Mariah Stewart - Last Look

“What did you do?”

“What could I do? I went inside to interview Franklin and hoped that the reporter didn’t think anything more of it.”

“That will depend on how good the reporter is. How curious.”

“Right. But anything else I said at that point would have had him wondering what the big deal was, so I acted like it was nothing. Sometimes the more you say, the more they want to know.” Andrew licked tomato sauce off his thumb. “Did I ever tell you that my favorite pizza was sausage, sweet peppers, and mushrooms?”

“Just a good guess on my part. Now talk. What happened?”

Andrew filled her in on his remarks to the reporters and his conversation with Franklin.

“What was your gut feeling about him?” she asked. “Too much protest? Overly indignant?”

“Neither. To tell you the truth, I didn’t get that vibe from him.”

“The vibe that says, I’m lying through my teeth, or the vibe that says, you’re way off base.”

“The lying vibe. I think he was telling the truth. I don’t think he was the one Shannon was running from.”

“Who do you think it was, then?”

“I think it might have been his father.”

“Reverend Paul? Founder of the church? The man who, according to Paula Rose, brought truth, justice, and salvation to the good people of Hatton?”

Andrew shrugged. “You asked me what my gut was saying, and that’s it. Look, he was there at the church that day, we know that for a fact. Shannon was in his office.”

“Martha said he had an appointment.”

“Maybe Martha was lying.” He polished off the first slice and took a long pull from the bottle. “A little more pizza and I might turn back into a human being again.”

“Hmmm. Grampa Paul as abuser.” She rubbed her chin as if considering the possibility. “I like it.”

“I’m thinking the other sisters knew about that.”

“Probably. If it was the old man, I’d be real surprised if he started with the third sister.”

Andrew took another bite and chewed thoughtfully. “It would be unusual, with those two older sisters around, for him not to have started with one or both of them.”

“It’s certainly something worth exploring.”

“You know, you’re awfully calm for someone whose cover has just been blown.”

“We knew it could happen.” She shrugged. “But you never know, the whole thing could have gone right over this guy’s head.”

“Your name is out there. All it takes is one reporter with a contact in the Bureau to find out who you are.”

“Well, let’s hope this guy was slow on the draw. I’m not really ready to back out of this yet. Too many questions remain unanswered. I’d like to be around to answer a few of them.”

“I’d like you to be, too.” He caught her eye and held her gaze. She looked like she was trying to think of a snappy comeback and couldn’t. He let her off the hook by adding, “It’s a complicated case. Of course you’d want to finish what you started. See how all the pieces fit together in the end.”

She nodded thoughtfully, eyes downcast. Then she looked up and grinned. “So how long exactly was it before Franklin kicked you out?”

“Maybe twenty minutes or so.” He laughed. “About average for the Randalls.”

He grew sober then, and related Judith’s recollections of hang-up phone calls that lasted a little too long, of envelopes that often contained nothing at all.

“I’d bet anything that was all Shannon,” Dorsey agreed. “But boy, the empty envelopes speak volumes, don’t you think? Wanting to connect, wanting to reach out, but not wanting them to really know…” She shivered. “That’s one of the saddest things I’ve ever heard in my life.”

“Everything about this case is sad.” Andrew went into the bathroom. “Can I get you another?”

“Sure. Thanks.”

He emerged with a bottle in each hand, and passed one over to her.

“Do you ever think about doing anything else?” Andrew asked as he sat back down at the desk.

“No. I don’t know what I’d be doing if I didn’t do this.”

“Doesn’t it ever get to you?”

She thought about her last case, about the two young men now sitting in a federal prison awaiting trial. Over a period of three months, they’d kidnapped, raped, and murdered seven girls in the Florida panhandle. Seven Dorsey knew of, anyway. Who knew how many others there might have been?

“Yeah.” She took a drink from the bottle. “Yeah, it gets to me.”

“You see these families, they appear so solid. And then you find out there was something underneath it all that just was not right, and you wonder what went wrong.”

His gaze went distant. To bring him back, she asked, “You’re talking about the Randalls or the Beales?”

“Neither. Both.” He focused on the pizza, as if debating whether or not to have another slice. “Maybe I was thinking about the Shields.”

“Your brother.”

“All of us. We came from this great, tight-knit family. We had two parents who loved us. Yeah, Dad was gone a lot, but Mom was no pushover, believe me. That woman ran a tight ship. She was strong, the real anchor of the family. I look back and remember how close we all were, how we were all such good friends. Me, Brendan, and Grady. And how protective we all were of Mia. She was the only girl in the entire family, you know? The baby sister. Even Connor and those guys doted on her.” He looked up at Dorsey with haunted eyes. “I just don’t understand what went wrong with Brendan. How he could have turned out so bad, when everything he came from was so good.”

He cleared his throat and added, “I read somewhere that 45,000 women and children are trafficked into the US every year. My brother was responsible for some of those kids. He arranged for them to be sent here so they could be sold like puppies in a pet store. He didn’t give a damn about them. About what was going to happen to them. I just want to understand how he ended up without a conscience. I just would have liked to have asked him why.”

“We’re used to finding answers, that’s what we do. There’s a case, we solve it. We try to find out who is responsible and we try to find justice for the victim, justice for their family.” She sat up a little straighter so that her eyes could look directly into his. “It’s hard for us to accept that sometimes things happen and there are no answers, no explanations. So we deal with it the best we can.”

The label on the beer bottle had gone soft in the icy water, and she began to pick at it.

“You get called out on a case and you never know what you’re going to find. Last year we arrested a guy who liked to collect thumbs. He had a whole shoe box full of them in his refrigerator. A few months back, we caught a case, two men, nineteen and twenty-one, stopped by a deputy sheriff for speeding. The cop thought they were acting strange, so he called for backup. Walked around the back of the car while he was waiting and noticed the blanket on the backseat seemed to be moving. The backup arrived, they looked under the blanket, and find a nine-year-old girl who’d been missing for five days. In the trunk was the body of another little girl. I probably don’t have to tell you the rest.”

“Jesus,” Andrew swore and put down the pizza, his appetite gone that fast.

“The first thing the mother of the twenty-one-year-old said when she found out what sonny-boy’d been up to? ‘He’s a good boy, my Jon. It was that Rodriguez boy that put him up to it.’ They’re all good boys, though, right?” Dorsey made a ball out of the paper shreds from the label and tossed it at the wastebasket five feet away. It missed the rim and she got up, retrieved it, and tried again. This time she hit her mark. “Shit happens every day. We just deal with it.”