Forgive Me(77)

“Oh, I see,” Mike said. “Not the letters I.C., I mean. I get it now.”

Angie took the photograph from her purse and set it face up on the table. The girl with the sad smile and deformed ear seemed to be looking right into Angie’s eyes, pleading with her for something. Justice, perhaps.

“The girl in this photograph,” Angie said, brushing the girl’s face with the tip of her finger. “We know her initials and when she was born.”

“And more important,” Bao added, “we know when she died.”





Raynor Sinclair was parked in his Acura SUV some four hundred feet away from the picnic table at the skate park, listening to Angie’s conversation with the help of a twenty-four inch parabolic microphone dish. The attached shotgun microphone was a Sennheiser model. The MKH-8040 used a special capsule to minimize feedback and off-axis audio. The compact design made the microphone ideal for almost any application from music recording to eavesdropping.

Raynor had heard enough and made a call he felt had to be made. “She knows.”

“Knows what exactly?”

“I.C.”

A lengthy pause followed. “Then it’s only a matter of time.”

“They have the dates,” Raynor said.

“I’ll have to make some arrangements.”

“What about me?” Raynor asked.

“You have a new focus.”

“And that is?”

“Ivan Markovich made bail. I want him.”

The call went dead. Just like that, Raynor had his new marching orders.





CHAPTER 40



Back in her office, Angie was reeling in more ways than one. The age-progressed image from NCMEC was meaningless now. It needed to be shredded. It was an insult to a little girl with the initials I.C., who for whatever reason never got a chance to blossom into the beautiful woman NCMEC’s computers had invented. That girl was gone. She was dead. She had died on March 4, 1988, and for whatever reason Angie’s mother had felt tremendous guilt for the tragedy.

Why?

Angie imagined a hit and run scenario on some rain-drenched day. Her mind’s eye, conjured an image of her mother driving home from a committee meeting, a few glasses of wine over the legal limit. She imagined the whap-whap-whap of the windshield wipers fighting a losing battle against a deluge of water.





On the side of the road a little girl wearing a yellow rain slicker leaps into puddles, sending geysers of spray skyward. The girl giggles while Kathleen DeRose fiddles with the wiper controls, hoping there’s an even faster setting. Her eyes leave the road for a few seconds at most. But it’s long enough. Her mother hears a loud, hollow thud and the car slips into a swerve. The girl with the deformed ear lies face up in a muddy bank. Red rivulets follow the folds of her rain jacket and drop like a crimson waterfall into the puddle where she had been playing. The girl’s parents are out of eyesight. It was back in the day when children, even those as young as I.C., could run free range.

Torrents of rain flattens Kathleen’s hair as she crouches down to feel for a pulse. Meanwhile, her pulse hammers. Her heart lodges in her throat. The girl isn’t breathing. In contrast, Kathleen’s own breath is sweet with wine. It’s obvious the girl is gone. Panic now. Kathleen comprehends all she is about to lose. She scrambles back into her car and speeds away. A sound from the house where I.C. lives cuts through the air. A scream. The anguished cry of a mother in distress. Running down the driveway, the mother arrives in time to see Kathleen’s car racing away. The rain is falling too hard to see the make and model of the car, let alone get the license plate. The grieving mother falls to her knees, her tears swallowed by the rain as she cradles her lifeless child in her arms.





Angie moved on to other scenarios in which her mother had borne witness to this girl’s mysterious plight, but for whatever reason was unable to take life-saving action. Had her mother watched I.C. drown, or burn up in a fire, or get snatched off the street? The list of misfortunes Angie imagined was a replay of a book she’d adored as a child, a diabolical alphabet created by Edward Gorey called The Gashlycrumb Tinies. Angie could still recall many of the maladies from memory. Amy who fell down the stairs, Basil assaulted by bears, and Clara who wasted away. What had happened to I.C. to cause Angie’s mother to seek forgiveness?

Angie’s father didn’t know. She had called him on the way back to the office from the skate park. “Do the initials I.C. mean anything to you?”

“No. Why?”

There had been no hesitation on his part, no shift in his vocal inflection.

Angie was skilled at detecting lies, and felt certain once again that her father was not the guardian of her mother’s secrets. So who was?

I is for Ida who drowned in a lake . . .

Or died on the side of a rain-soaked road.

A knock on the door drew Angie out of her head and away from her dark thoughts.

“Come in,” Angie said, rising from her chair.

The door opened and Carolyn Jessup entered, followed closely by a beautiful teenage girl with straight brown hair and big brown eyes. The face was the same one adorning the missing persons poster Angie had seared into her memory, had stored in the same part of her brain where I.C.’s picture also resided.