Acts of Mercy (3 page)

“She disappeared a few years ago, right?” Sam knew, but wanted a local’s take on it.

“You been on Mars or something?” She crossed her arms over her chest and frowned.

“Close enough.”

“The wife and their baby had been missing since right before Valentine’s Day, 2007. They just found her car not long ago. Just buried her last week. Beth was still strapped in her seat behind the wheel, but the baby was gone.” She lowered her voice as she delivered this last part.

“Gone?”

“Gone, as in someone must have found the car down in that ravine and took that baby and left poor Beth there all this time.” She shook her head disapprovingly. “You ever heard such a thing? Take a woman’s baby and leave her lying there dead?”

The tinny ring of a bell from the kitchen called the waitress to the pick-up window. She returned with Sam’s meal and placed it before him.

“No leads on what happened to the baby?” Sam asked. That had been left open in every article he’d read.

“None. He was just gone.”

“Any chance he could have gotten himself out of his car seat and got the door open and wandered off?”

“Not unless he was Baby Superman.” The door opened and she turned to see who was coming in. A party of four, obviously regulars, waved to Nancy as they seated themselves. She stood and walked to the counter for their menus. “Ian Magellan was only three months old when he went missing.”

He should have remembered that much, Sam thought as he took a bite from his burger and digested the information. Clearly Magellan’s own tragedy had been the motivating factor in establishing the Foundation, and Sam wondered if he’d hired an investigator to work only on finding his missing son. He took another bite without tasting and chewed slowly. He knew what it was like to lose the person you most loved in the world. He and Magellan had that much in common.

How had Magellan survived losing both his wife
and his son? That he had, and now spent a considerable chunk of change helping other people find their missing loved ones told Sam something about the man’s character.

“You need another water?” the waitress asked as she approached the table.

“Just the check.”

“You finished with that?” She pointed to his half-eaten burger.

Sam nodded. “I wasn’t as hungry as I thought I was.”

“Coffee? We have some nice Boston cream pie. Just came in from the baker this morning.”

“No, thanks. Just the check.”

“You staying in Conroy for a while?” She placed his check on the table.

“Maybe for a few days.”

“You stop in tomorrow morning and have breakfast with us”—she smiled as she turned to walk away—“your coffee’s on me.”

“I’ll do that. Thanks.” He picked up his sunglasses and stood. He counted out enough bills to cover his lunch and a tip, and left it next to his plate. The diner was beginning to fill up, with most of the booths by the windows already occupied.

Sam stepped out into the heat of the late summer afternoon and immediately wished he hadn’t. By the time he got to his car and turned on the air conditioning, he was sweating. He wondered what was wrong with him, even considering a move to a place where the temperature in August rose to one hundred degrees with nearly one hundred percent humidity. Why would he, who hated the heat so, choose to live
in such a place, when for the first time in his life, he had total control over where he would live, had no one to answer to but himself?

And why would he want to put himself in a position where he’d be dealing with the same demons he’d just spent seven months trying to exorcise? He’d used up a good portion of his savings in his attempts to put his past behind him. What in the name of God was he doing contemplating the possibility of walking back into that same fire again? He couldn’t even claim fatigue; he’d just returned from the longest vacation he’d ever had. So what had possessed him to apply to the Mercy Street Foundation in the first place?

Well, he did need a job, he rationalized, now that he was back in the States.

And, he reminded himself, he hadn’t expected his profiling skills—which were considerable, even he had to admit that—to be an issue. Mallory Russo had been correct in suspecting that Sam had thought the job would be easier, less stressful, than what he’d been used to in the Bureau. She’d disabused him of that quickly enough, even went so far as to wave a particularly tantalizing case under his nose to tempt him.

The air came on with a hot blast. He leaned back against the seat and waited for it to cool him. He left the parking lot and drove aimlessly past a row of boarded-up storefronts in a neighborhood where young and not-so-young hookers stood on the sidewalk and eyed every car that passed, including his. Jumpy young men in sleeveless T-shirts gathered on the corner, gesturing and posturing, maybe for the
hookers, maybe for each other. Sam had watched the same scenes play out in a dozen other cities on hot summer afternoons. The seamy side of Conroy was nothing new.

On his way back to the motel where he’d spent the night, he stopped at a drugstore and picked up two newspapers—one local, one national—and a news magazine. He’d been out of touch for months, and it was time for him to catch up. On his way to the cashier, he grabbed a copy of a sports magazine with a picture of the quarterback of his favorite NFL team on the cover.

It was still early, so he took the long way to the motel, choosing streets that wound through the town, past brick row houses close to the factories and larger, more stately homes overlooking the river, away from what must have been some serious emissions from those smokestacks back in the day. A side street brought him past Our Lady of Angels, and he recalled that Nancy had mentioned that Robert Magellan’s cousin was a priest there. Several blocks away he passed another church, this one smaller, older, in need of some paint and some general maintenance. Beyond the church, white stones of varying sizes rose up from the ground. Without thinking, Sam parked the car and got out. He walked around the building, noticing that the front door was padlocked, and walked through the quiet churchyard.

A dense row of evergreens grew tall along one side and he followed the shade until he reached what he suspected was one of the oldest sections of the graveyard. The headstones were shorter, sprouting from the ground like mushrooms. The names on most of
them were eroded by time and weather, but on some the names of the deceased were clear enough to read.
Mary Jenkins, good wife of John, lies buried here
, read one. Another said simply,
Ann Hamilton
, the dates illegible. He walked aimlessly through the untidy rows, careful not to step on anyone’s grave, and wondered if Carly was given the same respectful courtesy by visitors to the cemetery in Illinois where seven generations of her family had been laid to rest.

He crested the top of a small rise and found himself almost face-to-face with a couple who appeared to be in their seventies. They were busily tending a grave bearing a simple white marker that was taller than the ones in the older part of the cemetery.

“Afternoon.” The man nodded to Sam.

“Afternoon,” Sam returned the greeting.

“Hello,” the man’s wife said and smiled. Sam smiled back, feeling awkward as hell. He sensed he’d interrupted something very private, and wanted to extract himself as quickly as possible from the situation. He walked around the headstone that was the object of their attention to make a casual retreat.

“Hot as a son of a gun today, isn’t it?” the man noted.

“Sure is.” Sam paused. Against his will, he found himself reading the stone:

“Your daughter?” he heard himself ask without thinking.

They nodded in unison.

“I’m sorry,” Sam said.

“Thank you, son.” The man wiped sweat from his brow with the back of one hand.

“She loved roses,” the mother told him. “We planted a small bush here for her, but the groundskeepers didn’t like it.” She smiled wryly. “It got a bit out of hand, started growing where it shouldn’t, even though I tried to keep it trimmed. So every week I bring her some fresh ones.” The woman stood. “Evie would have liked that.”

“You’ve been bringing her flowers every week since …”

“Since the day we laid her to rest.” The man nodded. “Spring of ’76. She left for school one morning and never made it.” His face drooped and Sam started to open his mouth to tell him it was okay, he didn’t have to share the story, but he couldn’t get the words out fast enough. “They found her almost a week later, in a drainage ditch. She’d been—”

“I’m so sorry,” Sam interrupted to spare the man from speaking aloud his private torment. “Did they ever find whoever …”

“No.” The woman’s face hardened. “No, they never did. A night doesn’t pass that I don’t pray that he has a tortured passing from this life, and that the devil is waiting for him on the other side.”

“Francie.” Her husband reached out to her.

“I know it isn’t the Christian thing, John.” She
met Sam’s eyes. “But there are some things … some acts …”

“I understand completely,” Sam told her.
This is why
rang in his ears.

“She was our only child,” the woman told him simply. “We miss her every day.”

“I’m sorry.” Sam tried to think of something else to say, but nothing that came to mind seemed appropriate.

“You’ve lost someone, too,” she told him as he turned to walk away.

Sam nodded. “My wife.”

“I’ll pray for her,” the woman said. “And for you.”

“Thank you.”

The lump in his throat grew bigger, so he nodded once more to the couple and went through the rows of marked graves directly to the car. As he walked away, he tried to drown out that voice inside him that insisted,
This is why. Because of people like the Ericksons, who have been tending the grave of their only child for more than thirty years and who have never had closure; people like Lynne Walker, who needs to help her children understand why their father had been brutally murdered, left propped up by a Dumpster like a broken doll, his chest slashed to ribbons and an oversized hamburger stuffed in his mouth
.

Sam started the engine and took a deep breath of cool air, and understood why he’d sent in an application to the Foundation, and why he’d take the job if it was offered to him—because good people suffered at
the hands of the evil every day, and if he walked away, there would be one less person to stand between the innocent and those who would do them harm.

Sam drove back to the motel, and waited for Mallory’s call.

S
o what did you think of him?” Trula wiped down a counter where she’d rolled out dough for a peach pie. “Sam? That was his name, right?”

“I think he’d be perfect.” Mallory swiped one of the peaches and took a bite before Trula could stop her. “I’d love to have someone on the staff with his credentials, someone who has a deep understanding of criminal behavior. Someone who has some real insights into what makes these people tick.”

“By ‘these people,’ you mean the bad guys.” Trula searched a cabinet, noisily moving pans from one place to another. She found what she was looking for—a glass pie plate—and closed the cabinet door.

“Yeah. Sam has a lot of experience there. He was in some special FBI unit that handled the most challenging cases. The letter from his superior was glowing.”

“So what’s the problem?”

“I get the feeling he isn’t sure that he wants the job.” Mallory grabbed a paper towel to wipe the peach juice from her chin. “Great peaches, Trula. Where’d you get them?”

“The farmers’ market in Toby Falls.” She went
about the business of pie making without missing a beat. “So why would he apply for a job he doesn’t want?”

“I don’t know. Maybe it seemed like a good idea at the time.”

“Did he say he didn’t want it?”

“Noooo, but …”

“Then if you think he’s the right person for the job, if you think he’d be an asset …”

“I definitely think he’d be an asset.”

“… then offer him the job and see what he says.”

“I wanted to talk to everyone about him first,” Mallory told her.

“In that case, I hope you’re not looking to bring him on board any time soon. Robert, Susanna, and Emme are still in West Kingston working with those search parties they organized to look for Ian, and they won’t be back until Friday. Kevin took some of the seniors from Our Lady of Angels to the cathedral in Philadelphia today. He won’t be back till late this afternoon, but he does have his cell with him.” Trula shook her head. “If I get my hands on whoever it was who took that baby, it’s going to take an act of God Almighty himself to keep me from throttling the life from him. Or her.”

“I spoke with Emme this morning. She said there’s been no sign of anything that would give them a clue as to what happened to Ian.”

“But knowing Robert, he’ll keep on looking until …” She paused, overcome by emotion.

Mallory squeezed the woman’s shoulder. “They’ll keep looking until they find him, one way or another. Now that Robert has reason to suspect the baby
might still be alive, he isn’t going to give up until he finds him.”

“He isn’t a baby anymore. He’s two and a half already.” Trula wiped away tears. “He’s a toddler. He’s probably walking and talking, maybe even going to preschool somewhere. He’s grown so much, learned so much, since we saw him. It’s killing Robert, you know, to have missed all Ian’s firsts.”

“Hopefully, once they find Ian, having him back will make up for everything he’s missed.”

“Assuming they can find him.” Trula began to peel the peaches, her knife working furiously. “Someone has that boy and knows he isn’t theirs. People see that child every day, and don’t know that he’s not who they think he is.”

“Assuming he’s still alive,” Mallory reminded her.

“He’s still alive,” Trula said. “He’s alive and someone is raising him as if he’s theirs.” She slammed an angry fist on the counter. “What kind of person does something like that?”