She says something about a ransom. She says that it has something to do with James.
I’ve stepped into the family room, where I can listen. At the mention of James’s name, Gabe stands heatedly from the futon and begins to pace the room. “I knew it,” he says over and over again. I watch my baby sitting on the futon and think that her father had the ability to protect her from this. I leave the apartment, finding solace in the freezing winter day. Gabe watches me leave, knowing he cannot console us all at once.
When she goes to bed at night, I hear her toss and turn. I hear her cry and call his name. I stand outside her bedroom door, wanting to make it go away, but knowing I cannot. Gabe says that there isn’t anything I can do. Just be there for her, he says.
She says she could drown herself in the bathtub.
She could slice an artery with a kitchen knife.
She could stick her head into the stove.
She could jump from the fire escape.
She could walk onto the “L” platform at night.
Gabe
After
I get a warrant and conduct a search of the judge’s chambers. He’s beside himself. The sergeant comes along and tries to smooth things over, but Judge Dennett doesn’t give a crap. He says when we turn up empty-handed, we’re both going to find ourselves out of a job.
But we don’t come up empty-handed. As it turns out, we find three threatening letters hidden among Judge Dennett’s locked, personal files. All ransom demands. The letters say that they have Mia. In return for her release, they demand a shitload of money, or they’ll disclose the fact that Judge Dennett accepted $350,000 in bribes in 2001 for a lenient sentence in a racketeering case. Blackmail.
It takes some time, interviews and my superior detective work, but we’re able to identify key players in the failed ransom plot including Dalmar Osoma, a Somali man who helped carry out the plan. We have a task force assigned to tracking Osoma down.
I’d pat my own back if I could reach that far. But I can’t. I let the sergeant do it for me.
As for Judge Dennett, he’s the one who finds himself out of a job. He’s disbarred. But that’s the least of his concerns. He has evidence tampering and obstruction of justice to think about while he awaits his own trial. An inquest is made into the bribery charges to see if there’s any merit there. I’d bet my life there is. Why else would Judge Dennett sandwich the letters between file folders, never imagining someone would see?
I question him before he’s sent to prison. “You knew,” I say with utter disbelief. “All along. You knew she’d been abducted.”
What kind of man would do that to his own child?
His voice still brims with egotism, but for the first time ever, there’s an ounce of shame mixed in. “At first, no,” he says. He’s in a holding cell at the precinct. Judge Dennett behind bars: an image I’ve dreamed of since our paths first crossed. He sits on the edge of the bed staring at the public toilet, knowing that sooner or later he’ll have to piss in front of us all.
It’s the first time I’m sure Judge Dennett is being sincere.
He says that at first, he was certain Mia was off doing something stupid. It was in her nature. “She’d run off before.” And then the letters began to arrive. He didn’t want anyone to know he was corrupt, that he’d accepted the bribes all those years ago. He would have been disbarred. But, he admits and for a split second, I believe him: he didn’t want anything to happen to Mia. He was going to pay the ransom to free her, but also so they’d shut up. He demanded proof of life; there was none.
“Because,” I say, “they didn’t have her.” Colin Thatcher had her. Colin Thatcher had presumably saved her life.
“I assumed she was dead,” he says.
“And?”
“If she was dead, then no one needed to know what I’d done,” he admits with a modesty I never ever expected from Judge Dennett.
Modesty and remorse? Was he sorry for what he’d done?
I think of all the days that he sat in the same room with Eve, of all the nights he shared the same bed, believing that their daughter was dead.
Eve files for divorce, and when it’s granted, she’ll take half of everything Judge Dennett owns. That’s enough money to buy a new life for her and Mia.
Epilogue
Mia