by Steven James
“Discussion’s over. Paul.”
“I told you before. In my emails. You don’t need to call me Paul. I’m your father. You can call me Dad.”
Unbelievable.
“Patrick’s my dad. You’re just the man who impregnated my mom.”
She strode away, but as she boarded the elevator, she shot a glance at him, and saw that he hadn’t moved from where he’d been standing. He was still watching her with clear, unswerving eyes.
It creeped her out.
The elevator doors closed.
He used your mom. He didn’t love her.
He used her . . .
She felt a rush of hot anger and a tight coil of disappointment.
He didn’t love Mom. How could he have ever loved you?
And as soon as she reached the ground floor she escaped to the bathroom to think. To hide. And despite herself, to cry.
25
The woman in the back of the van was silent now, and still.
Earlier, as Brad had transferred her from the basement to the vehicle, she’d struggled more than he would have liked, but he’d put a stop to it.
Now, compliant once again, she lay next to the wheelchair that he would use to take her to the room where she would die on the eighth floor of the newly renovated Lincoln Towers Hotel, best known as the place where a would-be assassin tried to kill the vice president six years ago.
He and Astrid had taken a room at the hotel last month and, using the television’s volume, had tested how much sound was noticeable in the hallway. They’d found that, while the room wasn’t as soundproof as the one in their basement, with the television turned up to hide the woman’s cries, it would work just fine.
In a sweet curl of irony, the woman would die in a room that the corpse from the primate center was paying for—at a tidy sum of $598 per night. And no one would find that out until it was too late.
He hopped off I-95.
12:41 p.m.
The hotel wasn’t far at all.
Let the games begin.
26
I was less than five minutes from Missy Schuel’s office, and in anticipation of our meeting, my thoughts were revolving around Tessa and her father.
We met him in Wyoming at the end of last month.
The air in the mountains had been smudged with rain that day, and the peaks surrounding his cabin were swallowed in a thick gray mist.
A weary, drizzling sky.
As we stepped out of the car, Tessa slid a wisp of hair away from her eye. For some reason I remember that. A small gesture. Frozen in time. “I want to do this by myself.”
“That’s not going to happen.”
“I’m serious.”
“So am I. Tessa, I’m not leaving you alone with him. Not until I know more about him.”
“He’s my father.”
Though I knew the words were true, they stung a part of my heart I’d never known existed until after Christie’s death when Tessa became the most important person in my life. “Yes, he is,” I said. “But if you’re going in there, I’m coming with you.”
A pause. “Fine.”
So together we’d approached the cabin. The fog snaking around us. The mud thick underfoot.
I wasn’t sure how Paul would respond to having us show up like this unannounced. We hadn’t phoned to tell him we were coming; after all, he didn’t own a phone. Or have a bank account. Or a credit history. On paper the man didn’t exist.
And that was one of the reasons I wasn’t going to leave Tessa alone with him. He’d left society behind, and I wanted to know why.
When he answered the door I decided that mentioning I was a federal agent might not be the best way to get off on the right foot. “My name is Patrick Bowers,” I said. “Are you Paul Lansing?”
His eyes traveled back and forth from me to Tessa. “I am.”
I was about to explain the purpose of our visit, but before I could, Tessa held out the diary, opened to a note that a man named Paul had written to her mother seventeen years earlier asking her not to have an abortion. “Did you write this?”
He gazed at the page, and his expression changed from curiosity to mild suspicion. “Who are you?”
“My name is Tessa Bernice Ellis. My mother was Christie Rose Ellis. Seventeen years ago you slept with her and she wanted to abort me and you begged her not to. I’m your daughter.”
I waited for Paul to speak, to say something, anything. But he just studied Tessa for an infinitely long moment, and finally whispered, “So she didn’t . . .” Neither Tessa or I moved. “I always thought . . .”
And then a soft tear formed in his eye and he invited us inside.
And in that moment I realized that he had loved Tessa for the last seventeen years even though he hadn’t known she was alive.
Just down the block from Missy’s office, my phone’s ringer snapped me out of my thoughts about that gray day in Wyoming. I answered.
Ralph: “Where are you, man?”
“DC.”
“Good. Congressman Fischer wants to see you.”
“What are you talking about?”
“He asked for you. I think it’s about Mahan.”
“Me? Why?”
“Didn’t say. I know it doesn’t make sense, but I need you to—”
“Listen, I’m on my way to see the lawyer Brin told you about. Have Margaret deal with—”
“I know you need to do that, but those things take weeks. You have time. Fischer has a press conference in less than fifteen minutes.”
I pulled into the liquor store’s parking lot across the street from Missy Schuel’s office. “Ralph, this doesn’t make sense. There are plenty of people who can talk to Fischer. Sic Doehring on him.”
“You can stop him from—”
“What about a phone call? Why don’t I just call him?”
“He asked to see you.” Agitation rising in his voice. “I don’t need to tell you that right now is not the time to get him pissed off at the Bureau.”
“Wait.” I was losing my patience too. “Am I talking to Ralph, or is this Margaret?”
A slice of silence.
“The meeting with the lawyer can wait.” Ralph’s tone had turned cold. “You have ten minutes to get to the house minority leader’s office so Fischer can talk with you before he meets with the press, and I don’t want you to be late.”
“Get ready to be disappointed.”
“Pat, the priority right now needs to be—”
“My daughter,” I said and I ended the call.
Then I turned off the ringer, grabbed my satchel with the letter from Lansing’s lawyers in it, climbed out of the car.
And headed across the street to Missy’s building.
Tessa was washing her face, but her black mascara had smeared really bad and she still looked terrible.
How can that man actually be your dad? It’s not possible!
She felt like hitting something, hitting him, and of course, cutting again. Trying to slice the pain away.
Her eyes went to the scars on her arm.
She’d seriously been trying to move past that chapter in her life, didn’t even carry a razor blade or X-acto knife with her anymore. But she could get one. She could buy—
Don’t go there, Tessa. Not again.
She finished at the sink, dried her face, left the restroom.
She needed to talk to Patrick.
Now.
Tell him everything, apologize.
Oh great. That’s right.
The phone. The BlackBerry Paul had given her with his little Google GPS program on it so he could track her.
She pulled it out and left him a rather unambiguous message on the screen of what he could do with his little gift phone, then dropped it in the trash can beside the front door as she left the museum. Go ahead, let him track it, find it, read it.
Enjoy that, Dad.
She fished out her own phone. Speed-dialed Patrick.
No answer.
&nbs
p; Come on, pick up, pick up.
Nothing.
Dang.
She left a message, trying to make it seem like she wasn’t totally about to lose it, but it wasn’t easy.
Get back home.
Back to the house. Just get out of here.
At the street corner, she found a placard showing the location of the city’s Metro stations, located the nearest one that could get her to the VRE back to Virginia, and headed toward it.
Missy Schuel’s reception area was a small, cluttered nook of a room containing a desk piled high with papers, invoices, and legal pads filled with illegibly scribbled notes. No receptionist. An old TV sat in the corner of the room, sound off, mutely showing an empty podium with a flag beside it. Text at the bottom of the screen told me that Congressman Fischer’s press conference would be starting momentarily.
I’d dealt with enough crimes in the DC area to recognize the press corps room just outside the house minority leader’s office.
The place Ralph had told me to go.
A door to my left had a sticky note on it: “I’m in here.”
A sticky note.
Wonderful.
Brineesha said she’s good. At least give her a chance.
I knocked.
“C’mon in, Dr. Bowers.”
I stepped inside.
27
12:48 p.m.
A simple office.
Law manuals packed the bookshelves, a small window on the east wall faced another building less than five meters away. A laptop computer sat centered on her desk flanked by a small digital clock and a picture of three smiling children—one boy and two girls, all of whom appeared to be ten years old or younger. A neat, nearly empty inbox.
Missy Schuel was neither hefty nor slim, neither beautiful nor unattractive. Early forties, black hair fringed with a touch of gray. She made me think of an elementary school principal rather than a hard-nosed divorce attorney.
She stood and took my hand. “Dr. Bowers, pleased to meet you.”
“Call me Pat.”
“Missy.”
Before asking me about my situation with Lansing, she dove into an explanation of her own story: she was a mother of three who’d recently gone back to work after her husband left her last summer, he was a good man, she said, and it hadn’t been for another woman and she didn’t hold it against him.
Once again, strangely forthcoming.
And although I found it hard to believe, she really didn’t seem bitter toward her ex-husband, just wounded by him. I got the feeling that she’d been shattered by the fact that the man she’d given her life to had decided he would rather be alone than with her—a blow that I could only imagine might take a person a lifetime to recover from.
Still, as sympathetic as I felt toward her situation, I just wanted to get started and I think she could tell. “I only share this with you,” she explained, “so that you know I’m a single parent myself and that I can understand the types of struggles and issues you deal with. Every case is personal to me.”
“I’m glad to hear that.”
We promptly discussed her fees, and in contrast to her office surroundings, she wasn’t cheap, but I accepted her terms. Then she told me she would only be able to meet until 1:20, twenty minutes less than I had thought, and we both took a seat. She positioned a legal pad in front of her. “I won’t lie to you, Agent Bowers. These things, these custody cases—they can be . . .” She seemed to be searching for the right word.
“Tricky,” I said.
A nod. “Yes. And painful. And confusing. Especially for the children.”
I felt a twist of anxiety, maybe even guilt, although I couldn’t think of anything I’d done that I should feel guilty about. “I’m aware of that.”
She lifted an impossibly sharp pencil, held it in her hand just so, the tip against the top line of the legal pad. “All right. From the voicemail you left me this morning, I understand that your stepdaughter’s biological father is trying to get custody of her.”
“Yes.”
I handed her the letter from Paul Lansing’s lawyers.
She studied it. Set it aside.
“Talk me through this. You first met Tessa when?”
My cell phone vibrated in my pocket, and I ignored it.
“About three months before her mother and I got married.”
“Three months.”
“Yes. Christie and I were engaged for only a short time.” I gave her the dates.
She wrote.
The phone continued to vibrate and I continued to ignore it.
A new habit of mine.
I kind of liked it.
She glanced toward my pocket. She must have noticed the muted sound of my phone. “And your marriage lasted?”
“Christie died four months after we married.”
Missy paused. “I’m very sorry.” The sympathy in her voice seemed honest and heartfelt, and I began to trust Missy Schuel with my case.
“Thank you.”
My phone stopped.
“Go on,” I said.
“May I ask—if you only knew Tessa for such a short time when her mother passed away, why didn’t you contact another relative to have him or her raise Tessa after Christie’s death?”
“Both of Christie’s parents died when Tessa was young. Christie didn’t have any siblings. And I had no way of knowing who, or where, her biological father was.”
“So there were no close relatives.”
“Not that I was aware of, no. Before she died, Christie asked me to take care of Tessa.” Another call was coming in, but I didn’t want any distractions, so I took a moment to still the vibrate function on my phone.
“Then you do have custody? Legal custody?”
“Yes.”
“Good.”
A ray of optimism. Things were going to be okay after all.
But that’s not what Missy’s face told me as she asked me for more background. I took her through the story of how, after Christie’s death, I’d moved with Tessa from New York City to Denver in the hopes of putting some distance between us and our grief. At first we’d struggled to get along, but since my work schedule required seven or eight days of travel each month, mostly weekends, we were both able to get enough space to stay sane.
“And where did she stay during those times? When you were gone?”
“With my parents.”
I mentioned Tessa’s difficult times with self-inflicting—or cutting, as kids today call it—and then concluded by telling Missy about the weekend last October when our relationship began to improve. Pain had brought us together.
“She was abducted by a serial killer. He cut her and left her to die.”
“That’s horrible.”
“Yes, but I got to her in time. After that, I don’t know . . . maybe we both realized how much we’d always loved each other, needed each other, but had never really understood how to show it.”
“Does she have scars?”
“Pardon me?”
“You said he cut her. Does she have scars?”
The question seemed a bit intrusive. “Yes. She has a scar on her left arm. There’s a tattoo covering it, but it’s still visible.”
Missy wrote a few notes on her pad. I didn’t like that she scribbled in a style of shorthand that was impossible for me to read upside down. “And Paul Lansing,” she said, “what do we know about his relationship with Christie?”
“The few times I asked her about who Tessa’s father was, she only told me that he was no longer a part of their lives.”
Missy had her head down, staring at the paper, but now raised her eyes, gave me a slow, measured look. I sensed that she did not believe me.
“I didn’t press the issue with her. We all have some things that are too painful or awkward to share. Things we need to put behind us.”
“All right.”
“Tessa only found the diary with Paul’s name in it recently, a few weeks ago.”
&
nbsp; A head tilt. “Diary?”
“Yes, Christie’s. From when she was in college. According to what she wrote, she had a short-lived relationship with Paul and that was all.”
“And did he choose to assert his rights as Tessa’s father at that time?”
I hesitated.
Missy watched me. Reading my face, my silence.
“Tell me.”
“When Christie found out she was pregnant she decided to have an abortion. He wrote to her, Paul did, begging her not to. She kept his letter in her diary. After she chose to have Tessa, there’s no mention of him again in the diary entries. But it wasn’t the letter that persuaded her. It was—”
Missy set down her pencil.
“I’ll need to see that letter. The diary too.”
Even though I knew it was wishful thinking, I’d hoped to keep those two items out of this. There was no way either Paul’s letter or the diary was going to help our case. “All right.”
“And after Christie passed away, you didn’t put any paperwork through to legally adopt Tessa?”
“I had custody. It never occurred to me to adopt her.” The more we spoke, the more off balance I felt, as if everything I’d thought was solid in my life was sinking, shifting.
A slim breath. “Tell me a little more about your stepdaughter.”
Brad was parked in the handicapped parking spot beside the Lincoln Towers Hotel.
He crawled into the back of the van, held the woman’s arm still, and slid the needle into her vein. Depressed the plunger.
The drug he was using would work quickly. It wouldn’t take long until she would be unconscious.
He removed the needle, sat back, and watched as her breathing slowed.
As her eyelids drooped.
As her body went limp.
She lay helpless beside him.
He unpocketed his phone and took some video. It wasn’t officially part of the plan. This video was just for fun. For his own personal use.
Then he pulled out the woman’s computer to hack into the hotel’s security system and loop the video footage on the back alley’s surveillance camera.
28
1:15 p.m.
