22

Vanishing

Punk was the first word that came to Matthew Murphy’s mind.

He was staring down at an extremely unimpressive police record for Michael O’Connell, which showed a life of penny-ante and mostly insignificant run-ins with the law. Some credit card fraud, which Murphy assumed was using stolen cards, a car theft when O’Connell was slightly more than a teenager, one assault, which looked to be a bar fight that O’Connell apparently won. Of the various minor crimes that O’Connell had been charged with, none had resulted in anything more than probation, although O’Connell had spent five months in one county’s jail when he’d been unable to make a modest bail. It took his court-appointed public defender that much time to get the assault charge downgraded to a simple battery. A fine, time served, and six months’ probation on that one, Murphy read. He reminded himself to call the probation officer, though he doubted the man would be of much assistance. Probation officers tend to spend the bulk of their time on more significant criminals, and as best as Murphy could see, Michael O’Connell wasn’t significant—at least in the eyes of the legal system.

Of course, Murphy thought, there was another way of looking at everything he had accumulated: O’Connell would do anything; he just hadn’t been caught.

Murphy shook his head. Not precisely your master criminal.

He looked back down at the sheaf of papers on his lap. Five months in the county lockup. Not enough time to be more than inconvenienced, if you were a small-timer like O’Connell. Just the opportunity to pick up some valuable and useful skills from some of the more experienced inmates, if you kept your eyes and ears open and managed not to get preyed upon by the tough guys in the system. Crime, Murphy believed, like any advanced degree, took some studying.

There were black-and-white front and side-view mug shots of O’Connell. Is that where you got your start? he wondered.

He doubted it. Those five months were just a little graduate work. He guessed that O’Connell had already learned much.

The state police detective who’d given him the rap sheets hadn’t been able to access O’Connell’s sealed juvenile records. This made Murphy wary. No telling what might be there. Still, as he looked over the printouts, he saw only the smallest suggestions of violence, which reassured him. Just a bad guy, he thought. Not a bad guy with a nine-millimeter.

He could glean a little background from the police documents: O’Connell was a trailer-park, coastal–New Hampshire kid. Probably didn’t have much growing up. No white clapboard house with an apple pie baking in the oven and children playing touch football in the front yard; his childhood probably consisted of dodging blows. Good enough record in high school—when he was there. There were some apparent gaps in the process. Some time in juvenile detention? he wondered. Managed to graduate from high school. Bet you gave the guidance counselors a workout, he thought. Smart enough to get into the local community college. Dropped out. Went back. Didn’t finish. Transferred credits to UMass Boston. Clever with tools—a mechanic with some expertise. Had obviously used the same capabilities to learn computers. Plenty for him to look into, he thought, if that was what Sally Freeman-Richards wanted. He knew, more or less, what he was going to find. Abusive father. Drunk mother. Or maybe absent father and seductive mother. Divorce, blue-collar menial or domestic jobs, and too-much-beer-on-Saturday-night violence.

Matthew Murphy was parked outside Michael O’Connell’s grimy apartment on a bright, promising afternoon. Slivers of bright sky seemed to pass between the run-down apartment buildings, and from the corner he could make out in the distance the CITGO sign hanging above Fenway Park. He looked up and down the block and shrugged to himself. It was like many Boston streets, he realized. Filled with young people on their way up and old people on their way down from something better. And a few, like O’Connell, using it as a way station on the road to something worse.

It had been easy to get a friend in the state police to run O’Connell’s name, which had provided the printout that he had in his lap, along with the modest background material and known addresses. Now he merely wanted to get a good picture of the subject. On the seat next to him was a modern digital camera with a long lens. The private investigator’s primary tool.

Murphy was in his midfifties, right in that age that arrived before facing the anxiety of turning elderly. He was childless and divorced, and what he missed the most were the tight-collar uniformed days when he was young and had been out on the Mass. Pike behind the wheel of a cruiser, routinely working high-speed, back-to-back shifts on coffee and adrenaline. He also missed his time in the homicide division, but he was wise enough to understand that with the enemies he’d made, making it to old age might have been problematic. He smiled to himself. All his life, he’d always had the knack for getting out of whatever trouble he was in, one step ahead of the hammer coming down. A year after he’d joined the state police, when he totaled his cruiser in a high-speed chase, he’d walked away with only a scratch or two, while the EMTs fruitlessly worked on the rich and drunk kids in their dad’s BMW he’d been pursuing. In a firefight one midnight with a drug dealer coked out of his skull, the man had emptied a nine-millimeter in Murphy’s direction, only to have every shot smash the wall behind him. The sole shot he’d fired with his eyes shut had found the other man’s chest. He’d talked his way out of so many dicey situations, he could no longer recall them all, including a face-to-face with a multiple killer holding a butcher knife in one hand and a nine-year-old girl in the other, the body of his ex-wife at his feet and his mother-in-law’s on the floor of the kitchen pooling blood. He’d received a commendation for that arrest. A commendation and a threat from the killer, who had vowed to make him one of his next projects, if he ever got free, which wasn’t too damn likely. Matthew Murphy considered the number of threats he’d accumulated to be the most accurate measurement of achievement. He’d had too many to count.

He looked down at the papers again.

Michael O’Connell wasn’t much more than an inconvenience.

He took a deep breath and let his eyes race through the documents one more time, searching for some indication that O’Connell couldn’t be intimidated. He couldn’t see any. That was the course that he would suggest Sally Freeman-Richards follow. A late-night visit from himself, buttressed by a couple of his off-duty state police buddies. An informal visit, but one with as much menace as they could muster, which was considerable. Rough him up a little bit at the same time they presented him with a restraining order signed by a judge. Let O’Connell think that pursuing Freeman-Richards’s daughter would be far more trouble than it could ever be worth. And make absolutely certain that O’Connell understood that trouble, in this case, was pretty much defined by Murphy.

He smiled. Should do the trick, he thought.

He’d seen some pretty crazed stalkers in his day, the types that wouldn’t be deterred by threats, the law, or even by brandished weapons—pit-bull types who would walk through a firestorm to get at the person they were obsessed with—but O’Connell seemed to him to really just be a petty criminal, and he had years of experience dealing with his type. What he couldn’t see, the more he read about Michael O’Connell, was why this particular piece of minor-league garbage thought he could screw around with people like Sally Freeman-Richards and her daughter. He shook his head. He’d handled more than one homicide where an estranged boyfriend or husband had taken out his anger on some poor woman just trying to make her way. Murphy had a natural affinity for anyone seeking a way out of an abusive relationship. What he didn’t understand was where the passion came from. In the cases he’d handled over the years, it seemed to him that love was perhaps the stupidest reason for throwing away one’s freedom, one’s future, or, in some cases, one’s life.

Murphy took another look toward the apartment door. “Come on, kid,” he said out loud. “Come on out where I can get a look at you. I’ve got better things to be doing.”

As if on cue, he saw a movement in the sally port to O’Connell’s apartment building and, when he craned forward, immediately recognized O’Connell from the three-year-old mug shots.

He grabbed the camera and focused on O’Connell’s face. To his surprise, O’Connell lingered for a moment, almost facing in his direction. He rapidly snapped off a half dozen frames.

“Got you,” he said out loud, but to himself. Grinning. “You weren’t hard to make.”

What Murphy failed to realize at that moment was that the same was true of him.

It had been an easy call for Scott to make, although the arrangements were a little more complicated. The football coach had been in his office, going over game plans with his defensive coordinator. Scott had met the man on several occasions socially and made a point of attending as many games as he could.

“Coach Warner? It’s Scott Freeman.”

“Scott! Great to hear from you. But I’m a bit tied up right now…”

“Some unbelievably sophisticated defensive plan, designed to befuddle the enemy, rendering him into an ineffectual knot of incompetence?”

The coach laughed. “Yes. Absolutely. We won’t accept anything less than a total emotional meltdown by the opposition. But surely that’s not why you called?”

“I need a small favor. Some muscle.”

“Muscle we have in abundance. But we also have classes and practice. The boys are pretty busy.”

“How about on Sunday? I need two, maybe three guys. A very modest amount of heavy lifting, for which I will pay well and in cash.”

“Sunday? That would be okay. What do you have in mind?”

“Actually, Coach, I need to move my daughter out of her apartment in Boston and get her things put in storage. In a hurry.”

“This is the sort of blessedly simpleminded task that we football types are more than capable of performing,” the coach said with a laugh. “Okay. I’ll ask for a couple of volunteers today after practice, send them around tomorrow.”

The three young men who showed up at Scott’s office door the following morning were all huge and eager to make some extra cash. He rapidly explained that the job would consist of picking up a rental truck on Sunday morning, driving to Boston, packing everything in the apartment into cardboard boxes, and putting all the stuff in a storage facility just outside the city that he’d already arranged for.

“Need to get this done right away,” Scott said. “No delays.”

“What’s the rush?” one of the boys asked.

Scott had anticipated the question. He had spent some time thinking precisely about what he wanted the three young men to know. Not the truth, certainly.

“My daughter is a grad student in Boston. Some time ago, she applied for some sort of grant to study abroad. Didn’t think anything of it, but lo and behold, it just showed up the other day. But there’s some sort of time restriction. Anyway, the upshot of the whole deal is that she’s off to Florence to study Renaissance art for six to nine months. She’s got to be on a plane in the next few days. And I don’t want to end up paying for her apartment any longer than I already have to. I’m going to lose the security deposit, as is. Ah, well,” he sighed with exaggerated drama. “If you like all those pictures of martyred saints and beheaded prophets, I guess that’s where you’ve got to go. But I’m not imagining that the word job or the word career currently has much to do with my daughter’s approach to life.”

This caused the young men to laugh because it was something they could identify with. They made the final arrangements, and Scott told them he’d see them Sunday morning.

As the door closed, he thought, if anyone asks them, they will answer, gone. Out of the country. A credible story. Florence. They will remember that.

It was just a guess on his part, but he suspected a good one, that there would be one person who, assuming he spotted the three movers, would be most interested in the story Scott had so carefully planted.

Ashley felt a little ridiculous.

She had jammed a week’s worth of clothing into a black duffel bag and a second week’s worth into a small suitcase with rollers. The day before, the Federal Express deliveryman had arrived with a package for her from her father. It included two different guidebooks to cities in Italy, an English-Italian dictionary, and three large books about Renaissance art. Of these three, she already owned two. There was also a handbook put out by his own college called A Student’s Guide to Study Abroad.

He had written up a brief letter, using his computer to make up an impressive masthead from the fictional Institute for the Study of Renaissance Art welcoming her to the program, and giving the name of a contact when she arrived in Rome. The contact was actually real—a professor at the University of Bologna whom Scott had once met at a historical conference, and whom he knew was on a yearlong sabbatical, teaching in Africa. He didn’t think Michael O’Connell would ever be able to find him. And, even if he did, Scott had decided that mixing something fictional with someone real would at the very least be confusing. This, he had thought, was clever.

This letter was to be left behind by Ashley, as if forgotten by accident.

His directions for what she was supposed to do beyond leaving the fictional letter behind were detailed and, she thought, a little over-the-top. But he had made her promise that she would do precisely as he instructed. Nothing he was suggesting was truly out of line, and it all made eminently good sense, because to achieve what he wanted, some deception was in order.

One of the guidebooks was to be placed in an outside pocket on the duffel bag with the title protruding out, so that anyone who saw her carrying it couldn’t help but notice it. The other books were to be left around the apartment, so that they would be packed, although Scott urged Ashley to arrange them prominently on her desktop and bedside table.

The next-to-last call she should make, before calling the telephone company and canceling her landline service, was to a taxi company.

When the cab arrived, she was to lock her apartment and place the key on the lintel above the outside door, where the football movers could easily find it.

Ashley looked around at the place that she’d come to regard as a sort of home. The posters on the walls, the potted plants, the dingy orange shower curtain, had been her own, and her first, and she was surprised by how emotional she suddenly felt about the simplest of items. She sometimes thought that she wasn’t yet sure who she was, and who she was going to become, but the apartment had been a first step toward those definitions.

“God damn you!” she said out loud. She did not even have to form the name in her mind.

She looked down at her father’s handwritten note. All right, she said to herself. Might as well play it out.

Then she went to the phone and dialed a cab.

She waited nervously right inside the apartment-building door until the taxi arrived. Following her father’s suggestions, she was wearing dark sunglasses and a knit hat pulled down over her hair. Her jacket collar was turned up. Look like someone who doesn’t want to be recognized and is in the process of running away, he had written her. She was a little unsure whether she was acting, as if on a stage, or behaving reasonably. As the taxi rolled to a stop in front of her building, she hurriedly stepped through the doorway and placed the key where her father had told her to. Then, head down, looking neither right nor left, she burst forward, acting as rapidly and as furtively as she could, still assuming that Michael O’Connell was watching from some location. It was early in the afternoon, and glare from the sun shredded the cool air around her, casting odd shadows into alleyways. She tossed her suitcase and duffel onto the seat, then threw herself in behind them.

“Logan,” she said. “International departures terminal.”

Then she lowered her head, scrunching down in the seat as if hiding.

At the airport, she gave the driver a modest tip and made a point of saying, “Italy. I’m going to Florence. Going to study abroad.” She was unsure whether he understood anything she said.

She rolled her bags into the departures arena, her steps punctuated by the constant roar of jets taking off above the harbor waters. There was excitement in the lines of people checking in. A hum of conversation, in all sorts of languages, filled the space. She glanced toward the exit gates, then she abruptly turned and headed to her right, to a bank of elevators. She fell in close with a crowd that had come off an Aer Lingus flight from Shannon, all redheads, white-skinned, speaking rapidly in accented tones, wearing the distinctive green-and-white-striped Celtic jerseys, on their way to a big family reunion in South Boston.

Ashley found a little space in the back of the elevator and quickly opened up her duffel bag. She stuffed her knit cap, fleece jacket, and sunglasses inside, removed a maroon Boston College baseball cap and a brown leather overcoat, changing swiftly, thankful that the other passengers, if they did notice what she was doing, seemed to think nothing of it.

She exited at the third-story walkway to the central parking garage. In the gray, shadowy parking area, smelling of oil and punctuated by high-pitched squealing sounds from tires on the circular ramps, she rapidly made her way across to the domestic terminals. She followed the signs toward the bus connecting to the T station.

Only a half dozen people were in the subway train compartment, and none of them were Michael O’Connell. There was no chance, she thought, that she was being followed. Not any longer. She began to feel excitement and a heady sense of freedom. Her pulse increased and she realized that she was smiling, probably for the first time in days.

Still, she elected to follow her father’s instructions, thinking, They may be crazy, but I think they’ve worked so far. She got off the train at Congress Street and, still dragging her two bags, walked the few short blocks to the Children’s Museum. Inside the entrance, she was able to check her bags and buy a single ticket. Then she rose up into the meandering maze of the museum, wandering from LEGO room to science exhibit, constantly surrounded by giggling squads of fast-moving children, teachers, and parents. She stood in the midst of all sorts of happy, excited noises and immediately understood the logic behind her father’s plan: Michael O’Connell would have been unable to hide in the museum, despite the angles, stairs, and slides that filled it. He would instantly have stood out as wrong, where Ashley immediately became no different from any preschool teacher or mother’s helper, making her slow and exhausted way through the crowds in the museum.

She checked her watch, still keeping to her father’s schedule. At precisely 4 p.m. she retrieved her bags and exited directly into one of the cabs waiting outside. This time she inspected the street carefully for any signs of O’Connell. The museum was located in a onetime warehouse district, and the broad street was open in both directions. She recognized the genius in their choice of the location: no place to hide, no alleys, trees, dark places.

Ashley smiled and asked the cab to take her to the Peter Pan bus station. The driver grumbled—it was only a short ride—but she didn’t care; for the first time in days it seemed, she had lost the sensation of being watched. She even hummed a little as the cab cut through the downtown Boston streets.

She purchased a ticket for Montreal on a bus leaving in less than ten minutes. The bus stopped in Brattleboro, Vermont, before going on to Canada; she would merely exit well before the destination on her ticket. And she was looking forward to seeing Catherine.

The stench of exhaust and grease filled her nostrils as she climbed onto the bus. It was already dark, and shafts of neon blended with the gleaming silver shape of the bus. She found a seat in the back, next to a window. For a moment, she stared out into the growing night and was a little amazed that instead of feeling uncertain and unsettled, she felt almost free. And when the driver slammed the door shut and ground the gears as he backed the bus out of its loading dock, she closed her eyes, listening to the rhythm of the engine, as it accelerated through downtown streets, heading toward the highway, and leaving the city behind. Although it was only early in the evening, she fell into a deep, dreamless sleep.

The sun was unrelenting. It was one of those Valley days where the stagnant air seemed trapped between the hills, obese with heat, when I parked a few blocks away from Matthew Murphy’s office. A film of wavy, unapologetic warm air hung just above the sidewalk.

In many older New England cities, it is easy to see where the reconstruction dollars ran out and the local politicians counted up votes and saw little return. In the space of a single block or two, upscale businesses give way to a seedier, more decrepit look. It is not precisely decay, the way a tooth rots from the inside out, but more a sort of resignation.

The block where I expected to find his office was perhaps a little more rundown than some of the others. A dark and cavernous bar on the corner advertised TOPLESS ALL DAY ALL NITE on a handwritten sign stuck beneath a bright red BUDWEISER neon light in the window. Across from that was a small bodega with stacks of chips, fruits, Tecate malt drink, and canned foodstuffs cluttering the aisles, and a Honduran flag hanging by the front door. The rest of the buildings were the ubiquitous redbrick of almost every city. A police car rolled past me.

I found the entrance to Murphy’s building midblock. It was an unremarkable place, with a single elevator inside next to a directory that listed four offices on two floors.

Murphy was across from a social services agency. A cheap black wooden plaque by the door had his name and the phrase Confidential Inquiries of All Natures underneath in gold script.

I put my hand on the door to enter the office, but it was locked. I tried a couple of times, then reached up and knocked loudly.

There was no answer.

I knocked again and swore a couple of times under my breath.

When I stepped back, shaking my head and thinking that I had wasted the entire day driving down to the office, the door to the social services agency opened, and a middle-aged woman carrying an armful of dossiers emerged. She sighed when she saw me and offered up quickly, “No one’s there anymore.”

“Did they move?” I asked.

“Sort of. It was in the papers.”

I looked surprised, and she frowned. “You have business with Murphy?”

“I have some questions for him.”

“Well,” she said stiffly, “I can give you his new address. It’s just a half dozen blocks from here.”

“Great. Where about are we talking?”

She shrugged. “River View Cemetery.”