Authors: Alison Gaylin
He wasn’t the only one.
W
hen Morasco arrived at the station, Lane Hutchins was out by the fountain giving a press conference. His second of the day, but that wasn’t unusual for Hutchins. Public appearances of any sort were what he liked best, and the
way
he spoke . . . Not like a police officer or even a politician. More like Charlton Heston auditioning for
All My Children
.
Passing behind the TV cameras, Morasco heard the chief say, “. . . little did anyone know, Nelson Wentz harbored some dark secrets . . .”
That’s right, Chief. Tell us about secrets
.
“. . . a little man, with a giant rage . . .”
“Who writes this crap?” Morasco muttered. One of the cameramen turned to him, eyebrows up. Morasco kept his head down and slipped into the station thinking about secrets, how long they could keep before they rotted and stank and killed everything around them.
The station was mostly empty, most of the other detectives flanking Hutchins at the press conference, the uniforms who weren’t on patrol making sure the chief saw them standing among the reporters, watching. Morasco walked to his desk—such a large desk, polished to a sheen by the cleaning crew and so much like most everything else in this station—oversized and gleaming and completely unnecessary. His old desk had worked fine. His old desktop computer had been perfectly sufficient, and his old phone, too, without the headset, without the reflective space-age surface and the voice dial that constantly called wrong numbers.
You work in a place like this long enough, you get used to it, the pointless waste. The hypocrisy. But all you have to do is look at it directly and it doesn’t matter how long it’s been. It socks you in the face, just as hard as the last time you took a good, long look. What was he doing here? Why hadn’t he left eleven years ago?
There were no pictures on Morasco’s desk, not anymore. Before the divorce, he had one framed photo—a small one of Holly and himself, taken during one of their camping trips upstate. He didn’t remember specifics, but he could recall the look of the photo—smiling, arms around each other, surrounded by evergreens or maple trees—at this point, he wasn’t sure which. What he did know—what he would always know—was that Holly had been three months’ pregnant when the picture had been taken. Morasco had kept that picture on his desk for a very long time—after the baby’s birth and death. Even for a good three months after the divorce became final, the picture stayed there, next to Morasco’s computer. The department relocated to this new address, the enormous desk arrived. He stuck the picture in the drawer for a few weeks. Then he threw it out.
There are statistics, overwhelming ones, about the divorce rate among couples who lose a child. Experts say that after such a death—a SIDS death, beyond either parent’s control—it is nearly impossible for that couple to look at each other without feeling a sense of loss and powerlessness. Counseling might have helped, but Holly was never one for counseling. She just wanted to forget.
Iris Neff disappeared four months after Matthew died in his bassinet. At the start of the case, Lydia Neff had given Morasco a picture of Iris—a little girl in purple overalls with a big smile, her black hair pulled into pigtails. Morasco had made color copies of the photo, and then he’d put the original in the top drawer of his desk. Every day he’d crack the drawer, look at Iris’s face, and think,
I’ll find you
.
Don’t worry.
He’d kept the picture in that drawer long after it had outlived its usefulness, nearly as long as he’d kept the framed camping trip photo on top of his desk. Morasco wasn’t one to forget. If anything, he held on to memories too tightly.
He buzzed Fields. “Did you ever get those phone records for me?”
“Carol Wentz? Yes—the phone company sent them over a couple hours ago.”
When he picked them up at her desk, Fields said, “I’m sorry. I would have given them to you myself, but I figured you didn’t need them anymore, what with Nelson Wentz . . . You know.”
“Sure, Sally. No worries.” Morasco took the files back to his desk and started skimming through the numbers, made to and from the Wentzes’ landline in the two weeks before Carol’s death. There weren’t many calls at all—just two pages’ worth.
When he got to the start of the second page, though, he stopped. He read the number a couple of times, just to make sure he hadn’t gotten it wrong.
There was a roar of conversation at the front door just then—the chief coming back to work, along with the dozen detectives who had been standing behind him during the press conference. They all filed in, talking and laughing. Morasco heard Wentz’s name a few times, along with some bad pun-riffs on the word “hung.” Gallows humor. Literally. Pomroy walked up to Morasco’s desk. “Where were you?”
“Taking care of some paperwork,” he replied, the phone number he’d seen still swirling around in his head. “Be right back—I gotta go ask Sally something.”
Morasco headed back to the front desk. “It says here,” he told Fields, “that Carol Wentz called this police station on Monday, September 21, 9:30
A.M.
?”
Fields looked at the list, nodded. “Yep.”
“I mean . . . I’m assuming it was Carol, not Nelson, because he would have been at work. Right?”
“Just a sec.” Fields jiggled her mouse and her computer screen lit up. She’d been on her Facebook page, but Morasco pretended not to notice. Fields kept very precise records of everyone who called the station and whom she connected them with. For that, in Morasco’s opinion at least, she was allowed all the social networking she wanted. Fields called up her phone log file and stared at the screen. “You’re right—it was Carol,” she said. “See? She asked to speak to the chief. She was on for ten minutes.”
Morasco exhaled. “Thanks, Sally,” he said, his body moving of its own accord, around Fields’s desk and into the chief’s office suite, past his assistant and through his polished mahogany door, her whispery protests hanging in the air behind him, just motes of dust. Hutchins was on the phone. Morasco heard him say, “Gotta call you back, Eugene.”
Hutchins hung up, looking at Morasco as though he were something he thought he’d successfully wiped off the sole of his shoe this morning, only to find it still there, clinging.
“Was that Eugene Conti, editor of the
Gazette
?” said Morasco. “Or Eugene Phillips, the mayor?”
Hutchins gave him the crack of a smile. “I’m busy right now, Detective Morasco. If you have any business, discuss it with Detectives Pomroy or Fleiss.”
Hutchins’s desk was sprawling and decorated with a skyline of expensively framed photos—Hutchins with Mayor Phillips, Hutchins with Donald Trump, Hutchins with Conan O’Brien and Mayor Bloomberg and some actor from
Law & Order
whose name Morasco couldn’t remember. Hutchins with Derek Jeter and Hutchins with Matt Lauer and Hutchins with Roger Wright, golf clubs in hand. In each picture, the chief wore the same practiced smile—the mouth stretched wide and the eyes flat and the shoulders squared. Hutchins could have substituted a cardboard cutout of himself for half these photo ops, it wouldn’t have made any difference. Morasco walked up to the front of the desk. He put both hands on the smooth surface and leaned over it, staring into Hutchins’s eyes. “What did you talk to Carol Wentz about?”
“Excuse me?”
“On September 21, Carol Wentz called here. She spoke to you for ten minutes. What did you talk about?”
“None of your business, Detective.”
“Twenty minutes after she called you, she called Graeme Klavel, a private investigator she knew. What couldn’t you help her with that Graeme Klavel
could
?”
Hutchins stood up at his desk. He was a big man—same height as Morasco, but he easily had forty pounds on him. He used to be quite the bar brawler back in the day, before he became a “public official.” And when he met his gaze, Morasco saw a glimpse of that Lane, the old Lane with the meaty jaw and the crazy eyes, Lane the asshole, who had once broken a guy’s nose at Yankee Stadium for rooting too loudly for the Sox.
Did his photo op pal Jeter know that story? Doubtful.
Lane Hutchins stared into Morasco’s eyes for a solid minute, saying nothing.
Morasco stared right back. “It’s an easy enough question, Lane,” he said quietly. “What did you not want to look into for Carol Wentz?”
Hutchins squared his jaw, the bones pressing against his skin. “She asked me to speak at the Methodist church,” he said finally. “She thought it would be interesting for members of her women’s group to hear how they could become involved in the Neighborhood Watch program.” His voice was like ice cracking. Morasco left the office knowing there were changes to be made.
Hutchins hadn’t thought Morasco had noticed, but he had. That glint of recognition in the eyes, the slight blanching of the skin at the mention of Klavel’s name.
Changes to be made.
When Morasco got back to his desk, Pomroy was leaning against it, talking to Fleiss. “We’re thinking about ordering from Frankie’s,” he said. “You in?”
“Not hungry.” Morasco left his desk and then the station, taking the phone call list along with him.
“M
aybe she joined a convent,” said Trent by way of greeting, just after Brenna walked through her apartment door. He was staring at his computer screen, uncharacteristically intent, a look on his face as if he wanted to climb into whatever it was he was reading, yet despite all that, despite everything she’d seen and learned today, Trent’s shirt still stopped Brenna in her tracks.
“Shirt” was a generous description, to be honest. It was more of a sports bra, with the profile of a roaring tiger thickly rendered on the front in what looked like spray paint and mustard, red sequined tears dripping out of its angry yellow eyes.
Wow. Like what Christian Audigier would see in his nightmares after a twenty-four-hour appletini bender
.
Brenna shook herself away from the garment, started toward his desk. “Maybe
who
joined a convent?”
“Lydia Neff.”
“Doubtful.” Brenna looked over his shoulder at the screen.
“Lydia’s credit card bill from two years ago,” he said. “Last charge she ever made was for thirty dollars, at a gas station.” He looked up at her. “In Buffalo.”
“So she did make it up there.”
“And, oh, wait—before I forget, someone called for you a few minutes ago, but I let it go to voice mail.”
“Trent.” She took a breath. “I’ve got a few things to tell you about, and you’re gonna need to prepare a little.”
“Oookay . . .”
Brenna waited for him to tear himself away from the computer, give her his full attention.
“First of all. This.” She removed the slim envelope from her purse and put it on the keyboard in front of him. “Carol was hiding this,” she said. “She took it out of the Neff house. Taped it in a book.”
He opened it up, removed the drawing and then, the pictures. He gaped at them. For a moment, he appeared to swallow his own tongue. “Well, wax my ass,” he said, once he began to collect himself.
“Also . . .” She cleared her throat. “Nelson Wentz is dead.”
“
What?
”
Brenna talked him through the entire day, from her run-in with Wright and Hutchins to discovering Nelson’s body to everything Morasco had told her about, including Chief Griffin’s untimely death, Wright’s probable involvement, everything . . . Then she left Trent there, uncharacteristically silent, his jaw practically unhinged, while she walked over to her desk to check her voice mail.
“I don’t usually like to, uh, pull out early,” Trent finally said as the electronic voice told Brenna she had one message, “but in this case, it would seem like the smart thing to do.”
“Huh?”
“We should get out of this. Leave it to Morasco. I mean, come on. Our client is dead. Meade seems to be killing people left and right. The police looking the other way, and Roger freakin’ Wright seems to be in on it . . .”
“And you think Morasco can handle all that alone?”
“Brenna.”
“I’m not pulling out, Trent. Early or otherwise.” Brenna started to say more, but the words died in her throat once the voice mail message began.
“I want to give you my name and number but I feel like, if I do, things will happen that I won’t be able to stop. I know what happened to Mr. Wentz. I want to say something, but I’m so scared. I wish I could take back what I did, but . . . they’re going to be so angry with me. Oh my gosh, I’ve got to go.”
The teenage girl
. The electronic voice announced, “End of new messages.”
“She called,” Brenna whispered.
“Who?”
“We need to find Lydia Neff.” Brenna’s cell phone rang. She answered it fast, without looking at the ID. “Yes.”
“It’s Nick.”
She exhaled hard.
“You were expecting someone else.”
“That girl. She called me again. Left a message, and I was hoping . . . I just want to
know
.”
“Well,” he said slowly, “this might help.”
“What?”
“I finally got hold of the Wentzes’ landline records, Brenna. I’m looking at three calls, made to the Wentz home, at three, three-ten, and three-fifteen in the morning on September 21.”
“Before she started calling Klavel.”
“Before she started calling anybody,” Morasco said. “I’m thinking these calls might have been what set her off in the first place.”
My fault
. “Okay,” Brenna said. Her heart was pounding, and she wished she could slow it, slow down her whole body, the speeding pulse, the racing thoughts . . .
Don’t get your hopes up
. “Do you know who the calls were from?”
“I haven’t had a chance to do a reverse directory,” he said. “But they’re all from the same number—555–7651.”
Brenna’s mouth went dry. “You don’t have to do a reverse directory,” she said, “I know the number.”
“Who does it belong to?”
Brenna took a deep breath, let it out slowly. “It belongs to a soap star’s fax machine.”