Missing Brandy (A Fina Fitzgibbons Brooklyn Mystery Book 2) (2 page)

I looked straight at her. “Perhaps you’d be happier having to tell your story just once, but that’s not the way investigations work. They’re difficult, grinding, exasperating experiences, and I understand if you don’t want to go through it again, believe me I do, but it’s the best way to find your daughter.”

You might think I was crass, and you’d be right. I showed no sympathy for Mrs. Liam. Behind her hard-bitten veneer, she might be wailing in agony, but I had to get her attention. Time was slipping away, and her daughter wasn’t home. “Now I’ll tell you what, let’s start over. First you need to decide whether you want to hire me. Because if you do, I require a retainer. Next, why don’t you get me a glass of water with one and only one cube of ice, and then we’ll take it from the top.”

Trisha Liam smiled—if that’s what you can call what she did with her mouth—and disappeared down the hall.

While she was gone, I combed through the bookshelves lining the far wall. Her taste ranged from poetry to literary fiction, to fine art and the theater. I saw novels, stacks of playbills, poetry anthologies, and art books. But the lower shelves held a set of law books, including Roman law, French law, British law, and what appeared to be casebooks. No yearbooks or glossies. In this room at least, there was no evidence of anyone else in residence besides Trisha Liam, least of all a teen.

I looked for family photos and found a small faded one of three people—Trisha, Brandy when she was a child of about five, and a man, probably her dad. But another picture struck me, a more recent black and white of the family taken in happier times, Brandy in the middle of her mother and father, the three of them waving at whoever was on the other side of the camera.

Trisha Liam must have decided to hire me because when she came back into the room, she handed me the glass of water, went over to the desk, and retrieved her checkbook.

“Make the check out to …?”

I swallowed. “The Fina Fitzgibbons Detective Agency.” I told her the amount. “I won’t cash it until Brandy is home.”

As she wrote, I asked her for a photo of her daughter.

“I’ve given the school headshot of her to the police. I’ll have to look around for another. Should have ordered more, I guess.”

“Do you have a digitized copy of a recent photo?”

She thought a moment while I gulped the rest of the water and chewed on the ice. Then she pulled out her cell and began swiping around on the screen. “This one. I took it a couple months ago.” She held out her phone showing Brandy’s face, and I peered at it while she finished writing the check.

Staring back at me from Trisha Liam’s cell were a pair of resolute blue eyes, confident, with a spark of humor. Interesting lines around the mouth. Hair, dark blonde, long with one of those braid thingies they all wear. Defiant. Cheeky. I saw myself nine years ago and felt a lump between my shoulder blades.

“Perfect. Would you send it to me?” I gave her my number and, after I got it, passed it on to Jane and my guy at the FBI, Agent Tig Able, an agent who worked with me at Brown’s. I can see him now, creased suit, stiff white shirt, thin black tie, earnest smile. Together we’d do the grunt work wherever they needed us, sometimes in their Manhattan office, other times in Fort Lee or in Stamford, but always specializing in finding skips. In short, we got bleary eyed together working surveillance gigs before he was hired by the Feds.

I shook away the memory. “When was the last time you saw your daughter?”

“This morning.”

“Does she have a cell?” Stupid question, all kids have them these days.

She nodded.

“Did you try calling her?”

“No, Brandy always calls me after school to tell me where she is.”

“You don’t call her at lunchtime?”

Trisha Liam shook her head. “During the day she calls me if there’s something … unusual, if she’s not feeling well or school’s out early, which rarely happens. And no, she didn’t phone me this afternoon. And I … I didn’t call her during her lunch break, which happens to be early, too early to eat lunch at least, but what do I know. Anyway, I was in court all morning and didn’t have time. But about one o’clock, I got a strange feeling—guilt and fear in one nasty package—so I … I panicked and phoned her. It went straight to voicemail, and I left a message.”

“Asking her to call?”

“No, telling her I was sorry.”

There was a pregnant silence.

“For?”

“We’d had words this morning. I thought she was dawdling. She does that some mornings. On purpose, sometimes. She putzes around. Drives me wild. A child her age shouldn’t. A six-year-old, maybe, but not a teenager. I called to say I was sorry.”

“Mind if I try to reach her?”

“Why would I mind?” Trisha Liam gave me Brandy’s number. I dialed and was switched to voicemail on the first ring.

I looked at Trisha Liam who stood before me, arms crossed. She seemed to be shrinking into herself as if she were a dissolving clip in a horror movie.

After gulping down the rest of my water, I told Trisha Liam that I’d like to see her daughter’s room.

Chapter 2

Henry. Earlier That Morning, In Traffic

Henry inched into the flow of early morning traffic. His latex-gloved hands gripped the wheel. All the while he kept glancing into the rearview mirror, part of his vision peeled on the crowd busy with whatever kids were busy with toward the end of the school year. His son never knew their excitement. He shuddered, his mind fixed on the memory of Stuart’s smile as he heard the bell and watched the students file inside. No teachers around, no one stared at them, no arms gesturing toward the van.

Driving toward the BQE, Henry felt the knot in his stomach carve a path to his throat. He opened his mouth and breathed, felt the pain heave in his chest, the throb in his temples intensify.

Silence from the back of the van.

It would have been better if he could have managed the take alone, but the more he planned, the more Henry realized he’d need another pair of hands. And help with getting the medicine, too, or whatever it was Ben gave the girl that made her pass out right away.

From the passenger seat, Ben reached for the radio dial.

“No radio,” Henry said. He made a right-hand turn onto Atlantic Avenue, passing a traffic cop checking meters. Good, she had her head down, busy writing tickets.

Got to get out of here, he told himself.
Don’t drive too fast. Breathe slow. Relax. We rehearsed long enough; now we’re home free. Almost.

On the expressway, Ben was jumpy, his usual mood. Maybe he should give himself some of that juice he squeezed into the girl.

“You never let me drive.”

Not that again. “You don’t know how.”

“You don’t trust me.”

Maybe if he didn’t answer him, Ben would forget it. From the back he heard the tarpaulin rub against the floor of the van. “She’s stirring. Tap her but be careful—not too much. Just enough to put her to sleep.”

Henry heard the rush of air. Then the bundle stilled. He felt the stillness of the stars. “I love you, Daddy,” he heard his boy say. He saw the glint of sun as Ben drew out the needle.

Cars and trucks surrounded them. Horns honked. Exhausts chugged as they inched their way underneath the viaduct and squeezed into the left-hand lane. The van slid into the turn, its bald tires unable to find purchase on a street made slick by the oil of a million trucks. He breathed hot fumes.

“Should have gone the way I told you,” Ben said. “But you don’t trust me with cars. Now we’re stuck in traffic. Should have taken the bridge. Look at it, not a car in sight. Turn around, not too late. I feel cops breathing down the back of my neck. Gonna sweat the whole way back. Geezus.”

“Look at me; I’m not sweating. Relax. Breathe deep. We practiced this, remember? We were like a well-oiled machine back there. If something went wrong, if the weather was wrong, if I saw pedestrians staring at us, if a kid looked cross-eyed at us—and I can tell, believe me. I know my kids; I can tell when a kid’s eyes are boring into me. I see my kid’s eyes in their eyes. I know every move kids make. I know what they mean. Don’t worry. Like I say, if something wasn’t right, I would have called it off. We would have waited for a better time. Relax, it went smooth, smooth as butter. Just kids looking forward to the start of summer and their last days in school when the teachers look the other way, and it’s almost better than not having school. I remember that time, don’t you? Trust me, their minds are blanks. All those summers my son never had because of that bitch. These kids were clueless. They haven’t missed her yet.”

They’d practiced enough at the farm miles away from the nearest neighbor so no one would notice. Practiced almost too much. They rehearsed with a wooden dummy, then graduated to a mannequin on the curb, smiling, catching her eye. Over and over Ben slipped the tarpaulin over her head until his movements were seamless. They learned how to move like Bogie kissing Bacall. In his mind, Henry watched the actor slipping on his jacket, whisper smooth. If Bogie could move like that, so could they. They’d rehearsed until they were bone tired, tearing down each action, analyzing what went wrong, adding to it, taking angles away, perfecting it. First the van’s door had to be greased so it didn’t squeak. Then the grab. It must be silent, Henry said, so Ben could stick her with the meds before she knew it.

The two of them, Ben and Henry, became like parts of a machine, well-oiled, together in a silent groove, a marriage of their own making which neither acknowledged. Henry thought up last-minute glitches. They must be flexible, focused, slide into Plan B or Plan C until they could master alternative movements a hundred times in a row without a hitch, until they could perform it like the steps of a complicated ballet with their eyes closed.

The medic crossed his legs and sucked on a toothpick.

That toothpick again
.

They ran into heavy traffic on the BQE from all the trucks heading for the Belt.

“Accident ahead?” Ben asked.

“Do you see flashing lights?”

Henry watched the toothpick roll to the corner of Ben’s mouth, saw him look around, squint, move his head from side to side.

“All right, then.” Sliding his eyes to the rearview mirror, he surveyed the lump under the tarpaulin, heard the faint whoosh of water and smelled urine.

“Now look what you’ve gone and done. You’ve given her too much. I told you to be careful. She didn’t need much. Damn you to hell, Ben Small, you blew it!”

Chapter 3

Fina. Evening One, Brandy’s Bedroom

Trisha Liam led me upstairs and through the door to a room facing the street. After flipping the light switch, she opened one of the windows. It was a teenager’s room, all right, huge with bright purple walls and a high ceiling, soft wooden floors, the kind that your feet can sink into, and deep crown molding, white lacquered woodwork like the rest of the house, an old-fashioned crystal chandelier hanging from the center. No dolls, but a few stuffed animals, those elf or dwarf things. Pink and purple pillows were scattered on the bedspread and in one corner of the floor. There were several posters on the walls, a few of Zac Efron and one which read, “Bitch, Don’t Kill My Vibe.” I couldn’t help it, I smiled when I saw Kendrick Lamar’s words on the wall and looked at Trisha who didn’t seem to get the joke.

Opposite the bed was a white desk with a gleaming iMac sitting on it, bookshelves on one side, and in the other corner an overstuffed chair in purple and white zebra stripes. Over the nightstand was a crucifix and picture of the Virgin. I could identify with that—we used to keep holy pictures until Mom died and I took them down.

I opened the doors to a walk-in closet. Shoes stood in a tree on the floor. Blouses hung on one rack, skirts, dresses, robes on the other, all arranged by type and color. Brandy was some kind of neat freak? There was an island in the middle of the closet. I opened the drawers and saw socks, undies, sweaters, everything folded just so. And luck be a lady, in the bottom drawer underneath some scarves, I found Brandy’s diary. I didn’t think teens kept them anymore, but what did I know? It was almost full and dated this year. Who knows, it might give me a lead or two, so I put it in my pocket. For a second I felt like a thief, but I had to get to know Brandy, and this room, while a good start, wasn’t doing it for me, at least not with Trisha Liam lurking over my shoulder.

Beyond the closet was the bathroom. Sparkling, like the rest of Brandy’s world, or at least the one she let me see, except for one damp-looking purple towel bunched up on the floor. I checked the medicine cabinet, because you never know, and found an outdated bottle of baby aspirin.

My room never, ever looked this way, certainly not when I was thirteen. Believe me, I looked, but there wasn’t a mote of dust. No heaps of clothes slung over tables or chairs or on the floor, and the bed was made with the sheets and covers so tight and perfect like it was a hospital ward. Still, the room had a phony veneer, like some designer had stepped in and papered over everything that was real, except for the poster.

“Brandy keeps her room this way?”

She shrugged. “Phillipa.”

“Phillipa?”

“The housekeeper.”

“But it’s her day off, no?”

Suddenly Trisha doubled over, barely making it to the chair. She took off her glasses and wept. “My girl is neat, isn’t she?” She was bawling now.

I’m not so good with the emotion stuff. You’d think I would be, wouldn’t you, being part Italian, but not a chance. I nodded, grabbed a box of tissues from the desk, and handed her a clump of them. I waited several minutes until she dabbed and blew and composed.

“She’s a good girl,” she said, sniffing. “Studies hard. She has to, gets that from me. Maintains an A-minus average.”

“And her father?”

“He died two years ago. Brandy loved him. He used to take her to ballgames, that kind of thing. Tried to teach her baseball, but it was hopeless. She’d get straight A’s if it weren’t for gym. That’s where the minus comes in.” She stopped talking and stared, lost. Who knew what pictures were flickering in her brain?