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CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Marty lives in a three-story penthouse in the storied Beresford on Central Park West near the American Museum of Natural History. I googled the price on StreetEasy when Marty first moved in. Yes, it is none of my business, but this is the world in which we live. I don’t make the rules. It was on the market for $19 million. It sold for “far less” than fair normal market value because the previous occupant had been a notorious hoarder and criminal, who hid a stolen Vermeer on the premises. So Marty got a “steal” and paid a mere $14 million.

No, Marty, who I doubt is more than thirty years old, didn’t buy this place on his cop salary. He comes from money. Lots of it. His family lives in Houston and are what we used to call oil barons. He’s fourth-generation oil rich.

We sit on the terrace overlooking Central Park. The Beresford is noted for its three corner octagonal towers atop its twenty-two floors (there isn’t one on the northwest corner for some reason). Marty’s apartment has one of them. It looms next to us.

“I want you to know,” Marty says, “that we are going to put serious resources into reconvicting Tad Grayson.”

I don’t reply. I’m not saying the sentiment isn’t authentic, but no one in the department will care enough. That’s not a criticism. It’s just the way of the world. If Nicole is going to get justice, it’s going to be on me.

“But you’re not here about that,” Marty says.

“I am not.”

“So let’s get to it. The Victoria Belmond case. First off, it’s three steps beyond bizarre.”

Marty hands me a power shake of some kind. It’s green. He loves power shakes and working out and eating right and he looks like it. It is hard to imagine a more perfect physical specimen than Marty. Tall, handsome, muscular, gorgeous, while I look more like something left in the bottom of a laundry hamper. We made, in that short time we were NYPD partners, quite a pair.

“I’m listening,” I say.

“First off, the FBI case file is locked, sealed, classified, private, not in the system. Only the top guys can access it.”

“Theories on why?” I ask.

“Not really, no.”

“Why would the FBI seal a file in general?”

“Officially? It means the contents of the file are, and I quote, ‘intelligence-driven and threat-focused,’ meaning it relates to national security. They also make files private to protect sources or method or to safeguard evidence. In this case though, I think they are claiming privacy concerns. Files containing personal information about individuals are often restricted, if you have enough juice. But like I said, the Victoria Belmond case is weird—starting on the night she vanished.”

“How so?” I ask.

“So you have these rich high school kids renting out a room above a bar on New Year’s Eve. You know that part, right?”

“Right.”

“For starters, no one reported Victoria Belmond missing because her parents were traveling, and everyone thought she was at a rental house with her friends.”

“That part I know.”

“Right, and we also both know how crucial the first forty-eight hours are in an abduction.”

“We do.”

“This was far worse—more like three or four times that amount. By the time law enforcement finally did take it seriously, none of the kids at this New Year’s Eve party would even admit there had been a party that night. When the police finally got wind of it, the kids attending all lawyered up. Or should I say, their parents lawyered them up.”

“Suspicious,” I say.

“Yes and no. The kids were all underage and had fake IDs. They’d all just been accepted to elite colleges, which, as you know, means more than anything to people in these communities.”

I make a face. “So they lawyered up on their classmate being abducted because they were worried their college acceptances would be rescinded?”

Marty smiles. “What, you find that hard to believe?”

“Not really, no.”

“That’s what the rich do—they lawyer up. Better safe than sorry. College acceptance was probably enough, but maybe they worried their kids had done worse.”

“Like?”

“I don’t know. Got drunk that night, fought with her, whatever. Remember these are early days. Most people believed she’d either run away on her own or they’d find her dead somewhere. Either way, the legal advice they got was to shut up.”

“And meanwhile,” I say, “Victoria’s trail grows colder and colder.”

“Right. By the time the legalese was done—waivers, NDAs, all that—and the kids questioned, it led nowhere. No one remembered seeing Victoria leave the party. No one remembered any big incident involving her.”

I think about that. “Victoria had a boyfriend, right?”

“Sort of, a Trevor Rennie. Wrong-side-of-the-tracks kind of kid, which in this case meant his parents only made a few hundred grand a year. The police looked at Trevor hard, but all evidence indicates they’d broken up a few weeks before the party.”

“Was Trevor at the party?”

“He was, but think about it, Kierce. I mean, now. With hindsight.” Marty lifts his hands. “How could it be the boyfriend? Or for that matter, any of Victoria’s high school friends? I mean, if she was found dead a few days later, sure, you’d really focus on this Trevor Rennie. But that’s not what happened. Do you really think a high school kid could kidnap a classmate and lock her up for eleven years? Eleven years, Kierce.”

Marty had a point. “I know,” I say. “Makes no sense.”

“And so we get to something else I think is weird.”

“Go on.”

“McCabe’s Pub was willing to look the other way on the underage crowd, but they couldn’t completely break rules that could put them out of business.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning the person who signed the rental agreement had to be of age. No fake ID or any of that.”

“So who signed the agreement?”

“Victoria Belmond’s older brother, Thomas.”

I consider that. “Interesting.”

“Or meaningless,” Marty says. “The FBI asked him about it. Thomas said yeah, his sister said they needed someone of age to sign it, so he figured why not. Supposedly Thomas and Victoria were close.”

“Thomas Belmond has a record, right?”

“In his youth, he was in and out of trouble. DUIs. Some drug dealing. A few stints in rehab. He got arrested in a bar fight. There were rumors of him being aggressive with women, if you catch my drift, but this was before Me Too and so my guess is, a lot of it was swept away with money.”

“What’s Thomas Belmond’s deal now?”

“He’s married and working in the family business, but… hold on a second. Let me google.” Marty leans toward his laptop and starts typing in and nods. “Yep. According to his bio, he’s an executive vice president of the Belmond Corporation and lives in Greenwich, Connecticut, with his wife, Madeline, and two daughters, Vicki and Stacy.”

Marty spins the laptop so I can see. There is a photo of Thomas wearing a blue blazer and green tie. I’ve seen him before. Thomas. Tee for short. The Tee-ster.

It’s Smaller Guy Tee.

Marty watches my face. “You know him?”

“Yeah,” I say. “He threatened to kill me.”

Every other Thursday night for the past thirty-five years, the Kierces have had “family dinner” at a Chinese restaurant in West Orange, New Jersey, not far from where I grew up. When my father and mother emigrated to the United States, they lived in Newark, eventually settling into a two-family home in nearby Orange. They shared the house with the Weinbergs. Sam Weinberg, the patriarch, and Dad soon became best friends. The Weinbergs’ extended family—Sam, Sam’s parents, his sister, his brother, their kids—had Saturday night “family dinner” at the Golden China in the Essex Green Mall, usually somewhere between ten and fifteen of them. My dad admired the Weinbergs and liked the idea and thought it would be ideal for his own family.

We too started out at the Golden China, but they closed and then we tried Shun Lee in New York City, but that was too expensive and now we go to Moon Garden. We never had a lot of family like the Weinbergs. For years, it was just the four of us—my dad, my mom, my older sister. Tonight we are four again—me, Molly, Henry, and my dad.

Dad always orders and he always orders the same thing—dim sum, shrimp with lobster sauce, fried rice, spareribs. Sometimes he will order a wild-card dish, but that dish will never make the steady rotation. My mother died eight years ago from ovarian cancer, and my dad suddenly became a desirable widower. He doesn’t shy away from that. He dates a lot, has become what we used to call a “playah,” and while he has introduced us to five or six of his “lady friends,” none has ever been invited to the family dinner.

“They’re beautiful and smart and I enjoy their company,” my dad told me once after he’d had a few too many Woodford Reserves. Then he tapped his chest with his index finger. “But only your mother could reach my heart.”

My dad is the epitome of dapper. He wears vintage suits. He has a thin, perfectly symmetrical mustache; his steel-wool hair is loaded with product and slicked back. He always carries a pocket comb. He is the kind of man who looks like he’s opening a door for a woman even when he isn’t.

Henry gets super excited every time he sees his “Paw-paw”—his face lights up, his feet kick wildly, as if his whole body wants to express what he is unable to yet say in words. Molly adores my dad too, once telling me that my father “closed the sale” for her. We often hear that a woman becomes her mother, Molly explained to me once. When she met my dad, she hoped the same were true for a man. Sweet sentiment, but I have never been dapper in my entire life and take after my mother.

I try to not appear distracted as I mix the lobster sauce into the fried rice, but my father and my wife are the two humans who know me best. I’m not fooling anyone. Henry is in a high chair, his hand coated in rice, the insides of a dumpling leaking out of his tiny fist. Molly stands and reaches for him.

“I’m going to change him,” she says.

“I can do it,” I say.

“Let me. I need to pee anyway.”

It’s a weak-ass excuse, but I get it. She wants to leave me and Dad alone for a few minutes. I’ve wanted that all night too, and yet I’ve also been content with avoiding this discussion; my dad and I have been avoiding it for almost a quarter century.

Dad picks up on the opening. “So Nicole’s killer is out.”

Not the topic I have in mind, but: “Yes,” I say.

“How are you handling it?”

“Fine.”

“Not tempted to, I don’t know, take matters into your own hands?”

“Tempted? Perhaps. Acting on it? A definite no.”

Dad narrows his eyes. I think he believes me. “There’s something else, isn’t there?”

I look at him. I don’t say anything. I just look at him. And he knows. “Oh damn.” He leans back and pats the area beneath the bow in his tie. “Tell me.”

I do. I quickly tell him about the class, about Anna showing up, about following her, about our confrontation at the Times Square theater, all of it. As I do, my mind keeps flashing back to that long-distance call from Spain, the panic in my father’s normally smooth voice:

“Just go to the airport. Right now. Don’t talk to anyone. Get on the next plane home. Or at least, to the USA. I don’t care what city…”

My father taps his finger on the table as he listens. When I finish, he says, “I won’t insult you by asking if you’re sure it’s the same girl.”

I don’t reply.

He keeps tapping. “You realize, of course, this is good news. It means you didn’t…”

I feel something welling up inside me, but what he is saying is true. I had wondered about the truth and considered every possibility after stumbling away from that “dead” body, after realizing I didn’t have my wallet or phone, after visiting the local police, that cop Carlos Osorio who didn’t believe me at first, and then suddenly wanted to talk to me, though I never found out why because—

“… Don’t talk to anyone. Get on the next plane to the USA. I don’t care what city—”

“But, Dad—”

“You are a brown kid in a foreign country.”

“But maybe—”

“No one cares about the truth. You have to listen to me. You’ll be blamed. Here’s my credit card number. Get on the next plane.”

I listened. I took the next flight out, which ended up going to Atlanta. By the time I arrived, my father had already arranged for me to stay with my aunt in Tulsa for a little while. Just a month. Then two. Just to be on the safe side. We kept expecting Carlos Osorio to call my house in New Jersey, kept expecting law enforcement to knock on our door with some kind of extradition warrant for me to return to Spain.

But that never happened.

We never heard from Osorio. We never read about a body being found. And once I came back from Tulsa, my father and I never talked about it again.

Dad puts down his chopsticks. “So your Anna is really Victoria Belmond.”

“Seems so.”

“So what’s your theory on all this?”

I thought again about Sherlock’s axiom warning against theorizing too quickly. “I’m not sure.”

“When we first came to this country,” my father says, “the Patty Hearst kidnapping was a big story. Do you know about it?”

I nod. I had thought about that too.

“She was nineteen when radicals kidnapped her,” Dad continues. “Soon she was making statements against her own family and holding up banks. At one point, two of her kidnappers were arrested for shoplifting. She jumped out of the getaway van and sprayed the store with machine gun rounds.”

“I remember.”

“When they found her, Hearst claimed—still claims—that she was brainwashed and coerced, even raped. But they still found her guilty. So no one fully knows the truth. Something like this might have happened to Anna… I mean, Victoria… or maybe not. She could have been forced into it. She took a lot of drugs. You told me that yourself. The dealer, the one who told you to run, he could have been the kidnapper. Or working with them. They could have kidnapped the girl and brought her to Spain and got her hooked on drugs.”

I nod. I’ve thought about this possibility already, but I can’t make myself buy it. Yes, we took drugs. Yes, a more potent chemical was probably sneaked into what we—or at least, I—took that last night. But Anna didn’t have cravings or track marks or any of that. I’d have known if she was addicted or controlled by some kind of narcotic.

Wouldn’t I?

Her best friend back then, her only friend, was our dealer, a man from the Netherlands everyone called Buzz. I had figured that Buzz was how Anna kept herself financially afloat, that she sold drugs for him or something. I didn’t look too hard into this. I was on vacation. It was new. I was having fun. Was I supposed to have done more?

It had been Buzz who first heard my scream and burst into the room.

“Oh my god, what did you do…?”

My dad put his hand on my forearm. “It’s okay, Sami.”

I can barely nod.

“If they find her body, we will both go to jail…”

“Have you told Molly?” Dad asks.

“Some of it.”

“When?”

“Yesterday. I didn’t want to lie about it.”

Dad nods. “What did she say?”

“She mentioned Tad Grayson.”

My father lowers his eyebrows. “Why?”

“She thinks it can’t be a coincidence. Seeing Anna. Tad Grayson getting released.”

Dad thinks hard, and as he does, I can see my own expression echoed in his face. “I don’t see how.”

“That’s what I said.”

“But that doesn’t mean there isn’t a connection,” he says. “Maybe we can do some quick research on it.”

“Research?”

“Where was Tad Grayson when you were in Spain? Has he ever been to Spain? Could his life have somehow intersected with Victoria Belmond’s?”

I make a face. “And he, what, kidnapped Victoria years before we crossed paths and dragged her to Spain and then came home and started dating the woman I’d eventually propose to and then he killed her while he continued to imprison Victoria Belmond for, I don’t know, another eight or nine years?”

My father leans back now. He has an old-fashioned. That’s his drink. He slowly takes a sip. “I have another suggestion.”

“What’s that?”

“It’s similar to what I told you back then.”

“You told me to move on, to forget it.”

Dad smiles. Like yours truly, he has a good smile. “Exactly.”

I don’t want to tell him what I’m thinking right now because it’s pretty bad. I also hate when people blame their parents for their own problems. But the truth is, I took Dad’s route back then. I tried to move on from Spain. I tried to forget. And how does a man do that? In my case—and I’m sure I’m not alone—you forget with the help of some sort of psychoactive substance. Again I’m not going to be so pat as to blame my father for my drinking. But is it okay to place some of the blame on whatever happened on that hot summer night on the Costa del Sol?

“We should all move to Florida,” my dad says. “St. Petersburg. Let’s be honest. There’s nothing left for you here. You put the NYPD behind you. You put Tad Grayson behind you. Now that you know she’s alive and well, you can even put Anna behind you too. We start anew. You remember my friend Akash? He opened a private security firm down there. He said he could use a guy with your experience. The salary starts at six figures.”

We see Molly slowly move back toward the table. She’s holding Henry, who gives me a big smile and stretches his arms toward me and does that “baby lean” from her grip. The cliché answer, the expected answer, is to tell my father no, that I’m not running away again, that I’m taking a stand, that this is my home, that I was born and raised here, all that. But that would be stubbornness on my part.

“Let me think about it,” I say.

“Okay.”

“And obviously talk to Molly.”

“Obviously. But how about this? Until you decide, you just let the past be.”

“It ruined me,” I say without thinking, regretting the words as soon as they leave my mouth, even before I see my father flinch as though I had slapped him.

“I don’t mean that,” I say quickly.

“It’s okay.”

“I just… You didn’t raise me to walk away from a fight.”

“Yes, I did,” my father says, and then a wistful smile comes to his face. “But alas, your mother didn’t.”