“You know as well as I do who that was on the other end of the phone.”

“Shit.” Frankel suddenly held up his hand; his call had resumed. “Yes, I’m here. Gimme one second.”

Frankel dug into his pocket for a pad and pen. Grant noticed his expression darken the more he scribbled. Frankel finally mumbled thanks, disconnected, and held up the notepad.

“Looks like there were only three calls to the house phone this morning. One was from the cook’s mother who had locked herself out and needed a spare key. They tracked another to a resident’s girlfriend.”

“And the third?”

“Traces to a burner phone. Prepaid for thirty minutes of use; not registered to anyone.”

But both Grant and Frankel knew who had bought it.

“The phone’s on and working,” said Frankel. “They pinged it to an address less than two miles from here.”

Within seconds they were back in the sedan. “More than likely another dead end. I bet the asshole just dumped it near this place and took off,” Frankel said as he started the engine.

“Why would you say that?”

“The building’s been abandoned for thirty years,” Frankel replied. “It used to be an mental hospital.”

The Neponsit Health Care Center.

That was still the officially designated name, even though it hadn’t been operational for a couple decades. Originally, it had been called the Neponsit Beach Hospital for Children, a facility treating youngsters suffering from tuberculosis in the early twentieth century. In its day, it was among the most prominent pediatric hospitals in the country, offering top-notch treatments like Alpine sun lamp usage and supervised bathing in the adjacent Atlantic.

During World War II, it had been taken over by the Department of Public Health to treat merchant marines who had contracted TB. After the war, it had resumed tending children until its doors closed in 1955. It reopened in 1961 as a nursing home renamed the Neponsit Home for the Aged.

For the next few decades, it looked after elderly people and thus took on its current name. Few of its residents appreciated the white sand beaches below and the majestic Atlantic beyond, as many were mentally ill, some in the late stages of Alzheimer’s, and may not have noticed the difference from living out their days in a windowless building in Queens.

Then, in September 1998, ten years after Timothy Alan Leeds’s life had changed forever, a vicious storm pounded Far Rockaway, forcing everyone in the hospital to be evacuated to the aforementioned Queens property. It happened so fast that two patients died during the transfer and another went missing for weeks.