Endangered Species (35 page)

from life in prison, if not death row, was paroled the same week she

received the first death threat.

The stakes had definitely been raised.  Motive, should they now be on

the right track, was no longer a mystery.

Though Lester Mack had been released and Molly threatened before anyone

should have known who murdered the boy in the Bloomingdale's bag,

Frederick tracked down the parents of the three-year-old victim the

following morning.  Through his contacts with the NYPD, he learned that

the parents were young, both Puerto Rican, with very little

understanding of English.  The mother had been sixteen and the father

eighteen when Lester Mack's trial was in the news.  He doubted even now

that they connected Molly Pigeon with the murder of their son. Frederick

moved on to more promising territory.

Four years before, Mack had been accused and found guilty of the assault

and killing of two other children, both boys, both Puerto Rican, and

both from poor families.  Either Lester Mack had a racial taste in

victims or he was clever enough to realize the difficulty poor families,

particularly those with no command of the English language, would have

in pushing a successful investigation and prosecution through an already

overburdened legal system.

In an attempt to avoid being racist himself-in the sense of writing off

the families of the previous victims as suspects-Frederick uncovered

their whereabouts.  One family, shattered by the death of their son, had

returned to Puerto Rico, where they lived with the husband's mother.

Frederick called and spoke with a brother-whether of the wife or the

husband, his understanding of Spanish wasn't good enough to discern.  As

near as he could tell, no one in that household was aware of Mack's

release or of his rearrest on suspicion of the same charges that had so

impacted their lives.

The parents of Mack's other early victim had long since divorced.  No

one knew where the father had gone but his ex-wife thought he might have

moved to Los Angeles.  She had remarried and lived in Jackson Heights,

where she worked in her husband's dry-cleaning business.  She had read

of the recent murder of the little boy.  It had brought back the

nightmares, she said.

When Frederick questioned her about Dr.  Pigeon, she seemed to have only

a vague recollection of the name.  There had been a number of forensics

experts and expert witnesses at the Lester Mack trial.  She spoke

English well enough to converse, but she'd been unable to follow the

technical questions and the answers from the witness stand.

Frederick hung up convinced she'd not linked Molly with the release of

Mack, nor did she have the linguistic skills to pen the threatening

notes and alter her accent sufficiently to leave the phone messages

Molly had played for him.

Having arrived at another dead end, maxed out his Visa and irritated his

boss, Frederick could no longer justify staying in Manhattan and had

reluctantly boarded a flight to O'Hare.  They'd not yet entered the

airspace over Ohio and already he was missing Molly, or more accurately,

the way he felt when he was with her ." Young" about summed it up. Banal

as it was, he suspected this was what was meant by midlife crisis.  Had

he seen it coming, he hoped he would have had the good sense to buy a

sports car or indulge in some other harmless cliche.

A sudden memory made him laugh aloud, drawing an uncomfortable glance

from the matronly woman in the seat next to him .

Two years before, he'd very nearly bought that sports car.  He'd lusted

after a lurid purple Ford Probe he'd seen in a dealer's window.  He

would have bought it if it hadn't been for his daughter, Candice.  One

night he'd mentioned it and she'd said in a voice rich with the scorn

left over from her recent adolescence: "Ye ah, Dad, like a Probe is a

sports car .  .  ."

On his lap, closed in a battered leather notebook he'd carried for

fifteen years, were three half-written letters to Molly, all carefully

crafted with wit and charm.  It was just a mind game, he told himself.

He'd never send them.  Unless Molly wanted him to.  There was the

loophole.  One come-hither look and Frederick knew he would betray Anna

in actuality as he had already in his heart.  Not without a backward

glance.  He'd scourge himself for a week or two but the heady narcotic

of new romance would kill the pain.

The world was full of people doing as he did on various levels.  Most of

them were sublimely unaware of their actions, of the absurdity of their

self-made tempests.  He wished he were one of them.

Molly was attracted to him.  Frederick was an old enough hand to smell

the pheromones.  Whether she'd give in to it, he had no idea.  He looked

at the letters he'd started and wondered if he dared send them.

It had been so long since he'd been rejected by a woman, he wondered how

well he'd handle it.  Would he sulk, get angry, scurry away with his

tail between his legs, pretend it never happened?

Even thinking about it made him feel defenseless and a bit of a boob.

Often the worst things that happen are when someone important sees to it

nothing happens at all; a refusal of love, friendship, or help when it

is most needed.

Leaning back, he tilted the seat the allotted five degrees and let that

thought rattle around in his head.  There was something about it that

had caught in his mind, the idea of rejection being the unkindest cut,

indifference the greatest evil, the murder of what might have been.

Tray tables were being put up in preparation for landing by the time the

thought came to rest.  That first night he'd met with Molly he had asked

her about publicity.  She mentioned the Mack trial .

She said that after Lester Mack's sentencing she'd refused to appear for

the defense ever again but that, because of the success of the defense,

she'd been-how did she put it?  It seemed important to remember her

exact words.  She said she had people "beating down her door."

The flight attendant tapped Frederick and he obediently returned his

seat back to the full upright position.  Before stowing his notebook as

requested, he scribbled down a line of inquiry to follow up.

A new direction and an excuse to call Molly.  Not a bad two hours' work.

Anna was overwhelmed by the world's incomprehensibility .

All was black as pitch and she couldn't move.  She probably wasn't dead.

Twice before she'd thought she was dead and had been mistaken.  She'd

come to believe assuming one was dead-or wishing one was-indicated one

was still living.  Only mildly reassuring under the circumstances.

"Why does everything have to be so fucking mysterious." Mouth and throat

were dry and the words whispered out like wind over parched earth, but

it was reassuring to know some portions of her anatomy still functioned.

If she could speak, she was breathing .

Always a good sign.

Emboldened by success, she reached up to see if her eyes were open.  Her

knuckles rasped painfully against splintered boards.  As through a

shifting mist, memories of the night came back.  She was in the hog pen,

her forehead pushed against the slanting lumber of the roof.  At some

point she'd slipped the surly bonds of earth and tipped over; the

slanted sides of the narrow enclosure had kept her from falling.  Both

legs were folded under her and both were as insensate as the weathered

wood, so deeply asleep they ignored her orders to move, not responding

with so much as a tingle to indicate life.  They felt as if they'd been

packed with sand, but she could move her hands and arms. She used one to

prop herself upright .

Her head weighed a ton and pressure had built inside to an uncomfortable

degree.

Directly in front of her the world appeared vaguely lighter .

Somewhere along the line she must have opened her eyes.  They burned and

teared.  The view didn't change but she could feel water running down

her cheeks.

"Water," she croaked, testing her voice.  Thirst bore down upon her with

a vengeance and she clawed her yellow pack from where it lay behind her

left hip.  Fumbling off the cap of the bottle, she held it to her lips

with both hands, spilling water down the sides of her face.  The

melodrama of the picture she presented made her laugh .

Her lungs sore from processing smoke, the sound came out on a hacking

cough.

For a tense moment she waited for the racket to bring down retribution.

There wasn't a sound from without.  In a way she was disappointed.  The

shed had become intolerable and she wasn't altogether sure she could get

out of it without assistance.  Feeling as she did, the thought of being

murdered-if the dispatch was quick and painless-wasn't without its

attractions.

In a past now obscured by cannabis smoke, she had folded her legs into a

half-lotus.  Her lap was lost in the darkness that wrapped cocoonlike

around her.  The puzzle of how to disentangle limbs she could neither

see nor feel baffled her.  Her brain too was cocooned in darkness and

smoke.  Idly she wondered how many more little gray ells had gone the

way of the dodo.

A fuzzy thought made its appearance in her blasted mindscape: At least I

won't get glaucoma for a while.  That brought on the giggles and she

knew she was still high.  Paranoia made its familiar appearance on the

tail end of the laughter and she waited, consciously breathing, till it

passed.

Reality began reasserting itself in negatives: it was not light, she was

not straight, she was not dead, no one was going to come and pull her

out of the hog pen.  Armed with knowledge of the parameters, she took

action.  Helen Keller learns yoga, she thought as she felt down the

length of her calf till her hands closed around the ankle that rested on

the inner thigh of the opposite leg.  Grasping it firmly, she pulled it

free and tossed it in the direction of the outside world.  It fell with

a clunk that sounded as if it had struck something solid.  Easy, she

reminded herself.  In the not too distant future she would have to pay

the price for any injuries inflicted.

The plan was a bust.  One leg under her and one thrust out in front

cemented her more firmly than ever onto the shed floor.  Walking her

hands back down the leg from the knee, she hauled the ankle up to its

former resting place.  After what seemed a long time in thought, she

gave up trying to outsmart her body.  She hurled the yellow pack out

first, then, using the strength of her arms, pulled herself forward,

rocking her torso over the useless legs.  With hands and elbows, she

dragged her body from the enclosure.

The smell of smoke had given way to the smell of wet ash.  Anna rolled

onto her back and sat up, her sleeping legs splayed like logs before

her.  Shh, she heard her grandmother's voice say in her head .

You'll wake them up .  .  .  And when she did, it would be excruciating;

the unbearable tickle of sensation returning to a million oxygenstarved

cells.

Not ready to face that, she left them unmolested and dug the flashlight