Page 55 of Den of Iniquity

“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. Shetold 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.”

Chapter 26

Seattle, Washington

Wednesday, March 4, 2020

It wasn’t an easy conversation. I told Marisa all of it without pulling any punches, including letting her know about the string of aliases her niece had used and about how her trying to put the make on one of Kyle’s fifteen-year-old buddies had been the catalyst that had prompted my grandson’s decision to run away.

As I did so, however, I couldn’t help but feel somewhat sorry for two young women previously known as Tricia and Serena del Veccio. Both had been plucked out of what sounded like an upper-middle-class existence, banished to the far side of the continent, and dumped into Seattle’s seamy underbelly. With no education to speak of and no training, in order to support her daughter, Tricia had been forced to make do with what she’d had available—her good looks, for as long as those lasted. Had she known about her father-in-law’s connections to the mob, his subsequent murder, or her husband’smurder? And whatabouther husband? I had a sneaking suspicion that Sal had been connected to his father’s underworld dealings, but had Tricia been aware of any of that?

Rather than spending years in prison serving judge- and jury-imposed sentences, both men had been murdered, most likely by Bernardo’s unsavory former associates. Meanwhile, Sal’s widow and daughter had been handed lifetime sentences of their own. The US Marshals’ misguided attempt to protect them had, instead, hurled mother and daughter into a marginal existence from which Caroline Richards seemed to be making an equally misguided effort to escape. Unfortunately for all concerned, Jeremy Cartwright had been her ticket out. There were a lot of things not to like about the young woman, but I had to give her credit for being a survivor.

“So what do we do now?” Marisa asked when I finished.

“What about the cops back in Princeton?” I asked. “After Tricia ran away that second time, did they do any active investigating?”

“I doubt it. I got the feeling that since she’d done it before, they didn’t pay much attention when it happened again. If my parents had been on their backs about it, they might have done more, but once my mom got sick, everything else went by the wayside.”

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