Everyone.
7
SATURDAY, MAY 7
WILDWOOD, NEW JERSEY
A cold front had dipped out of the Great Lakes that first week of May, laying a rare glaze of ice on the beaches. The Carlino abduction remained a front-page story in the papers along the Jersey seaboard. Today’s read: “Echo Enterprises Puts Up $50K for Information Leading to Arrest.” Beneath it was the line “Police Baffled.”
A hotline received a deluge of calls from across the state, though none panned out. A trucker on a run from New York to Delaware saw a girl who looked a lot like Anne on the Lewes Ferry. She was in the company of an older man and she was wearing a scarf that covered not only her hair but also her mouth and most of her forehead, which he thought had a scratch above one eye. “Well, then, what color were her eyes?” the detective had asked, wondering how the man connected a pair of eyes with the missing teenager.
“Didn’t notice,” he replied.
They thanked him for his help.
There were dozens of “Anne sightings” in the rest stops, hotels, and gas stations along the Garden State Parkway, and not a few from the casinos of Atlantic City. None led anywhere, and nothing brought them closer to finding Anne or even a witness.
As for evidence, the blood type on the drainpipe matched that of the missing teenager. Several hairs taken from the scene matched samples from a hairbrush in Anne Carlino’s bathroom. The expensive gold wristwatch found in the silt under the pipe turned out to be a February birthday present from her parents. Gus Meyers, the forensic chief, found an unidentifiable residue in the links of the wristband and sent it to the FBI for identification.
Forensics picked up green fibers that had snagged on wood splinters under the boardwalk. Mrs. Carlino remembered a dark green sweater that was no longer in Anne’s closet. Her boyfriend couldn’t remember what she was wearing, but said whatever it was, it definitely wasn’t white. Aside from her wristwatch, she wore a gold ring with a smooth oval face engraved AMC and four studded earrings in each ear, a pair of which were gold stars. The ring they added to the broadcast. The star earrings they left out in case they got a confession and wanted to validate it.
Among the dozen or so teenagers who had been identified as being on the boardwalk that night, none had seen a man or a car that seemed out of the ordinary. No strangers, no strange cars.
They could do little else now but wait.
O’Shaughnessy saw the Explorer every day she came to work; it was parked in the police impound lot adjacent to her parking space. Looking at it always made her gloomy. The motor pool mechanics determined that the sidewall of the tire had been punched with the blade of a half-inch knife.
O’Shaughnessy had begun to suffer the effects of a full-blown cold and had an impressive array of remedies on her desktop. Between tissues and sneezes she hung blowups of the drainpipe photos around the walls of her office. It was a somewhat dramatic gesture, but a week had gone by and she didn’t know what else to do.
Some of the pictures had starry white back flash around the graffiti. She knew the words by heart now: JM loves PJ, Ron & TS 1983 forever, Surfers DRule, and East Hills Conference Champs 81. Syko Sue, Patrick B. and Jacko, Beatles, Horsley Eats Shit, and Grateful Ded. Photos also showed the bloody handprint on the pipe and the brushlike swipes that had been made by the girl’s blood-soaked hair.
She could imagine two very different scenes below the boardwalk. One of teenagers drinking beer and fumbling with each other’s clothes; the other of a frightened girl crawling on her hands and knees, badly injured, maybe even stabbed or shot. She would have been scared out of her wits, trying to be quiet and run at the same time. Every sound she made must have seemed amplified a hundred times, every hollow breath, every beat of her heart.
She must have thought that hiding was better than running, which bothered O’Shaughnessy. Did she turn to the dark recesses under the boardwalk because she was too badly injured to make it to Atlantic Avenue? She must have known at some point that she couldn’t make it out onto the beach on the other side and so tried to cram herself under the drainpipe. She must have heard him getting closer and closer until she realized he was going to find her.
O’Shaughnessy also wondered if Anne had been a random victim, or if her abductor had known she was Jason Carlino’s daughter. The Carlinos had money. Could it have been planned as a kidnapping for ransom and something had gone wrong? Six days was a long time to wait to make a demand.
Jason Carlino had done more than put up a reward for his daughter’s return. He had begun to campaign the city manager to request state police assistance. He wanted horsepower, not some local cops with limited resources.
But Wildwood had jurisdiction and unless it could be determined that the girl had been taken across state lines, the city didn’t have the power to relinquish the responsibility. That was the statement O’Shaughnessy gave to the press, though it failed to mollify Carlino.
O’Shaughnessy wiped her runny nose, picked up the case jacket, and went through it once more. It was gaining weight, was becoming a thing—the forensic reports, interviews by detectives canvassing the strip, interviews of Anne’s friends and informants and a handful of prior offenders.
Anne’s boyfriend had given the detectives written permission to search his truck. It was clean and his alibi was bulletproof. When he’d gone barhopping in town the night of her disappearance, dozens of people had seen him throughout the night, calm, cool, and without a drop of blood on him. The city manager’s own son had dropped him at home, and his mother, who had been up late reading, fixed him a sandwich and watched him take it to his room.
Cruel as it sounded, O’Shaughnessy would have at least preferred a body. Maybe then they could get evidence and stop whoever had done this, could prevent it from happening to someone else’s daughter. Unless, of course, Anne Carlino showed up on her parents’ doorstep one day—but that scenario seemed less likely as the days went by.
O’Shaughnessy had been sleeping poorly since May Day, dreaming about the cavernous place beneath the boardwalk. In her dream, someone was chasing her and she could hear his heavy breathing behind her. Water plunking from overhead conduits, she threw herself under a drainpipe, knees wet in mushy sand. She put a bloody hand on the pipe to steady herself and was trying to hold her breath when a hand reached across and grabbed her wrist.
“Line one, Lieu.”
Startled, she sat up, snatched the phone from its cradle.
“Lieutenant O’Shaughnessy, this is Detective John Payne with the Philadelphia city PD. We’re working a homicide from last evening and trying to locate relatives. You have a nursing home there, Elmwood. My victim’s father is supposed to reside there, but the staff won’t tell me anything and suggested I contact you. Can you tell me what’s going on down there?”
“What’s his name?”
“Andrew Markey.”
O’Shaughnessy squinted. “He’s dead,” she said. “Fell down a concrete stairwell and hit his head. May first.”
Silence.
“Detective?”
“Jesus, Lieu. Clear-cut accident?”
“I haven’t seen the autopsy report, but my sergeant was on the scene and said it looked okay.” She made a face. “We were told there was no next of kin.”
“Yeah, I think there was a problem between father and daughter. My victim’s husband says she barely acknowledged he existed. What happened, anyhow?”
“He opened a door to a storage area and fell down a dark set of stairs. Staff said the door should have been locked but wasn’t.”
“No witnesses.”
“Uh-huh,” she said, feeling less certain about the “accident” every second.
“You know he did some time in prison.”
“I heard something about that. Way back,” she said. “Mid-seventies?”
“Did you hear he testified against his codefendants?”
“No,” she said.
“And that one of them was
Anthony Scaglia.”
“Scaglia?”
“He’s an underboss in the Gambino family now, Peter Gotti’s successor.”
“He wouldn’t hold a grudge that long.”
“I don’t know,” Payne said. “The last two generations of organized crime in New York City were nothing less than bizarre.”
“Tell me about your victim.”
“Susan Paxton, her maiden name was Markey. Caucasian, forty-five years. She was the manager of an upscale women’s clothing store. One adult arrest, hashish possession in her teens. After that, not so much as a parking ticket. She was a saint, according to everyone who knew her around here. Plenty of friends, lots of activities, bigger than life in the church. The priest said it would take weeks to rechair all the committees she led. If she had a secret life, she had one hell of a time squeezing it in. Anyhow, my shooter comes in after closing and pumps three bullets into her, one in the head and two in the chest. Then he walks out the door without taking anything. No sex, no robbery, no motive. This didn’t look like sport shooting, Lieu. I think that whoever shot her knew her.”
“She keep ties here in Wildwood, other than the father?”
“Zip. She treated the coast and her childhood like it didn’t exist, and that’s for the last twenty-some-odd years.”
“I’ll get the autopsy on Andrew Markey. Give me twenty-four hours and a fax number.”
“Hey, Lieu. Can I ask you to keep that body on ice?”
She thought about it a minute. Thought she might want to talk to the medical examiner about it herself. “Shouldn’t be a problem. How long are you thinking?”
“Just a week or two. I shouldn’t need more.”
“The morgue’s rarely busy. I’ll do what I can. As long as family members don’t come out of the woodwork objecting.”
“Don’t think you’ll find any, but let me know if you do. I’d like to meet them. And I appreciate it.”
He gave her his fax number.
The blinds to the outer office were open and O’Shaughnessy could see Sergeant McGuire at his desk, phone cradled under his left ear, staring at the ceiling and rolling a quarter back and forth across the knuckles of his hand.
Sergeant McGuire was tall and curly-haired, a detective most of his twelve-year career. Everyone had considered Mac a shoo-in for the commander’s job when O’Shaughnessy’s predecessor retired, but she’d written the better paper on the promotional exam and the city had no choice but to offer her the job.
She never forgot Chief Loudon’s advice that day: “Win McGuire and the rest will follow. He’s the key to your success.”
Winning McGuire was much easier than she’d expected. He had no ego. They worked well together. Mac didn’t seem to mind working for a woman or anyone else as long as the job got done. Ever since she’d been promoted, she made it a point to include him in everything. When she wanted his advice, she had no qualms about asking for it in front of the men. She knew the allmale office had a lot of respect for him and that they were constantly looking for his reaction when O’Shaughnessy asked them to do something.
It was her third week without a cigarette and he’d joked with her this morning that the guys were getting ready to chip in for a carton. She knew she’d been getting edgy since the Carlino incident Sunday. She also knew McGuire had been kidding, but she sure as hell didn’t want the guys thinking she was cracking under pressure.
She pinched the bridge of her nose, thinking about Andrew Markey. She’d looked at Detective Randall’s report on the accident again. Nothing seemed wrong about the scene when you considered the man’s age and mental capacity. Still…
She punched a button when McGuire put the phone down on his desk.
“Mac,” she said, “you’re not going to believe this one.”
8
SATURDAY, MAY 7
PHILADELPHIA, PENNSYLVANIA
Sherry Moore sat in the ponderous silence of her home. It had been over a month since she’d returned from Pittsburgh and she had yet to cross the threshold of her door. She was still having the nightmares, but not nearly so many and not nearly as debilitating as they once were. Soon spring would bring the sun’s healing warmth.
Winters were awful under the best of circumstances, she thought. It was a conclusion she’d come to as a very young woman. She had once joked to a friend that she suffered from light deprivation, but it wasn’t, in all truth, a joke to Sherry. There was a difference, a palpable, indescribable difference between light and dark, never mind that she was blind. Never mind that she had been collecting images from the dying for half of her life.
She could have lived anywhere she’d chosen, of course, a climate more to her liking. But leaving Philadelphia would mean leaving the only place she had ever known as home.
An old Belgian clock ticked loudly from its place on the mantel. Crystal butterflies sat on either side of it. There were more butterflies on the nightstand in her bedroom and in her study and some silk ones in the sunroom. For a time she couldn’t stop touching them, holding them, surrounding herself with them. At every opportunity, she had Brigham or Payne take her shopping for one. She still thought about them, but not so obsessively.
She yawned, her stomach rumbled. She tugged on her earlobe, thinking she should eat, have a cup of tea, try to sleep on the couch. Blind or not, it felt safer to sleep during the day. Days were when she finally rested. Thank God they were getting longer.
The branches of a sugar maple scratched dully on her windowpanes. She listened to them, slipping in and out of sleep, recalling similar branches on similar trees, scratching the windowpanes of her childhood. The cat jumped to her lap, pressing its face to her breast, startled when a screen rattled.
Her house was on the Brooklawn shores of the Delaware. The real estate agent called it baroque, its facade greatly emphasized, but Detective Payne called it Gothic and proclaimed it Castle Moore. He said it was large and dark and scary.
Sherry knew it was an imprudent dwelling for a blind person—it had more staircases than most houses had rooms—but she hadn’t bought it for its design. She’d bought it for its massive brick sunroom and a lawn on the shore of the river. It was the closest thing to being in the city and the country at the same time.
The wind rose to a howl, lifting pages of a Braille book on a desk; dust swirled in the open hearth, sucked up the three-story chimney. The old house groaned. She put the cat down and stood, making her way toward the kitchen, annoyed when her elbow collided with a door frame.
White lace curtains rustled over a stainless steel sink, cool air pushed through the crack of an open window. She turned on the gas beneath a scorched teapot and let herself fall heavily on one of the kitchen chairs.
Hadn’t there been enough lonely days, Lord?
Brigham would be here any minute now. Dear Mr. Brigham. But company did not always dispel the loneliness.
She had dreamed of Karpovich last night, the state police captain she’d met in Pittsburgh. The Pittsburgh trip had been the only exception to her self-imposed exile, a favor to a friend and partly to appease John Payne, who had been pressing her to get out of the house. She took it mostly because the job was eminently safe. No one’s life was at stake. Either she would be able to solve the thirty-year-old mystery of the missing woman or she wouldn’t.
A lot of her work was safe. She’d worked with historians and treasure seekers at archaeological sites around the world, far from the heart-pulsing business of life and death, far from places like Oaxaca City, Mexico, and Walnut Ridge, Arkansas, far from Norwich, Connecticut. She’d more than had her share of those kinds of places.
In her dream Karpovich is standing in a field, his sad eyes watching a backhoe lift a cistern from the ground, chains creaking against the weight of a vault, and later, the onlookers stare witlessly as the tooth of the bucket catches a threadbare suitcase, dumping its rotten contents in the trench.
She looks down into the hole and sees a body bag. It is labeled “Pittsbur
gh General Hospital” and through a tear in the bag she can see a woman’s face, a beautiful woman with long chestnut hair. It was a sad dream, a profoundly sad dream, and as always, the face was that of the woman on the windshield.
The letter had prompted the dream, of course. Brigham, her neighbor, had been reading the mail the evening before, describing the grainy aerial photograph that Captain Karpovich had sent. It was a Polaroid of the Oak View Estate, a long, heavy Cadillac in the drive, a herd of sheep in the field behind the house. Scribbled handwriting on the back of the photo read “Oak View 1969.”
Karpovich would have found it in the house. She smiled at his thoughtfulness.
Brigham was a retired admiral, a widower who lived in the ivy-covered monolith next door. He taught political science at the university, but his classes were in the afternoon and he liked to keep late hours, so he came around every evening and looked in on her, read her the mail, and drank a cup of tea or some of his port, which he inestimably preferred.
Her personal mail was easy; Sherry had an accountant to handle her financial affairs, so it was mostly junk that they decided to throw away. After tea came the serious stuff from the PO box that Sherry used to receive her public mail.
There had been a time, in the early years of her notoriety, when she could get through it all in a week, and had even attempted to respond to the more compelling entreaties.
Now they were far too many, the majority unopened in boxes stored in the basement. Tens of thousands, the last anyone dared guess.
Sherry knew the mail ritual was macabre, godlike even, since she was choosing whom she would help and whom she would not. It left her with no small amount of guilt. She had given her gift to many over the years, yet it seemed too little in a world so filled with pain.
Brigham arrived promptly at nine. There were the usual letters from universities asking her to speak. There was a letter from Mexican authorities confounded by a serial killer at the Basilica de Guadalupe. There was a letter from a schoolteacher in the Virginia Blue Ridge Mountains about the death of one of her fourth-grade students. There were silk panties from a woman in Jasper, Alabama, who wanted to know the name of her husband’s mistress. There was hair from a man looking for his lost twin, and dried blood from a leukemia victim in search of a donor. Most people had no idea what she really did; they just clung to the hope that someone out there could help them.
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