Christy would be six years old now. She would be excited about starting first grade, and we would be shopping for number-two yellow pencils, crayons, scissors, and Elmer’s glue. We would be debating which backpack to buy, whether it should have cartoon characters on it or be more plain and grown-up. We would be getting school clothes ready and making sure her vaccinations were current.
Todd would be thirty-five. Maybe he would have decided to work toward making lieutenant with the sheriff’s department, maybe he would have been happy to stay a sergeant. I was now the age Todd was when he died. He will stay thirty-two while I grow older. He and Christy are like astronauts who stop aging when they leave earth’s gravity. Perhaps death is actually a different kind of space travel, leaving behind one’s body sleeve and moving into another space-time dimension in which there is no such thing as age or death. Or maybe they have moved into another dimension in which they continue to grow and have different lives. Who knows what happens after death? All I knew was that they weren’t in my world any longer and never would be.
I put the photograph down and picked up Tickle Me Elmo. I hugged him tight to my chest and kissed the red fur on his head. I carried him down the hall and put him inside a clean pillowcase and laid him on the top shelf of my linen closet. Then I closed the door.
The air was charged, continuously vibrating with massive air quakes. The wind had picked up, moaning and shrieking with primeval urgency. It was the kind of storm that floods canals and swimming pools, topples ornamental trees, and spawns tornadoes. I raised the metal shutters and peered through the French doors. The sky was purple as a bad bruise. Down on the shore, rolls of dark bulimic swells were vomiting strings of seaweed.
I opened the doors and stepped outside. The wind was so strong that horizontal rain slammed under the porch overhang and drenched me. I leaned over the railing and let the wind whip my hair around my face, let it offer my mind escape from its jail. After a while I went downstairs and slogged through wet sand and quivering thunder to the shore. Bracing against the howling wind, I faced the sea and raised my arms, spread-eagled to take the rain’s hardest force.
Then I looked directly into the great maw of churning sea and raging wind and gave it back my own sound: my fury and hatred, my despair and hopelessness, the rage and heartbreak trapped inside since Todd and Christy died. Howled it from my toes and guts and lungs and heart. Howled like women have howled since the beginning of time and maybe before, sending a woman’s demand to the ends of the universe to bring it into balance.
I don’t know how long I stood raging into that dark storm, but long enough. When I was empty, I felt a door closing with a gentle click somewhere in my brain, while another door opened. Part of me wanted to put them back the way they’d been, another part of me knew that would be an act of cowardice. My husband and my child were dead, my capacity for love was not. Staying in the safe darkness of memory and yearning is easy. Going forward to the light of possibility takes courage.
As I trudged back through the downpour, I saw Michael’s silhouette in his bedroom window and knew he had been keeping watch.
I left my sodden clothes in a heap on the porch floor and went inside and took a long warm shower. Then I crawled into bed and slept deeply and dreamlessly for the first time in three years.
24
The sky was pale and washed clear when I backed out of the carport next morning, and the air had a clean salty taste. A few early cranes were gathering goodies washed in on the tide, and songbirds were beginning to practice scales. If it hadn’t been for the sure and certain knowledge that a killer was out to get me, I would have felt downright contented.
Billy Elliot was waiting for me in Tom’s dark apartment, and he and I went downstairs and ran hard for thirty minutes around the parking lot. Nobody tried to run me down. Nobody jumped out and shot a poisoned dart at me.
So far, so good.
When we got upstairs, lights were on in Tom’s apartment. I could smell coffee brewing and hear the TV. I knelt to unclip Billy Elliot’s leash from his collar, and heard a newscaster’s voice say Leo Brossi’s name.
I yelled, “Tom? Okay if I come in?”
He rolled himself into the hall from the kitchen. “Of course. Want some coffee?”
“Did I just hear something about Leo Brossi?”
“Yeah, come watch.”
He zipped back into the kitchen and I trotted after him in time to see a live scene of several handcuffed men being herded into a police van. The announcer’s voice sounded young and excited, repeating several times that the men were charged with operating a massive racketeering, bribery, and money-laundering scheme headquartered at All-Call. He said the operation was far-reaching, involving more than the few men currently under arrest, and that it had been cracked through the combined efforts of federal and county law-enforcement officers. Leo Brossi’s attorney had already issued a statement saying Brossi was completely innocent, and if any unlawful operation had been going on at his call center it had been without his knowledge.
I scanned the television screen for a glimpse of Paco, but he wasn’t there. He had probably melted away the moment the arrests began.
I said, “Have they mentioned identity theft?”
“This is a lot bigger than identity theft. Sounds like they were laundering drug money. Moving it in and out of shell accounts.”
The TV station broke for a commercial, and Tom muted the sound.
I said, “I don’t understand how money laundering works. I mean, I know it starts out dirty and comes out clean, but I’m fuzzy about what happens in between.”
“Okay, say you’re a drug trafficker, and you’ve just sold some cocaine for a hundred thousand dollars. Drug sales are always in cash, and banks report cash deposits of more than ten thousand dollars, so you need to get the cash converted. There are several ways to do that. You can pay cash for things like antiques or gold or motorcycles or classic cars, and sell them to people who pay you with a cashier’s check or a money order. You can go to your neighborhood Wal-Mart and pay cash for a bunch of TVs and VCRs and CD players and then sell them on eBay. A more fun way is to go to a casino, buy a hundred thousand dollars’ worth of chips, gamble for an hour or two, and then cash in your chips. The casino will pay you with a cashier’s check as if you were a big winner. Your drug money has now been laundered, and you can deposit it in a bank.”
“But those guys at All-Call weren’t buying and selling things.”
“Say instead of a hundred thousand, your cocaine sold for a million, and say you get that much cash every week. You don’t have time to go through all the rigmarole of the small-time dealer. So you find a friendly banker or savings-and-loan officer who will take your cash deposits without reporting them to the government. Pay the friendly banker a nice bribe, a million here, a million there, and your money becomes nice and clean.”
I thought about the banker playing golf with Denton Ferrelli and Leo Brossi when Conrad was killed. Had he been getting bribes?
Tom said, “Now here’s where the people at All-Call come in. Once you have the cash in a bank account, you can make wire transfers to accounts in offshore banks. With just a few strokes on a computer keyboard you can move currency around the world with complete anonymity. Move it often enough, and the tracks become so crisscrossed that nobody can trace them.”
“Telemarketing firms have computers that can do that?”
“Are you kidding? For every ten people put in jail for money laundering, five of them are probably telemarketers.”
“Hunh.”