“So you don’t have any other way of finding out who sent it?”
“Sure,” the technician said. “We could send a warrant to the hosting company asking for the name of the person who registered the address, but it might take a while.”
“Maybe we could see if they have surveillance video of the person who was sitting at the computer when the e-mail was sent,” said Mann.
“They’re both worth a shot,” Commissioner Lynch said. “I’ll get you the warrant. Mann, you get in touch with the Free Library and see if we can get that video.”
“Did the Park Service ever send you the video from the Poe house?” Sandy asked.
“No,” said Mann. “I circled back with them a couple hours ago and they still didn’t have it, but I’ll check with them again.”
“So where does that leave us?” Sandy asked.
“Depends on what else we have,” the commissioner said, as they all looked at the technician expectantly.
“We didn’t really find anything else when we went through her computer, and her husband’s computer didn’t contain much more than porn.”
“What about her cell phone?” the captain asked.
“She got a text message yesterday that might have been significant,” the technician said as he looked through the papers to see if he could find the cell phone records.
“Here it is,” he said. “The bank sent her a text two days ago about check number 1766—a ten-thousand-dollar personal check that someone was trying to cash. Mrs. Bailey called the bank a few minutes later, apparently to okay the transaction.”
“Do we know who the check was made out to?” the captain asked.
“We had to cross-check the bank records on her computer,” the technician said while shuffling through the papers. “But it looks like the check was made out to someone named Sean O’Hanlon.”
“That’s Lenore Wilkinson’s father,” Mann said, sounding perplexed. “Did the check say what the payment was for?”
“In the memo line it just said ‘research.’”
“Get the officers guarding Lenore Wilkinson on the phone,” Commissioner Lynch said. “We need her back down here to answer some questions.”
Mann made the call as the others watched. But as he listened to the response from the other end, his facial expression became apprehensive. Slowly he disconnected the call and looked up at the commissioner.
“They knocked on the bathroom door and she didn’t answer, so they went inside. They don’t know how and they don’t know why, but she’s gone.”
“What do you mean, ‘she’s gone’?” the commissioner asked.
“I mean, she walked away. They did say she left a note, though. It said, ‘Don’t try to find me.’”
* * *
Coletti got the call just as they pulled into Dunmore. Mann told him about Lenore, the documents, and the money Clarissa Bailey had paid Lenore’s father.
The old detective turned ashen at the thought of Lenore gone missing, but when he saw the reporter looking at him, he tried to compose his face.
“Everything okay?” she asked.
“Yeah,” he said, knowing he couldn’t tell her everything. “Let’s just go in.”
Coletti parked the car in front of the house where Sean O’Hanlon was staying. As he did so, the pitch-black evening gave way to sleepy streetlights. It was hard to believe that this slice of small-town America was now infamous for being the Angel of Death’s hometown.
Dunmore, after all, was a place where Catholicism flourished and violent crime was rare. Much like its better-known neighbor, Scranton, Dunmore was also a place where family mattered and where neighbors looked out for one another. By default, it was a place of law and order, since it housed the local state police barracks.
But like every small town, Dunmore was a place that held on to its secrets. While everyone within the tiny town’s borders knew of the darkness that existed in his neighbor’s house, nobody told outsiders. Dunmore’s secrets were family business, and if you didn’t live there, you weren’t a part of the family.
That was what made it so odd that Sean O’Hanlon had not only agreed to speak with Kirsten Douglas, but had initiated the conversation. He had something he wanted to say, and he needed to say it in person, not over the phone, because here, speaking face-to-face was worth a two-hour drive.
Coletti and Kirsten got out of the car and walked toward the brick single home that was nestled among bushes and tall oaks. Kirsten looked at the house and then up at the stars that shone like crystals in the still and quiet sky.
The detective approached the front door with mixed emotions. Not just about the fact that Lenore was missing. He was also conflicted about Sean O’Hanlon, the man who’d fathered the two women who’d affected him the most. Coletti wanted to focus on the facts of the current case, but he couldn’t help remembering the emotions from the last one.
They knocked. Sean O’Hanlon cracked the door open and glanced at Kirsten Douglas before turning his penetrating stare on the detective.
“Hi, Mr. O’Hanlon,” Kirsten said with an easy smile. “This is Detective Coletti—the one I told you about.”
O’Hanlon stared at him. “I know Detective Coletti,” he said in a raspy voice. “I talked to him after my Mary died.”
O’Hanlon shuffled backward to open the door. His unkempt blond hair was mostly gray, and his stubble-lined jaws were gaunt. His pale skin was punctuated by dark circles around his bloodshot eyes, and though his face showed hints of the looks he’d passed on to his daughters, he was clearly not the man he used to be.
“Come in,” he said, walking with a pronounced limp as he escorted them into the living room. “Have a seat.”
As they sat down on a couch across from him, Kirsten took note of the way O’Hanlon’s flannel shirt hung limp from his shoulders, as if it were made for a much larger man. Coletti saw it, too, and he also saw the dozens of pill bottles on the end table next to his chair.
The walls were filled with photos of a family that had long since left Dunmore for greener pastures. A black and white wedding picture was there, fading badly after almost fifty years. The pictures of their six children were there, too. But even now, nearly thirty years after the divorce, there were no childhood pictures of Sean O’Hanlon’s seventh child, Lenore. He still couldn’t bring himself to put his illegitimate daughter’s photo on the wall.
“I guess you’re wondering why I called you,” O’Hanlon said to Kirsten.
“Yes, I am,” she said, taking out her notebook. “I’m especially curious about why you wanted me to come all the way out here to speak to you in person.”
“Well, as you can see, I’m not in the best of health,” he said with a cough. “The cancer’s got me pretty good, so I don’t get out much anymore, and with no one here to look after the old man, it’s best that I do my talking face-to-face.”
“I guess that’s why you didn’t answer the door when we sent the state police to knock,” Coletti said.
“You sent them to the wrong door. This is my aunt’s old house. I’ve been staying here for about a month because it’s easier to get around with everything on one floor. All I had to move over here were my pills and my pictures.”
“We called you, too, Mr. O’Hanlon,” Coletti said. “In fact we called every number for every O’Hanlon in Dunmore, and you never answered the phone.”
“Don’t take it personal,” O’Hanlon said. “I only wanted to talk to Kirsten. But when she told me you were coming, I thought it was for the best, since this Gravedigger thing seems to be centered on my daughter.”
“Why would you think it was about her?” Coletti asked. “We never said that publicly.”
“You didn’t have to. Clarissa Bailey said it when she came to see me last week. She was asking all kinds of questions about Lenore, and I told her I couldn’t answer them.”
“Why couldn’t you?” Kirsten asked.
“Because I didn’t trust her,” O’Hanlon sai
d. “The things she was asking seemed odd. She wanted to know if Lenore had told me anything about Fairgrounds Cemetery, or if I’d ever heard Lenore mention some guy named Irving Workman. She wanted to know if Lenore had ever mentioned meeting her. All of it made me feel uneasy.”
“But that’s not what you called me to say,” Kirsten said. “There’s more to it than that, isn’t there?”
“Yes,” O’Hanlon said, taking a deep, ragged breath as he looked away from them and into the distance.
“So tell us why you called,” Kirsten said gently.
He looked at them with a serious expression. “I called because Clarissa Bailey paid me ten thousand dollars to forget she’d ever been here. I was willing to keep my mouth shut until I turned on the news and saw Clarissa dead in the same cemetery she asked me about, and saw that my daughter was with her.”
Coletti was getting fed up with O’Hanlon’s self-righteous tone, so he did what he did best in interrogations. He went on the attack.
“So, let me guess,” Coletti said cynically. “You’re not speaking up because you want to come clean. You’re speaking up because that ten thousand dollars connects you to a woman who was murdered.”
“It has nothing to do with that,” O’Hanlon said, his tone edgy but calm.
“Then why speak up?”
“Because I never spoke up about Mary.”
“Sure you did,” Coletti said with a cynical smile. “You trashed her after she was dead.”
“And that was wrong,” O’Hanlon said firmly. “I should’ve spoken about her when she was alive. Fact is, I knew the types of problems she had, and I never said anything to anyone. I kept my mouth shut, and all those people died because of it.”
“Are you saying Lenore has the same types of problems?” Kirsten asked.
Coletti scoffed. “How could he say that? How could he say anything? He doesn’t even know Lenore.”
Kirsten looked confused. Coletti looked satisfied. He believed the emotion he’d conjured up might make O’Hanlon talk. When the old man’s eyes filled up with pain and he opened his mouth to speak, Coletti knew his gamble was about to pay off.
“The detective’s right,” O’Hanlon said softly. “For a long time I didn’t know anything about Lenore. She was born after I had an affair, and when the smoke cleared, my life was ruined. I had a wife who wanted to kill me. I had a daughter who didn’t even know me. I had six other children who hated me because I’d hurt their mother so badly.
“I was a hypocrite, and I can see that, now that I’m seventy with only a few months to go before the cancer takes me. It’s amazing that when you’re old your eyesight gets bad, but your vision gets a whole lot clearer. When I look back, I see a life that was basically wasted. So I didn’t just call you here to tell you about the ten thousand dollars. I called you here so I could make things right.”
O’Hanlon grabbed a crumpled pack of cigarettes from amidst the pills on the end table.
“Do you think you should be doing that, Mr. O’Hanlon?” Kirsten asked worriedly.
“Doctor says I’ve got three months,” he said while searching for a light. “I might as well die happy.”
Coletti took a lighter from his pocket and leaned over to light the old man’s cigarette for him. Kirsten gave the detective a dirty look, but Coletti didn’t care. He understood where O’Hanlon was coming from. In a decade, that could be him.
“So, what is it that you need to make right?” Coletti asked.
The old man took a short drag on the cigarette. He exhaled the smoke and coughed a few times. Then he reached over to the end table for his glass. He took a swig of whiskey and savored it for a moment before leaning back in his chair and looking from the reporter to the detective.
“Lenore’s mother was my wife’s best friend,” he said, his tone neither proud nor ashamed. “She lived a few blocks away, and she was at our house most days, talking to my wife or helping with the housework, or babysitting the kids. The affair happened over time, and when my wife found out about it she was hurt in ways I can’t even explain. Even then, she was willing to forgive me, but when the town found out things got a lot harder.”
“So, how did the town find out?” Coletti asked.
O’Hanlon puffed his cigarette and took another sip of his drink, grimacing as the alcohol burned in his chest.
“They found out because Lenore’s birth was unusual,” he said.
“You mean the veil?” Coletti asked.
O’Hanlon took another puff of his cigarette. “No, I never heard anything about a veil. Of course, it’s possible that she was born with one—they didn’t let fathers in the room back then, and even if they did I wouldn’t have been there, since I was married.”
“So what about her birth was unusual?” asked Kirsten.
He took another swig of his whiskey and swallowed hard as his eyes went vacant.
“Lenore came out bleeding. Turned out she was anemic, and she needed a blood transfusion. Her blood type was AB negative, which is very rare, so they did a big push for blood donors to save her—had it on the news and everything. When it turned out I was the only person in the entire Scranton-Dunmore area with that blood type, everyone started to suspect that I was the father. It didn’t help that she looked just like me.
“My wife and I divorced right after that. She took our kids and moved in with her parents on the other side of town. Her friend took Lenore and made sure I never had a chance to be a father to her. When all my kids were old enough, they left town, and only two of them have ever come back.”
He looked at Coletti as he spoke. “Mary came back to work at the state police barracks, probably just to torture me. She didn’t just blame you for what happened to her in that cathedral when she was a child, Detective Coletti. She blamed me.”
“Blamed you for what?” Kirsten asked.
“She was raped,” said Coletti. “I caught the guy who did it. It was one of my first arrests, but they said his confession was coerced and they let him go.”
“Mary blamed Detective Coletti for that,” O’Hanlon explained. “But she blamed me even more. If I hadn’t been distracted by the affair, if I would’ve watched her when she went in that bathroom in the cathedral, if I would’ve lived right, if I would’ve loved my wife … Mary gave me plenty of ifs over the years, and when she came back, she gave them to me again. She hated me for what happened to her, and I think that hate is the reason she turned out the way she did.”
They were quiet for a few minutes, digesting what Sean O’Hanlon had shared.
“Who was the other kid who came back?” Kirsten asked.
O’Hanlon took a drag of his cigarette. “Lenore.”
“Lenore?” Coletti said, sounding confused. “She told me she never knew you. She said she’d never talked to you before.”
“That was true until about a year ago,” O’Hanlon said. “But last fall she came back to Dunmore and showed up on my doorstep.”
“And what did she say she wanted?” Coletti asked.
“She wanted to know who her father was,” O’Hanlon said as tears sprung to his eyes. “I couldn’t believe this person I’d only seen in passing a few times—this little girl I’d thought about every day for almost thirty years—had come back to Dunmore to find me.”
O’Hanlon wiped his eyes and took another swig of his whiskey. “It seemed like we talked forever, catching up on everything about each other. She told me she had a master’s degree and that she was married to John Wilkinson. She said she was interested in charities and history. She told me she’d met a group of women from Philadelphia who loved Poe, just like she did.”
A chill went up Coletti’s spine as he thought of everything Lenore had told him. She’d said that she wasn’t interested in national historic landmarks. She’d feigned ignorance about the writings of Poe. She’d told him that she’d just met Clarissa Bailey for the first time. They were lies—all of them. But Coletti couldn’t figure out why.
�
�Did the two of you stay in contact after that?” he asked.
“No, but she left something behind,” O’Hanlon said, reaching into his pocket and unfolding two pieces of paper.
He laid them out on the coffee table for both Kirsten and Coletti to see. Kirsten was baffled. Coletti wasn’t.
On one sheet of paper was the original of the map that Clarissa Bailey had scanned into her computer. On the other was the cryptogram and its answer.
“So I guess you’re going to question Lenore now,” O’Hanlon said sadly.
“Yes, we are,” Coletti said with a sigh. “But first we have to find her.”
“What do you mean?” O’Hanlon said as Kirsten looked at Coletti with shock etched on her face.
“Your daughter’s missing, Mr. O’Hanlon. She disappeared from her hotel room about an hour ago.”
CHAPTER 14
Police fanned out across the city to find Lenore. Bus stations, train stations, and the airport were checked. Calls were placed to Princeton and Manhattan. They called every number her husband had left, and neither John nor Lenore was anywhere to be found.
Commissioner Lynch could deal with many things, but incompetence wasn’t one of them. As Mann, Sandy, and a team of homicide detectives pored over the material they’d collected over the course of the investigation, Lynch had the officers who’d been assigned to Lenore brought into an interrogation room in homicide. When they got there, he was waiting.
Lynch watched as cops from internal affairs brought the two patrolmen inside. One of the patrolmen was young and fresh-faced, with wide eyes and a nervous smile that he flashed to hide his fear. The other was older, more seasoned, and he wore the cynical expression of a man who’d been a cop too long.
“Have a seat, gentleman,” Lynch said to the patrolmen.
Both of them sat in scarred metal chairs that were normally reserved for suspects. The cops from internal affairs stood silently at the door as the commissioner sat on the edge of the table and looked down at the patrolmen’s faces.
“Officer Thomas,” Lynch said, reading from the older patrolman’s name tag. “When did you realize that Mrs. Wilkinson was missing?”
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