Hadley & Grace(30)
He looks at the photos of her through the years. The fresh-faced freckled teenager with the bold glint in her eye evolved into a tough young woman with a poker-faced fierceness glaring defiantly into the lens for the mug shot that was taken of her three months after she left juvie. She had been arrested for a crime she never should have been arrested for: trying to help another homeless girl, who, through no fault of Herrick’s, ended up dead.
He thinks of Shelly. He thinks of Ben. He thinks of his own mom and dad and the home he grew up in with his brother. It must be very lonely becoming an orphan at fourteen, to lose your family before you’ve had time to create a new one to replace it.
Herrick spent six months behind bars before a merciful judge commuted her sentence to time served; then she moved to California and has been flying straight since. A husband, a baby, a job—the American dream. Then her husband screws it up. He gambles away their rent money, and Herrick takes the baby, rips off her boss, and goes on the lam.
With Torelli?
Again, this is the part he trips over every time, the part that doesn’t make sense. By all accounts, Herrick is a lone wolf. Everything in her record points to her being independent to a fault. Her juvenile-hall counselor repeatedly wrote that Herrick’s biggest obstacle was her trust issues. She didn’t like to ask for help or to rely on anyone.
Mark toggles back to Torelli’s file. Compared to Herrick’s, the file is remarkably thin. Thirty-eight, she was born and raised in Los Angeles. Skipper’s mother, Vanessa Valla, is her only sibling, a half sister from her father’s second marriage.
Her mother died when Torelli was in college. Her father passed ten years ago. The only blemish on her perfect record is a traffic ticket she got a dozen years ago for rolling through a stop sign.
Torelli’s not a criminal, which means Herrick is the key. The question is whether Herrick knew the money was dirty and if she knew the feds were watching it. Interfering with a federal investigation and tampering with evidence are federal offenses, and with her prior record, that could put her away for a very long time.
It doesn’t feel right. Herrick’s not stupid, and she’s been living on the right side of the law for more than seven years. It’s hard to imagine her jeopardizing the life she’s built.
He thinks of the baby and what he would do to protect his own kids, how far he might go to provide for them if things became desperate. She must not have realized the feds were watching, believed she was only stealing from her boss, dirty money he couldn’t report stolen—the perfect crime, so long as he never found her.
So why involve the wife? Maybe Herrick didn’t know where the safe was, or she didn’t have the combination?
Mark shuts down the window and starts again, reopening the case file from the beginning. Two moms. Three kids. What’s the connection? What am I missing?
According to the nurse in the emergency room, Torelli was on her way to drop Skipper off with her sister, who had gotten married. The story jibes with what he already knows. The elementary school confirmed that Torelli had taken the boy out of school because he was returning to Wichita to live with his mom, and a credit card search showed that hotel rooms had been reserved at Hiltons in Victorville, Lake Havasu, and Albuquerque, all three cities en route to Wichita.
Mark looks at the notes he has on the sister. Vanessa Valla, twenty-six; lives in Wichita, Kansas; occupation, server.
So, Torelli packs up her nephew and her daughter under the pretense of dropping her nephew off and returning nine days later, but instead, she rips off her husband with her husband’s office assistant, and the two set off together. They drive to Barstow, which makes sense, but then disappear, not taking the 40, which is the only route to Kansas. So where did they go?
He looks away from the screen, stretches his arms over his head, and rolls out his neck.
The sister. Something niggles at him. He toggles the screen back to life and clicks on the sister’s file. She’s ordinary to the point of boring. Other than Vanessa’s getting pregnant when she was seventeen, her life has been completely unremarkable.
He scans the itinerary for her honeymoon. She and her husband are spending three weeks in Belize. On Wednesday they fly home.
A smile creeps onto his face, and if he were a fist-pumping kind of guy, he would be punching the air. Instead he gives himself an invisible pat on the back and zooms in on the three glowing letters he hadn’t noticed before.
OMA.
The thread he’s missed until now. The pull in the fabric and possibly the key to unraveling the whole damn mystery.
The sister lives in Wichita, and that’s where she and her husband flew out of for their honeymoon, but on Tuesday, they will be returning to Omaha, the city where her husband lives.
Torelli has led everyone on a wild-goose chase, leading them to believe she is going to Wichita, when the entire time her plan has been to go to Omaha.
So who is she trying to fool? Frank? The FBI? And how does Herrick factor in?
He pulls up Google Maps, punches in the new destination, then hits redial. “Fitz, I need you back at the office. Call off the roadblock and get me on the next plane to Las Vegas.”
23
HADLEY
Hadley’s ankle is killing her, and she is bored and irritated—the drive so far a tedious, torturous journey of worry and pain.
They’ve been driving for three hours, and Grace hasn’t spoken a word other than to ask Hadley where she preferred to eat, McDonald’s or Jack in the Box, to which Hadley replied neither, to which Grace rolled her eyes and chose McDonald’s, then proceeded to inhale thousands of calories in a matter of minutes as Hadley picked at an undressed wilted salad and cursed her mother’s wide-assed genes.