Shades of Eva (52 page)

It didn’t take me long to answer.
“Ully!”

Abby smiled, solemnly. “If it wasn’t him, it
would be one of my landlords or a convenience store clerk. Or Anna
even. I thought we’d have more time, Mitchell. With Ully’s
identification, and his testimony, police have tied us together.
I’m so sorry.”

“Have you talked to him?” I asked, referring
to Christian. “About any of this.” Silently, I was hoping that he
would appear, would show up and give me the support I was trying to
give to Amelia—to Abby. But no one appeared. We were as alone as
we’d ever been.

“I talked to him. He’s—

Amelia cut herself off.

“He’s what?”

“He’s irate. He’s beside himself. I’m afraid
of what he’s going to do, Mitchell. I’m afraid he’s going to kill
Ully. He and Sophia…they were very close. He’s not returning my
calls, which is what he was supposed to do if this went south. But
I’m scared. For him. And for you. This is all my fault.”

It felt as if the blood had just been
drained from my body. I hadn’t realized it, but I’d tied a few
dreams to Amelia’s coattails, and the thought of prison—for her or
for me—was poison to those dreams.

Amelia turned over. “Sophia had put me in
contact with a friend of hers in Lansing. Her name is Paula. She’s
the one Christian went to see, there. She works for the Social
Security Administration. She’s also a retired MP. She’s the one who
did the paperwork behind our aliases.”

“Was that her with Christian the other
night? The one you gave the toolbox to outside the Victorian?”

“No. That was Michelle. She’s in Serology at
an Indianapolis crime lab. She handled the DNA part of this.”

“She an MP, too?”

“Former.”

“So there were four people helping us:
Christian, Sophia, Paula, and this Michelle?”

“Yes.”

“Do they know where we are?”

“Yes, but they’re not going to turn us in if
that’s what you’re asking. If things fell apart, we were just going
to go silent. That’s all.”

“Like it never happened.”

Abby nodded, regretfully. “Yes, like it
never happened.”

She then gestured to the chest of drawers in
the corner of the room. “There’s a newspaper article in the bottom
drawer that I want you to read. Be careful, my wedding ring is in
there. I was saving the article for the Caymans. I thought we’d all
be there in a few days to celebrate the end of this. I guess I
should give it to you now.”

“What is it?” I said.

“Just read it!”

Abby stood up, left the room, and went
downstairs.

I stood up and did as she asked. I opened
the drawer and reached for the newspaper. There was a crumpled up
section sitting to the side of the drawer.  Curious, I opened
it. There was a diamond ring inside. I looked at it, and then
picked it up. I held it up to the window, to the moonlight, and
watched it sparkle for a moment. It was a pretty ring. It must have
looked pretty on Amelia’s finger. She must have been a beautiful
bride.

I replaced the ring in its paper and sat it
back down in the drawer.

I took the rest of the paper and sat down on
Mom’s bed and unfolded it. It was the front page of a Holland Sun
Times article dated February 26th of that year, one day after Joe’s
and Amy’s murders.

TWO KILLED AFTER

TRAFFIC ALTERCATION 

Police responded to a shooting at the 500
Block of Grant Avenue and Buchanan Road earlier today following a
two-car vehicle collision. Officer Frank O’Kinnon of the Michigan
State Police was first to respond. Twenty-eight year old Joseph
Angstrom and his two-year-old daughter had been shot and killed
during an altercation after the accident. Witnesses reported the
Angstroms’ vehicle pulled into oncoming traffic and was broadsided
by a second vehicle driven by Jackson Greer, of South Bend,
Indiana.

Former Military Police Officer Abigail
Angstrom, currently a police lieutenant with the Holland, MI police
department, a wife and mother of the deceased, told police that the
driver of the offending vehicle, and three passengers inside had
fled the scene after the shooting….

***

Wednesday, April 24, 1995: 11:47 p.m.

Ben Levantle

The television news report that night began
like this:

Police are searching for persons wanted in
connection with what they are calling an infiltration of Michigan’s
oldest and once largest mental institution….

The media had put two photographs on the
screen: a white male and a white female, each approximately age 25.
My patient, Mitchell, was the man. I’d never seen the woman.

Beneath Mitchell’s picture was the name of
an alias: Chester Imil. The female had been identified as Abigail
Angstrom, and she had at least two aliases: Emily Bond and Amelia
Hawkins.

Abigail Angstrom was a former US Army MP and
a civilian police officer in Holland. She had recently resigned her
latter position following the shooting deaths of her husband and
daughter. Abigail, also a former POW, was in an SUV with her family
when it was struck. She survived the accident, and the shooting,
but her husband and daughter were not so fortunate. Her daughter
was just shy of two-years-old at the time. It was a sickening story
to hear, and it’s sickening to have to retell it because that day,
April 24, would have been little Amy’s second birthday.

The media then posted the photograph of the
shooter: Jackson Greer.  He was said to have been a member of
the SM—or Southwest Mafia—a gang local to the region. Greer was
also dead.

According to police, Abigail Angstrom had
tracked Greer to a house in Plymouth, IN, confronted him there, and
then drove him to a nearby woods, where she executed him. She
unloaded a magazine full of bullets into the back of his head and
buried him on site.

A farmer who had been walking his dog just a
day ago had come across the remains. Angstrom was the first person
police thought of once they had a name for the victim. In checking
the ammunition pulled from Greer’s skull and the bark of a nearby
weeping willow tree, police discovered the rounds had come from an
M9, a Beretta 9 mm handgun, the same type of gun the Military
Police are issued, the same type of handgun registered to Abigail
Angstrom.  

She had motive, and she had opportunity. And
she, like my missing brother, and like Mitchell, my client, was
AWOL. No one had been able to locate Angstrom since the traffic
accident.

Greer was with three other men at the time
of the shooting. Police were withholding their identities. They’d
been arrested and were being detained for questioning.

Police believed that Mitchell, working with
Angstrom, had hired into the Coastal State Psychiatric Hospital up
in River Bluff as a security guard of all things. He had hired in
under the Imil alias. Hospital officials told police they had a
policy in place not to hire the immediate family members of
ex-mental patients who once resided there. They believed Rennix
hired in under the alias in an attempt to gain information about
his mother’s allegation of having been raped while there.

This is where the story turns disturbing for
me. Mitchell was, indeed, the second son of my first love, Eva
Fay.

Police reported that Eva gave birth to a
baby while at Coastal State, and that the infant had gone missing
after an abduction from the Institution. This was 1954—the same
year—the same day—that my brother went AWOL. Seriously, you
couldn’t write this stuff.

Imil’s identification was found to be false.
His driver’s license, birth certificate, and social security card
were found to be fraudulent. He also had produced a pistol permit
that he had given to the Coastal State Hospital, supposedly out of
Arizona, that was also a fake.

In speaking to Institutional officials,
police were informed that Mitchell’s mother, Eva, and Abigail
Angstrom’s aunt Emily White, had been sister patients at Coastal
State in the 1950s. This established a connection between Abigail
and Mitchell. Police reasoned that the two were likely lifelong
acquaintances, and since Abigail’s return to the US, and since her
parents had passed away, the two had probably reunited.

Media had put another photograph
on
screen—a picture of another female. Her name was Sophia Bermicelli.
She was also a former MP in the US Army. It took a phone call to
the captain under which Abigail had served to establish the
connection between Sophia and Abigail. They were sister MPs in the
same unit.

Bermicelli had been shot and killed. She had
shown up to cash out $1.2-million from an off-shore account in the
Cayman Islands using the alias Emily Wilson, an account police
believed was set up by Angstrom. The $1.2 million had been
deposited from funds transferred there by none other than Eva’s
brother, my old neighbor, Ully McGinnis.

Eva’s brother, as it turns out, had become a
very successful real estate agent from out of Gary, Indiana.
Apparently, he’d been confronted by Abigail Angstrom—so said
Ully—and coerced into making the wire transfer just a day ago.
Bermicelli made it out of the bank with the money, but she didn’t
make it back to her car. She was confronted by an armed gunman just
outside the bank, robbed, shot, and killed.

Her body was pulled from the street that
morning. The gunman was yet to be located or identified, but police
were detaining Ully at the Coastal State psychiatric facility for
questioning. As of the news broadcast, according to police, Ully
was unaware of the shooting.

Officials in the Caymans didn’t know who
Bermicelli was, of course. Not right away. Suspecting she was
American and her identity an assumed one, law enforcement sent her
fingerprints to the American embassy there, who in turn had them
run through AFIS, the US automated fingerprint database. Embassy
officials reported the victim’s true identity. Incidentally, her
history was quite celebrated. She’d been on a team that had once
rescued none other than Abigail Angstrom from an Iraqi prison.
Sophia was a recipient of the Bronze Star for her efforts, and
Abigail the POW Medal.

I’d come to learn that Ully said he’d been
forced to commit himself to Coastal State. Initially, his committal
appeared voluntary. He had made some pretty disturbing claims. He
had stated that he was having some sort of guilt reaction over
facts relating to his sister’s past. Ully had verified his sister’s
story of having been raped, and had pointed the finger at my
brother.

However, all of that was recanted when
Greer’s body was discovered and Abigail Angstrom’s true identity
hit the airwaves. Ully told the docs that it was Angstrom, and his
nephew, Mitchell Rennix, who had actually coerced him into
confessing this, into liquidating some assets. They sent him to
Coastal State for two reasons, he claimed: the first was sheer
irony, he would tell police, and the second reason was quite a bit
more pointed: he was to locate the buried remains of Eva’s missing
infant son. He was to assist his nephew (who was now posing as Chet
Imil, a security guard) in exhuming those remains. Chet Imil, I had
to laugh, was an obvious anagram for Mitchell.

According to Ully, Mitchell and Abigail
believed that Ully had something to do with Elmer’s abduction and
his demise. Ully told police the duo were convinced that the baby
was buried on Asylum grounds. When asked by police if he was aware
of what happened to the baby, and if he knew anything about Elmer’s
abduction, Ully told police no, but said he had to tell Abigail and
his nephew otherwise. If he didn’t offer them something, he said,
they were going to torture and kill him.

When police asked Ully what he offered
Mitchell and Abigail, Ully said that he made up a place where Elmer
was buried and pointed to some arbitrary spot near a black oak tree
out back of the Asylum grounds. He also claimed that Mitchell and
Angstrom had gone to the extraordinary effort to fall the tree in
an attempt to exhume the remains.

When police asked Ully what he thought they
were intending to do with the remains, he didn’t know, but felt
they were going to try and verify the child’s paternity, somehow.
Turns out he was right on that.

I learned later that there was some evidence
to verify an exhumation might have been attempted at the black oak
tree. Police had found a fallen tree where Ully had indicated
Mitchell and Abigail had sawed one down. Hospital officials had
also found a two-person strap saw at the base of the tree. They
hadn’t, however, found any evidence that there was, or had been,
any skeletal remains in the area, and because of the magnitude of
the rainstorm that had occurred that night, had found no forensic
evidence to link either Mitchell or Abigail to this would-be grave
robbery. Any prints that had been left on the strap saw had been
all but washed away.

Incidentally, any prints proving Mitchell
had ever been at Coastal State, in any capacity, as a guard or as a
patient, were nonexistent, as well. Chester Imil always wore
leather gloves.

In all of this recounting, I haven’t
expressed how it was that I got brought into the police
investigation. It’s actually quite simple. As soon as Ully’s story
went public, and the true identities of Mitchell and Abigail were
made, police were on the phone with me.

Ully was asked if he knew where my brother
was, and he told police the same thing I’d been telling everyone
for years: that he hadn’t the slightest clue. I didn’t doubt he was
telling the truth.

I had always thought that if Fred had
returned to the US, he would have found some reason, or
opportunity, to look me up. He never had. Ully did, however, tell
police that it was in the Institution’s best interest to find my
brother so that he might answer to Ully’s sister’s claims, so that
he could explain things away and perhaps put an end to this
lunacy.