Skeleton Justice (21 page)

“Like what?”

“I was always my grandparents’ favorite. They were cold to Esteban, and I never could figure out why. And my father … well, my father is harsh to everyone, but he was particularly hard on my brother.”

“The biological child favored over the adopted one,” Manny said.

“Yes. And there are no photos of Esteban as a baby, and none of my mother pregnant with him, but there are tons of me. And Esteban was small and sickly as a child.”

“Because of the premature birth,” Manny said. “The nurse must have been Amanda Hogaarth. She worked with Dr. Fortes on the side, helping deliver the babies.”

Paco nodded. “That’s why I said I don’t care that the Vampire killed those two people. But I don’t want Travis to be hurt, and I don’t want my mother ever to learn any of this.”

“But, Paco, your mother knows Esteban is adopted.”

“Yes, but she doesn’t know how my father got the baby. I’m sure of that. He had to have lied to her, told her Esteban was simply an orphan who needed a home. She must have wanted a baby desperately. But my mother would never have agreed to take the baby of a murdered girl, take him away from the rest of his biological family. You see how kindhearted she is. She had no trouble raising Esteban as her own, because she thought he was abandoned. She loves him, always has. Not like my father.”

A dark scowl settled over Paco’s face. The dour expression brought out a resemblance to his father. “Paco,” Manny said, “you’ve got to talk to your father about this. Find out what’s true. He may know who the Vampire is, what motivates him.”

“No way! He’ll just lie—he’s a master at that. He’ll do anything to protect his reputation, his position.” Paco’s voice rose, and again the driver turned to look at his mercurial passengers. “He’ll have me sent away, and then there will be no one to protect my mother. I’m all she has. I can’t let that happen.”

“What about your brother? Does he know?”

“Esteban is a doctor. He took a year off after his residency to work for Doctors Without Borders. He’s in Sudan now—completely out of touch. Sometimes he’s able to get an e-mail through. But I can’t send him an e-mail with news like this. He’ll be knocked flat by it. And he’s in a very dangerous place. He needs to stay sharp, alert. I can’t endanger him. I’ll tell him when he gets back in six months.”

Manny stared down at Mycroft, who was blissfully napping at her feet. Rarely had she felt so completely stymied. She simply couldn’t relate to a family like Paco’s, where everyone presented a cheerful face to the world while tiptoeing around land mines in private. In the Manfreda family, everything was out in the open. You were happy—everyone shared it; sad—everyone knew why; mad—you screamed at the offender and two minutes later you kissed and made up. Impossible to keep a secret, no matter how you tried. Uncle Bobby’s gambling problem, cousin Kay’s extramarital fling, Aunt Joan’s colonoscopy—all fair game, reviewed in excruciating detail at family gatherings. Manny simply had no expertise in the kind of evasion practiced by the Sandovals. How could she get Paco to confront his father with what he knew? She couldn’t unravel eighteen years of twisted family dynamics in one carriage ride around Central Park.

Would it be any easier to get Paco to tell his story to the police? Because as tantalizing as this new information was, it really didn’t help the Vampire investigation if she was the only person who knew it. Sure, she could take it to Pasquarelli and he would most likely believe her, based on his friendship with Jake. But how could he move forward with it?

There were instances in which diplomatic immunity could be breached, in which the police could force a diplomat to cooperate in an investigation, but hearsay evidence from the defense lawyer of an escaped federal prisoner charged with terrorism wasn’t one of them. Not even close. For Pasquarelli to be able to act on this information, he needed to hear it directly from Paco.

Manny didn’t hesitate to play the guilt card.

Sure, Jewish mothers grabbed all the headlines for inspiring guilt, but Italian mothers were no slouches, and Manny had learned at the knee of the best.

“Do I have to remind you that your friend is in the hands of a multiple murderer, a torturer, because of your actions?”

Paco grew petulant now, just as she had always done when her mother pulled the old “After all I’ve done for you, can’t you do this one little thing for me?”

“Travis is the one who told me not to tell,” Paco said.

“He’s terrified, Paco!” Manny reminded him. “And now he’s being held captive by people who haven’t hesitated to kill and torture. Of course he’s going to say whatever they tell him to say.”

She took both of Paco’s hands in hers and spoke slowly and patiently, as she would to a child. “This has gone on long enough. You need to do the right thing. Come with me now to talk to Detective Pasquarelli. He’s a good man. He can help.”

Paco wrenched his hands away. “It’s not that easy! They won’t be able to talk to me and my father without my mother finding out. Since the bombing, she’s been a nervous wreck. She doesn’t like me going anywhere. In fact”—he checked his watch—“I’m late getting home now. She’s going to start calling me.”

Manny made a concerted effort not to roll her eyes. She suspected that Mrs. Sandoval was a lot tougher than her son gave her credit for. “Paco, your mother’s going to find out about this sooner or later. The adoption doesn’t reflect badly on her. In fact, she’s done a great job raising Esteban. A doctor, and one who does volunteer work—she must be very proud of him.” Manny let out all the stops. “Now, make her proud of you. You know she would never want more people to get hurt. Come and talk to the police and put an end to all these attacks.”

“No!”

And before Manny could even snatch at his sleeve, Paco leaped from the slow-moving carriage and dashed nimbly into the trees, heading east. Manny watched him go. She wasn’t crazy enough to try the same stunt, wearing high heels and dragging a poodle.

The driver soon exited onto Central Park South and pulled up at the curb. He held out his hand to Manny. “Ride’s over. Forty dollars, please.”

BLOOD
.

Jake had printed the word in block letters on the whiteboard in his office, retraced each letter with bold strokes of his red marker, drawn a box around it, sketched arrows radiating out from it. Still, the word refused to cooperate.

It was like a “Down” answer in a crossword puzzle that fit neatly into the allocated spaces but wouldn’t mesh with the “Across” clues.

He tried again. “Just listen to me, Vito. Give me the benefit of the doubt while I work through the evidence.” He hadn’t seen or spoken to Manny all day. She was his preferred sounding board, but in her absence, Vito would have to do.

Vito Pasquarelli had pushed himself halfway out of the chair in Jake’s office, but the plea in his friend’s voice made him fall back into his seat. “You’ve been over it twenty times already. Be careful not to twist the facts to fit the theory.”

Jake finished a Coke, which kept him from passing out at his desk, then crushed the can and flung it into the trash. He’d seen plenty of scientists, and plenty of cops, come to grief trying to make evidence support a theory they’d grown too fond of. Is that what he was doing here? he wondered. He started once more to run through the evidence, looking for the one fact that would make all the others come together coherently.
Make no judgments; let the facts do the work
.

“Victims one, two, and three, and possibly victim four, were children of the Desaparecidos.” Of this, Jake was now positive. He’d spoken again to three of the early victims. Numbers two and three had readily admitted to being adopted. Both said they had no knowledge of their birth parents and had never tried to contact them. They assumed their birth parents were American, but when pressed, they admitted they really didn’t know.

Victim number one, Lucinda Bettis, had once again reacted differently from the others, shouting “No” and slamming down the phone when Jake asked her if she had been adopted. To him, that was as good as a yes. It was this discovery, at least three of the four early victims linked through adoption, that had reluctantly brought Vito around to discuss the case with Jake again.

Jake stood and made notes on the whiteboard in the corner as he spoke. “Fiore, Hogaarth, Fortes, and Slade, by virtue of their ages, are not children of the Desaparecidos. The first three are too old; Deanie Slade is too young. But three of the four have definite connections to Argentina.”

Pasquarelli’s only response was to purse his lips into a tight line. He refused to make the leap from adoption to Argentina. He still hadn’t completely let go of Islamic terrorists.

“The Vampire takes blood from all of them but tortures only the last three, and kills only Hogaarth and Fortes,” Jake said. “Why?”

“Because he’s a fuckin’ terrorist nut!” Pasquarelli shouted. “Why do they strap bombs to themselves and blow themselves up in buses full of innocent people? They’re nuts!”

Jake shook his head. “Not a nut. The Vampire’s escalating violence may be a sign of increasing mental instability, but when he began this series of attacks, I’m sure he had a very specific purpose in mind.”

The pained look returned to Pasquarelli’s face, as if he were humoring a temperamental child. “Which is …”

Jake stopped writing on the whiteboard and chewed the end of the marker. “Identification. To be able to match the children of the Desaparecidos with their biological families.”

“You just said the last four victims weren’t des… des… des… peradoes. Why take their blood?”

“I’ve gone around and around on this point in my mind. That’s the inconsistency I can’t resolve. But identification still seems the most likely scenario,” Jake said.

“Wait a minute,” Vito objected. “Why go to all the trouble to knock them out and draw their blood if all he wants is to prove they’re related to someone? He could’ve just broken into their homes and taken their hairbrushes or toothbrushes. Or followed them until they dropped a Starbucks cup in the trash and then fished it out. Those are much easier ways to get a little DNA.”

“That had me puzzled, too,” Jake said. “But remember, DNA analysis has only been in use since 1989. Before that, blood-group factors were used to establish paternity. Of course, it wasn’t conclusive, but it was the best technology available. Right before I called you, I stumbled across this in all the research I’ve been gathering about the Dirty War. Take a look.”

Jake tossed a journal article into Vito’s lap. The detective’s eyes glazed over as he scanned the dense columns of type. “Give me the highlights.”

“After the right-wing dictatorship collapsed in 1983, parents who suspected their daughters had given birth while in custody, or whose baby grandchildren had been kidnapped along with their parents, began to mobilize to seek reunification between the children of the Desaparecidos and their biological families. They knew it might take years, so they established something in Argentina called the National Genetic Data Bank to collect evidence from the biological families. Nowadays, they preserve dried blood spots for DNA, but when they first began the project in the early eighties, all they could save were meticulous records of the blood-group factors of the grandmothers and grandfathers. ABO, Rh …”

Vito sat staring at a scratch on the front of Jake’s desk. Jake could tell he was beginning to pry open a door in his friend’s mind. “If any of these grandparents died before 1989, all that would be left as evidence would be their blood-group factors,” Vito said. “So you’re telling me DNA wouldn’t be of any use in that case?”

“Exactly! DNA doesn’t show blood-group factors. You’d need actual blood from the grandkids to try to make a match.”

Vito held up a restraining hand. “Don’t get too excited. Why does the Vampire have to knock them unconscious, steal their blood if he’s trying to reunite them with their own grandparents?”

Jake scribbled on the whiteboard, his back to Vito. “Mrs. Martinette and Family Builders helped me understand.” He stood aside to reveal the sentence on the board:
BOTH PARTIES MUST WANT TO BE REUNITED
. “The grandparents want to find the kids, but the kids might not want to be found. They have their lives here; they don’t want to know about some awful past in Argentina.”

Vito rubbed his eyes. “But that implies the victims were all contacted by this grandparents group and declined to be tested. Don’t you think that would have come out when we first interviewed them, searching for connections? Like, wouldn’t someone have said, ‘Yo, here’s something weird—some guy called me last week to tell me my biological mother was an Argentine political prisoner’?”

Jake grinned. God bless Vito. He was such a New Yorker. No chance he’d ever let you get too full of your own brilliance. “Of course you’re right. If the victims had all been approached, we would have seen the pattern before now. But here’s what I’m speculating. As far as we know, only victim number one, Lucinda Bettis, was openly approached about establishing her biological identity. And she didn’t respond positively. And that’s what set the Vampire into action.”

Vito gnawed his lower lip. “When you talked to this chick, she was really cagey, right?”

“I think she might be more forthcoming in the presence of a New York City police detective.”

Vito stood up. “All right, all right. I’ll go talk to her.”

Jake beamed. Finally, Vito was back in his corner. “I think you’ll be glad you did.”

“Humpf.” Vito paused with his hand on Jake’s office door. “Wait a minute—what about the other vics? The Vampire doesn’t need their blood to match with grandma’s. How do you explain that?”

The smile faded from Jake’s face. The word
BLOOD
pulsated again from the whiteboard. “I’m working on it.”