The Butcher's Daughter

by Wendy Corsi Staub

  Bobby claimed he didn’t know where to find her. The relationship ended badly and they’ve been estranged for years.

  “What about Monica?”

  “Her, too. I wasn’t a good father.”

  “You tried to be,” his aunt Regina said.

  “Not till it was too late. Damage was done. By the time I changed my ways, she didn’t want anything to do with me.”

  Amelia knew those words had struck a chord with Barnes, though he remained poised and professional, never hinting at a personal connection as he interviewed the other adult relatives.

  None had anything to add. No one knew anything about the man Brandy’s been dating, other than that he was wealthy.

  “Kendra told us about him,” Regina said. “She and Brandy are the same age. They saw each other sometimes.”

  She provided contact information, and Amelia asked Barnes if he wanted her to try calling the cousin during the short drive back to the green.

  “Not just yet. She and her husband, Jeremy, are official witnesses, and Homicide will be working with them. Let’s wait and see what else we find.”

  Barnes pushes aside his coffee cup to make room for his notebook on the table as Amelia types details about Cynthia into the search engine. They don’t have much to go on, but they try various terms to narrow the search—geographic locations, security guard employment, and her daughter’s first name, Bobby’s last name, Montague.

  “Is it just me,” she asks Barnes as they scan a list of dismissible hits, “or do you think the Harrisons are a little off? Maybe . . . hiding something?”

  He seems to weigh his reply. “I don’t think they’re harboring a murderer, or that their family had anything to do with what happened to Alma and Brandy. James and Regina were pretty guarded, but a lot of people are, when they’re being questioned by the police.”

  “I’m not the police,” Amelia reminds him.

  “They didn’t know that.”

  “Isn’t it a crime to impersonate a police officer?”

  “Amelia, come on. I said you were an investigator, which you are. They drew their own conclusions. But tell me why you think the Harrisons are hiding something.”

  “You don’t think they are?”

  “I’m asking what you think.”

  “Well, a few times, it seemed like Regina almost slipped up and said too much when we were asking about Delia and Charisse.”

  “Right. And they didn’t bother to mention that Delia’s ex-husband was in the next room when I first brought her up. They didn’t want us asking him about her.”

  “Or Cynthia, either,” Amelia says.

  “And she had after-hours access to Chapel Square Mall when Charisse was abandoned. We need to find her.”

  She nods, typing again, well aware that finding Cynthia might not lead to finding Charisse, or Lily Tucker, if that’s who she became. When Barnes asked the Harrisons if they’d ever heard of anyone by the name, everyone denied it—though Amelia had again detected a hint of anxiety in Jimmy and Regina. She mentions it now, and Barnes shrugs.

  “Hard to tell. Like I said, even innocent people get nervous when they’re being questioned.”

  “Right, but you’d think Bobby would be the antsy one, considering his history, and he seemed to be telling the truth about—”

  “Amelia!” Barnes grabs her arm. “I just remembered something. Bobby said a neighbor called the police the day Delia showed up in Bridgeport.”

  “You’re right!”

  “We need to look for domestic disturbance records for that Thanksgiving.”

  Her fingers fly over the keyboard. Five minutes later, they’ve got a full name and current address and are back in the car, heading east on 95 toward Bridgeport.

  Left alone in the suite, Gypsy opens her laptop, pulls up a map of Ithaca, and studies the location.

  Coincidence is irrelevant . . .

  But had it been a coincidence?

  From Manhattan, the town lies in the opposite direction of Block Island, where Gypsy and Perry had been holed up at a dive motel. Red was supposed to complete the mission and return—although by then, of course, they’d have been gone. Perry, with his sadistic sense of humor, had gotten a kick out of imagining that little scenario—Red, triumphant after ridding the world of false prophets, returning to rejoin the chosen few . . .

  “But sorry, you aren’t one of us,” he’d said in mock disappointment after Red left the Sandy Oyster for the last time. “See you in paradise. Oh, wait . . .”

  Gypsy, too, had laughed. Not because she found it amusing, but because she needed Perry and his money as much as she needed Red. Both would be dispensable once she got what she wanted.

  Maybe Red had figured that out.

  Ithaca sits at the foot of Cayuga Lake in central New York State. It’s not on any well-traveled major highway a person would follow directly out of New York City if they were heading, say, to the Canadian border after committing the last of five murders in a twenty-four-hour spree. It must have been a deliberate destination. Why?

  She closes the map, thinking about Red’s final New York encounter with Bernadette DiMeo.

  Gypsy had never doubted the public consensus that her pregnancy had been terminated or more likely, miscarried. She was a devout Catholic who’d attended daily mass until the day she died.

  But what if she’d revealed to Red, in her last moments on earth, that she’d carried Oran’s child to term after all, and the child, now grown, is still in Ithaca?

  Gypsy pulls up a series of photos printed in the Daily News during Oran’s trial. All four of his teenaged rape victims had testified. Three of the girls—Margaret Costello, Tara Sheeran, and Christina Myers—were visibly pregnant that autumn. Even in December, though, Bernadette DiMeo was fashionably—for that era—emaciated.

  Gypsy remembers how the girls at school—especially Carol-Ann Ellis—had idolized Twiggy.

  This isn’t about Carol-Ann, though.

  Bernadette . . .

  Gypsy focuses on the photo. There’s no way a girl as skinny as Bernadette had been that winter was six months pregnant.

  It doesn’t mean that a misguided, drug-fueled Red hadn’t gone to Bernadette’s former college town looking for a grown child who’d never been born. But what if there’d been some other motivation?

  Opening a new search engine, she types Brooklyn Butcher Copycat Murders, 10/23/87–10/24/87 and Ithaca, bringing up accounts of the murder spree. She magnifies the screen and studies the facts.

  Red had been a young child when the original murders had taken place and was later determined to have had no ties to Oran Matthews and acted alone. Case closed for the police, and for the press.

  Not for the mastermind behind it.

  “What am I missing, Red? Why did you go to Ithaca that night?”

  Put yourself in Red’s shoes. Why drive two hundred miles to a place that isn’t on the way to any conceivable destination?

  With police closing in, Red fled Manhattan in a stolen car, got as far as Ithaca, broke into a house, and died after a brief scuffle with the residents. As minors, their identities were kept out of the news.

  In article after article, Gypsy finds the same information, until she comes across a speculative gold mine in the comments section of a popular true crime website.

  Even postmortem, Oran’s had his share of Brooklyn Butcher-obsessed devotees. These people know more about him, and about Red, than Gypsy ever knew, or cares to, and their posts contain well-informed theories regarding unsolved elements of either crime.

  One yields a compelling fact.

  Red’s final showdown and demise occurred in a house located directly next door to famed Cornell molecular biologist Silas Moss, who’d appeared on national television the night before. The general consensus among true crime buffs: the Moss home had been the true destination, and Red had simply gotten the address wrong.

  Gypsy skims the commentary.

  What do you expect from some
one about to kick from methamphetamine OD?

  Been there, done that, lived to tell about it, and couldn’t have found my way out of a damned bathroom stall.

  The dealer should be held accountable for the OD and the murder spree.

  Gypsy and Perry had warned Red not to take too much, that it might result in a reckless mistake.

  “We didn’t expect it to kill you, though,” she whispers, shaking her head with regret—if only because the truth had died with that moronic, dispensable loser.

  Gypsy’s search for Silas Moss yields a trove of information on a distinguished career. It makes sense that Red heard about the professor’s pioneering work reconnecting biological families and thought he might somehow be enlisted to turn up Margaret Costello’s missing daughter via DNA.

  DNA that Oran—and thus, Gypsy—would share.

  Uneasiness creeps in as she skims the transcript of Barbara Walters’s interview with Silas Moss, aired Friday, October 23, 1987.

  DNA is a distinctly patterned chain of genetic material found in every cell of every living organism . . .

  Our blood relatives will have similar markers, sharing ancestral origin, physical traits, predisposition to certain diseases . . .

  The information, revolutionary at the time, isn’t news now—not even to Gypsy. Not scientifically.

  Psychologically, it strikes like an ominous wartime bulletin.

  Blood relatives . . .

  Every cell . . .

  “Oh! I’m sorry!”

  Startled by a voice, Gypsy whirls to see a woman wearing a hotel maid’s uniform. She’s a blue-eyed blonde, middle-aged. The door to the hall is propped open, a cleaning cart framed beyond it.

  “Housekeeping—I knocked, but you didn’t—”

  “There’s a Do Not Disturb!”

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t see . . .” She turns to look. “There is no Do Not Disturb.”

  Gypsy closes the lid on her laptop. The sofa isn’t against a wall, but rather sits in the middle of the suite’s living room, back to the entry. Anyone walking in would have a clear view of the screen.

  How long had the maid been standing behind her?

  She plucks something from the floor and waves it at Gypsy. It’s the Do Not Disturb sign. “It’s here. Inside, you see? Not on the door. You made a mistake.”

  “I didn’t make the mistake. My friend did.”

  Damn him.

  “But don’t you want the maid to make up the room?” he’d asked on his way out, when she’d told him to be sure the sign was in place. “Bed made up with fresh sheets . . . so that we can destroy the bed again later?”

  “I want privacy. And you’ll be in Connecticut, keeping an eye on her like I told you. Find out everything you can, because when the time comes, we’ll need to move fast.”

  He’d grumbled his way out the door. Had he left the sign off on purpose?

  Is the maid really a maid?

  Her name tag reads Kasia. Gypsy memorizes it, and her face, and her hairstyle. A short cut with long bangs, parted on the side above her blue eyes. But she could be wearing a wig, and colored contact lenses, faking the Slavic accent. She might not be a maid at all. She might have crept up behind Gypsy and peered over her shoulder and seen what she was doing online.

  “I’m sorry. I will leave. I take garbage?” She reaches for the soggy plastic cape lying on the floor behind the couch.

  “That’s not garbage, it’s my raincoat!”

  “So sorry, so sorry. Do you want me to leave fresh towels or—”

  “Just go.”

  Kasia fumbles her way out into the hall, closing the door behind her.

  Gypsy strides over to it and slides the chain, hand trembling. Turning, she spots a figure across the room, and gasps.

  But it’s just her reflection in the mirror. She walks over and peers closer, confirming traces of the other woman’s features in her own.

  We could be related. She could be Margaret’s daughter. She found me before I could find her. She wants to destroy me before I can destroy her.

  If she’s Oran’s daughter, she’s inherently smart, and dangerous.

  So? You’re smarter. More dangerous.

  She returns to the closed door and leans into the peephole, expecting to find a blue eye looking back at her. She sees only the open door to the suite across from hers, and the edge of the maid’s cart alongside it.

  She puts her hand on the knob, then pulls it back. There will be security cameras in the hallway.

  That’s all right. Gypsy is one step ahead of the woman calling herself Kasia—and she’ll stay a few steps behind her when she leaves after her shift.

  Barnes drives around Cynthia Randall’s residential industrial neighborhood looking for a parking spot. Warehouses and shuttered manufacturers share blocks with storefronts and houses that aren’t so much historic as they are old.

  The only people who seem to be out and about can’t be considered pedestrians. They’re not walking; they’re loitering.

  Barnes knows the type. He was the type, back in his juvenile delinquent days after his father died, before Wash came along one night when Barnes was breaking into cars.

  In his troubled youth, his street name had been “Gloss,” so smooth and slick that nothing ever stuck. Wash did—his friendship, the legacy of NYPD service, the lessons he taught, his warnings, and his advice—with two noted exceptions.

  Barnes has spent his adult life rationalizing his reckless behavior in March and October 1987. When he was younger, he blamed circumstances.

  The night Barnes slept with Delia Montague, Wash was hospitalized for the illness that would kill him. The night Barnes accepted the dirty money from Stef and walked away from his newborn daughter, Wash’s health was deteriorating, and a close mutual friend of theirs had just been killed in an armed robbery.

  Three decades later, Barnes owns his mistakes. Too bad being older and wiser doesn’t grant you a time-travel pass to undo the damage and make things right.

  Barnes squeezes the car into a spot in front of a church where the signboard letters have been rearranged to spell an obscenity, and baby Jesus is ankle-shackled to the manger in the curbside plaster crèche.

  They walk several blocks, long-legged Amelia matching his stride, her boot heels clicking along the sidewalk. They pass a playground, empty swings dangling above muddy trenches.

  “Can we go to the park and play Penny on the Playground, Daddy?”

  “You’re getting warmer, son!”

  At Cynthia’s address, they find a multifamily house. The peeling paint job isn’t quite white and isn’t quite beige. A few tufts of grass poke alongside puddles in a tiny yard that’s mostly mud. There’s a small rutted driveway with space for two cars. A dented Toyota occupies one, with two children’s car seats in the back. There are two front doors on the small cinderblock stoop covered by a vinyl awning. One is hung with a tinsel candy cane that appears to have weathered many a nor’easter.

  At an adjacent house across the chain-link fence, a large dog is leashed to a stub of a tree. He growls and yaps wildly as they approach.

  “Aw, nice doggy,” Amelia says. “What’s your name, fella?”

  “My money’s on ‘Satan,’” Barnes mutters.

  They ascend the steps. The wrought iron railing wobbles in his hand, detached from its concrete anchor. The other railing is a crude, splintery-looking replacement crafted from two-by-fours.

  Cynthia Randall lives at 265A, the door on the left. Not the one with the bedraggled candy cane—for better or worse, he’s not sure.

  He rings the bell, and they wait. Satan barks, trying to launch himself over the fence.

  After a minute, Barnes rings again. Still nothing. He knocks. The candy cane door remains closed, but the other one opens. A young Hispanic woman stands with a baby on her hip and a toddler lurking at her knees.

  “Buck! Cállate la boca!” she shouts at the dog next door, and to Barnes’s shock, the animal obeys. She turns
back to Barnes and Amelia, resuming a conversation they haven’t yet had. “Hi. Cynthia’s at work till . . . What’s today, Tuesday?”

  “Wednesday.”

  “Oh, si. Wednesday—she’ll be home in about half an hour if you want to come back. I would have you come in to wait, but I’m about to put these two down for their naps, and they need a quiet house to sleep. Don’t ring the bell or knock when you come back. And don’t get Buck going, because that dog, he is loco.”

  She closes the door.

  Barnes and Amelia look at each other, then down at the steps. Dry, thanks to the awning. They sit down to wait.

  “It can’t possibly be getting dark out yet, can it?” Amelia checks her watch.

  “It can. Dead of winter, and the farther east you go, the earlier the sun sets.”

  “When there is sun.” She looks from the grim sky to the burned-out house across the street. “You know until today, I assumed New England was all fancy suburbs and picturesque small towns, not gritty cities.”

  “Eh, I’ll take a gritty city any day. Small towns aren’t all they’re cracked up to be.”

  “I don’t know about that. I was planning to stay in Ithaca after college.”

  Ithaca.

  When she’d mentioned it earlier, he’d almost told her about Gypsy Colt and Perry Wayland and the Brooklyn Butcher copycat who’d died there. But he’d stopped himself, deciding it might not be relevant.

  Ithaca isn’t exactly a tiny town in the middle of nowhere. It’s a small city that draws thirty thousand college students a year. Amelia had been one of them.

  Tawafuq?

  “Why didn’t you stay?” he asks her.

  “My husband didn’t like it. Future husband, back then, and, uh . . . past husband now.”

  “You’re not together anymore?”

  “Trial separation, but I keep forgetting, like—you know when something bad happens and you wake up the next morning and everything seems fine but you have this vague feeling that things are off, and then—bam. It hits you again.”

  “Yeah. I do know.”