The Butcher's Daughter

by Wendy Corsi Staub

  “Woe to the wicked! It will go badly with him, For what he deserves will be done to him.”

  Her phone buzzes in her pocket, a reminder that someone is waiting for her.

  Gypsy Colt crushes the butt on the sidewalk with her black boot and slips away into the night.

  Chapter Two

  Monday, January 2

  Despite a sleepless night, morning-after clarity has left Barnes grateful that his NYPD-issued phone had cut short his diner meeting with Amelia. He’d been about to ask her if she remembered Oran Matthews, the Brooklyn Butcher, and tell her that Wayland’s mistress was—is—the Butcher’s daughter, Gypsy Colt.

  As Barnes completes paperwork for a missing persons case after a sleepless night, his body begs him to go home to bed, but his brain is fixated on the damned ring, and the Harrisons’ double murder. He makes a couple of calls, asks a couple of questions, and discovers that his old friend Sumaira El Idrissi is working the Harrison case.

  One more phone call, this time directly to her.

  “Hey, Barnes, what’s up?”

  “I’ve got a lead on the Bed-Stuy murders.”

  “Yeah? What—”

  “I need to tell you in person. Are you at the scene?”

  “Where else?”

  “I’ll be there within the hour.”

  He makes it in forty-five minutes, including a stop at the halal deli and a pause to greet the uniformed cops at the entrance to Alma Harrison’s building.

  Sumaira is in the hallway outside the apartment, talking to another detective. Seeing Barnes, she excuses herself and strides toward him, phone in hand and a navy wool coat draped over her shoulders like a cape.

  Decades ago, Barnes had sworn off dating fellow cops after a brief, disastrous marriage to one, but he regrets it whenever he connects with Sumaira, an attractive brunette in her early forties. Her black pantsuit is unrumpled, her hair looks freshly brushed, and if she has circles under her eyes, they’re masked by makeup.

  “How are the knuckles holding up?” he asks.

  “Exactly how you’d think.”

  Yeah. Working a case in an impoverished building without interior security cameras to capture criminal activity, detectives have to knock on a lot of doors, and the search for witnesses and information can be grueling and fruitless. Regardless of what neighbors know and their willingness to share, they’re understandably wary of unexpected visitors calling “Police!”

  “For you.” He hands Sumaira a large black coffee and white paper bag from the deli.

  She peers inside. “My favorite! Thank you. Let’s talk inside,” she says around an enormous bite of black-and-white cookie, and leads him past crime scene tape and uniformed cops into Alma Harrison’s apartment. A forensics guy is on his phone in a corner of the kitchenette, and another packs up equipment.

  If Barnes had never been here before, he might attribute the disarray to crime scene aftermath. But other than fingerprint dust, he’s guessing this is what it looked like before the murders, if not what it had smelled like. The corpses are gone, but the stench of death remains despite windows wide-open to the cold morning wind.

  Sumaira points to a large dark stain on the floor beneath a string of Christmas lights taped to a blood-spattered living room wall. “Daughter was there. Mother was in the bathroom.”

  “Same time frame?”

  “No. Probably a few hours apart, the mother first.” She gestures at a couch littered with food wrappers, a pizza box, and laundry that isn’t likely clean. “You want to sit?”

  “I don’t even want to breathe. How are you eating in here?”

  “Starvation and desensitization.” She swallows the last of her cookie, crumples the empty bag, and balances it on top of a heap of garbage in a kitchen can. Then she takes a small notebook out of her coat pocket, clicks a pen, and looks at Barnes. “Tell me what you’ve got.”

  “I knew them.”

  “The Harrisons?”

  “Not well. But you’re never going to believe this . . .”

  She jots notes and asks questions as he fills her in. For now, he leaves out Perry Wayland, Cuba, Stef, and the dirty money—not for his own sake, but for his daughter’s. Reopening the Wayland cold case would be a complex, expensive bureaucratic task and most certainly stall the investigation. It might also bring his own ugly secret to light, sidelining him with complications and repercussions.

  He can’t let that happen. His priority is to locate Charisse and find out who’d murdered those two women. Common sense would indicate that Wayland and Gypsy Colt have nothing to do with this.

  “But what is your gut telling you, Stockton?” Wash asks in his head.

  The exact opposite.

  “Tawafuq,” Sumaira comments.

  “Excuse me?”

  “In my faith, that’s what we call synchronicity others might consider coincidence. Your finding a ring in 1987, giving it to your baby mama, and then thirty years later, her friend’s daughter returns it to the original owner . . . tawafuq.”

  “Two things about that. One, she didn’t return it to Amelia. She just showed it to her.”

  “Really? I wonder where it is, then? We didn’t find anything but costume jewelry here, and believe me, we looked, because the daughter was wearing an expensive necklace and bracelet. What’s the second thing?”

  “Please don’t call Delia my ‘baby mama.’ I haven’t seen her since 1987. Two strangers, one drunken night. That’s all it was.”

  “What about Amelia?”

  “She never met her.”

  “No, I mean, you said she’s single. Are you two—”

  “I said her marriage fell apart over the last few months.”

  “Isn’t that the same thing? Are you seeing her?”

  “No, and no.” He scowls. “How is this relevant?”

  “You’re ornery today.”

  “Sorry.” Barnes rubs the burning spot between his shoulder blades. “I haven’t eaten or slept in—”

  “I get it. Believe me. Anyway . . . tawafuq. Every incident has meaning. You and Amelia were meant to come together.”

  His phone vibrates. Ah, tawafuq sparing them both his ornery reply.

  Or is it?

  Amelia is asking him to give her a call when he gets up.

  Gets up?

  What is that woman thinking? Does she know anything about police work?

  No, she does not. Because she isn’t a cop. But that doesn’t mean he wants to date her, or that her texting him in this particular moment has some kind of cosmic significance.

  Ignoring the text, he thrusts the phone back into his pocket, apologizes to Sumaira, and asks her what happened to the Harrisons.

  “Close range double taps, back of the head.”

  Double taps—two bullets, rapid fired to get the job done with maximum efficiency.

  “No signs of forced entry, robbery, a struggle,” she continues. “No known enemies.”

  “So we’re looking at premeditated, execution-style?”

  “Yes.”

  “Who found them?”

  “Relatives from Connecticut. The victims were due up there Friday for a family party, but they didn’t get off the bus and no one could get ahold of them. Saturday, a cousin came to check on them and found them. No evidence so far of drugs, gangs, organized crime. But the cousin said the daughter had a new boyfriend. Older, and with big bucks. We’re following that lead.”

  “It would tie in with the fancy jewelry.”

  “Yes, and something else. Here, I’ll show you.”

  She opens the door to a tiny bedroom, and he smells a familiar floral perfume wafting with squalor and death.

  Sumaira points to a nightstand. A large etched crystal vase rises above the clutter. It’s filled with delicate white blooms. “From a florist, and not cheap. They’re lilies.”

  Not just any lilies, Barnes knows.

  White ginger mariposa—the national flower of Cuba.

  Gypsy takes an u
nsatisfying sip of coffee and plunks the cup back on the room service tray beside half-eaten toast and grapefruit. Measly American substitutes for café con leche, ripe guava, and thick, butter-slathered Cuban bread.

  But New York City does many things better—bagels, pizza, cloaks of anonymity. Here, no one cares who or what she is.

  Almost no one.

  Stockton Barnes had been assigned to investigate Perry Wayland’s disappearance back in 1987. The tabloids had a field day speculating about the suicidal tycoon until that story was eclipsed by a copycat killer who’d nearly succeeded in finishing off the four females who’d survived the Brooklyn Butcher back in 1968.

  Gypsy and Perry left the country to await Judgment Day in Baracoa, one of the most remote places on earth. Nearly three decades later, they were still waiting when Barnes showed up in their tiny island community. A coincidence, he claimed. But her father always told her that coincidences are signs. She’d been so caught up in interpreting that one that she’d overlooked something more significant.

  A storm of biblical proportion was barreling toward their island paradise, precisely as foretold in Isaiah 28:2: “A destroying storm, as a flood of mighty waters overflowing . . .”

  Having spent the days leading up to Hurricane Matthew fixated on the detective’s presence, she belatedly herded her followers to her mountainside retreat as opposed to the government-ordered shelters. There was no decision to be made. She was not their dictator, but their leader, their savior.

  Feverishly flipping through her Bible as the storm blew in, she’d settled on Kings 19:11. “Go forth, and stand upon the mount.”

  If only—

  Someone knocks on the suite door.

  The housekeeping staff starts at nine, but they wouldn’t ignore the Do Not Disturb sign. Nude, she climbs out of bed, ignoring the plush white robe and slippers. Her feet are cold on the marble floor, but she’ll be back in bed momentarily, and this time, not alone.

  Unless . . .

  “Who is it?” she calls through the door, thinking of the detective who’d turned up on that remote New England coastal island and a far more remote Cuban one.

  “Who do you think?”

  “Just making sure.” She flips the security lock, greets her visitor with a passionate kiss, and leads him to the bedroom.

  The city that had snoozed well past dawn on New Year’s yesterday has resumed humming with hyperactivity. Amelia shoulders her way off a rush-hour subway wearing last night’s hoodie, jeans, and sneakers under a puffy parka. Unpresentable, yes, but she has no client appointments until this afternoon, and can dash home to shower and change at lunchtime. Right now she’s on a mission so pressing that she skips her morning latte, barely breaking stride to buy mucky coffee-cart brew as she hurries toward her office.

  At the turn of the last century, the brick tenement was overcrowded with European immigrants and the neighborhood rampant with slums. By the turn of this one, Allen Street’s historic medians were decaying and the building was a rat-infested ruin. Now it houses professional offices on a charming block overlooking a restored, landscaped pedestrian mall.

  She climbs the creaky wooden stairway to a door bearing a brass plate that reads amelia crenshaw haines, investigative genealogist. Every time she sees it, wistfulness taints the surge of pride. No longer just because Bettina, Calvin, and her beloved mentor Silas Moss can’t bear witness to her thriving career, but because the husband who’d proudly put up the placard is no longer in her life.

  “Who knows? We might find out we can’t live without each other, either,” Aaron had said, zipping his suitcase on the chilly November morning before walking out the door for the last time.

  “I hope so.”

  “Do you, Amelia?”

  She couldn’t answer the question then for the fierce lump in her throat.

  She can’t now, because she’s not sure.

  Her life has gone on much the same way it always has. Aaron had traveled more than he was home ever since he’d made partner at his corporate law firm years ago, so she’s long accustomed to being on her own. In fact, her loneliest moments had unfolded when they were together.

  Her kitten, Clancy, is affectionate company, her work keeps her busier than ever, and her social life is unchanged. Childless by choice, Amelia and Aaron hadn’t hung out with fellow couples in years. He’d cultivated his circle of pals and colleagues and she has hers, though her longtime friendship with his sister has grown strained.

  “You’re part of the family. My parents still want you to come for Thanksgiving,” Karyn had said back in November.

  “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

  “Oh, Aaron is fine with it. He knows we all love you. He loves you, too. I’m sure you guys will work things out. He can be difficult, but he’ll come around.”

  “It’s not just him, Karyn. I have some stuff of my own to work out, too.”

  “You mean, the thing with your mother?”

  The thing with your mother—as if it’s some innocuous to-do list detail that needs tending. As if Amelia hadn’t finally clawed her way out of a gaping crater, scarred and dazed, only to be hit again by that unexpected DNA match to Bettina.

  She’s hoping to find some answers at last on Martin Luther King weekend, when she and her friend Jessie fly to Bettina’s hometown. The plane tickets had been Jessie’s Christmas gift to Amelia.

  “We’re going to figure this out together, Mimi, on location!”

  Jessie is the only one who calls her by that nickname, and as a fellow foundling, the only one who understands what it’s like to have been abandoned as a newborn. Well, besides Clancy, who’d been found on the street and brought to a kill shelter, where Amelia had rescued him.

  She unlocks the door and steps into an office that had once felt spacious, with high tin ceilings and tall windows. Now it’s cluttered with stacks of bankers boxes containing files that long ago overflowed the cabinets, courtesy of predigitalization-era research.

  The building is chilly every Monday morning, but she’s earlier than usual today, and the place had been vacant through the holiday week. A cold wind rattles the windowpane and a smattering of snowflakes swirl beyond. Still bundled in her coat, she settles on the couch with her client records for the woman she now knows was Brandy Harrison.

  Last night as she was drifting off to sleep, she remembered something. Brandy might have lied about her name, but she’d given Amelia a folder filled with newspaper accounts about a Black toddler abandoned at a Connecticut shopping mall in 1990. Why?

  Skimming the thick sheaf in the manila folder, Amelia is struck anew by two details.

  There’s no mention in any press account of a later adoption or charmed life the foundling had supposedly gone on to lead as Lily Tucker.

  And the articles Brandy had given her weren’t printed off the internet, as they would be if the story had been accessed in online archives. These are photocopies of actual clippings, mostly torn, not cut, from newspapers. Either they’d been collected at the time the story was unfolding, or someone had gone to a lot of trouble and expense to hunt down copies of vintage papers to make the file look authentic.

  The Connecticut child was discovered at downtown New Haven’s Chapel Square Mall just after the place opened. Unlike Amelia, she’d have been old enough to comprehend that she was alone in the world and surrounded by strangers.

  The media accounts detail how she’d been found in a dim corner of the cavernous mall, sound asleep in a cheap folding stroller. The accompanying photos show a strikingly pretty little girl. Her chin is down, upturned gaze wide-eyed and frightened. Amelia studies her features. Her mouth is a delicate rosebud mouth; her enormous eyes fringed by long, thick lashes. There’s something familiar about her.

  She uses her phone to snap photos of the child in the clippings, then grabs another client’s file and snaps a few more. Flipping back through the articles, she makes notes on a pad.

  The child is described as unkempt
, dressed in grungy pink corduroy overalls and a jacket that was two sizes too big for her, and a season shy of the weather. No mention is made of a little gold ring on a chain.

  That doesn’t mean there hadn’t been one. But why would the authorities withhold it from the press? There was no reward offer to protect, and it wasn’t a criminal case.

  Her phone dings with a text.

  It’s from Jessie. Last night, Amelia had called to tell her about her meeting with Barnes. Of course Jessie immediately wanted to know if he was single and hot.

  “Both, but that’s not why I’m calling,” Amelia said. She told Jessie about the Brooklyn murders and the gold ring, leaving out Perry Wayland and the bribe, having promised Barnes she’d keep it to herself.

  Any updates? Jessie asks now.

  Amelia writes back, Can you talk?

  Her phone rings a moment later.

  “Mimi? Everything okay?”

  “Yes—it’s just a lot to type. Are you on your way to work?” Jessie is a therapist with an enormous caseload.

  “Not yet. I just got Theodore to school and now I’m doing laundry. Chip’s ski boot socks stink to high heaven and Petty thinks everything that’s not a towel should be washed by itself on delicate and hung to dry.”

  “Can’t they do their own?” she asks, aware that Jessie’s oldest son and daughter are home from college on winter break.

  “They can, if you don’t mind having the laundry room tied up for days. I mind. Anyway, I was talking to Billy this morning—when we were still on speaking terms, which was before he tried to help me lug two tons of dirty clothes to the basement . . .”

  “That’s a switch.” Jessie’s husband is recuperating from a heart attack.

  “Yeah, I told him to hold that thought, because the second the cardiologist gives him the all clear, I’m taking a bubble bath while he does the laundry and scrubs the toilet.”

  How Amelia envies the steadfast Jessie and Billy, affectionately—and sometimes not—squabbling through twenty-five years of never having enough time or money, but more than enough love to sustain each other and a kid-filled, pet-filled old house.