Disturbance

FIFTEEN

So I told them about gathering all the information I could from the women about Marilyn Foster and that time. How she had shown up the next day with bruises on her face and arms, and completely stopped talking about her boyfriend. Not long after that, she learned she was pregnant.

“She never considered trying to contact the father for help, and infuriated her parents by refusing to name him. She went to an adoption agency that could cope with her special medical needs. After a difficult pregnancy, she gave birth to a boy, whom she held for only a few minutes before he was given up to an adopting couple. It was much later that she began her search for him.”

“With adoption laws as they are, she couldn’t find him?”

“Not at first. She had told Dwayne that at the time of the birth, she was afraid the child’s father would try to find him by looking up any records that mentioned her, so it was a closed adoption, and she kept her records sealed. Even when her son turned eighteen, when he could begin the process of letting his birth parents know he was seeking them, she didn’t start her own side of that process.

“Yet suddenly one day, she seemed to decide that it was safe to start looking for her child.” I pushed a piece of paper across the desk. It was a copy of a form Marilyn Foster had filled out online, signing up for an organization that helps adoptees and their birth parents locate one another.

“Father is still listed as unknown,” Pete said.

“Look at the date. Recognize it?”

They both glanced at the date, then looked up at me, puzzled.

“September twenty-seventh…” My voice trailed off. “Could you open that door?” I asked. “And could I get a glass of water?”

“Sure,” Reed said, eyeing me with concern.

A few minutes later, I continued. “That was the date he was injured. Parrish. Early in the morning on the twenty-seventh of September. At the time it seemed likely he’d be a tetraplegic for the rest of his life. When that turned out not to be the case-still, he was captured. If there was some small chance he’d ever get out of his bed in the prison hospital, there was no chance he’d ever get out of prison.”

“Should have gone for the death sentence,” Pete said.

“The district attorney might do that yet,” Reed said. “Especially now that Parrish won’t have to show up in court in a wheelchair. They’ve got DNA on other cases.”

I stayed silent. It brought Reed’s attention back to me. “So you’re saying that she filed this form because she felt safe from him.”

“But it doesn’t even mention Parrish by name!” Pete objected again. “And while I know that date means something to you, why should she remember it? Irene, face it, there is such a thing as coincidence.”

I let that go. I put a small stack of printouts on the table. Reed picked them up and studied the first page.

“E-mail from someone who says he thinks he might be her son.”

“It’s not e-mail, really, it’s a set of private messages on an Internet message board. Which is why you wouldn’t find it if you looked through her e-mail. I don’t know how far your computer guy has gotten with his efforts.”

“Not far,” Pete said. “He’s swamped. He’s due to testify in some other cases and hasn’t had much time for anything else.”

Reed frowned, his attention still on the papers. “No names. Just a bunch of numbers.”

“For the protection of both parties, the service keeps real names hidden until they agree to release identifying information to each other.”

“Not too anonymous-he’s giving his birth date and the name of the adoption agency.”

“It matches her son’s birthday and the agency she used.”

“‘After reading your post, I am fairly sure I’m your son,’” he read aloud. “‘Do you by any chance have type 1 diabetes? I have it. I am told it is hereditary, so that might be one thing we have in common. If you don’t, I might have inherited it from my father.’”

He read her response and the next few messages to himself, then said, “It looks as if she was careful.”

“Yes. She was clearly excited but didn’t just hand over her address and phone number. Keep reading,” I said. “Look at the last two.”

“‘We haven’t discussed this yet,’” he read, “‘and forgive me if it is painful to you, but I’m kind of anxious to find out if a man who now says he is my father really is. Can you tell me, is my birth father in prison? Maybe you gave me up for adoption because you thought I might become like him. I don’t want to meet him, really, but I have been contacted by someone who thinks he is my half brother. He said his dad told him about me a long time ago. If none of that make sense to you, that’s actually a relief to me. Otherwise, it’s kind of the orphan’s worst nightmare, if you know what I mean. I just don’t know what to do, and if you are my mother, maybe you would be willing to give me advice. Here’s the Web site about the guy he says is my dad.’ And there’s a link.”

Reed looked up again.

“Yes,” I said. “The Moths.”

It didn’t take more convincing. Even when Frank and Vince arrived, Reed and Pete managed to get Vince steered away from his anger toward me (and Frank) and onto the scent of a new line of investigation.

They were good enough to let me know what happened after they told me to go home.

By the end of the day, they not only had the cooperation of the adoptee contact group but had the name, address, and phone number of the young man who had claimed to be her son. Cade Morrissey.

He had recently moved to Las Piernas and rented a small apartment in an old building not far from downtown. Had a job as a cook at a nearby restaurant, had applied for college.

Morrissey didn’t answer a knock on his apartment door, and his landlady said she hadn’t seen him for a while; neighbors said the same. They tried calling him-it was a cell phone number and went to voice mail. When police checked at the restaurant where he worked, the manager-happy to do some venting-said that Cade hadn’t shown up for work for several weeks, so he was fired. But if they found him, the manager said, his last paycheck was waiting for him.

At that point, it didn’t take much to get a warrant.

What they discovered, on entering the premises, was that someone had been searching before them. No sign of Cade Morrissey himself, but his toothbrush, razor, and other personal items, including a supply of insulin in the refrigerator, were still in the apartment. An empty suitcase was in the closet. A desk, however, that had once held a laptop computer and a router now held just a router. The drawers of the desk had been pulled out, their contents strewn on the floor.

The cell phone company cooperated with the police, and with GPS tracking, they followed its signal to the same industrial area where Marilyn Foster had been found. In an abandoned cannery, they came across an odd sight: a pristine white home freezer unit sitting unplugged in the center of the concrete floor of a large room, surrounded by rusting machinery. The freezer was padlocked.

Vince called the cell phone again.

They heard muted ringing from within the freezer and hurriedly broke the lock off.

Cade Morrissey’s moth-decorated body had already thawed.