“I think she’s closer to him than she’s ever been,” Marcus said quietly.“And that scares the hell out of me.”
Torres nodded, closing the notebook.“Then we better catch up.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
St.Bartholomew’s had once been a landmark of municipal pride, a place where surgeons wore starched coats and the sick went to be mended.Now it sagged inward on itself, a hulking thing of boarded windows, peeling paint and the slow, inexorable rot of abandonment.
The Bronx had changed around it; developers had moved on, and so had most of the people who remembered why this building mattered.What remained were the echoes of gurney-wheels long silenced, young interns joking in the wards as the sun came up, solemn old nurses who had cleaned bodies and smoothed brows until there were no years left in their hands.
It was 7.15 in the morning, and Kate moved through those echoes like someone carrying a secret in both palms.She had her badge tucked into her jacket at the small of her back, a talisman no longer entirely symbolic; it got you across thresholds, opened doors and sometimes, if you were bold enough, bought you the audacity of the first question.Right now it had no purpose; brute force had got her through a metal side-door.There were no lights, no orderly, no smells of cooking drifting from a staff canteen.There was only the rattle of elevator doors in the breeze.
She didn’t like hospitals, closed or otherwise.You wait until you need one– her Dad used to say.He’d done some of his earliest work in a lab right here, back when embryonic stem cells were still a promise on the horizon, when grant applications were prayers and the edge of science looked dangerously like salvation.Kate hadn’t been born, or even conceived back then—but, as she’d recently discovered, there’d been another child, not quite a baby, who’d lived a pitifully short while.Jeanette.
And that had to be why Cox had brought her here.
The main corridor swallowed her footsteps.Fluorescent fixtures had burned out years ago, leaving narrow shafts of light to collect on the linoleum in pale, exhausted pools.Kate’s torch played across rooms: a ward of beds with no mattresses; a nurses’ station with drawers pulled half-open, their contents cached and mummified; a surgical theatre whose theatre-hood had been stripped of steel and left to rust.In one of the side rooms somebody had set up a makeshift camp—an old dining chair, a blanket thrown over it like a fort.She moved closer, careful, the way you move around a sleeping dog.
The handwriting hit her before she could see the words.It was the same handwriting she had seen on the back of a yellowing family photograph, the spidery, arrogant script that adorned all of Elijah Cox’s manifestos and notes.He wrote scripture like other men wrote blueprints—selective, obsessively annotated, a mixture of heat and chill: gospel and geometry in one hand.The scrawl surveyed the peeling plaster like a claim.
Her throat tightened.She forced her breath into normal rhythms and walked on.
There were signs—soft, domestic markers that told her someone had been living here recently.A strip of clothesline was strung between two bedframes, socks and a wash cloth draped like little flags.It felt odd to see them, these traces of the man beneath the myth and the menace, like seeing your teachers outside of school.
Cans of beans sat in a tidy stack on top of a beer crate; a kettle sat, long-cold, on a camping stove.A paperback lay open on the floor, the spine had been split a hundred times.Cox was readingDie Physiker: a Swiss play from the Fifties, about the moral dilemmas of science. Was he actually reading it, Kate wondered.Or was it another prop?Put there like a footnote, referencing her dad’s research, his neglect of family in favor of work.It was impossible to know, with Cox, where the man ended and the show began.
A Polaroid, edges yellowed, was held to the plaster with a rusted nail.She squatted, the flashlight turning the photograph into an island.It showed her father in a lab coat—young, hair dark and unruly at the temples, grin sharp as a new nickel.
Flanking him, a younger group: a man too boyish for the cigar in his lips, a woman with short hair and a serious frown.Arranged around a cluttered lab bench like a family portrait.
“Hello?”she said aloud.The sound hit the low ceiling and came back softer, almost apologetic.
She moved from room to room, registering small items as if cataloguing evidence.A scrap of newspaper with a headline about a clinical breakthrough; a box of sterile spatulas; a Bible, spine cracked, its margins filled with marginalia—verses underlined, cross-references scribbled in the margins with the same spidery script she had come to expect.She picked up the Bible, fingertips running across pencilled notes.
Time was, her skin would have prickled to stumble on a sight like this.To be this close to the beast’s lair, to walk where he’d stood, breathe the same air.For some reason, though, she wasn’t experiencing that animal response.Something had shifted, but Kate couldn’t put it into clear thoughts, let alone words.She was tired; that was the answer and yet not the answer.
She found the phone in a dentist’s office—an old cell the size of a small book, resting on a cracked vinyl patient chair.The screen was shattered; a small, pale icon of a crown appeared behind the maze of tiny fractures.When it rang, it hit like a bell in a silent church.The tone that filled the corridor was Handel—Zadok the Priest—bloated, ceremonial, absurdly triumphant.It sounded like a herald, ridiculous among the leaking pipes and mouldy curtains, and for a heartbeat Kate laughed despite herself.
Her thumb answered before she could talk herself out of it.
“Hello?”she said.
There was a small, amused silence at the other end, as if the man had been enjoying her reaction and had decided to wait.When he did speak his voice was the one she knew well: cultured, a hint of the South; the baritone of old-time radio plays.But a rasp at the edges, as if illness had finally taken a small, private toll on his lungs.
“Kate Valentine,” he said.He said her surname like a benediction and a threat.“You are a creature of habit.You came alone.”
She pictured him as he had been: the man in the photographs on the walls of a dozen investigations, the man whose portraits were more mythology than memory.There were crackles on the line like distant rain.“You’re… you’re not here, are you?”
“No.”He laughed, low and small.“No, I am not inside the hospital.But I am near.”He spoke in measured phrases.“Have you seen the photographs, Kate?”
She swallowed.“You left them.”
“Left them?No, I placed them.There is a difference.Placement implies intention.Left implies negligence.”He made the distinction as if they were reading from the same page.“Do not be afraid.”
“What do the photographs mean?What are you trying to tell me?”
Cox said nothing.She felt, rather than knew, that wherever he was, he was still smiling.
“What do you want?”Kate asked.
