Missing Brandy (A Fina Fitzgibbons Brooklyn Mystery Book 2) (30 page)

Ten minutes later, we found the lot. Early evening, and the air was filled with soft sunlight, dust motes, and bugs. We drove up and down the street to get a feel for the neighborhood. It was a quiet one. Unassuming clapboard homes built in the 1950s stood across the street from monuments and graves. I saw toys strewn on front lawns, cars in driveways, bikes on sidewalks, a tribute to normal life. But my radar was on red alert, my sixth sense telling me we were getting one step closer to finding Brandy.

In the middle of this serenity, a vacant lot displayed itself like an open wound. As I stared at Ben Small’s overgrown patch of land, something about it gave me the creeps, big time.

“You’re being too dramatic,” Jane said. But when she lowered her window and caught a whiff of that haunting quality in the air, she shivered. “You may be right.”

I pulled to the curb, and she handed me a pair of latex gloves.

In the lowering sun, we walked through the lot on Woolsey Street. Although it was vacant, had been for years, it teemed with life. It looked like deer and raccoons had taken over. The grass was high and filled with weeds, but someone must have been tending to it, at least once in a while; otherwise it would have been a jungle. Jane pointed to a line of crumbling cement, probably the foundation of a house. In a back corner of the property, we found black soil mixed in with charred remains. It looked like a personal garbage dump—some rusting tin cans, a few glass jars and bottle caps.

My eye caught a glinting in the dirt, part of a beat-up box baptized with bird droppings. Inside were moldy toothpicks. A chill ran down my spine. “Remember what Cookie said about the messenger who looked like a monk after a meal?” I held up the toothpicks.

Jane nodded, her eyes wide. I caught her deep intake of air as she pulled an evidence bag out of her back pocket.

After another fruitless pass or two around the property, we walked back to the car. A few feet to our left, a man was hitching up his boat. He had blond stubble beneath one of those marine hats, and my heart did a quick flip until he stopped what he was doing and smiled. He was so beguiling, so innocent, I immediately relaxed.

“Looks like you’re planning a trip,” I said, showing him my ID.

“On the Delaware River.” His eyes held the deep blue of the sky.

“Do you remember the people who lived here?” I pointed to Ben Small’s lot.

He shook his head. “Vacant when we bought our house ten years ago. I’d buy it if I could locate the owner, a guy named Small. He’s still paying taxes on it, the county tells me, but he pays with postal money orders, and the address he writes down is bogus. My luck! I’ve written to him a couple of times, but my letters keep coming back.”

“Did you tell the tax assessor?”

He nodded. “Believe me, I want that land, but as long as the township gets their money, they’re happy, and I can’t file for ownership. I try to keep it up for the sake of the neighborhood, but you know how it is. We’ve got kids, not enough time. I do what I can.”

I showed him Cookie’s sketch of the Brite messenger, but he just shook his head. “Never seen the guy.”

We thanked the man and asked him for directions to Hamilton Hospital.

Chapter 55

Fina. Late Afternoon Three, The Hospital

We entered through the emergency room door, past hushed faces in the waiting room and orderlies moving gurneys through hallways. I wanted to rush back outside. Hospitals do that to me. The business office was closed, but Jane flashed her shield, and I showed them my New Jersey PI license. One of the women working reception asked us to sit down. With a wary glance, she disappeared. In a moment the administrator on duty greeted us. Like a stuffed apple coming out of the oven, she was round and plump and rosy in a scrubbed but tired way.

“You were asking about Ben Small?”

We nodded.

“Sorry I can’t give you more information, the office is closed now, but I remember him.” She shoved a pen behind one ear. “I consider myself sort of retired. Kids are grown, and I don’t need all the crazy shifts, so I work part-time. I started out twenty years ago as an ER nurse and worked with Ben on some of the shifts. When he was good, he was very good.”

“What work did he do?”

“Sorry, I thought you knew. He was an ER social worker.”

“What do they do?”

She thought a moment. “I guess you’d say they help patients and family members in crisis. They help them cope with shattering events, and as you can imagine, we have many of those every hour, so they perform a valuable service while nurses and doctors deal with the medical aspects of the emergency.” She sucked in her cheeks. “They’re trained to help in medical situations, too—sometimes there’s a thin line between the physical and the emotional. They know their way around a hospital, that’s for sure.”

“And Ben was on staff?”

“He worked here often. Some years it seemed like I saw him every day, but he was freelance, on call. Whenever we were in crisis, many victims headed our way, he’d be called in. He lived close by, so he could be here in less than five minutes.”

“You liked him?”

Her eyes flitted from side to side, and she half-smiled. “Ben was an acquired taste, but we got along. I didn’t mess with him. Whenever I called him, he was always there for me. He was competent enough, but there were others who worked with him that despised him.”

“Why?”

“Ben was arrogant. Knew it all. He had no patience with what he thought was incompetence.”

“So much for bedside manner,” I said. “I would think that someone in his position, someone who was charged with helping shattered lives cope, would be able to show patience and compassion.”

“He could do his job; I’m not saying he wasn’t competent or didn’t show compassion with patients. But with staff, he was unpleasant most of the time. Like I say, we got along. For some reason, he liked me, but he looked down on some of the nurses and interns, and there was a lot of friction. No one knew as much as Ben. That’s the way he came across.”

“Can you be more specific?”

“This is a teaching hospital. Some of the interns, especially, didn’t want to work with him. I remember one time an intern was having problems setting up the IV for a patient with Raynaud’s phenomenon—sometimes the veins are hard to find—and she couldn’t seem to locate one. Ben grabbed the needle from her and shoved her aside—in front of the patient, mind—and slipped him the needle. The intern was mortified and so was the patient.”

“But you don’t see him here anymore?”

The administrator bit her lip. “I wasn’t here the day it happened, but apparently there were two unexplained deaths. I heard that Ben was escorted out of the hospital. I’m not privy to any more detail than that.”

I looked at Jane. “You must have heard the rumors. What were they?”

“I’m sorry. I just can’t tell you any more. You’re welcome to return and talk to the hospital administrator. He comes in tomorrow morning, and he’s usually here by nine.”

“We’re working the Brandy Liam abduction.”

She hadn’t heard about it.

“It’s a kidnap for ransom. Occurred in Brooklyn. We think someone who sounds an awful lot like Ben Small may be involved.” I told her about Phillipa Olinski and finding her body. “We think she died by lethal injection, say digoxin, similar to the way the abducted girl’s father died. We have good reason to believe Ben Small was involved in both deaths.”

She did a quirky thing with her mouth that involved flattening her lips and scrunching her cheeks down, an expression incapable of translation. I took it to mean she wouldn’t be surprised.

“Ben held funny beliefs when it came to laws and morality. I didn’t understand them, not really. I don’t think he had a relationship with a higher power, and he didn’t hold with most legal constructs. On rare occasions when the midnight shift was becalmed, we’d sit around the lounge, trying to keep awake, and we’d have these discussions, which as I recalled, were convoluted at best. His belief system, such as it was, didn’t endear many of us to him. But I admired his mind, to a point, of course.”

“Do ER social workers have access to drugs?” Jane asked.

“They’re licensed professional counselors, so of course they do, and they write prescriptions.”

“What about drugs such as digoxin?”

She shrugged. “I can’t think of an instance where they’d have to administer it, not like a nurse would, but they have access to anything in the pharmacy.”

“You wouldn’t know how we could reach Ben Small?”

She shook her head. “As I say, we lost touch long ago.”

“And you don’t have the key to his file?”

“Again, I think you ought to speak with the hospital administrator, but I’m going back a long way. How time disappears. I lose track, but it’s been at least ten years since I last saw Ben.”

“And you’d recognize him?”

“It may take me a few minutes.”

“Just so we’re on the same page, can you describe him?” Jane asked.

She nodded. “Tall, thin, light brown hair beginning to recede, a bald spot on the crown.”

I held out Cookie’s sketch.

The woman squinted at it for a few seconds. She puffed out her cheeks and nodded. “That’s an older version of the Ben I knew. Or a dead ringer for him.”

“Admit it,” I said on the way to the car. “Having Cookie draw a sketch of the Brite messenger was a good idea.”

Jane shrugged. “Means nothing.”

“Means someone recognized the Brite messenger as Ben Small.”

“Maybe.”

“Means Ben Small delivered the ransom note.”

“Means someone who
maybe
looked like Ben Small to one person—a person who hasn’t seen him in over ten years—
maybe
delivered the ransom note.”

“That’s an awful lot of maybes.”

Jane walked away from me, pulling out her phone. As she paced and talked, she wagged a finger in the air. I don’t know what all she said, but I overheard her telling someone to “pull the Brite manager in for questioning.”

I figured she hadn’t had an all perfect day, so I stood there, arms crossed, blank-faced, waiting for her to finish.

When she did, I asked, “So what do you think?”

“Ben Small’s looking more and more suspicious. We have his fingerprints on the dashboard of the getaway van. Through his work he had access to meds and may have been involved in patient deaths at Hamilton Hospital.”

I unlocked the car. “That’s why he was escorted out of the hospital?”

She nodded. “He may have been involved in Mitch Liam’s death, although that’s a stretch, and he probably murdered Phillipa Olinski.”

“Afraid she was going to break?”

She nodded. “I wish we’d get an address for Henry Gruber.”

I looked at the clock. Close to dinner.

“Let’s check out the address Susan Gruber gave us.”

“We know he won’t be there.”

“The neighbors may know something.”

“That’s another stretch. It’s been close to ten years since Henry and Susan Gruber lived there.”

Chapter 56

Fina. Early Evening Three, Overlooking The Delaware

We headed toward a hilly area outside Trenton’s city center, looking for the Grubers’ old address. It turned out to be an imposing stone house overlooking the Delaware River in a fairly affluent section, probably filled with history professors and corporate executives. We had a pleasant chat with the present owners, who’d bought the house five years ago from another family. They’d never heard of the Grubers.

So we canvassed the neighborhood. Luckily most people were home, or at least the cooks in the family were, so it took us a while, during which time the light faded totally. We flashed IDs and told anyone who answered our knocks that we were searching for Henry Gruber in connection with the settlement of a will. We were batting zero when our luck broke.

Down the block we saw an older man pruning shrubs. He tipped his hat and studied my ID, nodding his head and scratching his chin. “Now there’s a name I haven’t heard in a long time,” Mr. Hallowell said. He invited us inside and introduced us to his wife.

“You remember them, don’t you, Mother?”

She nodded. “Of course, how could I forget Susan Gruber? She was an artist. Quite accomplished. Oils. Had one-woman shows in Lambertville.”

“How life plays cruel tricks. If that house could speak, it would tell a sad tale, believe me.”

“Maybe you can tell us the story,” Jane said.

We were seated in their living room with a view of the river. Mr. Hallowell picked up a cold pipe lying next to his chair and drew on it a couple of times. Otherwise, there was silence for a beat before he began. “If you look far to the right and squint into history, you can see Washington crossing the Delaware, at least in the daylight.”

I looked out the window. The sky was thick with stars. The trees surrounding the house were covered in new leaves. The air smelled fresh, and into the evening pause, crickets chirped.

Mr. Hallowell rubbed a finger over his lips and crossed his legs. “Very well. I guess I knew them the best of anyone around here. Henry and I got along, you see, and Mother and I, I guess we’re the only old timers left.”

I nodded and told myself to keep my mouth shut.

“Henry helped me several times with my mower. He could fix anything, that guy could, and he told me how to make my bookshelves. Actually he designed them and helped me to build them. Would you like to take a look?”

He led us into his library. It had a large bay window facing the water, and we could see a bridge in the distance.

Mr. Hallowell must have followed my gaze. “Isn’t it a beauty? Henry loved that bridge. He called it a steel truss, whatever that means. Told me it was constructed in 1904. It connects Lambertville with New Hope—New Jersey bridged into Pennsylvania. It was one of Henry’s favorites.”

I’m not one for bridges, except for the Brooklyn Bridge, of course, but so far what I was hearing of Henry didn’t sound like he was much of an abductor.

Leave it to Jane to get us back on track. “You were going to tell us about what happened to the Grubers.”

“Their boy died suddenly. I remember the night it happened. I heard a wail coming from somewhere. Sounded like a woman in trouble. I ran outside and saw Mrs. Gruber—Susan, that was her name—I saw Susan Gruber outside. You read the old books about women tearing out their hair? Well, that’s what Susan Gruber was doing, marching back and forth. I’ll never forget it. We had a moon, you see, and she was pulling her hair, her body arched backward, wailing like a creature gone mad. I ran outside. ‘My boy, my boy!’ That’s all she could say. Mother and I, we tried to comfort her, but what do you say? What do you do? Looking back on it now, it seems like yesterday, doesn’t it, Mother?”