Gone, Baby, Gone (Kenzie & Gennaro #4)(3)

Helene McCready had taken a hell of a beating in the press when that information came out. Twenty-four hours after her daughter’s disappearance, the News, Boston’s tabloid answer to the New York Post, ran as its front-page headline: COME ON IN:

Little Amanda’s Mom Left Door Unlocked Beneath the headline were two photographs, one of Amanda, the other of the front door to the apartment. The door was propped wide open, which, police stated, was not how it was discovered the morning of Amanda McCready’s disappearance. Unlocked, yes; wide open, no.

Most of the city didn’t care much about the distinction, though. Helene McCready had left her four-year-old daughter alone in an unlocked apartment while she went next door to her friend Dottie Mahew’s house. There she and Dottie watched TV—two sitcoms and a movie of the week entitled Her Father’s Sins starring Suzanne Somers and Tony Curtis. After the news, they watched half of Entertainment Tonight Weekend Edition and then Helene returned home.

For roughly three hours and forty-five minutes, Amanda McCready had been left alone in an unlocked apartment. At some point during that time, the assumption went, she had either slipped out on her own or been abducted.

Angie and I had followed the case as closely as the rest of the city, and it baffled us as much as it seemed to baffle everyone else. Helene McCready, we knew, had submitted to a polygraph regarding her daughter’s disappearance and passed. Police were unable to find a single lead to follow; rumor had it they were consulting psychics. Neighbors on the street that night, a warm Indian summer night when most windows were open and pedestrians strolled at random, reported seeing nothing suspicious, hearing nothing that sounded like a child’s screams. No one remembered seeing a four-year-old wandering around alone or a suspicious person or persons carrying either a child or an odd-looking bundle.

Amanda McCready, as far as anyone could tell, had vanished so completely it was as if she’d never been born.



Beatrice McCready, her aunt, had called us this afternoon. I told her I didn’t think there was much we could do that a hundred cops, half the Boston press corps, and thousands of everyday people weren’t already doing on her niece’s behalf.

“Mrs. McCready,” I said, “save your money.”

“I’d rather save my niece,” she said.



Now, as the Wednesday evening rush-hour traffic dwindled to some distant beeps and engine revs on the avenue below, Angie and I sat in our office in the belfry of St. Bartholomew’s Church in Dorchester and listened to Amanda’s aunt and uncle plead her case.

“Who’s Amanda’s father?” Angie said.

The weight seemed to resettle onto Lionel’s shoulders. “We don’t know. We think it’s a guy named Todd Morgan. He left the city right after Helene got pregnant. Nobody’s heard from him since.”

“The list of possible fathers is long, though,” Beatrice said.

Lionel looked down at the floor.

“Mr. McCready,” I said.

He looked at me. “Lionel.”

“Please, Lionel,” I said. “Have a seat.”

He fitted himself into the small chair on the other side of the desk after a bit of a struggle.

“This Todd Morgan,” Angie said, as she finished writing the name on a pad of paper. “Do police know his whereabouts?”

“Mannheim, Germany,” Beatrice said. “He’s stationed in the army over there. And he was on the base when Amanda disappeared.”

“Have they discounted him as a suspect?” I said. “There’s no way he would have hired a friend to do it?”

Lionel cleared his throat, looked at the floor again. “The police said he’s embarrassed by my sister and doesn’t think Amanda is his child anyway.” He looked up at me with those lost, gentle eyes of his. “They said his response was: ‘If I want a rug rat to shit and cry all the time, I can have a German one.’”

I could feel the wave of hurt that had washed through him when he’d had to call his niece a “rug rat,” and I nodded. “Tell me about Helene,” I said.

There wasn’t much to tell. Helene McCready was Lionel’s younger sister by four years, which put her at twenty-eight. She’d dropped out of Monsignor Ryan Memorial High School in her junior year, never got the GED she kept saying she would. At seventeen, she ran off with a guy fifteen years older, and they’d lived in a trailer park in New Hampshire for six months before Helene returned home with a face bruised purple and the first of three abortions behind her. Since then she’d worked a variety of jobs—Stop & Shop cashier, Chess King clerk, dry cleaner’s assistant, UPS receptionist—and never managed to hold on to any for more than eighteen months. Since the disappearance of her daughter, she’d taken leave from her part-time job running the lottery machine at Li’l Peach, and there weren’t any indications she’d be going back.

“She loved that little girl, though,” Lionel said.

Beatrice looked as if she were of a different opinion, but she kept silent.

“Where is Helene now?” Angie said.

“At our house,” Lionel said. “The lawyer we contacted said we should keep her under wraps as long as we can.”

“Why?” I said.

“Why?” Lionel said.

“Yeah. I mean, her child’s missing. Shouldn’t she be making appeals to the public? Canvassing the neighborhood at least?”