by Susan Wiggs
Vance and Teresa seemed like the perfect couple—affectionate and communicative, incredibly good-looking, interested in the kids. Perhaps their only fault was that they were a bit too indulgent, but they made no apology for this. Teresa had confessed that they were unable to conceive a baby. They decided to become foster parents, hoping in some small way to do their part for the community’s less fortunate.
Being childless did have its benefits. While other parents were running themselves ragged, keeping up with all their kids’ activities, Vance and Teresa put all their love into each other. A birthday or anniversary might be marked with an extravagant piece of jewelry. For his fortieth birthday, Teresa surprised Vance with flying lessons, and he ended up getting a pilot’s license. After that, they took weekend float plane trips to Pier 8 in the city, or sometimes to remote lakes in the Poconos. It seemed like a dream life.
Yet in time, it became clear that all wasn’t quite right. There seemed to be something almost obsessive, smothering, about the way Teresa loved her husband. Clarissa didn’t know much about marriage, but she sensed Teresa’s adoration of her husband was over the top. Then again, maybe it was a rare and lucky thing to be loved like that.
The only thing was, Vance was having an affair with his partner at work, a junior detective named Ava Snyder. The boys had told Clarissa shortly after she’d moved in. They fancied themselves amateur detectives and tended to snoop around. They got away with everything because on the surface, they were just goofy kids who had been left behind when their mother, an undocumented worker, was deported. No one ever thought they had the smarts to solve a mystery or get away with spying on people, but that was exactly what they did. They’d seen Vance sneaking around with his partner, had hacked into his computer and tailed him like a couple of pros. Vance swore he would dump Teresa and marry Ava Snyder as soon as he could save up enough to break free of his wealthy wife.
If Teresa ever got wind of the affair, she’d freak out.
Or maybe not. She had a flair for drama, and a habit of saying, “I always have a plan B.”
As things turned out, Clarissa was the one in need of a plan B. By seventeen, she’d had everything taken from her, including who she was—her name, her past, the few connections she had to people who cared about her, everything.
She didn’t dare complain. At least she was alive.
Mario and Jo-Jo, her two foster brothers, had not been so lucky. They’d discovered Vance was stealing evidence and forfeited drug money. Apparently that was his plan for gaining freedom from his wife. Claire had been horrified, even though everyone knew police corruption was common and pervasive. It seemed like such a breach of the public trust. She and the boys approached Teresa about it, and Teresa was shocked, as well. “I can’t rat out my own husband,” she’d said, looking heartsore, “but you do what you have to do.”
She’d given them the address of a substation in a South Ward neighborhood, and told them to wait there for an internal affairs guy who would help them do the right thing. Clarissa had missed the bus; she’d called the boys to say she’d be arriving late to the meeting. By the time she arrived, it was nearly dark. Boarded-up houses, forbidding-looking brick buildings and steel garage doors topped with razor wire dominated the deserted streets. At first she thought she’d missed the meeting. Then she saw three guys halfway down the block. She’d nearly called out to them until she realized something wasn’t right. Vance Jordan was herding the boys into an adjacent alley. He was yelling at them, and they were acting scared. She heard Vance demanding, “Where’s Clarissa?”
“She don’t know a thing,” Mario had said. “Swear to God.”
She froze and shrank into the shadows while the shouting continued. She found a rusty iron fire-escape ladder and hoisted herself to the first level, crouching on a grill overlooking the alley. She had no idea what her next move would be, so she made herself as small as possible and didn’t make a sound. There was a flash and popping noise, and Jo-Jo dropped to the damp, grease-stained pavement.
The thing about killing two people was that you could only do one at a time. Mario fought back. He had a knife, maybe a utility knife. But it didn’t matter. A second later, he was as still as his brother. She nearly passed out, trying to keep from making a sound. A thousand screams and sobs were trapped in her chest, clawing to get out. He’d shot the boys, one and then the other, with no more emotion than if he’d been swatting a fly. The boys had loved Vance. They’d idolized him, dreaming of one day being detectives themselves.
Vance Jordan scoured the area, removing traces of himself.
Don’t look up, she prayed. Don’t look up.
Jordan’s hand was bleeding; maybe it had been cut with the knife in the struggle. He wrapped a cloth around his hand, but the cloth kept unraveling. With jerky movements, he nudged the boys onto their backs and emptied their pockets, maybe to make it look as though they’d been robbed. He used something to cut the pocket from Mario’s jeans. Of course he would do that. A police detective would know exactly what evidence to look for at a murder scene, and exactly what he needed to remove.
Clarissa realized he was removing traces of his own blood. As he made his way to his car, something dropped from his bundle and fluttered to the curb, unnoticed. He jumped in the car and drove off. Clarissa let out a series of terrified sobs, still so shocked that she could barely think. She half jumped, half fell from the fire escape. At the edge of the alley where the bodies lay, she paced back and forth, hugging herself and shaking.
A car or two passed, one a low-riding clunker emitting loud music, another a sedan driven by a driver barely tall enough to see over the dashboard. She held her breath, nearly fainting as she waited for someone to notice her, or to see the bodies, or…
She spotted the object Vance had dropped in his haste. Every nerve of her body vibrated as she realized it was a pocket cut from the boy’s jeans.
The fabric was stained with blood, most likely from Vance Jordan’s cut hand. That’s why he hadn’t left it behind. She knew evidence shouldn’t be handled too much. Holding it gingerly, she dropped it into a zipper pocket of her backpack. Her hand shook so much as she took out her phone that she couldn’t dial. That was something they didn’t show you on police shows—that in reality, your hands and fingers stopped working when you were scared. It took her several tries to dial 911. Her shaking thumb hovered over the send button. Send. Send what, exactly?
“Nine-one-one, what’s your emergency?”
Another thing that stopped working—her voice. She felt as though she was being strangled.
“Hello? What’s your emergency?”
She found her voice, formed words she never dreamed she’d be speaking: “I just saw a murder. Two boys—Mario and Jo-Jo Balzano. He…he killed them.” She’d watched enough crime shows on TV to know this was an open-and-shut case. She knew the killer. She had a piece of physical evidence.
“Are you safe?”
“No…yes…I guess, for now. Please…”
“What’s your name?”
Something kept her from saying it. “He…I saw who did it.”
“Can you tell me his name?”
“It was Vance Jordan.”
There was a pause, pulsing with disbelief. Then the dispatcher said, “Could you repeat that, please?”
Clarissa hit End. It should have been a simple matter to make a statement to the police. Instead it began a long nightmare that had no end.
A few minutes later, her phone vibrated—Caller Unknown. Now what? NowwhatNowwhatNowwhat? The words bounced around in random panic. Her first instinct was to go home. But home was where the killer lived. She forced herself to think things through.
It occurred to her that the call from her mobile phone had been recorded. She knew this for certain when the next call came in from Vance Jordan. The dispatcher must have alerted him. “Clarissa, let’s talk.” His voice sounded the same as it always did. Calm. Fatherly. “It’s not what you think.”
/> “I’m not thinking anything. I know what happened.”
“Kiddo, you’ve got it wrong. What happened is this—some lowlife dealer popped those boys. I’m sure the scumbag’ll be arrested tonight, and it’ll all be over tomorrow.”
“That’s a lie,” she said. “I saw, and I can prove it.”
“You can’t prove shit, girlie. And the entire department’s on my side. Hell, I play golf with the other general assignment detectives. I’m the fucking godfather of the primary investigator’s firstborn, and the duty sergeants report to me.”
She knew it was true. He was a golden boy in the department, surrounded by layers of allies. “I can prove it,” she repeated stubbornly.
“Why, because you saw something? Do you know what a joke a single eyewitness is? Even the stupidest public defender would rip you to shreds. Nobody convicts based on a single witness, especially a girl like you. You’d probably end up doing time for perjury. So come on home, and we’ll figure this out. Those boys were trouble—they would have hurt you if they hadn’t been stopped. Come on, Clarissa. You know me. I’d never hurt you.”
That was when she knew he’d kill her. There was something in his tone. She tried to sound normal when she said, “All right. I’ll come home.” She ended the call.
The phone vibrated again, its display window lighting like a beacon. A beacon. Some mobile phones were like tracking devices. Their whereabouts could be detected. She dropped it as though it were a live snake and turned to run. Then she changed her mind, ran to the next block and placed the phone under a seat on a transit bus. Maybe that would buy her a little time.
She spent the night in a gas station ladies’ room, not sleeping, but shivering and crying and trying to figure out what to do. In the morning, she dragged herself out into the open. Jabbing coins into a pay phone, she called her case worker and babbled out her story. Sherri told her to calm down, and they arranged to meet. Sherri never made it to the meeting. She’d been taken to the hospital, the victim of a hit-and-run accident. She was not expected to live.
Claire had nearly gone crazy with grief…and guilt. She spent the day in the shadows, terrified Vance would find her next. She was afraid to call anyone else, afraid for anyone connected to her. When the bad guy was a cop, you couldn’t call the cops.
Just as Vance had predicted, a lowlife gangbanger had been arrested for killing Mario and Jo-Jo. While in custody, he’d been stabbed to death with a prisoner’s homemade knife. These things happened.
She racked her brain, trying to figure out where to turn for help. She remembered Mel Reno, a volunteer who coached the school chess team. A quiet, middle-aged guy, he was well-liked by the students, and brilliant when it came to chess. He had a past, though, which she’d found out from Vance himself. He had been talking to someone on the phone, probably Ava. Reno was a laughingstock, a disgrace, forced to resign from his job under a cloud. He’d been in charge of protecting a family of witnesses, and they’d all been killed. Fucking bleeding heart, Vance had said. A couple of witnesses got popped, and he ran like a cat on fire. Fucking coward.
Mel had believed every word she’d told him. She’d been jubilant, until he explained her fate. She was going to have to disappear.
And Vance Jordan was going to get away with murder. In the Star-Ledger, he was pictured with a grieving Teresa and quoted as saying, “They were always so troubled, those boys. We had no idea something like this could happen.”
The way Mel explained it, the case was closed. With limited resources, the department was only too happy to go along with the explanation of the gangbanger who was stabbed to death right after his arrest. Even the existence of Mario’s pocket stained with Vance’s blood wouldn’t be enough. If she produced the evidence and gave a statement, she’d be exposing herself to a terrible risk, possibly for no reason. Public prosecutors had difficulty protecting witnesses, particularly when the suspect was a cop. There was no staff or dedicated financing for witness protection. Sometimes a program could be cobbled together with a combination of petty cash, drug forfeiture money and general operating revenues. Sometimes relocation worked. But in a case like Claire’s, she’d never make it long enough to testify. Mel felt sure of this.
The proof appeared in a footnote to the article about the murders. The Jordans’ foster daughter, Clarissa Tancredi, was assumed to be involved in drugs, just as the boys had been. Vance and Teresa were pleading for information as to her whereabouts. Her embarrassingly homely yearbook picture ran like a milk-carton ad.
Clarissa Tancredi had to disappear for good.
Sometimes, especially in the early days of her exile, she grew so exhausted trying to stay alive that she was on the verge of giving up and surrendering to her fate. She imagined walking into a police station and telling her story. She wouldn’t let herself, though. She owed it to the boys who had been silenced to stay alive. She wondered if anyone—other case workers or Teresa Jordan or people at her school—wondered what had become of Clarissa Tancredi. Did they know why she’d disappeared without a trace?
Mel had set out the phony grave marker himself, a silent message that she was gone for good. The technique was common in witness security programs, but something had awakened Vance Jordan’s suspicions.
Ross listened with his body held tense. She appreciated that he hadn’t interrupted or questioned her. He’d just let her finish, as though sensing the need for the bottled-up story to come out.
“Mel recently found out Vance was going to be a foster father again,” she explained. “Mel must have tried to alert the authorities.” She stared at the ground. “It’s my fault. I’ve known for years that Vance Jordan is a killer on the loose, and I was too afraid to do anything about it.”
“Don’t you dare do this,” Ross said. “Don’t you blame yourself.”
“But—”
“There’s something I need to know. Whatever happened to the evidence you picked up, the one with Vance Jordan’s blood on it?”
“I’ve still got it. I thought I had the ultimate proof, because the report to the public never mentioned that Mario’s pocket had been cut out. It’s something that would only be known to someone who’d been there. Investigators often leave out key details as a way to test a witness’s reliability. In most murder cases, I could tie it up with a bow and give it to the investigators and walk away a hero. I almost did that. I almost delivered the evidence in person. Then I thought about sending it in anonymously. But in surrendering the one piece of evidence, I’d be playing my entire hand.”
“And it sounds like this guy knows exactly how to deal with evidence,” Ross said.
She nodded. There was a blue wall around Vance Jordan. Nobody messed with him. “I feel like such a coward.”
“Keeping yourself safe has to be the number one priority. If anything happens to you, then he will get away with murder—for good.”
“You sound like Mel.” Her heart constricted as she thought of Mel, lost in the shadows, his prognosis uncertain.
Ross held her as she cried. She told him how scared she was for Mel. She told him about the case worker involved in the hit-and-run accident, and how she was afraid that anyone she tried to tell would get hurt.
“You asked me once why I don’t get involved with people,” she said. “This is why. And you wondered how I could stand doing this job, caring for people who are going to die on me. It’s because dying is not the worst possible thing that can happen to a person. Failing to live—that’s worse.”
“Everything’s going to change now,” Ross assured her.
“How?”
“Just tell the truth.”
“The way those boys did?”
“Ah, Claire. We’ll figure this out together.” He made a brief search of his wallet, extracting a business card.
He was a fixer. A rescuer. That was what he’d done in the army. Swooped and rescued people.
Twenty-Eight
Blurred vision was among the many symptoms of George’s
ailment. He found that if he held himself very still and blinked a few times, the world would come back into focus.
Sometimes, however, he was in no hurry for clarity to return. The genius painter, Claude Monet, had produced some of his best work while going blind. With lines softened by dappled light, the scene appeared before him in dreamlike splendor.
George was no painter, just an observer. He was seated in a cushioned Adirondack chair that was so big and imposing, it resembled a throne. The chair had been placed on the grassy lawn by the resort lodge, where a team from the resort staff was setting up for the family reunion.
The first annual Bellamy family reunion.
For George, it was bound to be the last. He hoped it would go well. He wished—dear God, he wished—his son Pierce could be here. He wished for that every day.
Jane had taken on most of the planning, in consultation with two of her granddaughters—Olivia and Dare. From a distance, and seen through a haze of sunlight, Jane could easily be mistaken for a slender girl. She wore a sundress and a wide-brimmed straw hat with a yellow ribbon around its crown.
Ah, Jane, he thought. Jane.
As though summoned by his thoughts, she came toward him, still surrounded by a gauzy nimbus of light. “Olivia made a seating chart,” she said. “Would you like to take a look at it?”
George smiled and shook his head. “I’m sure it’s fine. Remind me again, which one is Olivia?”
“She’s the daughter of our eldest son, Philip.”
George wondered if there was the smallest bit of strain in her voice. He couldn’t tell. Philip and his wife, Laura, had been away, so George hadn’t met him yet. “And she’s an only child?”
“She has a half sister, Jenny. Both girls have given me great-grandbabies, and I couldn’t be happier. Can you imagine, George? I’m a great-grandmother.”
To him, she would always be as young and fresh and beautiful as she’d been the last time he’d held her in his arms. He stayed silent. He had a searing headache now, but he ignored it.