She didn’t want the girls to overhear their brother’s name out in public, and couldn’t exactly warn Leo while his phone was on speaker with the girls in the car. She told the girls she loved them and thanked Leo again for entertaining them. Once she’d hung up, she sent a quick follow-up text to Leo that he would see once he was out from behind the wheel.
As she set her phone down, she saw her husband through fresh eyes. They’d known each other ten years, but in her mind, it had whizzed by in a flash, and he hadn’t changed one bit. Same wavy head of dark hair and steely blue-gray eyes. He had a fuller face than his more famous older brother, but to her, he was even more handsome. She suspected that if she and Andrew were lucky enough to turn one hundred together, she’d still see him as a young man.
But in this single moment, she saw the strands of gray peering out from his temples, and the lines that had formed around his eyes and lips. And, more than anything, he looked exhausted. Of course he did. So did she.
And in ten minutes, they were expected to step in front of the camera crews assembling in the parking lot outside the hotel. They would lay their pain bare for public consumption—for strangers to suspect them of harming their own son, to judge them for losing sight of him, to feel grateful they weren’t the ones begging to see their child again—all in the hopes that maybe, just maybe, one person would recognize Johnny from a picture and help bring him home.
Her phone buzzed with a new text from Detective Langland. We’re all set up outside. Let me know when you’re ready. I’ll walk you from your room. There’s quite a crowd gathered.
She thought again about the booklet’s mention of the number of parents who divorced after a child went missing. Those irreparable fractures had to start somewhere, maybe with the tiny little crack of one parent speaking to the police without the other.
“I have to tell you something before the press conference,” she said.
Andrew immediately closed his laptop and looked up at her with his full attention.
“This morning, I didn’t only go to the print shop. I met Detective Langland at the coffee shop.”
“Okay,” he said tentatively.
She explained to him that she had wanted Langland’s unvarnished views of the case, including Leo and Laurie’s theory about Darren Gunther. “And maybe because she was a woman, I thought it would somehow help if I met with her, one-on-one—to make sure Johnny wasn’t just a case number to her. But I’m sorry. I should have told you.”
He rose and made his way toward her, setting his laptop down on the coffee table. “You don’t have to apologize, babe. I would literally do anything—anything—if I could take this pain away from you and carry it for both of us.”
“But that’s why I owe you an apology. All I’ve been thinking about is my own pain—my special bond with Johnny, the way my body somehow felt different once we brought him home, as if nature was telling me that he was mine, just as if I had carried him myself. But I’m not his only parent.”
“No, but you’re his only mother.”
“You were the one who could always sense if he was fussing in his crib, even if we couldn’t hear it over the baby monitor.”
He smiled sadly at the memory. Johnny was the only baby they’d ever seen who could be red in the face from fretting, his little hands balled into fists, without making the slightest sound.
“Well, I don’t know if this helps, Marcy, but you’re right: I have always felt that kind of psychic connection to Johnny. And, somehow, I just know that he’s out there, waiting for us, alive and alert and trying to get home.”
“But how much longer can he wait?”
She sent a text to Detective Langland to say they were ready. They were about to be those poor parents you see on the news.
Chapter 26
Laurie felt the heavy weight of her assignment as she stepped out of the elevator into the offices of Fisher Blake Studios. If everything had gone according to plan, she would not have set foot in 15 Rockefeller Center for another two and a half weeks, the longest she had ever been away from work other than after Greg’s murder. Now here she was, trying to launch a new investigation in the hopes that the trail would somehow lead to Johnny.
When she arrived at the entry to her office, she saw that Grace Garcia was away from her desk, but then quickly heard her assistant’s distinctively throaty but upbeat voice emerge from Jerry’s office next door.
“I’m telling you, Jerry, you would love it. I’ve seen you at your dance parties. Come with me next week and try it out.”
“Me? Absolutely not.” The tone of Jerry’s voice suggested less resistance to the idea than his words did. “Goofing off at a party with friends is one thing. A public workout class based totally on Beyoncé’s dance moves? I’d land flat on my face before a room full of strangers by the second chorus.”
A smile broke out across Laurie’s face and she had to stifle a giggle. She was about to interrupt, but gave herself a moment to enjoy another brief bit of workplace banter before she’d have to pull Grace and Jerry into the darkness with her.
Grace suddenly broke out into song, bending her knees and swaying low to the floor. “Six-inch heels,” she crooned. “She walked in the club like…”
“Are you kidding me?” Jerry balked. “My knees would quit in protest if I tried to make them do that!”
Laurie stepped into the office and gave Grace a short round of applause. “Nice moves. But you’re probably the only person in the class who wears six-inch heels when it’s snowing outside, so I imagine you have a leg up on everyone. Pun definitely intended.”
Grace suddenly stood upright. “Sorry, Laurie. I didn’t expect you to get back to the city so fast.”
She had called them as she was leaving the Hamptons so they could prepare for a brainstorming session about Darren Gunther.
Grace pulled Laurie into a hug that was followed by another from Jerry.
“I’ve been praying for little Johnny all day long,” Grace said. “We watched the press conference. Poor Marcy and Andrew. They must be absolutely beside themselves.”
“Are you okay?” Jerry asked. “How are you holding up?”
How am I feeling? she thought. Anxious. Overwhelmed. Terrified that violence may have struck Alex’s family—my family, once again.
Jumping into Darren Gunther’s case as a way to find Johnny felt like such a shot in the dark, but she reminded herself of her father’s reasoning. He had been absolutely certain that Gunther wouldn’t use his one chance at a court’s exoneration without somehow trying to cheat during the process. So far, Leo had been unable to figure out what Gunther might have done to try to stack the deck in his favor. Now that Johnny was missing, Leo believed he had found the answer to his question.
“Honestly?” Laurie said. “Nothing would be more comforting right now than to get straight to work.”
Chapter 27
Once they were clustered around the conference table in Laurie’s office, Laurie asked Jerry to begin by laying out what he knew about Darren Gunther from publicly available reports. Most of what she knew so far was from her father, who obviously had his own opinions about Gunther and the evidence against him. Now Laurie wanted to hear the other side of the story, even if she’d never believe it.
Jerry began with a description of the fight that had spilled onto the sidewalk in front of Finn’s Bar eighteen years earlier, followed by the arrests of both men involved, Darren Gunther and Jay Pratt. “I pulled up the original news articles about the case from the archives. Even before the police made an official announcement about which of the men would be charged with murder, the early reports found ways of painting Gunther as a bad guy, out by himself on his twenty-first birthday, getting drunk all alone. I mean, that’s sort of weird in itself, right? Plus there’s a quote from an unnamed customer at Finn’s that night, saying that Gunther had been aggressive to a couple of the women at the bar.”
“And Pratt?” Laurie asked.
“
A twenty-seven-year-old commercial real estate broker who went to boarding school and Yale. It’s not evidence, mind you, but the news has a way of planting subtle messages. Pratt came across looking better.”
“Not in all the ways,” Grace said. “That Darren Gunther is fine.”
Jerry threw Grace an icy stare, while Laurie shook her head.
“Sorry,” Grace said. “Inappropriate.”
“No, it’s relevant,” Laurie said. “Public opinion isn’t always driven by evidence or even personal biographies.”
“Apparently so,” Jerry said, “especially if we fast-forward to now.”
“I haven’t kept up with all of it, but my father makes it sound like the press fawns over Gunther as if he’s a modern-day Hemingway with the face of a young Paul Newman.”
“You’ve got it, Laurie.” Jerry flipped through the pages in front of him, reading a few quotes he had highlighted in advance. “ ‘Gunther’s green eyes twinkle with the same spark of quiet intelligence that saturate the pages of his searing essays.’ ‘Gunther’s bright smile and slim, youthful face belie the years he has spent in prison, captured so poignantly in this impressive debut.’ Oh, and this one’s my favorite: ‘That’s the hottest felon I’ve ever seen.’ ”
“Stop it,” Laurie said. “That can’t be real.”
“Okay, it was a reader comment on that little piece that Vanity Fair ran, but it was funny.”
For a minute, it felt like a regular workday, preparing for a regular production. “So he’s managed to work the public relations angle in his favor. What about the actual evidence? Dad says that even the DA’s Office has been backing away from the original conviction, even though Gunther confessed. What am I missing?”
“Well, it’s just—um…” Jerry looked down at his notes again, but said nothing.
Laurie had not seen Jerry this nervous since he was a shy college intern. She noticed that Grace was looking down at her hands, avoiding her gaze.
“You guys, you’re not going to offend me. I know Gunther claims my dad fabricated that confession. If we’re going to do this, I need to make sure I’ve got the complete picture.”
Seeing her resolve, Jerry took a deep breath and tried again. “So, after he got a couple of small but favorable press pieces about his book, Gunther filed a petition claiming that he was wrongfully convicted. He wrote it himself, using the prison law library as a resource. He used the advancement in DNA technology as a reason to request DNA testing of the murder weapon. Once the court ordered the state to conduct the testing, Tracy Mahoney agreed to begin representing Gunther as his lawyer.”
Laurie knew that so-called touch DNA found on the edge of the knife’s handle, closest to the blade, had been matched to a felon named Mason Rollins. Leo had been trying to find an alternative explanation for Rollins’s DNA on the murder weapon, but had so far come up short. Now that she heard the facts from Jerry instead of her father, she was starting to understand why the court was giving serious consideration to Gunther’s innocence claim. Mason Rollins’s convictions included multiple assaults against strangers when he perceived insults against him, ranging from bumping into him on the street to pushing past him to a subway turnstile. He clearly was a violent man.
“To be fair,” Jerry said, a hint of hesitation returning to his voice, “it would be one thing if some other random person’s DNA was on the knife—maybe a retail clerk who handled the sale. But the DNA just happens to match someone who stabbed a person in a bar fight eight years after Lou Finney was killed? Plus, your father emailed me copies of everything he had on Rollins for me to print out. Rollins pled guilty to a misdemeanor assault when he was nineteen years old, two years before Lou Finney was killed. The charge was for throwing punches, but Rollins attacked the victim at a party when the victim told Rollins to knock off this little party trick that involved throwing his knife in the air and catching it. So that proves Mason Rollins was already in the habit of carrying knives.”
“I agree it’s intriguing,” Laurie said. “The problem for Gunther, of course, is that he actually confessed.”
“Which is why he’s claiming that Leo made it up,” Jerry said.
“That’s a ludicrous position,” Laurie said, “but I guess someone who doesn’t know my father personally might look at the DNA evidence and wonder. Besides, my understanding is that Gunther initially claimed that Lou Finney was the one who originally pulled the knife on him and Pratt, and that he was struggling to get control over it when Finney was pushed toward him. Only after my father went back to the station to question him again did he admit that he was in a blind rage because that woman in the bar rejected him.”
“Jane Holloway,” Jerry added. Laurie was always impressed by Jerry’s ability to quickly commit to memory the names of everyone involved in one of their cases.
“Yes. But here’s my point: if a detective were going to fabricate a confession, why would he make up two versions of the admission? My father could have simply said that Gunther fessed up during the initial interrogation. It makes no sense.”
“It’s more complicated than that,” Jerry said. “Gunther concedes that he made the first statement—about Finney falling on his own knife. He claims he only said it because he was exhausted and half-drunk, and both of the interrogating investigators refused to believe that he was innocent. So he offered them a story that he thought might get them to back off.”
“Both?” Laurie asked. “I thought it was just Gunther and my father, alone in the room.”
“Not at that point. It was Leo and another detective named Mike Lipsky.”
Laurie remembered the man her father referred to as Hot Lips well. “My dad’s former partner. Salt of the earth. He passed away about six years ago.”
“Well, Gunther says they didn’t seem to buy his story about the stabbing being an accident, but eventually they left the interrogation room and had him booked for murder. Then your dad came back alone a couple hours later, badgering him to take more blame for the homicide. Gunther insists that he stuck to the same story, and then suddenly your father stood up and began claiming he’d confessed to intentional murder instead.”
Laurie realized that in her rush to move quickly in the hopes of finding Johnny, she had not been careful enough in gathering the specifics of the interrogation from her father. When she asked Leo why he was alone with Gunther during the confession, he explained that Lipsky had gone home by then. She now realized that both detectives had left after the initial round of questioning, and only Leo had returned to pursue the “spurned Casanova” angle. “My father warned me that Gunther is cunning. Pretty convenient that he only denies the part of the conversation when he and my father were alone in the room together. It’s easier to accuse one detective of perjury than two.”
Grace was nodding along. “He may not have known that one of the detectives had passed.”
“He probably also had no idea just how hard it would be to malign someone with Leo Farley’s reputation,” she said. “Dad thinks Gunther would have been released by now, except the DA’s Office knows it will have a major problem with the NYPD if they essentially concede that the former first deputy commissioner framed an innocent man.”
“Not to mention the defendants who would come out of the woodwork claiming they were set up, too,” Jerry added.
“But if my father were to admit it? Gunther would walk out of prison tonight, a free man.”
Jerry shook his head. “I’m starting to understand why your father’s so convinced Gunther may have been trying to kidnap Timmy. Your father would do anything for that boy.”
“Okay.” Grace held up both of her hands dramatically. “But how does a man in prison manage to pull this off from a jail cell?”
“He would need to have outside help,” Laurie said. “Gunther’s only family is his mother, and according to my father, she’s in assisted living in Staten Island. But Gunther has attracted some pretty die-hard supporters. There is a Facebook page called Darr
en Gunther Is Innocent. It promotes his book, but also pushes his claims of innocence. We should make a list of the most active posters on the page and see if any of them sets off alarms.
“Will do,” Jerry said. “I know our focus is on finding Johnny, but I went ahead and put in a request for the trial transcripts. And I started a list of the people we’ll eventually be wanting to interview. So far I’ve got Jay Pratt, of course. And we’ll need to contact the victim’s family.”
“His wife passed away a few years ago,” Laurie said. “They had three children, but only one who still lives in New York—their daughter Samantha. She owns a hair salon in midtown. I already left a message.” Laurie knew from her father that Finney’s daughter was distraught over the possibility of Gunther’s release. Laurie wanted to be certain that she heard about Under Suspicion’s involvement directly from her.
Jerry added Samantha’s name to his running list and placed a checkmark next to it. “We’ll also want to track down the woman Gunther was hitting on that night, Jane Holloway. And Clarissa DeSanto, a bartender who was working that night.”
Laurie nodded along, finding it hard to focus on the aspects of the case that did not relate to her immediate concern for Johnny. “My father mentioned that Clarissa didn’t testify at Gunther’s trial. It struck him as odd at the time. She was a critical witness to prove Gunther’s aggressive demeanor that night, and she had been very close to Finn. They got the conviction even without her testimony, but it would be nice if we could get her side of the story on screen.”
Laurie turned at the sound of knuckles rapping against her open office door. Ryan Nichols flashed the perfect smile that had helped to land him on People’s most recent list of “sexiest men alive,” an accomplishment he touted even more brazenly than the Harvard degree hung just inside his office door. His sandy-blond hair appeared slightly damp.
Piece of My Heart Page 11
