Gone, Baby, Gone (48 page)

The three came back into the kitchen and Amanda perched on the counter again and talked nonstop, her hands pantomiming her brushing of Larry, her fingers gripping her cheeks as she aped Tricia’s description of distant Uncle Larry’s jowls. Jack Doyle threw back his head and laughed, smothered the small girl against his chest. When he raised himself up from the counter, she clung to him and rubbed her cheeks against his five o’clock shadow.

Devin reached into his pocket and removed a cell phone, dialed 411. When the operator answered, he said, “West Beckett Sheriff’s office, please.” He repeated the number under his breath as she gave it to him, then punched the numbers into his cell phone keypad.

Before he could press
SEND
, Angie put a hand on his wrist. “What are you doing, Devin?”

“What are you doing, Ange?” He looked at her hand.

“You’re going to arrest them?”

He looked up at the house, then back at her and scowled. “Yes, Angie, I’m going to arrest them.”

“You can’t.”

He pulled his hand away from her. “Oh, yes, I can.”

“No. She’s—” Angie pointed through the trees. “Haven’t you been watching? They’re good for her. They’re…Christ, Devin, they
love
her.”

“They kidnapped her,” he said. “Were you awake for that part?”

“Devin, no. She’s…” Angie lowered her head for a moment. “If we arrest them, they’ll give Amanda back to Helene. She’ll suck the life out of her.”

He stared down at her, peered into her face, a stunned disbelief in his eyes. “Angie, listen to me. That’s a cop in there. I don’t like busting cops. But in case you’ve forgotten, that cop engineered the deaths of Chris Mullen, Pharaoh Gutierrez, and Cheese Olamon, if not implicitly, then tacitly. He ordered Lionel McCready and the two of you probably to be murdered. He’s got Broussard’s blood on his hands. He’s got Pasquale’s blood on his hands. He’s a killer.”

“But…” She looked desperately toward the house.

“But what?” Devin’s features were screwed up into a mask of anger and confusion.

“They love that girl,” Angie said.

Devin followed her gaze to the house, to Jack and Tricia Doyle, each holding one of Amanda’s hands as they swung her back and forth in the kitchen.

Devin’s face softened as he watched, and I could feel an ache invade him as a cloud crossed his face and his eyes grew wide as if opened by a breeze.

“Helene McCready,” Angie said, “will destroy that life in there. She will. You know it. Patrick, you know it.”

I looked away.

Devin took a deep breath, and his head snapped to the side as if he’d taken a punch. Then he shook his head and his eyes grew small and he turned back from the house and pressed
SEND
on his phone.

“No,” Angie said. “No.”

We watched as Devin held the phone to his ear and the phone on the other end rang and rang. Eventually he lowered it from his ear and pressed
END
.

“No one there. Sheriff’s probably out delivering the mail, a town this size.”

Angie closed her eyes, sucked in a breath.

A hawk flew over the treetops, cut the cold air with its sharp call, a piercing sound that always makes me think of sudden outrage, reaction to a fresh wound.

Devin shoved the phone in his pocket and removed his badge. “Fuck it. Let’s do it.”

I turned toward the house and Angie grabbed my arm, turned me back. Her face was feral, torn, her hair falling in her eyes.

“Patrick, Patrick, no, no, no. Please, for God’s sake. No. Talk to him. We can’t do this. We can’t.”

“It’s the law, Ange.”

“It’s bullshit! It’s…it’s wrong. They love that child. Doyle’s no danger to anyone anymore.”

“Bullshit,” Oscar said.

“Who?” Angie said. “Who’s he a danger to? With Broussard dead, no one knows he was involved. He has nothing to protect. No one’s a threat to him.”

“We’re a threat!” Devin said. “You on fucking drugs?”

“Only if we do something about it,” Angie said. “If we leave this place now, never tell anyone what we know, it’s over.”

“He’s got someone else’s kid in there,” Devin said, his face an inch from hers.

She spun toward me. “Patrick, listen. Just listen. He…” She pushed at my chest. “Don’t do this. Please. Please!”

There was nothing resembling logic in her face, nothing reasonable. Just desperation and fear and wild longing. And pain. Rivers of it.

“Angie,” I said quietly, “that child does not belong to them. She belongs to Helene.”

“Helene is arsenic, Patrick. I told you that a long time ago. She’ll suck everything bright out of that girl. She’ll imprison her. She…” Tears poured down her cheeks and bubbled in the corners of her mouth, and she didn’t notice. “She’s death. You take that child out of that home, that’s what you’re sentencing her to. A long death.”

Devin looked at Oscar, then at me. “I can’t listen to any more of this.”

“
Please!
” The word came out of Angie at the pitch of a kettle’s whistle, and her whole face sank around it.

I put my hands on her arms. “Angie,” I said softly, “maybe you’re wrong about Helene. She’s learned. She knows she was a lousy parent. If you could have seen her the night I—”

“Fuck you,” she said, with a steel chill in her voice. She pulled her arms out of my hands and wiped the tears violently off her face. “Don’t give me that you-saw-her-and-she-looked-sad shit. Where’d you see her, Patrick? In a bar, wasn’t it? Fuck you and this ‘people learn’ bullshit. People don’t learn. People don’t change.”

She turned away from us, to fish in her bag for her cigarettes.

“It isn’t our right to judge,” I said. “It’s not—”

“Then whose right is it?” Angie said.

“Not theirs.” I pointed through the trees at the house. “Those people have chosen to judge certain people on whether they’re fit to raise children. Who gives Doyle the right to make that decision? What if he meets a kid and doesn’t like the religion he’s being raised in? What if he doesn’t like parents who are gay or black or have tattoos? Huh?”

A squall of icy anger darkened her face. “We’re not talking about that, and you know it. We’re talking about this particular case and this particular child. Don’t give me all that pampered classroom philosophizing the Jesuits taught you. You don’t have the balls to do what’s right, Patrick. None of you do. It’s that simple. You don’t have the balls.”

Oscar looked up into the trees. “Maybe we don’t.”

“Go,” she said. “Go arrest them. But I won’t watch you.” She lit the cigarette, and her back stiffened against her crutches. She placed the cigarette between her fingers and curled her hands around the grips of her crutches.

“I’ll hate all three of you for this.”

She swung the crutches forward, and we watched her back as she carried herself through the woods toward the car.

In all the time I’ve been a private detective, nothing has ever been quite so ugly or exhausting as the time I spent watching Oscar and Devin arrest Jack and Tricia Doyle in the kitchen of their home.

Jack didn’t even put up a fight. He sat in the chair by the kitchen table, shaking. He wept, and Tricia scratched at Oscar as he pulled Amanda from her arms, and Amanda screamed and batted Oscar with her fists and cried, “No, Grandma! No! Don’t let him take me! Don’t let him!”

The sheriff answered Devin’s second call and pulled up the drive a few minutes later. He walked into the kitchen with a confused look on his face as Amanda lay limp in Oscar’s arms and Tricia held Jack’s head to her abdomen, rocked him as he wept.

“Oh, my God,” Tricia Doyle whispered, her eyes open to the end of their life with Amanda, the end of freedom, the end of everything.

“Oh, my God,” she whispered again, and I found myself wondering if He heard her, if He heard Amanda whimper against Oscar’s chest, Devin reading Jack his rights; if He heard anything at all.

EPILOGUE

The Mother and Child Reunion

The Mother and Child Reunion, as the headline of the
News
called it the next morning, was transmitted live at 8:05
P.M.
EST, on all local channels on the evening of April 7.

Bathed in hot white light, Helene bounded off her front porch, through a stream of reporters, and took Amanda from the arms of the social worker. She let out a yelp and, with tears streaming down her face, she kissed Amanda’s cheeks and forehead, eyes and nose.

Amanda wrapped her arms around her mother’s neck and buried her face in her shoulder, and several neighbors broke out in raucous applause. Helene looked up at the sound, confused. Then she smiled with a demure shyness, blinked into the lights, rubbed her daughter’s back, and the smile grew broader.

Bubba stood in the living room in front of my TV and looked over at me.

“Everything’s all right, then,” he said. “Right?”

I nodded at the TV. “Sure seems like it.”

He turned his head as Angie hopped down the hallway with another box, placed it on the stack just outside the front door, and hopped back into the bedroom.

“So why’s she leaving?”

I shrugged. “Ask her.”

“I did. She won’t tell me.”

I gave him another shrug. I didn’t trust myself to speak.

“Hey, man,” he said, “I don’t feel good helping the woman move. You know? But she asked me.”

“It’s okay, Bubba. It’s okay.”

On TV, Helene told a reporter she considered herself the luckiest woman in the world.

Bubba shook his head and left the room, picked up the stack of boxes in the doorway, and trudged down the stairs with them.

I leaned in the bedroom doorway, watched Angie pull shirts from the closet, toss them on the bed.

“You going to be okay?” I said.

She reached up, grabbed a stack of hangers by the necks. “Be fine.”

“I think we should talk about this.”

She smoothed wrinkles from the top shirt in the stack. “We did talk about it. In the woods. I’m talked out.”

“I’m not.”

She unzipped a garment bag, lifted the pile of shirts and slid them inside, zipped the bag.

“I’m not,” I repeated.

She said, “Some of these hangers are yours. I’ll get them back to you.”

She reached for her crutches and swung toward me.

I stayed where I was, blocking the doorway.

She lowered her head, looked at the floor. “You going to stand there forever?”

“I don’t know. You tell me.”

“I’m just wondering whether I should put the crutches down or not. After a while, my arms get numb if I’m not moving.”

I stepped aside and she moved through the doorway, met Bubba as he came back up the stairs.

“There’s a bag on the bed,” she said. “That’s the last of it.”

She swung out to the stairs and I heard her clack the crutches together, hold them in one hand, while she held the banister in the other and hopped down the stairs.

Bubba picked the garment bag up off the bed.

“Man,” he said, “what did you do to her?”

I thought of Amanda lying on the porch bench in Tricia Doyle’s arms, the Afghan pulled around them against the chill, the two of them talking quietly, intimately.

“Broke her heart,” I said.

Over the weeks that followed, Jack Doyle, his wife, Tricia, and Lionel McCready were all indicted by a federal grand jury on charges of kidnapping, forced incarceration of a minor, child endangerment, and gross child negligence. Jack Doyle was also indicted in the murders of Christopher Mullen and Pharaoh Gutierriez and in the attempted murders of Lionel McCready and Federal Agent Neal Ryerson.

Ryerson was released from the hospital. Doctors had saved his arm, but it was withered and useless, at least temporarily and maybe forever. He returned to Washington, where he was assigned desk duty in the Witness Protection Program.

I was summoned before the grand jury and asked to testify to my knowledge of all aspects of what the press had dubbed the Copnapping Scandal. No one seemed to grasp that the term itself suggested cops being abducted as opposed to doing the abducting, and the label was soon as synonymous with the case as Watergate had been to Nixon’s multitude of treasons and petty corruptions.

Before the grand jury, my comments regarding Remy Broussard’s last few minutes with me were disallowed because they could not be corroborated. I was restricted to testifying as to exactly what I’d observed on the case and what I’d noted in my case file.

No one was ever indicted for the murders of Wee David Martin, Kimmie Niehaus, Sven “Cheese” Olamon, or Raymond Likanski, whose body was never found.

The federal prosecutor told me he doubted Jack Doyle would be convicted in the deaths of Mullen and Gutierrez, but because it was patently obvious he’d been involved, he’d take a hard fall on the kidnapping charges, never see the outside of a prison again.

Rachel and Nicholas Broussard disappeared the night Remy died, taking off for parts unknown with, most on the prosecution side assumed, two hundred thousand dollars of Cheese’s money.

The skeletons found in Leon and Roberta Trett’s basement were determined to be those of a five-year-old-boy who’d disappeared from western Vermont two years ago and a seven-year-old girl who has yet to be identified or claimed.

In June, I dropped by Helene’s.

She gave me a tight hug with bony wrists that bruised muscles in my neck. She smelled of perfume and wore bright red lipstick.

Amanda sat on the couch in the living room, watching a sitcom about a single father of two precocious six-year-old twins. The father was a governor or senator or something similar and he always seemed to be at the office yet, as far as I could tell, had no baby-sitter. A Hispanic handyman dropped in all the time and complained a lot about his wife, Rosa, who always had a headache. His jokes were nonstop sexual entendres, and the twins laughed knowingly while the governor tried to look stern and hide a smile at the same time. The audience loved it. They went wild for every joke.

Amanda just sat there. She wore a pink nightdress that needed a wash or at least some Woolite, and she didn’t recognize me.