by R. G. Belsky
I could recite that damn speech by heart. I’ve given it so many times in the newsroom to Maggie and Brett and Dani and Cassie and Janelle and all the other people who work for me. And yet, here I was now ensnared in the same web of lies and dishonesty and moral corruption that I’ve preached so eloquently about to others.
They say that everyone can be bought.
That everyone has a price.
It just isn’t always about money.
“Do we have a deal?” Grayson asked me now.
“Yes,” I heard myself say. “I’ll do whatever it takes to find Lucy.”
The Woodstein Maneuver.
CHAPTER 54
“THE FIRST THING you have to understand is about my sister,” Grayson said. “I loved my sister. You’re wrong in thinking I had anything to do with what happened to her.”
“But, there was no mysterious stranger in the schoolyard, was there?” I asked.
“No.”
“Why did you tell the police there was?”
“Christ, I was only twelve years old …”
“That’s not really an answer.”
Grayson looked at me with a sad, pained expression on his face. I knew at that moment he was going to tell me the truth about his sister. Later, when I’d play over in my mind our conversation in the park that day, I’d never be sure how much he told me was fact and how much was fiction. But there was no doubt about his sister. The pain was too real.
“My father was a fireman who saved people’s lives and their houses and their possessions,” Grayson said softly. “He was a hero in that town. He took part in civic activities, he coached Little League baseball, and he went to church every Sunday. Everyone thought my father was a terrific guy. Except his own family. We didn’t think he was so terrific.”
“He mistreated you?”
“He beat the hell out of me. Sometimes to punish me. Sometimes because he was drunk. Sometimes because he just seemed to get a kick out of doing it. I never understood then what makes a man do something like that, and I still don’t today.”
“What about your mother?”
“He beat her, too. Behind closed doors, most of the time. But I could hear it.”
“And your sister?”
“Sarah? She got it the worst of all. She was tough, though. She was the only one who stood up to him. That made him even madder, so he beat her harder. I sometimes would lie in bed at night and hear the screaming coming from her bedroom. I felt sorry for her, but mostly I was just glad that it wasn’t me getting a whipping that night.”
I saw the pain on his face again. I realized it was for the guilt he’d been holding on to all these years.
“By the time Sarah got to be ten or so, things changed,” he said. “My father didn’t just beat her anymore, he did other things, too. He’d come home after a night of drinking at the bar and force himself sexually on her. I don’t think I really understood what was happening at that age, but I knew it was a terrible thing for my sister. I wanted to help her. But I was afraid.
“Finally, this one time, I stood up to him. I told him to leave Sarah alone. He didn’t do anything to her that night—instead he concentrated all his anger on me. There was a deep woods behind our house, and he dragged me out into it for maybe a mile. Then he went to work on me—first with his fists, then with a thick tree branch.
“By the time he was finished, I was a bloody mess. My jaw was broken, I had a couple of cracked ribs, and there were bloody bruises all over my body. He left me out there like that in the woods, alone and scared and hurt in the dark. The next morning, after I managed to make it home, I told people I’d gotten lost in the woods and fallen down a cliff. No one ever suspected my father had done it.
“A few weeks later, the screams coming from Sarah’s room were worse than ever. The next morning, when I went in to check on her, she was nowhere to be found. I knew in my heart what had happened. She had fought back against my father again, and he’d taken her out into the woods—just like he did with me. I searched the woods until I found her body. I’d never seen a dead person before, and this was my own sister.
“I ran back to the house and found my father drinking a beer at the kitchen table. When I told him about Sarah, he dragged me back to the spot in the woods where I’d found her body. He made me help cover her up with leaves and dirt. Then he said I should go to school as if nothing had happened. He said that when anyone asked me about Sarah, I should tell them that I saw her talking to a strange man in the schoolyard. He said if I told anyone the truth, then I’d wind up like her. I did what he wanted. I was just a scared twelve-year-old kid.”
It was the second time he’d used the phrase, “I was just a scared twelve-year-old kid.” I had the feeling that he’d said it many times to himself over the years, trying to justify what he did. But he hadn’t quite managed to pull it off.
“What happened after that?” I asked.
“A few months later, my father moved us to a new town—this time in Tennessee, where he got a job in another fire department. And everyone there thought he was a great guy, just like they did back in Clarion. After a while, I even almost believed that night in the woods with Sarah had never happened. But deep down I knew. I wanted him to pay for what he did to her. I didn’t know how or when, but he had to be punished.
“When I was older, I promised myself, I’d reveal the true story to everyone. But I never got the chance. One night my father rushed back into a burning building, the furnace exploded, and he was killed. He saved four people before he died, and they eulogized him at the funeral as a true hero. I suppose I could have come forward then, but it would have been pointless. No one would have believed me anyway.
“I guess that’s probably why—after I went through my motorcycle gang phase—I decided to go into law enforcement. It was too late to do anything about what he did to Sarah, but maybe I could help other families. Child abuse is going on every day all over America. Everyone says there’s nothing that can be done about it. Well, I decided to try. I got myself assigned to a department at the FBI that specialized in missing and abused and murdered children. I became an expert in these cases. I arrested a lot of predators and I put a lot of people in jail. It was very satisfying work for a while. But it wasn’t enough.
“One day we got this really heartbreaking letter at FBI headquarters from a little ten-year-old girl in Virginia. It was a helluva thing. Her name was Lisa Fenton, and she actually sat down and wrote us a letter telling us about all the terrible things her father had done to her. She said she had watched this show about the FBI on TV, and they were always helping people. She asked us if we would help her. I went to see Lisa Fenton. After talking to her, I was sure she was telling the truth. But I couldn’t do anything. Her parents denied it all and said Lisa was always making up stories. The father was a big corporate lawyer in Washington, and he had a lot of political clout. My boss said there wasn’t enough evidence to make a case, and I knew he was right. So we let it drop.
“A few months later, the parents brought Lisa to the emergency room of a local hospital. She had internal bleeding and she’d been battered around the face and head. It turned out she’d resisted her father’s advances that time, and he’d gone a little crazy—as he put it. He was crying and saying how sorry he was, and his wife kept insisting how much he really loved his daughter. We wound up prosecuting him after all, but it was too late to save Lisa. She died a few days later from her injuries.
“That one really got to me. Lisa Fenton was the same age as my sister, Sarah, had been, she fought back like Sarah and she even looked a little like Sarah. And, worst of all, she had come to me for help, and I’d let her down. Just like I did with Sarah. That’s when I decided I needed to do more than just put these bastards in jail.”
It was all starting to make sense to me now. These weren’t any black-market adoptions at all, like I had thought. There was no money involved here. This was about Elliott Grayson, the vigilante.
He had spent a lifetime scarred by the memory of not being able to save his sister. So he tried to save as many other children as he could to somehow make up for it. At first, he used the law to do this, but it wasn’t enough. That’s when he crossed the line between being a lawman and a lawbreaker.
Now he was somewhere in between.
“These cases of abuse you were dealing with had already happened,” I said. “It was too late to save the young victims. You wanted to get the child out of the family where they were being abused. You found children who were in bad family situations, with no hope and no way out. Then you ‘abducted’ them—and found them different, better homes with parents who were desperate to have children.”
“Something like that.”
“Why was Sandy Marston helping you?”
“We used to ride together. Different motorcycle gangs. But we met up a couple of times and hung out together for a while.”
“And the two of you just decided to save the world together?”
“Look, bikers aren’t always what you think they are. I was a good one, and there’s a lot of good guys there. Hell, Marston was the valedictorian of his high school class, did you know that? He should have gone to college, but he never did. His father had a bad gambling habit and lost all his tuition money one weekend in Atlantic City. Marston was so distraught he ran away, joined the Warlock Warriors, and never looked back after that. But he was a very intelligent man. He wrote poetry, you know. I’ll bet he never told you that.”
Maybe that was the side of him that had attracted Louise Carbone.
“Okay, Sandy Marston was a sensitive and misunderstood genius,” I said. “But why did he do all this stuff for you? Taking all these kids for you, driving them cross country to new homes. What was in it for him?”
Grayson looked across the park where a young boy of about eleven or twelve and his father were throwing a football back and forth. The father would throw a pass, and the boy would run out and catch it. Each time he did, the boy would do a celebratory touchdown dance like they do on TV, and then the two of them would exchange high-five congratulations. Grayson wiped something from his eyes as he watched them. Maybe a tear as he thought about him and his own father. Maybe he was thinking about how he never had the chance to throw a football around with his father when he was growing up. Maybe he was thinking about how lucky that little boy in the park was. Or maybe he just had something in his eye. Sometimes I overanalyze things.
“When I first started working in law enforcement, there was a big federal drug bust against the Warlock Warriors gang for dealing and distribution of marijuana, cocaine, and a lot other stuff. They took Marston into custody. I pulled some strings, got him out of jail, and told him I could keep him out of it. In return, he had to help me.”
“He was your snitch.”
“At first. He gave me information about drug deals and other things he heard people were up to. He really helped my career skyrocket. I got this reputation as a guy who knew more than anyone else in the department. In return, I gave him and his people in Hell’s Kitchen a wide berth, made sure they didn’t get hassled by any authorities. I got the NYPD to go along with me. It wasn’t hard. That kind of thing happens all the time. One hand washes the other. I was his rabbi, his protector. Even that time he got arrested—back with the little girl he was checking up on before Lucy—I was able to keep the jail term to a minimum. Marston was my snitch. I owned him. I took care of him. It’s the way things are.”
“Then he became more than a snitch. You used him more and more in dealing with these kids.”
“How did you ever figure that out anyway?”
“Joey Manielli.”
“Of course. I’d heard about him popping up in the system. I hoped no one would notice. But yes, that’s what happened. I had access to all sorts of information around the country. When I heard about a particularly bad family situation, I looked into it. The really bad cases … well, that’s when I did something.”
“Let’s talk about the other five bodies in that grave,” I said.
“What about them?”
“They’re not who you said they were either, right? Just like Joey Manielli wasn’t.”
He nodded.
“It just happened. I heard about the kids’ bodies being found, and I made sure I got put in charge of the task force investigating it. We dug up the bodies, and that’s when I got the idea. The children I’d found new homes for … well, their families were still looking for them. If some of them were dead—or at least people thought they were dead—then they’d be safe for good. So, I gave out the wrong IDs.”
“But you didn’t figure on one of them turning up somewhere—letting people know he or she was alive—like what happened with Joey Manielli?”
“They had new names, new identities. That’s all I could do. Some of them were too young to even remember much about their real parents or homes. Manielli was the anomaly. He’d gotten those fingerprints taken after the car theft when he was twelve. It was just a bad break that someone discovered that.”
“But other stuff like that could have happened,” I pointed out. “Arrests, medical issues. Even more likely, one of them could have gone looking for their past lives and families as they got older—for revenge or maybe just curiosity or a lot of other possible reasons people want to know about their ancestry.”
“Look, I’m not saying it was a perfect plan. It was flawed. I know that. I wish now I’d never done any of it. But at the time I just wanted to save these children and let them have a chance at living normal lives—away from the hellish homes where they were trapped. I knew it was dangerous, but I took the risk because the welfare of these children was the most important thing to me. I saved six lives. I’m proud of that, even if I’m not proud of everything I had to do to accomplish that. Anyway, this all happened a long time ago. After a while, I stopped. It just became too difficult to pull off. And I guess I realized I was wrong to take the law into my own hands like that, even though I believed I was doing the right thing for those kids.”
I nodded. It all made sense, sort of.
“What about the six real children in the grave?” I asked Grayson. “Who were the bodies?”
“Other missing children.”
“Who killed them and put them in that grave?”
“I don’t know.”
“And what about their parents? Still sitting at home waiting for word? These people didn’t do anything wrong, they just lost their children. Because of you, they’ll never have any kind of closure in their lives. Didn’t you feel guilty about that?”
“I did what I had to do,” he said. “I wanted to save the six who were alive. As for the dead ones, I figured it wasn’t the worst thing in the world that their families still clung on to hope they might be alive somewhere. Is hope—even false hope—the worst thing in the world to give someone?”
I thought about Alice Devlin waiting all those years for Lucy to come home.
I wasn’t sure about the answer to that.
“Like I said, this all happened years ago,” Grayson said. “I hadn’t thought about it in a long time until that e-mail and the phone call to my office from Louise Carbone, which I’m sure Marston set up.”
“Marston probably figured he could score big now that you were running for a high political office. He’d been holding onto this stuff for years, and now he was trying to blackmail you. He thought you’d be willing to pay him off to make sure none of this came out before Election Day. But you couldn’t give Marston the money he wanted. He was too much of a loose cannon out there. As long as he was around and knew what he knew, you couldn’t be sure about being elected. I think Marston suddenly realized that, realized what you might be capable of doing to win the Senate seat. That’s why he and Louise took off the way they did. To get away from you. But you set them up, made it seem like they were responsible for Lucy’s death. I helped you do that, even though I didn’t realize it at the time. Then they both convenien
tly died in that shootout. They had to die, didn’t they? Because otherwise Marston would have told everything he knew. About Lucy Devlin. About all of it. You could never let that happen.”
“That’s ridiculous.”
“All right, you tell me what happened in Idaho.”
“I made up the suicide letter with the confession about Lucy, I admit that. But the shooting was an accident.”
“Who was the little girl that you dug up and claimed was Lucy?”
“Just another missing kid whose body we’d discovered.”
“What’s her name?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“I’ll bet it matters to her family.”
“I did what I had to do,” he said defiantly. “What I didn’t do was kill Sandy Marston and his girlfriend deliberately.”
I wasn’t sure if I believed him or not. It could have all happened the way he said it did, of course. But I remembered what my friend Cliff Whitten had said about Grayson. That he’d do anything to get what he wanted—lie, cheat, break the rules, and violate any legal standards—because he thought he was in the right. The problem is when you do this, sometimes you make things worse than they were in the first place. Maybe he decided that Marston and Louise were expendable. Maybe he decided that, in the big picture of things, they really didn’t matter that much. Maybe he thought of all the great and noble things he could do in Washington if they weren’t around to ruin it. Maybe. I’d probably never know for sure.
Of course, I’d saved the most important question until last.
“What about Lucy?” I asked.
“She was the same as all the rest of them. Marston befriended her, got her to go away with him on his bike that day. She really was at that motorcycle convention in New Hampshire, just like the letter said. But she was with Marston, not me. I wasn’t there. I guess Marston and his girlfriend just told you that to get me involved. Eventually, we placed her with another family. A good family. She’s a grown woman now, married, a mother—happy, healthy, with her whole life to look forward to. I don’t know how much of this she knows. You’ll find out when you meet her. If you meet her.”
