by An Anthology
The police found that the guardrail on the bridge had been tampered with, enabling the car to easily break through.
They kept looking for Atkinson’s body, which they assumed had been carried down the Belfast River and out to sea. (The river’s real name is the Passagassawakeag, but I always refer to it as the Belfast—I think you can figure out why.)
The FBI discovered that a New Jersey girl named Cady Clark had disappeared in New York City five years earlier, when she was seventeen, and had never been heard from again. Her Social Security number was now being used by the Cady Clark in our case. Some New Jersey State Police troopers showed the girl’s parents a photograph of our “Cady,” and they said they’d never seen her before.
Our Cady’s skin cells, the ones that were found under Joe Bruno’s fingernails, were too degraded to provide a useful DNA sample to see if it matched the DNA of the charred corpse from the car. (That was another problem, getting viable DNA from a charred corpse.) So they took a sample of the epithelials (sloughed-off skin cells) from the duct tape in the motel room, then extracted a molar from the victim in the car to get mitochondrial DNA, or mtDNA, from the dental pulp. MtDNA is inherited directly from the mother. It can’t be used to prove an exact match between two samples, only that the two samples came from the same maternal line, but it was something.
The FBI lab was doing the tests, but they had a serious backlog and there were no other labs available that work with mtDNA, so we had to wait awhile for the results. Still, as things stood, all the evidence seemed to point to it being the phony Cady Clark’s body that was found in the wreck.
The FBI got tons of fingerprints from her house, her car, her office, etc., but she wasn’t in the system. She’d worked as a paralegal, or so she’d told me. That turned out to be one of the few true things she did tell me. And oddly enough, the law office where she worked was right across the street from the bank that was robbed; just another in a long string of coincidences.
The feds interviewed her co-workers, neighbors, employees at the places she shopped, had her dry cleaning done, etc., and though none of these people had ever met her sister Amanda, more than a few of them had heard her talk about the woman, and not in the most glowing terms.
There were no records of anyone named Amanda Hitchcock living anywhere in Maine or surrounding areas.
I learned all this between visits to radiology during my first two days recuperating. Meanwhile the press had decided that I was either a hero or a chump. Personally, I didn’t feel like much of a hero: a survivor, sure, but not a hero. I did feel like a chump though and—as I fell asleep my last night in the hospital—I decided that if I had to do it over, I wouldn’t have gone to Dr. Atkinson’s office alone. That had been a freshman move. Really dumb.
A hospital is mostly silent at night. And dark. You might hear the faint, steady beep of a heart monitor from another room, or some muffled footsteps passing down the hall, or the soft murmur of voices and a few strains of “light” music from an FM radio at the nurse’s station. That’s all. So when I woke up suddenly from a deep sleep, my last night at emmc, I knew something was wrong.
The hairs on my arms and the back of my neck tingled as I listened carefully for any sound that was out of place.
Nothing happened; no sounds were made. I noticed I was holding my breath and started breathing again through my nose, very soft and slow. I tried to play back in my mind the sounds that had awakened me.
The door to my room had been left ajar, and I had a dim recollection of a startled female voice crying out from somewhere down the hall, and then the soft, distant thump of a body falling. Now, nothing. Then, I heard the squeak of a leather shoe in the hall. I could just faintly hear it coming slowly toward my room.
Squeak… silence… squeak... silence…
Coming closer and closer.
I slid out of bed, put some pillows under the blanket to make it look like I was still sleeping, then looked around in the dim light for a weapon. The only thing I could find was a shiny bedpan, sitting needlessly on the chair by my bed. I picked it up, holding it by the narrow end, tiptoed to the bathroom, and waited.
The squeaking sound got to my door then stopped.
The door creaked open, there was a pause, then it closed with a soft click. The squeaking shoe started up again, this time within inches of where I stood.
I held my breath as a dark figure slowly passed my line of sight. He was about my height (I’m 6’1“). He was wearing a state police uniform, and had a gun drawn, holding it like cops do, with both hands. It looked to be a small caliber revolver.
He stopped just a few steps past the bathroom door, aimed the gun, and shot at the bed, three times. In the middle of his third shot I sprung through the door and, using both hands, hit him as hard as I could across the back of his head.
He groaned, sagged, the gun flew out of his hand; he went down. I stepped forward—in bare feet, wearing nothing but my boxer briefs and a hospital gown—and tried to hit him again, but he twisted away then tackled me awkwardly at the knees.
I made another swing, but it glanced harmlessly off his shoulder. He was strong, built like an old football player, and used his weight advantage to tip me over, banging my head against the wall.
We both stood up slowly, breathing hard, our heads bleeding, neither one sure yet what to do with the other.
As I stood there I caught a good glimpse of his face in the dim light. He had gray balding hair and a grim face, sallow and going pouchy. I was looking at Mike Delgado.
Before he could try for the gun, which had skittered under the bed, we heard the sound of faltering footsteps and anxious voices coming from the hall, and, in the distance, the wail of approaching sirens.
“Count yourself lucky this time, Field,” he panted.
“I count myself lucky all the time, Mike,” I said, but the words floated, as if coming through layers of cotton.
I teetered, swayed.
Delgado smiled an evil smile and ran past me to the door as I passed out. Good, I remember thinking as I hit the floor, at least he left his gun behind; that’s evidence.
After Delgado got away, and I was revived by a night nurse (not the one he’d sapped), they put an armed guard on my door. The next day brought more trips to radiology, more CT scans, more worried visits from Jamie. After a full day of this, I was finally pronounced fit for civilian life. I left for home with a clean bill of health, an armed FBI agent on my property, and a large scab on my forehead that gradually turned into a small white scar that I eventually grew fond and a little proud of. Michael Delgado was still at large.
I made cold curried chicken for dinner that night (with golden raisins, apples, and cashews), along with Cajun red beans and rice, and homemade French onion soup. What can I tell you; I had cravings that didn’t necessarily go together, at least not ordinarily. (In my defense, I’d been whacked on the head numerous times in the previous three or four days.)
Jamie and I drank a cold, dry viognier that went well with the curry and the beans and rice, yet didn’t clash with the cognac in the soup. Leon drank Pepsi.
“So, what’s your next move?” Jamie asked.
“I guess I’ll call Kelso and see if he can track down Delgado with his computer.” Lou Kelso is a friend from my days on the NYPD. He was a prosecutor for the Manhattan DA’s office and is now a private investigator, though he doesn’t need the money. He recently won a lawsuit against the estate of a former client—a very rich client—so he’s on easy street.
“Good,” she said. “Maybe he can come up with something the cops and the FBI can’t that’ll stop Delgado once and for all. It’s nice, though, that the FBI is keeping an eye on you and the house. Oh, I forgot to mention; Dr. Atkinson’s corpse was found floating off Eggemoggin Reach this afternoon.”
“Urn,” Leon said, “it’s dinner? No morgue talk, please?”
“Sorry,” said Jamie, sipping her soup.
“Are they sure it’s Atkinson?
” I asked.
“Pretty sure,” she said. “God, this soup is delicious. And who would’ve thought these three dishes would go together? Anyway, I’ll know more after I perform the autopsy tomorrow. The body is pretty badly decomposed.”
Leon said, “Jamie!”
“Sorry.”
I said, “I make it with Bermuda onions.”
“Well, it’s really good.”
“Thanks. You want some more?”
We engaged in culinary conversation until Leon and Magee (his wheaten mix) had gone back to his quarters in the guest cottage, a converted carriage house between my Victorian two-story and the kennel, which was once a dairy barn.
When dinner was over I called Kelso and gave him the story. After he’d asked about my current health and my prospects for it continuing, he made an interesting comment:
“How sure are you that this client of yours is really the fried corpse they found in the car?”
“Former client,” I said.
“Fine, ”former client.“ Maybe it was her sister.”
“You could be right. If she really has a sister.”
“In the meantime, I’ll keep hacking into any database I can to locate Delgado, and also try to find out what the connection is between your former client, whoever she is, and the real Cady Clark.”
The next day Earl came out of his coma and one of the first things he wanted to do was talk to me.
So I went to Rockland Memorial in Glen Cove, where a nurse with a crisp manner told me he’d suffered some brain damage and short-term memory loss because of the shooting. The bullet had damaged his corpus callosum, which divides the right and left hemispheres of the brain.
She had me sign a visitor’s log at the nurse’s station, then took me to a room where Earl was wrapped in cheap hospital sheets, handcuffed to the bed, and had a morphine drip in his arm and a breathing tube jammed up his nose. Though he wasn’t very tall, his bony feet stuck out of the sheets at the bottom of the bed.
Earl didn’t say anything to the nurse as she brought me in; he just nodded.
She cleared what was left of breakfast off the meal tray, pulled it back to the wall, and left. I found a chair next to the bed, pulled it out, sat down, holding a file folder in one hand, and said, “So, what’s on your mind?”
“I guess I should apologize for the crack I made about putting a bullet in your brainpan,” he said, his lips and tongue straining to form each word, like an idiot or a stroke victim.
I nodded. “You mean since Cady put a bullet in your brainpan you feel bad about threatening to do that to me?”
“Screw that,” he said. “Cady didn’t shoot me.”
“Really? You remember how it happened? I thought you—”
“No, I don’t remember, but I know she wouldn’ta done it.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Anyway, I just wanted you to know she had nothin‘ to do with the robbery or whatever happened at the motel.”
“Ballistics tells a different story about the motel.”
He shrugged and his eyes withdrew. “Then they got it wrong,” he said. “And the bank job was all Delgado. He was the wheel man and the one who held the dough after.”
That fit. I said, “So Cady never mentioned the bank? That it was right across the street from where she worked?” He shook his head. “Really? Because we got her phone records from work and know she called you at least a dozen times before the robbery. You’re saying she never dropped a casual mention of the exact time the armored car showed up each week, or that the bank guard had a heart condition, or that she needed money for her eye operation?”
He thought it over. “It don’t matter what she said to me, she wasn’t in on it. She didn’t even know about it.”
“Right. Then why did she schedule a dog training session with me at the exact time she knew you’d be arriving, fresh from the bank, with money for her surgery?”
“She didn’t know I was comin‘,” he said, then struggled to take a breath. “That was just a, a, a accident.”
“I don’t think so, Earl. Maybe she thought I’d have a gun with me and that I might use it on you, I don’t know. But I do know it wasn’t an accident. She wanted you dead, just like she did at the motel in Wiscasset.”
His eyes struggled to hold mine. “That ain’t true.”
“Really? But which makes more sense, that Cady shot both of you or that you shot your cousin, who you look up to?”
“I don’t care what you say.”
“Okay, then,” I said, taking the life insurance policy out of the folder and handing it to him. “Explain this.”
“What is it?”
I told him what it was and when it had been made out.
He looked it over briefly, muttering, “This can’t be real, this is a forgery,” and shaking his head.
But as he handed the document back to me a brief sputter of heartrending emotions sparked and died in his sad, lizardlike eyes, and I could tell that he finally knew the truth.
I wanted to say, “What did you think, you moron? That a girl like that was really going to fall for a reptile like you?” but held my tongue. I’m not saying I felt sorry for him, but he certainly looked pathetic.
“What diff’r‘nce does all this make if she’s dead?”
“True.” He kind of had me there. “But we need to find Cady’s sister, Amanda, Earl. And we need to find Mike Delgado. Do you know how to find them?
He shook his head sadly. “But if anyone’s the kind of scheming bitch you think Cady is, it’d be Amanda, not her.”
“Good. That’s good, Earl. What do you know about her?”
“Amanda? Nothin‘. Just what Cady told me. She’s been ruining Cady’s life ever since they was kids.”
I doubted that. I wondered what Amanda Hitchcock was really like and if Cady hadn’t been the one ruining her life. Or maybe Kelso was right. Maybe Amanda had been the one to die in the explosion in the river and Cady Clark—or whatever her real name was—was still out there, planning trouble for more innocent victims—or half-innocent victims like Earl and Amanda Hitchcock.
I put the insurance policy in the folder. “Anyway, thanks for the conversation. I’ve got dogs to get back to.”
“You’re wrong about her, Mr. Field,” he said, but the brimming look in his eyes told a different story.
That afternoon I was scraping the dried residue of Hooch’s drool off the kitchen floor with a putty knife (that stuff is impossible to get rid of), when Kelso called.
He’d found out a few things:
A few months after the real Cady Clark disappeared, a former Belfast PD detective was hired by the missing girl’s family to find her whereabouts. His name was Mike Delgado.
“What? Why would a New Jersey family contact Delgado?”
“They wouldn’t. He contacted them. He spent a few months looking into it, then they never heard from him again.
“But get this,” he said, “there was another teenager, this one was from Queens, who went missing around the same time. Her name was Janet Slemboski. Both girls were enrolled in an acting school in New York. They had an acting class together, plus a tap class, and a theatrical makeup class.”
“You think this Janet Slemboski could be the real identity of the girl in our case?”
“I do. I glommed an 8-by-10 from the school and she looks similar to the girl in the Polaroid you faxed me. The thing is, a girl’s face can change quite a bit from the time she’s sixteen to when she’s twenty-two. Plus, a lot of these girls are like doppel-gangers of each other. But get this: the real Cady Clark had just won a two-year scholarship—with a bit part on a soap opera attached—the day before she disappeared.”
“Sounds like you could be on to something. If Slembaski felt the scholarship and soap part should have been hers, she might’ve made Cady Clark disappear, right?”
“It’s a good possibility.”
“Sounds like she’s our guy.”
“Yeah,” he sa
id, “except for one thing: as far as I can tell Janet Slemboski doesn’t have a sister.”
I thought it over. “That’s moot since no one around here except D’Linda has ever seen Cady Clark’s supposed sister. Hell, maybe the woman D’Linda saw was actually Janet Slemboski pretending to be Amanda Hitchcock.” I stopped. “She could’ve worn a wig and dark makeup and contact lenses, I guess, but how could she have gotten rid of her scar?”
“You got me. She did take a theatrical makeup class.”
“A fake scar? Maybe.”
“Meanwhile, Slemboski’s parents are dead, so we can’t ask them if she’s your Cady Clark, or get a DNA sample from them. And I’m having trouble finding her dental records.”
