Beautiful Lies (26 page)

“So if you’re Charlie and I’m Jessie, what about the other two children who went missing that year? Who are they?”

“I don’t know. I’ve never been able to track them down. These kids all
disappeared.
I mean, take yourself, for example. You have a different name
and
a different Social Security number. There’s a birth certificate in the name of Ridley Jones. It’s the same with me; I have a birth certificate for Harley Jacobsen. Charlie, Brian, Pamela, and Jessie don’t even exist anymore. Most of their biological parents are dead.”

It didn’t seem strange to be talking about Charlie and Jessie in the third person. Neither one of us, I think, quite identified yet with the missing children. I didn’t feel as though I had ever
been
Jessie. She was someone whose fate was intimately connected to mine, someone whose story I needed to unravel before I could understand what had happened to me. By the way Jake was talking, it seemed as though he felt the same way.

“I still don’t understand. These children were taken from their homes and somehow wound up in other homes with different names and Social Security numbers. Why? And how could this have happened?”

“A network of very powerful people with a lot of money and a lot of influence,” he said without any hesitation, as if he’d been thinking about it for a while. “The level of organization and corruption it would take to accomplish it is nothing short of astounding.”

“But why?” I asked again. “Why would anyone do this?”

“When I first started looking into this, it was just about me, what had happened to me. At first I thought it was some kind of black-market thing. I thought, Okay, kids were abandoned at the Project Rescue sites, many of them probably left without birth certificates, Social Security numbers. There has to be a system in place for getting abandoned children new identities, right? Maybe the healthy Caucasian children were snatched from the system somehow and sold to wealthy people who wanted children but couldn’t conceive.”

“But your mother went back for you. You weren’t actually abandoned.”

“Right. And when I learned about the other children who went missing in that area, I found that they were never abandoned, so it kind of blew my theory.”

“But they’d all been patients at the Little Angels clinic.”

“That’s what they had in common.”

“And the Little Angels clinic is a Project Rescue facility.”

“That’s right.”

“So? What does that mean?”

“The other thing they had in common was the number of visits to the clinic. When a child has too many visits to the doctor for certain kinds of injuries or excessive illness, they’re flagged by attending physicians as possible victims of abuse. Jessie’s arm was broken. Charlie was abandoned. Brian was brought in for a broken leg, a blow to the head. Pamela had her arm pulled out of the socket. These are not normal injuries for toddlers.”

“How do you know that? Dr. Hauser said he didn’t give you the files.”

“Well, you wouldn’t expect him to tell you that he’d violated clinic policy because of his friendship with Arnie.”

I smiled inside. I had been right about Dr. Hauser and his Dancing Bear tie. The inner hippie had won out in the interest of doing the right thing, even if it meant breaking the rules.

“So you’re saying that someone believed these children were the victims of abuse.”

“Not someone, Ridley. Your father.”

Jake seemed to be looking past me, his brow knitting, and I turned to see what he was looking at. There I saw what he saw, the Firebird, as stealthy and menacing as a shark.

He reached over and grabbed my head and pushed it down on the table. He lay his head next to mine and yelled to the waitress, who was the only other person in the diner, “Get down!” She responded as if she’d been trained to do so, immediately dropping into a crouch behind the counter.

It was then that the windows of the diner exploded in a crystalline blizzard of glass. The sound of automatic gunfire and shattering glass was deafening, easily the most terrifying sound I’d ever heard. The whole world was a kaleidoscope of deadly shards and blinding light. Jake dropped under the table and tugged on my legs for me to do the same, and together we crawled behind the counter, where the frightened waitress was weeping on the floor. I was too stunned to even be afraid.

“Is there a back door?” Jake yelled above the sound.

She nodded and crawled into the kitchen. A back door stood open through which the cook must have fled. We exited on all fours.

By the time we were in the back lot, the sound of gunfire had ceased and we heard the burning of rubber on asphalt. The Firebird engine revved and rumbled off into the distance. Jake pulled me to my feet.

“Call the police!” he yelled at the frightened woman, who huddled against a concrete wall, weeping. “Ask for a Detective Gus Salvo.”

In the cold, bright morning, Jake took my hand and we started to run.

We ducked into a church on Hicks Street. My ears were ringing from the violence of the sound and my heart had burrowed itself into my esophagus, where it stayed, making it difficult for me to breathe. I gripped Jake’s hand like a vice, only noticing how hard once I let go and felt my fingers cramp.

The church hummed with silence. An old lady in a black kerchief prayed in the front pew. The morning light washed in through the stained-glass windows, those bright colors dancing on the floor like butterflies. Votive candles flickered in the alcoves. It felt very safe. Who would try to kill you in a church?

Jake dragged me into a confessional. A small sign announced that confession would begin at four
P.M.
I was glad. I wouldn’t even know where to begin. I sunk onto the red velvet cushion that was so worn, its stuffing had started to show through. I touched the leather Bible and took away a fingertip black with dust. Jake stood peering through the curtain.

“Who is trying to kill us?” I whispered fiercely.

“Ridley, we’re deep into something. Someone doesn’t want us getting any deeper. But at this point, you know as much as I do,” he answered softly.

“But I don’t know anything.”

He gave me a look that I couldn’t read and then turned back to keep his watch outside the confessional. I noticed a gun, a semiautomatic, cold and menacing in his hand. I realized I’d never seen an actual handgun before. It made me sick.

“What are you going to do with that?” I asked stupidly.

“Protect us…if it comes to that.”

Do you think you go straight to hell for shooting someone in a church, or does God understand that sometimes there are extenuating circumstances? I leaned my head against the wood wall and felt the most powerful wash of fatigue. “I don’t know anything,” I whispered again.

I thought about those foundation dinners, those glamorous events filled with New York City’s elite in business, broadcasting, medicine, society. I thought about all that money being funneled into Max’s charitable fund. I thought about all the people that money had helped. I thought about Max’s driving passion to save abused children and battered women in a way he and his mother had never been saved, how it had become a kind of salve for his own pain. I thought of how frustrated he and my father were sometimes over a system that failed so often, a system that bound the hands of physicians from helping children in danger. So many nights over dinner they had discussed these issues. So many times I overheard their impassioned debates in the study. So many times as a child I wondered why they became so angry and sad.

What would have happened if Max and my father had decided to take certain cases into their own hands? What if providing safe haven for abandoned babies was just one arm of Project Rescue? What if there was another Project Rescue? One with which the social elite of New York City wouldn’t be so eager to have their stellar names associated. These thoughts ran like liquid nitrogen in my veins.

“So you don’t have any idea
how
these kids were taken and
why
? You don’t have any theories?” I whispered to him.

“I didn’t say that.”

He moved away from the curtain and sat beside me on the small bench so that we were squished in next to each other. He stuck the gun in his waistband and wiped a sheen of sweat from his brow, then dropped his arm around me.

“We’ll stay here for a while, okay?”

“And then what?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t thought that far ahead.”

I noticed for the first time just how dog tired he looked.

“What are you going to do, Jake?” I said softly, my lips so close to his ear that I could taste him.

“What do you mean?”

“When you figure it out? When you know all the answers about what Project Rescue is and what happened to us, what are you going to do?”

He looked at me blankly with a slight shake of his head, as if the thought had never occurred to him, as if he’d been questing for an object he couldn’t identify. We’re all so lost, aren’t we? Always looking for something elusive, something we think is crucial, never knowing exactly what it is.

“I just need to know who I am,” he said.

“You know, don’t you?”

“I need to know what happened to me. These other kids wound up in homes, I think, like you did. What happened to me? How did I wind up in the system? Don’t you want to know for sure, Ridley, what happened to you? Don’t you want to know the truth?”

We were still whispering. It was a good question. The truth is always held up as this Holy Grail, the thing for which all must be sacrificed. Everyone’s always talking about how it will
set you free
and how nothing bad can come of
facing it.
I strongly suspected, in this case at least, that the truth was going to suck completely, that all my beautiful lies had been so much better. But I knew enough by then to know that the universe doesn’t like secrets, that it lays snares you can’t avoid. I was a fox with my leg in a trap. The only way to escape now would be to chew off a limb. And I’d lost too much already. I didn’t realize that I was crying (yes, again) until Jake reached over and gently wiped a big fat tear from my cheek.

“I’m sorry, Ridley. I’m so sorry for all of this,” he said, kissing me. His breath was hot in my ear as he whispered and goose bumps raised on my arms. “I could have squashed this for you but I didn’t. I fanned the flame. I led you to Christian Luna. It was so selfish. I just—”

“Didn’t want to be alone in this anymore?”

He nodded. I understood that. I remembered how alone I’d felt lying in that dark hotel room wondering who I was and where I came from, who was trying to hurt me. Jake had felt like that all his life. And in the last year, this searching for his family and for answers to what happened to him, his only friend gone. How lonely he must have been. The thought of having someone sharing his questions, sharing his quest, must have been irresistible. After all, beneath the surface of it, isn’t that what we’re all looking for? We may say we’re looking for love, following dreams, chasing the dollar, but aren’t we just looking for a place where we belong? A place where our thoughts, feelings, and fears are understood?

“I’m sorry,” he said again, pulling me into his arms and holding me. I wrapped my arms around him as best I could in the small space and held on tight. I couldn’t get close enough to him.

“It’s okay,” I said. “I understand it now.”

“What?”

“Quidam.”

He looked at me then, some combination of disbelief and gratitude in his eyes. I could taste the salt of my tears on his lips.

While we were hiding in the church, Detective Gus Salvo arrived at the scene of the shooting. I would find out later that, standing amid the glass confetti on the floor of the diner, he took from the shaken waitress the description of the two people who had fled the scene. He shook his head as she told him what she’d seen. It was another misshapen piece in a puzzle that made less and less sense the more he learned. What had started as a random shooting in a dangerous park was taking on dimensions he hadn’t intuited when the case first landed on his desk.

Gun laws in New York State were pretty strict. If you wanted to legally obtain a weapon, there’s a gauntlet of checks and balances, a long waiting period, etc. Harley Jacobsen had observed these laws in obtaining his Glock nine-millimeter and another smaller five-shot .38 Special Smith & Wesson, a gun cops often used as their off-duty piece. He was legally licensed to carry both. The rifle used to kill Christian Luna, however, had been purchased in Florida, where laws were much more lenient, employing only a three-day waiting period. In fact, in Florida, you could buy a weapon legally without registering it. Now, Detective Salvo could understand driving to Florida, buying an assault rifle, and driving back to New York City to use that weapon in the commission of a murder. What he couldn’t understand was why Jacobsen would have
registered
it. Salvo obtained the documents that Jake had signed, compared them to the signature he had on file for Jake’s PI license, and discovered that they were not even close.

He had been true to his word to me and was looking into the cases of the four missing children, following pretty much the same trail Jake, and then I, had taken. But Gus Salvo was a very single-minded man. He didn’t have all the distractions and personal agendas that Jake and I did. And he never lost sight of his goal, to discover who had killed Christian Luna and why.

Luna was believed by police to be Teresa Stone’s murderer. The fact that he hadn’t been caught meant that the case was still open. But according to the files Detective Salvo had been poring over, no one had looked into any other possibilities. Teresa Stone didn’t have any family to press the investigation, so after a year or so it had fallen into Cold Cases, more or less finished, gathering dust in a file deep in a basement somewhere in Jersey. Good news for whoever killed her. So the fact that Christian Luna had resurfaced and asserted his innocence to a woman he believed to be his kidnapped daughter, and who happened to have an entirely new identity now, must have seemed like pretty bad news and a very big problem to someone.