by Lisa Gardner
The knock that came on my bedroom door this time was not a request.
I opened the door to find Bobby standing there, a very dark look on his face. “Sketch? Same time? Same place?”
“Hey,” I said brightly. “Want to go for a ride?”
MR. PETRACELLI WAS relieved to hear he wouldn’t have to make the dreaded drive into the city. Bella also thought heading out was a grand idea. Which just left Bobby and me, sitting up front, careful not to meet each other’s eyes.
Traffic was light. Bobby called into Dispatch, requesting a background check on my old neighbors. It intrigued me not to be the only one who was paranoid, for a change. Generally, I ran the name of everyone I met through Google.
“Where’s D.D.?” I finally asked.
“Had to attend to other business.”
“Eola?” I fished.
He slanted me a look. “And how would you know that name, Annabelle?”
I went with a bald-faced lie. “The Internet.”
He arched a brow, clearly not fooled, but didn’t ignore my question. “D.D. is in the process of running a crime scene in her own home. The subject may have left a gift at your door, but he broke into D.D.’s home and stole her underwear.”
“It’s because she’s a blonde,” I said, which only earned me another droll gaze.
We pulled into the Petracellis’ driveway.
The tiny gray cape seemed to blend into the overcast sky. White shutters. Small green yard. The right home for an elderly couple who would never have grandkids.
“Mr. Petracelli never thought the Lawrence police took his daughter’s case seriously enough,” I volunteered as we got out of the car. Bella whined. I told her to stay. “If you mention you’re looking into a connection between Dori’s disappearance and my stalker, I think Mr. Petracelli will open up.”
“I talk, you listen,” Bobby informed me coldly.
Badass, I mouthed behind his back, but didn’t say a word as we headed up the flagstone walk.
Bobby rang the doorbell. Mrs. Petracelli opened the door. She sighed when she saw the two of us. Gave me a look I can only describe as deeply apologetic.
“Walter,” she said calmly, “your guests are here.”
Mr. Petracelli came bounding down the stairs with far more energy than I remembered from my previous visit. He had an accordion-style file folder tucked under his right arm and a bright, almost surreal gleam in his eyes.
“Come in, come in,” he said jovially. He shook Bobby’s hand, mine, too, then glanced around as if searching for my attack dog. “I was excited to hear you were coming, Detective. And so soon! I have the information, absolutely, it’s all right here. Oh, but wait, look at us, standing in the foyer. How rude of me. Let’s make ourselves comfortable in the study. Lana dear—some coffee?”
Lana sighed again, headed for the kitchen. Bobby and I trailed after Mr. Petracelli as he went skipping to the study. Once there, he plopped himself on the edge of a leather wingback chair, eagerly opening up his file folder, spreading out sheets of paper. Compared to his ominous, brooding approach last night, he was practically whistling as he pulled out page after page bearing the grim details of his daughter’s abduction.
“So you’re with the Boston PD?” he asked Bobby.
“Detective Robert Dodge, sir, Massachusetts State Police.”
“Excellent! I always said the state should be involved. The locals just don’t have enough resources. Small towns equal small cops equal small minds.” Mr. Petracelli seemed to finally have all his paperwork arranged just so. He glanced up, happened to notice that Bobby and I both still lingered in the doorway.
“Sit, sit, please, make yourselves at home. I’ve been keeping detailed notes for years. We have quite a bit to cover.”
I sat on the edge of a green plaid love seat, Bobby wedged beside me. Mrs. Petracelli appeared, depositing coffee cups, cream, sugar. She departed as quickly as possible. I didn’t blame her.
“Now, about November twelve, 1982…”
Mr. Petracelli had indeed kept scrupulous notes. Over the years, he’d developed an elaborate time line of the last day of Dori’s life. He knew when she got up. What she ate for breakfast. What clothes she selected, what toys she had in the yard. At approximately noon, her grandmother told her it was time for lunch. Dori had wanted a tea party instead, with her collection of stuffed bears on the picnic table. Not seeing the harm, Dori’s grandmother had delivered a plate of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, crusts cut off, plus a sliced apple. Last she had seen, Dori was passing out treats among her plush guests. Dori’s grandmother went inside to tidy up the kitchen, then got caught up talking to a neighbor on the phone. When she returned out front twenty minutes later, the bears were still sitting, each with a bite of sandwich and apple in front of its nose. Dori was nowhere to be found.
Mr. Petracelli knew when the first call had been placed to 911. He knew the name of the officer who had responded, what questions were asked, how they were answered. He had notes on the search parties formed, lists of the volunteers who showed up—some of whom he’d asterisked for never giving a satisfactory alibi for what they were doing between 12:15 and 12:35 that afternoon. He knew the dog handlers who volunteered their services. The divers who eventually tended to the nearby ponds. He had seven days’ worth of police and local activity distilled into elaborate chronological graphs and comprehensive lists of names.
Then he had the information from my father.
I couldn’t tell from Bobby’s face what he thought of Mr. Petracelli’s presentation. Mr. Petracelli’s voice raised and lowered with various stages of intensity, sometimes even spitting words as he hashed out obvious failings in what seemed to be a thorough search for a missing girl. Bobby’s expression remained impassive. Mr. Petracelli talked. From time to time, Bobby took notes. But mostly Bobby listened, his face betraying nothing.
Personally, I wanted to see the sketch. I wanted to gaze at the face of the man I believed had targeted me, sentenced my family to a lifetime on the run, then killed my best friend.
The reality was disappointing.
I had expected an angrier-looking man. A black-and-white sketch with dark, shifty eyes, the tattoo of a teardrop topping the right cheek. Instead, the artfully rendered drawing, my father’s work most certainly, appeared almost pedantic. The subject was young—early twenties, I would guess. Short dark hair. Dark eyes. Small, almost refined-looking jawline. Not a thug at all. In fact, the picture reminded me of the kid who used to work in the neighborhood pizza parlor.
I studied the drawing for a long time, waiting for it to speak to me, tell me all its secrets. It remained a crude sketch of a young man who, frankly, could be any one of tens of thousands of twenty-year-old, dark-haired males who’d passed through Boston.
I didn’t get it. My father had run from this?
Bobby asked Mr. Petracelli if he had a fax machine. In fact, we could both see one standing on the desk behind Mr. Petracelli. Bobby explained it might be faster if he faxed the notes, etc., into the office right away, for the other detectives to get started. Mr. Petracelli was overjoyed to have someone finally take his file seriously.
I watched Bobby punch in the fax number. He included an area code, which wouldn’t have been necessary for a Boston exchange. And the only piece of paper he fed into the machine was the sketch.
Bobby sent the rest of the pages through the fax on copy function, helping himself to the duplicates. Mr. Petracelli was rocking back and forth on the edge of his chair, his face unnaturally red, his smile beaming. The excitement of the moment had obviously spiked his blood pressure. I wondered how soon before the next heart attack. I wondered if he’d make his goal of living long enough to see his daughter’s body recovered.
We drained our coffee cups, just to be polite. Mr. Petracelli seemed reluctant for us to depart, shaking our hands again and again.
When we finally made it out to the car, Mr. Petracelli stood on the front porch, waving, waving
, waving.
My last glance of him was as we drove down the street. He became a small, hunch-shouldered old man, face too red, smile too bright, still waving determinedly at the police detective he firmly believed would finally bring his daughter home.
YOU FAXED THE sketch to Catherine Gagnon,” I said the moment we hit the highway. “Why?”
“Your father showed Catherine a sketch when she was in the hospital,” he said abruptly.
“He did?”
“I want to see if it’s the same drawing.”
“But that’s not possible! Catherine was in the hospital in ’80, and that sketch wasn’t done until two years later.”
“How do you know?”
“Because the stalker dude didn’t start delivering gifts until August of 1982. And you can’t have a sketch of the stalker dude without any stalker.”
“There’s only one problem with that.”
“There is?”
“According to the police reports, no one ever saw the face of the ‘stalker dude.’ Not your father or mother, not Mrs. Watts, and not any of your neighbors. In theory, therefore, stalker dude could not have served as the basis for that drawing.”
Well, that was a stumper. I stewed on it, telling myself there was a logical explanation, while realizing I was using that line a lot lately. My father had known something in 1980, I decided. Something serious enough to drive him to masquerade as an FBI agent and visit Catherine with a sketch in hand. But what?
I tried searching my memory banks. I’d been only five in 1980. Living in Arlington and…
I couldn’t get anything to come to mind. Not even the memory of a comic-strip-wrapped gift. I was certain those started arriving two years later, when I was seven.
The silence was finally broken by the chirping of the cell phone clipped to Bobby’s waist. He retrieved it, exchanged a few terse words, slid a look at me sideways. He flipped it shut, seemed about to speak, then the phone rang again.
This time, his voice was different. Polite, professional. The voice of a detective addressing a stranger. He seemed to be trying to work out a meeting, and it wasn’t going his way.
“When do you leave for the conference? I’ll be honest, sir, I need to meet with you as soon as possible. It involves one of your former professors. Russell Granger—”
Even I could hear the sudden squawk on the other end of the line. And then, that quickly, Bobby was nodding.
“Where do you live again? Lexington. As a matter of fact, I happen to be right around the corner.”
He glanced at me. I answered with a shrug, grateful that I didn’t have to elaborate. Obviously, Bobby was trying to set up an interview with my father’s former boss and obviously it needed to happen now.
I didn’t mind. Of course, there was no way in hell I was waiting in the car.
TIME TO TAKE Bella for a walk,” Bobby announced as he drove through a winding side street just north of the Minuteman Statue in Lexington Center. Paul Schuepp had given his house number as 58. Bobby spotted 26, then 32, so he was moving in the right direction. “Looks like a nice area to stretch your legs.”
Annabelle took it about as well as he expected. “Ha ha ha. Very funny.”
“I mean it. This is an official police investigation.”
“Then you’d better start deputizing me, because I’m going in.”
House number 48…There, the white colonial with the red brick façade. “You know, it’s not exactly the Wild Wild West anymore.”
“Have you read the latest accounts of shootings in the city? Could’ve fooled me.”
Bobby pulled into the driveway. He had a decision to make. Spend ten minutes of the thirty Schuepp had agreed to spare arguing with Annabelle, or let her tag along and receive another lecture on proper policing techniques from D.D. He was still annoyed from his last conversation with the sergeant, which, frankly, didn’t work in D.D.’s favor.
Bobby popped his door and didn’t say a word as Annabelle followed suit.
“Detective Sinkus tracked down Charlie Marvin,” he filled her in as they headed for the front door. “Marvin spent the night at the Pine Street Inn, from midnight to eight a.m. Nine homeless and three staff members vouched for him. So whoever came to your building with that gift, it wasn’t him.”
Annabelle merely grunted. No doubt Charlie Marvin made a good suspect in her mind. On the one hand, he was an urban cross between a priest and Santa Claus. On the other hand, he wasn’t her father.
Bobby would like to say he didn’t believe Annabelle’s father had returned from the dead either. Except he was growing more and more puzzled by the hour. Mr. Petracelli had been a poignant lesson in the power of obsession. Bobby would have an officer follow up on Mr. Petracelli’s whereabouts late last night, though, in all honesty, delivering comic-strip-wrapped presents was probably a shade too subtle for someone who was obviously mad as a hatter.
The sketch was the key, Bobby decided. Who had Russell Granger known, and why had he felt threatened nearly two years before filing that first police report?
It had become clear to Bobby within the first five minutes of meeting Walter Petracelli that Annabelle’s former neighbor didn’t hold the key to those answers. Perhaps Bobby would get luckier with Russell’s former boss, whom Bobby had first buzzed at seven this morning from outside Annabelle’s apartment. Seemed lately all he did was work his cell phone. Yet, still the demands on his time had D.D. operating behind his back. Reaching out to the ME in a thinly veiled attempt to bolster her own theory of the case…just thinking about it pissed him off all over again.
Bobby found the brass knocker, strategically located in the middle of a giant wreath of red berries. Three knocks and half a dozen berry droppings later, the door swung open.
Bobby’s first impression of Paul Schuepp: about two inches taller than Yoda and two years younger than dirt. The small, wizened former head of MIT’s mathematics department had sparse gray hair, an age-spotted scalp, and rheumy blue eyes that peered out from beneath bushy white eyebrows. Schuepp’s face was sinking down with the years, revealing red-rimmed eyelids, shaky jowls, and extra folds of skin flapping around his neck.
Schuepp stuck out a gnarled hand, catching Bobby’s arm in an unexpectedly firm grip. “Come in, come in. Good to see you, Detective. And this is…?”
Schuepp suddenly stopped, droopy eyes widening. “I’ll be damned. If you’re not the spitting image of your mother. Annabelle, isn’t it? All grown up. I’ll be damned. Please, please, come in. Now, this is an honor. I’m going to fetch us some coffee. Oh hell, it’s gotta be noon somewhere. I’m fetching us some scotch!”
Schuepp set off at a brisk shuffle, heading through the arched foyer into the formal living room. There, another arched doorway led into the dining room, where a right-hand turn took him into the kitchen.
Bobby and Annabelle followed the man through his house, Bobby taking in the heavy floral furniture, the delicate crocheted doilies, the eucalyptus swags gracing the tops of floor-length mauve drapes. He was hoping there was a Mrs. Schuepp somewhere, because life was too scary if Mr. Schuepp had done the decorating.
The kitchen was country-style, with oak cabinets and a massive oval walnut table. A lazy Susan in the middle of the table boasted sugar, salt, and a small pharmacy of drugs. Schuepp fiddled with the coffeemaker, then moved on to the pantry, where after much clinking of glass, he withdrew a bottle of Chivas Regal.
“Coffee’s probably gonna taste like crap,” he announced. “The missus passed away last year. Now, she could brew a cup of coffee. Personally,” he added, dropping the Chivas in the middle of the table, “I recommend the scotch.”
Annabelle was gazing at the man wide-eyed. He produced three glasses. When Annabelle and Bobby begged off, he shrugged, poured himself two fingers, and tossed it down. For a moment, Schuepp’s scalp turned bright red. He wheezed and started to cough, and Bobby had images of his interview subject suddenly dropping dead. But then the former professor recovered,
thumping his shrunken chest.
“I’m not much of a drinker,” Schuepp told them. “Given the occasion, however, I could use a belt.”
“Do you know why we’re here?” Annabelle inquired softly.
“Let me ask you this, young lady: When did your dear father die?”
“Nearly ten years ago.”
“Made it that long? Good for him. Where?”
“Actually, we’d returned to Boston.”
“Really? Hmmm, interesting. And if you don’t mind me asking, how?”
“Hit by a taxicab while crossing the street.”
Schuepp arched a bushy white brow, nodding to himself. “And your mother?”
Annabelle hesitated. “Eighteen years ago. Kansas City.”
“How?”
“Overdosed. Booze mixed with painkillers. She, um, she’d developed a drinking problem along the way. I found her when I returned home from school.”
Bobby shot her a glance. She’d already volunteered more details for Schuepp than she’d ever given him.
“Collateral damage,” Schuepp observed matter-of-factly. “Makes some sense. Shall we?” He gestured toward the table. “Coffee’s ready, though I insist you should try the scotch.”
He returned to the kitchen, loading the coffeepot, cups, and creamer on a tray. Bobby took it from him without asking, mostly because he couldn’t picture a hundred-pound man lifting a ten-pound tray. Schuepp smiled his appreciation.
They made it to the table, Bobby’s mind whirling, Annabelle looking paler by the second.
“You knew my father,” she stated.
“I had the honor to serve as head of the department of mathematics for nearly twenty years. Your father was there for five of them. Not nearly long enough, but he left his mark. He was into applied mathematics, you know, not pure mathematics. Had an excellent rapport with students, and a brilliant mind for strategy. I used to tell him he should give up teaching and work for the Department of Defense.”
