Matter of Trust Read online

  ‘So, what else is news?’ asked David after a pause, half expecting this was where Chris would advise him of his latest career or personal victory – a fourth child on the way, another political milestone? Maybe even plans for a bigger role in US politics? Chris Kincaid had never been one to rest on his laurels – at least, not with his mother constantly pushing his barrow.

  Instead there was silence, and David heard his old friend take a breath.

  ‘What is it, Chris?’

  ‘It’s probably nothing,’ said Chris who paused again.

  David sat up in his leather office chair, his elbows resting on the overcrowded desk before him, a biro twisting in his fingers, his feet tapping quickly beneath his seat.

  ‘It’s just that . . . Well, I’m a little worried,’ his friend said finally.

  ‘About what?’

  ‘Not about what – about who.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘It’s Marilyn, DC. I . . . I think she’s missing.’

  David stopped with the tapping. He had not heard Chris speak of Marilyn Maloney for a very long time – and the fact that he was mentioning her now, mere moments after his friendly update on Rebecca and Connor and the twins . . .

  ‘How do you know?’ he asked, figuring there was no way to go with this one but straight down the line.

  ‘We’ve . . . we’ve kept in touch.’

  ‘Jesus, Chris,’ David could not help himself.

  ‘I know . . .’ Chris’s voice was now loaded with guilt, regret and perhaps the slightest trace of panic. ‘But she’s an old friend, David, and she’s not had it so good of late.’

  David tried to think of a time when Marilyn Maloney had ever had it good. ‘Were you two . . . ?’

  ‘No!’

  But David was not convinced. ‘How do you know she’s missing?’ he asked after a beat.

  ‘I haven’t been able to raise her. She doesn’t answer her cell or her home phone.’

  ‘When was the last time you spoke to her?’

  ‘Two Saturdays ago – the twelfth. We had coffee.’

  ‘You speak to anyone else who might have seen her?’

  ‘No, but yesterday a couple of my meetings got cancelled so I went around to her apartment in University Heights and ran into the super who . . . well, he told me he was a little worried too, said he hadn’t seen or heard from her since the twelfth either.’

  David registered the fact that Chris knew where Marilyn lived – and that he’d spoken face-to-face with her super. ‘This super say it was common for Marilyn to go AWOL?’ he asked, figuring if Marilyn was still the Marilyn he remembered, the answer to this question was probably going to be yes.

  ‘Yes and no. He said the last time he saw her – which was late on the Saturday night, she’d had a bit to drink so he helped her upstairs to her apartment. Said he was out all day Sunday and then came down with a stomach flu that had him holed up in bed for a week, so . . . he might have missed her. She works at some nightclub in the city, so I called there and asked the manager if she’d been in in the past week, but they said the boss had pulled some of her shifts because she – well, apparently she’d been drinking on the job. After that, given she doesn’t have any family, I didn’t know who else to call.’

  David knew Chris must be worried – given the lengths he’d obviously gone to to track Marilyn down. ‘If she is missing, it’s been twelve days,’ said David counting the days from Saturday the twelfth to today.

  ‘That’s right. Look this may be nothing, David, but Marilyn, well . . . you know how she lived, balancing on that knife’s edge almost willing someone to push her.’

  Despite the distance of years and geography, David knew exactly what his old friend was talking about. Havoc had a habit of following Marilyn Maloney, whether she asked for it or not. ‘I think you should call the police. Get them to get the super to open up her apartment.’

  But there was silence again – and this time it spoke volumes.

  ‘What is this, Chris? You want me to report Marilyn missing?’

  ‘I know how that sounds, DC,’ said Chris with a sigh. ‘But you used to be her friend too and . . . you were always the diplomat in our little group, while me and Mike, we were . . .’

  But David was already shaking his head. It had been a long time since he’d been placed in a situation where he had to dig a hole for Chris Kincaid or Mike Murphy to crawl through, but he had never hesitated back then, so despite the extraordinary nature of this situation, he found his reflexes making the decision for him.

  ‘I know a friend with a friend in Newark PD,’ he said.

  ‘And given my situation,’ said Chris, letting out the slightest of breaths, ‘and given Marilyn and I were just friends, and given she is probably fine, there probably isn’t any reason why you should mention that I . . .’

  For the first time in his life, David felt his stomach turn – just a little – at the sound of his friend’s voice. ‘Leave it with me,’ he said.

  ‘Okay, thanks – and I’m sorry DC, you know, for the all the cloak-and-dagger stuff. You’ll call and let me know, right?’

  ‘Sure,’ said David, and then paused. ‘Give my love to the family,’ he added, unable to help himself.

  But his friend did not hear him; he had already hung up the phone.

  5

  Newark, New Jersey; October, 1983

  The streamers were hung, the punch was spiked and the parquetry floor of Saint Agnes’s Catholic School for Girls performance hall had been so thickly polished that all the boys not wearing rubber soles were slipping like penguins on ice.

  The air was thick, the chaperones alert and Joan Jett was telling everyone just how much she loved rock and roll when Marilyn Maloney strolled up to the somewhat scruffy-looking trio in the far corner and introduced herself the only way she knew how.

  ‘You guys are totally gross,’ she said, and from that instant David found it hard to take his eyes off her – the white-blonde hair, the dark brown eyes and skin so smooth it shone in the reflection of the blinking disco lights above them.

  It was Mike who spoke first – as his two friends knew he would. ‘Well, it’s a shame you feel that way because I was about to offer you fifty per cent in a lifetime investment opportunity.’

  ‘What?’ she said, her nose crinkling in confusion. She shifted her weight to her other foot, her pink taffeta dress hiked up at the waist with a fake leather black studded belt.

  ‘I was gonna ask you if you wanted to go halves in a baby?’ said Mike, his elbow nudging Chris in the ribs as if to say ‘that got her!’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she returned without the slightest hesitation. ‘You see, I’m a good Catholic girl and according to the Bible humans and animals shouldn’t mate.’

  Chris stifled a laugh, prompting Mike to shoot him a look.

  ‘Why aren’t you asking anyone to dance?’ she asked, her eyes now fixed on Chris. ‘I mean, I know this compulsory dance is totally bogus, but everyone else is polite enough to get off their butts and at least look like they’re having a good time.’

  But Chris said nothing, and David realised that he too was a little awestruck by the girl’s beauty.

  ‘You’re the Governor’s son,’ she said then.

  She was right. Chris’s father, Daniel Kincaid, had been elected Governor of New Jersey mere weeks earlier, the last one having resigned following accusations of corruption.

  ‘That’s right,’ Chris managed.

  ‘My dad says your dad is like . . . a total wimp.’

  ‘That’s funny, my mom says that too.’

  There was a pause, until Chris laughed and Marilyn smiled. Her eyes shifted left toward David.

  ‘You’re Sean Cavanaugh’s brother,’ she said – another proclamation of fact.

  David felt his tongue catch mid-swallow. ‘Ah . . . yeah,’ he managed.

  ‘Your brother’s a stud.’ Then, perhaps reading the slight disappointment in David’s eyes, adde
d, ‘I mean, he’s like, totally Matt Dillon while you’re more, I dunno – Rob Lowe.’

  David, who had never been compared with any sort of movie star before, let alone Rob Lowe, had no idea what to say.

  ‘That’s not a put-down, that’s like a pretty major compliment,’ she added, perhaps not knowing how to read David’s silence.

  Mike, obviously sensing the attention had shifted a little too far to the left, chimed in once again. ‘Who’s your silent partner?’

  David craned his neck to see who Mike was referring to – a small, skinny, brown-haired girl standing directly in Marilyn’s shadow.

  ‘She’s not silent,’ said Marilyn, reaching behind her to grab the girl’s hand and drag her into the foreground. ‘Say hello to the boys, Becca.’

  ‘Hi,’ said Becca, and the three boys nodded.

  ‘So, are you gonna ask me to dance or what?’ said Marilyn, her eyes set firmly on Chris.

  ‘I thought you had the hots for David’s brother.’

  ‘I do,’ she smiled, her white teeth lighting up the room. ‘But he’s not here and you look even more like Matt Dillon than his brother does.’ She glanced at David. ‘No offence, Rob.’

  David just shrugged, not knowing what else to do.

  ‘You can dance with Becca, Rob,’ she said, while grabbing Chris’s shirt sleeve to pull him up to standing and shoving her friend Rebecca diagonally toward David. ‘Rebecca Gillies, this is Rob Lowe.’

  ‘Um . . . hi,’ said David, throwing a glance at a now sour-faced Mike before rising to his feet.

  ‘Oh, and I’m Marilyn,’ she said to Chris. ‘Marilyn Maloney.’

  Chris smiled.

  And then the four of them were on the dance floor which had been sectioned off with a balance beam and climbing ropes commandeered from the girls’ gymnasium next door. David did his best to not look like a complete idiot as he danced to The Cars’ ‘Shake it Up’, his eyed flicking between his good friend Chris and the girl who was obviously keen on him, and his own fragile-looking dance partner – the girl who would eventually become Chris’s wife.

  6

  Boston, Massachusetts

  Christopher Columbus Park runs the length of Atlantic Avenue between Mercantile Street and Long Wharf at the northern end of Boston Harbor. It is one of those places where shoppers go to rest, local office workers sit to eat their lunch and, in the summer, children get soaked in the circular fountain that shoots intermittent jets of water out of hidden holes in the ground.

  In fact, as David looked out over the now ice-covered park before him from the comfort of the heated Myrtle McGee’s, he made a mental note to take Lauren there in the summer, so she could crawl around the fountain and get drenched with the best of them, an experience he knew she’d love as getting wet as much as possible seemed to be her thing.

  ‘Lauren’s gonna be an Olympic swimmer,’ he said, his parental pride taking a giant leap.

  ‘Is that right?’ said Mick McGee, the ginger-topped proprietor of the popular café known as Myrtle’s. ‘I used to be quite a swimmer myself,’ he added as he refilled David’s coffee. ‘In fact, the Irish Olympic Committee was after me for years to represent them in the butterfly, but I told them I was more of a synchronised swimmer than the lap-trawling kind.’

  ‘So you spent your youth doing water ballet with a peg on your nose in the one Olympic-sized pool in Ireland?’ joked David.

  Mick grinned. ‘There are worse ways to spend your youth, Davy boy.’

  ‘He’s right,’ said another voice from behind, and David looked up to see his good friend Boston PD Homicide Unit Chief Deputy Superintendent Joe Mannix. Joe ran the unit out of the PD’s Roxbury headquarters – the recent promotion from Lieutenant to Deputy Superintendent long overdue. ‘David here spent his youth getting his head pulped on the rugby field – a habit he obviously has trouble breaking,’ he said pointing at the scar below David’s right eye as he took off his coat and sat down.

  ‘That’s not from rugby,’ smiled David, as he rose to shake Joe’s hand. ‘Lauren swung a right at me when I tried to commandeer her fluffy pink bunny.’

  ‘Then she should give up on the swimming and focus on becoming a pitcher for the Red Sox,’ grinned Mick.

  Moments later, Mick brought David and Joe two helpings of soup of the day and some fresh toasted baguettes. Once the steaming cup was placed before him, Joe looked up to meet David’s eye. David and Sara had spent a fair amount of time with Joe, his wife Marie and their four boys over the holidays, but Joe had obviously guessed this hastily organised lunch had more to do with business than with pleasure, an assumption confirmed by the furrow now forming in David’s brow, and the fact that David had not said a word in over a minute.

  ‘So, what’s up?’ asked Joe after a time.

  David frowned, not sure how to word his request. Joe was a friend but he was also a lifetime cop who, despite his willingness to bend the law when necessary (more than once to help David), still took his position as a high-ranking officer very seriously.

  ‘I got a call this morning, from an old friend,’ David began. ‘We went to school together, in fact I think I mentioned him last November when he was elected to the US Senate.’

  ‘Sure,’ said Joe, taking a mouthful of soup. ‘Kincaid, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Yeah. Chris Kincaid,’ David took a breath. ‘Anyway, Chris called to shoot the breeze and then mentioned that another old friend of ours seems to have gone AWOL.’

  ‘Who?’ asked Joe.

  ‘Her name is Marilyn Maloney.’

  Joe put the spoon down. ‘A friend of the female variety.’

  David nodded, perhaps sensing there was no need to elaborate.

  ‘This Kincaid is married, right – has a few kids?’

  ‘Yeah – a teenage son and young twin daughters. He’s been married to the same girl since his early twenties. I knew her in high school too.’

  ‘Incestuous little group, weren’t you?’

  ‘Not all of us,’ said David.

  Joe said nothing, perhaps sensing David needed the space to go on.

  ‘Anyway, this Marilyn, she was a good kid, smart, pretty – she had this white-blonde hair and these deep brown eyes – but as beautiful and savvy as she was, we all knew she had it tough. Her father was a drunk and we all suspected used to knock her around, and, well . . . I guess what I am trying to say is, Marilyn’s life didn’t go the way it was meant to.’

  Joe shook his head and sighed. ‘Kids like that don’t often get much of a choice as to how their life goes, David.’

  And David nodded.

  ‘So where does your friend think she is?’ asked Joe after a pause.

  ‘He has no idea. Reading between the lines, I think he sees quite a bit of her. He called the nightclub she works at, even went round to her apartment – had a conversation with the super.’

  ‘Not a conversation he wants advertised, I imagine,’ said Joe.

  ‘That’s the impression I got.’

  Joe took a breath. ‘I gather she’s been a no-show at work?’

  ‘That’s right,’ said David. ‘But apparently she’d been drinking on the job, so she’d lost a few of her shifts.’

  Joe nodded. ‘So how long has it been since someone physically set eyes on her?’

  ‘Twelve days or so.’ David shifted in his seat. ‘The thing is, Joe, this girl, she had a tendency to flout danger. All those years I knew her, all those years she dated Chris, she had more balls than the rest of us put together.’

  David saw by the look on Joe’s face that he knew girls like that too.

  ‘You want me to reach out to McNally?’ he asked. Harry McNally was Newark PD, an old friend of Joe’s who, as it happened had once helped David out with a false accusation against his school teacher mom a few years back.

  ‘That’s what I was thinking.’

  ‘And I suppose your politician friend wants to remain conveniently anonymous?’

  David could see the dis
taste written all over Joe’s face, and in all honesty he couldn’t blame him. ‘His family and career are important to him, Joe,’ he said, wondering why he was making excuses.

  ‘It won’t matter,’ said Joe, scooping up the last of his soup before reaching behind his chair to grab his jacket. ‘This guy’s not in high school anymore, David, he can’t expect to ring the doorbell . . . and then run away.’

  7

  Newark, New Jersey; very early the following morning

  Detective Harry McNally walked toward the cop waiting for him near the riverbank, his head down against the chill. His hands were buried in his large overcoat pockets and his woollen scarf was pulled up tightly over his slightly stubbled chin.

  ‘Morning,’ he said as he reached her.

  It was 4 am, the sun was a good three hours from even thinking about rearing its head and McNally was still getting used to the fact that he could be called at any time of the day or night to attend a crime scene as point man in the investigation.

  McNally had been a good cop – better than good – for more than twenty years, and for two whole decades, wearing a Newark PD uniform had been more than fine with him. But then tragedy hit, and the better half of his life had been washed away overnight. After that, his job, despite its demands and responsibilities, seemed way too small to fill the emptiness left by her passing. And so, after years of nagging from a lieutenant friend from Newark PD’s Homicide Squad – a pestering that increased tenfold after his fellow officer wife’s death – he had finally swapped his silver shield for one that shone like gold.

  Which was how he found himself, at the ripe old age of forty-eight, playing the new kid on the detective block, receiving wake-up pages from the busy 3rd Precinct in the wee small hours of the morning. Pages that pulled him out of fitful sleep so that he could attend to some poor sod who would never be waking again.

  ‘Morning to you too,’ said his friend and former squad partner Officer Carla Torres with a look of poorly concealed worry on her narrow pretty face. ‘How come they called you, McNally?’ she asked, and Harry knew the question sprung from her desire to protect him.