Pine began, “Let’s look at this logically. Either Ito killed Mercy…” She paused, stiffening at her own words, and clenched her hands for an instant before relaxing and turning to Blum. “Or he abandoned her somewhere.”
“Or he gave her to someone,” added Blum.
Pine looked startled by Blum’s suggestion but quickly moved on. “Now, Mercy’s DNA is in a database at the FBI. Samples of all unidentified remains discovered anywhere in the U.S. are sent to that database for comparison checks. None have turned up that matched Mercy’s. I know that for a fact.”
“Was that your doing?” asked Blum.
“Yes.”
“What did you give them for Mercy’s DNA sample?”
“I’m her twin, Carol. I gave them a sample of my DNA. They put it in the database.”
“Of course, that was stupid of me. But that’s good news, then. No remains have matched her DNA.”
“Yes. But her remains might not have been found yet. And we can’t be sure that every agency across the country sends samples into the database. I’m sure some of them don’t, or a processing mistake was made. Or maybe she was taken out of the country and killed there.”
“Still, the odds are with you on that.”
“Now, if he had abandoned her, you would think someone would have found her, either dead or alive. She might have died from exposure or from animal attacks if she was left in some wooded terrain, which they have a lot of in rural Georgia. She could have starved to death or died from an accident.”
“But if so, you would think her remains would have been found by now.”
“Bodies out in the elements tend to disappear fast, Carol. Natural decomp, animal intrusion, if she fell into a river and got lodged on something at the bottom, lots of factors.”
Pine suddenly looked like she might be ill.
Blum said quickly, “But once more you have to look at the odds. And unless Ito had checked out a place beforehand to leave her, I doubt a guy from Trenton, New Jersey, and who had probably never been to Georgia, knew very much about places to abandon or get rid of her down there.”
“Well, according to what we found out while we were in Andersonville, he was in Georgia for a few months at the very least.”
“So are you leaning towards her having been abandoned?”
Pine rubbed her head and looked uncertainly at her friend. “That wouldn’t dovetail with the letter we read from Bruno. He was clearly pissed. He wanted revenge.”
Now Blum looked uncertain. “The only thing that cuts against that is everything we’ve learned about Ito thus far. It takes a lot to kill someone. It takes a lot more to kill a defenseless child.”
“He could have been driven to it by his love for his brother. By what happened to him.”
“May I play devil’s advocate?” said Blum.
“Please do.”
“How do we know that Ito loved Bruno? We’ve found no evidence of that.”
“Well, he went down to Georgia and took my sister and nearly killed me and then accused my father of the crimes.”
“Okay, let’s assume that is true. But the life he led before was polar opposite to his brother’s. And remember what Castor told us. He knew Bruno was a bad guy.”
“But he said he learned that from Evie, not Ito.”
“And you don’t think husband and wife were in agreement on that? I think they clearly were, from what we’ve learned.”
Pine thought about this for a moment. “Castor also told us that he never met Bruno.”
“That’s right. He worked for Ito all those years. Was with him every day all day, and Ito’s brother, who presumably lived in the area, or at least in New York City, never came by for a visit?”
Pine said, “And Evie’s neighbor didn’t like Bruno, either. And she said Evie hated him. Wouldn’t allow him in the house. And Ito didn’t object to that. The neighbor said Ito didn’t like Bruno.”
“Exactly my point.”
“Then why go down to Georgia at all and do what he did?” said a puzzled Pine.
“It might come down to what we read in the letter. It didn’t say much, but it did tell us that Bruno had maybe tried to do the decent thing for once in his life—not turn in a mole that was going after the Mafia families—and he ended up getting screwed. Maybe that just snapped something inside Ito. That sounds more plausible than trying to make Ito some cold-blooded killer on a rampage. Because that does not square with what everyone has told us about him.”
Pine sat back and pondered all of this. “I checked the police records. Before Ito came down to Georgia, Teddy was charged with grand theft auto and got prison time.”
“So Ito perhaps had in his mind that Teddy was going down the same path that Bruno had?”
Pine said, “It’s possible. And that might have fueled his fire to do what he did. Remember what he told Castor, that he’d done something that ‘shocked him.’”
“So it was a confused and perhaps conflicted man who came down to Georgia, then?”
“I can’t feel sympathy for him, Carol. Never.”
“I’m not asking you to. But we need to understand the man at that moment in time because it will help us better arrive at what he might have done with your sister.”
Pine’s expression became agitated. “To finish our line of reasoning, if he didn’t kill her or abandon her, he might have given her to someone, like you suggested.”
“Human trafficking, then?”
“No, to take a page from your book, in coming to understand the man, I doubt Ito knew anything at all about human trafficking. Now, his brother might have, but he was dead by then. And I don’t see Ito gabbing it up with the dregs of the organized crime family his brother once worked for in order to get input on where to sell little kids.”
Blum said, “But if he gave her to, say, a family, wouldn’t Mercy just tell the family who she was and that she had been kidnapped? The account of what happened I’m sure made the press all over Georgia, if not the country. Her picture was probably everywhere. They either would have taken her in and then called the police, or just called the police right off the bat when Ito came by with her.” She hesitated and then plunged on. “So maybe Ito gave her to someone by prearrangement.”
“We just discussed that—human trafficking.”
“No, not human trafficking. Just a family perhaps in desperate need of a child.”
Pine looked at her. “What? But they would know—”
“They would know only what Ito told them. He could have lied about her background, how he came to have her. Maybe they thought they were doing good by taking her in.”
“But wouldn’t Mercy have rebelled at that? Told them who she was, what had happened to her, just like you said, Carol? Now you’re arguing against your own position.”
“No, I’m just trying to look at it from different perspectives. Now, even a precocious six-year-old can be made to believe and accept things that no adult ever would,” said Blum. “We don’t know what Ito told her. That her life could depend on her accepting her conditions. Or he could have threatened harm to you or her parents if she didn’t do as she was told.”