by David Grace
“I don’t know anything,” he wailed. “I didn’t tell anyone. I don’t know anything. I don’t know!”
“I almost believe you,” Neddick said.
“Please, please, don’t hurt my wife.”
“Sssssh,” Neddick ordered, holding a finger to his lips.
A few minutes later, naked, bruised and bleeding, Eleanor was dragged into the living room.
“Eleanor!” Robert shouted and tried to wriggle over to her but Neddick pulled him back.
“This is your last chance. Tell me who you told about the gun or my friend here will kill her.” Monroe held up a slender knife. “One.”
“I don’t know anything about any guns. I didn’t tell anyone.”
“Two.”
Monroe put the blade against Eleanor’s throat.
“All right!” Robert screamed. “All right! I told the cops about the gun. I gave them the van’s license number and the VIN.”
“Now we’re getting somewhere. What’s the cop’s name, the one you told?”
Randazzo’s head swivelled left and right “Lamp. . . son. Detective John Lampson!”
Neddick followed Randazzo’s gaze to the table lamp on the far side of the room.
“All right,” Neddick said, smiling under his mask. “I believe you.” Randazzo slumped against the couch. “You didn’t tell anything to anyone.” Neddick flipped his fingers at Monroe in a little salute and the big man ducked behind Eleanor and slashed her throat.
“No!” Robert screamed and tried to get his bound legs beneath him. “Eleanor! Elean–”
Neddick grabbed a cushion from the couch, pressed it up against Robert’s head and pulled the trigger on his .40 caliber.
“Start going through the house,” Kyle told him.
“This dump?” Monroe said. “It’s all junk.”
“Get started. We’ve got to make it look right.”
Neddick climbed the stairs and headed to the girl’s room. Sturdevant was on top, her balled-up pajama bottoms stuffed over her mouth to stop her screams.
“Finish up,” Neddick ordered, “and check the bedrooms for anything worth taking.”
“Give me five minutes,” Sturdevant grunted.
“You’ve got two. Take care of her when you’re done.”
Four minutes later Sturdevant came down the stairs with a wooden jewelry box under one arm. An almost invisible spray of blood streaked the front of his black t-shirt.
“Did you check her pulse?” Neddick asked.
“She’s dead.”
“Go back up and check her pulse.”
“Fucking waste of time,” Sturdevant grumbled, then put down the jewelry box and climbed back up the stairs.
Twenty minutes later they had loaded the jewelry box, a small coin collection, five hundred-fifty dollars in cash and a few other of the Randazzo’s meager possessions into the van and disappeared into the night.
“What a fucking waste of time,” Sturdevant complained as they headed up Farmington toward the 96.
“Hey, I was stuck here twiddling my thumbs,” Ralph Anderson complained. “At least you got a fuck out of it.”
“I can get a fuck anywhere. What I need is money and we damn sure didn’t get any of that tonight.”
“You’ve got no right to complain, Paulie,” Neddick snapped. “This mess is all your fault. Next time don’t leave your fucking gun in the van.”
An hour later they had divided the cash, burned their clothes, run the Randazzo’s last possessions of value through a wood chipper, and by dawn they were in their beds, fast asleep.
Chapter Fourteen
Virgil and Janet’s dinner started out hopefully then began a slow-motion slide into tedium and awkward silences – “How’s your salmon?” “Good. How’s your steak?”
Every half minute or so Virgil caught Janet darting glances around the room as if concerned that sprinkled amidst the other diners there might be spies observing their every move.
“Let’s go for a walk,” Virgil suggested when they returned to Janet’s car.
“What?”
“Maybe someplace along the river?”
“In the dark?”
“We’ll be safe. We have guns.”
Janet hesitated then shrugged and headed for Hart Plaza.
“You looked a little distracted back there,” Virgil said as they entered the park. “Were you afraid that someone was watching us?”
“Not specifically,” Janet said, not looking at him.
“Unspecifically?”
“Look, Virgil, you have to understand how shaky my position is here. First, I’d never even been to Detroit when I was hired, and on top of that I was a Fed. That’s two strikes against me right there. Then you consider that this department is three-quarters male and seventy percent black and you start to get an idea of how out of place I am here. Add to that the fact that I was made squad commander over the objections of my boss’ direct superior and you begin to realize how many people are looking for an excuse to take me down.”
“And the fact that you went over their heads to bring in a disgraced Fed to solve their case for them is pretty much the last nail in your coffin, I suppose.”
Janet stared at him for a heartbeat, then turned away.
“Pretty much,” she said, looking toward the river.
“Then why’d you do it?”
“Do what? Bring you into the case?” Virgil figured it was a rhetorical question and said nothing. “If I solve this case before the election no one will be able to mess with me.”
“Because the Mayor will owe you, assuming Grantham wins. If not . . . .”
“They’ll knock me back to lieutenant and have me doing sound bites for the six o’clock news, and telling school kids that the policeman is their friend.”
A moment later they reached the sidewalk that ran along the river. Virgil leaned against the railing and stared at the towers of Windsor, Canada glittering across the dark water.
“I don’t buy it,” Virgil said a moment later.
“Don’t buy what?”
“This double or nothing throw of the dice of yours. Let’s be honest, the Mad Dog case doesn’t belong in the Felony Fugitive Squad anyway. It should be with Major Crimes or the Special Investigations Squad. How’d you even end up with it?”
“I pulled a few strings.”
“Janet, please. You were safe and secure in the FF Squad and you broke your neck to get a case that has ‘Career Killer’ written all over it?”
“Career Killer or Career Maker. I saw an opportunity and I took it.”
“Then why bring me in? To share the glory or take the blame?”
“The Virgil I knew wasn’t so cynical,” Janet said, turning to glare at him.
“Well, that Virgil was a lot more trusting than I am. Betrayal will do that to a man.”
An icy bolt shot through her. Has he found out what I did?
“You mean Helen,” Janet said, straining to suppress the fear in her voice.
“Of course I mean Helen! She–” Virgil turned away and leaned over the railing. “What’s going on with you, Jan?” he asked a few seconds later with an edge in his voice. “No more bullshit, please.”
She studied the lights of the Caesar’s Casino tower for half a minute then let out the breath she’d been holding.
“You want the Janet Tanner story? All right, fine. It starts with a young woman who was in love with her partner who was married to a crazy bitch who didn’t want him–”
“Wait. In love with me? I thought–”
“Do you want to hear this or not?”
Virgil hesitated for half a second then nodded into the darkness.
“Sorry. Go on.”
“Anyway, this woman who was acting like a lovesick schoolgirl, thought that sooner or later her partner would get his head out of his ass and dump his crazy wife and finally see her the way she saw him, but he never did. Even after his bitch-wife ran off with their daughter and he was
free, he went out fucking air-head kids and never gave her a second look. So–”
“Janet I–”
“So, she finally realized that she’d been living a stupid, childish fantasy about a man who would never love her, and she realized that she had to get away from him because being around him was ripping her apart.” Janet glanced at Virgil but this time he kept his mouth shut. After a moment, she turned back toward the Windsor lights.
“She moved to Chicago and thought that she had put everything behind her. Things went well and the next spring she met a DEA agent named, well, his name doesn’t matter. By Christmas they were married. But they didn’t live happily ever after. It turned out that her husband had a relaxed interpretation of their wedding vows, and they were divorced before she had to worry about buying him a Christmas present the next year. Then she did what she had always done. She ran away. This time it was to Detroit to become the liaison between the Detroit PD and federal law enforcement.
“She worked hard and was blessed with a wonderful boss who appreciated her talent and did everything he could to advance her career. She was happy. Life was good, then one day her boss, her friend, and her protector, disappeared and in an instant her career was at risk. She had to make a decision – move on gracefully or stay and fight. This time she didn’t run. She fought, but by fighting she made powerful enemies, enemies who were just waiting for their chance to take her down. Then she saw an opportunity.”
“The Mad Dog case,” Virgil’s voice whispered out of the darkness.
“The Mad Dog case. The Mayor’s chief of staff attended a couple of my meetings with the City Attorney and I still had his card. I called him the next day and he arranged a secret meeting in the back seat of the Mayor’s limo when he was on his way to a speech at the Business Leaders for Michigan luncheon. I told him that I could close the Mad Dog case faster than any other squad in the department. I implied that there were some in the department who might not be as motivated as I was in solving it before the election. It was a lie, but being a conniving ego-maniac the Mayor believed that others were as corrupt as he was and I got the case.”
Janet was silent for a moment and Virgil picked up the narrative.
“But the case proved harder to crack than you thought,” he said.
“No forensics, none, zero. No surveillance tapes. No witnesses. Nothing from our CIs. None of the loot showing up. Nothing tying the victims together.”
“So, you figured you needed some help,” Virgil said.
“No,” Janet snapped, turning away from the dark water. “I saw the video and I knew that my old partner was in trouble. I knew that after the shit storm he’d created that the most he could hope for was a transfer to the Service’s office in Hagatna, Guam, and I knew I could save him.”
“And you knew that maybe I’d be able to help you close your case.”
“I’d have helped you no matter what. I figured I owed you.”
“Owed me? What for?”
For helping your wife steal your daughter, Janet thought.
“We were partners,” she said instead. “You always watch out for your partner. . . . Any more questions?”
“Nope.” Virgil took a deep breath. The air held a tang of diesel and corroded metal and rotting fish. “We probably should go back. Big day tomorrow. We’ve got killers to catch.”
Behind them the lights of Windsor twinkled and slowly began to wink out.
Chapter Fifteen
It was after ten when Virgil got back to his room but he still had work to do before he could sleep. It took a few moments for his laptop to connect to the hotel’s wi-fi and then he began again his seemingly endless search for his vanished child.
Before he left the Marshals’ office in disgrace he copied his partner’s log-on and the passwords for both the Marshals’ computer system and the third-party services like Spokeo, Checkmate and Intelius to which it subscribed. None of those companies, of course, were going to show any results under Helen’s or Nicole’s names, but they were helpful in checking the histories of any potential new identities that he came across. Any candidate whose resume stopped at or shortly before Helen’s disappearance would merit further scrutiny.
Once or twice Virgil thought he might have found them. The first time was when he managed to get a copy of the list of new subscribers for a quilting magazine that Helen had been addicted to before she vanished. He collected the names and addresses of every person, male and female, whose new subscription began between the day Helen disappeared and one year later. Next, he ran those names through the background search sites with the goal of finding two things: (1) a new subscription address that was different from the subject’s pre-disappearance address and (2) a pre-disappearance personal history that was essentially blank.
Two people survived the cut. One turned out to be a woman with a two-million-dollar life insurance policy who had supposedly burned to death in a car crash but was now a million dollars richer and living happily half a continent away from her bereaved, millionaire ex-husband. The second was another woman like Etta Latham, a battered wife who had left everything behind and gone into hiding a month before her criminally-abusive ex-husband was scheduled to be released from prison.
Virgil’s second close call came four years after Helen fled. He had previously checked all new school registrations for children whose birth certificates were outright fakes and had come up empty. Apparently, Helen had cloned the identity of a woman who also had a real daughter close to Nicole’s age. This necessitated a brute-force approach, and Virgil compiled a list of every nine-to-eleven year old female child who had been registered in a new school in Nevada, Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, California, Washington and Oregon in the Fall after Helen disappeared.
He culled all the non-Caucasian children but that still left thousands of possibilities. Next he deleted all the names where the father was listed as living at the same address as the mother and child. That reduced the list to hundreds of names. He checked each of those several hundred mother’s names through death records in each of the fifty states. He was left with seven who showed as deceased.
Three of them turned out to be typos either in the school’s records or in the entry in the corresponding bureau of vital statistics files. One was simply a living person who was wrongly classified as dead. Two more were living people who coincidentally had the exact same names and dates of birth as the dead ones. The last candidate turned out to be a lunatic who had kidnapped the little girl three years before and randomly hopped from state-to-state, school-to-school, whenever her fevered brain got the urge. Virgil notified the FBI who immediately dispatched agents who recovered the child and arrested the phony mother.
Had Helen not stopped in the Western United States? Had she gone on to Kansas, Alabama, Maine? It had been difficult enough running his school-registration search in only seven states. Reproducing it in forty-three more would be impossible.
Or had Helen manufactured a fake husband for the school’s records as well? For a fraction of a second Virgil thought about running the names of all the newly registered girls in the seven states through the birth/death indexes of all fifty states but abandoned the idea for two reasons: firstly, on his own that would take him years, and secondly, the number of positive results it would turn up would be beyond his ability to process. And even if he accomplished all that, when all was said and done, it still might not work.
If Helen had cloned the identity of a still living person such a search would turn up nothing. And if she had settled someplace outside of the seven target states the search would also fail. But he did not give up.
For the first six years after Nicole disappeared, whenever he could steal computer time he continued to troll the school registration lists, new bank account filings, and any other databases that he hoped might provide some trace of Helen and Nicole’s whereabouts, all in vain.
For the last three years Virgil had been thinking about social security numbers. As a child Nicole co
uld get by without one, but as she grew older, eventually she would have to apply. If Helen had cloned the identities of a living mother with a real daughter then at some point the real child and Nicole would both file applications with the social security administration, both using the same date and place of birth, which would immediately raise an alarm. Based on her success so far, Helen was too smart to let something like that happen, which meant that she must have picked a dead child’s name for Nicole to assume.
Since Helen also needed a social security number she was either using the real mother’s social security number or a real number stolen from someone else. Both were risky. If the real person was employed then Social Security would get employer and employee contributions from two different locations and that would trigger a flag.
On the other hand, if Helen was using the social of a random dead person the Social Security Administration fraud division might pick that up which would also trigger an alert, and even if it didn’t, any bank or employer that ran a check on the bogus number would quickly discover that it didn’t match Helen’s new identity. Still, Helen might have decided to take that chance.
Virgil contacted the fraud division of the Social Security Administration and spent several months running down any warning flags that might tie back to his vanished wife, but, again, without success. What did that mean?
It meant, he decided, that Helen was either using the social security number of a dead woman whom the Social Security Administration did not know was dead or she was using the number of a living woman who was not actively employed. It also meant that whoever that woman was she also had a daughter of about the right age who herself had probably died before applying for a social security number. Who would fit those criteria? Virgil asked himself. Women in long-term hospital or psychiatric care and women in prison, he answered.
He decided to start with women in prison. How many women of about the right age had been in long-term confinement nine years ago and who also had had a daughter who would have been nine, ten or eleven at the time that Nicole disappeared? There couldn’t be that many, Virgil figured. Back to the brute force approach.