by R. G. Belsky
“Where is it?”
“She put it down in the basement, I think.”
“Did you look inside?”
“I haven’t been through any of her stuff yet. It’s too painful.”
The package was hidden behind the furnace. Maybe Louise did put it there because she figured they’d come back for it later. Or maybe she hoped someone would find it after they’d gone. Whatever, it was important enough that they’d apparently gone back to the gang’s headquarters in Hell’s Kitchen to get it before they left. And important enough to store at her mother’s house, so it wouldn’t be with them if they got caught.
I opened the package. There were file folders inside with documents and papers and clippings. The documents were missing person reports and posters from the FBI. There were six of them. Joey Manielli. Becky Gale. Tamara Greene. Donald Chang. Emily Neiman. William O’Shaughnessy. The six children whose bodies Grayson had identified as being in that mass grave in Mountainboro, New Hampshire.
There was a piece of paper with a list on it. It had all of the names of the same kids on it. But it had something else, too. Details on how and when and where they had been abducted. Specific details that no one had ever heard. They said Joey Manielli had been taken at a highway rest stop outside Allentown, Becky Gale from a shopping mall near Princeton. There were details for how the others disappeared, too. There was no proof of any of this, of course. But I knew in my heart it was all true. Why would anyone keep a record of this kind of thing otherwise?
There was also a picture. A little boy with a man. I didn’t recognize the boy. It could have been one of the missing children in the posters, but I wasn’t sure. I recognized the man though. Elliott Grayson. It wasn’t easy at first because Grayson wasn’t looking directly at the camera. It appeared as if the photographer had taken it without Grayson’s knowledge. But it was definitely him.
There was a series of newspaper articles and computer printouts from online websites about Elliott Grayson. His appointment as US Attorney. The press conferences after some of his big arrests. His campaign announcement that he was running for the Senate. In it, Grayson had pledged at one point to bring “a return to integrity and trust” to the criminal justice system. Someone—presumably Marston or Louise Carbone—had written the word “LIAR!” in big letters with a magic marker over that article.
There was a pair of older, wrinkled newspaper clippings, too. The first one was from a small paper in Pennsylvania called the Clarion Dispatch. It had the same story I’d read in the Pittsburgh paper about the disappearance of Grayson’s sister, only with more facts and details.
The headline said:
MASSIVE SEARCH FOR MISSING GIRL
By Richie Briggs
Hundreds of Clarion police, state troopers and local volunteers combed the area yesterday looking for 10-year-old Sarah Grayson.
The fifth grader was last seen three days ago outside the Valley Grade School, where she arrived for school shortly after 8 a.m.
The last person to see her was her brother, Elliott, 12.
“She was talking to a man in the playground,” Elliott Grayson told police.
The boy gave a description of the man, saying he appeared to be in his 40s, with gray hair, wearing a green windbreaker and a black cowboy hat. He said he had never seen the man, who is now being sought for questioning …
The second clip was also from the Clarion Dispatch.
10-YEAR-OLD GIRL’S BODY FOUND
By Richie Briggs
Police last night discovered the remains of Sarah Grayson, the 10-year-old who disappeared from her school playground this week.
A dog walker found her body shortly after 8 p.m., hidden under a pile of leaves about a mile into the Atchison Woods on the south side of town.
A preliminary examination showed she had been beaten badly and also appeared to have been sexually assaulted.
There were no suspects in custody, although police continued to search for an unidentified man seen talking to her in the school playground, just before she disappeared …
* * *
Six bodies in a grave. Now it turned out that at least one of them—and I was betting all six—were not who they were supposed to be.
That meant those were the bodies of six other missing children buried a long time ago in that New Hampshire grave.
Then there was ten-year-old Sarah Grayson who also went missing and was found dead.
Plus, all the tantalizing connections to Lucy Devlin.
That added up to fourteen cases.
No matter how you did the math, the answer to this puzzle always came out the same way.
One man.
Elliott Grayson.
CHAPTER 45
RICHIE BRIGGS HAD retired from the Clarion paper a few years ago, but he was still alive. I tracked him down by phone with a bit of help from a woman in the Clarion Dispatch personnel office who somehow was under the impression that I worked for an insurance company that had a cash payment for him. That was probably because I said I was from State Farm insurance company, and we had a cash payment for him.
She said she’d call Briggs for me, tell him the good news, and ask him to call me back. It was a scam I’d worked as a journalist many times in the past when I wanted to talk to someone. People were always a lot more likely to return your calls if they thought you were giving them money.
As it turned out, I could have saved myself the bother. Richard Briggs was listed right there in the Clarion telephone book. He’d never left the area.
“I checked out a lot of the areas where people retire to,” Briggs told me when he called. “Florida. Arizona. North Carolina. You know what I found out? I was better off staying right here in Clarion. I live in my own house, my own town, with people I’ve known all my life—why do I have to be rushing off to some new spot just because someone says that’s what you’re supposed to do when you’re sixty-five?”
I listened politely to him. Retired people always like to talk about how happy they are not working anymore. Most of the time I figure it’s just a kind of defense mechanism—a denial to themselves that they’re no longer a productive part of society. But Richie Briggs really seemed to mean it.
“Tell me about this money I’ve got coming to me,” he said finally.
“There is no money.”
“I knew that,” he chuckled.
“How did you know?”
“I’m seventy-five years old. In all that time, no insurance company has ever called me up to tell me they have money for me.”
“It could have been real …”
“Also, I don’t have a policy with State Farm.”
“Right.”
“So why would they be sending me any money at all?”
“Then why did you even bother to make the call?”
“I recognized your name. I still follow the news. I saw you being interviewed on CNN after that shootout in Idaho. I file away names and places and details like that. An old habit, I guess. When I heard your name, I remembered it right away. I wondered why a TV reporter from New York City would be calling me. There was only one answer, of course. Elliott Grayson.”
“You must have been a pretty good reporter,” I said.
“Oh, I had my moments.”
The Sarah Grayson abduction and murder was the biggest story he’d ever done, he recalled. There weren’t many abductions in Clarion and even fewer killings. Everyone knew the Graysons. Tom Grayson, Elliott’s father, was a local fireman and a deacon at the Methodist church. His mother was on the board of the PTA. The two children, Elliott and Sarah, were both straight-A students and budding athletes. She was on the swim team, and he played Little League baseball in the summer and ice hockey in the winter. The entire town liked the Graysons.
So there was immediate concern when Sarah didn’t come home from school that day. She wasn’t the kind to just wander off on her own. The townspeople’s worst fear was realized when the searchers discovered her battered b
ody in the woods a few days later.
“Everyone was terrified,” Briggs recalled. “This wasn’t New York, where this kind of thing happens a lot. There was a killer loose here, walking around among us in our quiet town. Until he could be caught, no one would be safe. We ran stories for days about people buying guns and putting extra padlocks on their doors and keeping their children home from school. Sort of a mini version of what the big cities like New York or San Francisco went through with Son of Sam or the Zodiac killer, I guess. Then, of course, there was the funeral for Sarah Grayson. The whole town was in mourning. Never saw anything like it before, never saw anything like it since. No one could believe that this beautiful little girl’s life had been snuffed out so horribly. All everyone talked about was poor Sarah. And about what they wanted to do when they found the bastard that did this to her.”
“Did they ever catch him?”
“Never did.”
“No leads, no clues?”
“The police figured it was a drifter. Someone who was passing through, saw little Sarah outside the school, somehow managed to get her away from there and attacked and then killed her.”
“The man her brother saw her talking to outside the school?”
“That was the theory.”
“And no one else ever saw that man?”
“No, just Elliott. Poor kid. Can you imagine something like that happening to you when you’re only twelve years old? You love your sister, and you see the man that killed her. But you don’t realize the danger she’s in until it’s too late. That must be a terrible thing to live with. It’s amazing that Elliott was able to survive that and live the successful life that he has.”
I worded my next question very carefully. The guy was still smart at seventy-five, and I didn’t want to give away too much of what I knew. But I needed to find out his answer to something.
“Did the police ever question Elliott?” I asked.
“You mean about the drifter? Of course.”
“No, I meant about his sister’s murder?”
“What about it?”
“Was there ever any suggestion that … well, he might have done it?”
“Elliott?”
“Yes.”
“Why are you asking that?”
“He was the last person to see her,” I said. “Sometimes the police zero in on that. I just wondered if that ever happened in this case.”
“Elliott was a twelve-year-old kid. His sister was tortured and raped. No kid did that. No one from this town was capable of something like that. It had to be some sick pervert who came through here, then moved on. God knows if he did it to other children, too. It never happened again in Clarion, that’s the one solace. But that didn’t help Sarah Grayson or her family.”
“What happened after that?”
“The Graysons moved away a short time later. There were too many memories for them to stay, I suppose. Eventually, people forgot and moved on with their lives. I didn’t even think about the Graysons for a long time until I started reading about Elliott in New York. Catching criminals and appearing on TV and now running for the Senate. We’re all very proud of him here. I even came out of retirement briefly to do an article about him for the paper. Local boy makes good and all that. I called him up, did an interview—he couldn’t have been nicer.”
“Did you talk about his sister?” I asked.
“No, Elliott didn’t want to talk about her. He said it was still too painful even after all this time. He said it was the most traumatic thing that had ever happened to him. He said that day in the school yard, it had … well, he said it had changed him forever.”
I thought about little Sarah Grayson’s battered body lying in the woods.
About how the police had never caught the person who did it.
About how Elliott Grayson had been the only person to see the drifter and the last person to see his sister alive.
Maybe that day had changed him.
“Everyone in town has been talking about Elliott these days, and how great it is that he’s going to Washington now as a US Senator,” Briggs told me. “For a lot of people, their lives could have been destroyed by a tragedy like he went through. But he survived. And he’s gone on to do such great things. We’re all very proud of him here in Clarion. He’s a real inspiration to the people of this town.”
“He’s a real inspiration to us all,” I said.
CHAPTER 46
I HAD A problem.
Well, two problems, actually.
Okay, three.
My first problem was that I had too much information. This sometimes happens in the news business. You knock yourself out trying to chase down a few basic facts, and then suddenly you’re inundated by them. You’ve got facts and information and hot leads coming out your ass. Having too much information is still better than having none at all. But enough is enough.
The next problem I had—which was a direct offshoot of the first problem—was that I didn’t know what to make of the information I had. There was no straight line, no pattern—the trail took off in different directions every time I tried to follow it. Was Grayson responsible for everything that happened or just some of it? What about Sandy Marston? And how did Patrick Devlin fit in? I had lots of suspects, lots of clues, and lots of unanswered questions.
My third problem—and this was undeniably the biggest one of all—was what to do with all this information I did have. The simple answer was to put it on the air. Only it wasn’t that simple. I couldn’t just throw it out there to the TV audience and tell them: “You decide!” I didn’t have real proof for a lot of it. Marston couldn’t sue me for slander or libel, because he was dead. But Grayson could and Patrick Devlin could and so could anyone else I tried to implicate.
Anyway, it was more than just the potential legal consequences that I was worried about here. I wanted to do the right thing journalistically, too. You need to follow the rules as a journalist when you go after bad guys like Elliott Grayson. Otherwise, you’re no better than they are.
* * *
I was still mulling over my options on what to do now about the Elliott Grayson story when I got to the office the next morning. I decided I needed a second opinion. I called Maggie into my office and laid it all out for her—everything I’d found out about Grayson and the rest over the past few days.
“You don’t really have much there we can work with, Clare,” Maggie said when I was finished.
“I’ve got plenty.”
“Okay, but not much we can put on the air.”
“Well, that is a slight problem.”
“Grayson would sue our ass off if we suggest he had any connection at all to these murders and kidnappings.”
“True.”
“There’s all sorts of other issues, too. For instance, did the Carbone woman’s mother know about the stuff you took from her house?”
“I neglected to mention that to her.”
“So, you just took it.”
“I borrowed it.”
“You stole it.”
“There’s solid evidence there, no matter how I obtained it.”
I was starting to regret talking about this with Maggie. The damn kid asked too many questions. Sure, they were good questions, tough questions—the kind any smart journalist would ask. But she was still pissing me off by asking me all this stuff. Mostly because I didn’t have any answers for her.
“What about the list of the six dead kids that Grayson identified as being inside that grave—and the details of how they were abducted?” I said.
“It proves nothing at all. The names were always out there. Marston or anybody could have made the rest of it up.”
“Okay, then how about the picture of Grayson with a kid?”
“We don’t know who the kid is. Maybe it’s just a relative, maybe he’s in a big brother program, maybe the kid wanted to grow up to be an FBI agent and his parents asked Grayson to pose for the picture …”
“Whose side ar
e you on anyway?”
“I’m on your side, Clare. I’m just trying to save you from doing anything that might ruin your career. Elliott Grayson is a very important, a very powerful person. You can’t take on someone like that unless you have the evidence to back you up. It’s one thing to think you know something, but you need facts to put it on the air. You don’t have a story without those facts. C’mon, Clare, you taught me that a long time ago. You’ve preached that to every reporter in this place at one time or another.”
That shut me up. She was right. Tough to disagree when someone throws your own words back at you.
* * *
We spent the rest of the meeting in my office talking about more immediate issues—like that night’s newscast. There had been a subway fire that forced the evacuation of a jam-packed Number 6 train during the morning rush hour. Meanwhile, the city council was slated to hold a crucial vote on school funding.
“Subway fire trumps city council school vote,” I said.
“Are you sure?” Maggie asked. “No one was hurt in the fire, and the school funding decision is pretty important.”
“Do we have video of the subway evacuation?”
“Yes, some great stuff of people being led up out of the tunnels into the street around 59th.”
“And the council vote?”
“I guess that’ll be the press conference stuff from some of the council leaders afterward, talking about the importance of … education.”
“I rest my case.”
Maggie nodded.
“Anything else?” I asked.
“Well, there is a small crisis involving Brett and Dani.”
The crisis turned out to be which of my news anchors should speak first at the beginning of the show. It always started the same way now, with Brett saying: “This is Brett Wolff. Welcome to the six-o’clock news on 10.” Then Dani saying: “This is Dani Blaine. We’ve got you covered on everything that’s happening in New York City and around the world.” Dani wanted to know why she couldn’t speak first, then Brett second.
Now, as an old newspaper journalist, there were a few things that really ticked me off about TV news—and this was one of them. Why did we need two friggin’ people to do one simple intro? Hell, we could save a lot of money by just having one anchor altogether, instead of a twosome alternating sentences with each other. Except I knew that television news didn’t work like that.
