The Path of Silence (7 page)

The first thing I did, when Nellie had come to pick me up in Transgrove, was to ask her help me legally change my name. I was twenty-one. It wasn’t a breakaway. It was a safety measure. It would let me live, like any other average citizen.

I had spent eighteen years living a privileged, difficult and bizarre life. It was destructive. I had brought hardships upon myself but there was a cause, a root to every vile act, every punishment I had inflicted upon myself. A root in every sense of the word because it was my father. He believed I was a difficult child who was quickly becoming an impossible teenager. My brothers believed I was just maladjusted because they were my polar opposites—well-adjusted. I may have been a bit of both but only because those who professed to look after my welfare and well-being, did it from a great distance. According to my father the solution to every behavioral problem was money—or more precisely what it could buy. And it bought everything—nannies, tutors, caretakers, lessons, therapists, private schools, boarding schools and material goods—it bought shadows, never what I needed—substance and presence. I lived with the shadows and in the shadows so long that when I decided to step out, I did it by trying to walk on thin air. I’d been partying the night before in my penthouse suite and woke up light-headed—and supremely optimistic that I had a safety-net. I literally tried walking off the hotel’s balcony—thirty stories up. I spent three months in the hospital and father came to visit me daily—on a video screen, half a world away. My brothers just sent flowers and chocolates. Time healed my broken bones, the rest of my afflictions I had to heal myself.

When, at twenty-two, I went to see Blackwell Harris, our Police Commissioner, I faced him as Meaghan Stanton—and only then did I tell him my life story. He had listened without interrupting. He had to know. Without a detailed background check, I wouldn’t have been allowed into the police academy.

No one else knew. That’s the way I wanted it. I wouldn’t compromise it, not even for my daughter’s sake.

I took a shower and went to work on the alternate DC car services.

There were twenty-seven auto retailers in the greater Washington area. Four carried, in addition to the domestic product, exotic imports.

I had already phoned these places from work. No one had employed Brick.

When the fourth irate dealership owner had asked the name of my superior officer and my badge number, I had cut him off. “We’re investigating Mr. Brick’s murder. Would you like to be subpoenaed to provide whatever information we deem is relevant?”

It had shut him up. I’d dropped the phone into the cradle. The Washington exotic connection was cold. Brick may have traveled but if he had set up a money laundering operation in Washington, it couldn’t have been another Guilford scheme.

Ken had believed otherwise.

“If he was one of the foot soldiers with a bomb in his chest, then he would have been given a specific assignment,” he had said.

“Exotic car dealerships—exclusively?” I had been skeptical.

“That’s the way I would run it.”

I had disagreed. “I would recruit someone I could use as a generalist, not a specialized agent, with limited use.”

“He wasn’t an operative. He was a walking ghost. He had to do as he was told to stay alive. This organization doesn’t recruit. It targets those it needs to do one type of job and then takes them—for implantation. Brick must have been kidnapped before—according to Patricia four other times, when she had filed reports. She shouldn’t be in Mongrove. She should be an outpatient, under a doctor’s care. She’s not crazy. We should try and help her.”

“I’m not without compassion, Ken but we have more work than we can handle, without her case. If it’s as you say, then Brick probably didn’t want to cooperate.”

“Would you?”

He’d had a point. “So you figure that they had kidnapped him when he resisted, implanted that shit into his chest and then released him? Why?”

He had shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe to think things over, live under such a threat for a while—reconsider.”

“He was reconsidering for a long time. Patricia filed four missing persons reports. Why would you leave such a reluctant recruit alive? Why not blow up his chest when it looked like he wasn’t coming around to their way of thinking? Why keep on enticing him to visit 7-Elevens farther from his neighborhood?”

“That may have been his own initiative.”

“Initiative for what, Ken?”

“To find out whether the device had a range.”

“Not bad. I’d go along with that. I would call that kind of initiative suicidal but it sounds plausible. Brick didn’t want to embrace this organization. He kept pushing the limits, testing the range, visiting 7-Elevens farther and lingering longer…”

“Until they finally had enough and snatched him from the one in Dundalk,” Ken finished.

“They must have really wanted him badly.”

“That’s pretty strange,” he had nodded. I thought so too.

“Why would they need an economist that badly?”

“Maybe we ought to visit the place where he worked,” he had suggested. “It’s been four years but someone might still remember him—his work.”

I had thought that was a good idea too.

“But why continue with the exotic car dealerships?” I had motioned at the Washington paperwork on my desk.

“There has to be more to it than just laundering money through five hundred thousand dollar sets of wheels but exotics is all we’ve got for now,” Ken had said. His own pile was high, the New York part of grand touring exotics.

“Did you get anywhere?”

“No.”

“But you still think it’s got to be exotic car dealerships.”

“Training—”

“That usually means a variety,” I interrupted.

“With focus.”

“Brick’s focus was car places?”

“Had to be.”

Something had occurred to me. “Why don’t we look through those four missing persons reports Patricia filed? We’ve skimmed through them and have Brick’s bare-bones bio but maybe we ought to take a closer look at what Patti knew about him, the background information.”

Chapter 7

I
had taken Brick’s file and Patricia’s reports home. Now I had to clear my mind of parent-child power struggles and survival issues because I had to examine them in detail.

Slowly, not feeling motherly, I headed for my daughter’s bedroom.

Tonight, for the first time in ten years, she had reminded me of her father. He too was a man of action and didn’t ask me whether I wanted to be a part of it. When I had told him I was pregnant, he’d pursed his mouth, reflected on the “joyous” news and thirty minutes later he had dragged me into the Moultrie Courthouse, the Marriage Bureau office, to take out a license. My blood-work was five hours fresh—from a clinic in Georgetown that had shocked me with the news. His was handy too. It should have raised questions but my head was throbbing from the nasty discovery.

He had spent the five-day waiting period musing, in a fragmented way, about our future—and our child’s. I had listened to his grand plans. They felt solid…he felt solid. The plans always started on a strong note but faded when they reached his next career step, family roots, residence, friends, associations, organizations—social benefits and entitlements. I knew nothing about him but what I saw. A six-foot-two muscular Smithsonian security guard, in snappy uniform, with a well-shaped head, shaved bald. He had mellow green eyes. The light shone through and made them sparkle even on the dullest Washington day. It must have blinded me.

I was in my fourth year of law at the George Washington University. I had completed the undergraduate curriculum in three years, in residence as per requirement, with the extra help of summer clinics and seminars. I was in my first year of advanced studies, heading for Juris Doctor Degree. I was toiling through the Criminal Law and Procedure. My grade average was a notch below excellence. I wanted it to stay that way. I finally believed that the world was round and there were fragrant green meadows and spirited brooks, not tar pits and quicksand.

I was dead wrong.

I had met Fielding Weston at the Freer Gallery of Art at the Smithsonian, in the Peacock Room. The golden peacocks had watched us from every square inch of the opulent sheets of bullion imbedded into the walls. He stopped beside me. I glanced at his guard’s uniform, then at my watch, wondering whether it was closing time. He motioned with his head a the brilliant, blazing artwork and started to tell me the history of the dining room that once used to be in the London home of Frederick R. Leyland, a wealthy ship owner from Liverpool.

“I can read,” I had said discouragingly.

“I wasn’t testing your eyes or trying to check out your academic credentials,” he drawled.

“Just passing time or trying to gauge my mood?”

“I’m off in half an hour. Can I buy you lunch?”

“Smooth,” I laughed.

I had let him buy me lunch, in the cafeteria, appropriately named “Mr. Greenjeans”. It was a half-price admission day, favored by students. Most of the crowd in the cafeteria wore jeans. The place dripped with foliage.

Two weeks later, I knew his patrol route through the gallery as well as his supervisor. He had met my roommate. Nellie disliked him at first sight but out of friendship let him stay overnight at our Georgetown flat.

Seven months later, with the school year drawing to a close, I had tried to figure out a way to ask my Criminal Procedures professor if he would let me write the exam with a tin bucket beside me, so I would not have to rush out to throw up. This was still occupying my mind when, five days later, I had said, “I do.” in front of the judge and signed the marriage certificate.

I could tell all of this to my daughter, in an abridged form. It would stem her anxieties about her roots. Unfortunately, I couldn’t say any of this without revealing something about the final ten days that had culminated this dramatic period in my life.

Jazz was asleep, fully dressed. I turned on the little bedside lamp and sat down on her bed. I took off her sneakers and held them for comfort. She had the right to know. But what was I going to say when she asked whether she was a “planned” child or an “accident”?

Her father had stayed ten more days, after the courthouse ceremony and disappeared, never to be heard from again.

I wrote my exams. I didn’t bother to find out how I did. I left my unfinished degree in the back seat of a limo, one last gift for my father. I had jumped from his armored car.

In ten years, I had not been so stressed as to shout at Jazz, that a woman who had jumped out of a moving car while two months pregnant, wanted to keep her child badly enough. That limo was heading for the Baumgartner Clinic in Maryland. It was a posh, private facility that specialized in discreet abortions for the filthy rich. I was forced into it, kidnapped and under guard. It wasn’t enough to get me to Baumgartner’s. Perhaps that’s when I decided to become a cop.

My roommate came to get me in Transgrove. Today, Nellie Clarrington was a lawyer with the Greater Washington Board of Trade. I heard rumors that five years down the road, she would be a good bet to run for Congress. She was bright—and a good friend. She drove me to Baltimore, to the First Tavistock National Bank. I withdrew all the interest I was allowed from the trust fund left by my late mother. I knew my father would move quickly to freeze it—and did—but too late to leave me penniless and at his mercy.

Nellie had looked after all the paperwork involved in changing my name to Meaghan Stanton. Meaghan was my middle name. The Smithsonian guard had called me Meg. I picked Stanton from a phone book.

“You’re giving up a lot,” Nellie had said with a painful smile. I knew she meant my law studies.

“I’m used to it,” I said. She knew my tortured eighteen-year history. We had been roommates for four years.

“Your father will track you down,” she warned.

“Not to Mexico. I’ll outrun him until my child is born. Once that’s over, what can he do?”

“Kidnap your child.”

“What’s there to leverage me for once the child is born? He never wanted me around when I was growing up. Why would he bother now?”

“Control.”

I shook my head. “He never had any over me for eighteen years. I came out of the tailspin by myself. He doesn’t care where I am and what I’m doing, as long as it’s nothing that brings shame on his name—his tradition—public respectability and my brothers’ political careers. Once the media stopped flashing their cameras at me in clubs, parties, orgies, he all but disappeared from my life. His money stayed but the man himself…he went to play golf with his sons. The news was no longer filled with his name—the black smear had faded. I ceased to trouble him. I turned my life around. Once that happened, he didn’t care.”

“You should have told him you were married.”

“That would have seen me in that limo even faster, along with the new son-in-law.”

“Where do you think Field has gone?”

“According to the personnel at the Smithsonian, to a better paying job, far away.”

“Doesn’t sound right,” she had shaken her head.

I didn’t want to believe either but I knew that if I held hope, it would hurt that much more, when I proved to be wrong. I had asked the human resources clerk at the gallery whether Mr. Weston had made any changes to his marital status in his records in the last ten days, prior to his departure. Her startled headshake was a poignant answer.