Acts of Mercy (2 page)

She held out a hand for his jacket, and for a moment, he was tempted to hand it over. But he was meeting with one of the nation’s most successful businessmen, and he wasn’t sure the casual look was the way to go.

“I’m fine,” he told the woman—the housekeeper, he assumed.

“Suit yourself.” She smiled and waved and set off toward the back of the house, and Sam headed up the steps as he’d been directed.

At the second door on the left, he knocked lightly. When there was no answer, he pushed it aside slightly and took a step inside. A woman stood looking out the back window.

“Excuse me,” Sam said, and she turned around as if startled.

“I’m sorry,” he told her. “I’m Sam DelVecchio. I was told to come up here and …”

The woman laughed and waved away his apology.

“I’m the one who should apologize. I was daydreaming. Sorry. Please, have a seat.” She walked toward him, her hand out in greeting. “I’m Mallory Russo. We spoke on the phone.”

He shook her hand, then sat in the chair she’d pointed to.

“I have your resume here …” She sorted through a
pile of papers in a fat folder at the head of the table. “Just give me a second … here we are.”

“Excuse me, but I thought Mr. Magellan—” Sam began, and Mallory waved him off.

“I conduct the interviews. I am responsible for the hiring,” she said without taking her eyes from the resume she was scanning. “If I think you’re the right fit, I’ll discuss it with our committee for their input. But the final decision is mine.”

She raised her head and met his eyes. “Do you have a problem with that?”

“No, of course not. I just assumed that Mr. Magellan would be—”

“So.” She brushed his explanation aside. “May I ask why you left the FBI after sixteen years?”

He’d expected the question, but hadn’t expected it to be the first one. “Well, truthfully, I just had enough.”

Might as well just toss it out there
.

Mallory raised an eyebrow.

“If you’ve read my resume, you know I’ve worked with the Behavioral Analysis Unit for the past several years,” he said in answer to her unspoken question.

“That was what made your resume stand out from the others. I thought that someone with profiling experience would be an asset to the Foundation.” She paused, then asked, “You do understand what the Mercy Street Foundation was established to do, don’t you?”

“It’s my understanding that your purpose is to help find people who have gone missing. Cases that the local law enforcement agency had to put aside for one
reason or another. People who have been lost, and never found.”

“Well, we haven’t ruled out cases where we know death has occurred but the case was never solved. Those families need closure, too. Robert likes to think of us as a facilitator or catalyst for finding the truth, but our focus so far has been on missing persons. Some of those people will be found alive—our first case involved two missing teenagers who we did in fact find and return to their families. Our last case did not result in a happy ending. We did find the young woman we were looking for, but unfortunately, we were too late by months to save her. The case I’d like to handle next involves a homicide. The bottom line is that we’re searching for answers. What happened to this person? Dead or alive, what caused them to go missing? If we know from the outset the person was a victim of a violent crime, our job is to find out who and why, if law enforcement hasn’t been able to do so.”

“I think your website describes your work as private investigation with a twist,” he said.

“The twist being that if we decide to take on a case, it’s because there’s something about it that interests or speaks to us, and therefore our services are free.” She sat back in her chair, her arms crossed against her chest. “Do you see where a profiler’s skills might come in handy to an organization like ours?”

“Well, yes, but—”

“Did you think the cases we take on would be easier than the cases you worked for the Bureau?”

“I thought they were mostly missing persons cases.” He shifted a bit uneasily in his seat.

“You mean, ‘Someone is missing—here, track them down’?”

He nodded. “Pretty much, yes.”

“And that appealed to you?”

“To some extent,” Sam admitted sheepishly.

She closed the folder. “Mr. DelVecchio, I think you’d be better off working for another private investigative firm, if that’s what you’re looking for.”

“Miss Russo, maybe we should start this interview again from the beginning. I’ve obviously gotten off on the wrong foot.”

“I’ve already told you that your experience as a profiler made your resume stand out, so that cat’s already out of the bag. Why don’t we cut to the chase and you just tell me flat out why you left the Bureau and why you’re reluctant to sell yourself on your profiling skills.”

Sam nodded.

“For the past six years, I’ve been on call to several of the Bureau’s top investigative units. That meant every time a child was found raped and murdered, every time a body was found and there appeared to be a pattern to the attack, every time serial crimes were identified, I was one of several people who could be called in to study the crime and try to interpret the behavior in a manner that would help our agents get a handle on the killer.” He hesitated momentarily while he debated with himself how much of his personal story to add, then decided to omit it. If he came on board with the Foundation, it would come up sooner or later. Right now, for the purpose of this interview, he decided he was more comfortable leaving it out.

He leaned forward, not liking what he was about to say, but knowing he’d say it anyway. “Miss Russo, the things I’ve seen over the past few years are the stuff of nightmares. When I say I’ve had enough, I mean I’ve had enough of children who have been tortured and degraded and had any sense of humanity stolen from them. I’ve had enough of young women who have been sold or slaughtered, of bodies that had been hacked beyond recognition as anything human. I’ve had enough of destroyed lives.”

Mallory held up a hand to stop him from continuing. “I was a cop for nine years,” she said softly. “I’ve seen my share. I understand.”

Sam hesitated, rethinking his decision to not bring up Carly. He suspected that Mallory, as a former cop, would understand. But before he could speak, Mallory went on.

“Your references are impeccable. The recommendations couldn’t be better. Your superior at the Bureau has made it clear that he’d take you back in a heartbeat. Very unusual for the FBI, I’d say.”

Sam nodded. His old boss was one in a million. If circumstances had been different, he’d have been happy to stay, and if he was ever inclined to go back, John Mancini would be the first person he’d call.

“What I need to know is, if we have a case that involves the type of victim you just mentioned, where we’d need those skills of yours—a child who has been abducted, a young woman who’s been tortured, maybe a particularly gruesome murder—are you going to be willing to do the job?”

Remembering Carly, the words came before he could think about what he was saying. “Not if I’m
going to be sitting around waiting for a case like that to come in, no.”

She studied him for a long moment, then opened another file and turned it around.

“No wait necessary, Mr. DelVecchio.” She slid the file across the table to him. “Take a minute to read this over—the newspaper articles as well as the letter on top—then look me in the eye and tell me you wouldn’t be more than happy to be the one who finds this son of a bitch.”

B
y three thirty in the afternoon, Sam had seen just about all there was of Conroy, Pennsylvania. He’d driven back to the city from Robert’s plush suburban grounds, past vast fields of tall corn, and orchards where peaches were being picked and apples still ripened. The farms he passed, with their centuries-old farmhouses and red-roofed barns, reminded him of his Nebraska roots and the three-story clapboard home of his youth. He tried to remember just how long it had been since he’d gone back and couldn’t, which in itself told him that it had been way too long. He’d meant to go after he returned from what his mother and brother Tom referred to as “Sam’s wanderings” this past year, but from his hotel room near the Newark International Airport where he’d stayed after a mind-numbing flight from Turkey the week before, he’d seen an interview with Robert Magellan on CNN and was intrigued by the mogul’s new venture. Who’d have guessed a businessman of his stature would have such an altruistic streak that he’d personally bankroll a foundation set up specifically to help other people search for their missing loved ones?

Laid low by what he’d dubbed travel plague, Sam spent two days more than he’d intended in Newark, his time shared almost equally between sleeping and channel surfing before returning to his old apartment in Virginia. He spent most of one afternoon on his laptop, researching Magellan and his Mercy Street Foundation, and found himself wondering what it would be like to start over with a private investigative firm instead of a law enforcement agency. When he quit the Bureau to take some badly needed time off, he’d given little thought to what he’d do when he came back. Hell, he’d given little enough thought to
when
he’d come back. He’d only known that his life was killing him, and he had to walk away from it. He still wasn’t sure what had prompted him to submit an application to the Foundation, and hadn’t bothered to examine his motives for driving to Pennsylvania for the interview with Mallory Russo.

As he approached the city, the country road widened. In the distance he could see the smokestacks of factories that had once fueled Conroy’s economy. From his Internet wanderings, he’d learned that the factories had closed, one by one, back in the seventies and eighties, until the city’s unemployed outnumbered those who still brought home a paycheck every week. He drove over a metal two-lane bridge that crossed a stream feeding into the Schuylkill River about a half mile west, and on impulse, took the street that ran past the deserted factories. Empty water towers stood on spindly legs and flocks of pigeons roosted along shingled roofs. Cyclone fences wound their way around the now-silent buildings, and other than a stray dog
that dragged part of a chain behind him, there wasn’t a living soul to be seen. The heat rose off the crumbling sidewalks and the streets had potholes large enough to hide a Hummer. All in all, it had been a depressing tour of the city he might find himself living in. He felt at loose ends and at odds with himself over why he was here in the first place.

The road bent sharply to the right, and Sam followed it, relieved to be heading back toward town. A sign for a diner a few blocks up reminded him why his stomach was grumbling. He’d had breakfast at a chain restaurant right off the New Jersey Turnpike around seven that morning, nothing since, and even his bottle of water was empty.

It was almost four in the afternoon when he parked in the steaming parking lot and walked through the glass door into the welcome cool of the diner.

“You by yourself?” The waitress sat on one of the red-leather-covered stools at the counter and turned completely around to look him over. She was in her late fifties, with hair a shade too strawberry to be considered a true strawberry blond, and eyeglasses trimmed with rhinestones hanging from a beaded cord around her neck. She wore a blue and white striped dress that zipped up the front and a name tag with
NANCY
written in red script.

“Yes,” he replied.

“Booth near the windows okay?”

“As long as it’s out of the sun.”

“Yeah, it’s blazing today, all right.” She led him to a booth on the shady side of the narrow building. “Nearly blistered my hands on my steering wheel.
Swear to God.” She handed him a menu. “What can I get you to drink?”

“Water’s fine. Lots of ice.” Sam slid across the cool vinyl seat and took off his sunglasses. He placed them on the table and opened the menu.

“You missed the lunch specials,” the waitress told him when she returned with his drink, “and you’re too early for the dinner specials.”

“Can I just get a burger and fries?” he asked.

“Sure. Be right back with that.” She took the folded menu from his hands and walked into the kitchen through double swinging doors.

Sam stared out the window at the traffic, just beginning to pick up as the end of the work day drew closer. Two police cruisers passed with lights flashing but their sirens silent. A group of five or six young girls, laughing and pushing each other playfully, their hair wet, walked by in short summer cover-ups, each carrying a large tote bag.

“Is there a public pool nearby?” Sam asked when the waitress returned with flatware and a napkin.

After placing them before him, she leaned one knee on the bench opposite his seat and asked, “You’re new in Conroy?”

Sam nodded. “My first time here, yes.”

“You just passing through?”

“I haven’t decided yet,” he told her.

“The pool is about four blocks up. Nothing fancy, but it’s wet and the young families enjoy it. Used to be more for the folks who had a little money, but these days, people with any serious money have their own pools, someplace other than Conroy, so the city pool
has had to open its membership to anyone who can afford the fee. Anything you want to know about Conroy, you can ask me. I’ve lived here all my life. Isn’t anything that happened around here that I haven’t heard about.”

Sam suspected as much. “You’ve heard about the Mercy Street Foundation?”

“Oh, yeah.” She gestured with one hand as if to say,
Of course, who hasn’t
. “Robert—that’s Robert Magellan, the one who started it up—he comes in every once in a while with his cousin, Father Burch. He’s the Catholic priest over there at Our Lady of Angels. Nice guys, both of ’em. Both good tippers, too. Shame about Robert’s wife.” The waitress shook her head slowly from side to side.

Sam had read everything he could find on Robert Magellan. It occurred to him that though he’d spent several hours with Mallory Russo that morning, the tragic disappearance of Robert Magellan’s wife and child had never come up.