Nobody Knows

by Mary Jane Clark

  While he waited for backup, Danny started the paperwork. He took the initial offense report form from the aluminum strongbox fastened to the back of the ATV, filling in the date and time. Then he asked the boy his name.

  “Vincent. Vincent Bayler.”

  “How old are you, Vincent?”

  “Eleven.”

  On the small side for eleven, the deputy thought. This kid looked like he spent a lot of time outdoors. The tips of his eyelashes were bleached white. So were the hairs on his bronzed arms and legs. Danny stared at Vincent, still not able to put his finger on where he had seen the boy before. “Address?”

  “603 Calle de Peru.”

  Now he remembered. He had responded to a call at this kid’s house last winter. This Vincent had called 911 when his little brother had some sort of coughing attack. Yeah, that was it. The little guy had cystic fibrosis.

  The mother had left the older brother in charge while she was working. But, to her credit, Danny remembered, she’d come running when her son phoned her. She was the one who told Vincent to call the police while she was on her way. The deputy and the mother had arrived at the tiny bungalow at about the same time. It had been raining. He recalled the sound of the heavy tropical raindrops falling on the tin roof, persistent background noise for the younger boy’s racking cough.

  The call had ended with a ride to the hospital emergency room, where the sheriff’s deputy had left the family of three. Danny was ashamed now that he had never followed up to see how they had made out. But, as he recalled it, that was the night before Colleen gave birth to Robbie. Yeah, he remembered clearly now. Looking at his healthy baby in the nursery bassinet and saying a silent prayer that his tiny son would never have to go through the agony that the little Bayler boy had gone through the night before.

  Now, the deputy regarded Vincent’s solemn face with respect and compassion.

  For an eleven-year-old kid, Vincent had a lot of responsibility. It couldn’t be easy having a brother as sick as that. Plus, there didn’t seem to be any father around. There was an air of sadness about the boy. Too sad and too serious for a young kid.

  Deputy Gregg could not know that Vincent was trying with all his might to keep the solemn expression on his freckled face as he answered the officer’s questions. He recounted how he had discovered the hand and then flagged down a jogger and asked him to find a telephone and call the police. The deputy noticed that the boy told his story with his fists clenched and stuffed into the pockets of his baggy shorts. But he couldn’t see that Vincent’s left palm was closed around the ruby ring the boy had twisted and pried from the severed hand before he called for help.

  CHAPTER 6

  Showered, dressed, and made up, Cassie drove her Ford Explorer through the guardhouse and clicked her battery-powered opener to raise the security gates. On the way out to Biscayne Boulevard, she stopped for gas at the Texaco station that also served as a mini–grocery store. A working girl’s best friend, the convenience store had milk, juice, bread, snack food; it even stocked a decent wine selection. Cassie didn’t like to recall how many times she had stopped on her way home after a long day and picked up a bottle of Kendall-Jackson Merlot knowing that it would keep her company for the rest of the evening.

  As she inserted the nozzle into the gas tank, she thought with a pang about why she’d chosen this vehicle from the used-car lot. She had purchased the gold-colored SUV when she arrived in Miami because it was relatively cheap and would have space for the gear for all the things she told herself it would be great to take up. Scuba diving, sailing, golfing, weekend trips to the Keys. Things that Cassie hoped would lure Hannah down to visit. Activities and trips that hadn’t materialized. Hannah had refused to come down. Cassie hadn’t had the desire to follow through on the planned activities on her own.

  “I’ll take a lottery ticket, Manuel,” she said as she paid the cashier.

  “You feel lucky, señora?” The cashier smiled as he handed her the ticket.

  “Yes, Manuel, so lucky. You wouldn’t believe how lucky I feel.” She tried to keep the sarcasm from her voice.

  At the beginning of the five-mile drive south from her condo to the office, Cassie passed a country club, a few churches, and a couple of shopping centers. Then the neighborhood took a decided turn for the worse as she drove by sleazy, no-tell motels. It wasn’t that Washington didn’t have any seamy neighborhoods, Cassie reflected. Far from it. But Cassie didn’t have to drive through any on her way to and from work every day. Her life had changed dramatically, and she was still shell-shocked.

  If she felt like a sleepwalker going through the motions of her day-to-day existence, Cassie wondered how Pamela Lynch was faring. Any FBI director was held under a magnifying glass, but for the first female director the scrutiny was ratcheted higher still. Pamela Lynch was expected to do her job each day, and though it was tragic that her daughter had killed herself, in the end no one but her family and friends really cared. The press corps wouldn’t give her any passes if she fouled up. She had to perform every day, whether her heart was broken forever or not. In that way, Cassie supposed, she and the powerful woman who was suing her were a lot alike. Of the two of them, though, Cassie knew she had the better deal. She would rather be herself, tangled though her life might be, because Pamela Lynch’s daughter was dead and nothing could bring her back. Cassie’s Hannah was alive, and Cassie still had a chance to make things right between them.

  For the rest of her life, Cassie knew she would regret Maggie Lynch’s death and the part she had played in it. She could try to rationalize it with the belief she had been doing her job and the public had a right to know that the director was using the FBI to find her daughter’s attacker. Yet a young woman whose promising life lay before her couldn’t face a world that knew her secret. A secret that Cassie had broadcast to the entire country.

  Cassie wished, oh how she wished, that she could turn back the clock.

  Though she was extremely worried about the lawsuit, part of Cassie felt she deserved to be sued. If the reverse had happened, and something Pamela Lynch said or did had contributed to Hannah’s death, a lawsuit would be a poor substitute for the more visceral urge to use her bare hands to take revenge on Lynch.

  The voice from the Explorer’s radio pulled Cassie from her reverie. “That tropical storm in the Gulf of Mexico is building quickly. They’re calling it Giselle. Winds are being clocked at seventy miles per hour.”

  Cassie had a sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach.

  CHAPTER 7

  Most mornings Etta Chambers came home from her early morning search on Siesta Beach with her plastic bag filled with a nice assortment of shells. Turkey wings and whelks, conches and cockles and lion’s paws. Occasionally she came across an unbroken black sand dollar or a starfish. Since they were still alive, Etta always threw those back into the ocean. But today there was very little in Etta’s shell bag. Her search had been interrupted by the ruckus at the beach.

  “Charles? Charles!” she called out as she came through the front door of the town house she shared with her husband of forty-seven years. “Charles, where are you?”

  “I’m out here, Etta. Where I am every morning when you come home from the beach, honey.”

  Etta followed her husband’s voice to the screened lanai, where Charles sat with his feet up in a lounge chair reading the newspaper. “Charles, you’ll never guess what happened!” she said, continuing on before he had a chance to respond. “A woman’s hand was found on the beach. You know that boy we always see with the metal detector? He found a woman’s hand!”

  Charles closed the Sarasota Herald-Tribune and put it in his lap to listen to Etta’s story. The boy, the seaweed, the police. Charles was impressed by Etta’s description of the hand and the fact that his usually squeamish wife had gotten so close and taken in the gory details so thoroughly.

  “The hand was all bloated and some of the fingertips were actually missing,” said Etta, her eyes wide. “Bu
t I think there was a delicate bone structure beneath the puffiness. And I’m sure it was a woman’s hand because there was bright red polish still painted on some of the fingernails. I think she was a racy kind of woman, Charles. There was a little black spiderweb painted on the pinkie nail.” Though it was growing warmer by the minute on the lanai, Etta rubbed her bare arms as she finished relating what she had seen. “You don’t think this kind of thing happens around here much, do you, Charles? This is the type of thing we wanted to get away from up north.”

  “Etta, we’ve been here almost a year now, and this is the most exciting thing that’s happened yet.”

  “Exciting? How can you say it’s exciting? It’s horrible!”

  Charles shrugged. “All right. Horrible. It’s a horrible thing, Etta, but I’m sure it’s not reflective of life down here. And, as a matter of fact, I wouldn’t say that we retired down here to get away from this sort of thing up north. McLean, Virginia, wasn’t exactly the inner city, dear. We came down here to get away from the cold and the gray winter days and because the kids had moved out so there wasn’t any sense in having that big house anymore. Now we don’t have to rake leaves, shovel snow, or scrape ice off the car.”

  Etta waved at her husband dismissively. “You know what I mean, Charles. I like to think of this as our little island paradise.” She looked through the screen out to the expanse of green water that led to the Gulf. A heron swooped gracefully across the sky. “I don’t want crime and ugliness to invade our world here, Charles. We’ve worked very hard, and now I want to sit back and enjoy life. I don’t want to worry about murder and someone lopping someone else’s hand off.”

  “Who said anything about murder?” asked Charles. “Maybe the poor soul had an accident or committed suicide.”

  Etta paused to consider her husband’s theories, but it wasn’t long before she was distracted. “What time is it?” she asked sharply.

  Charles glanced at his gold watch. “Almost nine.”

  “Oh. I have to get into the shower,” she said, forgetting the hand on the beach for the time being. Forgetting until she got up to the Ringling grounds and could tell the other volunteers who staffed the art museum, the circus museum, and Cà d’Zan, the former winter residence of John and Mable Ringling. Etta had hurried to get involved as soon as they moved down here. She worked at the gift shop or staffed the admission desk, and she was studying to become a docent. She looked forward to being able to give visitor tours and answer questions about the history of the Ringling family and about John Ringling himself, the man who had forever linked the circus with Sarasota.

  “You won’t forget to meet me at Dr. Lewis’s office at eleven-fifteen, will you, Charles?”

  “Don’t worry, Etta, I’ll be there.”

  Etta turned and went back into the town house and up the stairs as her husband rose from his lounge and walked slowly from the lanai through the living room and into the galley kitchen. He pulled a quart of orange juice from the refrigerator and poured himself a tall glass.

  “Ahh,” he said to no one but himself. The orange juice just plain tasted better down here. So did the fruit and the vegetables and the chicken.

  Charles shook his head as he went back into the living room and switched on the TV. He couldn’t believe how much time he spent thinking about the quality of his food these days. For four decades of his job as a contractor, he hadn’t cared what Etta served for dinner at night—as long as it was ready when he got home. Now, not only did he care but he was doing most of the shopping and cooking.

  He had to admit Etta had been making more of a life for herself here than he had. Not only did she volunteer at Ringling but she had joined a book club and a garden club. She had made friends, and Charles had the distinct feeling that she could be doing more with her new pals if she so desired. He’d heard her turn down telephoned luncheon invitations many times. When he’d asked her why she was declining, Etta had pecked him on the cheek and told him that she’d come to Florida to spend her days with him. It was her husband she wanted to be with, she said, but still, she knew they couldn’t be together every minute. They would drive each other insane.

  It would be healthier if he found some outside interests, too, Charles thought as he settled into the big chair across the room from the television. But what? He had never taken up golf, and truth be told, he wasn’t exactly enthusiastic about learning now. Maybe fishing? He should track down that old fisherman who was always at the beach and see if he would share his knowledge.

  The retiree’s attention was diverted by the Suncoast News meteorologist, who was talking about the tropical storm in the Gulf of Mexico and explaining the storm grading system. “Winds up to thirty-eight miles per hour, that’s a tropical depression. If winds reach thirty-nine miles per hour, that’s a tropical storm. When a tropical storm reaches a constant wind speed of seventy-four miles per hour or greater—that’s a hurricane.

  “Stay tuned, folks, and we’ll keep our audience in the Sarasota Bay area up to speed on how Giselle develops.”

  CHAPTER 8

  Cassie drove into the parking deck underneath the fifteen-story bank building that housed what was left of the KEY News Miami Bureau and gave the garage attendant a quick “Buenos días.” She eased the Explorer into her designated slot, next to the one marked EL JEFE, the space for the boss. But the latest round of corporate layoffs had eliminated the head count for a Miami bureau chief. Senior Producer Leroy Barry had inherited the boss spot. Leroy’s parking space was empty.

  The bundle of newspapers was waiting near the elevator, and Cassie picked it up. The Miami Herald, The New York Times, USA Today, and The Washington Post. It stung every morning to see the masthead of what had been her hometown paper. Cassie had to force herself to go through the Post’s pages, reading about people with whom she had been on a first-name basis, people who’d always returned her calls, people who didn’t want to know her anymore. Once, Cassie had influence and power in the Beltway world; now she was weak. In an environment based on power and access, weakness was repulsive. Even those who sympathized with her situation were uncomfortable associating with her, and Cassie knew it.

  She was a leper.

  If she had paid more attention to her family and less to the job, it would be different. She would have drawn strength and emotional sustenance from a loving relationship with her husband and daughter. But she had neglected both Hannah and Jim. She hadn’t meant to, but she had. Everything at KEY News had seemed so damned important. It was so easy to get sucked in. The broadcasting adrenaline was addictive and intoxicating. Now, especially without her family, withdrawal was excruciating.

  Yelena Gregory had tried to make the Miami assignment sound positive when she broke the news that it was her decision, as president of the news division, that Cassie move from the Washington Bureau, but not to New York as planned. Both women, though, knew the truth.

  It was fine to be stationed as Miami correspondent on the way up the news ladder. But Cassie most definitely was on the way down. Wanting to make a point, Pamela Lynch was suing KEY News along with Cassie for $100 million. KEY News was sticking with Cassie while the case was in the courts. But after that, Cassie suspected she’d be on her own, cut loose by the company she had worked for most of her professional life.

  How quickly things change, she thought as she got off the elevator on the eleventh floor and walked along the outside terrace to the office. Six months ago she was on track for the spot on Hourglass. Her agent had been salivating about going into the next contract negotiations. Now he didn’t return her calls.

  Cassie punched in the security code at the front door, which unlocked with a buzzing sound. She entered the dark and depressing space. A large office, meant for dozens of staffers, was now used by only a handful. Because of the leaner operation across the board, the KEY corporate stock was doing well. Cassie knew this because she was suddenly paying attention. The shares she had accumulated over the years would be up for grabs in the
divorce proceedings.

  Her office was off to the side of the no-longer-busy central newsroom. She went in and whipped through the newspapers, listened to her voice mail, and checked her e-mail. Next she scanned her computer for the Evening Headlines early rundown. Cassie felt another catch in her throat as she saw that Valeria Delaney was slated to do a story from the Justice Department. Valeria was an ambitious young thing, and she was lobbying hard for the justice correspondent title officially left unfilled since Cassie’s departure.

  Cassie pushed the phone pad keys and waited for further humiliation. She had to keep calling the Fishbowl, pitching story ideas, and see if they’d bite.

  “Bullock,” came the curt answer.

  “It’s Cassie Sheridan, Range.” Why did she feel like a nervous kid when she got the executive producer on the line?

  “Yeah, Cassie. What’ve you got?”

  She knew Range was just going through the motions with her, though neither of them wanted to acknowledge it. Almost every story Cassie had proposed since she had been in Miami had been flatly rejected. The reasons given had varied, but she knew the bottom line: they didn’t want her on the air. Not unless it was to do the miserable stories that no one at her stage of the game really wanted to do. For those awful natural disaster stories, the Fishbowl would use her.

  “There’s a story in the Herald this morning, Range, about the FBI’s Organized Crime/Drug Program investigation of drug trafficking here in Miami. I thought I’d call around and see what I could come up with on it.”

  There was a momentary pause on the line.

  “Range?”

  “I think it would be best if Valeria worked on this one, Cassie. Why don’t you give her a call and ask her to check things out with the FBI?”