Джозеф Файндер - Judgment

She wondered if he’d been tortured.

She thought about his voice message, replayed it in her head.

I have a file for you... I don’t trust your e-mail, frankly... Happy to drop it off wherever you are. Happy to bring it to your office. Maybe I’ll do that. Or you can stop by my office and pick it up, if that’s on the way. But I think you need to see this. Okay?

Did he have this file with him, and had it been grabbed when he was beaten?

Or had he left it at his office?

She noticed a large clear plastic bag in the corner with the words PATIENT BELONGINGS printed on it. The mud-spattered leg of a pair of jeans spilled out. His stuff.

She picked up the bag, pulled out the jeans.

She felt the jingle of keys in his pants pocket. She checked the other pockets. No wallet. No cell phone. Nothing besides clothes in the bag. No file, no pieces of paper, folded or crumpled or anything. If he had a file with him, it was certainly gone.

She had a thought and reached into the jeans pocket and grabbed the ring of keys.

There was a knock on the open door. She looked up. A young man in a white doctor’s coat, wearing a tie. Had he just seen her take the keys?

“I’m Dr. Robiano,” he said. “I take it you are a friend of the patient’s.”

“Yes. Juliana Brody. Are you a surgeon?” she asked.

“I’m the neurocritical care fellow,” the doctor said, nodding. He was surprisingly alert for the middle of the night. His eyes shone. He had short brown hair and an appealing, very white smile. He also looked like he was about fifteen years old, though in reality he was probably in his midthirties. He reminded her of an adolescent who’d put on his dad’s white medical coat and tie.

He took a sip from a can of Coke Zero. “Look, I’m going to be very direct with you. I don’t have very much good news. His injuries are such that he could die.”

Juliana’s eyes flooded with tears. She nodded.

“We have him in a medically induced coma now, but he arrived with a Glasgow coma score of one-one-one.”

“I don’t know what that means.” A plastic bag of blood hung from one stand, fluids from another. A tube came from under the sheet filled with what looked like pinkish urine.

He didn’t bother to explain. “He sustained a really serious injury, but for now he’s stable.”

“So what happened to him?”

“He had injuries consistent with an attack. This is a nonmedical observation, but to me it looks like someone went after him with a tire iron.” He finished his Coke and tossed the can into the trash.

“Jesus.”

“I’m guessing some good Samaritan called 911. Anyway, there was a lot of facial trauma. His jaw is broken. We put a tube down his throat to protect his airway, then put him on a breathing machine and gave him some medication so he’s protected and he’s not in any pain.”

“Okay.”

“Unfortunately, we found a large amount of bleeding in his brain, an intracranial hemorrhage that required surgery.”

“Oh, dear God.”

“A subdural bleed — under the dura.”

“Was the surgery — successful?”

“We evacuated the hematoma, yes. We stopped the bleeding.”

“Is there — is there going to be brain damage?”

He looked at her for a couple of seconds. “You don’t ever know what the damage is going to be. Just putting all my cards on the table, he has a high risk of death or permanent disability. You just never know. Or he could recover and go back to a normal life.”

She nodded hopefully.

“If he does recover, though, there’s a good chance he’ll never be the same person again.”

“My God.”

“This is a marathon we’re looking at now. It’s impossible for us to predict today what the outcome is going to be, and he’s going to be in the coma, on the ventilator, for easily another twenty-four hours.”

“Then what?”

“Then we wean him out of the coma, and he’s extubated. This is a significant and serious injury. I should tell you — I don’t know what Mr. Hersh was like, physically, before this. But he gave as good as he got.”

“What do you mean?”

“You see what we call ‘fight bites’ on his hands? That laceration in the knuckles, from punching someone in the mouth. We found a tooth embedded in one of his knuckles. Whoever went after him probably has some serious dental work in his future. You can tell from his hands he didn’t go down gently.”

She nodded. “When can I — speak to him?”

“When? I don’t know if you’ll ever be able to speak to him.”

It was a few minutes after one in the morning, and she was beyond exhausted. She felt jittery and strangely wide awake. She stood on the sidewalk outside Boston Medical Center, stunned, horrified by what had been done to Philip Hersh. She wondered if it had happened because of her. Surely he was also working on other cases.

But what if it was because of her case that he was so badly wounded? What if it was over this file he mentioned? The possibility sickened her.

There was a surprising amount of traffic for that time of night. She watched the cars for a moment, then looked at her phone. Duncan had called several times.

His voice messages sounded increasingly worried. I thought your flight gets in at like eleven thirty. Call me. Where’d you go? Jules, where are you?

She called him back, told him she’d be home soon, and she’d explain.

Then she hailed a cab to the Park Colonnade Building, in downtown Boston.

Maybe he’d left this paper file in his office. What had he said? I’d be happy to drop it off... you can stop by my office.

I think you need to see this.

If the file was in his office, she needed to get over there right now and get it. Whatever it was.

The cab pulled up to the Park Colonnade Building, and she got out. It was dark, nobody else around.

That means no one is following me, she thought.

At least no one that I can see.

She took the stairs to the third floor. The hallway was dark, as were the offices, which she assumed were all empty and locked this late at night.

She walked down the hallway in the darkness, her footsteps echoing. At the door to Hersh’s office, she took out her cell phone to use as a flashlight and Hersh’s key ring.

And began to try the keys, one by one.

The fifth key turned the lock.

She waited for an alarm warning tone, but there was just silence.

No alarm? That surprised her. Hersh would make sure his office was alarmed. He would take security precautions. That was the kind of guy he was.

Maybe the alarm had been turned off. Or hadn’t been set in the first place, for some reason.

She didn’t want to turn on the overhead lights, which would spill light into the hallway and arouse the curiosity of any passing security guard. Instead, she continued to use the flashlight function on her phone. It illuminated a broad area with a dingy light.

And she saw that his office had been searched. File cabinet drawers were all open, files spilling out of them. His desk was heaped with file folders. Piles of folders were scattered here and there on the carpet. Hersh’s office had been untidy, but there was no way Hersh had left it like this. Someone had been here and searched aggressively, not bothering to return it to its previous condition, not caring who knew what had happened. It almost looked as though they were making a point — we can do whatever the hell we want. Not just to the office, but to anyone who gets in our way.

She heard footsteps in the hallway and immediately fumbled with her phone, trying to turn off the damned flashlight, finally swiping up and finding the right icon and pressing it to switch off the light.