“Then...” Carolyn’s voice trailed away to nothing. She cleared her throat. “My husband wasn’t Frank Pierce?”
“No.”
“Who was he?”
“James Richard Ross. Have you ever heard that name before?”
Bewilderment filled her eyes. “I’ve never heard that name before in my life. James Richard Ross, did you say?”
“Yes.”
“Are you ... are you completely sure about this, Detective Shaw? That my husband was this other person?”
“Yes, ma’am. Very sure.” He extracted three pages from the file and spread them across the coffee table. “He was born in 1954 inChicago. His mother had five other children, some older, some younger, with a total of three different fathers.”
Carolyn and her daughters stared at Kurt, faces glazed.
“Your husband dropped out of high school after his sophomore year,” Kurt continued. “It wasn’t that his grades were bad. In fact, from what I could tell, he was bright. I’m guessing that his desire to make money overrode his desire to get an education. He wasn’t listed as part of his mother’s household in the 1970 census, which means he’d left home by the age of sixteen.” He leaned over and pointed to a mug shot of a teenager. The black-and-white picture showed an expressionless kid with a John Lennon haircut. “Is this your husband?” he asked Carolyn.
The paper shuddered slightly in her hand as she picked it up and studied it. Zander knew—no doubt everyone here knew—what her response would be. The teenager in the photo was undeniably Frank.
“Yes,” Carolyn finally said. “This is my husband.”
“He was arrested three times,” Kurt said. “Once for underage consumption of alcohol when he was seventeen. Once on a drunk and disorderly charge when he was twenty-four. And once for robbing a gas station when he was twenty-six.”
On the kitchen counter, an incense stick that smelled of cloves burned.
“What did he steal from the gas station?” Sarah asked.
“All the money out of the cash register and safe, as well as food and beer. He and a friend named Ricardo Serra committed the crime together. Does the name Ricardo Serra ring a bell?”
They shook their heads.
“James and Ricardo both served time for the crime,” Kurt said. “Your husband was released from prison in November of 1983.”
“I met him a year and a half later,” Carolyn said.
“I found documents confirming that James Richard Ross was working in Seattle around that time. But after that, he vanishes from government records.”
Courtney knotted her hands together on the upper ridge of herpregnant stomach. “You think that my dad turned his back on everything that had come before and started over?” she asked Kurt.
“Yes. How did he explain his lack of family to you?” Kurt asked Carolyn.
“He said that his father abandoned his mother when he was four. That his mother died when he was eleven, and that he was then raised in the foster care system.”
So many lies. The revealing of them made Zander feel as though the foundation of this house might be torn in half at any second by an earthquake.
Today was Friday, and on Monday, he, Carolyn, Courtney, Sarah, Daniel, and many others would be attending Frank’s funeral. The programs had already been printed and they clearly stated his birth year as 1955 and his name as Frank Joseph Pierce. What was Carolyn supposed to put on her husband’s headstone now?
Would Carolyn still be able to trust, in retrospect, the relationship she’d had with Frank? Could Frank’s girls still trust the relationship they’d had with their dad? Couldhestill trust the relationship he’d had with Frank? Or did Frank’s lies force everything into question?
No.
He’d had so few good family relationships in his life. He needed to hang on to his belief in Frank’s love for him.
“You mentioned when we met at the station that a bullet had been removed from Frank’s leg,” Zander said to Kurt. “Could testing the bullet potentially provide us with useful information?”
“Useful information concerning the circumstances surrounding the shooting?” Kurt asked.
