“Or Cynthia, either,” Amelia says.
“And she had after-hours access to Chapel Square Mall when Charisse was abandoned. We need to find her.”
She nods, typing again, well aware that finding Cynthia might not lead to finding Charisse, or Lily Tucker, if that’s who she became. When Barnes asked the Harrisons if they’d ever heard of anyone by the name, everyone denied it—though Amelia had again detected a hint of anxiety in Jimmy and Regina. She mentions it now, and Barnes shrugs.
“Hard to tell. Like I said, even innocent people get nervous when they’re being questioned.”
“Right, but you’d think Bobby would be the antsy one, considering his history, and he seemed to be telling the truth about—”
“Amelia!” Barnes grabs her arm. “I just remembered something. Bobby said a neighbor called the police the day Delia showed up in Bridgeport.”
“You’re right!”
“We need to look for domestic disturbance records for that Thanksgiving.”
Her fingers fly over the keyboard. Five minutes later, they’ve got a full name and current address and are back in the car, heading east on 95 toward Bridgeport.
Left alone in the suite, Gypsy opens her laptop, pulls up a map of Ithaca, and studies the location.
Coincidence is irrelevant . . .
But had it been a coincidence?
From Manhattan, the town lies in the opposite direction of Block Island, where Gypsy and Perry had been holed up at a dive motel. Red was supposed to complete the mission and return—although by then, of course, they’d have been gone. Perry, with his sadistic sense of humor, had gotten a kick out of imagining that little scenario—Red, triumphant after ridding the world of false prophets, returning to rejoin the chosen few . . .
“But sorry, you aren’t one of us,” he’d said in mock disappointment after Red left the Sandy Oyster for the last time. “See you in paradise. Oh, wait . . .”
Gypsy, too, had laughed. Not because she found it amusing, but because she needed Perry and his money as much as she needed Red. Both would be dispensable once she got what she wanted.
Maybe Red had figured that out.
Ithaca sits at the foot of Cayuga Lake in central New York State. It’s not on any well-traveled major highway a person would follow directly out of New York City if they were heading, say, to the Canadian border after committing the last of five murders in a twenty-four-hour spree. It must have been a deliberate destination. Why?
She closes the map, thinking about Red’s final New York encounter with Bernadette DiMeo.
Gypsy had never doubted the public consensus that her pregnancy had been terminated or more likely, miscarried. She was a devout Catholic who’d attended daily mass until the day she died.
But what if she’d revealed to Red, in her last moments on earth, that she’d carried Oran’s child to term after all, and the child, now grown, is still in Ithaca?
Gypsy pulls up a series of photos printed in the Daily News during Oran’s trial. All four of his teenaged rape victims had testified. Three of the girls—Margaret Costello, Tara Sheeran, and Christina Myers—were visibly pregnant that autumn. Even in December, though, Bernadette DiMeo was fashionably—for that era—emaciated.
Gypsy remembers how the girls at school—especially Carol-Ann Ellis—had idolized Twiggy.
This isn’t about Carol-Ann, though.
Bernadette . . .
Gypsy focuses on the photo. There’s no way a girl as skinny as Bernadette had been that winter was six months pregnant.
It doesn’t mean that a misguided, drug-fueled Red hadn’t gone to Bernadette’s former college town looking for a grown child who’d never been born. But what if there’d been some other motivation?
Opening a new search engine, she types Brooklyn Butcher Copycat Murders, 10/23/87–10/24/87 and Ithaca, bringing up accounts of the murder spree. She magnifies the screen and studies the facts.
Red had been a young child when the original murders had taken place and was later determined to have had no ties to Oran Matthews and acted alone. Case closed for the police, and for the press.
Not for the mastermind behind it.
“What am I missing, Red? Why did you go to Ithaca that night?”
Put yourself in Red’s shoes. Why drive two hundred miles to a place that isn’t on the way to any conceivable destination?
With police closing in, Red fled Manhattan in a stolen car, got as far as Ithaca, broke into a house, and died after a brief scuffle with the residents. As minors, their identities were kept out of the news.
In article after article, Gypsy finds the same information, until she comes across a speculative gold mine in the comments section of a popular true crime website.
Even postmortem, Oran’s had his share of Brooklyn Butcher-obsessed devotees. These people know more about him, and about Red, than Gypsy ever knew, or cares to, and their posts contain well-informed theories regarding unsolved elements of either crime.
One yields a compelling fact.
Red’s final showdown and demise occurred in a house located directly next door to famed Cornell molecular biologist Silas Moss, who’d appeared on national television the night before. The general consensus among true crime buffs: the Moss home had been the true destination, and Red had simply gotten the address wrong.
Gypsy skims the commentary.
What do you expect from someone about to kick from methamphetamine OD?
Been there, done that, lived to tell about it, and couldn’t have found my way out of a damned bathroom stall.
The dealer should be held accountable for the OD and the murder spree.
Gypsy and Perry had warned Red not to take too much, that it might result in a reckless mistake.
“We didn’t expect it to kill you, though,” she whispers, shaking her head with regret—if only because the truth had died with that moronic, dispensable loser.
Gypsy’s search for Silas Moss yields a trove of information on a distinguished career. It makes sense that Red heard about the professor’s pioneering work reconnecting biological families and thought he might somehow be enlisted to turn up Margaret Costello’s missing daughter via DNA.
DNA that Oran—and thus, Gypsy—would share.
Uneasiness creeps in as she skims the transcript of Barbara Walters’s interview with Silas Moss, aired Friday, October 23, 1987.
DNA is a distinctly patterned chain of genetic material found in every cell of every living organism . . .
Our blood relatives will have similar markers, sharing ancestral origin, physical traits, predisposition to certain diseases . . .
The information, revolutionary at the time, isn’t news now—not even to Gypsy. Not scientifically.
Psychologically, it strikes like an ominous wartime bulletin.
Blood relatives . . .
Every cell . . .
“Oh! I’m sorry!”
Startled by a voice, Gypsy whirls to see a woman wearing a hotel maid’s uniform. She’s a blue-eyed blonde, middle-aged. The door to the hall is propped open, a cleaning cart framed beyond it.
“Housekeeping—I knocked, but you didn’t—”
“There’s a Do Not Disturb!”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t see . . .” She turns to look. “There is no Do Not Disturb.”