Torn (9 page)

“’Scooze me,” he says in his cute little accent, eyebrows raised at her attire. “Am I the early bird? Apologies!”

“No need to apologize, Vash, dear. You and I, we needn’t stand on ceremony. Welcome back.”

She extends her slender hand, knowing he will do that
Eastern European thing, not quite clicking his heels as he kisses the back of her hand, two fingers resting lightly upon the inside of her palm. Lingering just long enough so that she registers the soft imprint of his lips. Vash with his blue-black curl of Superman hair flopping playfully on his forehead, and the dark, calculating blaze of his eyes, she can practically hear his greedy little brain humming. Calculating the odds, counting his money, improving his status.

“Tell me everything,” she breathes.

As always, he takes her literally. “No worries. Perp is dead. No evidence to follow. So state police give up on school investigation.”

“I know about that, baby doll,” she says, containing her impatience. “What about the lab? And the private investigator?”

“Miss Hilly Teeger knows which butter to put on her bread, no problem. This Shane you warn me about, turns out he’s old guy, retired, he’s got no legal power. He’ll find nothing and go away very soon. If not, we take care of him, okay? For sure no problem.”

“What about the woman?”

“The crazy mother? That’s beautiful, because everybody, they think she really
is
crazy, you know? All the time she’s talking conspiracy this, conspiracy that, everybody out to get me, sure sign of crazy. But if crazy mother gets to be big problem, we make her stop. Probably she’s suicide. She puts head in oven, or maybe pipe from exhaust, something like that. Terrible tragedy. Very believable.”

“She was supposed to die in the explosion, looking for her son,” Evangeline points out, feeling petulant.

“Yeah, yeah, I know. But this thing happen,” he says, not the least bit sheepish. “Nothing goes completely the right way, okay? Important thing, we can fix if necessary. I got people in place, no problem.”

Evangeline smiles. “That’s what I love about you, Vash, dear. You always have people in place. There’s always no problem.”

He flashes his wolflike grin. “Helps when you own big company, yes?”

“Oh yes,” she says, sidling an inch or two closer. “That helps.”

6. Proof Of Sanity

I’m watching the tube at ten in the morning when Randall Shane finally returns, a laptop case in one hand and a big grin on his face.

The TV has been on since I came down from the attic. Something to make background noise, keep me company. Now and then I zero in on something—Regis and Kelly are upset about
Captain Underpants
—but mostly it’s a comforting drone, the soundtrack to the flash of images in my brain. Jedediah holding me when I was sick at Chili’s—stupid girl!—except I know he never actually held me, not then, but it’s nice to pretend he did, it helps me with the grief. And Noah looking up from his Cocoa Puffs, asking about zip codes and the black pulse of the bomb going off, over and over, endless loop.

I’m having a bad day. A bad day in a bad life, that’s how it feels. I thought finding Jed’s letter would make me feel better. Wrong.

Randall Shane smiling, though, that has to be a good thing.

“What?” I ask, whipping open the door, my voice pitched like a broken whistle. “What?”

“Something fishy’s going on,” he says, striding into the kitchen and placing the carrier case on the leaf table. “Got any coffee?”

A few minutes later we’re both seated at the table, sipping high-test. There’s something very different about this version of Randall Shane. The big man is more animated, there’s a light on behind his pale blue eyes, and oddly enough despite the palpable excitement there’s something more relaxed about him. As if he’s stopped holding his breath, feels free to inhale deeply.

This is the guy I read about on the Web. The guy they raved about on missing person blogs. The guy who makes things happen, who finds kids that can’t be found. This is the self he didn’t want to reveal until he was convinced there was a shred of hope to cling to.

I feel like weeping, but don’t. This is a time to show strength.

“Impressive lab,” he begins. “Just opened in the last six months and already they’re getting work from most of the state agencies, plus tons of stuff from the private sector. Apparently there’s something called BRAC analysis that’s really big right now. These folks can find DNA on the head of a pin, literally. They’ve got protocols in place that make the old FBI lab look like something in Boris Karloff’s basement.”

“Boris Karloff?”

“Old movie dude. You’re too young. Once played Frankenstein’s monster.”

“I thought that was Robert DeNiro.”

“Later, much later. Anyhow, the lab is state-of-the-art and they pride themselves on transparency. That’s what the lab director told me. Dr. Hilly Teeger—she has a truly amazing number of advanced degrees in medicine and biology. I believe you’ve spoken to her.”

“Three or four times, yeah. Wasn’t much help. Very polite and trying to sound like she cared, but she wouldn’t say ‘yes.’ Just all that stuff about protocols.”

“Sensitive topic. Because they violated their own protocols, not to mention local, state, and federal protocols. Dr. Teeger never mentioned this?”

“Not like that. All she kept saying was, the original results were confirmed, they couldn’t run the tests again.”

“Yeah, well, that’s because they messed up.” Shane stirs a teaspoon of sugar into his cup, explains that he needs the energy. “Didn’t sleep last night, the sugar helps.”

“You say messed up? How did they mess up?” I ask. “I kept calling, they kept saying ‘results confirmed.’ Like there was nothing more to be done. Then I asked to have the, um, tissue returned, so I’d have something to bury. They said that couldn’t be done, because of protocol. Always with the protocol.”

“You wanted the tissue back to bury? Or to have tested elsewhere?”

“Tested someplace else,” I admit. “That’s not Noah.”

“The blood spatter was a match,” Shane points out.

“They matched to the samples taken when Noah had his
tonsils out. Plus they reveal genetic markers that confirm you are his mother, from the oral sample you provided.”

“But you said something was fishy. What? Why are you smiling?”

He nods eagerly. “Sorry. I’m a bit wired, not explaining things in the right order. There’s no doubt the blood spatter is a match. But when you requested another test, the tissue samples turned up missing. I phoned the lab technician who handled the material—who by the way has been terminated—and he seems completely baffled. He has no satisfactory explanation of how the tissue sample vanished from the lab, other than to assume it was somehow diverted to the incinerator. Which totally should never happen.”

“But it did.”

“Absolutely it did. That’s why they kept stalling you. You’ve got the basis for a major lawsuit and they know it.”

“I don’t care about a lawsuit. I just want them to admit that Noah wasn’t killed in the explosion.”

Shane shakes his head. “They won’t. They’ve retested the blood spatter and come back with a perfect match. That’s their only concern—identification—not proof of life or death.”

“I don’t get it,” I say, feeling even more helpless than usual. “What’s good about this? What made you change your mind?”

Shane reaches across the table, gently touches my tightly folded hands. “It’s relatively easy to contaminate a scene with a little blood spatter. Blood can easily be drawn from a living person. Cut your cuticle, you’ve got blood. But tissue is more difficult to fake. The details are gruesome and we needn’t go into them, trust me on that. But we’ve seen people trying to fake their own deaths by
squeezing out a few drops at a crime scene. It happened after 9/11, if you can believe it. A guy planted his own blood in the Trade Center wreckage, a few days later his ‘widowed’ wife files for a big payoff. They almost got away with it, too. The jerk got himself arrested at a stripper bar a few months later, which pretty much proved he was alive.”

“So you think Noah is alive.”

Shane gives me a startled glance, leans back in the chair, which creaks ominously. “I didn’t say that. We don’t know that yet. All we know is that the tissue samples collected at the scene were, at the very least, compromised. Which warrants further investigation.”

“That’s it?”

“That’s a lot, Mrs. Corbin. Yesterday I thought this was going nowhere.”

“But you looked so happy coming to the door! You were
smiling,
” I say in an accusatory tone. It feels as if his smile was some sort of betrayal.

“That’s because of the other thing,” he says.

“What other thing!” I demand.

“I was just getting to it,” he says. “The other thing I found out. That’s what kept me up all night last night, running it down. Took me hours to work back through all the companies and legal entities. But what I finally determined is that the holding corporation that owns GenData and several other related enterprises is in turn owned by a private equity firm controlled by legal representatives of Arthur Conklin and his organization. The Rulers.”

“Oh my god,” I say again, heaving a huge sigh of relief. While at the same time there’s a chill creeping up my spine.

“I told you I wouldn’t lie to you,” Shane says, concerned. “This is an interesting and possibly very important development, but it doesn’t prove your son is alive.”

“Maybe not,” I tell him, unable to focus through tear-blurred eyes. “But it proves I’m not crazy.”

7. Driving Mr. Shane

The new Randall Shane—the energized version fueling himself on caffeine—waits for me to mop up my tears, get myself together, and then opens up his laptop and starts to take notes, typing rapidly. He wants to know everything, all of my suspicions, all the things that convince me Noah somehow survived.

But first he wants me to share what I know about Arthur Conklin.

“I know he’s a coldhearted bastard,” I tell him, and produce the letter Jed saved for all those years.

Mr. Shane carefully unfolds the worn pages and reads. He sighs and shakes his head once or twice and when he’s done he carefully folds it up, hands it back to me. “I’d say your assessment is generous. Plus it fits with what little I know. Egocentric professor writes famous book about how to get rich by being selfish, follows his own advice.”

I put the letter away. “The amazing thing is, even after all that, Jed didn’t really hate him. He needed to cut himself off, but he never really hated him. Said his father couldn’t help being who he was, that something was missing. Believe it or not, he felt sorry for him.”

“So you never met Arthur Conklin?”

I shake my head. “We assumed he didn’t even know I
existed. Or about Noah. I thought we succeeded in starting a new life. We both did.”

The big man nods to himself. “Okay. I get it why your husband wouldn’t want anything to do with his father, but why did he feel the need to take a new identity? Why didn’t he just stop going home for Christmas?”

“It wasn’t just his father,” I explain. “It was the people around him. They treat his stupid book almost like the Bible. So to them Jed was sort of like the son of God. Except they don’t believe in God, so that doesn’t really make sense, does it? Whatever the reason, they were always trying to draw Jed back in. As if they could use him somehow. That’s what he was afraid of, why he changed his name, started over. He always said they’d put him in a cage. A golden cage.”

He looks puzzled. “Did he mean an actual cage?”

I shake my head. “More like they’d keep him in luxury, give him everything he wanted, except they’d never let him go. Never let him be himself.”

“And he walked away from all that. Wealth and power.”

“He didn’t walk away, he ran. And I ran with him.”

Mr. Shane clacks away, typing in his notes. “Okay,” he says, looking up. “I’ll see if the FBI cult experts have any helpful insights. But first I want to get a handle on exactly what happened here in Humble. The events leading up to the explosion. You mentioned a state policeman who knew the suspect?”

“Yeah, Trooper Thomas Petruchio, with the ERT. Sweet kid. He’s the nephew of our town librarian, that’s how I know him. He went to school with Roland Penny.”

More notes. Again he looks up. “What’s this about a schoolteacher you haven’t been able to contact?”

“Irene Delancey, Noah’s homeroom teacher. He adores her. I spoke to her briefly a few moments after the explosion. She told me that while they were all being held hostage, Noah slipped down below the seats for a while, but she was sure he was with the rest of his classmates when the smoke started. It was crazy in there, a panic because of the gunman and the smoke, and nobody could see a thing. They all linked hands but somehow Noah got separated. One second he was there, the next he was gone. She was devastated, said she could never go back into the school without thinking of Noah. I think she blamed herself.”

He checks his notes. “So she quit her job and left town, is that correct?”