Acts of Mercy: A Mercy Street Novel Read online

  He leaned forward, not liking what he was about to say, but knowing he’d say it anyway. “Miss Russo, the things I’ve seen over the past few years are the stuff of nightmares. When I say I’ve had enough, I mean I’ve had enough of children who have been tortured and degraded and had any sense of humanity stolen from them. I’ve had enough of young women who have been sold or slaughtered, of bodies that had been hacked beyond recognition as anything human. I’ve had enough of destroyed lives.”

  Mallory held up a hand to stop him from continuing. “I was a cop for nine years,” she said softly. “I’ve seen my share. I understand.”

  Sam hesitated, rethinking his decision to not bring up Carly. He suspected that Mallory, as a former cop, would understand. But before he could speak, Mallory went on.

  “Your references are impeccable. The recommendations couldn’t be better. Your superior at the Bureau has made it clear that he’d take you back in a heartbeat. Very unusual for the FBI, I’d say.”

  Sam nodded. His old boss was one in a million. If circumstances had been different, he’d have been happy to stay, and if he was ever inclined to go back, John Mancini would be the first person he’d call.

  “What I need to know is, if we have a case that involves the type of victim you just mentioned, where we’d need those skills of yours—a child who has been abducted, a young woman who’s been tortured, maybe a particularly gruesome murder—are you going to be willing to do the job?”

  Remembering Carly, the words came before he could think about what he was saying. “Not if I’m going to be sitting around waiting for a case like that to come in, no.”

  She studied him for a long moment, then opened another file and turned it around.

  “No wait necessary, Mr. DelVecchio.” She slid the file across the table to him. “Take a minute to read this over—the newspaper articles as well as the letter on top—then look me in the eye and tell me you wouldn’t be more than happy to be the one who finds this son of a bitch.”

  TWO

  By three thirty in the afternoon, Sam had seen just about all there was of Conroy, Pennsylvania. He’d driven back to the city from Robert’s plush suburban grounds, past vast fields of tall corn, and orchards where peaches were being picked and apples still ripened. The farms he passed, with their centuries-old farmhouses and red-roofed barns, reminded him of his Nebraska roots and the three-story clapboard home of his youth. He tried to remember just how long it had been since he’d gone back and couldn’t, which in itself told him that it had been way too long. He’d meant to go after he returned from what his mother and brother Tom referred to as “Sam’s wanderings” this past year, but from his hotel room near the Newark International Airport where he’d stayed after a mind-numbing flight from Turkey the week before, he’d seen an interview with Robert Magellan on CNN and was intrigued by the mogul’s new venture. Who’d have guessed a businessman of his stature would have such an altruistic streak that he’d personally bankroll a foundation set up specifically to help other people search for their missing loved ones?

  Laid low by what he’d dubbed travel plague, Sam spent two days more than he’d intended in Newark, his time shared almost equally between sleeping and channel surfing before returning to his old apartment in Virginia. He spent most of one afternoon on his laptop, researching Magellan and his Mercy Street Foundation, and found himself wondering what it would be like to start over with a private investigative firm instead of a law enforcement agency. When he quit the Bureau to take some badly needed time off, he’d given little thought to what he’d do when he came back. Hell, he’d given little enough thought to when he’d come back. He’d only known that his life was killing him, and he had to walk away from it. He still wasn’t sure what had prompted him to submit an application to the Foundation, and hadn’t bothered to examine his motives for driving to Pennsylvania for the interview with Mallory Russo.

  As he approached the city, the country road widened. In the distance he could see the smokestacks of factories that had once fueled Conroy’s economy. From his Internet wanderings, he’d learned that the factories had closed, one by one, back in the seventies and eighties, until the city’s unemployed outnumbered those who still brought home a paycheck every week. He drove over a metal two-lane bridge that crossed a stream feeding into the Schuylkill River about a half mile west, and on impulse, took the street that ran past the deserted factories. Empty water towers stood on spindly legs and flocks of pigeons roosted along shingled roofs. Cyclone fences wound their way around the now-silent buildings, and other than a stray dog that dragged part of a chain behind him, there wasn’t a living soul to be seen. The heat rose off the crumbling sidewalks and the streets had potholes large enough to hide a Hummer. All in all, it had been a depressing tour of the city he might find himself living in. He felt at loose ends and at odds with himself over why he was here in the first place.

  The road bent sharply to the right, and Sam followed it, relieved to be heading back toward town. A sign for a diner a few blocks up reminded him why his stomach was grumbling. He’d had breakfast at a chain restaurant right off the New Jersey Turnpike around seven that morning, nothing since, and even his bottle of water was empty.

  It was almost four in the afternoon when he parked in the steaming parking lot and walked through the glass door into the welcome cool of the diner.

  “You by yourself?” The waitress sat on one of the red-leather-covered stools at the counter and turned completely around to look him over. She was in her late fifties, with hair a shade too strawberry to be considered a true strawberry blond, and eyeglasses trimmed with rhinestones hanging from a beaded cord around her neck. She wore a blue and white striped dress that zipped up the front and a name tag with NANCY written in red script.

  “Yes,” he replied.

  “Booth near the windows okay?”

  “As long as it’s out of the sun.”

  “Yeah, it’s blazing today, all right.” She led him to a booth on the shady side of the narrow building. “Nearly blistered my hands on my steering wheel. Swear to God.” She handed him a menu. “What can I get you to drink?”

  “Water’s fine. Lots of ice.” Sam slid across the cool vinyl seat and took off his sunglasses. He placed them on the table and opened the menu.

  “You missed the lunch specials,” the waitress told him when she returned with his drink, “and you’re too early for the dinner specials.”

  “Can I just get a burger and fries?” he asked.

  “Sure. Be right back with that.” She took the folded menu from his hands and walked into the kitchen through double swinging doors.

  Sam stared out the window at the traffic, just beginning to pick up as the end of the work day drew closer. Two police cruisers passed with lights flashing but their sirens silent. A group of five or six young girls, laughing and pushing each other playfully, their hair wet, walked by in short summer cover-ups, each carrying a large tote bag.

  “Is there a public pool nearby?” Sam asked when the waitress returned with flatware and a napkin.

  After placing them before him, she leaned one knee on the bench opposite his seat and asked, “You’re new in Conroy?”

  Sam nodded. “My first time here, yes.”

  “You just passing through?”

  “I haven’t decided yet,” he told her.

  “The pool is about four blocks up. Nothing fancy, but it’s wet and the young families enjoy it. Used to be more for the folks who had a little money, but these days, people with any serious money have their own pools, someplace other than Conroy, so the city pool has had to open its membership to anyone who can afford the fee. Anything you want to know about Conroy, you can ask me. I’ve lived here all my life. Isn’t anything that happened around here that I haven’t heard about.”

  Sam suspected as much. “You’ve heard about the Mercy Street Foundation?”

  “Oh, yeah.” She gestured with one hand as if to say, Of course, who hasn’t. “Robert—
that’s Robert Magellan, the one who started it up—he comes in every once in a while with his cousin, Father Burch. He’s the Catholic priest over there at Our Lady of Angels. Nice guys, both of ’em. Both good tippers, too. Shame about Robert’s wife.” The waitress shook her head slowly from side to side.

  Sam had read everything he could find on Robert Magellan. It occurred to him that though he’d spent several hours with Mallory Russo that morning, the tragic disappearance of Robert Magellan’s wife and child had never come up.

  “She disappeared a few years ago, right?” Sam knew, but wanted a local’s take on it.

  “You been on Mars or something?” She crossed her arms over her chest and frowned.

  “Close enough.”

  “The wife and their baby had been missing since right before Valentine’s Day, 2007. They just found her car not long ago. Just buried her last week. Beth was still strapped in her seat behind the wheel, but the baby was gone.” She lowered her voice as she delivered this last part.

  “Gone?”

  “Gone, as in someone must have found the car down in that ravine and took that baby and left poor Beth there all this time.” She shook her head disapprovingly. “You ever heard such a thing? Take a woman’s baby and leave her lying there dead?”

  The tinny ring of a bell from the kitchen called the waitress to the pick-up window. She returned with Sam’s meal and placed it before him.

  “No leads on what happened to the baby?” Sam asked. That had been left open in every article he’d read.

  “None. He was just gone.”

  “Any chance he could have gotten himself out of his car seat and got the door open and wandered off?”

  “Not unless he was Baby Superman.” The door opened and she turned to see who was coming in. A party of four, obviously regulars, waved to Nancy as they seated themselves. She stood and walked to the counter for their menus. “Ian Magellan was only three months old when he went missing.”

  He should have remembered that much, Sam thought as he took a bite from his burger and digested the information. Clearly Magellan’s own tragedy had been the motivating factor in establishing the Foundation, and Sam wondered if he’d hired an investigator to work only on finding his missing son. He took another bite without tasting and chewed slowly. He knew what it was like to lose the person you most loved in the world. He and Magellan had that much in common.

  How had Magellan survived losing both his wife and his son? That he had, and now spent a considerable chunk of change helping other people find their missing loved ones told Sam something about the man’s character.

  “You need another water?” the waitress asked as she approached the table.

  “Just the check.”

  “You finished with that?” She pointed to his half-eaten burger.

  Sam nodded. “I wasn’t as hungry as I thought I was.”

  “Coffee? We have some nice Boston cream pie. Just came in from the baker this morning.”

  “No, thanks. Just the check.”

  “You staying in Conroy for a while?” She placed his check on the table.

  “Maybe for a few days.”

  “You stop in tomorrow morning and have breakfast with us”—she smiled as she turned to walk away—“your coffee’s on me.”

  “I’ll do that. Thanks.” He picked up his sunglasses and stood. He counted out enough bills to cover his lunch and a tip, and left it next to his plate. The diner was beginning to fill up, with most of the booths by the windows already occupied.

  Sam stepped out into the heat of the late summer afternoon and immediately wished he hadn’t. By the time he got to his car and turned on the air conditioning, he was sweating. He wondered what was wrong with him, even considering a move to a place where the temperature in August rose to one hundred degrees with nearly one hundred percent humidity. Why would he, who hated the heat so, choose to live in such a place, when for the first time in his life, he had total control over where he would live, had no one to answer to but himself?

  And why would he want to put himself in a position where he’d be dealing with the same demons he’d just spent seven months trying to exorcise? He’d used up a good portion of his savings in his attempts to put his past behind him. What in the name of God was he doing contemplating the possibility of walking back into that same fire again? He couldn’t even claim fatigue; he’d just returned from the longest vacation he’d ever had. So what had possessed him to apply to the Mercy Street Foundation in the first place?

  Well, he did need a job, he rationalized, now that he was back in the States.

  And, he reminded himself, he hadn’t expected his profiling skills—which were considerable, even he had to admit that—to be an issue. Mallory Russo had been correct in suspecting that Sam had thought the job would be easier, less stressful, than what he’d been used to in the Bureau. She’d disabused him of that quickly enough, even went so far as to wave a particularly tantalizing case under his nose to tempt him.

  The air came on with a hot blast. He leaned back against the seat and waited for it to cool him. He left the parking lot and drove aimlessly past a row of boarded-up storefronts in a neighborhood where young and not-so-young hookers stood on the sidewalk and eyed every car that passed, including his. Jumpy young men in sleeveless T-shirts gathered on the corner, gesturing and posturing, maybe for the hookers, maybe for each other. Sam had watched the same scenes play out in a dozen other cities on hot summer afternoons. The seamy side of Conroy was nothing new.

  On his way back to the motel where he’d spent the night, he stopped at a drugstore and picked up two newspapers—one local, one national—and a news magazine. He’d been out of touch for months, and it was time for him to catch up. On his way to the cashier, he grabbed a copy of a sports magazine with a picture of the quarterback of his favorite NFL team on the cover.

  It was still early, so he took the long way to the motel, choosing streets that wound through the town, past brick row houses close to the factories and larger, more stately homes overlooking the river, away from what must have been some serious emissions from those smokestacks back in the day. A side street brought him past Our Lady of Angels, and he recalled that Nancy had mentioned that Robert Magellan’s cousin was a priest there. Several blocks away he passed another church, this one smaller, older, in need of some paint and some general maintenance. Beyond the church, white stones of varying sizes rose up from the ground. Without thinking, Sam parked the car and got out. He walked around the building, noticing that the front door was padlocked, and walked through the quiet churchyard.

  A dense row of evergreens grew tall along one side and he followed the shade until he reached what he suspected was one of the oldest sections of the graveyard. The headstones were shorter, sprouting from the ground like mushrooms. The names on most of them were eroded by time and weather, but on some the names of the deceased were clear enough to read. Mary Jenkins, good wife of John, lies buried here, read one. Another said simply, Ann Hamilton, the dates illegible. He walked aimlessly through the untidy rows, careful not to step on anyone’s grave, and wondered if Carly was given the same respectful courtesy by visitors to the cemetery in Illinois where seven generations of her family had been laid to rest.

  He crested the top of a small rise and found himself almost face-to-face with a couple who appeared to be in their seventies. They were busily tending a grave bearing a simple white marker that was taller than the ones in the older part of the cemetery.

  “Afternoon.” The man nodded to Sam.

  “Afternoon,” Sam returned the greeting.

  “Hello,” the man’s wife said and smiled. Sam smiled back, feeling awkward as hell. He sensed he’d interrupted something very private, and wanted to extract himself as quickly as possible from the situation. He walked around the headstone that was the object of their attention to make a casual retreat.

  “Hot as a son of a gun today, isn’t it?” the man noted.

  “Sure is.” S
am paused. Against his will, he found himself reading the stone:

  HERE LIES AN ANGEL

  Evelyn Joy Erickson

  Born October 12, 1959

  Taken from her loving parents

  on May 30, 1976 at Age Seventeen

  “Your daughter?” he heard himself ask without thinking.

  They nodded in unison.

  “I’m sorry,” Sam said.

  “Thank you, son.” The man wiped sweat from his brow with the back of one hand.

  “She loved roses,” the mother told him. “We planted a small bush here for her, but the groundskeepers didn’t like it.” She smiled wryly. “It got a bit out of hand, started growing where it shouldn’t, even though I tried to keep it trimmed. So every week I bring her some fresh ones.” The woman stood. “Evie would have liked that.”

  “You’ve been bringing her flowers every week since …”

  “Since the day we laid her to rest.” The man nodded. “Spring of ’76. She left for school one morning and never made it.” His face drooped and Sam started to open his mouth to tell him it was okay, he didn’t have to share the story, but he couldn’t get the words out fast enough. “They found her almost a week later, in a drainage ditch. She’d been—”

  “I’m so sorry,” Sam interrupted to spare the man from speaking aloud his private torment. “Did they ever find whoever …”

  “No.” The woman’s face hardened. “No, they never did. A night doesn’t pass that I don’t pray that he has a tortured passing from this life, and that the devil is waiting for him on the other side.”

  “Francie.” Her husband reached out to her.

  “I know it isn’t the Christian thing, John.” She met Sam’s eyes. “But there are some things … some acts …”

  “I understand completely,” Sam told her. This is why rang in his ears.

  “She was our only child,” the woman told him simply. “We miss her every day.”