The Good Stranger (A Kate Bradley Mystery)

by Dete Meserve

  “Don’t,” he said.

  “Don’t what?”

  He drew a deep breath. “Don’t call the police. She wouldn’t like it if I got into more trouble.”

  “More trouble?”

  “If you want all she’s doing to continue, stop looking for her. There’s a reason she doesn’t want to be found.”

  I took a step toward him, even though my body was vibrating with fear. “What reason?”

  He sighed. “It might kill her,” he said, then started running.

  I ran. Gravel and debris on the rough sidewalk cut into my bare feet. He was fast, but it didn’t take long to gain on him.

  What would I do if I caught him?

  Across the street, I spotted a guy walking his dog, and I waved my arms at him.

  “Stop him!” I shouted, but it sounded like a grunt. Uncontrolled.

  Jordan rounded the corner. Then stopped. He placed his hands on his thighs, chest heaving.

  I slowed, gaining control of my breath, deciding what to do.

  “You really want to find her this bad?” he shouted at me.

  I blew out a breath. “Yes.”

  I walked slowly toward him, steadying my wobbly legs. His entire figure was shrouded in shadow. If he attacked me, I had nothing. Not even my phone.

  “Why will it kill her if we find her?” I asked.

  “She’s sick. It’s serious.”

  “What is it?”

  “I don’t know. But I can tell by everyone’s voices it’s not good.”

  “So that’s why she doesn’t want to be found?”

  He looked up at me. “That’s what I think.”

  “But you don’t know.”

  “No.”

  I stopped ten feet away from him. From here, I could see he was much younger than I’d originally thought. Late teens. “You could’ve misunderstood.”

  He turned toward me then, and I could see fear in his eyes. “Don’t think so.”

  “Do you know what she’s doing? Who she’s working with?”

  His voice was strained. “I don’t know anything.”

  “Then how do you know she’s even the Marie we’re all looking for?”

  He rubbed his jaw. “I found a lot of cash in her kitchen. Took some of it, you know, planning to pay her back. But then she caught me with it. Explained to me that it had a purpose. That she was part of everything I was seeing all over the news.”

  I stepped close enough that he could have grabbed me if he’d wanted to. “Does she know you’re here?”

  “No. This is me taking care of her, for a change. She’s bailed me out a lot.”

  “For?”

  I looked into his eyes and saw the weight of shame there, dark-purple streaks from what I assumed were sleepless nights. “Stealing stuff. Cutting school.”

  “I’ll bet she’s been bailing you out like that because she cares about you. But I don’t think she’d like to hear that you’ve been writing threatening letters to me.”

  His voice shook. “You gonna call the police?”

  I thought about it for a moment, fear rising. “Not if you stop the threatening notes. Stop following me.”

  He took a long moment to respond. “Will you stop looking for her then?”

  I shook my head.

  “I can’t let you do that to her.” He walked away. Something in the way he said it pulled on my heart. I let him go.

  Our video from Marie’s concert went viral. Seven million views in less than twenty-four hours, giving us hundreds more leads to follow—people who claimed they’d seen her, a few who thought they had talked with her, and even one woman with fifty thousand Twitter followers who claimed she’d met Marie at the concert and, after she returned home, discovered her rosacea had suddenly cleared up.

  Of the five thousand concertgoers, Scott and I turned out to be the only journalists invited, so our reports carried the banner “Exclusive to ANC.” Otherwise, thousands of concertgoers posted their own videos, sending Marie’s message ricocheting through social media, reaching tens of millions more.

  As I headed into the newsroom that morning, I thought about what Jordan had told me. Marie was sick. If that was true, I had the feeling he’d keep trying to stop me from finding her. But after talking with him, I wasn’t afraid of him like I’d been before, and his story made me want to soften my approach to finding her.

  At the same time, her illness was an essential clue that none of the other networks had. Not only did it give us insight into why she might be doing all this, but it also helped explain why she was upset when she found the note on her airline seat.

  At my desk in the newsroom, I dug into the lead that Jeff the concert producer had given us: the construction company that Marie had insisted they hire to work at Floyd Bennett Field. I googled Hagerty Construction in Kentucky, the company Jeff’s coworker mentioned, and scrolled through a dozen or so photos and bios of the team—from the bright-smiled CEO through the red-bearded CFO through a slew of young project managers. Was one of these people related to Marie? I thought about calling the company, asking them why they’d been chosen to do the work for the concert, then nixed the idea. If one of them was related to Marie, I doubted they’d admit it.

  I mulled over the idea that Hagerty Construction had worked on another project connected to Marie. But what? On their Projects page, I scrolled through endless photos of construction sites—scaffolding, wood framing, cranes, and backhoes—and completed stores, banks, and warehouses. Nothing stood out. Until I found a group photo of a construction team finishing up a Dollar Tree store. It was a playful shot, a row of guys in white hard hats and mud-stained work pants clowning around for the camera, big grins on their faces.

  My eye fell on the guy on the end. With his tall, slim build, he stood out among the other, more sturdily built construction workers.

  Logan.

  Minutes later, I was dialing Hagerty Construction in Kentucky, based in Hawesville, a small town on the banks of the Ohio River.

  I worked to sound calm. “I’m looking for one of your employees. His name is Logan,” I said to the woman who answered the phone.

  “Logan Wilson or Mattingly?”

  “Blue eyes. In his twenties.”

  “You mean Logan Wilson. May I ask who’s calling?” she asked with a soft Kentucky lilt.

  “I’m Kate Bradley from ANC.”

  “ANC?” She sounded impressed. “Usually wouldn’t find him here in the office. But you’re in luck. He was here just a minute ago. Let me see if he’s still here.”

  I waited a few minutes before we heard shuffling on the other end of the line.

  “Hello?” a young man’s voice said.

  “Logan, this is Kate from ANC. We met the morning you—”

  “Look, this isn’t a good time. My car just got slammed in a hit-and-run.”

  He sounded so calm that it felt like he was making it up. But if he didn’t want to talk to me, he could’ve asked the receptionist to say he wasn’t available. That meant he was probably curious to find out what I wanted. And maybe he had actually been in a hit-and-run?

  “I’m sorry. Are you okay?”

  “Yeah. The car was parked. But the whole thing sucks. My deductible is steep, so I’ve got no way to get it out of the body shop.”

  “My timing is crummy. But I’d like to talk to you about Marie.”

  He was silent for so long I thought he’d hung up. “I don’t know who you’re talking about.”

  “We have witnesses who saw you with her in the Dallas airport,” I said.

  “Give me a sec,” he said slowly. Then the noise around him quieted, as if he had gone into another room. “I was there, okay? But you have to stop looking for us. For Marie.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s not for me to say.”

  “Can you at least tell me how you met her? I know she helped you when you couldn’t rent a car in Dallas.”

  His voice was distant. “Yeah, I don’t know.�
��

  “This is off the record, of course,” I said, trying my best to sound like someone he could trust. “I’m . . . just curious.”

  “I’ll just say that was a really low time for me.”

  “What was going on?”

  He sighed. “I’d been unemployed for almost nine months after making a big mistake at my last job. Then I lost my license because of another really dumb move. I had debt collectors chasing me day and night, and money was so tight I had to pawn my guitar to pay for the plane ticket to get to my cousin’s graduation.”

  “You didn’t know Marie before Dallas?”

  “No. I met her at the rental-car place. She invited me into the car, listened to my story, and told me she thought I had an important purpose in the world. She was one of the few people who didn’t think I was a loser.”

  “She believed in you.”

  “Yeah,” he said, his voice trembling.

  “Did you know the others?”

  “No.”

  “Why did she choose Hagerty to do the work at the concert at Floyd Bennett Field? Was it because you work there?”

  “I think you already know the answer.”

  “Then at least tell me what happened on the car ride through the storm.”

  He hesitated. “She asked me to take a leap. And that’s all I’m gonna say.”

  “A leap? What kind of leap?”

  His voice was tense. “I’m hanging up now. But before I do, I’m going to ask you again to stop looking for us. Stop looking for Marie.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  What was a leap, anyway? I knew Logan wasn’t talking about a physical leap, like jumping off the Brooklyn Bridge. Maybe a leap of faith? But even that had many meanings. It might involve doing something you weren’t sure would succeed. Or accepting something that wasn’t easily believed. It could even mean doing something that was beyond the bounds of reason.

  Whatever it was, why was this leap a secret?

  Lost in thought, I returned to the newsroom, dodging frantic producers and editors working on the Category Four–hurricane story on the way back to my desk.

  Stephanie rushed up, her face flushed with excitement. “Look what I got,” she said, waving two tickets in front of my face. “One of the producers just gave me these. They’re for Perfect Crime tonight, one of the longest-running shows Off Broadway. And Scott’s girlfriend stars in it.”

  She held up her phone and showed me a poster for the play.

  I felt a pang of jealousy. Dressed in a slinky black dress and four-inch heels and holding a gun, Paige was luminous, slender, and, by all evidence, flawless. I could see why she and Scott were together.

  “I was hoping the show would take your mind off the robbery for a few hours,” Stephanie said. “Can you go?”

  “It sounds great, but I can’t. I’m meeting the owner of the party-supply store who saw the guy buying grosses of balloons a while back. Thinking I missed something when I talked to him the first time.”

  She looked surprised. “Wait. Are you still working on that story?”

  I nodded. “Of course. Why?”

  “I overheard Mark telling Andrew he was taking you and Scott off it.”

  My voice rose. “Are you kidding me? Again? Even after the viral concert video?”

  “Mark pitched the idea of giving it to Jason Berman.”

  I stared at her. Jason was one of the network’s best-known anchors, a nightly fixture on ANC with his signature black glasses and anchor-perfect salt-and-pepper hair.

  “Mark and Jason go way back. Worked together at a station in Philadelphia before coming here.”

  “Why would Jason want this story?”

  “For the obvious reasons, of course. And I heard Jason’s mom was one of the people whose hospital bills were paid off by that Marie person. This is personal for him.”

  My reaction was instant and physical. I winced. Like someone had just punched me in the gut.

  It took me a moment to realize why. The story was personal for me too.

  There is a peculiar smell in a party-supply store. A musty, grandma’s-attic-y scent mixed with latex balloons, plastic of every species, and the sweet smell of cheap candy. Village Party Store was no exception. Lit by long fluorescent-tube lights that looked like they’d been installed fifty years ago, the store aisles were so narrow I had to walk sideways to squeeze past the masks, plush animals, bulk-size containers of candy, and party favors bursting from the shelves.

  Most of the employees seemed like they were recent high school graduates, but the owner, Burkley McCarthy, was well into his sixties, trim and fit with silver-gray hair and trendy Warby Parker glasses. He was the one who’d called me to report that he’d seen a guy in a hoodie leaving with bags of purple and white balloons.

  I found him in the back of the store trying to balance a Book of the Dead in the spindly hands of a wraithlike witch in a Halloween display.

  “He had to be carrying, what, like ten thousand balloons in all those bags,” he told me.

  “Did he rent some helium tanks too?”

  He shook his head. “For that kind of volume, not from here. There are dozens of places he could’ve gone that do tanks for commercial use.”

  “What made you notice him?”

  “The purple and white balloons. My first thought was he hadn’t paid for any of it. We get a lot of theft here. People come in with shopping bags and just take stuff off the shelves. But he had a receipt.”

  “You have security cameras?”

  “Of course. But I already told you where he went. What more do you need?”

  “Problem is, I talked to the woman in the apartment you saw him enter, and she hadn’t seen anyone like that. Nor did anyone in the building.”

  He frowned. “I know what I saw.”

  “Maybe we can find the guy on your security footage and run a photo of him in my next report. Find him that way.”

  Burkley seemed to like that idea and showed me to his office, where we could access the recordings. The technology was surprisingly sophisticated, allowing us to zip to specific dates and times and, with striking clarity, view what each camera saw. It took us a few minutes to figure out what date he had seen the balloon guy in his store, but once we did, we quickly spotted him.

  Unlike the other shoppers whom we’d seen wandering through the aisles, browsing through the novelty items, this guy, his hoodie pulled tight to his face, hurried to the balloon aisle, scooped up the entire shelf of bulk-size bags of purple and white balloons into a couple of shopping baskets, and rushed to the cashier. He knew what he was doing.

  As we watched him do this from several camera angles, Burkley pressed the stop button. “You know, I don’t like watching him like he’s some kind of criminal. Ever since he started doing all this, things in this city have gotten better. People are friendlier. Happier. If you find him, you think he might get in some kind of trouble?”

  “Trouble?”

  “No good deed goes unpunished,” he said grimly. “Maybe police will slap him with fines for littering the city with balloons. Or someone will claim his balloons damaged their property—”

  “I’ve got to believe that people will see the good in this. And not try to crush it.”

  He sighed. “You’re an optimist.”

  No one had ever called me an optimist. Skeptic. Cynic. Those were words people used to describe me. How could I be an optimist after covering thousands of violent, brutal, and cruel stories for TV news?

  Was it possible I was becoming one?

  He pressed play again. “Crazy stuff happens all the time in this city. And when I first saw them putting balloons everywhere, I thought, Well, this takes the cake. But then I noticed how everyone reacted to all of this—smiling and talking about the balloons with people they don’t know—and I realized I was wrong about the balloons. It’s a simple but genius way to connect all of us.”

  As he continued talking, I watched the footage as the balloon guy han
ded a stack of cash, bound in a purple currency band, to the clerk. Twenty-dollar bills. When the clerk took the cash from him, the balloon guy’s fingers peeked out from the oversize hoodie. They were long and slender, topped off with light-blue nail polish. Then he reached up to tighten the strings on his hood. But before he could, a long lock of blonde hair had escaped.

  The balloon guy was a girl.

  The guy who answered the apartment door at 828 East Thirtieth Street twenty minutes later looked like Josh Groban, the famous singer-songwriter, only a decade younger. Same wavy brown hair, a scruffy beard, and big brown eyes.

  It wasn’t, of course.

  “Brad Darnell,” he told me after I introduced myself.

  “This is going to sound strange, but did you get married a few weeks ago?”

  He shot me a skeptical look. “Yeah. How’d you know?”

  “I met your wife’s maid of honor here. Blonde hair. Lives in Dallas.”

  “Alexia?” He shifted his weight to his other foot. “What do you want to talk to her for?”

  “She and I were discussing a story, but I forgot to get her phone number. Would you happen to have it?”

  “Is this about her kidney?”

  My mouth fell open, trying to make sense of what he was asking. “Actually, it’s—”

  “Is this about the donor? Did he die or something?”

  “Donor?” I repeated, trying to put it all together. “Sorry, does Alexia have a kidney donor?”

  “Yes, I thought . . .”

  “I’m here about the balloons.”

  He looked at me like I was crazy. “What balloons?”

  “The ones she brought here,” I said. “She’d bought grosses of them. We think she’s part of the group that’s been leaving them all around Manhattan.”

  He shook his head. “You sure you got the right Alexia? She doesn’t have money to buy balloons. And why would she be part of that when she doesn’t even live here?”

  “You never saw them?”

  “No. But I wasn’t in this apartment when she was. I stayed with a friend when all the bridesmaids were in town.”

  “I’d like to talk with Alexia. How can I find her?”