If Mark were a cartoon character, steam would be blowing from his ears. “You’re telling me that two women, one on crutches, who are traveling with an infant and two kids, first managed to evade two highly trained FBI operatives at a hospital, which has a thousand security cameras, and have now slipped past the entire Barstow police force, along with half the agents from the LA field office?”
“We missed them by minutes,” Fitz says.
“And you have no idea where they went?”
“There’s video of them driving past the McDonald’s, where they left the old lady’s car in the parking lot, but nothing after that. Agents are canvassing the area but so far have come up empty. No one’s seen them. The roadblock on the 40 is solid: no way to see it coming and no place to hide. The highway patrol’s checked every car for the past three hours, and nothing.”
Mark feels like his head is going to explode. “So, you’re saying they just disappeared? Into thin air?”
Wisely, Fitz remains silent.
After three long breaths, Mark sighs and says, “What’s the connection between them? Between Herrick and Torelli?”
“It’s strange, boss. There doesn’t seem to be one. From what I can tell, the women barely know each other. I looked at their phone records and even looked at the old tapes. Torelli hardly ever went to the office, and Herrick hardly ever left it.”
“What’s the sister say?”
“She hasn’t returned my calls. She’s in Belize on her honeymoon. I contacted the local police, and they’re sending a couple officers to her hotel to talk to her.”
“And Herrick’s husband?”
“I feel bad for the guy. He didn’t even know his wife had left, and the news really hit him hard. He kept going on about how it was all his fault. I guess he has a bit of a gambling problem, and last week he lost their rent money betting on the Marlins.”
“The Marlins?”
“Yeah, I know, right? Guy’s obviously not real bright.”
Mark closes his eyes. So, Herrick’s motive for leaving and ripping off her boss is clear. Her idiot husband bet on the Marlins, a team his softball team could beat this year, leaving Herrick and her baby high and dry.
Torelli left for the same reason most women leave: Frank Torelli is a grade A jerk. Mark’s been watching him for almost a year, and the whole time he’s wondered how a guy like that has ended up with a wife like Hadley Torelli.
But why team up? It makes no sense, and something about the way the whole thing went down doesn’t add up. Torelli showed up first, and Herrick arrived an hour later. Torelli parked in the back and Herrick in the front. Herrick left her kid in the car. Torelli left hers somewhere else.
Maybe Torelli ran into trouble. She couldn’t open the safe, so she called Herrick and made a deal. There’s no record of any calls between the two, but they could have used burners, which would mean it was planned.
And somewhere along the way, Torelli was hurt. So maybe that’s why she called Grace. The plan was for Torelli to bring the money to Grace, but Torelli sprained her ankle and couldn’t drive. Perhaps a hostage situation—Herrick holding Torelli’s kids hostage?
Okay, so if that’s the case, then why stick together? Torelli and her kids were chasing after Herrick in the hospital parking lot, and Herrick looked like she wanted nothing to do with them.
So what’s the connection?
Mark pinches the bridge of his nose.
“The note was kind of nice, don’t you think?” Fitz says, breaking the silence.
“The note?”
“The note they left for the lady whose car they borrowed. It was kind of nice.”
Again Mark clamps his jaw shut. Shelly grins at him from the pool, and he gives her a gritted grin back, along with a thumbs-up. The note was not nice. It was infuriating. These two women have turned into an incredible thorn in his side. Not only have they hijacked his case and embarrassed half the agents west of the Grand Canyon, but they actually took the time to tape a very sweet thank-you note to the steering wheel of the old lady’s car.
“By the way,” Fitz says, “she’s pissed.”
“Who?”
“The lady who loaned them her car. She’s saying we violated her constitutional rights.”
“What constitutional right? To be stupid and loan her car to criminals? To aid and abet fugitives?”
“Technically, Hadley and Grace aren’t criminals,” Fitz says. “They’re only wanted for questioning. Which means she actually couldn’t have aided and abetted them.”
“Hadley and Grace?” Mark snaps, his voice so sharp the swim instructor looks over.
“I mean Herrick and Torelli,” Fitz corrects, but Mark can tell he doesn’t mean it. Already the kid is rooting for them, confirming once again why he is not cut out for the field. An agent cannot get emotionally involved. Whether a suspect is a hoodlum or a sweet, gray-haired grandmother, the job is black and white—gather evidence and arrest the suspects, regardless of the circumstances, the crimes, or the victims. It’s up to the courts to figure out the gray.
“She says she’s going to sue,” Fitz goes on. “And I’ve gotta admit: she kind of has a point. She’s like ninety, and she made a fair deal. Taking her money feels a little like we’re mugging Betty White.”
“We aren’t mugging anyone. That money is evidence.”
“Right, boss.”
Mark exhales slowly through his nose and reminds himself this isn’t Fitz’s fault. He’s not the one who screwed up.
“Is the file updated?” he says.
“Yeah, it’s all there.”
“Okay. Thanks, Fitz. Go home and get some rest. Thanks for staying late.”
“Sure, boss.”
Mark slides his phone into his pocket, and Shelly flashes a gaping grin, now that he’s done with the call, which makes her forget to paddle, and the instructor lunges to catch her a second before she sinks.
Across the pool, on the opposite deck, as far from the action as possible, Ben sits on a bench reading. With a deep breath, Mark walks around the edge to join him.
“Hey, buddy.”
Ben ignores him, his eyes fixed on the page in front of him.
“What are you reading?”
Ben lifts the cover for Mark to see. The Lightning Thief.
“Didn’t we read that one together last year?”
A year ago, before Mark’s life was yanked out from under him, he and Ben would read books together, and The Lightning Thief was one of their favorites.
Ben gives the slightest nod, his jaw slid out.
“Might help,” Mark says, “if you told me why you’re so mad.”
Ben says nothing, his eyes still fixed on the page.
Since Mark moved out, Ben has refused to talk to him. At first, Mark thought he was just angry in general because of the divorce, but lately, Ben’s made it clear that his anger is specifically targeted at Mark. But no matter how many times Mark asks, Ben refuses to tell him what’s wrong.
Mark sits beside him a minute longer, feeling like this is an important moment, one of those critical parenting junctures where he is supposed to say or do something profound. But he has no idea what that something might be. Parenting often leaves him feeling this way: like he is floundering in the middle of the ocean with no compass or oars.
Mark’s dad was brilliant at it, and he made it look easy. He always knew just what to do and say with Mark and his brother. Of course, his dad and Mark and Mark’s brother were all cut from the same cloth, hard boiled and tough, while Ben is a different animal altogether, sensitive and thoughtful, introspective in a way that is difficult for Mark to understand.
With a sigh, Mark pushes to his feet and walks a few feet away to review the updated files, which include the surveillance videos from the McDonald’s, the interview with the lady who loaned Torelli and Herrick her car, and the note Torelli and Herrick taped to her steering wheel.
Mark clicks on the note. The first image shows a scan of
the outside of the card. It says Thank you, with butterflies floating around the words. The second image is of the inside. In loopy cursive it reads:
Dear Nancy,
Your car was wonderful. Skipper nicknamed her Pujols (after Albert Pujols who plays for the Angels) because, while she’s not fast, she’s reliable and gets the job done. Thank you for loaning her to us. Trust and faith are often difficult to find and even more difficult to give. I’m glad our paths crossed however briefly.
Stay kind, stay you.
Best,
Hadley, Skipper, Mattie, Grace, and Miles
Mark practically groans. Fitz is right, the note is nice, and a horrible thought hits him, the idea of what will happen if this story gets out and the media gets hold of it: two women on the run with their kids, eluding the FBI, giving money to old ladies, and leaving thank-you notes with references to beloved baseball players. If the press gets wind of this, the FBI is going to be crucified.
“Dad?”
Mark startles at Ben saying his name.
“Yeah?” he says, trying not to look overly anxious as he sits back down beside him.
Ben’s head is still bent over his book, and the book is still open to the same page it was five minutes ago.
“You promised,” he says, the words hitching and barely above a whisper.
Mark’s mind spins, his thoughts pinging around in his brain, searching for the promise he made and hasn’t fulfilled. Mark prides himself on being a man of his word, and he hates himself for breaking a promise, especially to his son.
Perhaps he promised that he and Marcia would never get divorced? He dismisses the idea before it fully forms, knowing he never would have promised that. From the day he married Marcia, he knew there was always the very real possibility it would end.
Maybe he promised he would never leave, and that’s what Ben thinks he’s done: left him.
“You said,” Ben mumbles.
Mark looks at him, desperately trying to decode the riddle. Ben’s skin is pink with emotion, his ears heated red, signs of how difficult this is for him.
“You said once we were settled, and when Mom wasn’t so stressed.”
Mark’s thoughts spiral back to two years ago, when they first moved to DC, and a thought tumbles forward through the stressful milieu of that time, his throat closing as he realizes why Ben is upset. Not anger but disappointment—Ben’s persistent silence a result of deep disappointment he’s kept buried for two months now, and heat creeps into Mark’s skin that matches his son’s, his rage so fierce it makes him want to lift the bench they’re sitting on and smash it against the wall.
That’s the thing about divorce, which he tried again and again to explain to Marcia: it’s not just about them; it’s about the damage it does to the kids, to the unit, to the foundation, and to their future. To goddamn everything.
“The dog,” he mumbles to himself out loud. “I promised we would get a dog.”
Ben nods, his nose pinched as he holds back his emotions.
They joked about it, how they would go to the shelter and pick the ugliest mutt they could find, one that no one else wanted. Since Ben could talk, he’s been asking for a dog. Mark was going to get one for Ben’s birthday this year, then again for Christmas. But the timing was wrong both times. Marcia was threatening divorce, making things far too tense to bring a dog into the mix. Ben turned nine, Christmas came and went, and three months later Mark was no longer living at home.
“I know it’s not important,” Ben says, the words quivering. “It’s just . . . you said . . .”
Mark scoots so he is right beside him and wraps his arm around Ben’s shoulder. “It is important. Very important. And I should have remembered.”
Shelly bounds up to them, dripping wet. “Whassup?” she says in the sassy talk she’s been using lately.
Ben straightens and pulls away from Mark so his little sister won’t see his tenderness. “Nothing,” he mumbles.
Mark takes a towel from the bag Marcia packed and holds it open for Shelly to walk into. As he rubs her down, he tickles her through the terry cloth until she begs for mercy; then he releases her to go to the locker room to change.
Mark turns back to Ben. “I’ll look into getting a new place,” he says. “One that allows pets.”
Ben looks up at him through his brow. “Really?”
Mark has no idea how he’s going to afford a place with a yard, but he’ll figure it out. Lately, Mark hasn’t had a lot to be proud of, but he has always been a man of his word, and that’s not going to change. “Really.”
Shelly returns, and together they walk toward the exit, Ben walking a little taller, which makes Mark feel a little better himself.
Marcia and Stan the Insurance Man are waiting at the curb when they walk through the door. Mark loads the kids in the back of Stan the Insurance Man’s Volvo, and when the car is out of sight, he sits on the bench beside the door and drops his face into his hands, the heels pressed against the sockets of his eyes.
When spots begin to swim, he lifts his face, pulls out his phone, and pulls up the Torelli file. He stares at the small screen and scrolls through the pages until the words blur into black blobs on a field of pulsating white.
He’s missing something. He can feel it. There’s always something, a loose thread that, when pulled just right, unravels the whole damn mystery.
Leaning back, he closes his eyes, and Shelly’s gap-toothed smile fills his mind, making him smile. Then he thinks of the note Torelli and Herrick left and the love he felt in it toward the boy, Skipper. Torelli has raised him since he was born, a special-needs child who isn’t her own. It takes a special kind of person to do that. She’s certainly not your typical mobster’s wife or criminal.
Herrick, on the other hand, is another story. Her record of trouble with the law stretches back to her teenage years.
Mark toggles back to her file and opens it, scrolling through page after page of her rough history.
Reading it boils his blood. The system has failed her on so many levels it makes him want to strangle each and every person who’s had a hand in it.
Orphaned at fourteen, she was shuffled from foster home to foster home for the first year, then finally placed with a distant relative who was never properly screened and who turned out to have a drinking problem. He saw Herrick as his ticket to the easy life and kept her out of school so she could work flipping burgers for a paycheck.
When social services discovered what was going on, they moved her to a group home, but group homes don’t usually work out too well for cute, nice girls like Herrick, so not surprisingly, she hightailed it out of there the day after she arrived.
A few months later, she was arrested in Savannah during a homeless sweep. They locked her up in juvie, and from what Mark can gather from the records, social services tried to get her out, but Herrick wanted to stay. When they said she couldn’t, she did small things to extend her sentence—stole things from the commissary, scratched her name in the warden’s door. She probably figured it was safer than another group home or the streets, and she was probably right. When she turned sixteen, she took the GED and then, for the next two years, took vocational classes and online courses. She even got an online associate’s degree in accounting.
He looks at the photos of her through the years. The fresh-faced freckled teenager with the bold glint in her eye evolved into a tough young woman with a poker-faced fierceness glaring defiantly into the lens for the mug shot that was taken of her three months after she left juvie. She had been arrested for a crime she never should have been arrested for: trying to help another homeless girl, who, through no fault of Herrick’s, ended up dead.
He thinks of Shelly. He thinks of Ben. He thinks of his own mom and dad and the home he grew up in with his brother. It must be very lonely becoming an orphan at fourteen, to lose your family before you’ve had time to create a new one to replace it.
Herrick spent six months behind bars before a mercifu
l judge commuted her sentence to time served; then she moved to California and has been flying straight since. A husband, a baby, a job—the American dream. Then her husband screws it up. He gambles away their rent money, and Herrick takes the baby, rips off her boss, and goes on the lam.
With Torelli?
Again, this is the part he trips over every time, the part that doesn’t make sense. By all accounts, Herrick is a lone wolf. Everything in her record points to her being independent to a fault. Her juvenile-hall counselor repeatedly wrote that Herrick’s biggest obstacle was her trust issues. She didn’t like to ask for help or to rely on anyone.
Mark toggles back to Torelli’s file. Compared to Herrick’s, the file is remarkably thin. Thirty-eight, she was born and raised in Los Angeles. Skipper’s mother, Vanessa Valla, is her only sibling, a half sister from her father’s second marriage.
Her mother died when Torelli was in college. Her father passed ten years ago. The only blemish on her perfect record is a traffic ticket she got a dozen years ago for rolling through a stop sign.
Torelli’s not a criminal, which means Herrick is the key. The question is whether Herrick knew the money was dirty and if she knew the feds were watching it. Interfering with a federal investigation and tampering with evidence are federal offenses, and with her prior record, that could put her away for a very long time.
It doesn’t feel right. Herrick’s not stupid, and she’s been living on the right side of the law for more than seven years. It’s hard to imagine her jeopardizing the life she’s built.
He thinks of the baby and what he would do to protect his own kids, how far he might go to provide for them if things became desperate. She must not have realized the feds were watching, believed she was only stealing from her boss, dirty money he couldn’t report stolen—the perfect crime, so long as he never found her.
So why involve the wife? Maybe Herrick didn’t know where the safe was, or she didn’t have the combination?
Hadley & Grace Page 9
