Buried Innocence - A Mary O'Reilly Paranormal Mystery - Book Thirteen (Mary O'Reilly Paranormal Mystery Series)

by Reid, Terri

  “They passed away when he was in the service,” Mary explained. “They were in a car accident when he was deployed. So, really, the only parents he’s had for years were Jeannine’s mom and dad.”

  “Oh, dear, well no wonder he wants to invite them,” Rosie said. “I really hope they come.”

  Nodding, Mary smiled at her. “Me, too,” she said. “We want to share the news with everyone we love.”

  Rosie put the list back into her purse. “Well, it’s going to be a great party,” Rosie said, and then she turned to look at Stanley, “as long as no one lets the cat out of the bag.”

  “Don’t look at me,” Stanley grumbled. “My lips are sealed. No one is going to hear from me that Mary is going to have a baby—”

  “Stanley!” both women yelled.

  Chuckling softly, Stanley winked at the women. “Just kidding.”

  Chapter Ten

  Mary opened the small, plastic container and took two boiled eggs from it and placed them on the paper plate on top of her small office refrigerator. Putting the lid back on the container, she snapped it closed and put it back on the refrigerator shelf and closed the door. Picking up the small, glass, pepper shaker, she started to sprinkle pepper on the eggs.

  “Hey, Mary, what’s up?” Mike asked as he suddenly appeared next to her.

  Startled, Mary swung around, hurtling the pepper shaker through the air where it crashed into a mirror hanging on the wall and caused it to shatter.

  They both stared at the broken mirror for a moment. Finally, Mike rocked back on his heels and cleared his throat cautiously. “So, how’s that bad luck horoscope working for you so far?” he asked.

  She glared at him for a moment. “Well, I was doing pretty well until a certain someone just made me break a mirror,” she replied. “I believe that’s seven years bad luck if I’m not mistaken.”

  “Mary, you can’t believe in those old superstitions,” Mike said. “They were created back in a day when people were ignorant of true science, when they would believe in anything.”

  “Like ghosts and angels?” Mary countered.

  “Touché,” Mike replied.

  Sighing, Mary picked up a roll of paper towels and her trash can. “Well, I might as well clean it up,” she said, walking across the room to the mess.

  She had just bent over to pick up the first large shard of mirror when her phone rang. Standing, she hurried over to her desk and answered. “Mary O’Reilly.”

  “Hello, Mary, this is Donna from Galena,” the voice on the other end stated. “She came back. She’s here right now, and we want to be sure we ask her the right questions.”

  Mary slipped into her chair and pulled out a pen and paper pad. “That’s great, Donna,” she said. “Can you ask her for her full name?”

  She could hear Donna relaying the information to her son, Ryan, and Ryan asking Liza.

  “Her name is Liza Parker,” Ryan said.

  “Does she know how old she is?” Mary asked.

  Donna repeated the question to Ryan.

  “She’s five, but her birthday is in September and she will be six,” Ryan said brightly.

  Mary’s heart ached for the little girl who would never see her sixth birthday. “Ask her if she knows her address,” Mary said.

  Donna repeated the question and Mary heard Ryan ask it. There was a long pause while Ryan waited for the response. “She doesn’t know her newest address,” he said. “She didn’t live there for very long. That’s where the bad man lives. But she used to live with her first family in a place called Dubuque.”

  “Does she remember the name of her first family?” Mary asked.

  “She said she remembers their last name was Larson,” Ryan said, “because they called her Liza Larson for a little while.”

  “Does she remember what year she lived with the Larsons?” Mary asked, crossing her fingers.

  Donna relayed the question to Ryan, and Mary could hear Ryan asking Liza.

  “She’s getting tired,” Ryan said. “She really doesn’t want to answer any more questions. They make her sad.”

  “If she could just answer this one, it would be so helpful,” Mary pleaded.

  She heard Donna ask Ryan one more time.

  “She says that she remembers a New Year’s Eve Party with the Larsons just before the mom got sick,” Ryan said. “And it was for 2010. Does that help?”

  “It helps a lot,” Mary replied. “Thank you so much. Please tell Liza that she’s done a wonderful job today.”

  “Is there anything else I should do?” Donna asked.

  “If Ryan tells you anything else, please call me,” Mary said. “But you have both been amazing. I’m sure there’s going to be information about a missing girl out there, and this will help me narrow down the search.”

  “Okay, I’ll write anything down that Ryan tells me,” she replied. “Thank you for helping us, Mary.”

  “Thank you for helping Liza,” Mary replied.

  After hanging up the phone, she smiled at Mike, who was busy cleaning up mirror shards. “Well, this should be a piece of cake,” she replied. “There’s got to be a record of this little girl out there somewhere.”

  Chapter Eleven

  Mary sat at a small desk in the corner of Bradley’s office typing on the keyboard connected to a dedicated computer system that accessed the law enforcement databases available to the Freeport Police department. Finally, she sighed with frustration. “I can’t believe there is no record out there,” Mary said, pushing herself away from the desk and computer screen. “A child doesn’t simply disappear and have no one report her. Someone has to know.”

  Bradley looked up from the reports he was filling out at his desk. “No missing persons report?” he asked.

  She shook her head. “No missing persons, no hospital reports, no DCFS reports,” she said. “It’s like she never existed.”

  He leaned back in his chair and tucked his hands behind his head, contemplating the situation for a moment. Finally, he sat forward and met Mary’s eyes. “A couple of months ago, I received a memo about a situation in Wisconsin where a child was re-homed.”

  Mary shook her head. “Re-homed? What’s that?”

  “It’s basically a practice where someone puts an adopted child up for adoption again,” Bradley said. “But the adoptive parents use social networking to find new parents; they don’t go through an agency.”

  “Wait. They give their child away like you would give away a puppy?” Mary asked, shocked.

  Nodding, Bradley reached over and typed on his keyboard. “Yeah, it’s generally done with older kids, and very often they have been international adoptions,” he said. “The parents find they can’t handle the child’s behavior, or circumstances in their lives change. So they look for another home for the child. In the Wisconsin case, the couple who adopted the child turned out to be child molesters. Luckily for the child, the first set of parents decided to check up on the child. It was only when they couldn’t get in touch with the new parents that they called the police and found out the new parents had not only falsified their information but their own children had also been taken away from them because they had violent tendencies.”

  “So, there’s no official record, no documentation for these children that have been re-homed?” Mary asked.

  Bradley shook his head. “No, and according to the reading I did, there have been at least 5000 cases of re-homing in the past five years.”

  “Liza did mention that her family gave her away to someone else,” Mary said. “I wonder if that’s the reason there’s no record.”

  “That makes sense to me,” Bradley agreed.

  “Okay, first I have to get my head around the fact that people would think it’s okay to give away a child,” she said, sitting back in her chair, “to people they don’t know with no background checks, no governmental knowledge, and no safety net for the child.”

  “Not that this is a justification,” Bradley said, “but ma
ny of the cases of re-homing were with older children who had behavioral problems. The parents just couldn’t handle them, so they looked for other families who were more capable of dealing with things like that.”

  “But isn’t adoption kind of like marriage?” Mary asked. “For better or for worse, in sickness and in health? When the going gets tough, you don’t just give a child away.”

  “No, you’re right,” he agreed. “You don’t give up when the going gets tough.”

  Sighing in frustration, Mary picked up her pad of paper and scanned her notes. “Well, this adds a whole different layer to the investigation.”

  “But if she was re-homed, and she was killed by the new parents, it adds more urgency to the case,” Bradley said, “because people are still re-homing their children through the Internet.”

  “Liza said that she lived in Dubuque with her first family,” Mary said. “I would think the first adoption was done legally. Do you think you could make an official call to the courthouse in Dubuque and see if you could gain access to her adoption records?”

  Bradley picked up the phone and pressed a button. “Hi, Dorothy,” he said. “Could you get me the Dubuque County Courthouse in Dubuque, Iowa? I need to talk to someone about adoption records and a possible abuse case.”

  He hung up the phone. “Now we just wait and see how cooperative they are going to be. Generally, especially in cases of child abuse, they will open the closed adoption files.”

  “Well, if that doesn’t work, I’ll be calling every family with the last name of Larson in Dubuque County to find out if they ever adopted a little girl,” Mary said. “This is really frightening, Bradley. That little girl was brutally murdered, and the man who did it to her might be gaining access to other children the same way.”

  Chapter Twelve

  Joseph Amoretti pushed open the doors of the gentlemen’s club and squinted into the bright sunlight. He was a dapper man with an olive complexion, a neatly groomed moustache and dark, thick hair. Dressed casually in designer jeans and a button down shirt, the lifts stuffed inside his leather shoes gave a few more inches to his five-foot five-inch height. He took a deep breath, inhaling the unique scent of the Mississippi River only a hundred feet away. The East Dubuque Strip lay along the riverbank, littered with nightclubs, gentlemen’s clubs and bars. And Joey felt perfectly at home in the area reminiscent of the Illinois town’s darker history.

  He paused in front of his car and checked out his reflection, running his fingers through his hair to give it the tousled, sexy look he felt flattered his face. Opening the car door, he reached in and pulled out a bottle of mouthwash. The few drinks he had allowed himself were just a little treat before he had another busy day, but he didn’t want his wife, Gigi, to notice them on his breath. Taking a swig of the mint-flavored liquid, he swished it around for a minute before spiting it out on the gravel parking lot.

  After opening his car door, he pulled out his wallet, thick with bills, and congratulated himself on another job well done. It hadn’t taken him very long to turn this transaction into profit. She’d only been with him for four months. It was just enough time to present the façade of respectability and reassure the family who had given her up. And she was a beauty, he sighed, shaking his head. If his wife wasn’t so damn crazy, he might have considered keeping the girl around.

  With a slight shrug, he slid his light frame behind the wheel of his car and headed home. He needed to shower, shave and change into his vestments to meet the newest member of his family. He glanced into the rearview mirror and noted his bloodshot eyes. “Yeah, the good reverend is going to have to use some eye drops to make himself presentable,” he sneered. “Don’t want to screw up the deal.”

  Driving away from the Mississippi river, he continued up the winding roads that led away from downtown East Dubuque into the solitude of the countryside. Considering himself an expert in crime throughout history, he smirked as he passed through quiet, residential neighborhoods and picturesque parks. “All dressed up and looking respectable,” he muttered, “when you know you ain’t any better than me. Ain’t nothing but window dressing.”

  In its heyday, East Dubuque was known as “Sin City” for its speakeasies, nightclubs, whiskey stills hidden in the hills during Prohibition, and its connection with the notorious mobster, Al Capone.

  “There’s always a market for sin,” Joey said, thinking about the money in his wallet.

  He drove south beyond the town limits into the countryside. These roads, the same ones the bootleggers used nearly a hundred years ago, wove through thick, forested woods and farmlands to isolated destinations that were perfect for concealing all kinds of nefarious actions.

  Finally, after about twenty minutes, he pulled up on the dirt road in front of the dilapidated farmhouse and parked his car. Before he exited the car, the front door of the house opened and a petite middle-aged woman met him. She was dressed in a modest skirt and blouse, her hair carefully coiffed. She wore pearls around her neck and on studs through her earlobes. She looked decisively like a minister’s wife until you looked into her eyes.

  Angelina Gambino Amoretti, or Gigi as her daddy always called her, was the daughter of one of the top crime bosses in Chicago. She was a real looker, curves in all the right places, blonde hair that glimmered in the light, and a mouth that was so plump and ripe it took all he had not to taste it the first time he met her. Yeah, he thought, grabbing his wallet from the dashboard, and see where that got me.

  “How did it go?” Gigi asked.

  He reached in his wallet and pulled out the stack of hundred dollar bills. “We hit the jackpot,” he said, placing a kiss on her cheek. “And she was worth every cent.”

  She snatched the bills from his hand, placed them inside her handbag and then looked him over. “You look and smell disgusting,” she said. “Go in and clean up, and be quick about it. We’ve got to drive down to Clinton to meet this new family.”

  “Yeah, I’m going,” he grumbled.

  “And this time, don’t forget to bring your holy books,” she called after him. “What kind of minister are you without a Bible?”

  He stopped on the first step of the porch and turned back to her. “The kind that gets his rewards here on earth, my dear,” he sneered, grabbing his crotch and smiling, “and enjoys the blessings of the flesh.”

  “Yes, I noticed,” she said, glaring at him with such venom that he nearly stumbled. “In the future, just remember that I give you the ones you can sample. The other ones, you keep your hands off.”

  He shrugged. “Just breaking them in, my dear,” he replied carefully. “They don’t mean nothing to me. None of them are as sexy as you are.”

  Her eyes softened for a moment, and then she shook her head. “Don’t try to sweet-talk me, you Casanova. You don’t touch them unless I say so,” she repeated. “Do you understand?”

  Nodding, he stepped back toward the door. “Yeah. I do,” he said.

  “Good,” she said, meeting his eyes. “Because I can dig a big hole in the forest just as well as I can dig a small one.”

  A chill ran down his spine as he considered the collection of graves behind their barn. “I won’t touch one ever again, Gigi,” he breathed. “I promise.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  “Where are you going?” Mike asked, appearing in front of Mary as she headed out of her office door.

  She stopped suddenly, her hand on her chest, and took a deep breath. “You really have to stop doing that,” she said pointedly. “This can’t be good for the baby.”

  Mike looked ashamed. “Sorry,” he said.

  “Really. I’m sorry,” he repeated when she gave him a skeptical look. “I was just going to check in on you, and suddenly, you’re going out the door. Does Bradley know?”

  Sighing audibly, Mary put her hands on her hips and met Mike’s eyes. “I am going to Galena,” she said. “I need to see if I can find out any more information about Steve. Bradley does know that I’m going, but
not because I have to ask his permission to do my job. He knows because we both let each other know what we are doing. I’m fine. I’m healthy. And I can drive my car.”

  “Yeah, yeah, I know you can,” Mike said. “It’s just…well, Mary, you’re pregnant. And I’ve never gone through pregnancy before.”

  “And you’re not going through pregnancy now,” Mary replied.

  “Well, yeah, okay, if you want to be technical,” he said, feeling hurt. “I just don’t know how to protect you.”

  She slowly shook her head. “Mike, is that your assignment? To protect me?” she asked. “Or are you just getting a little carried away here?”

  “Well, I get to watch over you now, too,” he said. “Because of the baby.”

  “Well then, I don’t mind you watching over me, and I don’t mind your company,” she said. “But could you just calm down a little? You’re making me nervous.”

  “Sorry,” he said. “I’ll try to be calmer.”

  He slid out of the way so she could open the door, but then she stopped and looked outside. A light summer rain had begun to fall. Reaching over to the coat rack near the door, she grabbed an umbrella and started to open it.

  “Mary! Stop!” he yelled.

  She froze. “What?” she demanded.

  “You nearly opened an umbrella inside,” he said. “That’s bad luck.”

  She looked at him and then looked at the umbrella. “You’re right,” she said. “I forgot.”

  She stepped up to the door, held the umbrella outside and then opened it. “Thanks, Mike,” she replied. “I certainly don’t need any more bad luck coming my way.”

  She walked to her car with Mike following alongside. “So what are we doing in Galena today?” he asked.

  “We?” she replied, lifting an eyebrow.

  “You said you didn’t mind my company,” he said with a charming smile.

  Laughing, she shook her head as she entered the car. “Well, we are going to stop at Amelia’s and see if she can shed any light on what could have happened to Steve.”