He stood over her, a gun in his hand.
“Has she been shot?” Riley asked.
“No,” Lorraine groaned. “I’m all right.”
“She hit her head,” Plummer said.
“She needs medical attention. Let’s get her out of here,” Riley said.
“No,” he said stubbornly.
“She can go,” Riley said. “I’ll stay, we’ll talk. Let’s not make this a bigger deal than it has to be.”
“The police are throwing ancient history at me, old allegations,” he protested.
“Whatever you might have done back then,” Riley agreed, “is ancient history. Statutes of limitations must have run out a long time ago. You were probably too young to be prosecuted, anyway.”
“They want to arrest me.”
“Things are different today, R.J. They could never take your baby away now like they did then. Everything that doctor did was absolutely illegal. You have standing in this community. You’ve never been in serious trouble since then. You’re a prominent businessman, a success. You lead an unblemished life. Everybody knows R.J. Plummer, your dealership, and your car commercials on TV.
“You were the victim. So young then. I can’t see how any judge or jury could blame you. It wouldn’t even get that far. They took your child, for God’s sake!”
“That’s right.” He took a step toward her. “I tried to save him. Just now I was trying to show Lorraine where he was, all these years, in a box,” he said bitterly, “in a cellar.”
“You don’t want to go down there,” Riley said quickly. “It’s nasty. There are spiders, snakes, and rats.”
“Hear that, Lorraine?” He turned and kicked at the fallen woman, who bleated in pain. “That’s where my son has been all these years, thanks to you!”
“Hold on, R.J.!” Riley shouted. “Don’t touch her again. That does you no good. You may never be charged with any old case, but hurt her and you’ll wind up doing twenty years for aggravated assault or attempted murder. Don’t let her do that to you. Let’s talk, but first, put the gun down.”
“No.”
“Why? You’re a big guy. You don’t need it.”
“I might, for myself.”
“You don’t want to do that. This is nothing to lose your life over. You’ve lost enough. You lost a child years ago, but you have other children who love you and grandkids that you want to see grow up.”
Plummer’s eyes roved the shadowy interior of the house and up the stairs. Sounds rustled all around them, and from below, a sort of faint whispering.
“Interesting place, isn’t it?” Riley said. “Pierce Nolan lived here. Have you seen it before?”
“Not the inside,” he said.
“I know you tried to save your son,” Riley said gently. “You did everything you could, but you were so young and people wouldn’t listen. Your parents, Lorraine’s parents. You even went to the police.”
Lorraine began to sob. Riley wished she would shut up.
“What happened, R.J.?”
“All I wanted was my son,” he acknowledged. “They were both evil.”
“Who?”
“That doctor and Pierce Nolan.”
“I never figured out their connection myself,” Riley said. “How the infants reached here.”
“I saw it.” His voice echoed eerily through the empty rooms. “I didn’t know what it was at the time, but now I do.”
“What did you see?”
Lorraine began to crawl toward the door, her bathrobe dragging through the dust and dried leaves on the floor.
R.J. stepped on it. “Don’t move!”
She moaned and sniffled.
“You should have seen her when she was a teenager,” R.J. said. “She was beautiful.”
“Right,” Riley said. “What did you see? The connection between Pierce Nolan and the adoption doctor?”
“They wouldn’t let me talk to Lorraine. They were giving away my son. I was desperate, going to pieces. After the doctor called the police on me, I watched the clinic, hoping to see Lorraine. I kept driving by to see if she was there and to stop anybody who tried to take my son.
“I saw Pierce Nolan come out. I thought I recognized him. His picture was always in the newspapers. Everybody knew him. My father had worked in the campaign to elect him mayor. I’d seen his daughters at the skating rink and the Venetian Pool.
“The doctor was with him, she looked upset. They put something, a box, in the trunk of his big Buick.
“He left and I followed. I only wanted to talk to him. I was desperate. He stopped at a White Castle, the one that used to be up on the Boulevard, and I followed him inside. He was using the pay phone. When he got off, I asked to talk to him. Said it was important personal business.
“He said, ‘Sure, son,’ and bought me a cup of coffee. Seemed to be a nice guy, at first.
“I said I needed his help, I needed him to talk to Dr. Wentworth, to persuade her not to put my son up for adoption. The man had clout. He could have done it.
“But the son of a bitch wouldn’t listen. He said I was too young to be a husband and father. Started to give me a lecture, said I had to finish school and my obligation to the military first. Said I couldn’t support a family, that I’d have other children someday. He wouldn’t listen, either. Said he had to go. I followed him out into the parking lot. In essence, he wanted to pat me on the head and tell me to go home and be a good boy. I resented being patronized. He kept saying I was too young. We argued. I’m a man, I told him. I ain’t no kid. I’m a man. I’m a father. I got her pregnant, didn’t I?
“The bastard laughed and said that proved I still had a lot of growing up to do. He laughed!
“He talked down to me, then drove off in his big car! I went home. I couldn’t eat. I couldn’t sleep. I hated them both. A friend called to tell me Lorraine was back home, had been for a few days. When I tried to call her, her father hung up on me.
“I stayed up all night. I couldn’t take it anymore. The next day I decided to go to the clinic and take my kid out of there. I didn’t care if they put me in jail. I didn’t care if Wentworth called the police.
“Funny thing was, she didn’t. Not even after I pushed the door open and shoved her out of my way. I couldn’t find the baby. There was nothing but empty cribs. The girl who usually worked there was gone. The doctor was all alone. I wanted to know where my kid was. She said it was too late, he’d been adopted. I wanted the name and address of the family who took him. I went to her office to find the records. She followed me, said there weren’t any, and tried to push me out the door.
“She slapped me and I hit her. Once it started, nothing could stop it. I tried to clean up a little afterwards, looked for her records, then left. I called Lorraine that night to tell her the baby was gone. Her fucking father wouldn’t let me talk to her. I had nothing left to lose. I’d already lost it all.
“I kept remembering the way Nolan laughed at me, kept hearing it in my head. A detective came to ask where I was when the doctor was killed. My mother lied for me, but I knew the cops would be back. I had nothing left to lose, so I went after him, too, to make him pay. I brought my father’s old shotgun to the Shadows the next night. His car wasn’t here, so I waited for Pierce Nolan. It was like a dream. It almost didn’t happen. I waited so long I couldn’t stand it and decided to kill myself instead, but at the last minute, I heard it, I heard his car.”
“You see anybody else here that night?” Riley asked.
“How did you know?” His head jerked up and he stared at her oddly from across the dimly lit room. “There was something, somebody else, out there. Scared the hell out of me.”
“You scared him, too. It was another kid, a Peeping Tom, watching Summer, one of Nolan’s daughters.”
There was no hint of humor in his staccato laugh. “Sex,” he said, “it makes the world go round.”
“You and I wouldn’t be standing here without it,” Riley said.
�
�Damn straight. What did you say your name was again?”
“Kathleen.”
“You really don’t think I’ll go to prison if I get it all off my chest, Kathleen?”
“I think everything will be taken into consideration—your age, the times back then, the circumstances, the loss of your son.”
He sighed. “All right,” he said. “But first I have to show Lorraine where our baby spent all these years.” He looked behind him. “The newspapers said that the basement door was beneath the stairwell.”
Lorraine gasped as he wrenched her to her feet by her hair. The pine floor groaned and creaked in protest.
Riley winced. “R.J., I really wish you’d stop doing that. It’s no way to treat the mother of your children. And you sure don’t want to go down there in the dark. There are no lights. You can’t see a damn thing.”
“We just want to see where it was, then I promise we’ll come right back up.”
“Then you’ll come to the station and make a complete statement? Get it all off your chest? I bet we can even persuade Lorraine not to prosecute you for anything that happened today.”
“I won’t, I promise,” she babbled. “I promise, I promise.”
“Deal,” R.J. said. “Let’s go.”
SWAT had assembled outside. Officers in flak jackets, with long guns, were positioned in the dense foliage and undergrowth around the Shadows.
“Riley,” Burch called, from just outside the door. “Everything okay in there?”
“Yes,” she answered, “keep everybody back. We’ll be out shortly. We’re just going downstairs for a minute first.”
“Downstairs?”
Burch and Nazario exchanged alarmed glances.
“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” Burch said.
“Stay put,” Riley said firmly. “For just a few more minutes.”
“Ask them for a flashlight,” R.J. said.
Riley sighed. “Guys, get us a flashlight from one of the cars.”
Reluctantly, Burch brought it up on the porch and pushed it inside the door.
“FYI,” he said, “Billy Clayton strenuously objects and says you have five minutes to come out.”
“Billy Clayton is an asshole,” Riley said.
“Who the hell is he?” R.J. said.
“Our SWAT captain,” she said. “An impatient man. You don’t want to meet him. He doesn’t like waiting.”
“I know the feeling,” R.J. said.
She rolled the flashlight to his side of the room and he picked it up.
“Come on, Lorraine.” He pushed her ahead of him, holding her by the wrist as he pulled back the dusty carpet and groped for the rusted iron ring on the trapdoor.
He jerked it open. The old hinges screeched in protest and Lorraine joined in. “I don’t want to. I don’t want to go down there,” she whimpered. He nearly kicked her down the stairs, shining the light after her.
“You next,” he told Riley.
“No thanks, I’ll follow you.”
He shrugged and descended.
She secured her gun in the holster at the small of her back, took a deep breath, and followed.
No one in their right mind would do this, she told herself. But she hadn’t been afraid of anything, including death, for a long time. The sighs and whispers grew louder as she descended.
“Where was it?” R.J. played the light beam off the limestone walls, the sloping floor, and the hatchlike door to the tunnel.
“The newspaper stories said it was on the west wall, but I’ve lost my bearings down here. Which way is west?”
“Forgot your compass, huh? It’s over there, R.J. That shelf on the far wall behind you.”
“Come on, Lorraine.” He held her by the scruff of the neck.
“No! No!” She shrieked, and suddenly struggled wildly, catching him off guard.
Her flailing knocked the flashlight from his hand. He grabbed her robe as the light clattered to the floor and went out.
“Hold it!” Riley shouted into the utter darkness.
She heard Lorraine’s bare feet slapping the stone stairs.
Plummer scrambled for the flashlight and accidentally kicked it. Riley heard it hit the wall.
“Lorraine!”
“Let her go,” Riley said.
“No!”
She heard him cock the gun as he tried to sense Lorraine’s movements. Riley lunged toward him in the dark as the gun spit fire with a deafening roar. Ears ringing, inhaling the gunpowder, she heard the bullet ping off the walls as the trapdoor above them slammed shut.
R.J. turned and ran. Riley hoped he’d forgotten the tunnel but then heard him fumble with the hatch in the dark. She tried to go after him but stumbled over something and hit the floor. It was Lorraine’s bathrobe.
“Oh, crap,” she said, glancing up toward the trapdoor.
She groped frantically for the flashlight and found it, but the batteries had spilled out. No time to try to find them.
She smelled the dank air and decaying greenery of the tunnel, found the door in the dark, closed and secured it.
Then she went upstairs and burst out onto the porch.
“Are Stone and Corso in position?”
“That’s affirmative,” Burch said.
“Good. Plummer’s in the tunnel, he’s armed. He’s all yours,” she told Captain Clayton.
At the bay end of the tunnel, R.J. heard Stone and Corso shout for him to go back the way he came and surrender. There was no way he could slip through the overgrown mangroves and downed trees that blocked his exit to the water, and if he did, they were waiting, guns drawn.
At the other end of the tunnel, SWAT waited with tear-gas grenades.
Two were enough to flush him out, coughing, choking, and weeping.
“I couldn’t believe it when that naked woman came flying out the front door,” Burch said. “Should a seen the look on Pete’s face.”
“Where is she?” Riley said.
“Gave her the blanket from the trunk a the car. Rescue is checking ’er out. She’s got a few bumps and bruises, a nasty cut on her head, but she’ll be okay.”
“Plummer spilled the whole thing,” Riley said. “Go take him away from SWAT, wash out his eyes, and make nice. Count his goddamned strawberries if you have to. He said he’d give us a full statement.”
“How’d you pull that off?”
“I lied.”
CHAPTER 33
As R.J. Plummer was led out of court in handcuffs after being denied bond, a reporter asked him if he planned a funeral for the infant son he’d sought for so long.
“No,” he said. “Why should I?”
DNA confirmed Plummer was the father. The other six infants, two boys and four girls, remained unidentified.
Moved by the news stories, Miamians adopted the unclaimed infants, collecting funds to pay for decent burials. Donations poured in to save them from a mass, unmarked grave dug by jail prisoners in potter’s field. Instead there were seven small satin-lined white caskets, an overflow crowd at the church, and seven small white crosses beneath a live oak tree in a local cemetery.
“Did you see all the flowers and teddy bears?” Burch said as they met in Riley’s office after the funeral. “Have to tell you, I shed a tear or two myself. The public really came through.”
“They always do,” Nazario said. “Miami is good that way.”
“It was nice,” Riley said, “really moving, that after all these years total strangers came to pay their respects. There wasn’t a dry eye in the place.”
The chief medical examiner had left a message confirming that the infants’ deaths were due to carbon monoxide poisoning. The death toll during that gas company conversion that summer of 1961 was not three—but ten.
“What’s the matter, Pete?” Riley frowned at his expression. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing, Lieutenant,” he said.
As the others left her office, he stepped back inside.
“Lieut
enant, are you aware…I hate to say anything. But look behind you….”
She turned and stared. “Oh my God! I’ve been watering it.”
The crime scene unit conducted a station-wide search. They found one each in the shift commander’s office, the records bureau, in the lobby, in the PIO office, and on the chief’s desk—a total of six.
“Six. Dios mío,” Nazario confided to Burch. “Remember that pervert Stokoe, the Peeping Tom? I went out there with Corso to pick him up. We confiscated his little garden. There were six….”
Riley summoned them all to her office later.
“Every time I’ve ever asked you to tell me the truth, you always did. That’s why this job is aging me fast.” She looked furious. “Who,” she demanded, “planted marijuana in my office and all over the station?”
No one replied.
“Did you, Sergeant?”
“No.”
“Did you have any knowledge of it?”
“Not until Nazario spotted it in your planter today.”
“Everybody kept saying they wanted more green things in the station,” Corso protested.
“What if a reporter had seen it?” Riley demanded. “There was one in the PIO office, for God’s sake! This department gets enough bad press as it is. I don’t want to believe that anyone on my squad is stupid enough to play such a juvenile prank. That’s not something I want to hear.”
“Then don’t ask me,” Corso said.
Fleur was waiting for Nazario at Casa de Luna. “I’ve got something to tell you.”
He held his breath.
“It’s good-bye.”
“You’ve got a place?”
“Yes.” Her eyes danced and she was smiling. “I’m going back to Seattle. My mom called. She needs me. She was crying. Ricardo left her—for another client, a younger woman with more money. She sent me a ticket, one-way.”
She literally danced with excitement. “I’ll miss you, Pete. But I can’t wait to see her!”
“Great news, mi amor.” Nazario opened his arms. “Buena suerte”—good luck—“and stay in touch. You know how I worry about you.”
“I know.” She hugged him tight.
Shadows Page 25