty-two years ago, but had not been in trouble since. Meyerson’s report came with all sorts of caveats about the match not being close enough to hold up in court, but it was good enough to convince Frank to make the two-hour drive south.

  He realized as he steered the patrol car through the twisting drives and cul-de-sacs that all the streets were named after authors: Melville Drive, Alcott Court, Whitman Place. Cute. The houses were cute too, each with their developer-issued tree and regulation five shrubs; most with an expensive swing set in the backyard. Twenty years of wear and tear would reveal the quality of the workmanship that went into them, but right now the neighborhood was bright with the hopefulness of young families just starting out.

  He got disoriented driving around–God forbid someone should be out in their yard on a beautiful day so you could ask directions. Finally, he flagged down the UPS man, who pointed him toward Hawthorne Lane.

  The woman who answered the door at number twelve looked to be in her early thirties. Everything about her radiated crispness: the short, styled hair, the rosy lipstick, the creased slacks, the sweater that looked as if that UPS man had just delivered it. Despite the fact that a uniformed cop stood on her doorstep, she faced Frank through the glass storm door with unquestioning friendliness. Her husband might be a convicted felon, but she showed no sign of animosity.

  “Eileen Finn?”

  “Yes.”

  “My name is Frank Bennett. I’m Chief of Police in a town upstate—Trout Run.” He produced his ID, which she scanned briefly, without anxiety. “I wonder if you can help me with an inquiry I’m working on?”

  “I’ll be happy to try.”

  “I’m looking into a matter concerning the Sheltering Arms adoption agency. I believe you may have dealt with them?”

  The smile on Eileen Finn’s face disappeared. “My husband’s not home right now. Maybe you should come back later.” She edged backwards, her hand on the doorknob.

  “I just have a few questions. Can I come in?” Obviously he’d hit on something, but he kept his tone bland.

  “Do you have a search warrant?”

  “I only want to talk to you. If you want me to shout my questions through the storm door, that’s fine,” Frank replied with a pointed glance at the neighbor’s open windows.

  She opened the door with a grudging shove and Frank followed her into a living room every bit as clean and crisp as Eileen herself. The curtains matched the chairs, a framed seascape hung squarely over the sofa, and the flawless pale carpeting made Frank feel that he should have kicked off his shoes before walking in. The impeccable appearance of Mrs. Finn and the house made him wonder if this lead was really going to pan out. New parents were usually haggard from sleep deprivation, their homes a riot of baby paraphernalia.

  Eileen Finn sat huddled in a corner of the striped sofa watching him. He felt as welcome as a raccoon who’d gnawed his way into her attic.

  He plunged in. “Do you know a young woman named Mary Pat Sheehan?”

  She looked at him blankly. “No.”

  “I found a letter in her bedroom that was signed Brian and Eileen, and has Brian’s fingerprint on it. What can you tell me about that?”

  “I…we wrote a letter to prospective birth mothers, telling them that we wanted to adopt.” She straightened up a little and tried to project more confidence. “There’s nothing wrong with that.”

  “No, nothing at all,” Frank agreed. “Except this particular birth mother is dead and we’re trying to find the baby. Do you know what happened to it?”

  Eileen Finn’s makeup stood out as garish splotches on a face that was now drained of all its natural color. He’d pegged her age at about thirty, but now he saw lines that hadn’t been noticeable when her cheerful façade was intact.

  “The girl we wrote to—the birth mother—is dead?” she asked in a hoarse whisper.

  Frank nodded. “No one knew she was pregnant and she had the baby without any medical help. A few days later, she died from complications of childbirth. We had no indication of what happened to the baby other than your letter. We want to know that the baby is all right. Is the baby here?”

  Frank’s question unleashed a torrent of sobs from Eileen. At that moment, Frank heard a door open and close in the back of the house and a man’s voice cheerfully calling, “I’m home.”

  Frank scowled. What timing—he would have much preferred continuing to talk to Eileen alone, but there would be no way to separate a crying woman from her husband.

  A burly man with close-cropped sandy hair appeared in the doorway. “Eileen! What’s wrong? What’s going on?”

  Eileen nodded toward Frank. “He wants to know about Sheltering Arms. The birthmother we wrote to died after she had the baby. They found our letter because it had your fingerprint on it.”

  Brian dropped onto the sofa and put his elbows on his knees, propping his head up with his hands.

  “The baby?” Frank asked again.

  “We saw her ten days ago,” Brian explained. “She was fine then. But we don’t have her now. They took her back.”

  “They? Who’s they?”

  Brian groaned. “This mess just keeps getting worse and worse. This is what happens when you try to pull an end-run around the rules.” Eileen had drawn away from him; they were each alone in their misery.

  Frank felt sorry for them, but he wanted the whole story. “Why don’t you start at the beginning and tell me everything.”

  Brian stood up and began to pace. “Eileen and I tried to have a baby for ten years. We finally decided to adopt. Thought it would be no big deal. We’re good people, have a nice home. So we go to the adoption agency…”

  “Sheltering Arms?” Frank interrupted.

  “Oh no, this was a real agency. That’s when we found out we weren’t eligible to adopt.” Brian sighed. “If you traced me
through a fingerprint, I guess you know I have a record for assault. In high school I had this girlfriend–we were obsessed with each other. After graduation, we ran away and got married. It was two years of pure insanity. We drank and took drugs and lived like bums. One day we got in a fight over another man we were crashing with. I tried to punch him and she got between us and I knocked her out cold. I got arrested and my family couldn’t afford the kind of lawyer that can get you out of situations like that, so I pleaded guilty to get probation. So I now have a record for spousal abuse, and the law in New York says you can’t adopt if you were ever convicted of abusing your wife or a child. That one mistake I made as a kid keeps us from having a family.”

  Eileen mopped her face with the sleeve of her yellow sweater. “It’s so unfair. Brian is the kindest, gentlest man. He’d make a great father. That’s why we decided to follow an, uh, alternative route.”

  Alternative route? It seemed to him they had out-and-out deceived Mary Pat to get her baby.

  “Back up a minute. How did you get from the agency who told you didn’t qualify to Sheltering Arms?”

  “We started to do some research on the Internet,” Brian explained. “We found out that if we located our own birth mother, one who said she wanted us to raise her baby, we might be able to move ahead with an adoption, maybe in a state where the rules aren’t as strict. We didn’t have the slightest idea how to go about finding a birth mother. But one of these adoption web sites had a chat room where you could ask questions, share your frustrations, that sort of thing. So we posted a few times, and the next thing you know, we got this email from Sheltering Arms.”

  “They contacted you?”

  “Yeah. I guess that should’ve been our first clue that something wasn’t right. But it sounded so perfect. They said they had a birth mother who wouldn’t care about my past—just wanted loving parents for her child. All we had to do was write a letter that described ourselves and how we’d raise the child. If she liked us, she’d be willing to say in the paperwork that she wanted us to have the baby, and they would arrange everything else.”

  “So Mary Pat agreed that you should adopt her baby—how long ago was that?”

  “August—she was pretty far along in her pregnancy. We were thrilled that it was going so fast,” Eileen explained. “We paid Sheltering Arms $10,000 to pay for the mother’s medical expenses.”

  Frank scowled. Mary Pat’s medical expenses had amounted to the buck ninety-eight she’d spent on Tylenol the day before she died.

  Brian took over the story. “Two weeks ago, we got a call that the baby had been born on September 17th. We met a woman named Betty in a park outside of Glens Falls, about fifty miles north of here. She brought Sarah—that’s what we were going to name her—so we could see that she was healthy.”

  Eileen spoke in a dreamy, faraway voice. “She was beautiful, perfect. With big dark eyes and a headful of black hair and the longest, most delicate little fingers.” She wiped her eyes with a shredded tissue. “Betty let us spend all afternoon with Sarah. We fed her and changed her. We walked her in her stroller and people smiled at us and asked how old she was. One lady told me how good I looked—” Eileen choked, her face crumpled and she started crying with the wholehearted abandon of a small child.

  Brian put his arm around her and pulled her close. “At the end of the day Betty told us she had to take the baby back until all the paperwork was completed, but then she would be all ours.” He snorted. “That night when I got home, I checked my email. There was a message from Sheltering Arms saying that the mother had experienced unusual medical expenses and we’d have to pay another $50,000 if we wanted Sarah. When I replied that we just didn’t have that kind of money, they said they were going to have to place her with someone else.”

  “We believed them,” Eileen said. “I mean, things can go wrong. We knew we were taking a risk when we sent our money to Sheltering Arms–that there were no guarantees—but what other choice did we have? They told us that for another $10,000, we could try for another baby—one with no problems. We were actually considering it.”

  “You were considering it,” Brian corrected. “I thought they were tempting us with that baby. They tried to get us hooked, then upped the amount we had to pay to get her.”

  “You were right, Brian,” Eileen said as she gnawed on her thumbnail. “The birth mother never received any medical help at all. That poor girl died because she had the baby outside of a hospital—” She buried her head in her husband’s shoulder.

  Frank stood and began to pace around the living room. There was still no hard evidence that the baby the Finns had been shown was Mary Pat’s baby, but the timing sure seemed right. “So, who has that baby now?”

  Brian scowled. “Someone who didn’t flinch at coughing up a lot more money than we have, apparently.”

  “We ought to be able to trace Sheltering Arms through the money,” Frank said. “How did you pay them the first ten thousand?”

  “By wire transfer to a Bank in the Cayman Islands. All our dealings with them were electronic. We never met or spoke to anyone.”

  “Except this Betty,” Frank said. “Can you describe her?”

  Brian shrugged. “She was pretty average. Older than us—maybe mid-fifties. Brown hair, eyes, I don’t know, brown, maybe gray. Medium height, not heavy. Frankly, we were so excited about the baby, we hardly looked at Betty.”

  “What about the letter you wrote? How did you get that to Mary Pat?”

  “They said the letter should be hand-written—more personal—and that we should include a photo. We mailed it to a PO Box in New York City.”

  Frank rose with a sigh. Hard to believe people who seemed as reasonable as the Finns could be so gullible. “Well, get me that address, the email address, the wire transfer address. We’ll get to work tracking them down.”

  Brian sighed. “You can have them, but somehow I doubt it’ll do you any good. I think Sheltering Arms is gone. Our money is gone.”

  Eileen pulled her tear-streaked face away from her husband’s shoulder. “Who are these people? What are they going to do with Sarah?”

  “They’re going to use her to lure another couple.” Frank answered. “See how much money they can get from them.”

  “But this is so unfair to Sarah,” Eileen pleaded. “She’s just a baby. She needs a mom and dad.”

  Frank knew the Finns were suffering, but he couldn’t help feeling they were partly responsible for this mess. Now that the game they’d been playing had turned against them, they were worried about Sarah. But when they’d thought they would win, they hadn’t minded gambling on that baby.

  He looked at the couple: Eileen trembling, Brian morose. “I suppose she’ll get parents eventually,” he told them. “When her usefulness runs out.”

  Chapter 7

  “I don’t understand—why aren’t the Finns getting this baby? They really were good with her.”

  “I have someone else who’s willing to pay more. I gave the Finns an opportunity to match the offer. They couldn’t do it.”

  “I don’t like it. It’s not right.”

  “If you don’t like the way I do business maybe you should go to work for a real adoption agency. I wonder what that pays?”

  “Don’t threaten me. You need me.”

  “And you need me.”

  Frank had planned on driving down to the Finns’ and back the same day, but after he left their house, a terrible weariness came over him. He spent two hours in a dark little roadside tavern nursing a beer and thinking.

  How had Mary Pat connected with Sheltering Arms? The Sheehans didn’t have a computer. He supposed Mary Pat could have used one at the library in Lake Placid or at the county college. If she had, would he be able to trace it? Would they be able to track down the agency again on the Web? He didn’t relish the prospect of hours in front of a computer screen, using search engines to come up with seventy-nine thousand possible sites to check out. Earl could help with that
—his patience was limitless.

  He thought about Mary Pat’s baby, who had been a faceless infant but now was a little girl named Sarah. He found it perversely reassuring to know she was such a valuable commodity; her monetary worth meant whoever had her would want to keep her safe. But Sheltering Arms had allowed Mary Pat to deliver without medical attention, so presumably the baby hadn’t been examined by a doctor. Anything could go wrong—he remembered Caroline needing special treatments for jaundice in the days after she was born.

  Would these con artists even recognize a problem if Sarah wasn’t healthy? They might know their way around the Internet and offshore banking, but would they realize if she wasn’t eating right? And how long could Sarah be shunted around to different caregivers before that treatment took its toll?

  By the time he came out of the tavern, the sun had set, his head was pounding and the Motel 6 across the highway looked irresistibly inviting. Despite the lumpy mattress and musty-smelling sheets, he slept soundly. He leapt out of bed the next morning, shocked to see “7:30” blinking in red on the bedside clock. Heading north at top speed, he exited the Northway by nine-thirty.

  The patrol car crested the hill and the long sweep of Route 73 leading into Keene Valley, just west of Trout Run, unrolled before him. Pockets of mist still swirled in the low areas as the sun began its climb. The car picked up speed as it coasted down, and Frank’s mind glided along, unshackled as yet by the problems of the day. Luckily, his unconscious reflexes were still engaged. When a man shot out of the parking area near the Giant trailhead and stood in the middle of the road waving his arms, Frank slammed on the brakes and the patrol car skidded to a stop, close enough to spray the man with gravel.

  Frank jumped out of the car ready to yell.

  “Oh man! Thank God you came along!” He was a stocky man in his late thirties, and his words came in bursts between gulps of breath. “There’s a guy up there on the trail. Oh man, I think he’s dead.”