The Shadow Box (78 page)

Frampton Childress was under indictment already. The
FBI claimed that it had broken the case. Two agents
named Mowbray and Phipps were singled out for their
diligence. The charges against Childress, however, in
volved only the smuggling of veterinary medicines and evasion of taxes. Evidence relating to human medicines
would never reach the public.

On a jogging path near the Jefferson Memorial, Avery
Bellows put a gun to his temple and pulled the trigger.
Victor Turkel had indeed left the country. He first flew to
Panama where he kept his money, then worked his way
north to Costa Rica. Two weeks later, in the town of Limon, he was murdered by two children who wanted
his watch.

Brendan Doyle, once again, paid an unannounced visit
to Martha's Vineyard. And again, he had the look of a
man with something on his mind. It was a look he'd had,
it seemed to Michael, every time they'd ever talked about
his mother.

Michael knew, in his heart, that she was dead. Whether
she died out West, whether she never left New York alive,
Michael didn't know. Maybe Rast had her killed, or
maybe, like his father, she took her own life. Whatever
the truth was, Doyle and Moon and especially Jake had
been trying to protect him from it since he was twelve
years old.

“We need to talk, Michael,” said the lawyer.

“Listen . . . Brendan . . .”

“You better sit down.”

Fallon shook his head. “Brendan, look. I told you that
I trust you. I guess I want to say that if there's something
you know . . . and you've felt that you shouldn't tell
me...I
can live without knowing it myself.”

Doyle blinked. A look of confusion.

“Brendan
...
let it lie. Let's just go on from here,
okay?”

Doyle scratched his head. “You don't want to know
about Megan?”

Fallon felt his blood go cold.

“She's alive, Mike. I think we found her.”

Chapter 48

He did
not need to sit down.

He had tried, these past weeks, to believe that she was
alive. But afraid of the answer, he had not asked.

“You have to understand,” Doyle was saying, “when
you send out a skip-tracer, you can't expect him to hunt
in the dark. He's got to learn all he can.”

“Brendan . . . where is she?”

“Because
no one disappears completely. Sooner or
later, they'll contact a relative, a friend, and you have to
know who these people are.”

“Brendan . . .”

“We think she's in Mexico.”

Doyle wanted him to hear how they traced her. Michael
didn't care how.

“You'll listen,” said Doyle. ”I have my reasons.”

The tracer, in fact, had found only one relative. But Megan would not have called him. Nor did she seem to
have any close friends. The tracer, Eddie Larkin, had come
up empty.

Finally, on a hunch, he checked with the telephone com
pany. Given that the girl knew at least three of the victims who'd been taken to the hospital that night, and had practi
cally lived with one of them, maybe she could not resist
calling to see how they were. Maybe there was a record
of a call from New London.

There were two.
One on Saturday,
one on Sunday of
Memorial Day weekend.
T
here had been many such calls that weekend. Many
people had suffered
burns
. The volunteer who worked the
phones could not remember who called about whom. But
she said that a woman had called several times since and
as recently as a week ago. She had asked, each time, about
the same three men.
The telephone records showed calls on those days from
Mexico. They were placed from a town called Campeche
on the Yucatan Peninsula.

‘‘But . . . why would she go there?” Michael asked.

“She's talked about it. The Oceanographic
Institute,
Woods Hole, has been doing a series of digs down there.
There's this comet that hit near where she's—”

“She's with them? With a diving expedition?”

“She's alone. The next dig's not until the fall.”

“Well
,
what's she doing? How does she live?”

“She's got an income, Mike. Not big, but enough.”

“I'm going down there. I'll fly down tomorrow.”

“Michael .  .  . there are things I think you should
know.”

Whatever it was, Fallon didn't want to hear it. Not from
Doyle. He would go to Campeche. He
would
find
her
. She
would tell him or not. It would be strictly up to her.

“
She'll run from you, Michael. And this time she might
hurt herself.”

“You don't know her that well. You don't know her
at all.”

Doyle only sighed. He raised his hands in surrender.

“What if
...
you just told me a little?”

Michael asked this question as he packed a bag.

“There isn't any little.”

“Then never mind.”

“Michael, this is dumb. Why should I know and not you?”

“Then just . . . tell me the basics. Tell it slow. If I ask
you to stop . . .”

“That's fucking ridiculous, Michael.”

”I know. But do it anyway.”

“Would you believe it ties in with drugs?” Doyle asked
gently. “Not hard drugs. Drugs from drugstores and
doctors.”

Michael believed it. She hated when he took pills. She was glad when he stopped. He'd assumed that she might
have been hooked at one time.

“Age
s
twelve through twenty,” blurted Doyle, “she
was in an institution.”

Fallon blinked. “For substance abuse? At age twelve?”

“It's a place in Virginia.”

He waited for Michael to stop him. Michael didn't.
Doyle threw up his hands.

“Mike, there's no slow way to say this. It's a place for the criminally insane.”

Doyle had refused to play the game any longer. He
reached into his briefcase, a new one, and pulled out a
nine by twelve envelope. He handed it to Michael.

“Read it, don't read it, that's up to you. Just don't kill
the messenger,” he said.

The report was from Edward J. Larkin Associates. Its
contents broke Michael's heart.

Her name wasn't Cole. It was Anderson until she
changed it. Cole had been her mother's maiden name. Sixteen years ago, her mother was murdered. She was
hacked to death as she slept. Megan was charged with the crime and found not guilty by reason of insanity. She was
committed for an indefinite period.

Her father, Warren Anderson, owned a small chain of
drugstores based in Newport News, Virginia. He testified
at the trial that his daughter had been almost totally out of control for the two years prior to the murder. She was
a drug user at ten, perhaps even before that. A quantity
of drugs, morphine in particular, and certain hallucinogen-
ics and other psychoactive compounds had disappeared
from his stocks. He was sure that she'd taken them. But he made a mistake. He tried to protect her.

His daughter, he said, was an addict at eleven. She was
sexually promiscuous, sleeping with grown men to get
money for more drugs. She even, to his horror, offered
herself to him if he would bring her what she needed from his pharmacy.

The father was away when it happened. Mother and
daughter were home. Megan claimed to have awakened
the next morning and found her mother hacked to death.
She got dressed and went to school. She mentioned to a teacher that her mother was dead. The teacher called the
police. The teacher later testified that Megan seemed
numb, detached, unaffected. The police had her examined.
They found a multitude of drugs in her system. Megan
denied that she took them. The examination also confirmed
that she had indeed been sexually active. Megan denied
that as well. She then accused her father of murdering
her mother.

Fallon had to stop reading. He could barely see.

“It gets worse,” Doyle said quietly. “But then it gets
better.”

Fallon swallowed hard. “How does a thing like this
get better?”

“Give me. Give it here.”

Doyle found a section he had marked.

“These three pages,” Doyle told him, “say how she
said she saw him do it. Her description of the weapon,
the blows, matched the physical evidence exactly. Except
her father had an alibi. He was way up in Richmond at
his other store. So if Megan was right about where her
mother got chopped and how many times, it had to have
been her who did it, right? On top, they found blood in
Megan's shower where she'd tried to wash it off and more
on her bedsheets. She claimed it was there when she
woke up.”