Unintended Consequences (17 page)

All his efforts had led to a state of gridlock as bad as anything that gripped Manhattan streets during rush hours. No movement forward, just sitting at his desk and twiddling his thumbs. Earlier that morning he’d gotten a call from the lab doing the testing on the note left tucked under his car’s windshield wipers. The good news: The paper had yielded distinct fingerprints. The bad news: no match for them could be found in any of the databases.

Tommy wondered how Dani and Melanie were doing with their motion. There were only three ways to have certainty in this case: Exhume the body and find out definitively whether the child was Angelina Calhoun; find a record of her death in Minnesota; or find Angelina Calhoun, alive and well. That would be something, he thought, if she were still alive.

This case bothered him and not just because it involved a child. He’d been so convinced that this guy had handed them a load of baloney. Now he had doubts. Even if Calhoun had told the truth—and this was a big if—wasn’t he still guilty of something? It must be a crime to abandon a sick child. Maybe if he hadn’t, he would have found some way to get her medical treatment. Maybe she would have lived. And then there was that damned note on his car. What the hell was that about? There’d been no more nasty missives since he’d been back.

He looked at his watch and saw that it was after one o’clock. He sauntered to Bruce’s office and stuck his head in. “Want to grab some lunch?”

Bruce looked at the clock on the wall and then at the papers strewn over his desk. “I probably shouldn’t, but yeah, let’s go. The weather’s too nice to sit inside all day.”

As they waited for the elevator, Tommy asked, “You ever miss not having kids?”

“Sometimes. When I’m at my sister’s and her kids are running all over the place, all laughing and happy, I miss being a part of that.”

“I know what you mean. It’s great when they’re young like that. You know, watching them at Little League and soccer, tumbling around on the floor with them, all that stuff. You can’t believe how fast that changes. One day they’re dependent on you for everything, and the next thing you know, they’re embarrassed to admit you’re their parents.”

“Ah, the teenage years. I remember them fondly.”

“Tommy Jr. is heading off for college in the fall. I don’t know how Patty is going to handle that. She already gets weepy when she thinks about it.”

“How about you? You ready for that?”

Tommy shook his head. “I remember what happened when I left for college. It was the beginning of moving out of the family into my own life. I know it’s good for him. I know as parents we’ve got to let go, but still, it’s hard to do. I guess that’s why I’m so troubled by this Calhoun guy. I’m having a hard time letting Tommy Jr. fly the nest, and he’s almost eighteen and healthy. How could Calhoun let go of his sick four-year-old? I just don’t get it.”

Bruce nodded. “It’s hard to put ourselves in the minds of other people. We bring to these cases our own circumstances that make us the people we are. But we shouldn’t judge decisions made by others who’ve had different life experiences. Unless they’ve broken the law.”

“Well, the book is still out on Calhoun, as far as I’m concerned.”

The elevator reached the lobby and they headed out the door into bright sunshine. “Well,” Bruce said, “maybe after you get to Rochester, the answers will be as clear as today’s weather.”

“Maybe. I sure as hell hope so.”

Tommy’s plane landed at Rochester International Airport ten minutes early despite the driving rain. He wound his way through the airport corridors to the car-rental desk and then retrieved a Toyota Camry from the parking lot. He planned to check into his hotel and then start making visits. The first would be to the county Vital Records Office. He’d called the office, of course, one of the many fruitless calls he’d made. No death certificate could be found for an Angelina Calhoun. But she wouldn’t have gone by her name. Maybe the first name would be the same, but if George had been truthful, he’d purposely stricken her real name from the medical records he’d hung around her neck.

Forty-five minutes later he stood at the front counter of the Vital Records Office. “Is Helen here by any chance?” he asked the heavyset woman standing before him.

“Just left on a break. You can wait for her over there.” She pointed to a bench against the wall.

“How long do you think she’ll be?”

The clerk shrugged. She looked as if a smile would cause her face to crack into little pieces.

“Well, Anne? That’s your name, right?” Tommy said, noting the name tag pinned to her shirt. “Maybe you can help me until she gets back. I need to check through your death certificates for a white female child between the ages of four and seven, dating back between sixteen and twenty years ago.” Based on what Doc Samson had told him, Tommy figured that should cover the gamut of possible dates of death, assuming she’d succumbed to leukemia. It wasn’t a perfect calculation, but there just wasn’t time to expand the search.

Anne stared at Tommy with a blank expression.

“So, how ’bout it, Anne? Can you get me started on that?”

“You’re joking, right?”

“Nope. Deadly serious.”

“See those forms over there? Fill one out with what you’re looking for. A search like that, figure six months or so. Maybe a year.”

“I think I’ll wait for Helen to get back,” Tommy said and turned and walked to the bench against the wall.
Goddamn clerks. Do they go to school to learn how to drive people crazy?

Ten minutes went by before a shapely young woman with straight black hair down to the middle of her back walked in. As she approached the front desk, Anne pointed at Tommy. “That man there was asking for you.”

Helen turned and smiled warmly. “Yes? Can I help you?”

“I’m Tommy Noorland. We spoke on the phone a few days ago. Remember? About the little girl with leukemia?”

“Yes, of course. Come on back to my desk and we can talk there.” Tommy followed her through the swinging door in the front counter to a desk in the back of the room. The first thing he noticed was a picture of Helen with a guy and a baby. The good ones are always married
,
he thought.

“As I told you on the phone, I’m not sure how much help we can be to you without more definitive information,” Helen said as she settled into her chair. “You don’t even know the child’s name.”

“Please tell me your records are computerized,” Tommy said.

“Of course, back fifty years. Before that we’d have to go through the archives.”

“Does your software have a search function?”

Helen nodded. “But I’ve never used it for anything other than searching a name.”

“Could you try? You know how important this is.”

“I do. And not just because your client is on death row. If the dead child isn’t his, then it means some mother and father are out there who’ve spent almost twenty years not knowing what happened to their child. I can’t imagine how agonizing that would be. So, yes, I do want to help you. If it’s possible.”

Thank goodness Helen had answered his initial phone call and not that sourpuss at the front desk. He was sure she’d have given him the brush-off. “Okay, so maybe we start with the year 1990, then narrow down results to where cause of death was leukemia, and then narrow those results to four-year-olds, and finally to females. And then do it the next year with five-year-olds. How does that sound?”

Helen had been fiddling with the computer while Tommy spoke. “I think it might work, but it’s going to take some time. If you have some other things to do, I can work on this by myself and give you a call if I find anything.”

Tommy gave her a big smile. “You’re an angel. I owe you for this.”

He wrote his cell number on the back of his card and handed it to Helen. As he headed out, he passed Anne behind the front counter. “Keep up the good work, sweetheart,” he said and patted her fanny. He could have been wrong, but he thought he saw the barest hint of a smile.

Next stop—Olmsted County Community Services. If Angelina Calhoun had been abandoned in Rochester, Minnesota, someone would have called that agency to take her. Tommy had spoken to a few people there and mostly gotten a runaround. He didn’t expect much more in person. By the time he arrived, the rain had finally tapered to a drizzle. After parking, Tommy walked into the building and scanned the directory for the right office. Five minutes later he sat at the desk of Roger Holmes. Roger looked like a throwback to the hippie generation: washed-out jeans, a T-shirt with a peace symbol on the front, bushy hair down to his shoulders, and a beard that should have been trimmed a decade ago. Tommy couldn’t guess his age under all that hair, but he thought Roger was in his fifties. The nameplate on his desk had the initials “MSW” after his name.

Tommy had handed him Calhoun’s signed release and a picture of three-year-old Angelina. Holmes sat staring at it. Finally he looked up. “I don’t know what you expect me to do with this. You have no name of the child or the parents. And my crystal ball is out for repair.”

“Look, I know I’m not asking for something easy. But maybe somebody here remembers a little girl being abandoned at the hospital.”

Roger snorted. “You think that’s unusual? I can’t tell you the number of abandoned children we get. Not that it’s an everyday occurrence, but enough so over the years that it’s no longer shocking.”

“This girl would have been different. She had leukemia. The parents left all her medical records with her.”

Roger sat back in his chair and stroked his beard. “Let’s see. Maybe Abby. She’s old enough to have been around back in 1990. No.” He shook his head. “I forgot she transferred here from up North.” He continued stroking his beard, his lips moving silently as he rolled off names in his head. Suddenly his face brightened. “I know just who. She’s not a caseworker, but Alice would know. She’s been secretary to every director who’s gone through these doors since 1979. Keeps track of everything that goes on in the office. If anyone remembers, it’d be Alice.”

“Okay,” Tommy said. “Let’s go ask her.”

Roger looked at the large clock on the adjacent wall: four thirty. He scanned the opposite end of the large open room and saw an empty desk next to the director’s office. “You’ll have to wait for tomorrow. She comes in at eight and leaves at four. She’s gone for the day.”

“Damn. I don’t suppose you’d be willing to give me her home phone number.”

Roger shook his head. “No can do, buddy.”

“How about if you call her?”

“I wouldn’t know her number. We don’t share personal information here.”

Tommy felt himself get irritated. He had a short fuse, a problem since his teen years. He’d gotten good at keeping it under control after he joined the FBI, but it still sparked now and then. “Look, somebody here’s got to know her number. Don’t you have a personnel office, or what do they call it now—human resources?”

“Sure, but they won’t give you her phone number. What’s the big deal about waiting one more day?”

“A man’s fucking life. That’s the big deal,” Tommy said as he got up and left the office.

He’d had enough for one day. Flying always tired him out. He headed back to the hotel, where he took a long scalding-hot shower and ordered room service. While waiting for it to be delivered, he called Dani to report on his day.

“Please tell me you have good news, Tommy.”

“Not yet. But it’s also not hopeless. I’ve got a few things going here that might pan out. And I’m heading over to the hospital tomorrow.”

“Well, we struck out today. The judge didn’t even wait overnight to think about it. He ruled from the bench.”

“You know, even though it’s true that Angelina had leukemia, it doesn’t mean our guy didn’t kill her. Maybe it gave him more of a reason—he couldn’t handle it. Or maybe he thought he’d save her from suffering in the end.” He heard a sigh at the other end of the line. He pressed on. “You can’t just ignore Sallie’s confession. I mean, it’s nineteen years later and she’s still saying they killed their daughter.” He appreciated how much Dani wanted George to be innocent. The thought of a parent murdering his child was abhorrent. But Tommy knew from his days at the FBI that most murders of children under the age of five were done by parents—fifty-seven percent. And the bulk of the rest were committed by other family members or family acquaintances. He would spend the time in Rochester looking for another answer, and he would do it diligently, but he didn’t have high hopes that he’d find any trace of Angelina Calhoun in this city.

“She could barely look me in the eyes. There’s no question she feels enormous guilt, but maybe it’s over abandoning her sick daughter. Nineteen years of not knowing what happened to her. Not knowing whether she suffered a horrible death, all alone. Not knowing whether some stranger picked her up and did awful things to her. Yeah, I can see a mother feeling that she killed her daughter by leaving her the way they did.”

Tommy would keep investigating and maybe he’d find something that would prove Dani right. He knew he’d never convince her otherwise.

Finally, the clouds were gone and sunshine greeted Tommy when he pulled back the heavy drapes in his room. The bright sky put him in a better mood. Not a great mood, just better. Being on the road, being away from his family, tired him. Lately, he’d thought about leaving HIPP and finding a steady security job, a nine-to-five life. He wasn’t like the others there who were on a mission against capital punishment. He’d heard all the excuses criminals gave for their acts—their abusive childhoods, their alcoholic parents, their crime-infested neighborhoods. But for him it boiled down to this: Murderers should get what they gave.

He downed his usual breakfast—coffee and a cinnamon roll—and headed back to Olmstead Community Services to find Alice. An attractive young woman stood behind the counter with a welcoming smile. Her name tag read “Pam.”

“You’re a breath of fresh air to start the day with,” he said.

Pam’s smile dimmed. “Excuse me?”

“Just teasing you, sweetheart. I had a sourpuss wait on me yesterday over at Vital Records and you’re a welcome improvement.”