Once outside, Wally heard a low whistle come from the side fence of the property, where she had seen her crew crouching out of sight. They were still there, motioning for her to hurry. Wally traversed the yard and leapt over the fence, tumbling down in the brush beside her friends.
“Are you okay?” Ella asked in a panic.
“I’m fine,” said Wally, breathless but feeling a sense of relief. “That was you guys who rang at the door?”
“Yeah,” Jake said. “We did a ring-and-run to distract them.”
“Wally,” Tevin said, “we’re so sorry. Those guys snuck up to the house from the side yard. We didn’t see them until they were at the back door.”
“It’s okay, you did great,” Wally assured them. “Let’s just get the hell away from here.”
The four of them crashed through some brush into a neighbor’s yard, staying low, then moved directly toward Crichton Road. Wally got her shoulder bag back from Ella and was just reaching for her phone when the Fantasy Island cab pulled onto Crichton Road and slowed down to park in front of the Hatch home. Wally stepped into the street and waved the cabbie over. He accelerated and pulled up in front of the neighboring house, where they were waiting, and signaled them to jump in. They did, and he drove off.
“Thought I’d check back in case you needed a ride,” the mellow young cabbie said. As he looked into his rearview mirror, seeing all four of them breathless and looking spooked, he asked, “How was your visit?”
The cabdriver dropped them off at the Shelter Island marina for their return trip. Wally thanked the cabbie and tipped him lavishly.
“Wow,” said the cabbie, reacting to the extra fifty bucks. “Are you sure? It was just a few miles.”
“I’m sure. Thanks again.”
He shrugged and smiled, pocketing the tip. “You’ve got my card.” He gave her a winning grin and drove off.
Within a few minutes, Wally and the crew were at the bow of the ferry again, the chilly wind to their backs this time, looking out over the water and waiting for their heart rates to return to normal.
“It was him, right?” Ella was the first to speak. “One of those guys was the one from the picture?”
“Yeah,” Tevin said. “I got a pretty good look. It was him.”
“He’s looking for her,” Wally said, certain she was right, remembering the gratified tone in the man’s voice when he had spotted the ancient photograph on the wall of the Hatches’ house and spoken her mother’s name—Yalena—before pulling the photo from the wall and taking it with him. And why was an old photograph of her Russian mother pinned to the wall of that house? Things were all tied together somehow—Yalena, the Hatches, and the two intruders in the Hatches’ house.
“He’s looking for Yalena,” Wally repeated.
“And he’s following the same leads that you are,” said Jake.
Wally nodded in agreement, feeling a jacked-up sense of urgency.
“I have to find her first.”
TEN
The streetlights along Centre Street were just flickering on as Atley parked his car and stepped into Bergin’s Pub. He took a table at the back and ordered a beer to nurse while he reviewed Wallis Stoneman’s Social Services file. While he waited for his drink to arrive, Atley checked his voice mail and listened to messages from his lieutenant and his watch commander, both curious about why he had nothing to show for all the hours he was putting in on the Sophia Manetti murder. The only other message was the one he had heard two hours earlier from his longtime friend Bill Horst, special agent at the FBI’s Manhattan headquarters.
“Yo, Atley,” came Bill’s voice on the voice mail recording, “I’ve got something you might need. I’ll be at Bergin’s around five.”
Atley erased the messages and checked his watch, confirming that he had at least fifteen minutes before Horst showed up. His pint of ice-cold Stella arrived, and Atley took a deep end-of-the-workday drink before finally opening Wallis’s file. He could see right off that it would be interesting reading, some of it familiar juvenile stuff, some not so much.
The collection of documents covered the previous two or three years, a time when Wallis Stoneman started acting out in various ways and eventually ended up on the street. There was truancy, of course, and several cases in juvenile court, mostly minor stuff—two instances of shoplifting, a charge for resisting arrest when she and some friends were stopped in the East Village at three in the morning. Wallis was expelled for disciplinary reasons from Harpswell and two other expensive prep schools.
When she finally ran away from home, Wallis’s record showed that she was frequently in the company of someone named Nick Pierce and—there she was—Sophia Manetti, recently deceased. Pierce was a runaway minor one year older than Wallis but with a very long record in juvenile court, including drug charges. Apparently the two of them were no longer connected. There were no other mentions in the file regarding the Manetti girl.
According to the file, much of the grief in Wallis’s life seemed connected to the fact that she had been adopted, a detail that hadn’t come up in Atley’s interview with Claire Stoneman. Atley had friends who had been through some of that stuff. The adopted kid reaches adolescence and the usual rebellion issues can get magnified, sometimes to an extreme, as if they wake up one day and they’re living in a stranger’s home. For the most part, it seemed the mother had done what she could to heal the situation, including various types of counseling, but with mixed results.
There were a couple of special entries in the files by her caseworker that amounted to warnings. In an effort to help her daughter learn discipline and channel her emotions, Claire Stoneman had enrolled Wallis in a mixed martial arts program at a well-known dojo up on Columbus. The girl had kept with it for two years. Wallis was an angry and defiant twelve-year-old when she began the training. After two years of high-level classes she was an angry and defiant fourteen-year-old who now knew fifty different ways to cripple a man. In addition, the mother’s ex-husband, Jason Stoneman, was a gun owner, and for safety reasons he had schooled Wallis on the use of various firearms.
Fantastic, thought Atley. Nice parenting. Mr. and Mrs. Stoneman had turned their daughter into a one-teenager wrecking crew, currently at large on the streets of New York City and, apparently, uncatchable. There had been a PINS warrant out on her for a full year, but in that time she hadn’t been collared, not even once.
Atley finished the file and his first beer just as Bill Horst arrived.
“Brother Atley.” Bill flashed a smile as he sat down and signaled the waitress for two Stellas.
Bill had been a classmate of Atley’s back at the academy, almost twenty years earlier. One day during a lecture break, two FBI agents had appeared and stolen Bill away, presumably to be tasked on an undercover assignment that required a face with no law enforcement history. Atley never found out why the feds had chosen Bill—a raw recruit—or what his assignment had been. Bill had been completely off the radar for almost ten years, then shown up in the city again as a regular duty agent in the FBI’s Manhattan field office.
“What’ve you got for me?” Atley asked.
Their beers arrived. Bill nodded thanks to the waitress, then waited for her to leave before continuing. “You put out a BOLO on some girl from the Upper West?”
“I did,” said Atley, surprised. He had put out a Be On the Look Out bulletin for Wallis Stoneman but had distributed it to local law enforcement only. He couldn’t imagine how the sixteen-year-old could possibly be of interest to the bureau. “Her name is Wallis Stoneman. Street kid.”
“She a perp?”
“No,” said Atley. “Witness, hopefully. Source, maybe. How’d the BOLO come across your desk?”
“Are you kidding? All of us in the Manhattan field office are huge fans of your work,” said Bill. “We have a special bulletin board to keep us up to date on your current cases.”
“Fuck off,” said Atley.
Bill smiled. “We got a double homicide
up the coast yesterday. You know Shelter Island?”
“Heard of it, never been there.”
“The victims …” Bill paused, clearly trying to figure out how much information to share with Atley, a non-fed. “Okay, so … we had a guy on a watch list, just him at first and eventually we added his two sons also. Benjamin Hatch, sons Andrew and Robert. Those names mean anything to you?”
“Nope,” said Atley, still perplexed as to how Wallis Stoneman could possibly fit into a federal case.
“Anyway,” Bill continued, “this Hatch guy … he ran an import business. A few years back the bureau caught word he was sidestepping Customs regs. We ended up plugging his name and his boys’ into a watch list, just to keep a heads-up; you know how much of a hard-on Homeland Security has for overseas trade activity. Years go by, no hits ever come up on Hatch or the sons.”
“How many years?”
“Ten or more. Hatch croaked three years ago. As for the sons, there’s been nothing … until yesterday. Apparently, the Hatch boys were out running errands and came home to some surprise visitors. Whoever it was left an awful mess. Andrew and Robert both very dead, very wet. The local cops put the Hatches’ names into the system and the case gets flagged on our end ’cause they’re still on our watch list. We went up there to show some due diligence.”
“Did you find anything?”
“Nope,” said Bill. “Nothing for us. Just homicide, far as we could tell. We left the case for the local yokels.”
“Okay …” said Atley, still waiting to hear what all this had to do with Wallis Stoneman.
Bill pulled out his smart phone and scrolled through the content files for a moment, looking for something. When he found it, he hit play and handed the phone to Atley. It was a color video clip—surprisingly sharp—shot from above by a security camera in what looked like a train station platform. The footage showed four teenagers on the platform, dressed in emo street attire. Looking closely, Atley identified one of the teens as Wallis Stoneman. As he continued to watch the footage, a train arrived at the station. Wallis and her friends climbed aboard the train and rode away.
“That’s her,” said Atley, handing the phone back to Bill. “What station is that?”
“Greenport, end of the line. Near the ferry landing for Shelter Island, yesterday. Day of the killings.”
Atley considered this for a second and gave Bill a look. “You’re not thinking these kids had anything to do with the murders. …”
“Nah,” said Bill. “The local cops have a pretty solid timeline and a general description of the two unsubs and their vehicle. Plus, your kids left Greenport at least two hours before time of death. We went over the security camera footage from the train station and parking lot, hoping to spot the unsubs in the vicinity—”
“Okay,” said Atley. “So, your facial recognition system scanned the faces at the station and ran them against current warrants, and that’s how my BOLO popped up. I don’t suppose your super-secret software can tell me what young Wallis Stoneman and her friends were doing way the hell up Long Island. …”
“I do not know, my friend,” Bill said with a cheerful grin, “and as of right now, I consider it your problem, not mine. Cheers.”
ELEVEN
The day after the Shelter Island trip, Wally woke up feeling more focused than ever. The quest to find her biological mother had begun with a sort of dreamy, fairy-tale quality to it, but that feeling had evaporated with the sight of the armed men in the Hatches’ house, especially the one whose photograph was in the Brighton Beach file. He was the most dangerous man, someone whose very presence inspired terror. She suspected—no, felt certain—that she and that man had crossed paths for one simple reason: they were both searching for Yalena. Wally felt just as certain that if she did not find her mother before he did, then she would never find her at all.
Wally joined the others in the bank’s employee break room, where they were drinking microwave hot cocoa and eating day-old bagels.
“I’m headed to the library,” she said. “What Andrew Hatch said about ‘Emerson’ people … I’m going to run that down, if I can.”
“We’re kind of freaked out,” Ella confessed to Wally.
“There are guns in this now, Wally,” Jake said. “You’ve run into some serious shit, whatever it is.”
“I know.”
“You’re done with the Hatch brothers, right?” Tevin asked. “You’re not going back there?”
“For now I’m just going to try to figure out the Emerson thing,” Wally said, wondering if she had already taken the quest too far but knowing that if she gave it up, she would never forgive herself. “I just have to keep moving forward. I’ll catch up with you later.”
Wally threw her messenger bag over her shoulder and hurried out the bank’s rear exit, through the narrow walkway to the street. There she took an extra look around to be sure she was not being observed; the encounter on Shelter Island had put her on alert. If she and those men really were both hunting the same person, they might cross paths again at any time. She scanned 87th Street, looking for anything unusual. As far as she could tell, her exit was safe, and she made her way east to Amsterdam Avenue and had just turned north when she heard footsteps behind her and turned to find Tevin standing there.
“You’re okay alone?” he asked.
It was easy for Wally to see that he wanted her to invite him along, that he wanted her to need him. But it was more responsibility than she could handle for the moment.
“Thanks, Tev.” She gave him a smile. “Yeah, I’m okay.”
He nodded, doing his best not to seem disappointed as he turned around and headed back in the direction of the bank.
The Internet access area of the library had twenty stations running, and Wally had to wait only ten minutes before one came open.
She took her coat off and logged on to her station, opening a search engine on the home page. She typed in the name Emerson just to see what would come up: more than four million hits. Wally thought for a moment, then entered both Emerson and Hatch. One hundred and forty thousand hits. She then entered three terms: Emerson, Hatch, and Russia. The hits on these terms were equally forbidding—several hundred. The first page of results began with a reference to Cabott Emerson III, former American ambassador to the Soviet Union.
Wally pulled up Wikipedia and entered Emerson’s name. The man’s full biography came up, revealing that Emerson had served in the Soviet Union for almost twenty years and had been an advisor on Soviet affairs to four American presidents. He had died in the mid-seventies. At the end of the Wikipedia biography was a list of related hits on the search terms, and the third one caught Wally’s eye: the Emerson School, named after Cabott Emerson III and located in Moscow.
Hadn’t the Wall Street Journal article described Benjamin Hatch as “a former teacher”? Wally did a basic Google search for the Emerson School and clicked on the first link. The Emerson School site came up on her screen but immediately presented Wally with a hurdle: the opening page was nothing more than a log-on screen, requesting a user name and password to gain access.
That was strange, Wally thought. The Internet site of most any school, especially a private one, would usually be the equivalent of an admissions brochure, featuring lots of information about faculty, curriculum, campus layout, and admissions procedures. The Emerson School offered nothing. A log-on screen was the equivalent of a sign reading PRIVATE PROPERTY—NO TRESPASSING. Wally tried another tack. She navigated back to Wikipedia and did a search for the Emerson School there. Here Wally had success: the article included a fairly long entry about the school, reviewing its history, the focus of its curriculum, exterior photos of the campus, and a list of notable alumni.
What Wally learned there explained the unfriendly reception at the school’s own site. The Emerson School was a private, K–12, American-run school in Moscow that was named after the distinguished American ambassador and geared toward the needs of the Western diplomatic c
orps living full time in Russia. The student body consisted mostly of the children of diplomats and business executives from the United States and other Western countries; the security of students would be a priority.
Did Benjamin Hatch teach at the Emerson School during his time in Russia? Did Yalena Mayakova herself have some sort of connection to Emerson as well? If she did, then maybe her relationship with Benjamin Hatch had begun there. If so, maybe Benjamin Hatch had helped Yalena reach America. Maybe Wally’s best chance for getting closer to her mother was to move backward instead of forward, to retrace Yalena’s path to America as a way of finding out why she had left Russia and where she had eventually landed.
It was a lot of maybes. Wally didn’t know for sure if learning more about the Emerson School would bring her closer to finding Yalena here in the States, but this string of possible relationships—from Yalena to the Emerson School to Benjamin Hatch to America—was the only real lead she had. She needed access past the firewall of the Emerson School site.
Of the people in Wally’s life, she knew only one who had the computer skills to penetrate a secure website; before he began his outlaw life on the street, Nick Pierce had been a computer sciences geek in his suburban New Jersey high school. Nick could help Wally; whether or not he would was another question. There was bad blood.
Wally tried a few of Nick’s old squats on the Lower East Side but came up empty—two of them were boarded shut, and a third had been renovated from a thrashed old industrial storage space into expensive loft apartments. She walked south on Avenue B and crossed East Houston toward the place that was her last best chance of finding Nick, the Essex Street subway station.
Dark Eyes Page 10
