Dark Eyes (17 page)

The information had led Klesko and Tiger to Shelter Island, the former home of Benjamin Hatch. Hatch was long since dead, it turned out, but the two of them had waited in the cold, empty house until Hatch’s sons had returned home. They’d been very persuasive with the Hatches. Tiger and Klesko had spent the next three days tracking down the woman who the Hatch brothers had given up before they died. Soon, Klesko and Tiger would meet her in person.

FOURTEEN

At the Bloomingdale Library
, Wally grabbed an Internet station and brought up the Emerson School website. She typed in the default password that Nick had put first on his list—EmersonAlum—and was granted full access, just as Nick had predicted.

Fortunately for Wally, the school made an effort to help former students and faculty keep in touch, with contact lists and message boards that seemed to get updated on a regular basis. Wally scanned the faculty rolls and found that her hunch had paid off: Benjamin Hatch had in fact been employed at Emerson for three academic years. His last year of teaching coincided with the failed vodka-importing business described in the
Wall Street Journal
article. Most likely, Hatch had traveled to Moscow for the teaching job, but after a few years he had sensed an opportunity to make his fortune in the newly thriving Russian economy, quitting Emerson and setting his doomed vodka import scheme into motion.

The scenario was a guess on Wally’s part, and it still didn’t explain if or how Hatch had been connected to Yalena. Wally continued searching the site. There was a photo section with class pictures stretching back many years, and Wally spent a half hour scanning the photos but didn’t come upon any faces or names that helped her. For one thing, there was no evidence that any Russian students were mixed in with the student body, so it was unlikely Yalena had been a student at Emerson.

Wally continued checking the faculty listings from the time Hatch had been employed at the school—maybe she could track down other former teachers who might have useful information. After a half hour of searching, Wally came upon a listing for a woman named Charlene Rainer.

Charlene Rainer
. Wally had the distinct feeling that she’d heard that name somewhere before. She scoured her memory but couldn’t pinpoint it. On the Emerson site, Ms. Rainer’s position was listed simply as “counselor,” and her bio included only her nationality (American) and the span of her employment. Wally immediately noticed that Rainer had left Emerson the same year as Benjamin Hatch, around seventeen years ago. That had been right around the time Wally had been born, and the coincidence was intriguing. If Wally could locate her, Charlene Rainer might have some useful information on Hatch or even Yalena. Wally navigated a separate browser window to the same Friend Finder site she had used to come up with the long list of Benjamin Hatches and, after paying the $79.95 again, entered Charlene Rainer’s name.

The results were as daunting as they had been for Benjamin Hatch. There were 141 Charlene Rainers throughout the United States, and many of them were within a realistic age range for someone who might have been working as a student counselor over eighteen years earlier—eighty-seven of them, in fact.

Wally had no luck remembering why Charlene’s name rang so familiar for her, and wondering over this question spurred other thoughts. Since opening the Brighton Beach file, Wally had begun to mentally review her relationships with the women in her life, even those with whom she had only casual contact, wondering if any of them could be
her
… Wally’s real mother.
She’s been watching over you
, Ella had said upon reading the handwritten note from Yalena, and Wally had felt instantly that it was true. Was it possible that Charlene Rainer actually
was
Yalena Mayakova? Her heart raced a little at the possibility.

Wally could call all the Charlenes on the list, but that process had not helped find Benjamin Hatch and had taken the crew three whole days besides. No, Wally needed to further narrow down the list of Charlenes … but how?

Wally thought about Charlene’s position at Emerson: counselor. What did that mean? Was she a career counselor, a college-admissions counselor, or what? Wally reexamined the faculty rolls and found other people specifically listed for those jobs, so the answer was no. Could Charlene Rainer have been some kind of in-school shrink? That seemed like a possibility, since students at Emerson would probably experience some adjustment issues after moving so far from the States. Wally assumed that the Emerson School would only hire a licensed therapist to shrink the children of the American diplomatic corps. A little research on Wikipedia led Wally to the American Psychology Board, a good place for her to start; the APB was the licensing institution that certified the graduates of the nation’s best accredited schools.

Wally stepped out of the library and called the APB’s public referral number, which was answered by a woman with a business voice that sounded somewhere in between an airline stewardess and an exhausted nurse.

“Referrals,” the operator said. “How can I help you?”

“You make referrals for therapists?”

“We offer referrals for licensed members of the American Psychology Board only,” answered the woman. “If you’d like to read about the credentials of our—”

“No, thanks, I went to your site. The thing is, my mother is having some issues. A family friend recommended someone, but I misplaced her contact number.”

“I can check to see if she is a member of the APB. What is the clinician’s name?”

“Charlene Rainer.”

“Okay.” Wally could hear the woman typing onto her keyboard. “I see we have four members by that name. …”

Wally was annoyed. “You wouldn’t think there would be more than one.”

“What’s your geographical area?” the operator asked. “We can probably find her that way.”

“Can you give me the contact numbers for all four?” Wally tried to sidestep the geographical issue, since she had no idea where Charlene might be based.

“Of course. The first is listed in—”

“Actually,” Wally cut the woman off as an idea suddenly occurred to her, “sorry for interrupting, but I think maybe I can narrow it down. Do you have information there for specific areas of expertise?”

“Yes, ma’am,” said the operator.

“My mother’s native language is Russian. That’s why this particular therapist was recommended.” Wally was taking a shot. If Charlene Rainer spent several years in Moscow, there was a good chance she came away with enough Russian to list it as a marketable skill on her resume.

“In fact,” the operator answered after a moment’s perusal of the files on her computer screen, “one of the Charlene Rainers is proficient in Russian. Do you have a pencil and paper handy?”

“Shoot,” said Wally, and jotted down the phone number and mailing address of the Russian-speaking therapist named Charlene Rainer. When she hung up, Wally looked at the notes in front of her, not knowing whether she should feel lucky or nervous; the address was on West 88th Street, in the Upper West Side between Columbus and Amsterdam, just a short walk from the empty bank where Wally and the crew were squatted.

Atley Greer stood
on the balcony of the sixth-floor apartment, looking down on Riverside Drive.

“Can you point out which part of the street you’re talking about?” he asked.

Mrs. Dearborn, a bone-thin woman in her mid-sixties, wore a heavy chenille robe, pajamas, and pink ankle-high Ugg boots. She pointed to a spot on the drive just half a block to the north.

“Down there, across from that green mailbox, the kind that you can’t put anything in,” she answered, and fixed a perplexed look on Atley as she sucked a heavy drag off her menthol cigarette. “What is it with the green mailboxes, anyway? They got no openings to put anything in. What the hell are they for?” She posed the question as if it were one of the great mysteries of the human condition.

“I haven’t a clue, Mrs. Dearborn,” said Atley.

It had been ten days since Sophia Manetti had been found dead in the baseball diamond—Atley could see the spot from the balcony, less than two hundred yards away—but the case had zeroed out. Atley had worked all possible leads, including the information on Sophia’s drug associations that Wallis Stoneman had offered at the community garden, but so far none of it had panned out. Finally the chief of Ds had authorized six uniforms for a re-canvass of the area, and one of the cops had found Mrs. Dearborn.

“So,” said Atley, “go over this for me if you would. The officers say you were out here smoking.”

“Yeah,” she answered, “Mr. Dearborn doesn’t let me smoke inside. Even in this cold weather.”

“About what time was that, ma’am?”

“Midnight. Ish. It was damn cold.”

“So around twelve, and the first thing you noticed was something you saw or something you heard?”

“I heard sort of a yell, an out-of-breath yell of a girl, coming from the park. When I looked down, I couldn’t see anything at first, but then this girl rushed out of the brush right over there, right out onto the drive, and the car almost hit her, screeching to a stop, you know?”

“Can you describe the car?”

“A big sedan, American I think, but what do I know from cars?” Mrs. Dearborn snuffed out her cigarette in an over-full ashtray, and the cold morning breeze immediately swept it out of the ashtray and onto the balcony floor. Mrs. Dearborn lit another.

“So the girl just stands there in front of the stopped car,” Mrs. Dearborn continued her narrative, sucking on her fresh menthol. “She’s sort of frozen in place there, for whatever reason, and that’s when the man gets out from the driver’s side of the car. Then two guys come out of the park, running like, but then they stop there too, the four of ’em just sort of standing there. Maybe they all said something—I couldn’t hear—but after a second they all get into the car.”

“The girl’s not forced into the car?”

“Not from what I could tell, but who’s to say? Three big colored guys there with her? Who’s to say what’s her idea and what isn’t? It’s a hard world for a girl.”

Atley could not disagree. “And then what happened?”

“The car does a U-turn on the drive and heads back north. I go back inside and watch that Ferguson guy on the TV. He’s funny, with the accent and everything. I thought about calling the cops, but … she just got right into the car without a fight, you know?”

“I know,” said Atley. A 911 call about a girl who had willingly climbed into a car on Riverside Drive would hardly raise any flags. “These three guys … what kind of a look did you get at them?”

“My eyes are good,” said Mrs. Dearborn, “but that’s a ways away and the light’s that weird electricity-saving color. Not a very good look, just basic details.”

“Okay.”

“The big guy driving the car, I’m pretty sure he was a black,” she said. “The other two I couldn’t say for sure. Probably lighter skin, a little, but both with dark hair. Coulda been Puerto Ricans or even Chinese for all I know.”

Atley produced some mug shots for her to look at. One array of photos included a shot of the drug dealer Rage, who Wally had mentioned. He was African American, but very fair-skinned, with freckles, and a puffy ’fro of red hair that was the source of his street name: Rage, for red. None of the lady’s descriptions sounded remotely like that, and the other dealer Wallis had mentioned—Bright Eyes—was a blond white kid. Atley showed Mrs. Dearborn their photos anyway.

“Nah,” she said with certainty. “Not them.”

Atley sighed, tired and discouraged and footsore after almost a full day of canvassing. As Mrs. Dearborn puffed away on her cigarette, Atley leaned over the railing and imagined the scenario as the lady had described it: Sophia Manetti runs out of the park—chased by two men—and onto the drive, where she almost gets hit by a black guy driving a sedan. But she doesn’t keep running, because …
because
, the driver is someone she knows? That’s quite a coincidence. She doesn’t even run when the guys chasing her catch up and appear there on the street, next to the car.

Suddenly, it’s not a chase and it’s not an assault: it’s a friendly get-together, right there on Riverside Drive at midnight. They all climb into the car, no drama. The car does a U-ey and heads north on the drive, taking the turnoff that circles back into the park, where the baseball fields are located. Sophia had climbed into that sedan willingly, but her ride—and her life—ended at the hands of someone she knew.

Back at the precinct house
, Atley opened the Manetti book to review what he had so far. It did not take long. The biggest boost had been Wallis Stoneman’s information about Rage and Bright Eyes—Sophia’s drug connections—but if Mrs. Dearborn’s eyewitness account could be trusted, then those two were not involved in Sophia’s death, at least not directly. Atley had an eyewitness account of Sophia’s abduction, if that’s what it was, and still the case was dead-ended. He opened the murder book again and reread everything from page one, looking for an avenue he might have missed.

He pored over all the crime scene reports and found nothing productive—no DNA, no fingerprints, no footprints or tire tracks, no witnesses other than Mrs. Dearborn, nothing interesting in the autopsy other than a slew of drugs in the girl’s system, as expected. Atley moved on to Sophia Manetti’s juvie file. He had been through it already and what was inside added nothing to the case, just a sad life story with a familiar and tragic progression: unstable home, parental abuse, drug abuse, street. Atley continued into Wallis Stoneman’s juvie file. The notes documented Wallis’s problems at home, her flirtation with life on the street, her expulsion from school, etc. Unlike Sophia, there was no violence documented in Wallis’s home, but the girl had spent the first five years of her life in a Russian orphanage, so who could know what sorts of pain she had experienced before coming home to America with Claire and Jason Stoneman?

In the mass of Social Services paperwork was a psych eval of Wallis, written up when Wallis was just ten. After a single thirty-minute interview, the Social Services shrink had diagnosed Wallis’s problem: disruptive behavior disorder. Atley did a search for the term on his desktop and came up with a description of the diagnosis: a DBD-diagnosed subject “refuses to comply with adults,” “deliberately annoys people,” and “is angry and resentful.” In other words, the subject is exactly like every teenager Atley had ever met.