I'll Walk Alone (29 page)

72

K
evin Wilson spent more than an hour in the exercise room of his apartment late Saturday morning. During that time he switched the remote from channel to channel, trying to see every possible news clip showing Zan leaving the courthouse. Her agonized protest, “I am not the woman in those photos,” cut through him like a knife.

Frowning, he watched as a psychiatrist compared the photos of Zan in Central Park after Matthew disappeared and the ones of her taking Matthew from the stroller and carrying him away. “There is no way that woman is not the mother kidnapping her own child,” the psychiatrist was saying. “Look at these photos. Who else would be able to find and change into the exact same dress in the space of a few hours?”

Kevin knew he had to see Zan today. She had told him she lived in Battery Park City, only fifteen minutes away. She had given him her cell phone number. Keeping his fingers crossed, he dialed it.

It rang five times, then her voice came on. “Hi, this is Zan Moreland. Please leave a number and I’ll get back to you.”

“Zan, this is Kevin. I hate to do this to you, but I’d really like to get together with you today. We’re getting the workmen started Monday on the apartments and there are a few things I need to go over with you.” Then he added, hastily, “No problems, just choices.”

He showered, then dressed in his favorite kind of clothes: jeans, a sport shirt, and a sweater. He wasn’t hungry, but he had some cereal and coffee. He sat at the small table that overlooked the Hudson while he read in the paper about the charges that had been placed against Zan. Kidnapping, interfering with parental custody, lying to the police.

She was ordered to surrender her passport and could not leave the country.

Kevin tried to imagine what it would be like to stand in front of a judge and have charges like that hurled at him. He had been a juror in a manslaughter trial once and had watched the frightened defendant, a twenty-year-old kid who’d been high on drugs when he rammed a car, killing two people, sentenced to twenty years in prison.

His story was that someone had slipped something into his soda. Kevin still wondered if that was possible, but the kid had a history of being arrested for pot.

I am not the woman in those photos.
Why against all the odds do I believe her? Kevin asked himself. I know, I absolutely
know,
that she is telling the truth.

His cell phone rang. It was his mother. “Kev, did you see the newspaper about the Moreland arrest?”

You know I did, Mom, he thought.

“Kevin, are you going to hire that woman after all this?”

“Mom, I know it sounds crazy but I believe that Zan is a victim, not a kidnapper. Sometimes you just know something about someone else and that’s the way I feel.”

He waited, then Cate Wilson said, “Kevin, you’ve always had the biggest heart of anyone I know. But sometimes people aren’t deserving of it. Just think about that. Good-bye, dear.”

She had disconnected.

Kevin debated, then pushed Zan’s number again. He hung up when her voice started to direct him to leave a message.
I’ll get back to you.

It was nearly 1:30. You’re not going to get back to me, he thought.

He got up, put a few dishes in the dishwasher, and decided to go for a walk. A walk that will take me to Battery Park City, he thought. I’m going to Zan’s apartment and knock on her door. If nothing else, I would guess that this job is more important to her than ever—her legal bills have to be piling up already.

He was reaching in the closet for his leather jacket when the phone rang again. It better not be Louise crowing about Zan’s arrest, he thought. If she is, I’ll fire her.

His “Hello” was close to a bark.

It was Zan. “Kevin, I’m sorry. I left my cell phone in my coat last night and the ringer was off. Do you want me to meet you at Carlton Place?”

“No, I’ve had enough of being on the job for a week. I’m just about to go out for a walk. You’re fifteen minutes away. May I come to your apartment and we can talk there?”

There was a moment of hesitancy, then Zan said, “Yes, of course, if that works better for you. I’ll be here.”

73

C
ome on, Matty, eat your hot dog,” Gloria coaxed. I made a special trip to the store to get it for you today.”

Matthew tried to take a bite, then put it down. “I can’t, Glory.” He thought she’d be mad, but she just looked sad and said, “It’s a good thing this is the end, Matty. Neither one of us is going to last, the way we’re living.”

“Glory, why did you pack up my stuff? Are we moving to a new house?”

Her smile was bitter. “No, Matty, I told you, but you don’t believe me. You’re going home.”

He shook his head in disbelief. “Where are
you
going?”

“Well, for a while I’m going home to visit my daddy. I haven’t seen him in the whole time you haven’t seen Mommy. After that, well, I guess I’ll try to get my career on track. Okay, I’m not going to make you eat that hot dog. How about some ice cream?”

Matthew didn’t want to tell Glory that nothing tasted good anymore. She had packed away almost all his toys and cars and coloring books and crayons. She had even taken the picture he was drawing of Mommy, the one he had put back in the box because he didn’t want to finish it. He didn’t want to throw it away, though. And she had packed the bar of soap that smelled like Mommy.

Every single day he kept trying to remember what it was like to be with Mommy. Her long hair that sometimes tickled his nose. Her robe and how it felt when she wrapped him inside with her. All the animals in the zoo. Sometimes he said their names over and over when he was in bed. Elephant. Gorilla. Lion. Monkey. Tiger. Zebra. Like A, B, C, D. Mommy had told him that it was fun to put letters and words together. E is for elephant. He knew he was forgetting some of them and he didn’t want to. Glory sometimes gave him DVDs with animals in them, but it wasn’t the same as seeing them with Mommy at the zoo.

After lunch, Glory said, “Matty, why don’t you watch one of the movies on your DVD. I have to finish packing. Close the door of your room.”

Matthew knew that Glory probably wanted to watch television. She did that every day, but never let him see it. His television only worked on the DVD setting, and he had a lot of movies. But he didn’t want to watch one now.

Instead when he went up to his room, he laid down and pulled the blanket up over him. He forgot and his hand crept under the pillow for the soap that smelled like Mommy, but it wasn’t there. Matthew was so sleepy, he closed his eyes and hardly noticed that he was crying.

Margaret/Glory/Brittany finished the hot dog that Matthew had barely touched and sat reflectively at the kitchen table. She looked around. “Crummy house, crummy kitchen, crummy life,” she said aloud. Her anger at herself for having gotten into this situation in the first place had been mingled with a sense of sadness. It had come over her during the night and she knew it had to do with her father.

Something was wrong with Daddy. She knew it in her bones. Her hand reached for her cell phone, but then she pulled it back. I’ll be with him by tomorrow night, she thought, I’ll surprise him.

She said it aloud. “I’ll surprise him.”

The words sounded hollow and even foolish to her ears.

74

A
lvirah was reveling in her story as she sat at Billy Collins’s desk, and word for word she described her meeting with Tiffany Shields to him and his fellow detective Jennifer Dean. The shoebox with the sandals Tiffany had given her was on the desk. She had taken one of the sandals out. What she didn’t know was that she had placed it on top of Brittany La Monte’s photo, which Collins had hastily turned over, facedown.

“I don’t blame Tiffany,” she said. “She’s had one hard time of it being lambasted by the media and all the do-gooders. When she thought Zan had kidnapped Matthew, you can understand why she’d feel furious and betrayed. But when I explained to her that Zan had never blamed her, and reminded her that she would be under oath in a trial, she soon changed her tune.”

“Let me get this straight,” Billy said. “Ms. Moreland bought two pairs of identical shoes and had a third pair that was very similar, except for the strap.”

“You’ve got it,” Alvirah said heartily. “We talked about it, and Tiffany remembered a little more. Zan told her that she had ordered them online and by mistake got two pairs in the same color. Then when she realized that the sandals looked so close to a pair she already owned, Tiffany said, Zan just gave her one of the new pairs.”

“Tiffany’s memory seems to move around a bit,” Jennifer Dean suggested. “Why is she so positive that Zan Moreland was wearing the sandals with the thinner strap that day?”

“She remembered because Zan happened to be wearing the same ones that Tiffany was, the pair with the thin strap. She said she had noticed it that day, but she wasn’t in the mood for joking and Zan was nervous and in a hurry.”

Alvirah looked at the two detectives. “I came straight here after I talked to Tiffany. I didn’t happen to have with me those pictures showing Zan wearing one pair of sandals when she supposedly kidnapped Matthew and a different pair when she came back to the park after he was gone. But
you
do. So go look at them. And tell your experts to study them. And then wonder why any woman about to kidnap her child would bother to go home and change her shoes.”

Billy and Jennifer Dean looked at each other, once again knowing what the other was thinking. If what Alvirah Meehan was telling them was true, the case against Zan Moreland was unraveling. They had both been startled by the resemblance of Brittany La Monte to Zan Moreland, once Wally Johnson pointed it out, and by the fact that La Monte was a makeup artist who had disappeared in exactly the time frame when Matthew Carpenter had been kidnapped, and who had worked for Bartley Longe, the rival Zan Moreland insisted was responsible for Matthew’s disappearance.

In this high-profile case it was necessary to move very carefully. Billy did not want to admit that he was shaken — more shaken than he had ever been in any investigation he had ever worked.

We spoke to Longe, Billy thought. We dismissed him as a suspect. But now? With all this going on? Was the ex-cop Neil Hunt on target when he said he saw someone who looked like Zan Moreland getting into a cab near that church? He even remembered the hack number so we could check cab records for Monday night at that time. That was next on Billy’s list.

Was Tiffany Shields a reliable witness? Probably not. The kid had changed her version of the morning she began to babysit Matthew Carpenter to suit her imagination.

But what if she was right about the shoes?

Alvirah was getting up to go. “Mr. Collins, last night after her terrible experience of being arrested and placed in a holding cell, Zan Moreland, Matthew Carpenter’s mother, begged me to start out with the premise that I believed in her innocence. The minute I decided to do that, I sought out Tiffany and reminded her that she’d be under oath in a trial and she told me what I believe is the truth.”

Alvirah took a deep breath. “I think you’re a decent man who wants to protect the innocent and punish the guilty. Why don’t you do what Zan begged you to do, too? Assume that she is innocent. Really investigate the man she believes to be responsible for Matthew’s disappearance, Bartley Longe, and start digging. You see, even though she’s been arrested, she still got the big job instead of Longe — of decorating some fancy new apartments. If Longe did figure out how to kidnap Matthew, and if Matthew is still alive, this might be enough to make him try to get back at Zan again and with the only weapon he may have. Her son.”

Billy Collins stood up and extended his hand to Alvirah. “Mrs. Meehan, you are quite right. Our job is to protect the innocent. That is all that I am free to tell you right now. I’m very grateful that you encouraged Tiffany Shields to tell you what is perhaps a more accurate account of what happened when she met Ms. Moreland at her apartment the day Matthew disappeared.”

As he watched Alvirah make her way to the exit, his instinct was telling him that she was the one on the right track and that time was running out.

As soon as she was out of sight, he yanked open the drawer and pulled out the photos of Zan Moreland that had been in newspapers all over the world these past few days, the original ones of her at the park after the kidnapping and the ones that just surfaced from the British tourist. He laid them on the desk and reached for a magnifying glass. He studied them and handed the glass to Jennifer.

“Billy, Alvirah’s right. She’s not wearing the same shoes,” Jennifer whispered.

Billy turned over the photo montage of Brittany La Monte and aligned it with the other pictures. “What could a good makeup artist do to change a similarity to a look-alike?” he asked Dean.

It was a rhetorical question.