by R. G. Belsky
It was right after we got into the bedroom. He had taken his clothes off and was helping me out of mine.
“I guess we have Lucy Devlin to thank for this, huh?”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“Well, if she hadn’t gotten herself kidnapped that day, you and I might not be here now. Wherever she is—dead or alive—we should thank little Lucy. We’re going to have sex because of her.”
I pulled away from him.
“What’s wrong?” he asked.
“That’s a terrible thing to say.”
“C’mon, I’m just kidding.”
“Kidding about something like that?”
“Clare, don’t make a big deal out of it.”
“Yeah, well, try telling that to her mother.”
He tried to kiss me again, but I pulled away. I didn’t want to touch him. I suddenly couldn’t stand the sight of this man.
Without even thinking about what I was doing, I stood up and started to put my clothes back on.
Grayson looked confused.
“What are you doing?”
“Leaving.”
“But I thought you wanted to be here with me.”
“That’s before you made the Lucy Devlin crack.”
“You’re really overreacting.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Okay, let’s just forget about it and start all over again.”
“How about you go ahead without me?”
I wasn’t sure why I reacted exactly the way I did. I knew it was just a casual, offhand remark. Sure, it was in bad taste. But I said stuff like that all the time. Everyone does in a newsroom, and I’ve done a lot worse.
But there was something about the way he’d brought Lucy Devlin into the bedroom with us that really got to me.
Something that made me believe I could never be intimate with this man.
So, I got dressed, walked out the door of Elliott Grayson’s apartment, and never looked back.
CHAPTER 31
ONE DAY NOT long after that, I got a call from a hospital in Manhattan. They said Anne Devlin had taken a sudden turn for the worse in her battle against cancer and been admitted to the hospital. They said she was asking to see me.
When I got to the hospital, there was no one else in her room. Anne was hooked to a breathing apparatus and tubes that fed her and equipment that monitored her vital body signs.
A nurse walked by in the hallway where I stood looking in the room. She was middle-aged, stocky, and had a name tag that said her name was Joyce.
“How long has she been here?” I asked.
“They brought her in yesterday,” the nurse named Joyce said.
“Does her family know?”
“She said she has no family.”
“She had a husband.”
Joyce shook her head. “We called him. He said he had no relationship with her anymore.”
“And there’s no one else? Brothers? Sisters? Friends?”
“She said you were the only one she had to call.”
To me, the worst thing in the world is to die alone. Without any family or friends or loved ones to grieve for you. I’ve sometimes been terrified that I’ll end up like that. Like Anne Devlin, I had no family. Sometimes late at night, I’ve lain in bed and wondered what would become of me when I got old. Lying in a hospital bed somewhere, with only doctors and nurses around me. Just like Anne. The only person she could think of to call was a reporter who’d covered the tragic disappearance of her daughter years before.
I took a deep breath. I really didn’t want to go into that hospital room. I’ve been around people dying before, and it’s never an easy thing. I know people who will tell you that there’s something almost beautiful about the experience. All of the pain disappears, there’s a look of serenity on the dead person’s face at the end, that they’ve found peace at last. Maybe so, but I’ve seen the other side, too.
I remember my father dying in the hospital. He had cancer, too, and it had spread all throughout his body. Lying there, wracked with pain and loaded with drugs, yelling at me about all the ways that I’d let him down as his daughter. My mother had died a year before, and he was angry about everything that had happened to him. Angry at the cancer that was eating away at him. Angry at my mother for leaving him. Angry at me because I was the only person left for him to be mad at, I guess. But he didn’t want to let go of life. Instead, he just kept railing on about God and himself and my mother and me until his very last heartbeat. When he was finally dead, I wasn’t sure if I was happy that he was finally gone or sad about the real truths left unsaid between us. Probably a bit of both.
I’ve watched people die on the job, too. Murder victims. Accident scenes. Hospital emergency rooms. I’ve never seen one go easy. I remember one guy they pulled out of his car after a highspeed, head-on collision with a tractor trailer truck. He had massive internal bleeding, critical head injuries, and damage to almost every vital organ. He lay there on the side of the road for nearly twenty minutes, with paramedics futilely doing what little they could for him. Why didn’t he just die, I thought to myself that day. Finally, he did. But, like my father, the poor guy struggled to the end. Death might be inevitable, but all of us try to run from it as long as we can.
I thought about all these things now as I approached Anne Devlin in her hospital bed. She became aware of me as I got closer. She turned her head slightly toward me and tried to smile.
“How are you doing?” I asked.
“What do you think?” she whispered.
“It could be worse.”
“How?”
“You’re still here.”
“That doctor told me not long ago I had only a few months to live. I was pretty upset about that at the time. Now, well, I’d settle for those months. So many things have been happening about Lucy. I just want to last long enough to …”
“You’ll have plenty of time to see how things come out,” I said soothingly, even though I wasn’t sure if it was true.
“That means everything to me,” she said. “If I could just see her once more before my time is over.”
She knew about all the stuff I’d reported, of course. The search for Marston and Big Lou. The connection between Marston and the other little girl nearby a few days before Lucy disappeared. The authorities’ identification of him now as a potential suspect in the case.
“Do you think he’s the one who took her?” she asked.
“The police and the feds think he might be.”
“Will they catch him?”
“Sooner or later.”
“And then he’ll tell them the truth about Lucy?”
That was the big question, of course.
“I think this is the best chance we’ve ever had to find out what really happened to her,” I said.
It was the only thing I could think of to say.
“She’s alive,” Anne said.
“That’s always been a possibility.”
“She’s alive,” she repeated with grim determination.
I wasn’t sure if she was trying to convince me or herself that it was true.
The problem was it was a waiting game now for the answers. The case seemed to be coming to a head, one way or another. Hopefully, the truth would be known before too long. In the best-case scenario, all we had to do was wait until Marston and Big Lou were caught, then find out what they had to say about Lucy. But even if that happened, it would take time. I couldn’t tell that to Anne Delvin. Because she was just about all out of time.
“I think Lucy’s alive somewhere and we’ll find her very soon,” I said, figuring I owed her at least some small comfort.
“Me, too,” she said.
I stayed with her through the night. She kept drifting in and out of sleep. When she was awake, she talked mostly about Lucy. Things they had done together. Good-time memories. But eventually she would come back to the terrible day that she went missing.
“Why did he tak
e her?” she cried out at one point.
“I don’t know.”
“He has to pay for it. They all have to pay for it. They took my daughter, goddamnit! You can’t let them go free, Clare. You’ve got to make them tell you where she is!”
But then the anger would turn to grief.
“I’m sorry,” she sobbed to me. “I’m so sorry.”
“There’s nothing to be sorry about.”
“I was her mother. I should have protected her. I didn’t do that. This is all my fault.”
I looked down at her in the hospital bed and thought about how I’d wound up here. A long time ago, I’d made a promise to Anne Devlin that I’d help her find out what happened to her missing daughter, Lucy. That Lucy would never be forgotten. I knew now that I would have to keep that promise, even more than ever before.
I squeezed Anne’s hand tightly, trying to let her know that I was still there for her.
She squeezed back.
I held her hand until the early morning hours, when the first rays of sunlight began streaming in through the window next to her bed and she’d made it to another day.
CHAPTER 32
THEY FOUND SANDY Marston and Louise Carbone a few days later hiding out in a remote farmhouse in Idaho.
The two of them had kept a low profile during most of their time on the run. After leaving New York, they headed west through Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, then north through areas of Nebraska and Montana. By the time the nationwide alert went out to law enforcement officials around the country for their arrest, Marston and Big Lou were pretty much flying under the radar in an area where not many people were going to spot them.
When they got to Idaho, they came across an abandoned farmhouse and decided to hole up there for a while. They stayed hidden for a few days—and probably could have lasted months—without arousing any suspicion.
But then Marston made a mistake.
One night he got on his motorcycle and rode into a town ten miles away. They needed food and other supplies. If he’d left after that, no one probably would have paid much attention to him. There were lots of motorcycle guys passing through that part of Idaho.
Instead, he stopped for a beer at a roadside bar on the way out of town. Some guy at the bar made a derogatory remark about his motorcycle or the length of his hair or maybe both. Words were exchanged, followed by fists. Then Marston pulled out a knife and stabbed the local in the chest. He bled to death on the floor of the bar. Marston ran outside, jumped on his cycle, and roared away with a posse of Idaho police cars soon in hot pursuit.
He had a head start, and he might have been able to get away if he just kept going. But he made a U-turn and headed back to the farmhouse instead. I never understood if he did that because he wanted to get back to Big Lou or he was just stupid. In any case, the police followed him back to the house and surrounded the place. Gunfire came from the house, and everyone hunkered down for a standoff.
At some point the cops realized who they had surrounded inside. Federal agents soon descended on the area in huge numbers, with SWAT teams and all the latest weapons and technological equipment. Elliott Grayson flew out to Idaho to direct the operation himself.
It put him on every nightly newscast and—some political observers predicted—probably was going to insure his election as Senator. If Teddy Weller had tried to set up the rumors about Grayson and Lucy Devlin to make him look bad, it had backfired on him now and looked as if it might cost him any chance he might have had to still win the election.
I was there on the scene in Idaho, too. Channel 10 flew in a team of reporters—Brett and Dani even anchored the news on a remote from outside the siege at the farmhouse—since we had been the first to break the story. I did a lot of the on-camera reporting as well as directing our news operation.
Because of the danger and volatility of the situation, the press was kept back from the siege area itself. We got regular updates from a federal spokesman. But mostly we were just showing a lot of shots of Idaho countryside and speculating about what was going to happen. We were all wrong, of course. No one predicted that it would end up quite the way it did.
The actual details of what transpired that final day were never quite clear. But the official version said it happened this way:
The feds tried to talk Sandy Marston and Louise Carbone out of the house without anyone getting hurt. There were loudspeakers set up, telephone calls into the house, and even a note tied to a rock that was thrown through a window. Marston’s response was to take pot shots at the agents huddled behind their cars and barricades. Finally, Grayson ran out of patience and decided to bring it all to a head.
The idea was to fire a single tear gas canister into the house to flush them out. It should have worked. The only problem was there was a fireplace in the house. Marston or Big Lou had lit a fire there at one point during the night. The tear gas canister crashed through a window and landed in the fire. It exploded, quickly setting the entire house on fire. This wasn’t like Waco, where the entire building blew up. But the fire and smoke was enough to make Marston flee the house before the law enforcement people outside were ready.
He ran out the front door, holding a gun in his hand. Someone shouted for him to drop it. Instead, he opened fire. He kept running toward the line of federal agents, shooting as he moved. They returned the fire, and he died in a hail of bullets.
Louise Carbone was right behind him. Maybe if Marston hadn’t opened fire the way he did, what happened next could have been avoided. But you had to put yourself in the place of the federal agents. One of the people inside the house had just tried to kill them, running toward them with a gun. Now here came the second one. She had something in her hand, too. It was hard to tell what it was amid all the smoke and confusion, but they assumed it was a weapon, too. They yelled at her to stop and drop what she was carrying. When she didn’t, one of the agents fired a single shot. He said later he just wanted to hit her in the leg and wound her. But he aimed high, and the bullet crashed into her chest. She died right there on the ground outside the farmhouse, a few feet from Sandy Marston.
The object in her hand turned out not to be a gun.
It was a picture.
She was clutching it to her heart when she was hit.
The picture was of a young girl.
Maureen Carbone.
Big Lou’s daughter.
CHAPTER 33
THE PRESS CONFERENCE could have gone either way.
On the one hand, Elliott Grayson and his people had accidentally set the farmhouse on fire and then shot to death both suspects, leaving many questions unanswered. And one of the dead suspects turned out to be unarmed, holding only a picture of her daughter.
On the other hand, it was hard to arouse much sympathy for Sandy Marston and Louise Carbone.
He was a member of a motorcycle gang who was now a suspect in one of the most famous missing child cases of all time. He’d stabbed to death a man in a bar for no real reason. He and Big Lou had fired on law enforcement authorities repeatedly, charged their lines, and probably deserved what they got.
That was the way it sorted out in the end.
One of the reasons for that was the impressive performance Grayson put on during the press conference after the shootout.
“Why did you shoot to kill?” one reporter asked.
“We had a suspect who had fired at federal officers and police and was still firing at them at the end. I was trying to save the lives of my men and other innocent people.”
“What about the woman?”
“She was inside that house, too. There was gunfire coming from more than one place. She was shooting, too, we know that for a fact. She charged a line of federal officers who knew this. Everyone acted appropriately under the circumstances.”
“You don’t think the officer who fired the fatal shot into the unarmed woman, Louise Carbone, should face any type of disciplinary action?”
“No, I’m putting him in for a comm
endation medal.”
“What is the message you think this incident sends out to people?”
“That the world is a better place today because the likes of Sandy Marston and Louise Carbone are no longer in it. Especially for the children.”
Grayson was good, no question about it. I was impressed, and I was sure lots of people were going to be, too. This was the kind of thing that could get him elected, I thought to myself as I watched him deftly handing all the questions from the press that day.
He had not spoken to me since that night in his apartment. A couple of times, he caught my eye during the press conference. But he looked away. That was fine with me. I’d had a decision to make, and I made it. I had my reasons. They might not make sense to anyone else, but I had to live with myself. I didn’t think I could do that and be with Elliott Grayson.
He saved the biggest news of his press conference until the very end.
“There’s one more development,” Grayson said. “I wasn’t sure whether or not to make this public right away, but I think everyone has a right to know. Sandy Marston left a note. He talked about Lucy Devlin and about how he abducted her and what he did to her.”
I stifled a gasp. It was all coming together now.
“Marston apparently realized he was going to die, and so he confessed in the note that he forced her onto his motorcycle and took her back to the Warlock Warriors headquarters. Then he raped her repeatedly. When he fell asleep, she tried to run away. He caught her and, during the struggle, threw her against a wall. She hit her head, and she died.”
There was a stunned reaction from the reporters.
“Are you sure the note was from Marston?” someone finally asked.
“Yes.”
“What if he just made that story up?”
“Why would he do that?”
“Some sort of sick last joke.”
“Marston didn’t make it up.”
