Cry Mercy (40 page)

Read on for an excerpt from

ACTS OF MERCY

by Mariah Stewart
Published by Ballantine Books

H
er high heels clicking across the hardwood floors, Mallory Russo walked through the quiet foyer of the handsome Tudor mansion that served as home to business mogul Robert Magellan as well as her place of business. Uncharacteristically silent, the house seemed to reflect the sad spirits of all who'd come under its roof today. Earlier that morning, Mallory and her co-workers had gathered here before filing into the limousines that took them to Our Lady of Angels Church a few miles away in Conroy, Pennsylvania, where Father Kevin Burch, Robert's cousin, conducted the memorial service for Robert's wife, Beth.

Mallory removed the wide-brimmed black hat she'd bought for the occasion and walked the length of the hall to the wing of the house where her office and several others were located. She snapped on the overhead fan as she entered the room and went straight to her desk. She tossed the hat on a nearby chair and tried to remember if she'd ever owned such a thing. Under the desk, her feet kicked off the heels
she seldom wore and her cramped toes wiggled in the hopes of bringing back the circulation.

She wasn't sure when the others would be back but she hoped to get some work in between now and the time those who'd been invited back for a luncheon began to arrive. No one had seemed in much of a hurry to leave the cemetery after the service and gathered around chatting, but she'd been ready to leave even before the priest had begun to speak. There was something about holding a funeral for a woman who'd been dead but not buried for well over two years that had unsettled Mallory. So when Charlie Wanamaker, her fiancé and a member of the local police force, had whispered in her ear that he'd be taking off, she asked him to drop her off on his way to the police station.

As a former detective herself, one would expect that Mallory was beyond the point where death had the power to spook her, but there was something about this death that rattled her right to her soul. Beth Magellan and her infant son had been missing for more than two years, but the Jeep they'd been in had only recently been found in a deep ravine in the mountains of western Pennsylvania. Beth's remains still were strapped into the driver's seat when the Jeep was discovered, but there'd been no trace of the baby other than his car seat. That someone had come upon a dead or dying woman and had walked away without calling for help was beyond Mallory's comprehension, but the knowledge that this same person had most likely been the one who'd walked away with the woman's child was haunting her. Had Beth been alive, even conscious, when Ian had been taken? Had
her last breath been spent calling for her son? Had she been aware that she was dying? The horror of it sent a chill up Mallory's spine. Robert was a good man, and she'd grown very fond of him. He didn't deserve to suffer like this. She suspected that the only thing that kept him going now was the knowledge that Ian most likely was still alive. Somewhere.

It was this last part that was torturing everyone: where was
somewhere?

Robert Magellan had founded—and funded—the Mercy Street Foundation to provide private investigative services to those whose loved ones had gone missing and for whom the investigating law enforcement agency had made little or no progress. Robert knew the pain of not knowing what had happened to the two people he loved above all others—his wife and his son—but circumstances had blessed him with the means to hire professionals to search for them. That they had failed hadn't diminished the fact that he could afford to take those steps.

Not that any of the PI's Robert hired had had any success, Mallory reminded herself. It had been a member of Robert's own staff who'd eventually found his missing family. But the point had been that he could well afford to hire an army of investigators. Most people were not that fortunate. The foundation was intended to do for them what they could not do for themselves: get the best investigators on the case.

While still in its infancy, the foundation had taken only two cases, but both of those had met with success. There'd been an overwhelming response to their solicitation of applicants for their services as well as
their call for experienced law enforcement personnel to add to their staff. Mallory was charged with the task of sorting through all the applications and pulling out those cases that might best benefit from their services. She was also responsible for reviewing the hundreds and hundreds of résumés to find those individuals she thought might be best suited to the foundation's needs.

On her desk, she had both their next case and, she hoped, their next hire.

The letter from Lynn Walker had captured her imagination even before she'd read through the copies of the news articles that had accompanied it. Lynn's husband had been murdered under very odd circumstances, and the cop in Mallory couldn't help but be enticed by the challenge. Even now, she couldn't stop herself from reading through the file again: the body of Ross Walker, a construction supervisor, had been found behind the soup kitchen where he and Lynn volunteered one night every week. The body had been stabbed repeatedly, the face unrecognizable, left posed against the dumpster, seated, with a very large hamburger from a fast-food restaurant stuffed in his mouth.

The police investigation had been at a stand-still almost since the very beginning. Whoever had murdered Ross Walker had been careful to leave no trace of himself, and interviews with the folks who'd been in and out of the kitchen had proved fruitless. No one had seen or heard anything.

Yet someone had gone to a lot of trouble to kill Ross Walker and leave his body in plain sight. The man's widow had submitted it to the foundation for
consideration. After more than a year, she wanted to start to move on, wanted her children to be able to begin to move on with their lives. But not knowing who had killed her husband and why was keeping them all stuck in that moment when the doorbell rang and her seven-year-old son had opened it to find two police officers standing on their front porch.

Yes, this case would do nicely. Mallory hoped the others on the selection committee would agree.

Mallory turned her attention to the second folder on her desk and opened it. Over the past several weeks, she'd reviewed hundreds of résumés from law enforcement officers from every agency and just about every state. She'd been separating them into piles of
interview and toss
. At the top of the interview pile sat the résumé of Samuel J. DelVecchio, who in past lives had been a Marine, a lawyer, and most recently, an FBI profiler.

It was this last incarnation that most interested Mallory.

For one thing, a former FBI agent would have a lot of contacts within the Bureau, contacts that could prove invaluable, not only for this case, but for future cases as well. For another, he'd worked just about every kind of case imaginable, and would bring a wealth of experience to the foundation. Kidnappings, sex crimes, white slavery, serial killers—it seems Samuel DelVecchio had seen them all.

Mallory went back to Ross Walker's folder, and pulled out the newspaper article that contained part of an interview that the local chief of police had given three months after the murder. That the body had been carefully posed suggested that the killer was
sending a message, the chief was quoted as saying, but what that message was and who was supposed to receive it, well, no one had figured that out. Mallory figured an FBI profiler might be able to do just that.

Yes, Samuel DelVecchio looked like he just might be the right guy.

Sam DelVecchio stopped at the gate that blocked entry onto the grounds owned by Robert Magellan and waited for the guard to wave him through. The gate swung aside and Sam drove his old SUV along the drive that wound past an island of newly planted trees. When Magellan's Tudor mansion came into view, Sam hit the brake. Although he'd seen pictures of the house on TV and in a magazine spread, he hadn't been prepared for how impressive it was.

“Nice,” he said aloud. “Very, very nice.”

He parked on one side of the drive, as he'd been instructed, and got out of the car, pausing to put on his dark suit jacket and straighten his tie. It had been a long time since he'd been on a job interview, and he wanted to make a good impression. He walked to the door and rang the bell. Almost as an afterthought, he removed his dark glasses and tucked them into his jacket pocket as the wide front door opened.

A woman of indeterminable age stood at the threshold.

“Samuel DelVecchio?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“Come on in. You're early. But promptness is a virtue not everyone appreciates. Can I take your jacket for you? Must be warm out there.” The woman barely seemed to take a breath before adding, “Late summer
around here can be really toasty. Not to mention humid. You want to go right on up those stairs, second door to the left. Conference room. Mallory should be in there. If she isn't, give a shout and I'll find her for you.”

She held out a hand for his jacket, and for a moment, he was tempted to hand it over. But he was meeting with one of the nation's most successful businessmen, and he wasn't sure the casual look was the way to go.

“I'm fine,” he told the woman—the housekeeper, he assumed.

“Suit yourself.” She smiled and waved and set off toward the back of the house, and Sam headed up the steps as he'd been directed.

At the second door on the left, he knocked lightly. When there was no answer, he pushed it aside slightly and took a step inside. A woman stood looking out the back window.

“Excuse me,” Sam said, and she turned around as if startled.

“I'm sorry,” he told her. “I'm Sam DelVecchio. I was told to come up here and …”

The woman laughed and waved away his apology.

“I'm the one who should apologize. I was daydreaming. Sorry. Please, have a seat.” She walked toward him, her hand out in greeting. “I'm Mallory Russo. We spoke on the phone.”

He shook her hand, then sat in the chair she'd pointed to.

“I have your résumé here …” She sorted through a pile of papers in a fat folder at the head of the table. “Just give me a second … here we are.”

Mallory sat, her eyes scanning the résumé he'd sent in six weeks earlier.

“So.” She turned to him. “May I ask why you left the FBI after fourteen years?”

He'd expected the question, but hadn't expected it to open the conversation. “Well, truthfully, I just had enough.”

Might as well just toss it out there
.

Mallory raised an eyebrow.

“If you've read my résumé, you know I've worked as a profiler for the past several years,” he explained in answer to her unspoken question.

“That was what made your resume stand out from the others. We thought that someone with profiling experience would be an asset to the foundation.” She paused, then asked, “You do understand what the Mercy Street Foundation was established to do, don't you?”

“It's my understanding that your purpose is to help find people who have gone missing. Cases that law enforcement has given up on, for the most part. People who have been lost, and never found.”

Mallory nodded. “That's basically correct. Some of those people will be found alive—our first case involved two missing teenagers who we did in fact find and return to their families. Our last case did not result in a happy ending. We did find the young woman we were looking for, but unfortunately, we were too late by months to save her. The bottom line is that we're searching for answers. What happened to this person? Dead or alive, what caused them to go missing? If we know from the outset the person was a victim of a violent crime, our job is to find out
who did it and why, if law enforcement agencies haven't been able to do so.”

“I think your website describes your work as private investigation with a twist,” he said.

“The twist being that if we decide to take on a case, it's because there's something about it that appeals to us, and therefore, our services are free.” She sat back in her chair, her arms crossed against her chest. “Do you see where a profiler's skills might come in handy to an organization like ours?”

“Well, yes, but …”

“Did you think the cases we take on would be easier than the cases you worked for the Bureau?”

“I thought they were mostly missing person cases.”

“You mean, someone is missing, here, track them down?”

He nodded. “Pretty much, yes.”

“And that appealed to you?”

“To some extent.” Sam shifted uneasily in his seat.

She closed the folder. “Mr. DelVecchio, I think you'd be better off working for another private investigative firm, if that's what you're looking for.”

“Miss Russo, can we start this interview again? I've obviously gotten off on the wrong foot.”

Cry Mercy
is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

A Ballantine Books Mass Market Original

Copyright © 2009 by Marti Robb

Excerpt from
Acts of Mercy
copyright © 2009 by Marti Robb

All rights reserved.

This book contains an excerpt from the mass market edition
Acts of Mercy
by Mariah Stewart. This excerpt has been set for this edition only and may not reflect the final content of the forthcoming novel.

Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

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eISBN: 978-0-345-51288-8

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