“Bah!” she yelled at the mirror. She was letting him get under her skin. Again. And it needed to stop.
When she got back to the conference room, all three men were leaning over the table looking at something. Baldwin turned to her when she entered. His face was a mask, but she could see the excitement in his eyes.
“Oh, good, you’re here. Memphis may have found them.”
Memphis was looking at her. She risked a glance, saw nothing threatening. He wasn’t stupid. Baldwin was around, so he’d gone back to neutral. She needed to keep him there. Good. Maybe now they could get some work done.
“Tell me,” she said.
Memphis straightened. “Assuming we’re correct in our assumptions that we’re dealing with Louise Wise Services, there’s a record of twin boys being born to a Lucinda Sheppard, 14 June, 1980, in Manhattan. She was married to a chap named Michael Rickards. She was Caucasian, he was of Afro-Carribean descent.”
“Well, that fits. Is there a reason why they put twin boys up for adoption?”
“The parents didn’t, actually. The boys were orphaned. Lucinda Sheppard killed her husband, then killed herself. She was a paranoid schizophrenic, had a psychotic breakdown.”
“Wills found the story in the papers. It was all over the news. The boys were alone in the apartment with the bodies for over twenty-four hours, lying in their crib in full view of the carnage.”
Taylor felt the roaring sense of recognition she often got when a killer’s motivation became clear.
“Those poor children,” she said, thinking those poor babies grew up to be lethal, deadly killers. All the sympathy she felt for them fled.
Wills rustled through some papers he’d printed out. “Okay, here’s the Louise Wise records on them. According to this report, no immediate family would take them because of the interracial relationship-in addition to their racial divide, Sheppard was Jewish. The boys went into the foster system, then were quickly picked up by Louise Wise. They had been placed by the time they were four months old.”
Baldwin was reading the page over Wills’s shoulder. “They were placed in separate homes. They were split up. Louise Wise was the preeminent Jewish adoption agency. They were doing groundbreaking adoptions in the seventies, placing not only Jewish kids, but American Indian and African-American children-Afro-Caribbean to you, Memphis-plus doing studies on the children of people with mental illnesses. The boys were separated, which was something only Louise Wise was doing at the time. The head psychiatrist at Louise Wise insisted asking a family to adopt twins was too much to ask. Nowadays, they’d be drawn and quartered for trying to separate twins, much less identicals, but back then, it was considered a great social experiment. I read about it in med school. It’s actually horrifying, what they did. But it fits with the profile.”
“So we know Gavin Adler is one of them. Who’s the other?” Taylor asked.
Memphis took the page from Wills. “Thomas Fielding. Here’s the fascinating part. The boys are half black and half white, right? Gavin was placed with a black family who moved to Tennessee. Thomas was placed with a white family, and within a year of his adoption, they were transferred to Italy. His father was a mechanic at Aviano airbase, his mother was a doctor.”
“A doctor, huh? That’s interesting. So that’s how Thomas got to Italy. How do we know he stayed there?”
Wills was shaking his head. “If he’s still there, Kevin will find him. I’ll go let him know.”
Baldwin was clapping Memphis on the shoulder. “Great job. All of you. It’s time for some sleep. We leave in three hours for Italy.”
Sunday
Thirty-Eight
G avin was lost. The maze of streets was overwhelming, the flocks of people pushing their way in every direction, the sneaker-clad tourists frantically following tour guides who held identifying flowers or flags over their heads so their temporary wards could follow along and not get lost in the crowd. He heard snatches of many languages: Italian, English, German, French, Spanish, Russian. Tommaso hadn’t prepared him for the shuffle, the mess. He never envisioned Florence this way. Gavin felt a little panicky. He hated crowds.
The taxi had dropped him at the Duomo, per Tommaso’s instructions. Up to this point, the directions had been easy to follow. Land in Rome, take the Pendolino train to Florence, the Santa Maria Novella station. Tommaso had been very clear on that point. “Not Rifredi, Gavin. The ticket will be reserved for you. S.M.N. is a ten-minute walk from the Duomo, but it will be easier for you to take a taxi.”
He had followed the instructions to the letter, and everything was going smoothly until now. From the Duomo-the overwhelmingly large and beautiful neo-gothic facade with its white, pink and green marble panels stood gloriously in front of him. Gavin couldn’t help but stop and crane his neck to look at it all, he’d never seen anything so stunning.
He was supposed to walk south, through the Piazza della Repubblica, then take his first right. Tommaso lived on a tiny side street just off the piazza, Via Montebello. It sounded so easy on the phone, but now Gavin wondered why he couldn’t have taken a taxi directly to Tommaso’s house. It would have been less confusing.
This is why he didn’t travel-armchaired his desires and dreams. Gavin had gotten off-kilter, turned the wrong way somehow, and was surrounded by statues. He stopped, awestruck, by Michelangelo’s David . It was so huge. He knew it wasn’t the original, just a reproduction, but my God. All of the statues, the bronze sculptures, the fountain, were heartbreakingly beautiful. It was all just so Italian.
He found a shadowed corner of the piazza, fumbled in his pocket for the map he’d picked up as he exited the train station. A few minutes of searching and he found where he was, Piazza della Signoria. He regrouped. He needed to go back west, then turn south.
He started on his way. As he crossed the Via Porto Rosso, a man grabbed his arm.
“Tommaso, bastardi! Che cosa e accaduto ai vostri capelli? Mi dovete i soldi! Dove sono i miei soldi? ” He smiled broadly, clapping Gavin on the back and speaking in rapid-fire Italian. Gavin could tell it was good-natured teasing, but he didn’t understand a word the man was saying. He could only focus on one thing. This stranger had called him Tommaso.
The man continued to prattle on, oblivious to the fact Gavin wasn’t answering. He walked him along, hand on his arm, and finally left him with a brisk slap on the back. “ Ciao, ciao. A demani, ciao! ”
Gavin was standing alone in an alleyway. He didn’t have any idea where he was, what was going to happen to him. He’d just worked himself into a state when he noticed the address he was standing in front of.
Tommaso’s house.
The man thought he was Tommaso. He obviously knew Tommaso, knew him well enough to know where he lived. He was beside himself. He didn’t know whether to knock, or ring the bell.
In the end, he didn’t have to. Tommaso must have been watching for him, because within moments of his advantageous arrival on his brother’s doorstep, Tommaso opened the wooden door.
The dislocation he felt was immediate and overwhelming. It was like looking in a mirror. Tommaso was struck as well; Gavin saw his jaw drop slightly. Then he was enveloped in a bear hug that took his breath away, pulled inside a fragrant hallway. The door shut behind him, casting shadows in the foyer. He smelled rosemary, and wood and the harsh scent of Clorox.
The scents were familiar and alien. He shook his head, trying to assimilate. That’s when he caught the fragrant undertone. His heart scudded a happy beat.
Tommaso grasped his hand, looked into their replica eyes.
“I’ve been waiting for this moment for so long. Come in, little brother.”
Thirty-Nine
T aylor managed to rest on the Alitalia flight. Memphis was a few rows back, had walked past as she got
