Daddy's Gone a Hunting

83

Nick Greco reflected on the nearly twenty years that he had spent working on the Sloane case before he had retired. His determination to solve it had been well known throughout the office and so had the fact that he had taken a copy of the entire file with him when he had left.

Now, with the discovery of her skeletal remains, Detective Matt Stevens, who had taken over Greco’s position, was keeping him informed of whatever developments would occur. Stevens had told him earlier that neither Harry Simon nor Jack Worth had in any way changed their stories. Both absolutely denied having anything to do with Tracey’s death.

“Nick, we know Simon didn’t have time to abduct her,” Stevens had said. “And Worth claimed he went home to bed that night after working at Connelly’s. Hotchkiss admitted he punched Jamie Gordon, and we think he killed her. And for all we know, he was hanging around Long Island City twenty-eight years ago. He could have been panhandling in Manhattan the night Tracey Sloane disappeared. By then he’d been missing for over ten years and his wife had given up trying to find him. We’ll probably never know if Hotchkiss killed Sloane.”

Nick Greco did not believe that the vagrant who admitted punching Jamie Gordon had anything to do with Tracey Sloane’s disappearance. His gut feeling was that it had been a person who had somehow been in Tracey’s circle of trusted friends. From everything they had learned about her, he did not believe that she had a secret romance going on or that she would have allowed herself to be lured by a complete stranger.

All day Thursday, Nick had once more been going through the list of Tracey’s friends, coworkers, and the diners who always requested her table. There were more than one hundred of them on the list he had compiled all those years ago. He had been Googling them, one by one, to see if any of them had ever been in trouble in the past twenty-eight years.

A few of them were already dead. Others had retired and moved to Florida or Arizona. Not one of the people he could trace had led anything other than an ordinary life.

He had watched the press conference at noon and asked himself if a man on his deathbed would concoct a lie that, in a way, was almost as bad as admitting that he had killed Jamie Gordon. Nick didn’t think so. If Hotchkiss was going to lie, why would he have admitted knowing Jamie Gordon at all? He could have said that he found her notebook in the street in Manhattan and picked it up.

That would have been a believable story-or at least one that would have been almost impossible to disprove. And it would have exonerated him, at least in the eyes of his wife and son. So why admit punching her and then not trying to help her when she screamed?

Greco concluded that Clyde Hotchkiss had made a truthful deathbed statement.

At three o’clock, Matt Stevens called him with another update. “Nick, I could lose my job telling you this,” he began.

“I know you could. But you know you won’t because it’s just between us. What have you got?”

“Harry Simon’s lawyer is working out a deal. Simon claims through his lawyer that he was following Tracey Sloane that night, but that someone called out to her and she willingly got into a van.”

“A van?”

“Yes. Simon said it was a midsize black furniture van with gold lettering on the side, and he could read part of the wording. He swears ‘antique’ was one of the words. Jack Worth, the plant manager at the time of the explosion, was already working back then at Connelly Fine Antique Reproductions as an assistant bookkeeper. We’ll see if he’s willing to come back and answer some more questions. We’ll really lay into him this time. Let’s hope he hasn’t lawyered up.”

“All right, thanks, Matt. Keep me posted.”

After they had finished speaking, Nick Greco sat for a long minute at his desk as his mind made the connection between Connelly Fine Antique Reproductions and the names on his list of people who had been questioned in Tracey Sloane’s death.

Then, almost with a jolt, he remembered one of those names. Connor Connelly. Connor had dined at Tommy’s Bistro a number of times, Greco recalled. We had been told by some of her coworkers that Connelly had always requested Tracey’s table. And he was one of the men in the picture Tracey had on top of her dresser in her bedroom. But his name had been removed from the list of people to question when we learned that he had died in a boating accident weeks before Tracey disappeared. That was what I was trying to remember, Nick thought. I saw his name on the copy of my original list when I looked at it again yesterday.

This time when he opened his computer, Nick began a search for everything he could learn about Connor Connelly and his entire family.