by R. G. Belsky
“Do you know if he was at the biker rally fifteen years ago?”
“I have no idea.”
“Well, when do you remember seeing him?”
“Last week. He came in here and sat down at the bar and ordered a couple of beers. He said he was just passing through on some business. We talked about old times, people we knew, and then he left. Why? What’s Patty got to do with anything?”
Last week?
What the hell was Patrick Devlin doing in Mountainboro last week?
How did he fit into all this?
While Adcock was talking to me about Patrick Delvin, I heard something else that bothered me. Or rather, it’s what I didn’t hear. The sound of pool being played had stopped. I looked over at the table, and the two bikers weren’t there anymore. I turned around and saw them headed toward me. One of them was a big fat guy. The other one was short, but looked lean and tough.
“Hey, how about you and us have a little party?” the fat one said to me.
“Actually, I’m just about to leave,” I said, as if the request was the most normal thing anyone could say. “Maybe some other time.”
“Nah, you get rid of your little girlfriend here,” he said, gesturing over to Haussman. “Then you and me and Dave can have us some fun. Show you what a real man looks like instead of this sissy boy you’re with.”
I looked around the place. The guy at the end of the bar hadn’t moved; he was still staring at us. The pinball player kept at his game and paid no attention. Adcock was watching the whole thing from behind the bar with a bemused expression on his face.
Finally, Adcock said something.
“All right, Cliff, put it back in your pants. You and Dave, get the hell out of here. I don’t want that kind of crap in my bar. If there’s any trouble here, the cops will close me down. I can’t lose that money. It isn’t worth it for a piece of ass, not in my bar.”
The message seemed to be that he didn’t care what they did to us, but don’t do it in his place. That was okay with me at the moment. The two bikers gave me one last leer and then they walked out the front door.
I watched them go, then looked over at Haussman. He had a shell-shocked expression on his face. I don’t think he’d ever been in a situation like this before. I had, but that didn’t make it any easier or less scary. I leaned over to him and whispered, “Let’s give it a few minutes in hopes those two will be gone by the time we get outside. Then we run to the car, get in, and burn rubber all the way back to town.”
Haussman nodded eagerly. That was fine with him.
But when we finally ventured outside, both of them—Cliff and Dave, in all their manhood splendor—were standing next to our rental car. The tires of the car had been slashed, the windshield broken, and the hood was now open with parts of the engine scattered on the ground.
“Looks like you’ve had a bit of car trouble,” the fat one said. “You’re not going anywhere for a while, honey. I guess we’ll have time for that party, after all.”
They started moving toward us. I knew we were in big trouble. We were out in the middle of a remote area with these two Neanderthals. Haussman did his best to put up a fight, but he was no match for them. He tried to get to the car, but they knocked the video camera out of his hand to the ground, then pinned him against the car. One of them punched him and he fell to the ground.
I reached in my purse for my cell phone. If I could dial Robles’ number before they got to us, we might have a chance. At least they’d know the police were coming. I started to punch in the number. But then someone knocked the cell phone out of my hand and grabbed me from behind.
I turned around and found myself face-to-face with the dead-eyed guy from the bar. He was one of them. He’d followed me outside.
Suddenly, a gunshot went off and everyone froze.
At first, I thought one of them might be shooting at me. But they all seemed as stunned as I was. I figured then it was Adcock the bartender deciding to come to my rescue. But it turned out to be better than that. It was Oscar Robles.
He stood there with his gun out.
“Let her go,” he said. “Let them both go.”
Everyone backed off.
“All of you, on the ground with your hands behind your back,” he barked at the three bikers.
They quickly followed his orders. A few minutes later, police cars began showing up. Soon after that, the three of them were being handcuffed and taken away to jail.
“How’d you know to show up?” I asked Robles as they were being led away.
“I followed you from your motel.”
“I thought you said you had to go back to work.”
“Like I said, I decided you’d probably just get into some trouble.”
I was both mad and glad at the same time.
“That’s not very flattering,” I said. “I know how to take care of myself.”
“Yeah, it looked like you were doing just great until I showed up.”
“What do you want me to say?”
“You might say ‘thank you.’”
He was right, of course.
“Thank you,” I told him.
“You’re welcome.”
Before leaving, Robles asked me some more questions about the case—the story I was working on.
He seemed interested now. I’m not sure why. Maybe it was because of the altercation I had with the bikers at the bar trying to pursue it. Or maybe it was just a lawman’s curiosity. I got the feeling that Oscar Robles just might be a lot better law enforcement official than I thought at first. I was starting to like him. I tend to do that when people save me from a gang of motorcycle freaks.
Anyway, I told Robles everything I knew.
“None of it makes any sense,” I said. “But I think it would if I could figure out how to put all the individual pieces together. It’s like a giant puzzle. It completely baffles you for a long time until you find the right piece of the puzzle. Once that happens, the rest of it all falls into place. I’m still looking for that part of the puzzle that can help me figure out what happened to Lucy.”
“I guess you’re headed to Boston next.”
“How’d you know that?”
“That’s where the father, Patrick Devlin, lives now, right?”
“He’s a missing part of the puzzle,” I said.
CHAPTER 27
PATRICK DEVLIN MADE it clear right up front that he wanted no part of me or this story.
I’d tracked him down at a construction project he was supervising, an office complex in Plymouth—outside of Boston. I was by myself this time. I’d sent Haussman back to New York. He was pretty shaken up and a bit bruised physically from his confrontation with the bikers. Besides, I didn’t figure Patrick Devlin was going to be willing to go on the air with me. I just wanted to talk to him. Face-to-face. I’d known him a long time ago, and I needed to see firsthand what kind of a monster he had become. A monster who didn’t even care about his missing daughter anymore.
“What the hell are you doing here?” he snapped when I made a surprise appearance on the doorstep of his business.
“We need to talk about Lucy and some other stuff.”
“How’d you find me?”
“Your office told me where you were.”
“They’re not supposed to do that,” Devlin said. “Not to a goddamned TV reporter.”
“Well, I didn’t actually tell them I was a TV reporter.”
“What did you say?”
“That I was the secretary for the gravel company delivering a load to this project, and the driver had lost the directions and the cement would start settling if I couldn’t help him get to the site in a hurry.”
“You lied!”
“Technically, yes.”
“I told you on the phone I didn’t want to talk about Lucy.”
“Hence, my personal appearance here.”
“What’s so important that you need to know from me?”
“Let’s start wi
th why you don’t even want to talk about your own daughter anymore.”
Devlin looked pained by the question. His shoulders slumped and he looked down at the ground, like he wanted to avoid my gaze. He seemed a lot older and more vulnerable than I remembered. When I knew him fifteen years ago—at the time I’d covered Lucy’s disappearance—he was a kind of cocky, macho, muscular type of guy. Now he had gray hair, a lot of the muscle had turned to fat, and much of the bravado was gone, too. The years and the unanswered questions had taken their toll on him, too, just like his ex-wife.
“Let’s you and me take a walk,” Devlin said.
“Where?”
“Over there.”
He pointed to a temporary shed that had been built on the site. It was surrounded by construction equipment—bulldozers, steam shovels, cement mixers. I suddenly remembered that the bodies of the six children in New Hampshire had been found by a contracting crew. I wondered if there was any possibility they were connected to Patrick Devlin’s company. It was a long shot, but still worth checking when I got back to New York.
“Why do you want us to go inside there?” I asked.
“More privacy.”
“You’re not going to bury me in cement or anything, are you?”
“What?”
“Hey, I’ve watched the Sopranos, Goodfellas …”
“I think I owe you some answers,” he said.
We walked over to the shed and went inside. It was small and cramped, the air was stuffy, and you could hear the noise from construction equipment outside. Devlin seemed more comfortable though.
“When Lucy disappeared, I thought my life had ended, too,” he said. “I didn’t know how to deal with the grief and the pain and the guilt. Could I have done something to prevent this? Should I have protected her more? All of it was eating me up inside. For a while, Anne and I tried to make it work between us, but there was too much to deal with.
“She reacted to it by trying to keep everything the same as it had always been. She acted as if Lucy was going to walk in the door on her own one day like nothing had happened. She kept Lucy’s room just the way she’d left it, refused to get rid of any of her belongings, she even kept Lucy’s favorite foods stocked in the cupboard and refrigerator. Finally, when it became clear Lucy wasn’t coming home, she turned her life into a crusade to find her. Traveling the country, looking for tips or leads or clues. It became the only thing she cared about anymore. I thought it was sick, and I told her that. Eventually, we split up.
“Me, I took the opposite approach. The only way for me to get over my grief about Lucy was to put her behind me. I started my life all over again. I moved to Boston, I started a new company here. I rebuilt my business from the ground up and made it a successful one all over again. I remarried, I had a family, everything changed for me—after a while Lucy just became a bad memory. That’s why I can’t deal with this anymore. There’s too many memories. I need to move on and not dwell on the past. Maybe that makes me the bad guy in the eyes of you and a lot of other people. But that’s the only way I can survive. Otherwise, the grief would destroy me. Just look what it’s done to Anne.”
He was talking to me, but at the same time I think he was talking to himself. Trying to rationalize the things he had done and—even more importantly—the things he hadn’t done. I waited until he finished before I said anything.
“Did you used to be in a motorcycle gang?” I asked.
“Sure, a long time ago.”
“What gang?”
“The Warlock Warriors.”
“In New York?”
“That’s right.”
“Did you know Sandy Marston?”
“Yes, he was the head of the chapter.”
“How come he didn’t know you?”
“What do you mean?”
“I asked him once if he knew you. He said he didn’t. Why would he say that?”
“I don’t know. If he had something to do with Lucy’s disappearance—like they’re now saying—maybe he was trying to hide something. I wish I had the answers for a lot of things, but I don’t.”
“Did you guys keep in touch after you left the gang?”
“Me and Sandy Marston? No, we didn’t keep in touch.”
“How about you and Elliott Grayson? He’s the US Attorney for Manhattan now. He’s also running for the Senate.”
“I know who he is.”
“He was in a motorcycle gang, too.”
“I know.”
“Is that how you met him?”
“Sure, we hooked up a few times at some biker events. Both of us knew that life wasn’t for us and we wanted to get out, so maybe we kinda bonded a bit over that. We kept in touch from time to time over the years. I donated some money to his Senate campaign a few months ago because I wanted to help him win. Elliott’s a good man.”
“Did you know that he was the lead investigator on a federal task force that helped dig up the bodies of six children in Mountainboro, New Hampshire, a few years ago?”
“Okay.”
“That’s the same place where the e-mail to your wife said Lucy had been spotted on the back of a motorcycle a few days after she disappeared. The e-mail said the guy with her was named Elliott. Someone else identified him to me as Elliott Grayson.”
Devlin shrugged. “I don’t know what any of this has to do with me …”
“Have you ever been to Mountainboro?” I asked.
“Not that I remember.”
“Are you sure about that?”
“Maybe once or twice a long time ago.”
“You were there last week. The bartender of the Rusty Spike positively identified you from a picture I showed him.”
“He’s lying.”
“Now why would he lie about that?”
Devlin started to answer me, but then stopped. He seemed agitated. He stood up, clenched his fists, and began moving toward me. I thought for a second he might hit me. Instead, he walked over to a small filing cabinet behind me. He took out a sheet of paper and put it down in front of me.
“What’s this?”
“Read it.”
It was a copy of an e-mail. Just like the one Anne Devlin had gotten. Only this one was addressed to him. It talked about Mountainboro. The guy named Elliott on the motorcycle. How the writer talked to the little girl with him and thought it might be Lucy.
“I got this the same time Anne did, I guess. Anne, she made a big deal of it—bringing it to you and going on television and all. Me, I just tried to pretend I’d never seen it. But then one day, I decided to drive out there and just poke around. You’re right. I went to that town and that bar when I was in the Warlock Warriors. I stopped in for a beer, just for old times’ sakes. I’m still not sure why I went there at all. I guess I was just curious from the e-mail. I didn’t find out anything, but I tried.”
“I thought you said you’d put Lucy completely out of your mind.”
“It doesn’t always work that way.”
“That’s the only time you’ve been to Mountainboro since your Warlock Warrior days?”
“Right. Look, I’ve got to get back to work. Any other questions?”
There was one more thing I needed to talk to him about. It was the toughest thing. That’s why I’d left it until last. But it had been bothering me ever since my conversation with Anne Devlin.
“Anne said that Lucy had told her something right before she disappeared that made Anne suspect you of doing something horrible to your daughter. Anne said she never told that to anyone before, but it’s always bothered her. At first, I thought she was just confused or jumping to some kind of crazy conclusion because of all the stress she’s been under. But now I’m not so sure. Maybe Anne was right.”
“Right about what?”
“She suspects there was something going on between you and Lucy.”
“What are you saying?”
“Were you having sexual relations with your own daughter, Patrick?”
&nb
sp; I’m not sure what I expected him to say or do. But I wasn’t prepared for the way he reacted. He stood up again with his fists clenched and a look of rage on his face. He pounded on the table in front of him and then kicked a metal trash can against the wall so hard I thought the metal structure was shaking.
“She thinks that? She thinks I did that to Lucy? That bitch, that goddamn bitch!”
He strode over to the door, flung it open, and called out to someone. Two security guards appeared very quickly.
“Get her out of here and off my property,” he said, angrily pointing a finger at me.
The guards each took one of my arms and led me off the construction site and out onto the street.
“What happened back there?” one of them asked me.
“I’m a TV reporter; I was conducting an interview.”
“So why was Mr. Devlin so mad at you?”
“I guess he didn’t like my last question.”
CHAPTER 28
ANNOUNCER: It’s the Channel 10 News at six. With Brett Wolff and Dani Blaine on the anchor desk, Steve Stratton doing sports, and Wendy Jeffers with the Channel 10 Accu-weather for the tri-state area.
Channel 10 is the news station that’s ALWAYS on the move. When you want your news fast, you want it quick, you want it now … turn to Channel 10.
And now, here’s Brett and Dani …
BRETT: Good evening. Three people are dead tonight after a shooting in the Bronx.
DANI: A big oil spill on the Long Island Expressway has turned the rush hour into crawl hour.
BRETT: There’s a new poll out on the Democratic primary in the Senate race. Is the race getting tighter or is one of the candidates pulling ahead? We’ll tell you all the latest political developments.
DANI: But first … it’s not too early to start thinking about the best—and the safest—way to get a tan at the beach this year. Summer is just around the corner, and we’ve got some expert tips on how you can look good after a day in the sun—and still make sure you stay healthy.
My story didn’t even make the first twenty minutes of the newscast. I couldn’t justify putting it at the top of the show, even if I did think it was more important than traffic jams or holiday preparations. The problem was I didn’t really have a lot I could put on the air. What I had was a lot of tantalizing leads without any hard facts to back them up. Even in TV news, you have to have at least a few facts.