Chapter 25

Seattle, Washington

Wednesday, March 4, 2020

“Hello.”

“Marisa Young?” I asked.

“Yes, who’s calling?”

“My name is J. P. Beaumont. I’m a private investigator, and I’m calling in regard to your missing persons post on NamUs.”

I heard a small gasp before she spoke again. “Is this about Patricia and Serena?” the woman demanded. “Have you found them?”

That was when I realized I had blundered into an emotional minefield. Yes, we had located Marisa’s sister and niece. That

was the good news. The bad news was that my call was also a death notice. No doubt the woman had resigned herself to the idea

that both her missing loved ones had been dead for years, but now I was about to make that a certainty, at least as far as

her sister was concerned.

“Yes, we have,” I told her, “but I’m terribly sorry to have to inform you that your sister passed away several years ago. She died of natural causes in 2016 and was buried in the Mount Olivet Cemetery in Renton, Washington.”

“Where the hell is Renton, Washington?” Marisa wanted to know.

“It’s in the Seattle area.”

“What on earth was Patricia doing in Seattle?” Marisa demanded. “That’s all the way across the country from Plainfield, New

Jersey. That’s where she was the last time I saw her. And how could she die of natural causes at age thirty-nine? That seems

really young unless she died of some kind of cancer.”

In that moment, the woman on the phone sounded more angry than grief-stricken, and I couldn’t fault her for that. She had

spent years hoping for some kind of tearful reunion with her missing family members. This was anything but.

“I’m afraid your sister had a long history of drug abuse,” I told her. “She died of hepatitis C.”

Marisa took a moment to process that information. “Well, at least she wasn’t murdered,” she said at last. “I suppose that’s

what I was expecting—that she would be found as nothing more than unidentified human remains. What about Serena? Is she dead,

too?”

This time I was the one who took a breath. This was where the conversation would become much more complicated.

“No,” I said, “your niece is still alive. At the moment, she’s living in Ashland, Oregon, under the name of Caroline Richards.

She’s had a number of other aliases over the years, but that’s her current one. I’m afraid she and her mother lived a pretty

rough life once they came to Seattle. Your sister managed to scrabble out a living for them, but...”

“Was Patricia working the streets as a sex worker?” Marisa wanted to know.

In many circles, the word prostitute is slowly but surely going out of favor, but Marisa was clearly prepared to hear the truth, and I gave it to her straight.

“Yes, she was,” I answered. “For at least some of that time, she and her daughter were homeless. At the time of Patricia’s

death, the two of them may have been estranged. It’s possible Serena may not even be aware that her mother is deceased.”

“Estranged,” Marisa repeated. “Are you telling me Serena ran away?”

“It seems likely.”

“How old would she have been when that happened?”

“I’m not entirely sure,” I answered. “In her midteens, maybe.”

“Like mother like daughter then,” Marisa murmured with a sigh. “That’s about how old Patricia was when she took off for the

second time and never came back. My parents never recovered from losing her, but tell me about Serena. Is there any chance

you can put me in touch with her?”

“Before I answer that question,” I told her, “I need to let you know how I came to be involved in all this.”

“Didn’t you say you’re a private investigator?”

“Yes, I am.”

“So who hired you?”

“I’m actually working on behalf of my grandson, Kyle Cartwright. He’s eighteen and came to live with my wife and me a few

weeks ago because his parents—my daughter and her husband—are divorcing, and his dad has moved his much younger pregnant girlfriend

into the house.”

“And Serena’s the pregnant girlfriend?” Marisa asked faintly.

I gave Marisa Young several points for being perceptive. “Yes, she is.”

That one seemed to stop the conversation cold. “This all sounds very complicated,” Marisa said at last.

“It is, so before we go into all those details, please tell me what you can about your sister, and then I’ll share what I’ve

learned so far.”

“Do you know anything about our parents?” she asked.

“Not very much,” I replied. “I believe your father was an academic of some kind.”

“Yes, a professor of philosophy at Princeton. Believe me, he was a very straitlaced individual, and so was my mother. In that

regard, they were a matched pair. As for Tricia? She was a rebel from the get-go. She was a firecracker who went toe-to-toe

with them at every opportunity. She was always a beauty, but she routinely got into trouble at school. She started getting

into fights with both boys and girls while she was still in grade school. She began smoking, drinking, and hanging out with

much older kids when she was twelve, and that only got worse over time. By the time she was in high school, she had graduated

to hard drugs. The thing is, she and I were still really close back then. I knew all about everything Tricia was up to because

I was the one who helped her sneak in and out of the house late at night.

“She was fourteen when she ran away from home the first time. The cops found her within a day and brought her back. When she

took off the next time, a year or so later, she never came home. The folks were devastated, but Tricia and I stayed in touch

through one of my friends by leaving numbers where I could call her.

“I knew she was living in Newark and working underage as a pole dancer, but she begged me not to tell our parents about that. When Tricia started going steady with a guy named Sal del Veccio, she told me all about him. She said she had met him at the club. I suppose he started out as one of her customers, but she said he was rich, and she thought he was her Prince Charming.

“That’s about the time Mom took sick and was diagnosed with breast cancer. She didn’t believe in having mammograms, so it

was already stage four by the time the cancer was found. The next three years were hellish for her, for Dad, and for me, too.

I was still in high school at the time. I begged Tricia to come home and see Mom before she died, but she wouldn’t. And she

didn’t come to Mom’s funeral, either. For one thing, she was pregnant by then, and she thought showing up in that condition

would make matters worse. Knowing my dad, she most likely wasn’t wrong about that, but through it all, Tricia and I stayed

connected.

“After Tricia turned up pregnant, she and Sal got married. At first everything seemed fine. According to her, Sal’s family

was well-to-do, and Sal had a good job—enough so that they were able to buy a nice home in a good neighborhood. From what

she told me, Tricia seemed happier than I had ever known her to be. She told me once that sometimes she felt like a princess

living in a fairy tale, but then it all went bad.”

“How so?”

“I had no idea that Sal’s father was connected to the Mafia, but he was, and fairly high up, too. Around that time, in the

late nineties and early two thousands, there was some kind of changing of the guard in the mob with a lot of infighting. There

were a number of murders related to all that. Sal’s father ended up being implicated in one of them. Tricia told me he was

in jail awaiting trial.

“Then, shortly before Serena turned four, Tricia called our friend and asked me to call her back. When I did, she was in tears. She told me that her father-in-law was considering taking a plea deal. She said that if that happened, she and Sal would have to disappear. That’s exactly what she said to me, ‘We’ll have to disappear and I’ll never be able to see or talk to you again.’

“I was desperate to see her before that happened. Finally she relented and agreed that I could come visit. The very next day

I drove up to their house in Plainfield. I wanted to give Serena something special for her birthday, so I took along the pink

teddy bear Mom and Dad had given me when I was about her age.

“Once I saw her, I couldn’t believe how cute Serena was. She looked exactly like Tricia had looked in pictures of the two

of us together when I was still a baby. When I handed over the teddy bear, Serena gave me a huge smile, then she hugged the

teddy close to her body and held on to it like she wasn’t ever going to let it go. I wish I had an actual photograph of that

moment, but all I have is the image that’s engraved on my heart.

“When I asked Tricia about what was really going on, she shook her head and said she couldn’t talk about it. I left the house

an hour or so later and cried all the way back home because I was afraid that was the last time I’d see her, and I was right.

There were no more phone calls after that, but at least I got to hug her and say goodbye. That’s more than my father got.”

“Did you tell him about that final visit?”

“My mother had died a few months earlier, and knowing the reality of Tricia’s situation would have crushed him. Still, I believed

that she and Sal had done exactly what she had said they were going to do—that they’d disappeared to somewhere far away and

were living happily ever after. For a long time, I hoped that sooner or later, they’d all turn up. Five years ago that all

changed, and I stopped hoping.”

“How come?”

“In 2015 someone doing construction on an abandoned farm a few miles outside of Plainfield stumbled across human remains.

They were eventually identified as those of Salvatore del Veccio, Tricia’s husband. I thought they’d find Tricia’s and Serena’s

bodies somewhere nearby, but they didn’t.

“That’s when I started looking into what had happened to Sal’s father, Bernardo del Veccio. I found out that, as the prime

suspect in a mob-related homicide, he had taken a plea and testified against his coconspirators. They were all given life

without parole. Bernardo’s sentence was twenty-five to life. After the trials ended, he was transported to the New Jersey

State Prison in Trenton where, within weeks of his arrival, he was murdered, stabbed to death in the showers.”

“So his reduced sentence turned into a life sentence after all,” I observed, “and a very short one at that. Were the same

people who killed the father responsible for Sal’s death, too? And if so, why?”

“I don’t know,” Marisa responded. “Maybe he was involved with the Mafia, too, or maybe Sal knew too much. I’ve never been

able to sort that out, but once Sal’s body turned up and Tricia’s and Serena’s didn’t, I began hoping that maybe somehow,

somewhere, the two of them had survived. That’s when I really started looking for them. I couldn’t very well file a missing

persons report on Tricia because, as far as anyone knew, she’d already been reported missing years earlier. Once someone told

me about NamUs and the DNA Doe Project, I went ahead and posted them as missing on both those sites. I also submitted my DNA

to GEDmatch in hopes of finding a match.”

“What about your father?” I asked. “Is he still around?”

“Sadly no,” Marisa replied. “He never recovered from losing my mom and from everything we all went through before she died. I believe he suffered from PTSD and started self-medicating with alcohol. He died in a one-car rollover accident two years after Mom’s passing. The M.E. ruled his death as accidental, which was good for me financially due to the double indemnity clauses on both his life insurance policies. I was his only surviving beneficiary. After he died, people told me over and over that his death was accidental. I never bought that story. I believe he did it on purpose. With Mom and Tricia gone, he was done. He didn’t want to go on living, so he quit.”

After hearing that, it all made sense. Todd Hatcher is a smart guy, and everything he had surmised about Phyllis Baylor and

her daughter being taken into WITSEC had been absolutely on the money.

“I think I can tell you exactly what happened to your sister and her daughter,” I told Marisa Young. “Considering everything

you’ve just told me about Bernardo and Sal del Veccio, I’m pretty sure your sister and her daughter disappeared into the US

Marshals Witness Protection Program.”