To Faye
Chapter
1
The images were grainy and blurred. But they told a story.
The storyteller was a camera perched above the entrance to Westside Acu-Care Hospital on National Boulevard, a short stroll west of Robertson. The only active location on a grimy stretch of warehouses dominated by the concrete spaghetti of freeway overpasses.
The lens was a poorly placed witness, focused narrowly on a right-of-center slice of the hospital’s circular drop-off area. Luckily, it had captured the basics.
—
Saturday, two fifty-three a.m.: A car, dark, compact, speeds around the outer rim of the circle and stops short, rocking back and forth.
Seven seconds later, the driver’s door swings open and remains that way.
A man in a dark hoodie, pants, and gloves exits, runs to the rear right passenger door, and flings it open. Stooping, he reaches in and begins sliding something out. As the bulk of that something is brought outside of the car, it takes form.
Oblong, swaddled in something dark.
Bending his knees and lifting smoothly, the man slings the shapeover his shoulder, totes it a few feet, and lays it down with no apparent tenderness.
Five seconds later, he’s driven off and the thing, human-sized and inert, remains on the pavement.
—
Milo stopped the tape. “In answer to your next question, not for six minutes. The guard took an unauthorized bathroom break and didn’t get back until then. Seventy-eight years old so I guess he gets some kind of pass.”
His frown said not much of one.
I said, “Impressive security.”
“Place was run by skeleton crew, a nurse told me they’re probably going out of business.”
He tapped his computer monitor. “Top of that, the camera’s an antique, the techies couldn’t tell a thing about make and model. And you saw the tags. As in none.”
Removing license plates said careful planning. Likewise gloves and a face-blocking hood. Milo has the highest solve rate in the department. No sense mentioning any of that.
He rubbed his face. “Weird place. If there were patients, I didn’t see them.”
I knew the hospital’s history.
Abortion mill morphing to a slip-and-fall physical rehab center then to one of those inpatient drug rehabs that promises everything and delivers nothing. Each transformation short-lived and polluted by missteps and legal wrangling.
The new owners, a New York–based health-care outfit with connections to New York senators, had tried switching to pediatric urgent care funded by government money. The location made success unlikely. So did several malpractice suits that had scared parents away.
But grant money kept flowing and now the place was tagged as a “neighborhood-based acute-care facility serving the greater, diversecommunity.” With Cedars, Kaiser, and the U. within easy driving distance, it had no reason to exist.
I knew all of that because during the pediatric phase, I’d evaluated a nine-year-old boy whose broken femur had been set incompetently at Westside, leading to the possibility of a permanent limp.
My job had been to tell the court how that would impact a kid psychologically.
Not profound findings but the plaintiff’s attorney needed someone like me to spell them out.
Milo said, “Any ideas?”
I said, “Rewind.”
