Last Look (5 page)

“I don’t believe it. Someone screwed up someplace. No way.” He shook his head slowly side to side. “No goddamned way.”

He broke away from her and paced several steps down the beach, then turned back to her.

“That was a good arrest. Eric Beale was guilty as sin, and everyone knew it. The jury knew it. He was convicted—”

“Pop, they never found her body.”

“And they still haven’t.” His voice grew louder and his dark eyes flashed. He looked at his daughter as if seeing her for the first time. “You believe this bullshit, don’t you?”

“Pop, Decker says a positive identification has been made by one of her sisters—”

“What positive identification? No one’s seen that girl since she was fourteen, that’s been, what…twenty-four years?” His voice continued to rise. “You wouldn’t recognize yourself after twenty-four years. And they expect me to believe…?”

Matt shook his head adamantly. “No goddamn way, Dorsey. No
goddamn
way is anyone ever going to convince me that Shannon Randall was alive all those years. Eric Beale killed her back in 1983. He was tried, convicted, and executed for her murder. No goddamn way was that a mistake.”

“Pop…”

She reached for him, but he pushed past her, heading back up the lonely stretch of beach that dead-ended across the cove from the lighthouse. She watched him go, watched his stride increase with each step. She knew better than to follow him.

Dorsey walked back to where she’d dumped her shoes and gathered them up, then returned to the house. She walked around back and sat on the top step of the wooden porch, then reached into her pocket and pulled out her phone. She debated for several minutes who to call.

She’d start with Decker.

“Tell me again why the body in Georgia is Shannon Randall. You can’t possibly have any DNA results back yet,” she said when he picked up his private line.

“Fingerprints. Dental records. Identification of her birthmarks.” Her old boss sighed. “You’re at your dad’s.”

“Right.”

“And he’s pissed off and thinks this is all bullshit.”

“Wouldn’t you?”

“If I were in his shoes, yeah, I probably would want to see every scrap of evidence. However, in this case, under the circumstances, your father can’t be anywhere near this, Dorse. For the obvious reasons.”

“Like, he was in charge of the Bureau’s investigation?”

“It isn’t just that he was lead on our investigation, he made the case. It was a noteworthy case, one of the first trials in South Carolina where a defendant was convicted on circumstantial evidence alone, where no body had ever been found.” On the other end of the line, Steven Decker took a deep breath before adding, “And I probably don’t need to remind you that your father’s made quite a career out of this case.”

There was no denying that Matt Ranieri had become the poster boy for the FBI following the swift arrest and conviction of Eric Beale for the murder of young Shannon Randall, daughter and granddaughter of the ministers of a popular church in Hatton, South Carolina. Tall, handsome Matt had been a public-relations dream, and over the years had gone on to become the face of the FBI on every television news and talk show. He’d retired from the Bureau ten years ago and was still everyone’s favorite talking head. After every horrific crime, you were sure to see former FBI superstar Matt Ranieri on your favorite news talk show later that night, and for several nights thereafter. At one time, one of the cable networks had even talked about giving him his own show, where he’d interview law enforcement agents who’d been instrumental in the investigations of high-profile crimes.

“So, where does the case stand?” Dorsey asked tersely. “Who’s in charge of the investigation? Locals? Sheriff? State investigators?”

Decker laughed. “You’re kidding, right? The sheriff’s department in Georgia caught the case when it first came in. But once the ID came in from Deptford, and they realized who they had in the morgue, they called the Bureau and pitched that hot potato off to us like it was on fire. They want no part of it.”

“Odd. You’d think they’d like the opportunity to show up the Bureau.”

“I think they thought it would be more fun to watch us fall all over ourselves trying to spin it. Which sooner or later, someone is going to have to do. We’ve been trying our damnedest to keep a lid on it, but sooner or later, word will start to spread. I don’t know how much longer before something leaks out.”

“Shit.” She grimaced, knowing it would only be a matter of time before her father’s media contacts would catch up with him. “Who’s on it for the Bureau?”

“Andrew Shields.”

“I thought he quit after his brother went wacko last year and killed one of his cousins.”

“He didn’t quit. He took some time off, that’s all. But God, what a mess. The Shields family have been serving the Bureau for years. Damn shame, for everyone involved.”

“So is Andrew Shields still in that special unit of John Mancini’s?”

“Yes. He still is.”

“So, Mancini’s effectively calling the shots.”

“Stay out of it.”

“I can’t.”

“Don’t go near the case.”

“Look, I just want—”

“Doesn’t matter what you want. Just keep your fingers off it.”

“This is going to destroy my father. I have to know for certain, because if it’s her—”

“It’s her, Dorse. Accept it.”

“…if it’s her, where’s she been all these years? What the hell happened to her? Was she a runaway? And if so, why? The Randall family was very respectable. Father was a minister, mother a schoolteacher. This kid came from a good background, Decker. Why would she have run?”

“Let someone else find that out. Kids from good homes run away every day, you know that. Just leave it in Andy’s hands and stay out of it.”

I can’t,
was again on the tip of her tongue. Instead, she said, “Okay. Thanks a lot. For giving us the heads up. I—and my dad—appreciate it.”

Decker sighed, as if he knew his advice would be ignored the second he hung up the phone.

“Give your dad my best. And if there’s anything I can do…”

“Appreciated. Thanks again.”

She disconnected the call and walked to the end of the driveway, but her father was nowhere in sight. He’d be a while working this one out, she knew. She went inside and found a cold bottle of water in the refrigerator. She took several long deep swigs and returned to her perch on the back porch. She sat with her knees apart, swinging the bottle around by the neck in a mindless circle.

She tapped the phone against the palm of her left hand, then opened it again and dialed.

Grateful for once to be connected to voice mail, she left a brief, to-the-point message for her boss.

“Sorry I missed you, but I need to take some time off. I’m sure you can figure out why. I’ll take whatever personal days I have coming and however many vacation days I have left. Talk to you soon.”

She forced from her mind the open cases she’d left on her desk. They could be reassigned, she rationalized, but there’s no one else to do this for Pop. She reached for her phone one more time. She dialed the number she’d memorized weeks ago while she’d been trying to get her nerve up to call to ask if there was an opening. When the call was answered, she cleared her throat before speaking.

“This is Special Agent Dorsey Collins. I’d like to speak with John Mancini….”

3

It was well past dusk when Dorsey heard her father’s footsteps on the front porch. The squeal of the screen door followed, then its slap against the door jamb.

She waited silently in the living room, seated in her grandmother’s rocking chair, which had sat for sixty-some years in that same spot near the bow window overlooking what had once been gardens. If Dorsey closed her eyes, she could almost imagine herself curled on her grandmother’s lap, secure and sheltered, the gentle to and fro of the rocker lulling her to sleep.

But there’d be no comfort tonight. Anger, frustration, denial, indignation—her father’s emotions would run the gamut. She wondered if Matt—whose arrogance was a given to all who knew him well—was capable of considering the possibility that Decker had been telling the truth.

“I just saw Mike Summers out on the beach.” Matt made an attempt at normal conversation in spite of the fact that his face was flushed and his voice shaky. He sat in the old wing chair near the fireplace, the same chair he’d been sitting in for over forty years. Like the rocker, it had never been moved. She couldn’t recall that anything in this house had been moved out of place, ever.

“How’s he doing?” Dorsey responded, because she had to.

“He just sold his place up on Bay Road. You won’t believe how much.”

“How much?”

“Seven hundred grand. For that shack.” Matt shook his head. “Just think what you could get for this place. You could sell it, you know. Your grandmother left it to you, not me,” he reminded her without rancor. “You don’t need my permission.”

“It’s not for sale.”

“You’re never here. Why hold on to it?”

Because it is the only place I ever lived that when I left, I had only good memories.

“Sentimental value,” she told her father.

“Nice that you can afford to kiss off that much money for sentiment.”

She shrugged and rocked the chair slowly, knowing he was working up to what he really had to say.

His cell began to ring and he took it from his pocket and checked the number.

“Owen Berger,” he told her.
“And Justice For All.”

“Don’t, Dad.” She shook her head.

“Owen’s a good guy. I’ve been on that show a dozen times.”

“That was then, this is now.”

“I’m not afraid of the media, Dorse. I’ve always gotten along well with those folks.”

“Yeah, when you had a good story to tell. Now, you
are
the story. Whole ’nother ball game.”

“Look, I’ve been thinking about this. There has to be a mistake.” He shut off the ringer, set the phone to vibrate, and stuck it in his shirt pocket.

She sighed and opened her mouth to speak, but he cut her off.

“I’m not worried. It’s only a matter of time before they realize….” He cleared his throat. “Dorse, it has to be a mistake. I figure I’ll call the director, tell him I’m going to come back on active and work this thing out.”

She stared at him in disbelief.

“Do you really think for one second they’d let you anywhere near this case?”

“I worked it the first time.”

“Which is precisely why you can’t work it now. Come on, Pop, you know better than that.” She stopped rocking. “And I’ve already spoken with John Mancini. I asked him to take me on, give me a place in his unit. I’d heard there was an opening, and I thought maybe…well, I thought maybe he’d hire me.”

“And?”

“And, he said he’d consider me for the unit but he couldn’t put me on this case. It would look really bad all around. If the press got wind I’d been assigned, well, it would not look good for the Bureau. Or for you, for that matter. Bottom line, if they’re not willing to put me on board, they sure as hell aren’t going to let you anywhere near it.”

Matt sat forward in his chair, his arms resting on his thighs, and stared at the floor. Finally, he said, “What are they doing to prove that it isn’t Shannon Randall?”

“Pop, there are fingerprints, dental records—they’re checking DNA right now. It’s her.”

“You think they couldn’t have made a mistake? Happens all the time, you should know that,” he said angrily. “Could we just consider they made a mistake? I’d think at the very least, you of all people,
my daughter,
would want to take a look at the evidence before accepting this as true just because
they
said so. Could you at least do that?”

She nodded but did not speak. Instead, she raised herself from the chair and patted the pockets of her jeans, looking for her car keys.

“Damn it, I’ll call Mancini myself. Son of a bitch, after all I did for him, he can’t help me out here?” Matt stood, his hands on his hips, his anger exploding.

“Let me tell you something about John Mancini.” Her father’s jaw tightened. “Seven, eight years back, John caught a case, Sheldon Woods. Homicidal pedophile. Murdered—tortured, mutilated—fourteen young kids before he was caught. Bastard used to call John, every day, taunt him. Would never talk to anyone but John. Finally got to the point where Woods called him while he was torturing a kid. John had to sit there, helpless, listening to this little boy being murdered.”

Dorsey had heard the story before. She knew where her father would be taking it this time around.

“John kept his head, tracked Woods down, brought him in. John was just as cool and calm as could be. And when it was over, he broke. Started drinking. Got so bad, they finally made him take a leave. Spent six months with a shrink the Bureau handpicked to work with him.” He paused for effect, the way he always did when he got to this part of the story. “And who do you think they called to take this wounded agent under his wing, huh? To find him—Christ, he was holed up in this cabin in the middle of nowhere for a while—talk to him, bring him in, bring him the hell
back.
Me, that’s who. I’d already retired, and they called me back to bring him around. And he can’t help me now?”

Matt was close to shouting.

“I spent six weeks with that man. And he’s going to shut me out of this? I don’t think so.”

“Pop, when I spoke with John, he said he couldn’t assign me. I understand that. And you should too.” She held up a hand to delay the protest she knew would be coming. “But he told me if I just happened to stop at Shelter Island to say hey to an old friend from the academy, he couldn’t stop me.”

“Shelter Island?” Matt frowned and shook his head. “What old friend of yours lives on Shelter Island?”

“Shelter Island, Georgia, is the place where the body was found. And Andrew Shields would be the old friend from the academy.”

“You weren’t at the academy with Andy.”

She shrugged. “Guess John forgot.”

“John doesn’t forget anything.” Matt sat back down in his chair. “So he’s giving you an opening….”

“Not officially, no. But he’s made it clear he’d turn the other way as long as I was not publicly involved in the investigation and as long as no one knows I’m your daughter. If that gets out, I have to duck and run.”

“So, in other words, Andy can tell you what he finds out, but you can’t investigate on your own.”

“Right, but I can shadow Andy and I’ll know if there are any loose strings.”

“If there are, I’ll expect you to pull them.”

“Of course.”

Matt thought it over, then nodded slowly. “I guess that’s as good as it’s going to get.”

“And we’re damned lucky we got that much. I half expected him to tell me I’d be arrested if I set foot in the state of Georgia.”

“All right. Do what you have to do without getting fired. In the meantime…” He took his phone out of his pocket and checked the ID of the call coming in. He looked across the room to his daughter. “I can’t keep putting these guys off indefinitely. Sooner or later, I have to talk to them.”

“I wish you wouldn’t.”

“I’m no coward, Dorse. Don’t ask me to act like one. If I made a mistake…” His face went white, as the full implication of his having made a mistake sunk in.

“Just don’t talk to anyone for a while, okay?” She walked to him and knelt down. She understood what had just occurred to him, and knew he must be in terrible pain as a result. “We’re going to find out what happened, Pop, back then, and now. We’ll put it all together, I promise.”

“Jesus, Dorse, I can’t believe this is happening.” He ran a hand through his hair, then rubbed it across his chin. “I remember it like it was yesterday. Beale all but admitted that he’d killed her.”

“After how many hours of questioning, Pop?”

He shot her a look.

“Listen, the first thing I was told when I showed up in Hatton was that the cops knew who did it, that the kid had all but come right out and confessed. They told me this kid, Beale, had had the hots for Shannon Randall big time, but other than let him drive her home from school once in a while, she didn’t have any use for him. We spoke to her girlfriends, they all said the same thing. And he admitted to having picked her up late that afternoon; one of her friends said she saw the girl in his car an hour or so after he claimed to have dropped her off, and that the car was heading out of town, in the direction of the lake. He finally admitted the girl had been in his car—he couldn’t keep denying it because we found her things in his car. But he said he never left town, so we know he lied about that.”

“Because a witness saw him.”

“Right. And you know yourself, one lie leads to another. A suspect lies about one thing, chances are he’s lying about something else.”

“Did he ever confess, Pop?” she asked softly. “You were there when he was executed. Did he ever admit that he killed her?”

“No.” Matt suddenly looked like a balloon that was leaking air. His voice dropped and he could not meet her gaze. “No, even then, at the end, he didn’t admit to a damned thing. Still swore he was innocent.”

“Pop, we’re going to have to consider that he was telling the truth.”

“Jesus, Dorse, if I made a mistake,” he whispered, as if he’d not heard a word she’d spoken. “If I was wrong back then, that means…”

He looked at her through eyes dark with growing despair. “If Eric Beale did not kill Shannon Randall…dear God, I sent an innocent kid to his death. God forgive me, I watched an innocent boy die….”

Matt stood at the end of the drive and watched his daughter’s car grow smaller and smaller, then finally disappear around the first bend on Dune Road. He sighed and looked up at the sky as if hoping to see something other than what he saw every time he’d closed his eyes since Dorsey had given him the incredible news: Eric Beale’s face moments before his execution, eyes wide with fear and confusion, skin so pale as to be almost transparent, mouth moving in prayer.

His stomach wrenching, Matt went into the house and directly to the bathroom, where he dry heaved for the fourth time that day.

When he was done, he went back outside, hoping to find a place to sit and figure out what to do next, but he was uncomfortable everywhere he went. He set out on foot down Dune in the same direction Dorsey had driven. The cattails grew twelve feet tall along this side of the marsh, and he was just as glad for it. There’d be little traffic this time of day, but he had no desire to stop and chat with whoever might be driving through.

He was still working on getting past denial, to a phase where he could think. He’d lain awake all night trying to make sense of it all. How could something that had seemed so certain, so sure, have been so insanely wrong?

He walked along the sandy shoulder to where Dune met up with Hook Road, and took a right onto Hook, barely noticing what he was doing and giving no thought to where he was going. His pace quickened as he neared the inlet where the old lighthouse lay in ruins. The road narrowed to one wide dirt lane and a bit more, and the tall reeds on either side gave him little shelter from the sun overhead. Some slight breeze set the grasses dancing, their hushed rattle the only sound other than his breathing and his footfalls.

The lunch spot that had once been housed in the base of the light was gone now, pushed down in a hurricane several years ago. The roof had collapsed to one side, and swallows had come to build nests almost as soon as the rain had stopped falling and the wind had ceased to blow. They swooped around Matt as if they barely noticed his presence. He walked past the lighthouse to the sturdy pilings that still stood like fearless sentinels and looked across the inlet to the bay.

He exhaled deeply and blinked back the tears behind his dark glasses.

He walked to the end of the rickety pier with no thought that it could very well collapse under his weight and lowered himself so that he was sitting with his feet dangling just above the water. He remembered another time, a lifetime ago, when he’d sat in this very spot with Bernie. He’d been nervous as all get-out, the engagement ring in his pocket and his heart in his throat. He tried really hard, but he couldn’t see her there anymore. He remembered how she looked, her dark auburn hair pulled back in a ponytail, sunglasses perched on the edge of her nose, her legs long and tan—but he just couldn’t see her there.

All he could see in his mind’s eye was Eric Beale sitting at the table between two public defenders—both fresh out of law school, the low men on the county’s legal totem pole—as the trial had progressed.

Matt squeezed his eyes shut against the image, but it was still there. The boy’s mother and father sat next to each other but apart, a void between them, the kind of void that sits between strangers. Matt had never seen them speak to anyone, not even each other, so detached were they from the proceedings. He remembered thinking how odd it was, the way the parents had never turned to each other for comfort throughout the entire trial, as if each had shut out everyone else. Someone had told him that they were both alcoholics, and he had wondered if that might explain the sense of disconnect he had when he looked at them. Especially the father. Matt had never gotten the feeling that the father was actually there in the courtroom with the rest of them the way the mother was.

Jeanette, her name was, Matt just remembered that. Jeanette Beale sat through every minute of every day as if watching a movie she wasn’t enjoying. Her eyes rarely left her son. The father, on the other hand, showed up sporadically, and even then hadn’t seemed to be affected by what was going on.