Джеймс Паттерсон - The Midwife Murders

Katz sits at his handsome steel-and-glass desk, more of a dining table than a piece of office furniture. He folds his hands, and it is obvious to me that he is struggling to stay calm.

“The statements that we issued are completely accurate. There’s not much more we can do. You’ve seen the security. It’s like the Pentagon around here.”

He could have chosen a better security comparison than the Pentagon—Fort Knox, maybe—but I decide to say nothing about that.

I do still have a lot to say.

“I think we could have twice as much security. I think we could have more cops. I think this Blumenthal character could move more aggressively. I think a lot of things.”

Katz now speaks quietly. “I know you do. And here’s what I think. I think you should be back in your office or in one of your hippie-dippie birthing rooms.”

He is almost scarlet from trying to suppress his anger.

As for me, now I’m determined to get more involved in everything. I’m not quite sure how, but I will figure out something. Troy is smart as hell, and when it comes to passion and energy, he’s got unlimited resources. If Sarkar and I ever reconnect and “make nice” with each other, he might be of some help. He might be able to light a fire under Blumenthal.

“Now, if you’ll please leave, Ms. Ryuan,” I hear Katz say.

Oh, right. My mind wandered. I’m standing in the big boss’s office. Oh, who the hell cares? I look at him as if he is just some annoying stranger. And in a way, he is.

“Thanks, as always, for your help,” I say sweetly. Then I walk out.

CHAPTER 23

TROY IS THE MAN!

At 10 a.m. I ask him to join me in my office.

I am crazy-angry with Barrett Katz’s lazy, self-serving attitude and the investigative team’s stupid, slow-as-a-freaking-snail pace. Three kidnappings, a vicious stabbing—something has to be done. Okay, I am not the person to do it, but I am often the person who is never afraid of trying to do it.

“So you need me to light a BFF under him,” Troy says.

“Huh? A Best Friends Forever?”

“No, no, Lucy honey. A BFF is a Big Fucking Fire.”

An hour later, Troy and I are huddled together in a small meeting room watching the screen of my laptop, hypnotized by the hours of video unfurling in front of us: uninterrupted footage from a GUH surveillance camera trained on the corridor that connects the maternity area with the midwife birthing section.

I am afraid to blink, afraid to lift the can of Diet Pepsi to my lips. I’ve gotta stay glued to the computer screen for that one second when the possible clue shows up, that wonderful moment when the TV detective yells, “Hold it. Go back a little. Yeah, right there.”

The viewing is a combination of the hypnotically fascinating and the numbingly boring at the same time. We watch it on a higher speed than normal, but not so high that we can’t catch virtually everything that’s going on—quite a few very pregnant women, a few postnatal women walking with portable IVs, doctors walking with an entourage of residents, visitors laughing, visitors crying. It’s an interminable film of doctors and nurses and orderlies and janitors and visitors and patients and security guards and gurneys and janitor carts. The surveillance camera records life on the corridor in fuzzy black and white some of the time and fuzzy color at other times. The camera placement gives a strange angle to anyone captured by its lens. The camera is positioned on the ceiling, so high up that each person’s head is large and their body is much smaller, narrowing down to very teeny-tiny feet. Everyone on camera is either walking toward or away from the vanishing point.

“Okay,” I say to Troy, neither of us looking away from the screen. “While we’re here watching this fabulous movie, I really would like to know how you managed to get your hands on these surveillance DVDs.”

“I have my secret ways,” says Troy. He speaks so seriously that I’m actually a little creeped out. He’s not being sarcastic. He’s not being funny. He’s telling the truth.

“Did you steal them?”

“Not really. Let’s just say I have some tight connections.”

“Could you be a little clearer?” I ask. “C’mon. How’d you get these?”

“I just act my charming self. The ladies like me. The gentlemen who are so inclined also like me. Could it be my professionally whitened teeth, the cut of my Zegna jeans, or—” Troy, who has not stopped studying the monitor while carrying on jokingly about his good looks and charm, suddenly shouts, “Hold the video, Lucy!”

I freeze the image on the screen and dial the speed down to normal. We watch a man in a cheesy-looking navy-blue warm-up suit pause, then bend over at the waist. He hangs in that bent-over position, his hands almost touching the floor. Then a nurse approaches him and speaks to him. The man stands up straight. The nurse looks concerned, but the man waves her away. It must be the nurse’s lucky day, because as soon as she’s a few feet away the man vomits what looks like a week’s worth of meals.

“Mount Vesuvius blows!” Troy yells and laughs.

I click a control button and we watch the continuing segment at a faster speed: the man walks into a visitors’ bathroom and the nurse returns. She leaves frame. Then she returns again. This time she carries with her an antiseptic foam spray.

“So far this has been the most exciting part of the recordings,” says Troy. Then he adds, “And, by the way, I am not trying to avoid the question of how I managed to secure these.”

“Okay, and so …”

“So have you ever noticed that young security guy Jonah?” Troy asks.

“Well, no … I don’t think so.”

“Tall. Latino. Part-timer. He’s usually at the ER entrance on the dead-man’s shift.”

“Can’t say as I know him,” I say.

“Sometimes, when it’s real cold, he wears a black satin jacket with the logo from the Jersey Boys musical on it and a baseball cap with the logo from Hamilton on it.”

“Okay, now I know who it is,” I say. Then I add, just so I can be entirely unprofessional, “He’s got a nice little butt.”

“Well, Jonah is trying to be an actor, and let me just say that he and I have grown pretty close.”

“ Pretty close?” I ask skeptically.

“Okay, Lucy, very close.”

“ Very close?” I ask.

“And lucky for you, Lucy, that we are, because sometimes Jonah gets assigned to the video archives room when other folks are taking their break, and we do each other favors. We are close friends, very close friends. I have visited the video archives room a fair number of times.”

“Stop right there,” I say.

“No, it’s nothing like you’re thinking,” Troy says.

“No, stop the video. ”

This section of recording has flipped into blurry color.

Troy freezes the frame: a woman. Nurse’s uniform. Looks like she’s got blond hair. Because the image quality is so bad it’s hard to tell for sure. The woman is walking toward the camera. But her head is bent downward. Her time on camera is less than five seconds.

“Okay, Troy. What was wrong with that picture?”

Troy doesn’t skip a beat. “She’s wearing high heels.”

Troy is the man!

“When was the last time you saw a nurse wearing high-heeled shoes?” I ask.

“Only once, but that was a drag show in the Poconos.”

The fact is that nurses wear sneakers and clogs. I turn to Troy and say, “A nurse would never wear heels.”

“And such ugly ones,” he says. But neither of us laughs. We both know we might be on to something. We both know we might be looking at the baby-napper … or at least looking at the baby-napper’s possibly blond hair and probably black heels.