by David Hosp
‘No,’ Finn said. ‘It’s a long story. Is there someone we can talk to?’
The woman frowned. ‘Adoption Services is down the hall to the left.’ She nodded to a hallway that ran off the reception area. ‘They can help you down there.’
‘Thanks,’ Finn said. He and Sally headed down the hallway.
‘You were going to let her think I was pregnant,’ Sally said. She sounded angry.
‘I figured it was too much of a hassle to explain it to her,’ Finn said. ‘Is it a big deal?’
‘Yeah,’ Sally said. ‘It is.’
‘Why?’
‘I don’t want anyone thinking I’m pregnant.’
Finn looked at her. ‘So you wouldn’t mind doing something illegal – acting as a lookout, or breaking into someplace – but it’s over the line to give someone the misimpression that you’re pregnant?’
‘That’s right,’ she said.
‘I don’t get it.’
‘Growing up in the projects, it’s what you hear all the time. You’re gonna end up pregnant before you can drive. Either that or crack-whoring for some asshole and a fix. It always pissed me off. That’s not who I am; that’s not who I’m ever gonna be. If I’m gonna fuck up my life, I’m gonna do it my own way. You understand?’
‘Yeah,’ Finn said. ‘I do.’ They had arrived at a glass door with the words ‘Adoption Services’ stenciled on it. ‘I’ll be more careful in the future.’
‘Good.’
Coale put the time to good use. Sitting in the Mercedes in the parking lot of the great Gothic building where Scott Finn had been born, he tapped away at his laptop computer, researching all of the personnel in the Adoption Services Center. Once he had the names from the Center’s website, he began a detailed search using the most powerful information retrieval tools available. It took less than an hour for him to have everything he needed.
He derived no pleasure from this part of his job. Still, it was necessary, and he’d given up squeamishness long ago. Too long ago. He would do what needed to be done one last time.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Long was unsteady when he left the lawyer’s office. It had been months since he’d felt really drunk. A hovering level of inebriation had become his status quo, but he’d always felt in control. The booze usually provided some equilibrium. Now he felt lost, and his tongue felt two sizes too big for his mouth.
His plan had been to go back to the station house to continue his investigation, but he understood that was not an option. He knew that if he returned to the station in his current condition his career would be over. Driving back from Charlestown, he looked at his watch; it was after four. It was early to call it a day, but he didn’t have much of a choice.
Suddenly, tires screeched and horns blared. He raised his eyes back to the road to see that he had strayed over the double-yellow line, and cars were swerving to avoid a head-on collision.
Long jerked the wheel to the right, and his car hopped back into his lane. He almost overshot the mark and narrowly missed colliding with another car in the second lane headed south on Massachusetts Avenue. Horns sounded again, and through his window he could hear the obscenities yelled in a thick, heavy stream. He needed to get home, and he would have to pay attention to get there. He headed toward the Southeast Expressway, where the traffic at least traveled in only one direction.
Long lived in a condominium complex in Quincy, just south of Boston. The place was called Louisburg Square South, a rip-off of the most swank and expensive block on Beacon Hill in Boston, where the élite had their townhouse mansions. Quincy’s version was more modest. Several developments in brickface lined the main thoroughfare that ran from the edge of Dorchester out toward Wolliston Beach. Long had a one-bedroom rental with a view of the parking lot. It was fine. The place was clean and reasonably well maintained; the kitchen had been redone sometime in the 1980s. More importantly, it was affordable, and it was right off the highway, which made it an easy ten-minute trip to the station house.
By the time he got to the apartment his legs were buckling, and he knew he’d been lucky to get off the road alive. It took him three tries to thread the key into the lock, and when he tried to push the door closed behind him he didn’t make enough of an effort for it to catch. Instead it remained resting on the latch, neither opened nor closed.
Fuck it, he thought, looking at the door. He was drunk, he was a cop, and he had a gun. He’d pity any burglar with the misfortune to choose his apartment to rob at this particular moment.
He wanted a drink.
No, he needed a drink.
Needed not in the sense that he felt a desire to be more inebriated; he wasn’t sure that was possible. The need now came from someplace that was divorced from the actual physiological impact of the alcohol. It was more of an obsession. It was a compulsion, and for the first time he understood how it was possible for the bums down in the shelters to drink themselves to death – to continue pouring grain alcohol into their bodies until the cellular structures were too overwhelmed to continue the fight for survival, or to pick up a bottle of antifreeze, close their eyes and pretend it wasn’t pure poison.
He stumbled to the kitchen and opened the cabinet above the utensils, where he kept the bottles. Grabbing a fifth of Stoli, he pulled out a glass and started to pour. The upended bottle yielded nothing, though; it was empty.
He slid the bottle into the sink and pulled out another, not even checking to see what it was. Unscrewing the top, he lifted it to his lips and tipped his head back.
Nothing.
He threw the bottle at the sink, and it connected with the empty Stoli bottle, both of them shattering. He ripped open the cabinet again, this time hard enough to hear the wood crack. There were several bottles still there, and he went through them one by one. As each one proved useless, he threw it into the sink until the shards of glass started to spill over onto the counter.
Finally, the second to last bottle answered his angry prayers. It was a flask bottle of Jägermeister someone had given him a long time ago as a gag gift. He hated the stuff; it tasted like cough medicine to him, and he’d often bitched about the under-aged girls and metro-sexual assholes at bars who drank the crap.
Now, though, looking at the bottle, he had trouble imagining anything else that might taste as good.
He twisted off the cap, closed his eyes, and drank a quarter of the bottle – four full swallows – without pausing. He lowered the bottle, sighing heavily as he opened his eyes.
Suddenly he realized he wasn’t alone. Someone was standing by the door, inside the apartment, looking at him. His vision was blurred, both from the alcohol and from how tightly he’d shut his eyes. Panic shot through him, and he started reaching for his gun. His hand was tugging on the butt before his vision cleared enough to recognize Julie Racine standing there, looking at him with an expression that fell somewhere between horror and disgust.
‘Shit, you scared me!’ he barked. ‘How long have you been standing there?’
‘I was waiting for you in the parking lot,’ she said. ‘I tried calling you a few times at the station house earlier; tried email, tried your cell phone. I was just waiting, and I saw you pull in.’
Long looked over at the sink. Broken glass was everywhere. ‘How long?’ he asked again.
‘Long enough,’ she replied.
He noticed she was holding a bottle of wine and a folder. ‘You brought wine.’
‘I didn’t know,’ she said. He half expected her to run. She didn’t, though; she stood her ground. He had to give her credit for that.
‘What were you going to do?’ he asked, his tone angry and defensive. ‘Get me drunk and take advantage of me?’ He was leaning against the kitchen counter, and he stood up to take a few steps toward her, veered off into the living room. ‘I’ve already taken care of the first part.’
‘I thought you might want someone to talk to,’ she said.
‘You need wine to talk?’
‘Apparently not like you do.’
He smiled viciously. ‘Yeah, well wine is all right, but if you want real conversation, there’s no substitute for Jägermeister.’ He held the bottle up in toast, then guzzled a good portion of the remaining contents.
‘What are you doing?’ Julie demanded. ‘Seriously, what the fuck are you doing? Wallowing? Is that really the best you can do? Is that all you’ve got left?’
He was looking at her, and the sight was devastating. He’d forgotten how beautiful she was, or maybe he’d just never really noticed before. Her thick red hair fell seductively over her bright green eyes, and he could get a good sense of her lean, athletic build under her cotton shirt. He savored the memory of being next to her body, touching her freely. He’d taken that for granted. When they’d been together before, he’d been the department’s superstar. Now his career had disintegrated, and the rest of his life was falling apart. He slumped onto his couch. ‘What do you want, Julie?’ he asked wearily. ‘What could you possibly want with me now?’
‘I want to know what happened,’ she replied.
He shook his head. ‘I can’t.’
She walked into the room. On some shelves near the window a few pictures caught the waning sunlight. She picked one up; it showed Long with an older man. Both were in uniform, both were smiling broadly, squinting into the camera with the same eyes. ‘I’m sorry about your father,’ she said.
‘Yeah, well,’ he shrugged.
‘I’m serious – that must have been hard. Particularly with everything else you were dealing with.’
‘It was only fair,’ he said. Looking up, he could see the question in her eyes. ‘He told me I was dead to him,’ he explained. ‘I guess now we’re even.’
‘Don’t,’ she said. ‘Please don’t.’
Suddenly Long felt so tired he could barely move. ‘I appreciate your coming out to check on me,’ he said to her. ‘Really, I do. But as you can tell I’m not in the best condition for a heart-to-heart right now. I’d like to be alone.’
Julie nodded. ‘Fine,’ she said. ‘But I didn’t come out here to check up on you. I have some more information on the Connor case. I thought you should have it right away.’ She dropped the folder in her hand onto the coffee table in front of him. He was too exhausted to open it, and he wasn’t sure his eyes could focus enough to read.
She didn’t let him off the hook, though. ‘It’s the report on the other unlisted number,’ she said. ‘Homeland Security cleared the release. They just needed to know that it was for a genuine police investigation.’
‘Why?’ Long asked reflexively.
‘Because the number traces back to the home of a United States senator. I guess it’s just a precaution.’
His brain struggled to fight off the alcohol. ‘Who?’ he stammered.
‘James Buchanan,’ she replied. ‘It’s the number for his townhouse on Beacon Hill.’
Long stared at the file in front of him. He couldn’t even form words that made sense anymore.
‘You asked what I wanted from you before,’ she said. ‘For now, I’d settle for you doing your job.’ Without another word, she was gone. The door closed behind her, and he was alone on the sofa. The bottle of Jägermeister was nearly empty. Leaning over, he rested his head on the arm of the couch and closed his eyes. He was out cold in a matter of seconds.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
‘I’m sorry, there’s not that much I can do to help you. I wish you’d called first.’
The stenciled metal plaque on her door announced her name as Shelly Tesco, and she sat behind her desk in a small office in the New Hampshire Health Services Center. The head of the Adoption Services division of the Center was a well-kempt woman who looked to be in her early sixties. Her hair was solid steel gray brushed neatly into a ponytail. She was thin, and the wrists that stuck out of her white peasant blouse displayed a wire of sinewy muscles.
As near as Finn could tell, the Adoption Services division consisted of three rooms: Ms Tesco’s office, a waiting area with a desk for her secretary, and a file room.
Finn said, ‘All I want is access to my records.’
‘I understand, Mr Finn, but – as I would have told you over the phone – first, your file must be located. As I’m sure you can understand, given that your adoption records are more than forty years old, that it is not necessarily an easy task.’ She pointed to the room behind her with all of the filing cabinets. ‘You see those? They represent only a fraction of our records. Everything from the past five years is on computers; everything else must be dug out of there, or out of the state records center.’
‘So, dig,’ Finn replied.
She frowned at him. ‘We will,’ she said. ‘But that may take some time. We generally try to respond to requests within two weeks.’
‘Two weeks? What could possibly take that long?’ Finn demanded.
‘Well, as I was saying, finding the file is merely the first hurdle. Once the file is found, we have to pull out whatever information we can give you.’
‘What do you mean, “pull out”? I want the entire file.’
Ms Tesco sat back in her chair. ‘I understand that, but I can’t give you all the information in the file.’ Finn stared back at her intently, waiting for more of an explanation. The roll of her eyes made clear that she found him tedious. ‘You said you were a lawyer, didn’t you, Mr Finn?’
‘I did.’
‘Then you know I have to follow the law with respect to any information I give out. And under New Hampshire law, the only information I can give you about your parents is what’s known as “non-identifying” information. That includes things like any medical histories, allergies, general descriptions – anything that doesn’t identify who your parents were. You were born back in the 1960s, and those were the days of closed adoptions, when people had the right to conceal their identities. It’s only more recently that the trend has been toward open adoptions.’
‘But I already know who my mother was, and she’s dead. I’m just looking for any additional information about her.’
‘I understand, but I can’t give you anything beyond the basics.’
‘She’s dead, for Christ’s sake,’ Finn said, his voice starting to rise. ‘Who’s gonna complain?’
She nodded. ‘I understand your frustration,’ she said. ‘But that’s not the way the system was set up. For right or wrong, the system was designed to protect people’s privacy – to ensure anonymity. It seemed reasonable at the time.’
‘Why?’ Finn asked.
‘Because of how important adoption was to the country back then,’ she replied. ‘Particularly in the 1950s and ’60s, adoption was very common. The domestic adoption rates in this country went from around ten thousand per year before World War Two, to over one hundred and fifty thousand per year after the war. There was literally an explosion of babies being born to unwed mothers at the time. Placing those babies was a societal priority.’
‘Why were there so many more unwed mothers?’ Finn asked.
‘Times were changing,’ she said with a shrug. ‘It was inevitable, I suppose. People talk about the sexual revolution in the 1970s, but the real sexual revolution happened in the 1940s and ’50s – it’s just that no one bothered to notice. Women got a taste of freedom when the men went off to war and they went into the workforce. Economic freedom leads to all other forms of freedom, including sexual freedom.’
‘What’s that got to do with my getting information about my mother?’ Finn said.
‘Because the system was set up to prevent you from getting any information,’ Ms Tesco said with a sigh. ‘As more children born were to single mothers – young mothers – the adoption laws were changed to address the problem. You couldn’t have that many single mothers out there; society wasn’t ready for that. So a system was developed to make it acceptable for these young mothers to give up their children. That system also had to encourage people to adopt these children. One way to accomplish both goals w
as to sever all ties between the birth mother and the child when the child was put up for adoption. That way, the new parents never had to worry about the birth mother coming back looking to claim rights to the child. And the birth mother never had to worry about the child she gave up tracking her down. She could live her life as if she never made the mistake that led to the pregnancy. So the adoption laws were designed to make it very hard for anyone involved to get any information.’
‘Great,’ Finn said in a hollow voice. ‘Everyone got what they wanted. Except for the kids.’
‘And the mothers, in many ways,’ Ms Tesco said quietly.
Finn frowned at her. ‘I don’t understand. Like you said, the mothers got to get rid of their mistakes. It’s exactly what they wanted.’
She shook her head. ‘In most cases, it turns out that’s not true. The girls – and these are girls we’re talking about for the most part – were usually never informed that they could keep their children. That was never an option. They were told that the only way that they could have any sort of a life was to give up the child to adoption. Sometimes they were told that they were evil for what they had done, and were unfit to care for a child.’
Finn scoffed. ‘Name-calling wouldn’t stop a mother from keeping her baby if she really wanted to,’ he said. ‘That’s a cop out.’
Ms Tesco’s eyes flashed at him. ‘I can understand your anger, Mr Finn. I’m sure people have told you over and over that your mother didn’t want you, that she gave you up because she thought her life would be better without you. That’s always been the party line – the story that’s been sold to adoptees and adoptive parents and the public for decades – it’s all okay, because the birth mothers didn’t want their children anyway.’
‘I’ve learned a little bit about my mother in the last day. It sounds like it was pretty true in my case,’ Finn said.
‘Maybe,’ Ms Tesco said, grudgingly. ‘I’m sure it was true in some cases. Not in a lot of others, though. Trust me.’