Stuart Woods - New York Dead

“Let’s see the third,” Stone said.

The third fit Sasha Nijinsky’s general description, down to the hair color, but she had taken a shotgun in the chest.

“Domestic violence,” the attendant said smugly.

Stone couldn’t tell if the man was for it or against it. “It’s not she,” he said.

“Don’t talk like that,” Dino whispered. “It’s not her.”

“It is not she,” Stone said again. He produced a card and wrote his home number on the back, then handed it to the attendant. “This is extremely important,” he said. “If you get a Nijinsky in here, or a white Jane Doe in her thirties, call me. And please pass that on to whoever relieves you. If someone overlooks her, heads will ricochet off these walls for days to come.”

“I got ya,” the man said, and he stapled Stone’s card to his logbook. “They won’t miss it here.”

In the car, Dino, who was usually the most cheerful of souls, sighed deeply. “I got a feeling,” he said.

“Oh, God, don’t get a feeling,” Stone whimpered. “Don’t get Italian on me.”

“I got a very serious feeling that this one is going to be a fucking nightmare,” Dino said.

“Thanks, Dino. I needed that.”

“And, Stone,” Dino added, “never say, ’It’s not she’ to some guy at the morgue. He’ll think you’re a jerk.”

When Stone and Dino got to the precinct, the two detectives who had been at the Nijinsky apartment were sitting at their desks, cataloging evidence.

“So?” one of them asked. “Is she alive, or what?”

“Or what,” Dino said.

“So she croaked, then, or what?”

“Or what.”

Stone tugged at his partner’s sleeve. “Let’s see Leary.”

Lieutenant Leary, the squad’s commanding officer, was in his tiny, glassed-in cubicle, reading Sasha Nijinsky’s diary. He looked up and waved the two detectives in. “Well, it took a fuckin’ celebrity swan dive to get you back on the street, didn’t it, Barrington?”

“I saw it happen,” Stone said. “From the street.” He took Leary through everything that had happened at the apartment.

“So, where’s Nijinsky now?” he asked.

“It’s like this, I think,” Stone said. “The ambulance was taking her to Lenox Hill when it got broadsided by a fire truck. Another ambulance was called and took the driver and his partner to Bellevue. The driver’s alive, but doesn’t know what happened to Nijinsky. The partner’s dead.”

“So, to ask my question again, where’s Nijinsky?”

“We don’t know. She wasn’t at Bellevue. We looked at everybody there.”

“Not in the Bellevue emergency room,” Leary said.

“No. Not anywhere at Bellevue. We checked it out thoroughly. Not at the city morgue either. They’ll call me if she shows up.”

Leary looked bemused. “What the fuck is goin’ on here?”

“Probably homicide – attempted homicide, if she’s still alive.”

“Because of the guy you chased down the stairs?”

“Yes.”

“Maybe he was the pizza deliveryman, got there in time to see her take the dive, then ran.”

“Maybe. It feels like a homicide.”

“And maybe a kidnapping, too. If the lady fell twelve stories and then her ambulance got whopped by a fire truck, she ain’t walking around out there somewhere, right?”

Dino piped up. “If she’s dead, is it a corpsenapping? And is that a crime?”

Leary tapped the diary with a stubby finger. “You read this?”

“Only the last page,” Stone said.

“The last page was one of her better days. This was a very unhappy lady.”

“She was about to become the only female news anchor on a major network. I would have thought she had it all.”

“Anybody would think so. But she sounds scared to me. Maybe afraid she couldn’t cut it.”

“Maybe. It’s a natural enough reaction.”

“The diary makes her sound like a suicide.”

“Maybe,” Stone said. “I don’t think so.”

“Okay, here’s what happened, maybe,” Leary said. “You get this big pileup on Lex, and two ambulances respond. You know how competitive they are. One goes to Bellevue with the driver and the other guy, and the other ambulance goes to some other hospital.”

“That’s what I figured,” Dino said.

“Run it down,” Leary replied. He handed the diary to Stone. “Read that and tell me she didn’t try to knock herself off.”

Stone and Dino spent the rest of the night calling every hospital in Manhattan and reading Sasha Nijinsky’s diary.

When the day shift came on, Lieutenant Leary called a meeting and brought the new group up to date.

“Okay, now you know everything we know,” he said to the four assembled teams. “The press knows about the dive, because this guy Scoop What’s-his-name?-”

“Berman,” Stone said.

“-Berman shows up and gets his tape. They don’t seem to know that the lady hasn’t been seen since, and I want to keep it that way as long as possible. This is Barrington and Bacchetti’s case, reporting directly to me. Barrington, Bacchetti, go sleep. I don’t want you back here before noon. The rest of you, check on every private clinic, every doctor’s office in the five boroughs, if you have to. Check Jersey and Westchester, too. On Long Island, just check the fancy private clinics. I want this woman found this morning, dead or alive. When you find her, Stone and Bacchetti get the interview, unless it’s deathbed stuff. Nobody, but nobody says a word to the press except me, for the moment. I don’t have to tell you what this celebrity shit is like. The mayor’ll be on the phone as soon as he wakes up, and he’ll want to know. I’ll ask him to buy us a few hours to find the woman.”

As the detectives shuffled out, Leary called Stone and Dino back. “ Barrington, I’m assuming you’re up to this. You’re still on limited duty, officially.”

“I’m up to it, Lieutenant.”

“I mean it about the sleep,” Leary said. “You grab four or five hours. This one ain’t likely to be over today, and I want you in shape to fuckin’ handle it.”

“Yessir,” they replied in unison.

Stone limped up the steps of the Turtle Bay brownstone, retrieved the Times from the stoop, and let himself in. He was met by the combined scent of decay and fresh wood shavings. No messages on the answering machine in the downstairs hallway. Too tired and sore to take the stairs, he took the elevator to the third floor. It creaked a lot, but it made it.

His bedroom looked ridiculous. An ordinary double bed stood against a wall, with only a television set, an exercise machine, an old chest of drawers, and a chair to help fill the enormous room. He switched on the television and started to undress.

“Television journalist Sasha Nijinsky last night fell from the terrace of her twelfth-floor East Side penthouse. An off-duty police detective who was at the scene gave chase to someone who had apparently been in Ms. Nijinsky’s apartment, but was, himself, injured and lost the possible perpetrator. Astonishingly, Ms. Nijinsky may have survived the fall. She was taken to a Manhattan hospital, and we have had no further word on her condition. We’ll keep you posted as news comes in.”

“You’re guessing about the Manhattan hospital, sport,” Stone said to the newscaster. “That was my guess, too.”

He stripped off his clothes and stretched out on the bed, switching the channel to The Morning Show .

“Sasha Nijinsky has done just about everything in broadcast journalism, and she’s done it fast,” a pleasant young man was saying. They cut to a montage of shots from Nijinsky’s career, and he continued, voice-over.