by Haylen Beck
Libby remembered the numbers: eleven pounds of pressure if the hammer wasn’t cocked, only four if it was. She pulled the hammer back with her thumb, opened her mouth, and placed the muzzle between her teeth. Angled it up toward the roof of her mouth. Tasted oil and metal. The trigger moved beneath her finger.
“Libby?” A knock on the door. “Libby, you okay in there?”
She withdrew the muzzle from her mouth, removed her finger from the trigger.
“I’m fine,” she said, suddenly aware of how hollow and hoarse she sounded.
“You sure? You sick or something?”
“A little,” she said. “Go on down, I’ll be there in a bit.”
“Where’ve you been all day? I tried to call you, but you left your phone in the kitchen.”
“I went out for a drive, that’s all. I’ll be down in a minute, all right?”
“And the two days before that. You know, if you need time to yourself, that’s fine, I get it, but I’ve been worried.”
“I’m fine,” she said. “Everything’s fine. Just let me be for a minute.”
“I made us dinner. Penne arrabiata with chorizo. There’s wine, I picked up a couple bottles of a nice Tempranillo in town, I might maybe have had a glass or two already. You want I should pour you some?”
She closed her eyes and pressed her hands against her temples, the hard metal of the pistol digging into her scalp. “No, Mason, please just go.”
“Thing is, there’s news,” he said, his voice sounding close to the door.
“Please, Mason,” she said, unable to keep the sobs from her words.
“Mrs. Sinclair called. You remember, from the adoption agency? She’s been trying to reach you for a couple of days, but you didn’t answer, so she tried me instead. Thing is, she thinks she might have a match for us.”
Libby opened her eyes. “What?”
“She says it’s a really good prospect, a newborn, a little boy. She wants to come and talk to us about it tomorrow. I told her to come at noon. I can call in sick to work or take a personal day or whatever.”
“A boy?”
“Yeah. Just what we always wanted, Libby. I told you, didn’t I? I said it was for the best, right?”
“Yeah,” Libby said. “You did.”
52
“SHE TOOK HIM.”
Anna told them a hundred times over. She couldn’t fathom why they wouldn’t listen to her. Why they kept lying, saying he was dead. Her sister, her mother, the police officers, the doctors, the nurses. All of them were in on it. It was a conspiracy.
They told her nothing at first, only that she had been asleep for a long time. Weeks, they said, held under by sedation. She hadn’t been able to speak at first. A kindly doctor explained that the bullets had been low caliber, but high velocity, and at least two of them had passed right through her body, damaging her lung and liver. One had only just missed her spine, could have left her paralyzed from the waist down. Another had torn through the muscle of her neck and hit the back of her jaw on the left side, shattering bone and teeth. They had wired what they could back together. There would be more surgery to come.
Those first few days of waking were a long smear of bright pain and dark nothing, which she drifted through in a state of only partial awareness. She began her return to the world by noting the routines of the day, the opening and closing of blinds, the presence and absence of light, the renewals of painkillers, the changes in shifts as faces came and went.
She had been trying to speak for some time before anyone noticed. In the end, it was a young male nurse who first acknowledged her. He leaned in over the bed and waited patiently while she grunted up at him.
“Anna, you’re in St. Bartholomew’s Hospital in Boston. You were brought here from New Prestwick. Do you know what happened to you?”
Shot, she tried to say, but she choked on her own saliva, coughed, setting off a chain reaction of pain around her body.
“Okay, okay,” he said, his voice low and soothing. “Just relax. Anna, you were in a shooting incident. You were struck several times, and you were seriously hurt, but you’re going to be fine, all right? We have a very experienced trauma team here, they’re well used to dealing with gunshot wounds, and they’ve been taking very good care of you. You’re having difficulty speaking because your jaw is wired shut. Now, I want you to take it easy and one of the doctors will be in to talk with you in a while.”
She tried to shout after him, Where’s my baby, where’s L’il B? But the words remained trapped in her throat and he left her there alone.
The first doctor did indeed explain everything, as did the second, and the third. But none would answer when she forced one word out between her teeth.
“Baby,” she said to all three.
All three shrugged the question away, said her family would be around in the morning.
It was Marie who first told her the lie.
She sat at the side of the bed, no one else in the room, clutching her rosary in her hand, pressing the beads to her lips. Face flushed red, eyes brimming.
“Where is he?” Anna asked, her voice a low hum behind her teeth.
Marie’s head dropped so it rested on the blanket. “Oh, Anna.”
“Tell me.”
“Anna, he’s dead.”
“No,” Anna said. “Not.”
It was not a screaming denial, but a statement of fact. The way one wearily tells a child there is no monster under the bed.
“He is, Anna, oh God, he is.” She lifted her head. “The police doctor, what is he, the, the medical examiner, said the bullet passed through you and hit him. He died in the hospital. They couldn’t do anything for him.”
“No,” Anna said. She would have shaken her head if she could, but the pain was too great. “Took him.”
“We buried him in St. Patrick’s, in Grandpa Henry’s plot, under the cherry trees. It was a beautiful service, hundreds of people came even though they didn’t know him, I mean, Christ, I didn’t know him, only for a day, and now he’s—”
“No, listen,” Anna said, growling. “She took him.”
Marie stared back at her, shaking her head. “No, Anna, he died. I’m so sorry, but you have to—”
Anna’s hand lashed out, the palm striking Marie’s cheek and ear, rocking her head.
“Bitch,” she said, and struck her again. “Lying bitch.”
Then she grabbed a handful of her sister’s hair, pulled so hard some came away between her fingers, then slapped her again, and once more.
Marie got to her feet and backed away. Tears soaked her cheeks, leaving black trails of mascara across the red. She moved to the door, saying sorry, I’m sorry, so sorry, and Anna didn’t see anyone for hours.
The next day, the police came. Two detectives, a man and a woman, plus a young man in uniform who carried a sketchpad and pencil. The male detective was called Mearns and he looked more like an accountant than a cop. A big man, tall, the room’s fluorescent lights glinting on his bare scalp. The female, called Veste, looked like she could tear the head off of anyone who displeased her.
Anna told them everything from start to finish, from Betsy telling her about the ad in the free paper to watching that woman tower over her. Much of it they knew already.
“Sean Kovak,” Mearns said, “he died at the scene. No one’s spoken up for the body yet. Until very recently, he worked on a contract basis for a company called the Schaeffer-Holdt Clinic. That turns out to be a one-man operation run out of an office in Brooklyn, New York, by a Donald Sherman who claimed to be a doctor, though he was nothing of the sort. Same day the incident in New Prestwick hit the news, he burned it all down. Wiped every damn record of every transaction he was a part of, got the storage facility he used to flush all the sperm samples they were keeping for his clients, pulled every penny out of ev
ery bank account he had. Last trace of him was crossing the border at El Paso. After that, he’s up in smoke.
“We know there were a series of calls to and from Mr. Kovak’s phone in the couple days leading up to the incident, all from a cheap prepaid cell, all placed from the midtown area of Manhattan. We suspect these calls were made by the shooter.
“We have one witness. A man who lives four down from the trailer you were staying in. He heard the shots and went to investigate. He saw a woman run from the trailer and into the trees. We asked for a description, and he swore on his mother’s grave that it was you, the same woman who’d been living in that trailer for the last week. He never entered the trailer, just went back to his own and called the police. As far as he’s concerned, it was you who pulled the trigger.
“Anyway, the upshot of all this is that the woman you’ve described is only a couple of links in the chain away from being found, but we’re struggling to find those links right now. But we’ll keep looking, Anna, I promise. We’ll find the woman who killed your son.”
Anna tried to shake her head but couldn’t. “She took him,” she said. “Not dead. She has him.”
The cops looked nervously at Marie, who stood in the corner. Marie said nothing, looked down at her feet.
“Libby,” Anna said. “Her name was Libby.”
“How do you know?” the woman cop, Veste, asked.
Marie spoke for her. “She’s confused. She called her boy L’il B, short for Little Butterfly.”
“No,” Anna said. “Listen. Mr. Kovak called the woman Libby. That was her name.”
“Anna, I think you’re confused,” Marie said. “Maybe you need to rest awhile.”
The anger burned in Anna’s breast, impotent and useless. She wanted to scream at them to get out, to look for her boy, but she knew they would not listen. Instead, she stared at the ceiling and disconnected, switched herself off, disengaged from their reality until she could get out of here.
* * *
—
TWO WEEKS AFTER she left the hospital, the detectives arranged a visit with Anna at her mother’s house. She held off applying a fentanyl patch and endured the pain because she wanted a clear head for the discussion. Marie helped Philomena clean the place, and they laid out coffee and tea and store-bought cookies on the kitchen table. Heavy snowflakes pattered against the window.
This time, it was Veste who did the talking, Anna sitting across the table from her.
“Before we begin,” she said, “I want you to know that we’re still working on this. We haven’t given up on finding your son’s killer.”
Anna had decided that morning that she would not argue with them again. She would let them lie to her face and say nothing. Veste waited for a response from Anna, but as had become her habit, Marie gave it in her place.
“That sounds a lot like there’s a ‘but’ coming,” she said from the corner, where she leaned against the wall.
Veste shifted in her seat, unable to hold Marie’s gaze.
“We’ve explored every avenue we possibly can. We have partial fingerprints from the shooter that we found on the trailer’s door handle and the spent cartridges on the floor. We have footprints from the wooded area behind the trailer. But that’s it for physical evidence. Even if we had usable DNA, we’d still need to find the person it matches, same as the fingerprints. Unless there’s a record from a previous crime, we’ve got nothing to match it to. Boston PD gave us a forensics team to go over the scene, and that’s the best they could come up with.”
“What about the money?” Marie asked. “Last time, you said there might be a way to make the connection through the bank records.”
Veste shook her head. “This Sherman guy, the fake doctor, he’s a clever bastard. And careful. Not only to keep a separation between the surrogates and the people who bought the children, but to avoid the IRS seeing how much money he was taking in. As far as we can tell, he kept a chain of shell companies to funnel the payments through. We think the people paying for this service transferred money to one of these shell companies, which then moved the funds into an offshore account. Sherman then bounced just enough back into the clinic’s account to pay the rent on his office and whatever he gave to the young women. Even the clinics and lawyers he used in the various states got paid from that account, and we can’t trace the money back any further.”
Marie spoke again. “How about his clients? There must be some out there who saw what happened.”
“A few,” Veste said. “We asked all the local New York news stations to run an appeal with the story to find other clients of the clinic. Only six came forward. My guess is that of the others who saw the appeal, most didn’t want to run the risk of their children being taken from them. Of the six who did come forward, only three of them volunteered their own bank records to show the payment going out. In each case, it looks like Sherman created a new shell company and bank account to accept the payment. As soon as the money went in, it was moved offshore and that’s as far as we can trace it. To get the other three records, we’d have to get an order from a judge, which the clients could appeal and we’d be tied up in court for God knows how long, and in all probability, we’d wind up with the same dead end.”
“What about contracts? Anna signed one. The people buying the babies must have signed one too. Where are they?”
“Gone,” Veste said. “We don’t know where, whether they’ve been destroyed or stored somewhere. All electronic records have been wiped.”
“There must be a way to get them back,” Marie said. “Don’t you have people who can do that sort of thing? Computer experts?”
“No, ma’am, we don’t,” Veste said. “We’re a very small department with limited resources. Boston and New York PDs have given us a lot of help, but their indulgence only goes so far. I’ve personally spoken with contacts at the FBI, and although there are some aspects to this case that fall under their jurisdiction—mostly the financial irregularities—they don’t see it as a priority.”
“Not a priority,” Marie echoed. “My nephew’s murder is not a priority.”
“Our best hope now is that the IRS goes after Sherman and turns up something we couldn’t. They have resources we simply—”
“Murder,” Marie said. “You want some government accountants to somehow solve a—”
“No,” Anna said, even though she had promised herself she wouldn’t. The restriction of her jaw and the missing teeth made it difficult for her to speak, but she could not remain quiet while everyone around her avoided the truth. “Kidnap. Abduction. Not murder.”
Veste looked to Marie, who shook her head and lowered her gaze.
“Anna,” Veste said, “we’ve been over and over this. You have to—”
“I looked it up,” Anna said, her tongue struggling to form the words. “Child abduction is federal. Should be FBI.”
“Anna, please, we can’t—”
She would not listen to this. Not again. Anna stood, using the table for balance as everyone remained silent, grunted and hissed at the pain. She made her way to the kitchen door and the stairs beyond.
Veste called after, anger now unhidden. “Frankly, Anna, your lack of cooperation isn’t helping. It’s hard to investigate a crime when the only witness refuses to acknowledge it took place at all.”
“Stop,” Marie said. “Just stop, please.”
Their voices receded as Anna climbed the stairs, each step taking painful effort. Up in her room, she applied a fentanyl patch and let it spirit her away.
* * *
—
IT WAS SPRING, and Anna sat on the top step, listening.
Marie paced the living-room floor. Anna saw her shadow move along the wall, back and forth, back and forth. She pictured the phone pressed to her ear.
“No, not for weeks…We’re trying, believe me, but
you know what she’s like…Yeah, always, just like our father…She won’t go…No, not at all, we tried and tried…I mean, I offered to drive her, just to look, I thought if she saw the headstone, maybe she…She just refuses to discuss it…I know…I know…But short of dragging her by the hair, how can I make her go anywhere?…I know, but it’s almost six months now, and she hasn’t even…I know…I’ll keep trying…But the reason I called is…yeah…I called to see if we could get some more fentanyl patches…Yes, already…I know…I know…She says she needs them…The pain…I don’t know, that’s what she tells me…Okay…I understand…Really, don’t mention it…I completely understand…Thank you, Doctor…I’ll try…You too…Goodbye.”
Anna waited, listening as Marie continued to pace. Angry steps, the shadow quickening.
“Goddammit,” Marie said, then the sound of the phone being tossed onto a table.
She appeared in the doorway down below, crossed the hall, and mounted the bottom step. Looking up, she saw Anna, watching. Anna was struck by how pretty her big sister was. How tall she was, how good her skin, the intelligence in her face. And how much she looked like that woman, Libby, because Marie looked like Anna and Anna looked like that woman. For a burning, blinding moment, Anna hated her sister for it.
“Well?” she said.
“He said no,” Marie said, one foot on the bottom step. “He says you shouldn’t need the fentanyl by now and he’s concerned you’re crossing into dependency.”
“But it hurts,” Anna said, the lisp riding the sibilants, the audible remnants of the injury to her jaw still strange to her ears.
“Dr. Cooper said you should be able to manage your pain with over-the-counter meds. Tylenol, Advil, whatever. Dr. Myers said the same thing yesterday.”
