MARY CLARK - Piece of My Heart

Once the bathroom door was closed, Johnny fell to the floor and sobbed in silence. The television wasn’t on. There was no woman.

No one is going to save me.

Chapter 57

Leo sat with Mason Rollins in a conference room at the District Attorney’s Office as the lawyers finalized the details of his cooperation agreement with the police. In exchange for the DA’s promise not to file charges, Rollins would wear a wire and contact Toby Carver. Once Carver incriminated himself for witness tampering and the murder of Clarissa DeSanto, the next step would be to convince Toby to testify against Darren Gunther.

Leo felt his cell phone buzz at his waist. It was Laurie. He signaled that he was excusing himself from the room and navigated to the hallway.

“Laurie, you always have a reporter’s instinct when something important is happening. Wait until you hear what I learned from Mason Rollins. And still, all in time to pick up Timmy from golf camp—”

“Dad, we found Johnny. Or, at least, I think we did. His name’s Daniel Turner. He’s Johnny’s biological father.” Laurie delivered the facts at a rapid-fire pace. A motorcycle accident. Head injury. Personality changes. Hallucinations and paranoia. “Marcy spoke to his ex-wife and got a last known address for him, near the Delaware Coast, in Rehoboth Beach. We just have to figure out the best way to get Johnny out of that house.”

“I can call the local police right now. Connect them to Detective Langland. If they’re a small-town force without full SWAT-level resources, they can probably pull in state police. Outlying communities like that usually have cooperation agreements with the state for major crime responses.”

“There’s a problem though, Dad. Daniel Turner’s brother is the local police chief down there.” She relayed everything they had learned from Turner’s ex-wife about the police chief’s enablement of his brother.

“I can tell you this for certain: Detective Langland won’t be able to go to Delaware without local authority. Same goes for me as far as the NYPD is concerned. And we can’t try to retrieve Johnny on our own as private citizens. It’s too dangerous.”

“Well, we can’t call this guy’s brother, either. According to his ex-wife, the brother would give Turner advance warning that the police were looking for him. If that feeds into his paranoia, who knows what he might do to Johnny.”

“The other option is the FBI,” Leo said. So far, the local field office had been leaving the investigation to Detective Langland, offering federal resources as appropriate. “One of the agents here should be able to contact the Delaware office and hopefully skip some of the red tape. I’ll call Detective Langland now.”

“Okay, but call her from the car. Brett just told me that the studio belongs to a private jet concierge service—a little secret he never bothered sharing with the rest of us. He’s booking us a charter to the regional airport closest to the beach.”

“What about Timmy?”

“Alex said he can leave the courthouse to meet him at Chelsea Piers. Batting cages and all.” She had finally convinced Alex that he would be most helpful taking care of Timmy rather than joining her in Delaware. “Hurry, Dad. We need to go now!”

Chapter 58

Marcy slowed her minivan to a steady roll as she made her way through the E-ZPass toll for the Chesapeake Bay Bridge. On a normal day, she would take a moment to appreciate the white light shimmering up from the sun’s reflection on the bright blue water, but instead, she revved the engine as soon as she saw the all-clear that her toll had been processed.

According to the GPS, she still had ninety-two miles and an hour and fifty-two minutes to go before her destination. She had raced into the car as soon as she could after getting Daniel Turner’s address from his ex-wife. Fortunately, her neighbor had been home and agreed to watch the twins.

Hold on, Johnny. Mama’s on her way.

Her cell phone rang through the car speakers. The screen in the dash identified the caller as Andrew. She hit a button on the steering wheel to answer. “Oh, thank God. I’ve been calling constantly, but your phone was off.”

“I’m so sorry, babe. I was in court, and Judge Dickinson has a zero-tolerance policy. He had a lawyer jailed for contempt once when a phone rang during closing arguments. I got your messages. I’m on my way back to the firm now. I’ll go straight to my car and meet you in Delaware.”

“Okay, and Leo and Laurie are on their way, too, in a private plane. Detective Langland is trying to loop in the Delaware FBI to make an end run around Turner’s brother. I don’t understand what’s taking so long. A child’s missing, and we likely know where he is. They should drop everything and go get our son right now.”

“I’ll call Chuck Martin who works at the Department of Justice to see if he might be able to pull some strings, too.” Chuck was a law school friend of Andrew’s and now worked in the DOJ’s Criminal Division. “I’m probably about forty-five minutes behind you. When you get there, find a restaurant or some place to wait nearby and text me the address. Don’t go to the house by yourself. We don’t know what the layout is, and it’s possible he’d recognize the minivan if he’s been watching us.”

They didn’t know yet whether Daniel Turner had followed them to the Hamptons from Washington, D.C., or if he had already known that they were planning to go to New York for vacation. Marcy would never forgive herself for posting their vacation plans on Facebook for the entire world to see. She had never given a second thought to the privacy settings on her account and had put Johnny in danger as a result.

I’ll never do something so thoughtless again. Please, God. Just let us have our son back.

Chapter 59

Daniel Turner could feel himself smiling as he watched Danny Jr. work on his new jigsaw puzzle, a map of the United States.

He noticed that if the name of a state was legible on a piece of the puzzle, more often than not, Danny had an idea of where it belonged on the map. He himself had always had a knack for geography as a child, too. Maybe Danny would go on to develop an interest in architecture, as well. He certainly had artistic potential, based on his drawings and coloring.

He was still worried about Danny’s earlier comment about having heard a woman’s voice in the living room. He thought he had stopped having those episodes after he had finally learned the truth about Danny. He tried describing them to his neurologist last year, but he wasn’t as good at explaining things as he used to be. Plus, how do you get someone to understand what it feels like to be absolutely convinced that your ex-wife and daughter are with you, living with you, loving you… only to realize in the next moment that you are in the house absolutely alone?

During his most lucid moments, he understood these were the reasons he had lost Roseanne and Bella. The underlying cause may have been the damage to the temporal and frontal areas of his brain, but the end result was the same: he had made his family miserable and afraid. But during the hallucinations, everything was good again. He was in control of his choices, Roseanne loved him, and Bella would let him fly her in the air like an airplane, zooming in circles. The next second, though, they’d be gone, and he would realize how broken he was.

But then he got that shocking phone call from Michelle Carpenter. He rarely even thought of her all these years later. Maybe he had buried the memory of her, trying to bury his shame for having cheated on Roseanne, the love of his life. Until the motorcycle crash changed everything, his relationship with Michelle was the only real mistake he’d made in his marriage—and it was a terrible one. He met her in yoga class two days after Bella said her first full sentence. Me play, dada. She was a young toddler by then, but for some reason, those three little words made it real. He was daddy to a little independent person who would need him forever.