Chapter Eighteen

 

 

Sunday, October 14

 

 

As he drove to the hospital, he wondered if he should call Mona and tell her what had happened to Rae, but decided against it. For one thing, he had no idea what had happened to her. He would tell her, but he needed more information before he did.

Once he’d parked up in the hospital car park, he called Mary Lou.

‘Hello?’

‘It’s Tom Gabriel. You sound tired.’

‘That’s because it’s quarter to one in the morning.’

He glanced at the clock on the dashboard – it was exactly that time. ‘Sorry. It’s been one of those nights.’

‘Is this going to be a regular occurrence? If it is, then I’ll have to re-negotiate my salary.’

‘No. I was just wondering if you’d found out anything about those two people?’

‘One of them – yes.’

He waited.

‘Do you want me to give you the information now?’

‘That would be good.’

He heard a deep sigh, and guessed she wasn’t happy. Not that he could blame her at quarter to one in the morning.

‘I’ll have to go downstairs and switch on my laptop. I’ll call you back in five minutes.’

The call ended.

But the phone began vibrating immediately.

‘That was quick,’ he said.

‘We pride ourselves on the speed of our service at the St John’s County Medical Examiners’ Office.’

‘Oh, hello Debbie. I thought you were someone else.’

‘Clearly.’

‘Yes?’

‘Oh yes! I’m stripping the clothes from our two armed robbers and guess what I found?’

‘They’re both female?’

She laughed. ‘That would be something, wouldn’t it? No, not that. I’ve been involved in the John Doe case, so I know about the missing labels from his clothes.’

‘Okay.’ He wondered where she was going with this.

‘These two men suffer from the same identity crisis – the labels in their clothes have been removed, and I’m guessing we’ll find no fingerprint or DNA matches on any of the databases either.’

He tried to assimilate this new information. Shock and surprise would be apt descriptions of how he felt. At no point had he imagined that the robbery of the restaurant was connected to the cases he was working on. What was the point of robbing the restaurant? If they’d wanted to kill him, they could simply have shot him where he’d sat.

‘Tom! Are you still there?’

‘Sorry – that sucked the wind out of me.’

‘Don’t talk to me about wind. I don’t know if you know, but I have irritable bowel syndrome?’

‘No, I didn’t know that.’

‘I can’t begin to describe the problems I have with wind. Unknown to me at the time, I chose the right profession. The dead never complain about how windy it gets in the autopsy room, if you know what I mean?’

He had the feeling that she’d probably given him more information about her medical condition than he needed. ‘Yes, I think I have a good idea what you mean. Listen, can you keep this information between the two of us for the time being?’ He imagined what would happen if Allegre found out that the restaurant hold-up was actually to do with a case he was working on. She’d throw him and his belongings out on the street as more trouble than he was worth. It would be the second time in as many months that he’d brought trouble to the hotel.

‘Two days – that’s all I can give you. Mona will want to know who these two guys are. I’ll obfuscate for two days, but then I’ll have to tell her what I know.’

‘Thanks, Debbie.’

He ended the call.

It rang again.

‘Are you playing games with me?’ Mary Lou said, sounding annoyed.

‘As I said earlier, it’s been one of those nights. Okay, I’m all yours.’

‘I planned to look at Blanche Rainey tomorrow as a gesture of goodwill, but I don’t normally work weekends. If you recall, I offered my services because I wanted a life. Working weekends – and through the night come to think of it – is not having a life.’

‘Sorry.’

‘I’ll put it down to ignorance on your part, but if it’s a regular occurrence . . . Anyway, I know where Police Sergeant Neville van Dalen is now.’

‘That’s great. Where?’

‘Lake View Nursing Home on North Rodriguez Street, just before you reach the Evergreen Cemetery, which sounds so . . . I don’t know – romantic I suppose. It’s like a stop-off point to freshen up before you check out of life’s motel.’

‘I might ask if they’ve got any rooms available while I’m there visiting Mr van Dalen.’

‘I already enquired on your behalf when I called them. They said they had nothing at the moment, but to keep an eye on the obituaries.’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘I have a wicked sense of humour – especially at one o’clock in the morning.’

He pretended to laugh. ‘I can understand that. Thanks, Mary Lou. I’ll see you on Monday.’

‘Goodnight, Tom.’

‘Good . . .’

The call had ended.

He walked into the busy ER and asked one of the nurses manning the reception desk who he could speak to regarding the unconscious woman the ambulance had just brought in.

‘Are you a relative?’

‘No. I’m her partner. She hasn’t got any relatives.’

‘Her partner?’ She glanced at the computer screen. ‘Miss Raeburn is in her early twenties . . .’

‘Twenty-one,’ he corrected her.

‘Exactly, and you’re how old?’

His lip curled up, and he showed her his ID. ‘I’m a PI. She’s an investigative journalist with the Record. We work together.’

‘I see – working partners?’

‘Yes.’

‘But you’re not a relative?’

‘No, but I’m the nearest person she has to a relative. If she was conscious she’d name me as her next-of-kin.’

‘I’ll speak to the doctor and see what she has to say about your strange relationship.’

‘Thank you.’

‘Please take a seat.’

He moved into the seating area and sat down next to a man with a pet chipmunk that he kept feeding nuts to.

‘Name’s Alvin.’

‘Really?’

‘I’m not sick, ya know.’

‘Oh?’

‘No. Alvin and me come in here to while away some time. We have a different route each night, but I make sure I come in here on a Saturday night because there’s always a good floor show.

’Has it started yet?’

‘Not yet, but it’s still early.’

A doctor with shoulder-length grey hair appeared dressed in scrubs. ‘Mr Gabriel?’

‘Yes,’ he said, standing up.

‘I’m Doctor Ann Swinfen. If you come with me.’

He followed the doctor who took him to Rae’s cubicle.

‘Can you tell me what happened?’

‘Not really. I think she was kidnapped from her apartment and taken somewhere. Where and why – I have no idea. Or, why they brought her back. It’s all a bit confusing at the moment.’

‘I’ve examined Miss Raeburn, but apart from superficial bruising and cuts . . .’

‘Was she . . . ?’

‘There’s no obvious signs to suggest that she was raped. However, hospital policy dictates that we treat her as a sexual assault victim. As such, forensic evidence samples have been taken as required for further analysis.’

‘Do you know what was used to drug her?’

‘Flunitrazepam – more commonly known as Narcozep, or Rohypnol. Based on the amount found in a sample of her blood, I’d say she was kept in a catatonic state for at least twenty-four hours.’

‘Will she be all right?’

‘Long-term, of course. The drug has no lasting effects. Short-term, however, is a different matter. A recent human study found that the drug was still detectable in urine after four weeks.’

He opened his mouth to speak, but Doctor Swinfen carried on.

‘It has a number of side-effects such as impaired motor skills, confusion, dizziness, disorientation, reduced levels of consciousness, slurred speech, and difficulty in walking and standing, which could explain the wound on her forehead.’

‘I found her on the floor with a bloody sack on her head.’

‘Mmmm! Anyway, Rohypnol has a number of street names. One such name is the “forget-me-drug”. The main side effect is memory loss. She’ll be lucky – or unlucky – if she remembers anything of her ordeal.’

‘Are you saying she’ll never remember what happened?’

‘Never is a long time, Mr Gabriel. Rohypnol is also called the “date-rape-drug”. What surprises me is that she wasn’t raped. Whoever abducted her obviously had another motive.’

‘Thanks, Doctor. How long before she wakes up?’

‘We’ll admit her and keep her under observation for at least twenty-four hours. She should start regaining consciousness in a couple of hours, but don’t expect to get much sense out of her at first. As I said, the drug takes some considerable time to leave the body.’

 

 

***

 

 

While they admitted Rae and took her to the Emergency Care Centre, he sauntered along to the cafeteria for a coffee. There was no queue, and when he saw the shrivelled food that was on offer he realised that he never did get his blue cheeseburger with fries and coleslaw.

‘What’ll it be?’ a small pleasant-looking black woman asked him.

Even though he was famished, none of the food appealed to him. ‘Just a coffee, please.’

He sat down at a table next to a window that looked out over the Matanzas River, nursed his coffee and watched the small pinpricks of light from the ships bob up and down. Absently, he recalled that Matanzas meant “killings” in Spanish.

There were about ten people in the cafeteria, but only three of them were alive. The other seven were trapped between staying and going, light and dark, love and hate – they needed guides to complete their journeys, but there didn’t seem to be any available.

Was Rae’s abduction simply a warning? If it was, it seemed to be clear what they were saying: We can take you from your apartment anytime we feel like it. The next time, you won’t be coming back. And was the hold-up at the Casablanca restaurant a similar warning? If he hadn’t been there it could have been so much worse. He probably would have come back from Staten Island to find the hotel closed down. It was their way of telling him to walk away now while he still had a life.

So, the question was: Should he walk away? Should he let them get away with abducting his partner? With killing Manuel Alvarez? John Doe? Abducting at least twenty children, but probably a lot more? That would have been like letting Curtis Polk get away with hitting his daughter – he wasn’t the type of man to walk away.

He thought about calling Mona, but she’d laugh all the way back to the station. This side of reality, what did he really have that would stand up in a gentle breeze? There was John Doe with a brush used for stencilling packing crates, The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam with its strange code and Rosalind Winter’s unlisted telephone number on the last page, the dry-cleaning tags that might connect him to Maurice Stern and Alpine Dry Cleaning, and an ornate loupe hidden in a pair of slippers.

Then, there was Joseph Fowler who was murdered by Tony Dreyfus – an employee of Maurice Stern who owns Alpine Dry Cleaning that uses similar dry-cleaning tags to those found on John Doe’s clothes; and he also had the ramblings of Stuart Trigg – a crystal meth addict – who said there was a warehouse used by Maurice Stern on Chemical Lane in Staten Island with packing crates full of live children. Trigg said he’d opened up one of the crates and seen the children for himself, but it could just as easily have been a drug-induced hallucination.

And, of course, there was the missing Roger Harrison with Rosalind Winter’s non-existent crash report written by Police Sergeant Neville van Dalen that identified one fatality, Blanche Rainey who had died of old age, a safe deposit box in a Swiss bank, the clandestine meeting with someone from Greiner, Tibbs & Myrick – attorneys at law, and the book of airport codes.

There might be gossamer threads that connected some parts to other parts, but they were tenuous to say the least. If he was being honest – after six days he still had nothing. It would be easy to simply walk away, and tell Barbara Harrison that he’d tried and failed to find her husband. A PI was only as good as his last case – and maybe that was the nub of it all. Maybe, he should stop pretending he still had what it took, stop fighting the ravages of time and accept retirement in all its idle and decrepit glory.

That was certainly an attractive option, but first he should go and talk to ex-Police Sergeant Neville van Dalen in Lake View Nursing Home on North Rodriguez Street and find out what the crash report was all about, and who the fatality was.

Mary Lou would have something for him tomorrow . . . he looked at his watch – it was quarter to four on Sunday morning, which meant it would be today – on Blanche Rainey. Then, on Monday, Laura was due to ring him about the gold loupe and who the American collector was who had bought it. There was also the dry-cleaning tags, the code from the book and Lillian Taylor breaking into a laboratory to test out a theory.

If he had nothing after that – then he’d walk away. The problem, of course, was that it wasn’t just about finding Roger Harrison anymore. It was about finding the children, and he had the feeling that the two were inextricably linked.

He threw back the dregs of his coffee, hooked Rae’s rucksack over his shoulder and made his way to the Emergency Care Centre.

‘Butterfly Raeburn?’ he asked a pretty nurse he accosted in the corridor who – according to her badge – was called Janet Thompson.

‘Butterfly?’ She looked him up and down. ‘Yes, I think the name suits you.’

He tried to smile, but gravity had other plans for his face. ‘It’s a bit early in the morning for humour, isn’t it?’

Her smile worked much better than his. ‘For you it might be early, but I’m living in a different time zone.’ She pointed along the corridor. ‘Third door on the right.’

‘Thanks.’

He sat down in a chair next to Rae’s bed and held her hand. ‘Come back to me Rae,’ he said.

Now that he’d stopped moving, the adrenaline had ceased to pump into his bloodstream. The caffeine was beginning to wear off, and he was about to hit a metaphorical brick wall. He closed his eyes and rested his head on the bed. Sleep dragged him into the darkness. He didn’t fight it, but as he went his last thoughts were of Rae’s tablet and cell. Whoever had taken them now knew what they knew, and without Rae he had no idea how to contact Lillian Taylor.

 

 

***

 

 

‘Hey?’

No, no, no. He wasn’t ready yet. Professor Lidenbrock needed him. They had just crossed the vast underground sea and were now hacking their way through a dense prehistoric forest with giant mushrooms, insects and mastodons . . .

‘Mr Gabriel?’

‘Hello?’ He tried to lick his parched lips, but his tongue was stuck to the roof of his mouth.

Somebody shook him. ‘Wake up, Mr Gabriel.’

He sat upright, opened his bleary eyes and said, ‘There should be laws about mistreating old people.’

‘There are.’ It was the pretty Nurse Thompson from earlier.

‘In which case, I have no doubt you’ll be taken into custody imminently.’

‘As long as they let me sleep, they can take me to Devil’s Island for all I care.’

‘Why did you wake me up?’

‘It’s eight-thirty in the morning, and this isn’t a rest home for old people . . . and I don’t think you’re that old anyway. Yes, you have a baggy face as if your skin was stretched all out of shape and then didn’t go back to how it used to be, but otherwise you’re in pretty good shape.’

‘I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. How’s Rae?’

‘Drifting in and out of consciousness as we’d expected. She mumbles things, but they don’t make a lot of sense. If I were you, I’d go home and get some rest. I’m sure that if you come back later, she’ll be awake and you’ll be able to talk to her.’

He stood up and stretched. ‘Seems like excellent advice. Have a good day in bed yourself.’

She smiled. ‘That’s certainly my plan.’

He took a last look at the wounded butterfly lying in the bed, and then made his way out of the hospital to the car park.

Going home was certainly an option open to him. He could definitely do with a shower and a change of clothes, but if he went home he had no doubt that Allegre would want to discuss what had happened in the restaurant with him, and he really wasn’t in the mood for picking over the bones. It was his fault that Manuel had been killed. The sooner he got some answers, the sooner he could decide what to do.

Lake View Nursing Home had been converted from a family house over a number of years by extending upwards, sideways and backwards. The modifications were like tree rings, and could be used to assist in dating each extension. The lake, from which the home derived its name, was fifteen feet wide and supported three adult black ducks and seven ducklings. There was also a grey cat named Lavender who was responsible for vermin control, and a black and white American Bulldog called Bazooka who had a bandana – that someone had fashioned from a stars and stripes – hanging round his neck and he was in charge of security.

He rang the bell.

A thin black woman in her early thirties with long corkscrew hair and faraway eyes opened the door. ‘Hello?’

He held out his ID card. ‘I’d like to see Neville van Dalen, please.’

‘Are you a relative?’

‘No.’

‘I’m sorry . . .’

‘I knew Neville in the police force,’ he lied.

‘Really?’

‘Yes. Does he get many visitors?’

‘No.’

‘It wouldn’t hurt to let me see him then, would it?’

She shrugged. ‘I suppose not. It might brighten him up.’

‘Apart from being old, what’s wrong with him?’

‘You don’t know?’

‘No.’

‘I thought you said you knew him in the police force.’

‘A long time ago.’

‘He was shot in the line of duty in 1992. Since then, he’s been paralysed from the waist down. Recently, he was diagnosed with testicular cancer.’

‘I’m sorry to hear that.’

‘So, your visit will probably cheer him up.’ She stood to one side and let him in.

He followed her upstairs. She knocked on a door half-way along a hallway, and then opened it.

‘Neville . . .’

‘When there’s no fucking answer it means I don’t want you to come in. You fucking bitches should learn some manners. Now, fuck off and leave me alone.’

‘Good morning, Neville. You have a visitor. Thomas Gabriel – he says he knows you from your time in the police force.’

‘Never fucking heard of him.’

‘I’ll leave you two together then, shall I?’ she said. ‘Fifteen minutes, Mr Gabriel, and then we’ll have to come in and get Neville out of bed.’

She left and shut the door.

‘Who the fuck are you?’ van Dalen said. He had pasty washed-out skin, tufts of grey hair sprouting from his scalp and looked at least a hundred years old, but Tom knew he was only seventy-two.

‘As the nurse said – Tom Gabriel.’

‘I don’t know you.’

‘No. I was a Detective Sergeant in the force towards the end of your time, but we never met. I’m a PI now.’

‘So, what the fuck do you want?’

‘I have an original crash report dated July 4, 1984. You filled it out following a crash involving Rosalind Winter, which resulted in one fatality.’

He grunted. ‘I wondered when that fucking thing would come back to bite me in the ass.’

‘You admit it?’

‘What the fuck? Why not? There’s nothing anybody can do to me now except kill me, and that would be the icing on the cake.’

‘Why didn’t you submit it?’

‘Clarence Winter gave me half a million reasons not to.’

‘You took a bribe?’

‘Sure. Why not? It was meant to be for my retirement, but as you can see – that didn’t work out too well.’

‘His granddaughter killed someone.’

‘I reported it as a hit-and-run.’

‘Why didn’t you just rip the crash report up?’

‘Winter wanted to keep it. It didn’t matter to me one way or the other. He couldn’t use it to blackmail me without implicating his own granddaughter, so I let him have it. How come you’ve got it now?’

‘I found it in the safe deposit box of a man who’s gone missing.’

‘And how did he get hold of it?’

‘I have no idea. What about the fatality?’

‘A seventeen year-old boy called Bruce Effron.’

‘What about the parents?’

‘A mother.’ He shrugged. ‘You know yourself that hit-and-runs happen all the time. People die. The world continues to turn. It wasn’t changed in anyway by what I did. A mother still lost her son. Bruce Effron was still dead, Clarence Winter carried on trucking, his granddaughter’s life was destroyed by what she’d done, and I had half a million dollars for a comfortable retirement. I learned to live with my guilty conscience.’

‘You realise I might have to report you?’

‘Do what you have to do. As I said, there’s nothing anyone can do to me anymore. Call it poetic justice, but my life was destroyed on January 7, 1992. I walked in on a drug store hold-up and took a bullet in the back – been paralysed ever since.’

‘The nurse said.’

‘So, what’s it all about?’

‘I was hoping you’d be able to tell me.’

‘I’ve told you all I know.’

‘Well, thanks for your time, Neville.’

‘As you can see, time is not really my problem.’

The door opened.

‘Can’t you fucking bitches knock?’ He turned to Tom. ‘Even paralysed people dying of cancer deserve a bit of privacy.’

‘I can see Mr Gabriel has really cheered you up, Neville,’ the nurse said.

‘Fuck off.’

‘Have you finished, Mr Gabriel?’

‘Just.’