by Osborne, Jon
Dana’s heart sank in her chest, all the way down to her stomach. The loss of the boy’s mother was made all the worse by the fact that Bradley’s father had also died just a couple of months prior to the plane crash, turning the poor little thing into an orphan at the tender age of just four years old – not so much different from the way she’d become an orphan at just four years old when a deranged serial killer had entered their house in the dead of night and butchered both of her parents in cold blood way back in 1976. A deranged serial killer who’d gone by the name of Nathan Stiedowe and who’d just so happened to have been Dana’s very own half-brother…
Dana shuddered violently against the image of her brother that dance in front of her face, and then she shook her head to banish the unwelcome ghost from the passenger seat of her car. Nathan Stiedowe wasn’t welcome here today. He wouldn’t ruin this day like he’d ruined so many other days before. Not if she could help it. She wouldn’t let him. This day would be a happy one, no matter what.
Right?
Finally sliding the Protégé into an empty space in the parking lot of the Department of Children and Family Services in Parma fifteen minutes later, Dana glanced down at her watch. 11:42 a.m. Thank God for small favors. She’d made it on time – with eighteen minutes to spare, to boot. Things were going swimmingly already. They could only improve from here on out, right?
Right?
Only one way to find out.
Dana switched off the ignition and took another deep breath before letting out the air again in a slow rush over her bottom teeth, looking up into the rearview mirror and checking her make-up one last time before exiting the car. Happy day or sad one? Happy or sad? Which one would it be?
She filled her mind with as many happy thoughts as she could possibly think of as she hurried across the blacktopped parking lot and pulled open the glass doors on the front of the building a few moments later. Thoughts of picnics and long days at the beach and movie nights with freshly popped bowls of popcorn as she and Bradley sat on the couch and snuggled in their most comfy sets of pyjamas while watching the latest sequel to Ice Age or The Lion King or The Little Mermaid, giggling uproariously the entire time.
Stepping deeper into the marble-tiled lobby, Dana made her way up to the front desk and asked the receptionist sitting there where she might find Shelley Margolis. The receptionist smiled brightly and pointed her down a long hallway to the left.
Forty-five seconds later Dana was standing outside a heavy wooden door with an engraved plaque on it reading, Shelley Margolis, LCP. She lifted a hand and knocked lightly. This was it. Do or die time. No turning back now.
The door opened almost at once. On the other side of the door stood a woman even shorter than Dana’s own modest height of five-foot-three. The licensed clinical psychologist smiled warmly at her and beckoned her inside.
“Special Agent Whitestone,” the woman said. “Please come in. I’m Shelley Margolis.”
Dana shook hands with the psychologist, who asked, “Would you care for a drink, ma’am? How about some coffee? Or maybe a nice cup of tea or a cold bottle of water? I’ve think I’ve got some Perrier chilling in the fridge.”
Dana shook her head and hoped against hope that Margolis wouldn’t notice the sweatiness of her palms. The butterflies had really begun to swarm now and a cold blanket of perspiration had broken out across her entire body. And why not? This was real now. No more preparation, no more conjecture, no more imagining what it might be like. The moment Dana had been waiting for her entire life had finally arrived, and she was standing in the middle of it right now. “No, thank you, Dr. Margolis,” she said, praying that her voice didn’t sound half as shaky as she felt inside. “I’m fine, but thank you very much for asking.”
Margolis nodded and turned to her right, motioning to a pair of comfortable-looking leather chairs that were positioned over in the corner of the office with a fresh box of Kleenex sitting on a small table between. “Wonderful,” Margolis said. “Then shall we begin?”
Dana took her eighty-third millionth deep breath of the day and nodded. “Yes, ma’am,” she said. “That sounds great. Let’s begin.”
When they’d settled down into the chairs, the psychologist laughed good-naturedly and leaned forward to touch Dana’s knee. “I don’t know about you, Agent Whitestone, but for some reason or another I’ve been feeling nervous about this meeting all day.”
Dana’s answer tumbled out of her mouth before her frazzled brain had a chance to properly filter the words. “I know exactly how you feel, Dr Margolis, because I’ve been feeling nervous about this meeting my entire life.”
Margolis gave her a sympathetic look and flipped open a folder. Poising a pencil over a data sheet paper-clipped inside, she held Dana’s stare. “So, Agent Whitestone, when you were born?”
“September 20th, 1972.”
Margolis scribbled down her answer on the chart. “Where were you born?”
“Cleveland, Ohio.”
“What are your parents’ names?”
“James and Sara Whitestone.”
“Are they still alive?”
“No, ma’am. They’re both dead.”
Margolis pursed her lips. “I’m very sorry to hear that, Agent Whitestone. If you don’t mind me asking, what were the circumstances surrounding their deaths?”
Dana shifted in her seat. Much as she dreaded the proposition, though, she recounted to Margolis the tragic night of July 4th, 1976 in bloody detail – the awful night when Nathan Stiedowe had butchered both of her parents in cold blood directly in front of her horrified four-year-old eyes, causing Dana to pee her pajama as she’d stood in the doorway of the master bedroom just ten short feet away.
As she worked her way through the soul-crushing story, Dana tried her best to remain strong, but it wasn’t easy. She reminded herself again that she was doing this for Bradley. It helped. After all, there wasn’t anything she wouldn’t do for the little boy. She already loved him, had fallen madly in love with him the very first time she’d laid eyes on him on the plane all those months ago.
More than anything else in the world, Dana wanted to become his mother. Needed to become his mother, actually. For both their sakes. And if in order to do that she’d need to relive the most horrible night of her life all over again for a complete stranger, then so be it. Because if all went well for her and Bradley, two broken people might just get the chance to make each other whole again. And any way you sliced the bread, that wasn’t a bad payoff, now was it?
Nope, wasn’t a bad payoff, at all.
She didn’t leave anything out about the bloody July night back in 1976 that still haunted her dreams to this day, sharing things with the psychologist that she’d never before shared with another human being.
Every. Last. Graphic. Detail.
And why not? There wasn’t anything she wouldn’t do for the little boy, right? She’d die for him, if need be. And if that turned out to be the case, Dana couldn’t think of any other cause in the world she’d rather give her life for.
Then again, wasn’t that the way all mothers felt about their children?
CHAPTER 6
Getting raised up right is what Granny Bernice had done for Angel Monroe. Pulling up to the house they shared on the west side of Cleveland after work that day, Angel honked out a greeting when she saw her grandmother sitting on the front porch and fanning herself with the sports section of the Plain Dealer.
The first thing most people noticed about Angel’s grandmother was her size. Granny Bernice was a big woman, no debating that simple fact. Huge even. As a matter of fact, if you ever lost a sail on your boat out on Lake Erie during some freak thunderstorm, the flower-patterned housedress she was wearing right now most likely would have filled in quite nicely as a replacement.
“What you doin’ home already?” Granny Bernice asked her as Angel ascended the creaky wooden steps in front of their house. “Ain’t you supposed to be out there peepin’ on folks in their
underwear, or whatever the hell it is that you do with all your time these days? Don’t the freaks come out at night no more?”
Angel sighed and leaned down to plant a kiss on her grandmother’s feathery cheek. “It’s nice to see you too, Granny Bernice. So what the heck’s got you in such a great mood today?”
Angel’s grandmother shook her head in irritation, sending her impressive jowls quivering into motion. She leaned over to pour Angel a glass of lemonade from the ice cube-filled pitcher sitting at her side and pursed her plump lips. “C.C. Sabathia threw a two-hitter at us in the first game of the doubleheader against the Yankees,” she said. “Lowered his earned-run average to 3.18. Can you believe that? The Indians are seventeen and a half games out now, Angel, and Ivan Novoa is pitching the second half of the twin-bill, so it ain’t lookin’ too good for us.”
The second thing most people noticed about Angel’s grandmother was the veritable library of baseball knowledge housed inside her no-nonsense brain. Try to test Granny Bernice in this area and you’d get burned like a forgotten flapjack left too long on a hot griddle. More than one of Angel’s boyfriends had learned this lesson the hard way over the years.
“Who’s taking the bump for us?” Angel asked, referring to the pitcher’s rubber located in the center of the baseball diamond – a technical term of which she’d have absolutely zero knowledge were it not for Granny Bernice’s debatably patient tutelage in the subject.
Angel’s grandmother took a long sip of her lemonade and eyed her only grandchild suspiciously. “Josh Tomlin, not that you give a whit. Why you pretendin’ to be interested in baseball all of a sudden, anyway? What happened at work today that’s got your pants all on fire, girl?”
Angel shook her head. Unbelievable. This woman could smell a good story through a brick wall. Bloodhounds didn’t have a thing on her grandmother.
“How do you know anything happened at work today?” she asked, even though she already realized the utter pointlessness of the question.
Granny Bernice snickered. “Don’t you play games with me, little girl. I know you better than you know yourself, so quit stuttering already and just spit it out.”
Angel blew out a slow breath. But knowing that it was a fool’s errand to argue with an old black woman hot on the trail of some juicy gossip, she quickly shared with her grandmother all the details of having agreed to take on the case of tracking down Razor Diggs’s missing daughter.
“What you go and do a damn fool thing like that for?” Granny Bernice asked her once she’d finished.
An ice cube banged up against Angel’s front teeth. She almost choked on her lemonade. “Because you told me to,” she sputtered.
Angel’s grandmother leaned forward in her chair and calmly adjusted her voluminous housedress around her knees, brushing away an imaginary piece of lint from her tree-trunk right thigh as she did so. “I didn’t tell you nothin’ of the sort, little lady. Razor Diggs is a bad man, Angel. You should know better than to go messin’ around with the likes of him. I taught you way better than that.”
Angel shrank back in her seat, feeling four years old again. Granny Bernice had the uncanny ability to whisk her back and forth through the years with the simple tone of her voice, and she wasn’t in the least bit afraid to use that power. Her grandmother had taken Angel in as a baby shortly after she’d lost both her parents in a horrific car crash back in 1978 and – much like Jelani Diggs had been for Sasha – she was the only parent Angel had ever known.
She couldn’t have asked for anyone better on God’s green earth.
“I appreciate everything you’ve done for me, you know that,” Angel said softly, meaning it more than her grandmother would ever know.
Granny Bernice waved a hand lazily in front of her face, jiggling the thick layer of fat hanging off her left biceps like a rooster’s comb. “Hush, baby. You always been the light of my life. You know that, too.”
Angel smiled. “And you’ve always been the light of mine. Anyway, the bottom line is that I took the case. I start work on it tomorrow morning.”
Granny Bernice shooed away a fat black fly that was buzzing near her sweating glass of lemonade with an irritated sweep of her right hand. “You gotta do what you gotta do, I suppose,” she said. “But if you ain’t startin’ ‘til tomorrow, what you got goin’ on tonight then? You steppin’ out with that fool boy again?”
Angel’s heart twinged in her chest. Her grandmother was referring to her on-again, off-again boyfriend, Malachai Grimes, who she’d first started dating at the tender age of seventeen. Malachai was a graying thirty-eight now, a lawyer, for Christ’s sake, but no matter how old or how successful he got he’d always be “that fool boy” to her grandmother.
At the moment, however, she and Malachai were off again. And then some.
And for very good reason, too.
A week earlier, she’d caught him stepping out with Beatrice Patterson when he was supposed to be at home in bed nursing a bad case of the flu. That little stunt had earned him an indefinite suspension from Angel’s love life – a suspension she wasn’t sure would ever be lifted.
“No, I’m not going out with Malachai tonight,” Angel said quietly, the thought of not being with the cheating jerk hurting her far more than she cared to admit. “So that means I’m all yours for the night, Granny Bernice. What would you like to do with our time?”
Granny Bernice lifted her left eyebrow halfway up broad forehead and leaned over to turn up the radio just in time to hear the Indians’ play-by-play announcer rattle off the Tribe’s starting lineup for the second game of the doubleheader against the Yankees.
“You know what I want to do,” she said, straightening in her seat again and patting Angel’s left knee. “We gonna drink our lemonade and listen to the second game. We gonna listen to our boys finally beat them goddamn Yankees.”
Three hours later, the Bronx Bombers topped the Tribe five to four on the strength of Alex Rodriguez’s sacrifice fly in the top of the ninth inning, putting the Indians a full eighteen games out of first place two weeks before the All-Star break. When the contest had finally wrapped up and given way to the post-game show, Granny Bernice leaned forward in her chair again and flipped off the radio in disgust. “Goddamn it,” she muttered underneath her breath. “Ain’t that just par for the course with them bums?”
Angel put a comforting hand on her grandmother’s shoulder and gave it a small squeeze. “Don’t let it get you down, Granny Bernice,” she said. “At least we’re still ahead of Kansas City, right?”
Granny Bernice’s red-hot glare let her know that the foolish conversation was over even before it had a chance to begin. “Don’t you patronize me, little girl. You ain’t too big for a butt-whuppin’, you know. Don’t you ever forget that.”
Angel smiled as her grandmother rose to her feet and headed back into their house to go get ready for bed. Turning around in the front doorway once she’d made it that far, Granny Bernice asked, “You comin’ inside or what?”
Angel looked up into the night sky that was dotted with thousands of brilliant stars and shook her head. “No, Granny Bernice, not yet,” she said. “I think I’ll just stay out here a little while longer and enjoy the night.’
Granny Bernice nodded. “Suit yourself then. Goodnight, girl.”
“Goodnight, Granny Bernice.”
When the screen door creaked closed behind her grandmother, Angel stared up into the night sky for fifteen solid minutes, trying her best count all of the bright points of light scattered across the heavens. As a kid, she’d always imagined that God was playing with an enormous Lite-Brite set up there – and she’d always secretly hoped that He might invite her up sometime to join him. And counting stars still helped her relax before bed. Still, if she’d known then that this night would mark her last chance at getting a good night’s sleep for the next two weeks, she’d have followed Granny Bernice inside the house just as quickly as her frantically pumping legs would have carried her.
Then again, if she’d known last Wednesday’s lottery numbers, she’d have been a millionaire many times over by now, too, now wouldn’t she have been? And the last time she’d checked her decidedly anemic bank account, she’d still been as broke as a joke.
It wasn’t the kind of joke you laughed at, either. Not the haha kind. Nothing funny about it at all, actually. As a matter of fact – as Angel would soon find out the hard way – she wouldn’t be laughing at anything again for a very long time to come.
Because the cold-blooded murder of someone you loved had never been a particularly funny subject, now had it been?
CHAPTER 7
Josef Sullivan entered the Race Master’s elaborately decorated den and cast a wary eye at the huge dog standing at its master’s side.
The Race Master smiled. “Do not be afraid, Josef. Bane knows better than to attack without my permission.”
Sullivan nodded, also knowing better than to do anything without the Race Master’s permission. Twenty years with his employer had taught him very well. No move – not even something as simple as eating dinner – could be made until the Race Master himself first approved it.
Sullivan remained on his feet and waited until instructed before daring to sit down in one of the two wooden chairs that were positioned on the other side of the massive mahogany desk. Taking his own seat, the Race Master leaned back in his comfortable leather chair and waved a hand breezily in front of his handsome face. “Now then, Josef, what is it?”
Sullivan cleared his throat nervously. “We’ve acquired a target we think you may find to your liking, sir. Our operatives are in place now, just waiting for your final approval.”
The Race Master reached into his shirt pocket and extracted his smoking materials. Snipping off the tip from a huge Cuban cigar, he held it between his strong white teeth and brushed the orange flame of a gold Zippo across the fragrant tobacco before puffing hard against the expensive contraband and squinting his clear blue eyes against the thick cloud of smoke that curled up into his face. “Tell me about this woman, Josef.”