Chapter 25: A Gramme is Better Than a Damn - Lucidity

FREMMER WASN’T LYING TO MADDEN WHEN HE SAID THAT HE HADN’T told anybody about his discovery. After his conversation with Candace in the ICU, he did the first thing a lot of people would do under the circumstances: he Googled. He input the words “Menlo Park” “Ross” “husband” “choked” and “killed” into the search bar on his phone. The search results confounded and amazed him.

The first item was Bender’s story on onedumbidea.com, posted almost a month earlier. It was about a wealthy Silicon Valley entrepreneur that hired a well-known, retired local detective in Menlo Park to help solve a twenty-year-old cold case involving a man named Ross Walker and his missing wife, Stacey. The entrepreneur said he’d offered to pay the detective a huge bonus if he found Stacey or Ross Walker. Sounded like seven figures.

Could the Ross that Candace was talking about be the Ross in the article? And if so, didn’t that make her Stacey?

As soon as Fremmer got home, he dug up a picture of her on his computer that he’d taken of her at an Apple store a couple of years ago. He’d wanted to use the shot as her author photo on Amazon, but in the end she hadn’t let him. He realized there were almost no photos of her online, just the small one posted on her LinkedIn page that the media had been using.

He compared his photo to the pictures of Stacey Walker from twenty years ago. Her initial thought was that it wasn’t the same woman. The young Stacey had blond, straight hair. Candace Epstein had dark curly hair.

He kept looking, studying the features. Pretty soon he started to see the resemblance. It was in the eyes. A little in the nose, too, though it looked like Candace had some work done. The cheekbones seemed a little higher, the nose a little smaller. It was her. Had to be.

Making that connection didn’t send a shiver up his spine, that came a few minutes later. He clicked through more articles about the case, and read one about the discovery in Vietnam of Ross’s partial remains along with some personal effects including his passport. Fremmer soon realized that by “partial remains” they were talking about multiple bones, and those multiple bones added up to one hand, a wrist, and a forearm. One arm up to the elbow.

Fremmer read every article he could find on the subject of Ross. Over the years people had become divided over whether he was really dead. Some thought he’d chopped his arm off to fake his own death. Others thought that was crazy. Fremmer was in the middle of a piece when one line stopped him cold. It was a quote from Pete Pastorini, the lead detective in the case.

“Do I think there’s a guy walking around somewhere with one arm who got away with murder? Sure, it’s possible, but the more likely scenario is Ross Walker is dead.”

And then it hit him: Braden. He had one arm. The guy had one fucking arm. Staph infection? Yeah, right. The bastard chopped his own arm off. It’s him. Has to be.

Suddenly, it all began to make sense. Or at least he thought it did. When Candace told him she knew someone who’d done something very bad, the kind of thing that put a person in prison for a long time, she’d been referring to her previous life. Who was the someone? Braden? Maybe. But if she were Stacey and Braden were Ross, then no one was murdered. Could they both still be alive? Had it all been an elaborate scheme? And if so, to what end?

And what about Ronald? Was he connected to her past? And the alleged manuscript Candace was supposed to deliver, was there something in there implicating Braden in, well, something? And Madden’s investigation, what was the timeline there? Could she have been pushed because of some fact or event he’d uncovered?

Fremmer’s brief ah-ha moment suddenly morphed into a dizzying array of unanswerable questions and conjectures. He wanted to speak to someone about his recent discoveries, but that little piece about the bonus kept gnawing at him. There might be real money there, he thought. It could go straight into Jamie’s college fund. And he’d be able to give something to Morton. Make it worth his while for taking on Ronald, who was scheduled to be back in court that week.

He needed Madden. First, he’d have to get him to agree to split the reward, then convince him to come to New York to see if he could identify Braden as Ross and take a DNA sample from Candace.

And what about Rochelle? He wondered if she knew who her boss really was. Or if Rochelle were her real name. A day after he got out of the hospital he’d received a get-well card from her with the odd inscription, “Remember, a gramme is better than a damn. ’Til we meet again, Rochelle.”

The phrase sounded familiar. She spelled gramme the British way, so it had to be a literary quote. Google, the great curator of quotes, solved that part of the puzzle in less than half a second. Huxley. Rochelle had sent him a get-well card with a quote from Brave New World, a reference to one of the novel’s many hypnopædic slogans promoting the utopian use of soma. Narcotics for the greater good.

God that was hot, he thought. But he didn’t get the tone. What did she mean, “’Til we meet again?” Was she threatening or flirting? After all she’d already put him through were they just going to let him off the hook? That made no sense. Then again, maybe she’d gotten into his computer and lifted whatever file she was looking for. But what was it? What was she looking for?

What was her real name? Where did she live? He had to find her. The simplest way to do that would be to stake out the Lucidity Center, wait for her to show up, and then try to follow her back to her apartment. Except that he didn’t have time for stakeouts.

Then he remembered that she’d said she once worked at an aquarium shop. That could have been a lie. But it was worth a shot. There were only a couple of dedicated aquarium stores in the city and only one downtown. It was on Delancey Street, not too far from the courthouse, where he had to go anyway for Ronald’s mental competency hearing.

The hearing went pretty much exactly as Fremmer had expected. Ronald was escorted in the courtroom. Morton made an impassioned sixty-second statement about the hidden dangers of multiple concussions worthy of a Will Smith movie, and the judge announced his ruling. And just like that, Ronald was deemed officially fit to stand trial and sent off to Rikers Island, not the best place for a guy like him.

After the judge’s ruling, The New York Times reporter asked Fremmer and Morton if she could meet with Ronald once he got settled at Rikers. She was still working on a story about his past and his history of concussions, but she couldn’t tell Fremmer when it would be published. Candace was back in a medically induced coma so media interest was starting to wane. Her books had fallen off the bestseller lists. The case was entering a new phase. Morton called it the Hurry Up And Wait phase.

The shop was easy enough to find. A shiny plastic shark hung in a state of suspended animation in the front window, draped in something that resembled seaweed and surrounded by various colored coral and driftwood. The sign above the storefront began with some Chinese letters bracketing a reef fish. Below that were the words “Pacific Aquarium and Pet” and a phone number. Fremmer thought it looked like any other shop in Chinatown that sold knick knacks or maybe even edible fish.

The shop owner immediately remembered the young woman Fremmer described.

“Are you police?” he asked Fremmer.

“No, just an ex-boyfriend. I don’t have her full name. She said her name was Rochelle.”

“Her name not Rochelle. Her name Isabelle. Isabelle Hruska. I write it down for you. She worked for me long time ago. She take money from you?”

“She wanted money from me.”

“You better check. Where she now?”

Fremmer was suddenly concerned. What’d that mean? Check what? “I know her from the Upper West Side.”

“She live near here when she work for me. But she moved. I thought she good person but she not good.”

No shit, Fremmer thought.

“What happened?”

“She thief. That’s all I say. I give you name. She have guy she work with. He do psychic business. I give you his name, too. You no tell anybody. OK?”

Once Fremmer finally got a hold of Madden, five days after his conversation with Candace in the ICU, the ball began to roll. For all his hemming and hawing Madden got on a flight the next morning.

Fremmer told him to make a reservation at The Lucerne, a boutique hotel on the corner of 79th and Amsterdam. They’d meet for dinner at Nice Matin, the upscale bistro just off the lobby of the hotel. He’d be the guy at the bar wearing the Mohegan Sun T-Shirt. Double Down, the graphic said. He couldn’t miss him.

And he didn’t. Promptly at 8 PM, Madden walked into the restaurant and looked directly at Fremmer, who was sitting on a stool with his back to the bar.

Fremmer smiled. “Welcome to New York, Detective,” he said.