The Wrong Girl (34 page)

That’s why Ella was here tonight. That’s why she hadn’t gone home.

She flipped on her windshield wipers. Turned up the defroster as the windows fogged and the outside world disappeared. They were predicting snow. She hated to drive in snow. Maybe she should come tomorrow instead.

Yes. She shifted into drive.
No.
She shifted back into park. The most important thing was to protect the Brannigan—no, the most important thing was to protect the families. She couldn’t imagine how Ms. Cameron felt, thinking she was meeting her birth mother, only to find … well, Ella would not have been able to bear the disappointment. And what if the same thing happened with other Brannigan cases? Her entire adult life had been spent bringing families together. She couldn’t have it tainted with something as terrible as this.

She’d been
planning
to call Carlyn Beerman about the paperwork proving her daughter had not been dropped off with a bracelet and a note. Paperwork that Carlyn, as birth mother, would have. Then, phone in hand, Ella had panicked. What if Carlyn
sued
the Brannigan? Made huge trouble? Ella needed advice.

But first she needed information.

And she had a key, so it wasn’t trespassing. Besides, how could you trespass on a dead person?

Ella pulled a pink leather pouch from her tote bag. Unzipped it. Inside, a white enamel lily topped the keys on a gold-linked chain. Lillian had laughed when she entrusted them to Ella. “In case I get locked out,” she’d said. “Then I won’t have to call an expensive locksmith to let me in.”

A few fat snowflakes plunked onto her windshield. The metronome beat of the wipers slashed them away.

Ella stared at Lillian’s keys, wondering if she was up to this.

This was such a long shot. Jake led DeLuca back down the stairway of 343A Edgeworth. Weapons stowed but available, the two moved quickly and silently. This long shot seemed like the only answer, and if he was wrong, he was wrong.

Mirror image.

Jake pointed to the first-floor closet under the stairwell, then pointed to himself.
I’ll go.

DeLuca gave him a questioning look.
Huh?

Jake took the last three steps toward the wooden closet door, turned the knob, pulled it open. Stepped inside. Dark. Smelled wood, and dust, and musty disuse. Empty. No fuzzy woolen silhouettes of coats, no clacking metal hangers, nothing. He could touch each side of the closet if he stretched out his arms. He took a step inside. Another. Like Ricker’s closet on the other side, it was deeper than he’d imagined. And dark.

Too risky to click on the overheard light.

He held out an arm until his fingertips touched the back wall.

He sensed DeLuca close behind. Heard him breathing. With the palm of his left hand, Jake felt along the left edge of the closet’s back wall, barely touching it, almost closing his eyes with the effort to find something that seemed out of place, different. But there was nothing. Maybe he was wrong.

Wishing for the light, he turned slightly, felt along the right edge of the wall. There it was. A hinge. A foot or two beneath that, another hinge.

“This opens.” Jake barely whispered the words, demonstrating with one hand. “Into Ricker’s side of the house.”

DeLuca nodded, touched a hand to his weapon.

Jake patted again along the left side, feeling for a knob, a hook, a gizmo of some kind that would allow him to open the back of the closet—and enter the other side of the duplex.

Nothing.
Nothing.

There had been someone upstairs. Unless Jake was massively, impossibly mistaken, there had been a baby. Now, no one. And no one had left the house.

Only one other possibility.

Jake’s eyes had adjusted enough in the closet gloom to see the almost-amused look on his partner’s face. Jake pointed to his weapon, drew it, motioned to D to do the same.

He reached out his left hand, flat, and pushed as hard as he could.

The back of the closet swung open.

*

“Did either of you morons leave anything at Callaberry Street? Are we clean out of there? What about Margolin Street? Are we clear?” Kev paced back and forth in front of the TV, raking his hands through his hair and looking totally freaked out. The news was now showing some huge fire in a forest somewhere, Utah or Arizona. “We have signed contracts, right, Keef? Both places? I told you to get them.”

Keefer shook his head. “Not for Margolin Street yet. We went in on Hennessey’s go, but we’re waiting for next of kin. Hennessey was s’posed to call us, like, today.” He shrugged, waved his beer at the TV. “Guess that’s not in the cards now. Bummer.”

“Shit,” Kev said.

“What’s the big whoop?” Kellianne couldn’t figure out why Kev was so nervous. Yeah, it was true the cop who’d been the shooter was the one who’d hooked Afterwards up with the jobs. But that wasn’t on paper anywhere, just a “business proposition.” She’d learned that only when Dad got sick.

“Hennessey will call you as soon as he hears of a possible,” Dad had instructed the three of them from his hospital sickbed—once the hovering nurse left and Mom went down to the caf for coffees. “He’ll contact you by phone. If it’s his case, get to the scene, find him, and he’ll give you keys or point you to whoever’s got them. If not, you’ll work it out with him. Either way, you make copies, you get the keys back to him. The death family—if there is a family—will think the cops sent you, that it’s part of the deal, and who’s gonna tell them otherwise? They have no idea they’re supposed to hire the cleanup crew. How would they? They’re always upset, and don’t care who’s getting rid of the crap in their house.”

“How about the other cops?” Kev had asked.

“They’ll think the family called. Each one thinks the other did it. Nobody cares. There’s a dead person. That’s all they’re worrying about. That and the smell of death. So get in early, get what you can, and assess. Make sure there’s insurance.”

Had they been doing something she didn’t know about? she’d wondered. Pretty funny, considering now they didn’t know what
she
was doing.

“What’s he get out of it?” Kev had asked that day. “The cop?”

“That’s between us.” Her father said it was all off the books, and probably not strictly illegal. “Just do it.”

Far as Kellianne could see, it’d worked fine.

“Okay, we gotta take care of this.” Kev aimed the remote at the front door, as if he could open it that way. “We gotta go back to Margolin Street. I mean, like, now.”

“But Kev. We can’t.” Keefer’s voice always sounded whiny. “That’s where the guy had the heart attack. If the cops knew we were there, they’d put two and two together.”

“Shit.” The remote dropped to his side. “But what’re we gonna do, bro, UN-clean? We took up all the rugs. And…” Kev flashed his brother some kind of a look. “You know. The bathroom.”

“I told you,” Kellianne said. They were idiots. “I frigging told you. That was the world’s dumbest idea, dragging that guy out. Now they’re gonna know we were there, and figure out how he got into his stupid car, and you’re gonna be in the electric chair. I sure didn’t have anything to do with it. But you two morons are gonna fry.”

They all stopped talking. The only sound was the TV anchorwoman, yammering about how many acres of land went up in flames somewhere a million miles away.

“Holy freaking Christ,” Kevin said. “What’re we gonna do?”

Keefer pointed to the TV with his beer bottle. “Well,” he said, “I might have an idea.”

“I thought you were in Anguilla.” Jake blurted the first thing that came to his mind, not exactly by-the-book cop talk, but seeing the woman in Ricker’s ratty armchair pushed protocol straight out of his head. He’d stepped through the back of the closet, pushed through the two coats on Ricker’s side, and opened the closet door right into Ricker’s hallway. Instantly had a clear view of the living room. And a clear view of Margaret Gunnison.

Last he’d seen of the DFS caseworker, she was fast-talking through their interview about the kids in the Tillson murder because she was headed for Logan airport. Off to the Caribbean for a week. Only two days had gone by. She wasn’t tan.

“I only—” Margaret Gunnison pulled a swaddled bundle in a blue-striped flannel blanket closer to her chest. A molded plastic car seat decorated with pink Scottie dogs sat on the couch beside a zipped diaper bag. “You can’t—”

Jake saw a pink knit cap peeking out from the flannel, a tiny pink nose, and tiny closed eyes. Tried to read the expression on Gunnison’s face. Panic? Fear? Anger?

He cocked his head at D, who’d stepped from the closet behind him.
Stand down,
Jake signaled, as he lowered his own weapon, but didn’t holster it. This situation—whatever it was—wouldn’t be solved with guns. He hoped.

“Who’s that?” DeLuca scanned the room, got the picture.

“You remember Margaret Gunnison, the deputy commissioner of the DFS,” Jake said. “Maggie, you remember my partner, Detective DeLuca. Maggie? Who’s that in your arms? Is that Phillip and Phoebe’s…,” he was guessing now, “… sister?”

No answer. Okay, then.

“Is anyone upstairs, Maggie?” That’d be the big hitch. A woman and a baby in a supposedly empty apartment escaping into the home of a now-dead murder suspect, that was trouble enough. But if she had an accomplice hiding upstairs, that’d be a different story. What the hell was the deal? Was Maggie protecting this infant? Or kidnapping it? Was someone listening to everything they said?

Jake kept his voice calm. “We can talk. You can keep holding the baby. But only if we’re alone.”

Her eyes didn’t flicker to upstairs, a good sign. She adjusted the bundle in her arms, pulled at the seam of the blanket. A tear rolled down her cheek. She swiped it away with a finger.

“You want me to check upstairs, Jake?” DeLuca, voice barely audible, still had his weapon out.

Jake raised a finger.
Wait one.

“We’re alone,” she whispered.

“Okay, Maggie. I’m trusting you. What’s the baby’s name?” Jake needed to get into Maggie’s head about this. Figure out what she thought about this child. So far, he had no idea if Maggie was a wacko who might use the child as a bargaining chip. Or a hostage. That damn car seat and diaper bag bugged him. Where was she planning to take the baby? When? Why? One wrong word, one misstep or miscalculation, and this whole thing would go up in flames.

“Her name is Diane Marie Weaver.” Maggie looked down at the baby, fussed with the blanket, tucking it under her feet again. “Her mother’s dead, but she
must
have wished her daughter to be happy. She must have. And since baby Diane Marie has no other relatives—her father’s unknown—I’m helping her.”

“So…” Jake had to tread carefully here. “
You’re
not her mother?”

Maggie looked up at him, half-smiling as if that were the silliest question ever. “Oh, no,” she said. “Of course not.”

“Okay, Maggie, help me now,” Jake said. “You were on the other side of the duplex, right? With baby Diane Marie? You heard us come in? And you ran to this side of the house so we wouldn’t find you?”

Maggie nodded, silent.

“Is my partner going to be okay if he goes up there? There’s no one there? I’m trusting you, Maggie. Yes?”

“It’s only us,” she whispered.

Jake cocked his head at DeLuca. “Okay. Check it out. Be careful.”

*

What did she do before cell phones? By the second ring, Jane had grabbed hers by feel from her tote bag as she braked to a semistop in the slow-moving Fast Lane of the Mass Turnpike, rush hour in full swing.
Was it Jake?
She inventoried herself, just in case. Black turtleneck, clean. Good jeans, her good flat boots. Hair, okay. Makeup, fixable.

“This is—,” she began. Fingers crossed.

“It’s me,” Tuck said. “Ella called. She wanted
you,
said she knew all along it was you at the Dunkin’s. So much for
that
idea. But she said she had to talk to you, wouldn’t tell me what it was about, so I gave her your cell, I hope that’s okay, and she—”

Jane’s call waiting beeped in, interrupting Tuck’s light-speed recitation.

“Tuck? Call you back.” She
had
to see if it was Jake. Punching the phone onto speaker, she inched through the tolls toward Boston. “This is Jane.”

“Miss Ryland? I’m so sorry to call. It’s Ella. Ella Gavin. Ella from—”

“Yes, Ella, I know.” Jane was going to kill Tuck.

“Okay. Good. Like I told Miss Cameron, I recognized you at the coffee shop. It didn’t seem like you wanted me to, but everyone knows you. How you protect your sources, no matter what. How trustworthy you are. That’s why I’m calling. It has to be confidential.”

“Well, thank you, Ella.” Jane wondered where the hell this was going.
Why does everyone ask for confidential?
“Of course. Confidential. What can I do for you?”

“Have you not picked up your messages at work?” Ella said. “I left you one two days ago telling you about Mr. Brannigan.”

“Really?” There had been nothing on Jane’s phone, so—
oh
. The operator had probably sent Ella to the “Jane” line, the voice-mail limbo where stressed-out receptionists dumped what they decided were nuisance calls. Which interns answered. Sometimes.

“I bet you got the tip line,” Jane said. “I apologize. That’s—anyway. But I know about Mr. Brannigan, and I’m so sorry for your loss.”

“Listen, Miss Ryland?”

“Jane.” She was past exit 14 now. Almost home.

“Jane. Okay. Ah, I’d get in trouble if anyone knew I—Well, listen. I have the paperwork that proves Miss Cameron is not really Audrey Rose Beerman. The original intake documents for baby Beerman don’t show a bracelet or note. Mrs. Beerman would have them, too, to compare. But thing is, I called some other families who were reunited with their birth children by Lillian, and it seems like…” Her voice trailed off, almost buried in the roar of a thundering sixteen-wheeler.

“Ella? Are you there?”

“Well, I think—I think they could have been sent the wrong children, too.”