Gone, Baby, Gone (Kenzie & Gennaro 4)

“Fuck you,” she said, with a steel chill in her voice. She pulled her arms out of my hands and wiped the tears violently off her face. “Don’t give me that you-saw-her-and-she-looked-sad shit. Where’d you see her, Patrick? In a bar, wasn’t it? Fuck you and this ‘people learn’ bullshit. People don’t learn. People don’t change.”

She turned away from us, to fish in her bag for her cigarettes.

“It isn’t our right to judge,” I said. “It’s not—”

“Then whose right is it?” Angie said.

“Not theirs.” I pointed through the trees at the house. “Those people have chosen to judge certain people on whether they’re fit to raise children. Who gives Doyle the right to make that decision? What if he meets a kid and doesn’t like the religion he’s being raised in? What if he doesn’t like parents who are gay or black or have tattoos? Huh?”

A squall of icy anger darkened her face. “We’re not talking about that, and you know it. We’re talking about this particular case and this particular child. Don’t give me all that pampered classroom philosophizing the Jesuits taught you. You don’t have the balls to do what’s right, Patrick. None of you do. It’s that simple. You don’t have the balls.”

Oscar looked up into the trees. “Maybe we don’t.”

“Go,” she said. “Go arrest them. But I won’t watch you.” She lit the cigarette, and her back stiffened against her crutches. She placed the cigarette between her fingers and curled her hands around the grips of her crutches.

“I’ll hate all three of you for this.”

She swung the crutches forward, and we watched her back as she carried herself through the woods toward the car.

In all the time I’ve been a private detective, nothing has ever been quite so ugly or exhausting as the time I spent watching Oscar and Devin arrest Jack and Tricia Doyle in the kitchen of their home.

Jack didn’t even put up a fight. He sat in the chair by the kitchen table, shaking. He wept, and Tricia scratched at Oscar as he pulled Amanda from her arms, and Amanda screamed and batted Oscar with her fists and cried, “No, Grandma! No! Don’t let him take me! Don’t let him!”

The sheriff answered Devin’s second call and pulled up the drive a few minutes later. He walked into the kitchen with a confused look on his face as Amanda lay limp in Oscar’s arms and Tricia held Jack’s head to her abdomen, rocked him as he wept.

“Oh, my God,” Tricia Doyle whispered, her eyes open to the end of their life with Amanda, the end of freedom, the end of everything.

“Oh, my God,” she whispered again, and I found myself wondering if He heard her, if He heard Amanda whimper against Oscar’s chest, Devin reading Jack his rights; if He heard anything at all.

EPILOGUE

The Mother and Child Reunion[* *]

The Mother and Child Reunion, as the headline of the News called it the next morning, was transmitted live at 8:05 P.M. EST, on all local channels on the evening of April 7.

Bathed in hot white light, Helene bounded off her front porch, through a stream of reporters, and took Amanda from the arms of the social worker. She let out a yelp and, with tears streaming down her face, she kissed Amanda’s cheeks and forehead, eyes and nose.

Amanda wrapped her arms around her mother’s neck and buried her face in her shoulder, and several neighbors broke out in raucous applause. Helene looked up at the sound, confused. Then she smiled with a demure shyness, blinked into the lights, rubbed her daughter’s back, and the smile grew broader.

Bubba stood in the living room in front of my TV and looked over at me.

“Everything’s all right, then,” he said. “Right?”

I nodded at the TV. “Sure seems like it.”

He turned his head as Angie hopped down the hallway with another box, placed it on the stack just outside the front door, and hopped back into the bedroom.

“So why’s she leaving?”

I shrugged. “Ask her.”

“I did. She won’t tell me.”

I gave him another shrug. I didn’t trust myself to speak.

“Hey, man,” he said, “I don’t feel good helping the woman move. You know? But she asked me.”

“It’s okay, Bubba. It’s okay.”

On TV, Helene told a reporter she considered herself the luckiest woman in the world.

Bubba shook his head and left the room, picked up the stack of boxes in the doorway, and trudged down the stairs with them.

I leaned in the bedroom doorway, watched Angie pull shirts from the closet, toss them on the bed.

“You going to be okay?” I said.

She reached up, grabbed a stack of hangers by the necks. “Be fine.”

“I think we should talk about this.”

She smoothed wrinkles from the top shirt in the stack. “We did talk about it. In the woods. I’m talked out.”

“I’m not.”

She unzipped a garment bag, lifted the pile of shirts and slid them inside, zipped the bag.

“I’m not,” I repeated.

She said, “Some of these hangers are yours. I’ll get them back to you.”

She reached for her crutches and swung toward me.

I stayed where I was, blocking the doorway.

She lowered her head, looked at the floor. “You going to stand there forever?”

“I don’t know. You tell me.”

“I’m just wondering whether I should put the crutches down or not. After a while, my arms get numb if I’m not moving.”

I stepped aside and she moved through the doorway, met Bubba as he came back up the stairs.

“There’s a bag on the bed,” she said. “That’s the last of it.”

She swung out to the stairs and I heard her clack the crutches together, hold them in one hand, while she held the banister in the other and hopped down the stairs.

Bubba picked the garment bag up off the bed.

“Man,” he said, “what did you do to her?”

I thought of Amanda lying on the porch bench in Tricia Doyle’s arms, the Afghan pulled around them against the chill, the two of them talking quietly, intimately.

“Broke her heart,” I said.

Over the weeks that followed, Jack Doyle, his wife, Tricia, and Lionel McCready were all indicted by a federal grand jury on charges of kidnapping, forced incarceration of a minor, child endangerment, and gross child negligence. Jack Doyle was also indicted in the murders of Christopher Mullen and Pharaoh Gutierriez and in the attempted murders of Lionel McCready and Federal Agent Neal Ryerson.