Stripped (29 page)

Borden shook his head, “He didn’t give a name. He was big, neck like a redwood tree. Intimidating.”

Serena thought it sounded like Leo Rucci, although there were plenty of musclemen working for the casinos in those days. “You took a baby, just like that? No questions asked?”

“Things like that happened all the time back then. Girls in Vegas had relationships with high rollers and got pregnant. They wanted it to go away quietly. No papers. No inheritance problems. Every month it seemed there was another girl, another baby. Everyone has such nostalgia for the Rat Pack times, but that was mostly if you were rich and white. Nobody wanted to look at what was behind the curtain. Virulent racism. Women abused. Children thrown away.”

“So you took the baby?” Serena asked.

Borden nodded.

Walling leaned in and whispered, “Not that I don’t think you’re a fine citizen, Mr. Borden, but did any money change hands?”

Borden looked up at the ceiling. “Yes, yes, there was money, too. These people always paid handsomely. But I assure you, not a dime of it went into my pocket. It all went into the agency. It pulled us through some difficult times.”

“What about the family?” Serena asked. “Didn’t they ask questions?”

“Everything was anonymous back then. To them, there was nothing unusual. It’s not like today, where many birth mothers stay in touch with their children long after they’ve been adopted.”

Walling smoothed his fedora as he held it in his hands. “I’m a little confused, Mr. Borden. If you didn’t know where the baby came from, and the family didn’t know either, how did this man figure out that Amira Luz was his mother? And why did he start this nasty little game by murdering your sister?”

Borden looked pained. He took a few deep breaths, and Serena noticed that they didn’t come easily. “How he found out about Amira, I don’t know. The vendetta—well, that began a long time ago.”

“Explain,” Walling said crisply.

“I told you I made a mistake. An awful mistake. I don’t mean accepting the baby or taking the money. If I had it to do over again today, I would do the very same thing. My mission was protecting children.”

“Then what?” Walling asked.

Serena looked into Borden’s eyes, and she began to realize what had really happened. She had been there, too. She felt the warmth in the room begin to smother her. The word hung between them, waiting to be spoken.

Abuse.

“My mistake was in the family I chose,” Borden said.

Walling saw it now, too. “What did they do to the boy?”

“You have to understand,” Borden said. Serena thought he was trying to rationalize the decision to himself. “Placing children with adoptive parents is not an exact science. We make our best judgment based on interviews. Occasionally, there are problems. I confess, I was young and overconfident in those days. I have a doctorate in child psychology. I thought I could size up an adoptive family and tell you in a few minutes whether they were suited or not. I didn’t know then all the things I didn’t know.”

“The Burton family wasn’t suited,” Serena said.

Borden shook his head. “The husband, maybe. He was a decent man, hardworking, lower middle class. They had been married for five years. Desperate for a child. His wife, Bonnie, she was very eager. I thought they would do fine as parents. I simply missed the signs. Based on what I know now, I’m sure Bonnie herself had an abusive parent. She picked up right where they left off. Although, if the boy was telling me the truth, Bonnie was singularly cruel.”

“Don’t you do follow-up visits?” Walling asked.

“Of course. Everything looked fine. You have to understand, Mr. Walling, I’m not talking about physical abuse. Beatings. Violence. I’m talking about sexual abuse. Bonnie Burton was intimate with her adopted son from a very young age.”

Serena felt as if the ceiling were getting lower, as if it would begin pressing her into the floor. She had a flashback of her own mother and Blue Dog, over her on the bed. Her body became bathed in sweat.

“It wasn’t just sex,” Borden continued. “She terrorized the boy in order to dominate him. She had complete control over his psyche. When he resisted, she would do unspeakable things.”

“Such as?” Walling asked.

Serena really didn’t want to hear the details.

“The boy told me that Bonnie would sometimes lock him in the bathroom, naked, in the dark. Then she would release—things—under the door.”

“Things?”

“Cockroaches mostly.”

“Shit,” Serena said involuntarily. “You didn’t know any of this at the time? The husband didn’t know?”

“No, I didn’t know a thing. Our contact with the family ends at an early age, and the husband—if he knew, he didn’t stop it. I hope he didn’t know.”

“How did you find out?” Serena asked.

Borden’s face twitched. The crowd in front of the television laughed again. “It wasn’t until years later. The boy broke into my home while I was sleeping. He tied me up. I had no idea who he was at first. I thought he was going to rob me. Then he sat down by the bed, after I was tied up, and explained who he was. He wanted to find his mother.”

“So he was obsessed with her even then,” Serena said.

“Oh, yes. In his mind, his birth mother was a victim, like he was. Through the abuse, he had built an imaginary bond with her. He told me that she came to him and whispered to him sometimes. Told him everything would be fine. Told him to find her.”

It’s okay, baby
, Serena thought, and felt the room spin again. She was angry at herself, letting her own past creep into the present. It was infecting her.

“He told you about the abuse while you were tied up?” Walling asked.

Borden nodded. “In detail. If you’re wondering whether he made it up, I assure you, he didn’t. I’ve interviewed thousands of children. I know lies and fantasies, and this wasn’t either of them. Whatever he’s done since, whoever he’s become, the boy suffered indescribable torture in that house.”

“What was he like?” Serena asked. “Was he violent?”

“Violent, yes,” Borden replied, “but it wasn’t an uncontrolled violence. He wasn’t angry or confrontational. He was simply calm and cruel. I don’t even think it was deliberate cruelty. He had dealt with suffering by shutting himself off from pain and decoupling his emotions from what was happening around him. He was—I know this sounds strange—very focused. Very professional. For his age, he was quite mature. Violence was just a tool to get what he wanted.”

“And what he wanted was his real mother,” Serena said. She thought about Blake as a boy and realized she understood how he had reacted. He had become a kind of Barbed Wire, as she had. Frozen himself. Gone inside.

“Exactly. Unfortunately for me, I couldn’t give her to him.”

Waiting’s eyes narrowed. “What did he do to you?”

Borden unbuttoned his pajama top and calmly pulled aside the fabric. His wizened chest bore the zipperlike scar of open-heart surgery. There were other scars, too, dozens of them across his chest, circular disfigurements like pencil erasers. “He started asking me questions about the adoption, what records were kept, where he could find them. I told him lies at first, that we didn’t have records from back then, that records had been lost in a move. He knew I was lying. He was smoking a cigarette while he questioned me, and with each wrong answer, he used the end of the cigarette to brand me. I can’t even describe the agony of it. He didn’t take any pleasure in hurting me, though. It was clinical. Inflicting pain to get what he wanted. Answers.”

“You told him the truth?” Serena asked.

“Very quickly. It took a long time for him to believe that there were no records on his adoption, that I didn’t know anything about his birth mother. I described the man who brought the baby as best as I could remember, but sixteen years later, that wasn’t going to help him. I told him what I had always suspected, that it smelled like the mob, but a sixteen-year-old runaway in Nevada wasn’t going to crack the wall of silence among the casino bosses.”

“So you don’t think he found out about Amira back then?” Serena asked.

“I don’t see how. I still don’t know how he found out I didn’t know myself until you people told me.”

“Well, let’s assume he found out somehow. Why do you think he’s doing this? What’s his plan?”

Borden stared down at the sketch in his hand. He didn’t say anything for a long time, and Serena realized that a tear had slipped out of his eye. He wiped it away. She wondered if it was for himself or for his sister or for the boy he had accidentally sentenced to a tormented life. Maybe all three.

“Part of it is certainly vengeance. Not just on his behalf but on his mother’s. He’s getting justice for her.”

“But why family members?” Walling asked. “Why not just off the people he thinks played a role in Amira’s death?”

“In his mind, it hurts more to lose a family member,” Borden said. “That’s his own pain. It’s something he can relate to. He wants the people who took away his mother to know what it’s like to lose your family. Like he did. Like Amira did, too.”

“From what we hear, Amira was happy to be rid of the kid,” Serena said.

“Maybe so, but he doesn’t know that. I’m sure he wouldn’t believe it anyway.”

“You didn’t kill Amira,” Walling pointed out “Why start with you?”

Borden shook his head. “It’s not just the people who killed her. It’s everyone who
betrayed
her. In his mind, I was the first. I split up mother and child. That was obvious when he first came to me. He blamed me for taking him—and for placing him with the Burtons, too.”

“We should talk to the Burtons,” Serena said to Walling. A part of her hated the idea of coming face to face with another abusive mother, and a part of her wanted to lash out at the woman.

“That will be difficult,” Borden said, interrupting them. “When the boy came to see me that night, he was running away, leaving the city. Before he left, he burned down the Burtons’ home. With them in it.”

Blake remembered vividly the first time he learned the truth about Amira.

It was an accident. A miracle, some people might call it. There were a million reasons why he should never have known, but he was there, and the magazine was there, and he felt the truth shudder through him like acid burning in his veins. Life hangs on a slender thread.

Several months ago, he had been in the waiting room of a dentist in Cancún, whose specialty was not root canals or cavities but connecting American tourists with hits of cocaine. The dentist had made the serious mistake of skimming cash from people higher up the supply chain, people who didn’t tolerate theft. Blake’s job was simple. Separate the dentist from two of his incisors.

While he waited for the man’s last patient to leave, Blake found that the dentist had another passion. Gambling. That was probably why he needed to take an extra slice off the top. His waiting room was filled with magazines from Las Vegas, Mississippi, and Monte Carlo, including a recent issue of
LV
. It happened to be the issue with Rex Terrell’s article about Amira Luz and the Sheherezade.

A slender thread.

He opened the magazine, and there, staring out from a forty-year-old photograph, was his mother. There wasn’t a shred of doubt in his mind. To him, looking at Amira was like looking in the mirror and seeing his own eyes. He didn’t need anyone to tell him. He didn’t need DNA. He
knew
. The connection between them seemed to leap off the page and into his bones.

When he read the article, the pieces fell into place, confirming what he saw in the photo. The missing time in her life, when Amira was supposedly dancing in Paris, was the same stretch of months in which Blake had been born.
But you weren’t in Paris, were you? You were in Reno, a lost girl having a baby
.

Even the mob connection was there, just as the man from the adoption agency had warned him.

Boni Fisso.

Right there in the office, his mother called him back home to Nevada, where he had once vowed never to set foot again. She cried out for justice.

Blake left the Cancún dentist on the floor, passed out from pain, his face bathing in the puddle of blood that streamed from his mouth. He washed the teeth and kept them in his pocket as good luck charms. Reminders of the day his old quest ended and his new quest began. He was already developing the list of people who needed to pay for their sins. Sins against Amira and her son.

He slipped back into the United States across the Mexican border in Texas. It wasn’t hard. He had spent most of his life finding ways across borders, in countries like Colombia, Afghanistan, Nigeria, and Iraq. He had adopted dozens of identities, all of which came naturally to him, because he felt he had no true identity of his own. His own past stopped in Reno, when he had tied up his adoptive parents and doused them and the house in gasoline. Then, outside, he lit the match and watched the house of horrors erupt explosively into flame, and heard their last pitiful screams as the fire streaked up the stairs to find them, like a bloodhound on a strong scent. He took a deep breath, smelling the air as their flesh cooked, and then he ran.

A new life. Almost twenty-five years of running.

He had been shattered when the search for his mother turned into a dead end. The man from the adoption agency had begged him, in tears, his chest scalded, to believe that Blake had been a Mafia baby who came from nowhere. Ultimately Blake did believe it. A part of him even liked the mystery that came with it. It felt appropriate, being a nowhere man, someone literally with no past. The desire for the truth never went away, though, just like his mother never went away. Inside, in his head, she still talked to him. Guided him. There was still an umbilical cord that connected them and never went away.

Blake didn’t linger in the U.S. He was sixteen but could pass for early twenties. When Reagan invaded Grenada, he went down there with a few other mercenaries from Louisiana who smelled money. He found that there were always people ready to pay for someone to do a job. He didn’t need an identity, because no one wanted him to have one. He was smart, ruthless, and anonymous. That was all they asked, and they paid well.