Quickly, the boyfriend realized the danger he was in and jumped up to tell me that his girlfriend’s sister always took the boy without telling anyone. She felt like the boy was more hers than her sister’s.
Twenty minutes later, I was back at the apartment, asking about the mom’s sister, Crystal Fuches. According to the mom, Crystal was, let’s just say, untrustworthy. They clearly didn’t get along.
I found Crystal Fuches two blocks away. She was nothing like her sister had made her out to be. She was a bank teller who was concerned about her nephew. She took him some afternoons to give him a healthy meal and read to him. I was impressed.
She said, “I’m surprised my sister and her no-good boyfriend even noticed he was missing.”
“To be fair, only your sister missed him. She seems nice. Just in a difficult situation.”
“A situation she constantly puts herself in.”
“Have you seen your nephew?”
“Of course. I put him to bed an hour ago. My sister never looked up from her phone.”
When I rushed back to the apartment and checked the boy’s room, he was snoring, bundled in his blankets.
That’s why I always check every room in an apartment more than once during an investigation.
Natalie’s apartment looked fine. A little messy, but it was a typical twenty-one-year-old’s apartment. Except that she had no roommates. That was unusual down here where an apartment like this regularly went for more than four thousand dollars a month.
The quick background I had done on Natalie and her mother hadn’t shown any large incomes. I knew the mayor was proud of coming “from the people.” He lived on the mayor’s two-hundred-thousand-dollar salary. That sounded like a lot of money, but in New York, even when you were living for free in Gracie Mansion, it didn’t get you that far.
There was no super in the building, so I called the leasing office. I explained to the property manager who I was and that I was looking for a missing person. The woman on the phone sounded helpful, and I found the office a few blocks away.
The woman who met me at the office, Renee Schobert, was about my age and very well put together, in a professional dress with a colorful scarf. Her sandy hair draped down her right shoulder.
Renee ushered me into her office, crammed with file cabinets. She said, “I pulled out Natalie’s file after you called. There’s nothing out of order or unusual. Except her deposit and six full months of rent were paid at the same time.”
I said, “So you don’t know her personally? Didn’t ever visit the apartment?”
She shook her head, then slid the open file across to me. She said, “The entire amount was wired here from Danske Bank in Tallinn, Estonia.”
I glanced at the wire transfer and wrote down the information on the bank. The address was Narva Maantee 11, 15015 Tallinn, Estonia. I wasn’t sure what this meant, but I knew it was important. It was one of those gut feelings cops on TV always seem to have. They only came to me occasionally. It took me years to recognize them and longer to trust those kinds of feelings.
Just as I was finishing my notes, Renee Schobert looked closely at me and said, “Oh, my God, you’re the cop who’s been on TV. The one who shot that kid in the Bronx.”
I nodded, hoping to get out of there quickly.
She said, “How could you shoot an unarmed boy like that?”
I could’ve explained to her what happened. I could’ve told her not to listen to some of the things she hears on TV. But I had a job to do. And I thanked God that I had something to keep me occupied. That way I didn’t focus on the exact question she had asked.
I thanked her and slipped out of the office quickly.
CHAPTER 22
I WAS GLAD to be home just as it was getting dark. I decided to play down anything I was doing, officially or otherwise. Mary Catherine still felt I needed a break, and, yeah, I was too chickenshit to tell her I was back at work full-time.
Hiding exactly what I was doing at work didn’t turn out to be a problem. Mary Catherine met me in the hallway as soon as I walked in. The way she hugged me, I knew something was up.
I stepped back to look her in the eyes and said, “Tell me what’s wrong.” After you’ve lost a wife to cancer and you’ve dealt with the problems of ten kids, you rarely have time for people to beat around the bush. Not that Mary Catherine ever did.
She came right to the point, as usual. “Some of the younger kids are upset. They were teased at school. Excuse my French, but that asshole, the Reverend Caldwell, stuck a microphone in Jane’s face and asked her if you felt any guilt at all.”
That hurt. Any parent will tell you they would take any amount of abuse so their kids wouldn’t have to.
I said, “Is Jane upset? What did she say?”