Dead Silence Read online

  “I sure hope so, Harvey.”

  “Guess the NYPD’s handing out big fat raises to the Missing Persons Squad these days.”

  “Nah, I’ve just got friends in high places.”

  They don’t come much higher than Rob Owens, founder and CEO of Rucker Park Records. He’s perched in the backseat, wearing a snap brim Panama hat and pink guayabera shirt. Barnes is surprised to spot a familiar passenger slumped beside him. No tropical resort clothing on Rob’s son, though—just the usual dark jeans, tee shirt, and sneakers. His eyes, like his dad’s, are masked by designer sunglasses.

  “Hey, Kurtis!”

  He removes one earbud. “Hey, Uncle Stockton.”

  “I didn’t know you were coming with us.”

  “Neither did I.”

  “Last-minute birthday surprise,” Rob says.

  “Not my birthday for a few more weeks.”

  Don’t I know it. Barnes thinks of his own daughter, born the same day as Kurtis: October 24, 1987.

  “Never too early to celebrate a birthday,” Rob says.

  No. Only too late.

  Barnes’s daughter, too, will be turning twenty-nine. Does she also dress in head-to-toe black? Does she, like Kurtis, spend more time looking at her cell phone than at people? Is she more interested in texting than talking, and perpetually wearing earbuds? Does she, too, resent her father? Not, like Kurtis, for what he’s done, but for what he hasn’t.

  “Good morning, Detective Barnes.” The silver-haired driver steps out to open the door and stash his suitcase in the trunk. His clipped British accent is intact, but he’s replaced his usual dark suit with a fedora and open-collared cabana shirt that matches the splashy shade of the car.

  “Flying to Havana with us, Smitty?”

  “I’m afraid not, sir.”

  “I invited him, but his lady friend didn’t go for that idea, right, Smitty?” Rob says around the cigar clenched in his mouth.

  “No, sir, she did not.” Smitty’s lady friend is the formidable housekeeper at Rob’s palatial Bergen County house.

  Barnes says goodbye to his neighbors as Smitty slips back behind the wheel and they’re off to the airport, bongo-punctuated salsa blasting from the speakers. They’re flying to Cuba—a major bucket list item for Barnes, whose abuela emigrated from there back in the fifties.

  “Did you buy this car?” he asks Rob, leaning back into soft leather.

  “Nah, borrowed it from a friend.”

  Rob is no name-dropper, but in his world, the friend is likely a household name.

  Traffic is heavy, even up here in Washington Heights. Smitty navigates 177th Street, entering the West Side Highway just south of the George Washington Bridge.

  Glancing over his shoulder at the span, Barnes thinks of that pivotal October when he’d started his job as a detective with the Missing Persons Squad. Three days in, he’d had a near-miss with a stray bullet. A couple of weeks later, hedge fund tycoon Perry Wayland had disappeared in the wake of a catastrophic stock market crash he’d seen coming. Before the month was out, Barnes had worked that case, cared for a terminally ill friend, lost another to violent crime, and made a choice that’s haunted him ever since.

  Oh, and he’d met Rob at a Brooklyn hospital where they were both pacing, fatherhood imminent. Two babies and two days later, Barnes had held his little girl for the first—and last—time.

  Yeah. Tough month, October.

  Rob had caught Barnes in an emotional moment in the men’s room after he’d left his newborn daughter in the nursery, certain he’d never see her again. He’d been right, and wrong about Rob, about whom he’d thought the same thing. His friend had later tracked him down and has been family ever since.

  “Want a Cuban?” Rob asks.

  “Sandwich or cigar?”

  “Cigar, unless . . . maybe we have time to stop at Victor’s on the way. I could go for some ropa vieja myself.”

  “Thought you were on a diet.”

  “Not a diet, Barnes. A fitness plan. It’s about living an active lifestyle, physical wellness, making healthy choices—”

  “Smoking?” The comment comes from Kurtis, who has plucked an earbud from his ear. “Yeah, that’s healthy.”

  “So you can hear me when you want to.” Rob shakes his head. “A cigar once in a while never hurt anyone.”

  “You got statistics to back that up? Because I know you like your statistics when it comes to this stuff.”

  “Yeah, well, this is nothing like what you’ve been smoking, son.”

  “Tell me you never smoked weed.”

  Ignoring that, Rob turns back to Barnes. “So you’re hungry? Because I am hungry.”

  “I could eat.”

  “What do you say, Smitty? Do we have time to grab some takeout from Victor’s?”

  “Unfortunately, sir, we must make haste to the airport if you’re to board your flight on time.”

  “Sorry, Barnes,” Rob says. “Must make haste. You’ll have to settle for a Cuban cigar. Unless you gave up these when you gave up the cigarettes?”

  “Just cigarettes.” It’s been three years now since he kicked the habit, but not a stressful day goes by that he doesn’t reach for the pack.

  Rob hands him a fragrant Cohiba, along with a silver Puiforcat cutter and small box of wooden matches imprinted with the name of a downscale midtown pub.

  Typical incongruity. Barnes has seen him wear a Burberry scarf over a Champion tee shirt while eating Popeyes fried chicken from nineteenth-century Limoges porcelain. And though he’s flown with Rob on many a private plane, today, his friend informs him, they’re on JetBlue, the first US commercial airline to schedule regular flights to Cuba now that diplomatic relations have been restored.

  Kurtis looks up in dismay. “No first class on JetBlue. We’re flying in coach?”

  “Don’t worry. We’ve got extra-legroom seats.”

  “Yippee.”

  “You’re spoiled, son.”

  Kurtis shrugs. “Then you’re the one who spoiled me.”

  “No, that was your mother. Though I will admit, I do like to spoil that woman. Mmm-mmm-mmm.” Rob shakes his head behind a screen of cigar smoke. “That reminds me, I need to call her and say goodbye.”

  “You said goodbye at the house.”

  “Not the right kind of goodbye. I was in a hurry, and she was late for yoga. I forgot to tell her a few things.”

  Seeing the set to his son’s mouth, Barnes wants to tell him how lucky he is to have two parents who are alive and well and crazy about each other. Instead, as Rob dials, he asks Kurtis how work is going.

  “It isn’t.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “That place wasn’t for me.”

  Barnes puffs his cigar. “Not the right company?”

  “Not the right industry.”

  “Advertising?”

  “That was last year. This was publishing.”

  “Didn’t like that, either, huh?”

  “Nope.” He lounges back against the car seat, eyes closed.

  “Hey, babe, guess you’re still in class,” Rob says into his phone. “Just wanted to say I love you. Because I forgot.”

  “You didn’t forget,” Kurtis mutters without opening his eyes.

  Rob disconnects his call and looks at his son. “And you didn’t give it a chance.”

  “What?”

  “The job.”

  “I was there six months.”

  “Exactly. You were there six months. Tell him, Barnes.”

  “You were there six months?”

  “Yeah, I got that.”

  “What Uncle Stockton means is, you can’t learn anything about anything in six months. You have got to have patience. Give things time, son. Don’t just bounce from one thing to the next. That’s no way to live. Make a commitment, see it through. Right, Stockton?”

  Barnes thinks of his brief failed marriage to a fellow cop, and the string of women in his past. And present. Future, too, mos
t likely. Not to mention the daughter who’s a stranger. And Detective Sullivan Leary, his longtime partner and confidante, with whom he’s all but lost touch since she left the force and New York in August.

  But this isn’t about relationships, is it? It’s about work. And Barnes’s devotion to the job has been steadfast all the way back to his days in the academy . . . with one blip.

  He sighs a gust of cigar smoke and stares out the window at the Hudson River beyond the West Side Highway.

  October 1987.

  Damn. What he wouldn’t give for a do-over.

  Rob is lecturing Kurtis. Six years have passed since his son entered the business world with an Ivy League degree and a fierce determination to make his way without his father’s help. Early on, Barnes had admired Kurtis for avoiding the career path of least resistance. Now he wonders whether he really is more lazy than noble, as Rob sees it.

  “Listen up, son. If you don’t want to be like me, then be like your uncle Stockton. He’s the most positive role model you could ask for.”

  “Me?” Barnes forces a laugh.

  Rob doesn’t know about the misdeed that’s haunted him for almost thirty years.

  Misdeed?

  It was a crime. You know it now, and you knew it then.

  Amelia stares at the ring she’d lost nearly thirty years ago, on the worst night of her life.

  She’d last seen it in Harlem’s Morningside Memorial Hospital, where she had discovered, in the midst of a sorrowful deathbed vigil, that the dying woman, Bettina Crenshaw, was not her biological mother. She closes her eyes, thoughts spinning.

  “Are you okay?”

  Lily Tucker’s voice breaks through.

  “No . . . Yes . . . I mean, I’m fine. I just . . .” She opens her eyes. “I got a little dizzy there for a minute. Low blood sugar, I guess. Happens when I skip breakfast.”

  Lily nods, but Amelia sees something unsettling in her expression—a flicker of mistrust, maybe? Does she smell a lie?

  Amelia forces herself to look again at the ring. She doesn’t dare take it out of the box, afraid that she’ll burst into tears if she touches it. “This is exquisite. So unusual. Can you tell me about it?”

  “I had it on the day I was found.”

  So had Amelia, according to her father’s account.

  She clears her throat. “Weren’t you a toddler? It’s so small . . . a baby ring, isn’t it?”

  “Well, yeah, I don’t mean I was wearing it on my finger, because obviously it would be too small. It was on a chain, just like yours.”

  She gasps. “How did you know—”

  “Uh . . . what?” Lily points at her neck.

  She reaches up to touch her original wedding band dangling from a delicate gold strand. She’d forgotten all about it.

  “Sorry, I . . . Man, I really do need to eat something. Get the blood sugar back up, you know?” She shoves the lid back on the ring box and thrusts it into Lily’s hands.

  Then she walks to her desk on shaky legs and opens a drawer where she stashes protein bars for days when she doesn’t have time for lunch. Composing herself, she feigns a hunt through the drawer before she grabs a couple of bars. “Do you want one? I have . . . let’s see, there’s chocolate peanut and oat crunch.”

  Lily doesn’t want one.

  Neither does Amelia, but she tears the wrapper from the chocolate one and forces a dusty bite down her dry throat.

  Should she tell her?

  How can you not?

  But how can you?

  Lily has come here for help finding her roots. If they’re entangled with Amelia’s, the truth will likely emerge in the investigation. If it doesn’t, Amelia can consider telling her about the connection then. She cannot, however, drop the staggering bombshell in the first ten minutes of the young woman’s first appointment. Lily would be overwhelmed. She might leave, and never come back.

  The news can wait.

  She tosses the half-eaten protein bar into the garbage can and sits on the couch again. “So you were wearing the ring on a chain when you were found. Do you know anything else about it?”

  “I don’t know anything about anything. That’s why I’m here.”

  Pretending she’s any other client, Amelia gives Lily an overview of her ever-evolving search methods.

  “You can’t imagine how many libraries and hospitals and courthouses I’ve visited—especially back when I first started looking. Microfiche was as high-tech as it got.”

  “You mean Microsoft?”

  “No, microfiche.” Lucky Lily, spared all those dusty hours she herself had spent hunched over yellowed archives in fluorescent-lit rooms, searching for clues to her past. “Strips of film that had tiny images of documents like newspaper pages. You had to scroll through them manually on magnifying readers. This was way before the internet and online databases and social media.”

  “You use social media?”

  “All the time. Facebook is one of my most valuable resources. Are you on it?”

  “Yeah, but . . . not often.”

  Noting her guarded expression, Amelia guesses what she’s thinking. Younger generations had thought Facebook was cool about a decade ago, but changed their minds as it caught on with the older population.

  “Grandma sent me a friend request,” she’d overheard one of her nieces telling an older cousin a few Christmases ago.

  “No! Don’t accept it!”

  “Too late. And now she keeps, like, commenting on everything I post.”

  “Girl, you need to block her.”

  Amelia tells Lily that more than two-thirds of Americans are on Facebook. “The more people who join, the better chance I have of making important connections. It’s the same with the genetic DNA databases. Are you familiar with those?”

  “You mean like Ancestry, 23andMe, Lost and Foundlings . . . ?”

  She nods, pleased that Lily mentioned the last one. Silas Moss had established Lost and Foundlings back in the 1980s, part of a pioneering autosomal DNA research project aimed toward reuniting adoptees with their biological mothers. Si’s mission to help Amelia find her birth parents had never come to fruition, but she’d worked part-time in his molecular biology lab throughout her college years in Ithaca. If Aaron hadn’t come along, she’d probably still be there.

  Lily shifts her weight. “Wait—you’re going to put my DNA into those sites and see if I get any matches?”

  “That’s part of what I do, yes.”

  “Do I have to? Because I heard that they do all kinds of freaky sh—stuff with it. They’re making human clones from the samples.”

  It’s not the first time a client has brought up that well-traveled conspiracy theory. As always, Amelia acknowledges and respects the privacy concerns but does her best to debunk the myths, reassuring Lily that she only works with reputable companies and that laws regulate how the DNA can be used.

  Still, she seems wary.

  “I get it,” Amelia says. “I do. But foundlings don’t have much choice. Without DNA testing, it might be impossible to find out where you came from.”

  She continues the spiel she gives all her clients, struggling to keep her voice steady.

  “Genetic genealogy has taken off over the last few years. Last Christmas quite a few companies offered bargains on autosomal DNA testing kits, and now we’re really starting to reap the rewards. Have you ever tried online dating?”

  “Not really. Why?” Again, the guarded expression as if Amelia is about to urge her to join a matchmaking website.

  “Don’t worry, just an analogy. Say there’s a new dating app with ten or twelve members to start. Your pool of potential matches is going to be extremely limited, right? But the more people who join, the better your chances of making connections. This is the same. Your odds of finding a biological match increase exponentially as these sites build up their databases. And lately, they’ve been growing dramatically every day.”

  “Have you found any matches?”

&nbs
p; “Plenty. There’s a tab on my website about my clients’ success stories, if you want to—”

  “No, I mean, for you. You’ve put your DNA out there, right?”

  “Oh, it’s out there, and it has been for decades.”

  Out there and will inevitably—or so it’s beginning to seem—come back with a match one of these days.

  Amelia clears her throat, trying not to look at the ring box still clasped in Lily’s hands. “Again, we’re not here to talk about my journey. Just know that I understand how it feels to be in your shoes.”

  “Because you’re a foundling, too.”

  “Exactly.”

  “When would we do my DNA?”

  “Next week, if you decide you want to proceed. I’ll give you the information packet and some release forms today. Take it home, look everything over, and let me know if you have any questions. If not, you can scan them and email them back so that I can get this moving on my end.”

  “Can I . . . I mean, I don’t have a scanner. Not right now. I did, but it broke, and I haven’t replaced it yet. Sorry.”

  “Oh, not a big deal. You can just bring the forms to next week’s appointment.”

  “And then what? We’d go to some kind of lab, you said?”

  “Oh, no, not for the test. I do it myself, right here, and then it goes to the lab for analysis.”

  “You do it?” She seems edgy—squeamish, maybe.

  “Don’t worry, it’s just a simple saliva sample. No needles, no blood, nothing like that.”

  “How long does it take?”

  “Less than a minute. You just spit into a little vial, and—”

  “I mean, how long for the results?”

  “Oh—it varies, but typically, six weeks to a couple of months.”

  “Months? So it’s not . . . I mean, I had a test for strep throat last winter and they got the results right there at the clinic before I left.”

  “It’s not the science part of this that takes a long time. It’s the human part. The labs are swamped, and there are only so many technicians and machines. Basically, every new sample goes to the end of a long line. I’m no molecular biologist, but the analysis of autosomal DNA is far more complex than checking a throat swab for the presence of streptococcal bacteria. Did you have it, by the way?”