Джеймс Паттерсон - The Midwife Murders

The sickening odor in the air is accompanied by a nerve-racking soundtrack: squeaking, squawking, screeching sounds. A million birds gone crazy? Then suddenly an answer from many feet away … a woman’s voice …

“Rats! They’ve got cages and cages of goddamn rats!” she screams.

We move toward her voice.

“A lot of rats, maybe hundreds of them,” the same woman’s voice shouts.

Once we know that the squealing and smell are coming from rats—not pigs or birds or even cute little white mice—it all seems even more disgusting, more frightening.

The lights flicker. We see a mountain of desk chairs and examination tables. We turn the mountain’s corner and see yet another pile, a traffic jam of cabinets. We make another turn, and there it is: ten cages packed with rats. Rats scampering over one another. Rats packed tightly together. White, black, brown rats. Some as large as raccoons. Some as small as mice. Fat rats nibble on dead rats.

One of the GUH Security people explains. “This is some sort of goddamn private place for raising lab rats. I’ve got an idea who’s doing it. They grab a few rats brought into the med school for research, and the assholes mate them and raise them down here. Dr. Katz is going to have a shit fit when he finds out.”

My instincts tell me the security guy might know more about this illegal rat farm if we only let him keep on talking. But then suddenly a loud yell erupts from deeper in the pile of abandoned equipment.

“Over here. Detective B, over here.”

The group seems to follow in some sort of order of seniority, Blumenthal at the lead.

The hell with it. I’m on this case, too. I’m the one who knows how to deliver babies.

I push my way to the front of the pack. We make our way, stumbling through a jungle of broken desk chairs, cartons of old glass syringes, office clipboards. The smell. Jesus Christ, the smell.

Another yells, “Hurry up, for Chrissake. Will you just hurry up?”

Blumenthal and I look quickly at each other. We keep moving. We are like a crazy lunatic parade wending its way through the disgusting basement room. We should ignore the smells, the screeching, the filthy floors.

My instincts kick in again. I have a miserable feeling that the nightmare is just beginning.

CHAPTER 14

KATRA KOVAC IS SPREAD unconscious on the narrow bed of another discarded MRI machine. She is a dead or near-dead body in a deserted tunnel. She is almost naked. Only a bloodstained hospital gown is scrunched up around her neck.

“Jesus Christ!” says one of the police officers. He took the words out of everyone’s mouths.

Some of the group turns away. Tracy Anne checks Katra’s neck for a pulse. She’s got one.

I look at the blood-covered belly of the motionless woman. Blood is still seeping in small rivulets down over her sides, puddling on the floor.

Alarms ring. Sirens sound. Somewhere in the distance we can hear loud, fast clattering feet. Nurses and doctors appear in the basement. The goddamn rats won’t shut up; it’s as if they know something terrible has happened. We’re in a hospital, but no one has brought a medical emergency kit. One police officer rips off his shirt to staunch the blood. Orderlies and two doctors rush in with padding and surgical staplers. Hands covered in plastic gloves reach in and slip an IV needle into Katra’s arm. An oxygen tube is now dangling from her nose.

“Don’t transfer her to a gurney,” a voice yells. It is unmistakably Sarkar’s voice.

“Move her on the bed of the machine. Move the bed with her,” I yell.

Now I suddenly think that Sarkar, Tracy Anne, and I are most likely the only ones present who can tell exactly what has happened: Katra Kovac, nine months pregnant, has been slit open. Her baby has been taken.

The procedure—it’s a disgusting lie to confuse this butchery with the term C-section —has left the mother barely clinging to life. And the baby? Who in hell knows what has become of the baby, this baby who was literally ripped from its mother’s womb.

Two GUH maintenance men and two residents begin to attack the ancient MRI machine with screwdrivers and electric saws, to detach the bed from its base, while Dr. Sarkar is literally on top of the machine’s bed with Katra, straddling her knees and pushing down on her stomach. If this was not all so horrible, it would look almost ridiculous—a grown man on top of a woman in a blood-drenched hospital gown, surrounded by a highly agitated crowd.

Then a gurney appears. Someone has—perhaps wisely—vetoed my suggestion that Katra not be moved.

“Lucy, you hold her neck,” Sarkar says as he climbs off the MRI bed. ER staff slide Katra onto what is called a sponge gurney, a stretcher thick with a great deal of absorption material. It’s used a lot at accident scenes. Right now it’s ready to suck up Katra’s blood. It’s been a few million hours, but Katra is now quickly being wheeled toward the elevator. Sarkar hurries along beside the gurney, his hands red and slimy with blood.

I am shaking.

I remember what my mother always told herself when a procedure wasn’t going smoothly. “We must rise to the occasion, Lucy. We must rise to the occasion.”

Five minutes later, Dr. Sarkar, along with two surgeons—one general, one gynecologic—begins trying to put Katra Kovac back together.

And two rooms away, with a muted CNN report on the television and a stack of old Good Housekeeping magazines on a table nearby, sits a trio brought together by unlucky chance: Detective Leon Blumenthal, CEO Dr. Barrett Katz, and me. Blumenthal and I are sick, scared, and spattered with blood. Katz looks rich, beautifully groomed, and very much on edge.

CHAPTER 15

SIMPLY PUT, DR. BARRETT Katz is a big mess of crazy nerves at the moment. I should not take pleasure in his pain, especially at an awful time like this, but I can’t help it. I watch him closely. The guy just can’t sit still. Every few minutes he moves from his chair to the thick glass window that separates our room from the pre-surgical scrub room. The next room over from the scrub room is the operating room itself. Katz squints each time he looks through the glass, as if he believes that if he tries hard enough, he will get x-ray vision and then actually see through and into the operating room. But no one, not even the hospital CEO, is ever allowed an unscheduled visit to the operating room. In fact, so cautious is NYPD now about the discovery of near-dead Katra and her brutal delivery that a detective and two officers have had an antiseptic shower, changed into scrubs, and joined the surgical team in the OR.

The only thing we all know is that Katra Kovac’s condition is dire.

I am not lightly tossing around the phrase near-dead . Sarkar and his team are great, but as my mother used to say, “You can never be sure of the future. Only the Lord Jesus knows the end of the story.”

I sit and play with my phone. I text Willie. His response is, Hey, Mom. Busy with Mike. Love u. Mike, a decent kid from down the street. I text Sabryna. No response. I read some news on CNN.com. I text Troy. I text Tracy Anne. I read my email. On the floor near me is the Daily News. It is opened to a page of comic strips and the jumble puzzle. Yes, it seems disrespectful, but I pick up the newspaper and look at the puzzle. I can’t un-jumble the first word … or the second. So I toss the paper back on the floor.

I close my eyes and recite the prayer my mother always prayed. The prayer begins, Lord, make me an instrument of thy peace. Who can argue with that? I’m thinking a lot about my mother today. A crisis will do that to my brain.

NYPD officers and GUH personnel come in and out of our waiting room to confer with Leon Blumenthal. It’s clear that wherever Blumenthal is, then that’s where his central investigation office is. His laptop might just as well be actually attached to his lap. Whatever the reason, whoever the visitor, Blumenthal keeps tapping on that computer. I don’t believe multitasking is for real, but this guy might prove me wrong.