My Life Had Stood
Chapter 23: When Too Appalled to Stir
1990:
-"You fool! You'll ruin everything!" The woman dressed in an off-white sun dress shouted down at her. She tried to struggle but the woman held her wrist in a vice-grip.
"Momma." She mumbled, eyes widened and red. The expectant blows came, striking her face, arms, and torso - anywhere they could reach. Herself being tiny and the woman an adult, meant those blows could reach any part of her body. The only part not struck was her left wrist: that remained tightly in the woman's grip. "Momma..."
"Shut up, shut up, shut up!" The woman spat, her blows striking more furiously against the tiny child's body. She had switched from her bare hand to a wooden cooking spoon.
"Momm..." Tears streamed down the young girl's cheeks as she tried to curl into a fetal position. She'd read about people doing so to protect their more vital organs, also that it was an instinctual position when frightened.
She was terrified. Her mother's anger was more intense than usual. It wasn't like those times when her mom had had a bad day or conversation with someone and needed a release, so she hit her. It was worse even than when she'd got whipped for getting an A on a test.
"'Omma." She sobbed during the first syllable, making it miss the initial 'm' sound. She shut her eyes tightly, feeling her cheeks stinging. A slimy substance - blood, she realized - oozed copiously from around her right temple and eye. Her lips trembled. -
2015:
Alsie awoke, her head throbbing. The room she was in saturated with shadow, with heavy curtains on the sole window looking out onto the balcony. She groaned and shut her eyes tightly. Even in such intense darkness, it still felt like her sensitive eyes were being jabbed by light.
'Damn.' She hissed. It felt like her brain was cleaving and engulfing all sensation with unendurable agony. It was her worst headache in recent months.
Keeping her eyes closed, she moved slowly. Once her feet were on the bedroom floor, she opened her eyes a sliver. She kept them open only a few seconds, but long enough to realize that Shelly must've been over.
Her phone was placed on the charger beside her bed and that morning's paper had been laid underneath it. She sighed, then stilled. Her stomach twisted as she opened her eyes to stare at the date on the newspaper.
"Eight days?" Alsie mumbled to herself, at the same time struggling to recall those missing days. Eight days since her date with Spencer, and she couldn't remember a second after leaving the bookstore. Actually, her memory failed shortly after Shelly had showed up there.
She massaged her head, cursing. Her burnt umber eyes burned from unshed tears building up behind her eyelids. She'd thought she'd gotten rid of the black outs. Though her childhood was plagued by them, the worst being from ages nine to twelve, she had been free of them since seven years ago.
It was the same with the headaches, though those had never gone completely away. She had had them down to a manageable number per year. But ever since the accident three years ago...
She cringed, her lips trembling. Her right hand moved to her abdomen and touched the scar there. The tears slid down her cheeks bidden by an intrusive memory. It was a memory, that even compared to those from her early life, was excruciating. Yet she was grateful her black outs never stole it from her.
She didn't know how she'd live if she couldn't remember the day her daughter was born. Even if it had also been the same day her daughter...
Alsie gasped for breath, choked by sadness. And tears. She threw herself back under the covers, not wishing to do anything. Nothing was mandatory nor important. Sleep and curling into a ball to bypass the day was all she wanted to do.
The beep of her cell phone interrupted her respite. Though it was set on a calming ocean wave tone, it was still unbearable for her migraine. She whimpered and picked it up, determined to put it on silent. Or just shut it off.
-U have 2 read this, srly.- Shelly's text read, linking to a magazine article online. Alsie narrowed her eyes, about to shut off her phone when another text came in. -Serious, U have 2 read this. It's abt James!-
Certain that Shelly wouldn't stop texting until she read the article and replied, Alsie clicked on the link. She wondered why she bothered to get a smart phone - if she hadn't she could give Shel the excuse that she didn't have a computer to look at the article.
Though it had been Shel who paid for the upgrade after accidentally breaking her old cell phone months ago.
'Yeah, what...' Alsie froze reading the article, her headache and heartache pushed away by shock. Despite it being a poorly written article, containing little information and much conjecture, the facts it did reveal were shocking.
"James, you..." Alsie swallowed, her hand holding the phone trembling. She was shocked and confused. But also terrified. Not of James, but of what she realized would happen. Someone was bound to investigate further, and if she kept quiet and they found out about her...How would she be able to explain things?
She'd already mentioned to Spencer about buying that book for James, though she hadn't used his name, and had told about her daughter...
Trembling yet stable, Alsie dialed Spencer's number.
0
"Our offices will be in touch once we find anything useful pertaining to your case." A man told a young couple, bidding them a polite goodbye. As well as telling them to not be afraid of contacting this law office if they had any questions.
Morland Somerfield looked across the lobby at the man, dressed in a suit, bidding a young couple goodbye. The intensity with which he studied the middle-aged man enough that it engulfed all his attention.
"Excuse me? Mr. Somerfield, was it?" Another, much younger man greeted Somerfield. His arrival distracting the wizened doctor from tracking the other man. The old man scowled when he noticed the man he'd been watching had disappeared further into the building. "Right this way."
"Very well." Somerfield nodded curtly at the young man, who was likely an intern or newly hired assistant going by the part nervousness, part cockiness in his voice. "And it's Dr. Somerfield."
The young man flinched and quickly apologize for his mistake. He led Somerfield to a more private and comfortable waiting area of the law-firm. "I apologize, Dr. Somerfield, Mr. Alvarez is running late, but it shouldn't take much longer. If you'll wait here, he should be only a few minutes."
Somerfield returned a polite reply, though his thoughts were still on the man he'd watched in the lobby. He managed enough awareness of his surroundings to not draw undue concern from the young intern/assistant. At least until the said assistant left the area.
Somerfield stared at his hands, then the briefcase he'd brought with him. A multitude of thought spun through his antique brain. His age may have slowed down his mental ability and thus delayed his course of action, but he knew he was correct.
All the others were accounted for. Every child that he and Connell took, and the recipients of those children checked out. He'd even looked into the birth families of each child switched, just in case one of them had figured out the truth.
He knew where each of the thirty-four children they'd sold were, except for one. One of them had vanished nearly twenty-five years ago. As had the family who Connell had sold her to.
Of course he had hired a detective to track them down years ago, when he'd decided she'd be perfect for his experiments. Only to find out that the family Connell sold the girl to no longer had her. Further, they'd pretended like the child they'd bought never existed.
Somerfield had let the matter drop at that point, figuring that something fatal had happened to the girl and that the Crawfords had covered it up. A couple of the other children he and Connell had sold had been taken by social services or killed by the families who bought them. Since they'd sold the children to questionable people, things like that had been expected.
Except now the baby Connell had sold to the Crawfords was the only one unaccounted for. No record of her existed after the Crawfords had moved out of Nevada. And three years after the Crawfords moved, they too had vanished.
Somerfield glowered as he considered the possibilities. He mentally cursed Connell. Tobias Connell's deal with the Crawfords had been an unplanned thing and the idiot hadn't felt the need to inform Somerfield of it until eight years had passed.
"I apologize for the wait." A man dressed in a suit, who Somerfield surmised was Alvarez, approached. "Dr. Somerfield, I presume? I'm George Alvarez. If you'll just enter my office, we can get to the matter at hand."
Somerfield followed the lawyer, remaining quiet until he was seated inside Alvarez' office and the door was shut.
0
Garcia grumbled at her computer screens. She'd been trying to narrow down specific times and locations that could point them towards other families Tobias Connell had taken babies from, primarily by focusing on when he transferred to other hospitals or received large payments. However, neither proved useful.
Tobias Connell had, as her team surmised, transferred to many different hospitals since the eighties, but none of the transfers coincided with newborns suddenly dying in his care. It was actually the opposite. Throughout his career in obstetrics, he never lost a child during delivery or in hospital afterward. To make things more bizarre was that, though he'd transferred a lot over the years, many of the transfers were to hospitals he previously worked at.
He had had a stunning reputation in obstetrics, having never lost a patient - neither mother nor child during any delivery. Had she not known what Tobias Connell had done, Garcia would've thought he was a miracle worker. But instead she realized that Connell's never losing a child during delivery wasn't a fluke or miracle, but rather evidence to him selling babies to his patients who lost theirs.
The trouble was that Connell had worked in obstetrics for most of his career and had delivered hundreds of babies. To narrow down which ones had been switched and which ones hadn't would be a daunting task. Especially since, until a couple years before his death, he hadn't deposited or received any large sums of money in his bank account.
He hadn't even opened a bank account until three years before his death.
Garcia frowned at her computer screens, desperate for some new search parameter that could lead somewhere. As if on cue, her phone rang.
-"Did you find out anything yet, Baby girl?" Morgan asked after exchanging greetings with Garcia.-
"Aside from the facts that Dr. Tobias Connell literally delivered hundreds of babies throughout his career and that he never had a bank account until three years before he died, I have nothing." Garcia replied.
-"Hundreds?" Morgan drew in a sharp breath, his exasperation at the number audible in his voice. "There has to be a way to narrow down which babies he sold from those he didn't. Did you filter out the mothers who lost their babies while under his care?"-
"There aren't any. According to hospital records, Tobias Connell never lost a baby he delivered. And before you say anything, I already realized that that statistic is highly improbable, if not impossible." Garcia said, fiddling with one of her pink and feathery pens. "I need something to narrow down the list or it's going to be years figuring out which families took home babies bought from Connell and which brought home their real children."
-"..." Morgan thought for a moment. "All right, focus on the patients of other doctors who worked at the same hospitals as Connell." He paused while Garcia remarked that that list would be larger than the one they already had. "I know, that's why I'm gonna help you narrow it down. Now, Connell would have to make sure he had someone to buy the babies he stole, so cross off any mothers who gave birth on days that Connell didn't have a patient of his own give birth."-
"It's still a pretty extensive list." Garcia said after entering in the new parameters.
-"Now, since most people wouldn't find it acceptable to buy babies, even if they had just lost their own and that most would try adopting first, narrow down the list of Connell's patients to those who wouldn't be able to adopt. Focus on parents with histories of drug or domestic abuse, or those charged with crimes. Particularly violent crimes or crimes targeting children."-
"All right, give me a sec." Garcia started typing away, determined to find something. Her eyebrows rose as the number of potential buyers fell considerably. "That narrows it down to forty-nine potential families. Any ideas to narrow it down further?"
-Morgan paused, considering things. "How many of those mothers gave birth before the mothers who lost their children? About five or four hours before."-
"That would be twenty-nine. Well, twenty-seven if we take off the two children we already know Connell sold."
-"All right. We probably should question all of those families just in case, but let's try narrowing it down further. Which of those remaining families took out large sums of money - over ten grand - in the weeks after the deliveries?" Morgan replied after recalling how much Ted Gregson said he wrote the check to Connell for.-
Garcia, at first hopeful to narrow down the list further, grimaced when the money parameter eliminated the remaining families from the list. "None of them. And at least eighteen of those families never had anything higher than two thousand in the bank."
-"How about smaller amounts, ranging from hundreds to thousands, spread out over time? Most likely adding up to ten thousand, and likely following a schedule. Withdrawals that didn't exist before the mothers gave birth."-
"...that narrows it down to...twenty-six families." Garcia replied, struck by there being only one family filtered out with the money parameter.
-"Twenty-six?" Morgan gaped and shook his head in disgust. The thought that each of those twenty-six families potentially bought someone else's baby sickened him. He had hoped that Connell hadn't stolen more than a few babies. "All right, baby girl. Send us the list of those twenty-six families."-