“One time it was a little white clover flower.” Her eyes welled with tears. “Most times it was nothing at all.”
“Do you remember where they were postmarked?”
“The one with the little flower was from Nashville. I remember that one because I always wanted to go there, never did. Didn’t know anyone there, either.” She forced a half-smile. “I always used to say that in my next life, I was going to come back as a country-western singer. That I was going to sing at the Grand Ole Opry.”
“Do you remember where the others were from?”
“Not really. Just places.” She was crying now, tears spilling onto her face. “There was a postcard from Memphis once. It came on my birthday, about eight years ago. It had a picture of Graceland on the front. The girls used to tease me because I’d told them I was a big Elvis fan back when I was just a girl.”
“Did you recognize the handwriting?”
“No. It wasn’t Shannon ’s, if that’s what you mean. I would have recognized that. I would have known.”
“When did you receive the last envelope?”
“Oh, it’s been some time now.” She gazed upward as if searching for the answer. “Maybe four years or so.”
“And the phone calls? Do you remember the last time someone called and hung up?”
“Oh, it seems we always get those, but maybe just a few months back there was one like the others. Like someone was there and didn’t want to hang up but they wouldn’t speak.” She shook her head. “Wouldn’t that have been something, if that had been Shannon?”
“Mrs. Randall…the empty envelopes. Who did you think they were from?” Andrew couldn’t help but ask.
“I don’t know. I didn’t think much about them at all. I just figured someone had sent us something and it had fallen out because it wasn’t sealed in the back. The flaps were tucked inside the envelope, not sealed.”
“How often did these envelopes arrive?”
“Oh, every few years or so. Not frequent enough that it would make me think about it so much.” She took a tissue from her pocket and dabbed at her face. “Though that clover…that did make me wonder some. It never occurred to me that it could have been from her, that she could still be alive. But it should have made me think just a little.”
It was the second time she’d used that phrase.
“Think about what?”
“ Shannon always made those little clover chains, you know? She used to fashion them in a big circle and I’d have to wear it on my head.” Judith was openly weeping. “She used to say I was the clover queen, and she was my princess…”
Andrew took a step toward her, to comfort her, when Franklin appeared in the doorway.
“I told you to leave! Get the hell away from my wife. Get off my property!” He banged furiously at the closed screen door. “Judith, get in this house immediately! Do not speak to that man!”
“ Franklin, what on earth…” Judith turned to her husband.
“Thank you, Mrs. Randall, for sharing your recollections with me,” Andrew said quietly.
“You stay away from my wife, stay away from my family!” Franklin rolled his chair out onto the porch and wheeled past his stunned wife. “You hear me? Bastard!”
With Franklin Randall’s curses following him all the way to the end of the block, Andrew was more than happy to reach his car and escape the harsh aftermath of his interview with the man. He turned the key in the ignition and pulled away from the curb. He could have sworn he could still hear Franklin yelling.
He turned on the radio to drown out the voice ringing in his ears, but it didn’t help, so he snapped it off. Suddenly, he felt very tired, and wished he was home. Or if not home, then someplace, anyplace, where kids weren’t abused by people who were supposed to love and protect them, where kids didn’t cut themselves, didn’t prostitute themselves, didn’t give up bright futures in attempts to bury their horrible pasts.
He drove through quiet Hatton, his stomach rumbling. He called Dorsey to let her know he was on his way back and was grateful to learn she had in fact saved him some pizza. He parked his car in a space between her room and his and ignored the reporters who’d returned to the motel in hopes of getting some extra tidbit from him. He walked toward her room, prepared to knock, but when he raised his hand to the door, she opened it while keeping out of sight.
“Sorry,” she said as she closed the door behind him. “Nothing personal, but I figured the last thing you needed right now was speculation on who the redhead in the motel might be.”
He laughed ruefully and took off his jacket. “I have a feeling they might already know.”
“What do you mean?” Dorsey stood with her hands on her hips.
“I mean you’ve been outed.” He hung the jacket on the back of the room’s lone chair. “Please tell me you have beer.”
“In the bathtub.” She nodded in the direction of the bathroom. “What do you mean, ‘outed’?”
“One of the reporters asked how many agents had been assigned to the case and I told him one.” Andrew disappeared into the bathroom. “Oh, wow. You know, you just might be the perfect woman.”
He came back out with a dripping wet bottle of beer in his hands. “Ice in the bathtub. Brilliant.”
“Thanks. It’s going to make for a damn cold shower later, but hey, at least the beer isn’t warm.” She directed him to the desk. “The pizza might still be, though. I wrapped it in a blanket.”
“You really are brilliant, did I already say that?” He sat wearily at the desk and opened the lid of the pizza box. “I’m so hungry right now I could eat the box.”
“The pizza tastes better. Go on and eat.” Dorsey sat crossed-legged on the end of the bed. “Finish the part about me being outed.”
“I said, one agent had been assigned. Me. And Chief Bowden said, ‘Oh, but what about Agent Collins?’”
“And you said?”
“I said,” Andrew chewed and swallowed, “Agent Collins wasn’t officially assigned. Which would have been fine, except that after the mics were turned off, I heard the reporter asking Bowden about you.”
“What did you do?”
“What could I do? I went inside to interview Franklin and hoped that the reporter didn’t think anything more of it.”
“That will depend on how good the reporter is. How curious.”
“Right. But anything else I said at that point would have had him wondering what the big deal was, so I acted like it was nothing. Sometimes the more you say, the more they want to know.” Andrew licked tomato sauce off his thumb. “Did I ever tell you that my favorite pizza was sausage, sweet peppers, and mushrooms?”
“Just a good guess on my part. Now talk. What happened?”
Andrew filled her in on his remarks to the reporters and his conversation with Franklin.
“What was your gut feeling about him?” she asked. “Too much protest? Overly indignant?”
“Neither. To tell you the truth, I didn’t get that vibe from him.”
“The vibe that says, I’m lying through my teeth, or the vibe that says, you’re way off base.”
“The lying vibe. I think he was telling the truth. I don’t think he was the one Shannon was running from.”
“Who do you think it was, then?”
“I think it might have been his father.”
“Reverend Paul? Founder of the church? The man who, according to Paula Rose, brought truth, justice, and salvation to the good people of Hatton?”
Andrew shrugged. “You asked me what my gut was saying, and that’s it. Look, he was there at the church that day, we know that for a fact. Shannon was in his office.”
“Martha said he had an appointment.”
“Maybe Martha was lying.” He polished off the first slice and took a long pull from the bottle. “A little more pizza and I might turn back into a human being again.”
“Hmmm. Grampa Paul as abuser.” She rubbed her chin as if considering the possibility. “I like
it.”
“I’m thinking the other sisters knew about that.”
“Probably. If it was the old man, I’d be real surprised if he started with the third sister.”
Andrew took another bite and chewed thoughtfully. “It would be unusual, with those two older sisters around, for him not to have started with one or both of them.”
“It’s certainly something worth exploring.”
“You know, you’re awfully calm for someone whose cover has just been blown.”
“We knew it could happen.” She shrugged. “But you never know, the whole thing could have gone right over this guy’s head.”
“Your name is out there. All it takes is one reporter with a contact in the Bureau to find out who you are.”
“Well, let’s hope this guy was slow on the draw. I’m not really ready to back out of this yet. Too many questions remain unanswered. I’d like to be around to answer a few of them.”
“I’d like you to be, too.” He caught her eye and held her gaze. She looked like she was trying to think of a snappy comeback and couldn’t. He let her off the hook by adding, “It’s a complicated case. Of course you’d want to finish what you started. See how all the pieces fit together in the end.”
She nodded thoughtfully, eyes downcast. Then she looked up and grinned. “So how long exactly was it before Franklin kicked you out?”
“Maybe twenty minutes or so.” He laughed. “About average for the Randalls.”
He grew sober then, and related Judith’s recollections of hang-up phone calls that lasted a little too long, of envelopes that often contained nothing at all.
“I’d bet anything that was all Shannon,” Dorsey agreed. “But boy, the empty envelopes speak volumes, don’t you think? Wanting to connect, wanting to reach out, but not wanting them to really know…” She shivered. “That’s one of the saddest things I’ve ever heard in my life.”
“Everything about this case is sad.” Andrew went into the bathroom. “Can I get you another?”
“Sure. Thanks.”
He emerged with a bottle in each hand, and passed one over to her.
“Do you ever think about doing anything else?” Andrew asked as he sat back down at the desk.
“No. I don’t know what I’d be doing if I didn’t do this.”
“Doesn’t it ever get to you?”
She thought about her last case, about the two young men now sitting in a federal prison awaiting trial. Over a period of three months, they’d kidnapped, raped, and murdered seven girls in the Florida panhandle. Seven Dorsey knew of, anyway. Who knew how many others there might have been?
“Yeah.” She took a drink from the bottle. “Yeah, it gets to me.”
“You see these families, they appear so solid. And then you find out there was something underneath it all that just was not right, and you wonder what went wrong.”
His gaze went distant. To bring him back, she asked, “You’re talking about the Randalls or the Beales?”
“Neither. Both.” He focused on the pizza, as if debating whether or not to have another slice. “Maybe I was thinking about the Shields.”
“Your brother.”
“All of us. We came from this great, tight-knit family. We had two parents who loved us. Yeah, Dad was gone a lot, but Mom was no pushover, believe me. That woman ran a tight ship. She was strong, the real anchor of the family. I look back and remember how close we all were, how we were all such good friends. Me, Brendan, and Grady. And how protective we all were of Mia. She was the only girl in the entire family, you know? The baby sister. Even Connor and those guys doted on her.” He looked up at Dorsey with haunted eyes. “I just don’t understand what went wrong with Brendan. How he could have turned out so bad, when everything he came from was so good.”
He cleared his throat and added, “I read somewhere that 45,000 women and children are trafficked into the US every year. My brother was responsible for some of those kids. He arranged for them to be sent here so they could be sold like puppies in a pet store. He didn’t give a damn about them. About what was going to happen to them. I just want to understand how he ended up without a conscience. I just would have liked to have asked him why.”
“We’re used to finding answers, that’s what we do. There’s a case, we solve it. We try to find out who is responsible and we try to find justice for the victim, justice for their family.” She sat up a little straighter so that her eyes could look directly into his. “It’s hard for us to accept that sometimes things happen and there are no answers, no explanations. So we deal with it the best we can.”
The label on the beer bottle had gone soft in the icy water, and she began to pick at it.
“You get called out on a case and you never know what you’re going to find. Last year we arrested a guy who liked to collect thumbs. He had a whole shoe box full of them in his refrigerator. A few months back, we caught a case, two men, nineteen and twenty-one, stopped by a deputy sheriff for speeding. The cop thought they were acting strange, so he called for backup. Walked around the back of the car while he was waiting and noticed the blanket on the backseat seemed to be moving. The backup arrived, they looked under the blanket, and find a nine-year-old girl who’d been missing for five days. In the trunk was the body of another little girl. I probably don’t have to tell you the rest.”
“Jesus,” Andrew swore and put down the pizza, his appetite gone that fast.
“The first thing the mother of the twenty-one-year-old said when she found out what sonny-boy’d been up to? ‘He’s a good boy, my Jon. It was that Rodriguez boy that put him up to it.’ They’re all good boys, though, right?” Dorsey made a ball out of the paper shreds from the label and tossed it at the wastebasket five feet away. It missed the rim and she got up, retrieved it, and tried again. This time she hit her mark. “Shit happens every day. We just deal with it.”
“It’s still easier to deal with someone else’s shit than with your own.”
She started back toward the bed when Andrew reached out and grabbed her by the arm.
His eyes on her face, he removed the wide silver bracelet that was always wrapped around her right wrist and exposed the lines that were etched into her skin.
“What was it you were dealing with?” he asked. “What did you tell me a few days ago, that you cut so that you can control the pain? What hurt you so much that you had to do this to yourself? What was it you had to take control of it?”
“Not what you’re probably thinking.” She made no effort to pull away.
“So you’re telling me your father didn’t have anything to do with this?” He tugged lightly on her hand.
“I didn’t say he didn’t have anything to do with it. I meant he didn’t molest me, because that’s the obvious.”
“Then what did he do?”
“He abandoned me,” she said simply.
“He…” He let her hand drop.
“Abandoned me.” She nodded without emotion. “After my mother died he just”-she shrugged-“pretty much forgot about me.”
“How can you forget about your child?”
“He was in shock for a long time, I think.”
“What happened?”
“Short version? My mom was hit by a car as she crossed the street.” She spoke calmly, but melancholy settled into the lines around her eyes and her mouth. “One of the neighbors saw it happen, and he ran to our house to tell us. When we got to the scene of the accident, someone held onto me so that I couldn’t see, but I saw.” The control began to crack ever so slightly. “There was a mound in the street with a blanket over it, blood seeping out from under the blanket. I knew it was her. They put her on a gurney and carried it into the ambulance, and I couldn’t understand why they didn’t hurry more, why they weren’t rushing. Years later I realized it was because she was already dead.”
“How old were you?” He thought she might have told him once but he didn’t remember.
“Nine,” she said matter-of-factly. “I
was nine.”
“Where was your father?”
“He was with her. There on the street, then in the ambulance. He went with her. He stayed with her that night, or most of it, stayed with her body. At least I’m guessing that’s what he did.”
“He didn’t make arrangements for a neighbor to stay with you?”
“I kept waiting for him to tell me to come with him, that I could stay with her, too. Or to tell me to go home. But he never even turned around to look at me. He forgot I was there.”
“Did he know you were there? You said he left the house after the neighbor came to tell him about the accident.”
“It wouldn’t have mattered. He never gave me a second thought.”
“So what did you do? Did you go home alone? To a friend’s?”
“I went to the church, and I hid in the choir loft. I stayed there for the rest of the day, and through that night. It was so cold in there…” She bit her bottom lip, which had begun to tremble. Andrew wondered how long it had been since she’d last talked about it, if she ever had. “Anyway, I went home when the sun came up. He was home, but he never noticed I wasn’t there.”
“Didn’t any of your neighbors-?”
She waved him off. “Not their fault. No one knew where I was. I think everyone thought I was with someone else. But to me, it was as if I’d become invisible. No one could see me. It was like I wasn’t there at all.”
“Don’t you think your dad probably thought you were at a friend’s house?”
“No, Andrew. That’s the point. He never even thought about me at all.”
He started to say something and she stopped him. “He admitted it, years later. He admitted he never gave me a second thought that night. He was embarrassed by it, and humiliated and apologetic as hell. At least he didn’t lie.”
“Who took care of you?”
“My Aunt Betsy-my dad’s sister-came to stay with me, because he left.”
“Where did he go?”
“I had no idea at the time. He just said he had to leave, and he did.”
“How long did he stay away?”
“I don’t know. It seemd like six months, maybe. A long time. He took a leave from the Bureau, went…wherever it was he went-I still don’t know-and when he came home, he went right back to work.”
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