Last Look

2

Dorsey parked her rental car on the shady side of the street across from her father’s house. Matt Ranieri lived in a tidy half-brick split-level in a sprawling 1960s-era Philadelphia suburb. Back then, the neighborhood had been mostly upwardly mobile middle-class and totally Catholic. St. Patrick’s Church was two blocks to the right on this same street, and St. Francis of Assisi three blocks to the left, cleanly dividing the neighborhood into the Irish parish and the Italian parish. Over the years, members of other faiths had moved in, and the parishes had shrunk. Several years ago, the doors of the elementary school serving St. Francis had closed and the students were directed to St. Patrick’s, which had the larger building. These days, as many kids from the neighborhood attended public school as they did St. Pat’s. When the diocese consolidated the two parishes, enrollment at St. Francis had declined further. Dorsey had been in her old parish church exactly three times since she graduated from college. One wedding-hers-and two funerals, her former mother-in-law’s and her grandfather’s.

She crossed the street, toying with the house key on the chain inside her right pocket as she glanced down the empty driveway. Walking around to the back porch, she paused at the bottom of the steps to note the condition of the yard. The grass was neatly cut, the roses had been pruned, some of the shrubs cut back, and the flower gardens weeded and freshly mulched. Her dad must have been here for at least a week, she reasoned; it would have taken him that long to prune and weed and mow. She climbed the steps and unlocked the door, stepped into the stillness.

“Dad?” Even knowing he wasn’t at home, habit found her calling as she walked through the kitchen into the hall that led to the front door. “Dad?”

The downstairs windows were all tightly shut and the shades pulled down. She scooped up what appeared to be several days’ mail from the floor and skimmed through it while she carried it into the kitchen and placed it on the table. She opened the refrigerator and took out a diet soda, popped the tab, and took a few sips before closing the door. She exhaled loudly, looked around, and headed into the living room. The message light was blinking red and silent on the answering machine. Without hesitating, she hit the play button. If someone had already called her father to tell him about Shannon Randall, Dorsey wanted to know.

“Hi, Matt?” The woman’s voice, soft and tentative, played in the quiet room like music. “This is Diane.” Nervous laughter. “I guess you know that.” More laughter. “I…um…just wanted to thank you for last weekend. I had a really good time, and…um…well, I just wanted to thank you again.” Another pause. “I’d like to do it again sometime. You have my number…” The fumbling sound of the phone being returned to its cradle.

Diane?

Dorsey didn’t remember having heard about a Diane. Not that her father had to keep her up to date on his social life, but the last Dorsey had heard, he’d been dating a woman named Anna.

She sat in the overstuffed green chair near the fireplace and sipped the soda. The air was close and warm to the point of being stuffy, and would get warmer as the June sun continued to beat down on the roof. On the mantel a series of photographs paraded left to right, achingly familiar pictures of her mother, Bernadette-Bernie to all-some with Dorsey, some with Matt, the occasional shot of a smiling Bernie alone. The last photo was from their last Christmas, right before Bernie had stepped off the curb in front of the real estate office where she worked and had been struck by a car driven by an eighteen-year-old college freshman home on winter break.

Dorsey had been nine, old enough to recall every minute that followed a neighbor banging frantically on their front door. She’d heard his breathless speech, watched her father run barefoot out into the snow and down the six blocks to the site of the accident. Dorsey had run, too, but had been stopped by one of her mother’s coworkers far short of the white sheet that lay on the ice-covered street.

The boy who’d been driving the car stood on the sidewalk ten feet away from Dorsey, sobbing loudly and inconsolably, his face blotched red from the cold and tears. Whenever Dorsey recalled that scene, what she thought of was bone-numbing cold and the tears of a stranger who had changed their lives, and her father yelling at the paramedics to do something, do something. The empty feeling of being abandoned would wash through her every time, choking her with the memory of her father scrambling into the ambulance with her mother’s body. He’d never looked back, never given a second thought to Dorsey, who’d stood forgotten and alone in the cold.

Years later, Dorsey had tried to rationalize, reminding herself that her father had been in deep shock. That maybe he hadn’t known she’d followed him from the house. That he hadn’t been thinking of anything at that moment but hoping to save the life of his wife, even though everyone there knew it was already too late.

That had been twenty-seven years ago, and her father had never remarried. So, Dorsey reminded herself as she returned to the kitchen, if her dad was dating more than one woman, he’s certainly entitled, and it was certainly none of her business.

She poured the rest of the soda into the sink and tossed the can into the recycling bin, then called her father’s cell phone again. Still no answer. She left the house the same way she’d entered it and locked the back door.

“Hey, Dorsey, is that you?” a voice from the next yard called.

“Hi, Mr. Genzano, how’re you doing?” Dorsey stepped across the stretch of grass that marked the property line to give her father’s elderly next-door neighbor a quick hug.

“Can’t complain.” Thin, weak arms encircled her and gnarled hands patted her back. Mr. Genzano was eighty-eight that year. Or was it eighty-nine? “No one cares if you do, so what’s the point?”

“You’re looking well.”

“I’m looking older than dirt, but nice try, Dorsey.” He beamed. “So, you thought you’d pay a surprise visit to your old man, did you?”

“And you know it’s a surprise because…?”

“Because if you’d called ahead of time, you’d have known he was at the beach house.” A bony elbow nudged her ribs. “You’re not the only one in the neighborhood who can put two and two together and get four, eh?”

“Anytime you want a job with the FBI, Mr. Genzano, you give me a call. I’ll put in a good word for you with my boss.”

“If I thought they’d give me one of those glockenspiel guns, I might consider it. I used to be quite the shot, you know, back in Double-u Double-u Two.”

Dorsey laughed. “You just say the word, Mr. Genzano. The Bureau can always use a good man.”

Mr. Genzano chuckled, then coughed. “Asthma. Gonna be the death of me. Gotta get back inside and outta the yard. Pollen everywhere.”

He shook his head and turned toward his house. “You tell your father to give me a call when he gets home, hear? We’re going to need to do something about that old maple out back. Split in half and ready to fall…”

He continued to talk as he returned to his own yard and up his back steps. Dorsey waited until he opened the back door, then waved. The old man waved back, and she sighed with relief that he hadn’t gone into respiratory failure right there in the driveway.

Dorsey crossed the street and opened the driver’s side door, leaning against the car momentarily, looking back at her father’s house. The last place they’d all lived together as a family-it held so many memories. She turned away abruptly and got into the car.

She checked her voice mail, then turned the key in the ignition. There was no point in returning to the airport. The beach house was less than three hours away. She might as well just drive down and see what her father was up to.

Had he already heard the news?

Part of her almost hoped he had, so she wouldn’t have to be the one to tell him.

She dialed his number again. This time she left a message. “Pop, I’m on my way down to the beach house. We need to talk. I should be there in a few hours.”

The drive to Hathaway Beach took longer than Dorsey had expected, due to road construction on Route 1 just south of Dover, then again on Route 36 going toward Slaughter Beach on the Delaware Bay. Hathaway sat midway between Slaughter and the Old Mispillion Lighthouse, at the end of a road that was newly paved. Dorsey could remember a time when the road was mostly sand and dirt going down to the beach, back before the old Delaware fishing towns had been discovered. Twenty years ago, when Dorsey’s grandmother had considered putting the house on the market, she could barely have given it away. Now, local realtors stuffed the mailbox with solicitations, dying to market the old place to the people driving by who’d love to call it theirs.

Well, it was a pretty fine house, Dorsey reflected as she parked at the end of the drive behind her Dad’s dark blue Explorer. Built in the late 1890s by her maternal great-grandfather, James Mills, the old clapboard Victorian stood tall and stately and tightly laced as a spinster, all by itself on a large lot smack in the center of Hathaway. Behind the house stood the remnants of the old carriage house, which her father insisted he would someday renovate, and the remains of her grandmother’s gardens, in which neither she nor her father had any interest.

The grass in the front yard grew in tufts through the yellow sand, and three old pines along the side of the house leaned westward, as if exhausted from having stood against the wind off the bay for so many years. Across the street, two more houses from the same era sat on either side of a large square building of block construction that dated from the 1960s. The newer structure housed not only the small two-room post office, but the general store, a luncheonette-the town’s only dining spot-and a newsstand as well.

Dorsey climbed the five steps up to the freshly painted front porch and pulled the screen door open. The inner door stood ajar and she called to her father as she walked through the downstairs and out the back door, which was unlocked as well.

She checked inside the garage and around the back of the carriage house, but her father was nowhere to be seen. There was only one other place he’d be.

Dorsey walked two hundred yards to the path leading over the dune. She slipped out of her shoes and tucked them under her arm, and walked toward the bay. The sun was dazzlingly bright off the water, the tiny waves of low tide rolling gently onto the sand with barely a sound. She shielded her eyes from the sun with her right hand and saw her father far down the beach, almost to the cove that led to the lighthouse.

She dropped her shoes and walked over the coarse sand, avoiding the jagged edges of crab shells and the driftwood that had washed up during the last storm. By the time she was near enough for him to hear if she called out, the dread that had begun as a tiny flutter swelled to fill every pore. The speech she’d practiced all the way down in the car began to fall apart, leaving her with facts but no coherent way of delivering them.

“Know who’s driving that boat?” He spoke without turning to her, but pointed out toward the bay and the ferry that ran between Lewes, Delaware, and Cape May, New Jersey.

“You mean the bow rider at two o’clock?”

“Right. Mike Patton’s boy, Tom. Remember him? He used to tease the hell out of you because you were so short.”

“I remember.” She nodded, recalling that Tommy Patton had been a bully who’d made the life of every kid in Hathaway Beach miserable at one time or another.

He looked over his shoulder and smiled. “He’s about five seven now. And you’re…?”

“Five nine.” She smiled too, thinking it might be a good sign to know that mean Tommy Patton had gotten his, so to speak.

“Tommy’s grown up okay.” Matt Ranieri turned and reached for his daughter with both arms and hugged her. “He’s settled down and from what I hear, he hasn’t set rotten eggs under anyone’s tires in a long time.”

“Good to know.” She forced the smile to hold for a few moments more while she returned the hug.

“So. What brings you here?”

They stood side by side, his arm draped over her shoulder casually, but the tension between father and daughter was as tangible as a third entity there on the beach with them.

“What’s up?” He stared out at the horizon, as if he knew whatever news she was about to break would be devastating.

She cleared her throat, but before she could speak, he asked, “Are you all right, Dorse? Something happen to you? Something going on…?”

“Oh.” Her eyes widened slightly in surprise. It had never occurred to her that her message might have given her father the impression that this had to do with her. “Oh, no, Pop, no. I’m fine.”

“Good, honey.” He exhaled a breath as if he’d been holding it since he’d heard the message she’d left. “Then tell me what’s so important that you had to drive all the way here from…” He paused. “Have you been transferred?”

“No, I’m still in Florida. I flew to Philly, then rented a car and drove to the house. Mr. Genzano said you’d be here.”

“Must be important, then, for you to do all that traveling. You get promoted?”

“No, but-”

“Fired? You weren’t fired, were you?” He turned fully toward her, his face creased with concern for his only child. “Because I still have friends in the Bureau, the director and I-”

“No, Pop, this has nothing to do with me.”

“Then what?”

“It’s…” Her stomach clenched. She did not want to do this. “Maybe we should go back to the house.”

“Spill it, kiddo.”

“I got a call from Steve Decker last night.” She swallowed hard.

“And?” He made an impatient gesture with his right hand, urging her to continue.

“Pop, three weeks ago, they found the body of a woman in Georgia who has been positively identified as Shannon Randall. She’d been dead for less than half a day. She’s been alive all these years.”

He stared at her as if she’d spoken a foreign language.

Finally, he laughed awkwardly. “That’s impossible. We both know that Shannon Randall died twenty-four years ago. There’s been a mistake.”

“No mistake, Pop. They’ve matched the dental records and the fingerprints. DNA is being tested as we speak. Decker says it’s definitely Shannon.”

“I don’t believe it. Someone screwed up someplace. No way.” He shook his head slowly side to side. “No goddamned way.”

He broke away from her and paced several steps down the beach, then turned back to her.

“That was a good arrest. Eric Beale was guilty as sin, and everyone knew it. The jury knew it. He was convicted-”

“Pop, they never found her body.”

“And they still haven’t.” His voice grew louder and his dark eyes flashed. He looked at his daughter as if seeing her for the first time. “You believe this bullshit, don’t you?”

“Pop, Decker says a positive identification has been made by one of her sisters-”

“What positive identification? No one’s seen that girl since she was fourteen, that’s been, what…twenty-four years?” His voice continued to rise. “You wouldn’t recognize yourself after twenty-four years. And they expect me to believe…?”

Matt shook his head adamantly. “No goddamn way, Dorsey. No goddamn way is anyone ever going to convince me that Shannon Randall was alive all those years. Eric Beale killed her back in 1983. He was tried, convicted, and executed for her murder. No goddamn way was that a mistake.”

“Pop…”

She reached for him, but he pushed past her, heading back up the lonely stretch of beach that dead-ended across the cove from the lighthouse. She watched him go, watched his stride increase with each step. She knew better than to follow him.

Dorsey walked back to where she’d dumped her shoes and gathered them up, then returned to the house. She walked around back and sat on the top step of the wooden porch, then reached into her pocket and pulled out her phone. She debated for several minutes who to call.

She’d start with Decker.

“Tell me again why the body in Georgia is Shannon Randall. You can’t possibly have any DNA results back yet,” she said when he picked up his private line.

“Fingerprints. Dental records. Identification of her birthmarks.” Her old boss sighed. “You’re at your dad’s.”

“Right.”

“And he’s pissed off and thinks this is all bullshit.”

“Wouldn’t you?”

“If I were in his shoes, yeah, I probably would want to see every scrap of evidence. However, in this case, under the circumstances, your father can’t be anywhere near this, Dorse. For the obvious reasons.”

“Like, he was in charge of the Bureau’s investigation?”

“It isn’t just that he was lead on our investigation, he made the case. It was a noteworthy case, one of the first trials in South Carolina where a defendant was convicted on circumstantial evidence alone, where no body had ever been found.” On the other end of the line, Steven Decker took a deep breath before adding, “And I probably don’t need to remind you that your father’s made quite a career out of this case.”

There was no denying that Matt Ranieri had become the poster boy for the FBI following the swift arrest and conviction of Eric Beale for the murder of young Shannon Randall, daughter and granddaughter of the ministers of a popular church in Hatton, South Carolina. Tall, handsome Matt had been a public-relations dream, and over the years had gone on to become the face of the FBI on every television news and talk show. He’d retired from the Bureau ten years ago and was still everyone’s favorite talking head. After every horrific crime, you were sure to see former FBI superstar Matt Ranieri on your favorite news talk show later that night, and for several nights thereafter. At one time, one of the cable networks had even talked about giving him his own show, where he’d interview law enforcement agents who’d been instrumental in the investigations of high-profile crimes.

“So, where does the case stand?” Dorsey asked tersely. “Who’s in charge of the investigation? Locals? Sheriff? State investigators?”

Decker laughed. “You’re kidding, right? The sheriff’s department in Georgia caught the case when it first came in. But once the ID came in from Deptford, and they realized who they had in the morgue, they called the Bureau and pitched that hot potato off to us like it was on fire. They want no part of it.”

“Odd. You’d think they’d like the opportunity to show up the Bureau.”

“I think they thought it would be more fun to watch us fall all over ourselves trying to spin it. Which sooner or later, someone is going to have to do. We’ve been trying our damnedest to keep a lid on it, but sooner or later, word will start to spread. I don’t know how much longer before something leaks out.”

“Shit.” She grimaced, knowing it would only be a matter of time before her father’s media contacts would catch up with him. “Who’s on it for the Bureau?”

“Andrew Shields.”

“I thought he quit after his brother went wacko last year and killed one of his cousins.”

“He didn’t quit. He took some time off, that’s all. But God, what a mess. The Shields family have been serving the Bureau for years. Damn shame, for everyone involved.”

“So is Andrew Shields still in that special unit of John Mancini’s?”

“Yes. He still is.”

“So, Mancini’s effectively calling the shots.”

“Stay out of it.”

“I can’t.”

“Don’t go near the case.”

“Look, I just want-”

“Doesn’t matter what you want. Just keep your fingers off it.”

“This is going to destroy my father. I have to know for certain, because if it’s her-”

“It’s her, Dorse. Accept it.”

“…if it’s her, where’s she been all these years? What the hell happened to her? Was she a runaway? And if so, why? The Randall family was very respectable. Father was a minister, mother a schoolteacher. This kid came from a good background, Decker. Why would she have run?”

“Let someone else find that out. Kids from good homes run away every day, you know that. Just leave it in Andy’s hands and stay out of it.”

I can’t, was again on the tip of her tongue. Instead, she said, “Okay. Thanks a lot. For giving us the heads up. I-and my dad-appreciate it.”

Decker sighed, as if he knew his advice would be ignored the second he hung up the phone.

“Give your dad my best. And if there’s anything I can do…”

“Appreciated. Thanks again.”

She disconnected the call and walked to the end of the driveway, but her father was nowhere in sight. He’d be a while working this one out, she knew. She went inside and found a cold bottle of water in the refrigerator. She took several long deep swigs and returned to her perch on the back porch. She sat with her knees apart, swinging the bottle around by the neck in a mindless circle.

She tapped the phone against the palm of her left hand, then opened it again and dialed.

Grateful for once to be connected to voice mail, she left a brief, to-the-point message for her boss.

“Sorry I missed you, but I need to take some time off. I’m sure you can figure out why. I’ll take whatever personal days I have coming and however many vacation days I have left. Talk to you soon.”

She forced from her mind the open cases she’d left on her desk. They could be reassigned, she rationalized, but there’s no one else to do this for Pop. She reached for her phone one more time. She dialed the number she’d memorized weeks ago while she’d been trying to get her nerve up to call to ask if there was an opening. When the call was answered, she cleared her throat before speaking.

“This is Special Agent Dorsey Collins. I’d like to speak with John Mancini…”