Джеймс Паттерсон - The Midwife Murders

“The cops, they tell us nothing. ‘Not their department,’ they tell us,” Mr. Kovac says.

Before I can answer, before I can even give the standard “Everybody’s concerned and everybody’s working on it,” a giant scream comes from Katra.

She is facing away from us. She is raised on one elbow. She holds a fistful of hair in her right hand.

“She pull the hair,” Katra’s mother says.

We all move in toward the bed. One of the officer guards enters the room. Katra screams again, and she pulls out another small chunk of hair. I unclench her hand from the new cluster of hair she’s holding.

For a second, I consider calling for additional help or restraints or both.

But now Katra suddenly turns calm. She begins sobbing gently.

I pull up her chart on the bedside computer. “They didn’t load her with any special meds,” I say.

“I don’t know what’s happening,” Troy says. “The lady’s calm for about fifteen or twenty minutes. Then she goes to sleep for about ten minutes. Then she wakes up and gets all riled up again.”

“Get a post-op doc in here. Let’s see what he or she can tell us,” I tell him.

“But what of the baby?” asks Mr. Kovac. “We must learn of the baby.”

“We are all trying to find the baby. We are also trying to find the person who hurt your daughter. We will do everything in our power.”

Katra turns onto her back and looks toward her father. Her eyes are filled with fear and frustration.

I say the only thing that comes to my mind. “Really, Mr. Kovac. We will try .”

Yes, I’m speaking the truth, but it’s also a delaying tactic, and I don’t think the handsome Mr. Kovac is buying it.

Kovac says something to his daughter in a language I don’t understand. Serbian? Hungarian?

Katra keeps nodding as her father speaks. Then she decides apparently to speak to me.

“Lucy, my papa says that you say you will try. Try. Try. Try. He understands your heart is big. But he says that trying is good, but is not good enough.”

I nod. I tell her that I understand.

Troy walks toward me. He holds his iPad in my line of vision. “Take a look. The news media is all over us,” he says.

I look down at the screen.

“Let me borrow your iPad,” I say to Troy. “I’m going to visit our leader.”

CHAPTER 21

Five years ago

ONLY TWO PASSENGERS FLEW on the private plane that left Saratov, Russia. They were a man and a woman, each about forty years old. They were not linked romantically. In fact, they did not particularly enjoy each other’s company. But their supervisors had put them together. They would work as a team.

Fifteen hours later, they landed on a small airstrip somewhere just west of the Jersey shore. Two cars then brought them to a very small cottage—a shack, really—in Cranbury, New Jersey. One of the cars, a decrepit 1998 Toyota, was left with them.

After a week in Cranbury, the man told the woman that their “patrons” in Russia had emailed him. She was to take a job they had arranged for her. She would be clearing tables at the Molly Pitcher Service Area on the New Jersey Turnpike.

The woman was outraged. “I am a trained pediatrician. Now they want me to watch people eat hamburgers and cinnamon buns and then clean up their shit. No.”

The man responded quietly but firmly. “They have told me that if you don’t take some kind of job, we will be sent out of the country. Or even worse, sent to prison. And listen, Doctor, you will not be working any harder than myself. My job is terrible.”

That was true, and the woman knew it. Almost every day the man drove into the city of Trenton and talked his way into homeless shelters or women’s shelters. He went to the areas behind the railroad station and near the transient hotels where prostitutes gathered to meet clients, to shoot up, and often to perform their services right on the streets.

It was at those places the man searched for pregnant women, women who might be persuaded to sell their babies when they were born. The women—often addled by fear or drugs, or both—usually accepted his proposal.

So his partner angrily agreed to take the job. Every night after he worked in Trenton, he would pick her up at the Molly Pitcher Service Area. They would sit in the 1998 Toyota and dine on the food she had sneaked from the fast-food restaurants—cold, chewy shish kebabs, Coca-Colas without fizz, hot dogs without buns.

This happened every night of the week except Wednesday. Wednesday was delivery night. That night he would come screeching into the parking lot, she would jump into the Toyota, and then she would pick up the swaddled bundle on the back seat.

The bundle always contained an infant. Sometimes there were two infants.

The woman would take a stethoscope and examination light from her purse and carefully examine the babies. Then she would write careful notes.

“Less than four pounds.”

“Enlarged rear head.”

“Jaundice.”

“Atrial fibrillation.”

But most often her notation was “Perfect.”

These notes were attached to the swaddling cloth around each infant.

Then the man and the woman and the baby, or babies, would travel along the back roads of northeastern New Jersey. Eventually the car brought them to the William T. Davis Wildlife Refuge on Staten Island. There they would meet a man and a woman driving a small white van. The back of this van was outfitted with emergency medical supplies and oxygen tanks.

The people from the van took the infants, changed their diapers, powdered them, wrapped them again carefully, and read the doctor’s notes. Then the white van drove off.

This ritual occurred every Wednesday evening for eight months until one night when the man pulled into the Molly Pitcher parking lot and said to the woman, “No more Trenton. We’ve been transferred.”

“To where? What happened? Tell me!”

He smiled. “They’re moving us to Manhattan.”

She exclaimed in surprise.

“Yep. Like they say in America, this is the big time, baby.”

CHAPTER 22

“I WANT YOU TO take a look at CNN and NY1 online.” I am now practically screaming at Dr. Katz.

He holds out his hand like a traffic cop. “Who the hell allowed you into my office?” he yells.

I ignore the question. I yell just as loudly at the man: “Take a look at what’s going on in the news, Dr. Katz.”

“I’ve already seen it, Ms. Ryuan. I don’t depend on you for my news. Now answer my question. How did you—”

I continue to ignore him and begin to read out loud the report from the internet:

The very place that people go to get healed has turned into a place where people go to get kidnapped, even killed. Gramatan University Hospital is now being called the Hospital of Death. In the past forty-eight hours, three newborn infants have been kidnapped from the hospital’s maternity ward. What’s more, the mother of one of the kidnapped infants was viciously attacked and left for dead in a basement storage room. CEO Dr. Barrett Katz issued a statement saying the hospital was cooperating fully with the FBI and NYPD. Chairperson of the hospital’s maternity division, Dr. Rudra Sarkar, was away from the hospital and unavailable for comment. Leon Blumenthal, the NYPD detective heading up this shocking criminal investigation, would say only that the inquiry was ongoing. Further—

“Enough, Ms. Ryuan,” Katz says. “Are you here to tell me what I already know?”

“No, I’m here to tell you that sooner, rather than later, we won’t have a functioning maternity ward, or more importantly, we won’t have a viable Midwifery Division. No pregnant woman in her right mind will want to come here to deliver.”