by Jan Burke
“I wouldn’t let him.”
Pete laughed.
“Does your wife give you her casework to carry in here, or does she come in herself?” I asked.
That shut him up. Rachel got into her work as a private investigator after many years as a homicide detective. It was impossible to picture Rachel handing her cases over to him.
“I don’t know, Irene … ,” Reed said.
“Whatever. If you don’t want to know what I’ve found out, fine, I’ll go home.”
He made me wait it out for a minute or two. Then he said, “Let’s hear it.”
“Marilyn Foster had a son by Nick Parrish.”
“What!” Pete shouted.
“Settle down, Pete,” Reed said in his calm fashion. “You want to bring half the department running in here?” To me, he said, “What makes you think so?”
“When I interviewed Dwayne Foster for the story, he mentioned that she had given up a child for adoption as a teenager.”
“I read your story. That wasn’t in there.”
“The article you read was a missing person’s story that had to be rewritten as a murder story before it went to press. I never had a chance to write the follow-ups.” I paused, struggling to prevent my thoughts from going down a well-worn path of grief over the closing of the Express and to stay focused on convincing Reed. “I think you knew she had a child that had been put up for adoption.”
He didn’t say anything for a moment, then seemed to come to some decision. “For the sake of argument, and to save Frank the pain of a really long lunch with Vince, let’s say we know not only that she gave birth to a son but that she was looking for him. Let’s say Dwayne Foster told us that much and her computer records supported it. All well and good, but how you can reach the sensational conclusion you’ve reached …”
“Did Dwayne tell you that the father of the child was in prison?”
“No,” he admitted uneasily.
“Parrish is not the only man in prison,” Pete scoffed. “For god’s sake, Irene, a father in prison could be any one of more than a million-and-a-half men in the U.S. I hate Parrish, too, but I can’t tie every crime in the country to the guy.”
“First of all, Marilyn told her husband that the father of her child was in prison ‘for life.’”
“In California, that cuts out about eighty percent of them,” Reed said, “but it’s still a big number.”
“And she might have just meant he had a long sentence,” Pete added, “or she might have been reassuring her husband that no dirtbag from her past was coming after her.”
I sighed. “Look, you two. You can keep arguing with me every step of the way, or you can let me lay this out for you.”
“It’s falling apart already,” Pete said.
Reed gave him a quelling look. “Go on,” he said to me.
“The age of her son—and figuring back to his conception—works out to a time when Parrish was living here in Las Piernas. So it’s possible.
“With all the publicity surrounding her death, Dwayne received lots of sympathy cards, including some from people who had only recently been back in contact with her—several of them had contacted her in the past year through a social networking site. Two were her closest friends from high school.”
I handed him a slip of paper with the names and numbers of the two women. “They’ve said they would be willing to discuss things further with the police.”
He took the paper and frowned down at it.
“I talked to them about the summer Marilyn had an ‘older boyfriend,’” I said. “He was in his late twenties—although who knows if he told her his real age—and she was fifteen when they met. She was in full-on rebellion mode with her parents. She had been secretive about the boyfriend, but her girlfriends were curious. So one night, they watched when she sneaked out of the house, and followed her. They saw the young man she met.”
“And twenty-some-odd years later,” Pete said, “happen to remember that the guy they saw in the distance in the dark was one of America’s most notorious serial killers. Give me a break!”
“Pete,” Reed warned.
“They didn’t just see him from a distance. He caught them spying.”
Pete sat back.
I told them the story as it had been recounted to me.
Marilyn’s family lived near a park, and that was where she had her assignation with her boyfriend. It was after closing time, and she met him near a tree-lined path. A perfect place to spend time with a lover, with lots of concealing shrubbery. The girls followed the couple, hanging back a little, trying not to be seen.
They passed a lighted area near a bench, but Parrish and Marilyn didn’t stop there. The path twisted and turned, and they thought he was with Marilyn, so when each girl felt a hand grip the back of her neck, they screeched simultaneously. He held them hard, painfully, just below their skulls, and controlled them as if they were puppets. He told them to shut up, but they had already fallen silent.
He marched them back to the lighted area and turned them so that they were facing him. They said—independently—that he didn’t say another word, just stared at them, then smiled. It had the same effect on each of them—he might have been smiling, but they felt certain that he was damned angry, and if they didn’t get out of there, he’d hurt them worse. He released his grip, and they ran home.
I took a breath and let it out slowly, pushing aside my own memories of having Nick Parrish take hold of me.
“Even though it was more than twenty years ago, if you heard them talk about that night—the intensity of his stare, the way he stood, the painful bruises on their necks—you’d believe they haven’t forgotten that man or how he made them feel.”
“You’re sure it was Parrish?” Reed asked.
“Not from that, no. I thought of showing them a photo of Parrish, but I don’t have one of him from that time, so …”
“Thank God for small favors,” Pete muttered.
“Go on,” Reed said.
FIFTEEN
So I told them about gathering all the information I could from the women about Marilyn Foster and that time. How she had shown up the next day with bruises on her face and arms, and completely stopped talking about her boyfriend. Not long after that, she learned she was pregnant.
“She never considered trying to contact the father for help, and infuriated her parents by refusing to name him. She went to an adoption agency that could cope with her special medical needs. After a difficult pregnancy, she gave birth to a boy, whom she held for only a few minutes before he was given up to an adopting couple. It was much later that she began her search for him.”
“With adoption laws as they are, she couldn’t find him?”
“Not at first. She had told Dwayne that at the time of the birth, she was afraid the child’s father would try to find him by looking up any records that mentioned her, so it was a closed adoption, and she kept her records sealed. Even when her son turned eighteen, when he could begin the process of letting his birth parents know he was seeking them, she didn’t start her own side of that process.
“Yet suddenly one day, she seemed to decide that it was safe to start looking for her child.” I pushed a piece of paper across the desk. It was a copy of a form Marilyn Foster had filled out online, signing up for an organization that helps adoptees and their birth parents locate one another.
“Father is still listed as unknown,” Pete said.
“Look at the date. Recognize it?”
They both glanced at the date, then looked up at me, puzzled.
“September twenty-seventh …” My voice trailed off. “Could you open that door?” I asked. “And could I get a glass of water?”
“Sure,” Reed said, eyeing me with concern.
A few minutes later, I continued. “That was the date he was injured. Parrish. Early in the morning on the twenty-seventh of September. At the time it seemed likely he’d be a tetraplegic for the rest of his life. When that
turned out not to be the case—still, he was captured. If there was some small chance he’d ever get out of his bed in the prison hospital, there was no chance he’d ever get out of prison.”
“Should have gone for the death sentence,” Pete said.
“The district attorney might do that yet,” Reed said. “Especially now that Parrish won’t have to show up in court in a wheelchair. They’ve got DNA on other cases.”
I stayed silent. It brought Reed’s attention back to me. “So you’re saying that she filed this form because she felt safe from him.”
“But it doesn’t even mention Parrish by name!” Pete objected again. “And while I know that date means something to you, why should she remember it? Irene, face it, there is such a thing as coincidence.”
I let that go. I put a small stack of printouts on the table. Reed picked them up and studied the first page.
“E-mail from someone who says he thinks he might be her son.”
“It’s not e-mail, really, it’s a set of private messages on an Internet message board. Which is why you wouldn’t find it if you looked through her e-mail. I don’t know how far your computer guy has gotten with his efforts.”
“Not far,” Pete said. “He’s swamped. He’s due to testify in some other cases and hasn’t had much time for anything else.”
Reed frowned, his attention still on the papers. “No names. Just a bunch of numbers.”
“For the protection of both parties, the service keeps real names hidden until they agree to release identifying information to each other.”
“Not too anonymous—he’s giving his birth date and the name of the adoption agency.”
“It matches her son’s birthday and the agency she used.”
“‘After reading your post, I am fairly sure I’m your son,’” he read aloud. “‘Do you by any chance have type 1 diabetes? I have it. I am told it is hereditary, so that might be one thing we have in common. If you don’t, I might have inherited it from my father.’”
He read her response and the next few messages to himself, then said, “It looks as if she was careful.”
“Yes. She was clearly excited but didn’t just hand over her address and phone number. Keep reading,” I said. “Look at the last two.”
“‘We haven’t discussed this yet,’” he read, “‘and forgive me if it is painful to you, but I’m kind of anxious to find out if a man who now says he is my father really is. Can you tell me, is my birth father in prison? Maybe you gave me up for adoption because you thought I might become like him. I don’t want to meet him, really, but I have been contacted by someone who thinks he is my half brother. He said his dad told him about me a long time ago. If none of that make sense to you, that’s actually a relief to me. Otherwise, it’s kind of the orphan’s worst nightmare, if you know what I mean. I just don’t know what to do, and if you are my mother, maybe you would be willing to give me advice. Here’s the Web site about the guy he says is my dad.’ And there’s a link.”
Reed looked up again.
“Yes,” I said. “The Moths.”
It didn’t take more convincing. Even when Frank and Vince arrived, Reed and Pete managed to get Vince steered away from his anger toward me (and Frank) and onto the scent of a new line of investigation.
They were good enough to let me know what happened after they told me to go home.
By the end of the day, they not only had the cooperation of the adoptee contact group but had the name, address, and phone number of the young man who had claimed to be her son. Cade Morrissey.
He had recently moved to Las Piernas and rented a small apartment in an old building not far from downtown. Had a job as a cook at a nearby restaurant, had applied for college.
Morrissey didn’t answer a knock on his apartment door, and his landlady said she hadn’t seen him for a while; neighbors said the same. They tried calling him—it was a cell phone number and went to voice mail. When police checked at the restaurant where he worked, the manager—happy to do some venting—said that Cade hadn’t shown up for work for several weeks, so he was fired. But if they found him, the manager said, his last paycheck was waiting for him.
At that point, it didn’t take much to get a warrant.
What they discovered, on entering the premises, was that someone had been searching before them. No sign of Cade Morrissey himself, but his toothbrush, razor, and other personal items, including a supply of insulin in the refrigerator, were still in the apartment. An empty suitcase was in the closet. A desk, however, that had once held a laptop computer and a router now held just a router. The drawers of the desk had been pulled out, their contents strewn on the floor.
The cell phone company cooperated with the police, and with GPS tracking, they followed its signal to the same industrial area where Marilyn Foster had been found. In an abandoned cannery, they came across an odd sight: a pristine white home freezer unit sitting unplugged in the center of the concrete floor of a large room, surrounded by rusting machinery. The freezer was padlocked.
Vince called the cell phone again.
They heard muted ringing from within the freezer and hurriedly broke the lock off.
Cade Morrissey’s moth-decorated body had already thawed.
SIXTEEN
I tried to console myself with the thought that if I hadn’t talked to Reed, Cade Morrissey might have remained missing, left in an unplugged freezer to rot. I told myself that the investigation had been aided by my work. It didn’t make me feel any better.
I sold two freelance stories about him, telling myself that I was helping to bring him some justice. By writing about his life, I was letting others know who he was, showing that he was more than a decorated corpse in a sensational murder—he had been an individual, there were people who loved him. And I still felt that the checks for those stories were forty pieces of silver marked up for inflation.
The backlog in the crime lab’s DNA section—they were hard-pressed to have tests done in time for trials—meant that it would be weeks if not longer before we knew if there was indeed a biological connection between Nick Parrish and Cade Morrissey (in this situation, I could not bring myself to use the words “father-son relationship”). The director of the lab pointed out that Parrish, in prison, could not have killed Cade Morrissey, so looking for a connection was not evidence from his killer, it was more a matter of curiosity—they might get around to it at some point.
The police investigation seemed focused in three areas—trying to learn more about the bloggers who called themselves “the Moths,” tracking down people who knew Cade, and trying to identify the woman who had been found in the trunk of Marilyn Foster’s car.
I sold another piece freelance—to a magazine that specializes in municipal government issues, on the changes already being felt in Las Piernas’s city hall now that the paper wasn’t around to keep an eye on it.
At that point, I was back to wondering if I should face facts and give up on being a reporter. I was rescued from dismal reflections about what other work I might be suited for when I got a job offer: a low-paying gig at a local radio station. The person who made the offer was Ethan.
To my surprise, Ethan had talked the town’s struggling public radio station, KCLP, into letting him run an experiment. He had done his homework, discovered the weakest show in the station’s lineup, and then shown up in the manager’s office, underwriters in hand, with a proposal to replace it with Local Late Night. The program would be a mix of news and opinion on all things Las Piernas and surrounding areas. He wasn’t unknown to the people he pitched it to—he’d taken a few classes in radio production in his unending time at Las Piernas University, during which he’d done his best to network with the people who were now running the station. They went for it.
Long before the first show aired, he had built an online following for himself—started in part at the Express—and made use of social networking sites and other tech that the paper hadn’t fully utilized, and as a result he was
already something of a local celebrity. When he became the host of the show, that following increased, and he was now enjoying himself immensely.
One of the best things he did was to organize a Web site for the show that allowed those of his former print colleagues who worked with him now to write at length—any length—about the issues we discussed on the show. So while the part of the story that went on the air had to be kept short, the audience was always told there were more details on the Web. More underwriting and pledge dollars were generated from the site.
A few decades working as a journalist who focused on local politics didn’t hurt my ability to find stories for the program, but it took me some time to get used to the job, which differed in some important ways from print work. Learning to use the flash mike and the sound-editing software on my laptop were mechanics—they didn’t take too long, although I was nowhere near the artistry of some when it came to sound editing. I got used to carrying more gear and learned the hard way to always have an electronic Plan B (extra flash card, more batteries).
I tried to stop writing things down during interviews, a habit I couldn’t quite break, and tried to find humor in the fact that, in the press conference pecking order, my old colleagues couldn’t stop thinking of me as a newspaper reporter, which often allowed me to grab a better position than lowly radio reporters would usually get. On the other hand, I often caved in to the practical need to set aside my dignity and sit with my new colleagues on the ground at the feet of the television cameras for the sake of better sound quality.
Changes in my own thinking and writing had more to do with the nature of the medium. I found out how fast a minute could go by. I learned how much breath was needed to speak a long sentence on the air, so my sentences became shorter. I was expected to cover two to three stories in one day—that kept me moving.
While the on-air stories were shorter, the associated Web site allowed the reporters working with Ethan to develop our stories even more fully than we could have done at the Express, which had never made good use of its own site (failing to listen to the pleas of our computer guru, until she left in frustration for a much higher paying job). In the last few years, as the print edition’s pages had dwindled, the Express had kept most stories shorter than the ones we were publishing on the KCLP site.