by R. G. Belsky
I’d talked to the parents of those children, letting them tell me what they wanted me to hear. Just like I did with Victoria Gale. Until I found out the truth from the sister, Samantha. Now I needed to find out the truth about all of them. I needed to know if there were any secret dark sides to the other four families, too.
I spent hours checking deeper into their backgrounds. But it was worth it. I uncovered a lot of stuff I hadn’t known about them before.
William O’Shaughnessy had gone to the school nurse several times after teachers spotted bruises on his body. He claimed he’d fallen down the steps, but they didn’t believe him. The police were notified and they talked to the family. But everyone stuck to their story, and there was nothing anyone could prove.
Emily Neiman had tried to kill herself when she was ten. She slit her wrists with a kitchen knife. Her mother found her and rushed her to the hospital in time to save her life. Emily kept telling the doctors there that she just wanted to die. She was under psychiatric care at the time of her disappearance.
Neither Donald Chang nor Tamara Greene had tried to kill themselves, nor did they show any obvious signs of abuse. But each of them seemed to be a troubled kid. Low grades, trips to their school counselors, even a few run-ins with the law. Yep, there was definitely a pattern here. These were unhappy kids. These were kids with problems. These were kids who had a reason to be depressed about their lives.
That was the common denominator between all six.
But what did it mean?
I kept coming back to the theory that this made them perfect targets for a predator that could use that unhappiness to his advantage.
Who? Well, one obvious possibility was someone who came in contact with troubled kids. A school guidance counselor or teacher or principal, for instance. But that didn’t explain how all of these kids came from different parts of the country. A counselor in a school would have access to such information in only one area.
It had to be someone else. Someone who moved around the country a lot and might have come across—and taken advantage of—troubled kids on a wider scale. Someone like a truck driver. Or a traveling salesman. Or maybe even the member of a motorcycle gang. A modern-day Easy Rider who pedaled murder, not drugs.
Sandy Marston had been in a motorcycle gang.
So had Patrick Devlin.
And Elliott Grayson.
I remembered something else about Grayson. I’d asked him if he was an only child. He said he’d had a sister, but she died. I was curious to find out more.
He’d grown up in Pennsylvania in a place called Clarion and talked in interviews about his small-town roots. He also talked about his mother and his father, who was a firefighter in Clarion. He talked about the American values this kind of upbringing had instilled in him. But he never talked much about a sister.
It took some digging, but I finally found a story about his sister’s death in the Pittsburgh paper. It had gotten pretty decent coverage at the time. Her name was Sarah Grayson. One morning, she’d left for school with her brother, Elliot. He was twelve and she was ten. Elliott came home at the end of the day, but she didn’t. Her teacher said she never showed up for the first homeroom class. Elliott said he’d left her outside the school, where he’d seen her talking to some man in the school playground.
Her body was later found in a wooded area near the town. She’d been beaten and sexually molested, police said. They assumed she’d been abducted by the man Elliott had seen her talking to—and then assaulted and murdered. No one was ever caught. It was the first murder in fifty years in the town, and it remains on the books today as an unsolved case. A few months later, the Graysons moved away from Clarion, saying the memories were too much for them to bear.
Big Lou had claimed she saw Elliott Grayson with Lucy Devlin soon after she went missing at a motorcycle convention in Mountainboro, New Hampshire.
Then it turned out he was the federal investigator who directed the unearthing of six children’s bodies years later in the same small town.
I’d decided this was all a coincidence.
Now I found out that his own sister was abducted and killed—just like all the others—when he was young.
Elliott Grayson was the last person to see his sister alive. He said he saw her talking to a man in the school playground, but he never told anyone that until after she was gone. Why not? What if there was no man in the playground that day? What if Elliott had made that all up? What if Elliott had killed her himself? What if he was a pathological killer who’d started at a young age and then gone on to kill a lot of other people over the years? What if he was now trying to desperately cover up his murderous past as he ran for the Senate?
All of this was just speculation, of course.
I needed to concentrate on what I knew, not what I thought I knew, if I was ever going to put this on the air.
If I didn’t have any hard evidence against Grayson, that meant I had to attack the problem from a different direction.
Go with the facts I did have.
Well, one indisputable fact was that Sandy Marston had been involved with both the Lucy Devlin and Joey Manielli disappearances—Marston was the first real link I had between Lucy and those bodies in New Hampshire.
I decided to follow that trail for a while and see where it led.
CHAPTER 43
I’D DONE ALL right the first time I went into a biker lair at the Warlock Warriors headquarters in Hell’s Kitchen.
I hadn’t done so good the second time at the biker bar in New Hampshire.
Now it was time to try again, and I wondered if my luck might be running out.
The guy who answered the door at the Warlock Warriors headquarters this time looked a bit like Sandy Marston, only bigger. He was maybe six foot eight and most of it was muscle. He was wearing black jeans, a black t-shirt, and black combat boots.
“I can’t believe you have the nerve to show your face around here,” he said when he saw me. “Sandy’s dead. Louise, too. We’ve had people hassling us ever since then. Our landlord, he’s tired of all the trouble—we’re getting thrown out of our place. Now you show up at the front door. That’s just perfect.”
“You blame me for all this?”
“Why not?”
“Hey, I liked Big Lou,” I said. “I actually kind of liked Marston, too, if that makes any sense. I’m not sure we know the entire truth yet about what happened and what they did. I’m trying to find out. I just want to talk to you and some of the others here and ask some questions. What do you say?”
“What is it that you think you’re going to find out, lady? There’s nothing more to say.”
“I don’t think Sandy Marston did it,” I blurted out.
He’d already started to close the door in my face again, but stopped now.
“I know Marston was no Boy Scout,” I said. “But I don’t see him killing the Devlin girl. I think there’s someone else involved in this. Someone who wants to make it look like Marston did it. He’s a bad biker guy, and now he’s dead—end of story. But I think there’s a lot more story here. I want to find out the real answers to what Marston did or didn’t do. How about you?”
He stared at me for a long time, apparently trying to decide whether or not he wanted to talk to me.
“C’mon in,” he said finally.
I followed him through the house to a room where a half dozen people—five guys and a girl—were sitting around. The big guy said his name was Dale. He introduced me to Buddy and Nick and Carol and a few others whose names I couldn’t remember. They were reluctant to talk at first, but started to come around after a while.
“Did you ever notice Sandy having any abnormal interest in children?” I asked.
“Nah, he wasn’t like that,” one of the guys said. He had a tattoo on his arm of a Harley 1200 that was so prominent I had to stop myself from staring at it. “Sandy was a regular guy. He liked women. Grown-up women. Hell, look at Big Lou. She was his lady, and she was
no kid.”
“Maybe he had unfulfilled sexual fantasies that he needed to act out,” I suggested.
“Huh?”
“He wanted to have sex with young kids.”
“We never saw that,” one of them said.
“He liked kids but not like that,” the woman named Carol said. She had dirty-blond hair and acne and tired-looking eyes. She looked to be about twenty-two, going on forty-five. I wondered if she’d wind up like Big Lou. That is, if she lived that long. “When I got knocked up a few years ago, he looked out for me and my kid. Made sure the baby was well taken care of. He was a tough guy, but could be gentle, too. I never understood how he could have killed that little girl the way they said.”
“Then why did he confess to it?” I asked them.
“Maybe he didn’t,” tattoo guy said.
“You think the confession letter was a fake?”
“Sandy’s dead. He can’t speak for himself. All we’ve got is the law’s word. I don’t believe it, do you?”
Everyone shook their head no.
“It doesn’t make sense,” Dale told me.
They described how the cops and feds and all sorts of other law enforcement types had descended on the place after Marston and Big Lou had gone missing, then again after the big shootout in Idaho.
“They took everything that was here,” one of them said. “All of Sandy and Lou’s clothes and belongings. They were real bastards about it all, too. Walked around here like they owned the place. That never happened before. Not to us.”
“Before this, we used to get a free pass most of the time from the cops,” Dale explained. “They didn’t mess with us, we didn’t mess with them. It was like we had this kind of understanding or whatever. I was never sure why. But Sandy always said he could handle the cops. I figured he must be paying them off. But now I think it was more than that. It was almost as if they were scared of him or something.”
“Or something,” I said.
I wanted to see the room where Sandy and Big Lou had lived. They said there was no point, since all their stuff was gone. The cops had taken it all away. I said I wanted to see the room anyway. Dale took me up to the second floor. When we got inside the room, I realized it was the same place I’d seen Big Lou staring down at me from that first day. Which seemed like such a long time ago now. Of course, Dale was right about it being a wasted trip. There was nothing there.
“Were you here the day Sandy and Big Lou left?” I asked.
“Sure, I said good-bye to them.”
“Did they tell you where they were going? Or why?”
“He just said they had to get out of town in a hurry. He said there was trouble. I said we’d all help him take care of it. He said even we couldn’t take care of this kind of trouble. Then he and Lou got on their bikes and left. That was the last time I ever saw either of them until I found out they were dead.”
“So, Sandy and Big Lou are just sitting around the house here when they announce they’re leaving?”
“No, they came back.”
“Came back from where?”
“They were out somewhere on their bikes. They came back here, got some stuff from upstairs, and then left again for good.”
“You think they came back to pack?”
Dale shrugged. “I don’t know … Sandy wasn’t much for changing clothes. He sometimes wore the same outfit for days. Same with Lou. If he was really on the run, he wouldn’t ever have come back just to pack clothes.”
“So that means he came back here for something else?”
“I guess.”
Sandy Marston was scared. He wanted to get out of town with Big Lou, and he wanted to do it in a hurry. But he came back here first for something. What was it that was so important to him? And where was it now?
If he took it with him to the farmhouse in Idaho, the feds had it.
But if not …
“Did Sandy have any kind of a safe deposit box or place where he might store something valuable for safekeeping?”
“Nah, Sandy didn’t believe in banks.”
“How about a close friend?”
“He didn’t have any friends except us.”
“Maybe a family member, then …”
“Sandy didn’t have any family.”
No, he didn’t have a family.
But Big Lou did.
And I knew where to find them.
CHAPTER 44
BEFORE THEY LEFT town, Sandy Marston and Louise Carbone had visited two places where her family lived.
The first place was the house of Louise’s ex-husband and her daughter. I drove out to Lodi, New Jersey, again to talk to Dave Weber. I told him what I was looking for.
“No, Louise didn’t leave anything here that day,” Weber said. “Like I told you before, they didn’t stay very long. She really just wanted to see Maureen, our daughter. When Maureen wouldn’t talk to her, she and Marston left. That’s all that happened. I wish I could help you.”
“Where is Maureen?”
“She’s at school. She’s had a hard time with all this. Maureen had mixed feelings about her mother, I guess. On the one hand, she hated her for leaving us the way she did. On the other hand, well … she was her mother. Now that she’s dead, she’s having trouble coming to grips with how she feels about her. Me, too, I guess.”
“So, that day here was the last contact you and your daughter had with her.”
“In person, yes.”
“What other kind of contact did you have?”
“Just the letter.”
“What letter?”
“A day or so after she died in that shootout, we got a letter from Louise. She must have mailed it from somewhere on the road just before she and Marston died. It was addressed to Maureen, but it was really about the both of us. We cried together when we read it. I don’t know if Louise knew she was going to die when she wrote it, but it sounds like it.”
“Do you still have the letter?”
“Of course. I’ll show it to you, if you want.”
The letter was written on motel stationary from a place in Minnesota where she and Marston must have stayed during their run from the law. The handwriting in the beginning was neat and precise, but turned into more of a scrawl as it went on—as if she was in a hurry to finish it. Like her husband said, maybe she knew she didn’t have much time left.
The letter from Big Lou to her daughter said:
Dear Maureen,
We make a lot of decisions in our life, and sometimes wish later that we could take some of them back. To go back in time and change everything and make it right again. That’s what I wish I could do with you and me. But I’m afraid it’s too late for that now.
I know you’re mad at me, and you don’t understand why I’m not there for you. Why I haven’t been there for you in a long, long time. Maybe in time you’ll understand my reasons for what I’ve done with my life. (actually I’m not sure I do!)
The simple answer is I just lost my way. I went looking for something that was never really there. And all the time what I really cared about—you, Maureen—was there for me, if I had just realized it. I’m telling you this because I don’t want you to wind up like me. I want you to have a better life than I did.
Your father, he’s a good man. He probably wasn’t the right man for me, but that was my fault not his. Listen to him. Let him into your life. Love him. I never did any of those things, and I would be so much better off today if I had.
You’ve probably heard a lot of the things they’ve been saying about me on the news. Some of it is true, and some isn’t. But I’m afraid this will end badly, and I know it must be hard for you to understand how your mother ever reached such a point of no return.
That’s why there’s one thing I want you to know.
I love you, Maureen. I love you with all my heart.
That first day in the hospital I held you in my arms for the first time as a baby was the greatest moment of my life. I’ve scre
wed things up a lot since then. But that’s one thing that no one can ever take away from me. My love for you. No matter what you think of me, no matter what I do—I’ll always love you, Maureen. Remember that, no matter what happens.
A mother’s love for her daughter can never die.
They can never take that away from me.
All my love,
Mom
I looked up at Dave Weber. There were tears in his eyes.
I thought about how different Louise Carbone’s life might have been if she’d stayed in this house with him and her daughter instead of running off with Marston and the Warlock Warriors. How different her husband and daughter’s lives would have been. Could she have survived as a suburban housewife in Lodi, New Jersey? Probably not. Any more than I could. We all make decisions in our life, she said, and then we have to live with them.
“They’re saying all these terrible things about Louise now,” Dave Weber said. “How she might have been involved in abducting and killing children. It’s like they’re talking about someone else, not Louise. Sure, she wasn’t perfect. But I can’t believe those things about her. Louise was no killer. She was a good person at heart.”
He shook his head sadly as he looked down at the letter.
“Is this what you came here for?”
“Not exactly, but it helps.”
“What are you looking for?”
“Something she and Marston may have stopped somewhere to leave off before they hit the road.”
“I’m sorry, but she didn’t leave anything here.”
“There’s one other place she stopped,” I said.
* * *
Irene Carbone said her daughter and Marston had stayed there for no more than half an hour.
“Did she leave anything behind?”
“Like what?”
“A suitcase. A duffle bag. A briefcase. Anything like that?”
“There was a package. She said they had too much stuff to carry on the bikes, and she’d come back for it later.”
