by Ben Miller
“She paid her rent this month,” was all he said.
When he got into the car, Stanton texted Kim that he was on his way home, but he didn’t provide any details until he arrived. They decided to call the police. Stanton spoke with a very polite officer, Nate Baughman, who explained to him that they couldn’t really file anything until Maddie was missing for twenty-four hours. They continued to call her cell and leave multiple messages through the next day. When the twenty-four hours had elapsed—counting from the time of the missed OB appointment—they called Officer Baughman back.
A search for the missing person Madison Novak began that afternoon, and she was found the next day, two counties away in the obstetrics ward of a community hospital. She’d had the baby and named him William.
Stanton and Kim drove to the hospital, but Maddie refused to see them. Stanton called her room from the information desk in the lobby. After saying only a few words, he hung up, expressionless.
He looked at Kim blankly. “She said she had changed her mind. She wants to keep the baby.”
Kim nearly collapsed, sobbing. Stanton had to direct her to an armchair several yards away. He put his arm around her, but he could find no words. He looked up at a couch facing them and saw another couple, almost the same age as they were. The wife had her head at her knees, quivering, her husband’s arm around her. Stanton and the man locked eyes.
“Maddie?” Stanton said quietly.
The man nodded. “Maddie.”
As soon as they got home, Stanton called Officer Baughman. Per the agreement signed through the adoption agency, she retained the right to have custody of her child. Given that they had paid the extra money to Maddie out of their own kindness, and not as part of the contractual agreement, they had no legal basis to pursue her. They later learned that, in addition to themselves and that couple in the hospital lobby, a third couple had been duped by Maddie Novak as well. She had taken over $30,000 from all three families and racked up an additional $90,000 in medical bills.
Just when the pain had begun to wear off, about two months ago, Stanton received a phone call from Officer Baughman. Baughman informed him he had made it a pet project to try to keep track of Maddie Novak, and she had done it again. This time she took about forty grand from three families in Arizona.
Stanton’s first question was, “What about William? Where’s the first baby?”
“I don’t know,” Baughman replied. “She no longer has custody. I’m looking into it. And, he wasn’t the first baby. I think she’s done this at least twice before.”
Stanton paused, letting this supposition sink in. “So this is her job? She’s like a baby factory?”
Baughman agreed. “Yep. And I think she lines up a fourth family. I think that’s who pays the final medical bill, from the delivery, and that’s where the baby eventually goes. I can’t confirm that, though. I’m still looking into it.”
“And that would break our adoption agreement, right? Deciding to keep it is allowed, but deciding to give the baby to someone else breaks the contract.”
“That’s correct.”
“So, if you can confirm this fourth family, and if you know where she is, you can bring her in, right?”
“Sorry, Stanton. She broke a contract with you, which is certainly cause for a civil lawsuit. But it’s not criminal activity.”
Stanton didn’t understand. “Huh?”
“You can file a civil suit against her, sue her for the money she took from you. Which I’m sure she no longer has, by the way. But you can’t press charges—she didn’t break any laws.”
“What about child trafficking?”
“As far as we can tell, she’s never crossed state lines with these kids. It’s disgusting, it’s immoral, but it’s not illegal.”
Disgusting didn’t quite cut it for Stanton. His viscera reverberated with rage. He had never been a vengeful person, but, in that moment over a year ago, he had vowed revenge against Madison Novak.
In time his fury abated as his focus shifted. Back to babies.
Babies, babies, babies.
And now this. This opportunity.
Without verbalizing it as such, he knew what this was. He tried to convince himself he didn’t care, not after all he and Kim had been through. He wanted the guilt to fade, to let elation take over. But he couldn’t yet slide his moral center enough to stop feeling ashamed of what he had done, and what he was about to do.
19
Heath Reilly looked down at the bundle of silverware in front of him on the worn wooden table: the plain fork, spoon, and knife wrapped inside a paper napkin, all held together by a thin rubber band. Again he sat in a bar, again waiting for Corinne. Her lack of punctuality didn’t really bother him, but he was getting a little sick of greasy bar food. He didn’t consider himself a health nut—far from it—but he did like to stay in shape and eat food with some sense of nutritional value most of the time. He had already scanned the one-page laminated menu for a piece of grilled fish and came up empty. He found a club sandwich that sounded reasonably healthy. Maybe he would ask for the mayonnaise on the side.
Corinne plopped down in the chair opposite him and a smile involuntarily came over his face. He had been studying the silverware and contemplating the menu so intently that he hadn’t seen her come into the bar.
“Hi, handsome!” she said brightly.
“Hello, beautiful,” he replied, still smiling. “Do I know you?”
“Oh, yeah, I don’t feel like playing that,” she said dismissively as she looked down at the menu. Within seconds she tapped her finger on the flimsy plastic and announced, “Buffalo wings. Perfect.” She set the menu aside as she looked back up at Reilly. “How’d it go today?”
Reilly filled her in on his day, which he spent visiting the crime scenes with Amanda Lundquist and one of the officers from the Family Justice Division. Despite being the junior member of their CASMIRC team, Amanda had proven herself valuable as a meticulous researcher. She uncovered and compiled finely detailed data with aplomb. She hadn’t yet spent much time on location, but Jack had requested to bring her along on this trip.
The similarity between the two locations struck Reilly immediately. While he wouldn’t say the abductions occurred in “broad daylight,” the scenes were not exactly secluded either. Conceivably, there could have been several witnesses to each crime. The perpetrator either had studied and planned extremely carefully, or he had gotten extraordinarily lucky. Reilly surmised both must have contributed. Or, perhaps, the local police and FBI just hadn’t dug deeply enough yet.
“How was your day?” he asked her.
Corinne briefly contemplated telling him about her conversation with Eleanor Branford, but decided against it. She hadn’t discussed the Allison Branford case with him much at all. It wasn’t an intentional avoidance, but rather a conscious omission. She didn’t think it would interest him.
“Well,” she said, looking down at her watch, “I got up here a little earlier than I had planned and worked on some research.”
“Oh. Are you already working on a piece about the Piper?”
“Not yet. I plan on diving into that tomorrow. Maybe.” She smiled again. “I have two surprises for you.”
“OK,” Reilly replied, not sure what to expect. She had never presented him with a surprise.
“You may not be so psyched about the first, but, I’m going to throw it out there. It’s yours to do with what you want.” She took a measured breath and looked into his eyes. “I found your mother’s gravesite.”
Reilly’s eyes broke their gaze, looking at the opposite corner of their table. “Huh,” he uttered.
“Is that weird?” she asked.
He looked at her briefly, then up to the air above her head. He didn’t know how to respond.
She interpreted his glance and answered her own question. “It’s weird. You think it’s weird.”
Reilly took a breath to respond, intending to say, “no.” But he paused and
the word didn’t come out. For her faults, Corinne had always been honest with him, sometimes brutally so. He wanted to maintain that with her in return. “A little. It’s a little weird.”
“I hope you don’t think I’m intruding. Like I said, you don’t have to do anything with it. I can just keep the information to myself—I can even just completely forget it—and we can move on.”
“Can we just, sort of, table the discussion for now? I know the offer is there, and I’ll get back to you?”
“Of course, perfect.”
“OK. What’s the second surprise?”
Corinne looked at him with a forced smile. She took a quick glimpse at her wristwatch again. “After that reaction I’m not so sure you’ll want the second surprise.”
“Uh-oh.” Reilly forced a welcoming smile. “Try me.”
Corinne took a deep breath and blew it out slowly threw tightened lips. “I tracked down that foster family. The couple that almost adopted you. Faye and Richard Dellahunt.”
“Really?” Later, looking back at this conversation in retrospect, Reilly wondered if he should be wary of Corinne delving into his private past. Instead, both in that moment and in a later conclusion, he felt honored she cared enough about him to put forth so much effort. He sensed a genuine investment in his best interest, Corinne’s most loving and affectionate act on his behalf so far.
“I did. It’s in the public record, but it took some digging. Unfortunately, they both passed away. Richard died in 2008 and Faye in 2010.”
Reilly’s brief excitement about the Dellahunts gave way to a wave of sadness. Despite not having any contact with them for over twenty years, he still experienced a sense of loss at their passing. “That’s too bad.”
Corinne nodded and met his eyes. She tried to gauge if he wanted to hear more of her discoveries. “They had a daughter. Adopted in 1990. I guess Richard recovered from the back injury that led to their giving you up.”
“Huh,” Reilly muttered. The complexity of emotions brought on by this conversation surprised him, as it should. He had come here expecting a greasy meal, followed later by possibly some amazing sex and probably some annoying heartburn. “That kind of feels weird. Like a rejection.”
“Well, I contacted their daughter. Her name is Dana. Dana Dellahunt. And she remembers you.”
Reilly cocked his head; the surprises just kept coming.
Corinne continued. “She said you were both in the same foster home for several months in the late 80s.”
Reilly’s eyes opened wider, signaling the proverbial light bulb going off. “Yeah, Dana. She was a few years younger than me. We were with this really nice lady—Gladys, I think—and then we were taken out of there. We went to separate homes. I don’t think I ever saw her again.”
“I think she went straight from there to the Dellahunts. They adopted her a couple years later.”
“Huh,” Reilly said again.
“She was really interested in meeting you, so I said I would check with you, but, if it was OK—and only if it was OK with you—she could meet us here.”
“Here? Like now? Tonight?”
Corinne looked at the time again. “In maybe ten minutes.”
The waitress came to the table and introduced herself. Reilly had been so engrossed in their conversation that he didn’t realize they had yet to place any orders. It provided a welcomed break from the discussion, offering Reilly a chance to reflect on all of this new information. Up to this point, he wanted nothing to do with his childhood. He recognized how it influenced the person he had become, but he had no interest in dissecting it further or reliving any events from it. Over the last dozen minutes, he suddenly developed a passion to know more.
“I think that’s kind of a cool idea. I’d like to meet her again.”
“Good,” Corinne said as she got out her phone and sent a text message to Dana Dellahunt.
Their food arrived about fifteen minutes later. Reilly was pleasantly surprised at the freshness of the cold cuts on his club sandwich, and Corinne dove into her plate of hot wings, not missing any opportunity to lick the unnaturally pink mixture of buffalo sauce and ranch dressing from her fingers. As Reilly finished the second triangle of his sandwich and Corinne her sixth or seventh wing, a woman approached their table, leaning over at the waist.
“Heath?” she asked.
Reilly looked up and instantly recognized Dana. Though obviously she had matured in the last quarter-century, her facial features had changed very little. She must be in her early thirties, but she appeared even younger, due in part to her athletic build. He stood up and extended his hand stiffly, trying—yet failing—to compensate for his awkwardness. Dana smiled as she straightened up before accepting his handshake. She stood nearly as tall as Reilly.
“This probably seems weird,” Dana said, looking at Corinne for some reassurance and some relative normalcy.
“No, no.” Reilly shook his head, pretending he hadn’t used that exact same word numerous times in the last several minutes. He released her hand and gestured to the chair between him and Corinne.
“It’s weird,” Dana affirmed as she sat down.
“It’s a little weird,” Corinne agreed, and the two of them shared a glance and smiled.
“Yeah, I mean, a little. I guess.” Reilly, struggling to find a toehold in this conversation, just tried to hop on the bandwagon.
“When I talked to Corinne today and she told me about you, and what you were doing here, and what you had made of yourself.” She put her palms out, fingers spread wide, as if just completing a satisfactory clay model. “I just knew I wanted to see you. To touch base, catch up. I never knew until today, when Corinne told me, that Mom and Dad almost adopted you.”
“Yes.” Reilly didn’t know what to say next. He suddenly wished he had not agreed to this meeting. “Sorry,” he thought to say, “about their passing.”
“Oh, thanks.” Dana waved a hand at him. “It’s been several years. They’re both in a better place now. Dad was mostly in a wheelchair for the last ten years of his life—his back was never the same after that injury. And once he died, Mom was never the same. Her spirit just let go. It just took her body a couple of years to catch up.”
“They were good people,” Reilly said.
“They really were, yes,” Dana agreed. “So what happened to you after we left Miss Candace?”
“Candace!” Reilly said. He looked at Corinne. “I said Gladys.”
Corinne shrugged. “Po-tay-to, po-tah-to.”
“I went to another home, spent, I don’t know, five months there, then another for less than a year. You know the drill.”
Dana sighed. “I do.”
“What ever happened at Candace’s? I thought that was a pretty good place—she was one of the nicest ones I ever had.”
“You don’t know?”
Reilly shook his head.
“It was her boyfriend.”
“Oh, yeah. He started living there right before we got moved. What was his name?”
“Lynn. Lynn Caldwell. He did stuff to me,” she said as she moved her palms in circles over her breasts and crotch.
“Oh, God. I had no idea!”
Dana nodded and Corinne dipped her head. “That creep got fifteen years. And Candace never fostered again, I don’t think.”
“Shit,” Reilly said under his breath.
“Let’s talk about something different, OK?” Corinne interjected. “Dana, why don’t you tell Heath what you’re doing now?”
Dana looked at Reilly proudly. “I run a non-profit adoption agency.”
“You run one?”
“Yep. I worked for one for about a half-dozen years and thought I could do a better job running my own.”
“Good for you.” Reilly felt a sense of pride for his virtual little sister. When placed in a foster home with other children, he often took on the responsibility of watching over the younger kids in the household. However, after he left, he almost never thought b
ack about those children again. He didn’t feel guilty about this—he had enough to worry about for himself—but he never really reflected on this prior to tonight. Seeing a child borne of the same environment as he succeed—especially in such an altruistic manner—offered some redemption for him. Perhaps, in some small way, his brotherly instincts during that time had contributed to this productive young woman’s development.
“Good for us!” Dana corrected. “Look at you! You’re this hotshot FBI agent working on this Piper case. Who’d have guessed we would end up where we are?” Dana leaned in on her elbows, placed her chin on the back of her interlaced fingers. “Tell me more about what you do, ‘cause it’s far more interesting than what I do.”
Reilly spent the next twenty-five minutes catching Dana up on his career. Most of that time he retold the case of The Playground Predator and how he had met Corinne. His soliloquy culminated with this current case and their trip to Boston. Contrary to his awkwardness earlier in the conversation, luckily Reilly had always been quite comfortable talking about himself.
20
Jeff Pine took a sip from his diet ginger ale and set it on the table. “So tell me about your day?”
“Tina Langenbahn was interesting,” Jack replied.
“Tina Langenbahn is a tight-lipped, defensive, cold-hearted pain in the ass,” Rita interjected. “Cole Nierling was interesting.”
The three of them sat around a circular cocktail table in the small bar off the lobby of Jack’s hotel. Camilla had politely declined the invitation to join them, choosing instead to spend some time on the elliptical in the hotel gym before turning in for the night. The waitress came over and set a pint of beer down in front of Jack and Rita. While Jack and Rita each had ordered a beer, Jeff had opted for the soft drink.
“When in Rome?” Rita asked after Jack had ordered a Boston-brewed Sam Adams Lager.
“Rome or anywhere. It’s my favorite beer.” He tilted his bottle toward hers. “Coors Light, huh? Beer of champions.”