The Wrong Girl (2 page)

Hennessey nodded. “They’re canvassing, seeing if anyone saw anybody leaving. So far, no.”

“And there are two kids? Whoever called nine-one-one wasn’t clear. We know who that is yet? I have the kids as last name—” Jake checked his BlackBerry shorthand. His phone always ridiculously auto-corrected. “Is it Lussier?”

“So says the nine-one-one caller.” Hennessey, a stocky fire hydrant zipped into foul-weather gear, flapped his leather gloves against his BPD navy parka. “Wish we could close the damn door.”

At least Hennessey knew enough not to touch the scarred wooden doorknob of 56 Callaberry Street. There was barely room for the two of them in the cramped square of dark-paneled foyer. The dusty bare light bulb overhead didn’t cut it, and the one on the first landing was out.

“So, the kids? Don’t they know their mother’s name?”

“We asked. ‘Mama,’ the boy said. Their own names, he knew. Phillip and Phoebe. What kind of a name is Phoebe?”

“Hennessey?” Commentary, he didn’t need. “How many kids? The nine-one-one call indicated—”

“Apparently two. Maybe the caller meant three people resided here, ya know?” Hennessey shrugged. “We found a boy and a girl, approximately one and three years of age. Weren’t crying or anything when Kurtz brought them down. Guess maybe they don’t know. Victim’s their mother, looks like, white female, age approximately thirty. Checking her ID now. Cause of death, looks like blunt trauma. No weapon so far. Like I said. Ugly. Frying pan, something like that.”

“So says—?” Jake raised an eyebrow. It wouldn’t have been Kurtz, the officer who had the kids in her cruiser. She was new on the street, just promoted from cadet, now evidently partnered with Hennessey. The ME was still on the way.

“So says your partner, DeLuca.” Hennessey lifted his plastic-covered cap with one hand, propping it while he scratched a bristle of gray hair. “Guess he’d know. You two the big-time detectives and all.”

Here we go.
All he needed. Yes, his grandfather, Grandpa Brogan, had been police commissioner. Yes, Jake got his gold badge at thirty, three years ago. Jake had aced the academy, probably gotten higher scores than this guy. Still, even cracking last fall’s Bridge Killer case, getting the commendation from Superintendent Rivera, hadn’t stopped the sneers from the old-timers. “The Supe’s fair-haired boy,” they called him. Whatever.

Jake ignored the bait. “So the nine-one-one caller? Any ID? I know we’ll have it on tape, but anything else I should know?”

“Yo, Harvard, that you?” Paul DeLuca’s voice boomed down the stairwell. “You planning on coming up here anytime soon?”

“Chill,” Jake yelled back. Jake’s college history and Brahmin mother were a constant source of amused derision for his partner, though after a few close calls together and a couple of massacres on the basketball court, their relationship had matured into respect and good-natured banter. Jake held two thumbs over his phone keyboard. “So, Officer Hennessey? Anything? Sign of forced entry? Anyone else live in the apartment? Husband, boyfriend, the nine-one-one caller?”

“Nope. Nobody’s owning up. Neighbors all say it wasn’t them. Mighta been a blocked cell, ya know?”

Calling from a cell phone, Jake knew, didn’t give dispatchers a GPS location. Enhanced 911 often worked only from a landline.

“Cell phone nine-one-ones are a bitch,” Jake said. “Keep at the canvass, though, right?”

Hennessey’s eyes went past him and out to Callaberry Street, where a gray-and-blue cruiser idled, plumes of exhaust darker gray than the darkening afternoon.

“Poor kids,” the beat cop said. “They’re screwed.”

“The woman from the agency said my name is Audrey Rose Beerman, can you believe it?” Tuck laced her fingers together, clamped them on top of her head. “It’s an okay name. But I don’t feel like an Audrey Rose Beerman.”

Jane took a sip of her Diet Coke, not quite sure how to react. What did Tuck want
her
to do?

“Maybe it’s all about what we’re used to. How we see ourselves.” Plain Jane, Jane the Pain—the nicknames Jane’d been saddled with as a bookish kid in the relentless social hierarchy of Oak Park Junior High had sent her to name-fantasy world.
Anything but Jane.
For a while she’d wished to be Evangeline, courageous girl of the forest. Then Hyacinth, all flowy skirts and poetry. Her mother chose “Janey” when affectionate, “Jane Elizabeth” when making one of her pronouncements. As in “Jane Elizabeth Ryland is a perfectly good name. Evangeline is ridiculous.”

Hey, Mom,
Jane sent a message upward.
You were right. Miss you.

But today was about Tuck. “So you didn’t know your real name? Before?”

“Well, yeah. I did. That’s one of the weird things, and tell you about it in a minute. But anyway, my—adoptive mother, I guess I’m supposed to call her—told me the agency always said my birth mother—” Tuck stopped mid-sentence, slumped her shoulders. “It’s impossible. ‘Real’ mother? ‘Birth’ mother? ‘Adoptive’ mother? I mean, the woman I called my mother took care of me and changed my diapers and let me stay left-handed and yelled until the softball coach let me be the pitcher. She’s kind of a whack job, at times, but what mom isn’t, right? My biological mother, who conceived me, carried me for nine months, gave birth to me—she left me at the Brannigan.”

Jane’s eyes widened, she couldn’t help it. How would it feel to take something from yourself, a helpless new human, and give it away? That child was now twenty-eight. Twenty-eight, bitter and confused. And, somewhere, was a woman grieving the loss?

“I’m so sorry,” Jane almost whispered. “But your poor mother. It must have been horrible.”

“Not so horrible she couldn’t dump me at—well, whatever. My life has turned out fine. Even after the shit hit the fan, Laney and I are okay. He insists everything will work out.” Tuck fiddled with the fringe on the chocolate-and-cream afghan draped over the chair. Jane’s mother had crocheted it in her hospital bed, the last afghan she made. “Not feelin’ it so much today, you know?”

Today was turning out to be quite the Sunday. Jane needed to get this talk back on track. Whatever that track was.

“So, Tuck. What is it you want me to do? You got a call from the Brannigan. They said they found your birth mother. You drove to Connecticut, and then what?”

“Long story short.” Tuck folded the afghan over the arm of the chair. “I go to Connecticut. We meet at Starbucks. She’s great, she’s terrific, I’m in a Hallmark card or a Lifetime movie. I’ve never been so happy. I’m crying, she’s crying. We each order a triple venti nonfat latte—exactly the same thing!—and we start crying again.”

Tuck pressed her lips together, closed her eyes briefly.

“‘Audrey Rose. You’re so beautiful,’ she says. ‘I knew you’d be a knockout.’ She said that, ‘knockout.’ ‘You have my dark eyes,’ she says, ‘so skinny, and my crazy hair.’ We spend two days together. I’m thinking—I have a biological family. I have a history. I have a story.”

“Well, that sounds wonderful, Tuck. It sounds like—”

“No.” Tuck slugged down the last of her wine. The timer behind the couch clicked on the bulbs of the brass lamp beside her. Jane was shocked to realize it was almost dark outside. February in Boston. It wasn’t even five.

“I’m telling you, Jane. She’s not my mother. She expected her long-lost daughter. But I’m … I’m not her.”

“You’re not—why would you think that? Come on, Tuck, why would they—?”

“I don’t
know
. That’s why I’m here. You’re the reporter. My only—you’ve got to find out for me.”

Tuck stood, tears welling, tumbling a throw pillow to the floor. Coda opened her tiny green eyes at the sound, looked up, then dropped her head back into her paws.

“Imagine how she’ll feel? When she finds out?” One tear rolled down Tuck’s cheek, and she swiped it away. “After all the plans? The calls? She looked so happy. But I know it. I
do.
They sent that poor woman the wrong girl.”

The crime scene cleanup people would have quite a job on their hands. Not as bad as some Jake had seen, but murder was never good. They’d arrive soon enough, whoever the landlord hired, see it for themselves. Jake closed his eyes briefly, making a promise to the woman on the linoleum floor. “We’ll find this asshole,” he muttered.
Hennessey was right. Poor kids. Poor woman.

There’d been nothing on the stairway. He’d kept his gloved hands off the banisters and walls, hugging the wall to avoid possible suspect footprints, was careful walking up the three flights to the top floor. The wooden front door of apartment C stood open, leading to a threadbare living room, cheap couch with haphazard pillows, then a dining room with an oval table, white tablecloth, three twisty metal candlesticks in the center, no candles. Clean. No family photos, no keepsakes. No sign of forced entry, exactly as Hennessey had reported.

“Yo, D. What you got?” he called toward what must be the kitchen, but DeLuca had gone out a back door. Left it open. A spotlight glared from one outside corner of the minuscule back balcony, and Jake saw his partner’s lanky silhouette leaning over the wooden railing.
Three floors up.
No escape that way, probably. Unless the bad guy could fly.

It was four steps across the living room to an archway into the kitchen. Jake paused, getting a read on the place. Sniffed, as he always did. No gas, nothing burning, a sweet fragrance of—maybe some cleaning thing. He surveyed left to right, cataloging the elements, typing notes without looking at the keyboard. Dented white refrigerator, seen better days, but clean, no grubby smudges around the handle. He’d have to check inside it. Two saucepans on a gas stove. Open box of Quaker Oats on the drain board. An open box of Cheerios, on its side, a few pieces spilled on the floor.
Cereal.
Jake looked at his watch. Five in the afternoon.
Huh.

No dishes in the sink, a stack of multicolored sponges in a plastic dish, some generic green soap on the side. Kitchen table. A high chair, aluminum and plastic, not new, the molded pink serving tray wiped clean. A little pink bowl with a rabbit decal.

And that body on the floor. One side of her face against the once-ivory linoleum, the other revealing an angry red welt. More than a welt. The skin had already turned purple. Her eyes were open. A trickle of blood made a jagged seam across the yellowed floor, the dark seeping into the cracks between the tiles.
Blunt trauma?
Jake typed.
Weapon?

White female, approx 30, eyes brown, hair blond,
he typed. It spilled across her back, clean, shiny, cared for. Arms splayed. Hooded sweatshirt. Levis, bare feet. If you ignored what seemed the cause of death, it looked like the woman simply decided she needed a nap. Or been dropped from the ceiling. Had she—tripped? Hit her head on the stove? Or floor?

Jake stood, assessing. A siren wailed in the distance, the sound keening through the open back door. All the streetlights had popped on, and the interior lights in neighboring triple-deckers. People would be gathering below, the neighborhood disaster irresistible. Photog should get snaps. Sometimes the bad guys did return. Yellow crime scene tape should be up. Where the hell was the new ME? Maybe she was the siren.

It wasn’t suicide, anyway. If the woman had been clonked with a frying pan, like Hennessey said, it wasn’t in sight. No sign at all of a murder weapon. The woman looked poor. Had a family. But the place was—same as her hair—cared for. She’d be sad to see her kitchen messed up this way. Blood and Cheerios.

Jake never got used to that first moment. The first glimpse of the victim. Murder was the consequence of greed or fear or drugs or anger or frustration or money or whatever made someone explode and decide their needs were more important than whoever was in their way. Jake and DeLuca had seen their share. Solved their share, too. Plenty of bad guys owed their current long-term residency in MCI Cedar Junction to the work of Brogan and DeLuca.

Her ID was somewhere in the shabby little apartment. They’d find it, then find who she knew, then figure out who had a problem with her. This was a domestic, Jake predicted. They’d close it fast.

“Yo, Harvard.” DeLuca stood at the back door, his sport coat open, black hoodie underneath, no hat. His hatchet nose red from the cold, he swiped the back of his gloved hand across it. “You ready to join us on this planet?”

“Yo, D,” Jake said. Jane always said D looked like he’d gotten thinner every time they saw each other. DeLuca lived on black coffee and roast beef subs—maybe that was it. Right now Jake had a bigger question. Besides the murder weapon, another important thing was missing from this crime scene.

“We’ve got a dead woman.” Jake zipped up his jacket, zipped it down, then up again, like he always did when thinking. “No apparent murder weapon. An empty apartment. Two little kids who can’t talk. So who the hell called nine-one-one?”

Niall Brannigan strode up the front walk of Brannigan Family and Children Services, cataloging mistakes. No one had deadheaded the decorative mums along the garden path. Now some were rotting and brown.
Such
a waste of money.
Such
a poor public image. No one left tomorrow until those were gone. A fine mist lifted from the snowy grass, the last of the afternoon’s light disappearing. Still light enough to see a litany of annoyances.

Fallen twigs and branches, pine needles strewn across the flagstones, patches of ice on the cobbles. What, the whole grounds crew was surprised it was winter? His polished wing tips, protected by stretchy rubbers, marched through the slush.

“Ridiculous.” He said it aloud, swiping his plastic pass card through the new gadget mounted beside the front door. His father would have cringed, someone screwing holes in the wood Mother told him had come over on the Mayflower. Brannigan allowed himself the day’s first smile.
Doubtful.
But a useful and effective story.

A bell pinged, a green light appeared, and he clicked open the door. Inside, only the night lights lit the dusky hallway. The place was closed Sundays—he’d come here after afternoon mass—but as executive director, he liked to confirm all was well. Organize a few files, the mail, the upcoming schedule. See what new children were arriving. And departing. Ardith wasn’t waiting at home, but probably at her precious yoga, as always. Thank heaven for liberated spouses.