“Remember your history? Tokyo subways in 1995? Someone released an odorless gas called sarin, which killed a dozen people.”
“Sounds vaguely familiar.”
“Sarin’s a nerve agent,” Mike said. “You breathe it in or it makes contact with your skin and you’re dead in minutes. It’s a weapon of mass destruction, which was supposedly stockpiled in Iraq in the nineties, and then outlawed by international panels of weapons inspectors.”
“But Francie had nothing to do with—” I tried to say something but Mike was rolling over me.
“Fast-forward to 2017, when Kim Jong-un’s brother was assassinated in the airport in Kuala Lumpur,” he said, “by two women who smeared a nerve agent on his face. I think that one was called VX.”
“You’re talking military stockpiles and foreign dictators,” I said. “This has nothing to do with Francie.”
“Hear me out,” Mike said. “After the Korean kill, there was that couple in England last year—the Skripals. They were Soviet ex-pats poisoned by the cutting-edge level of agents. Novichok—‘the newcomer’ is how it translated. It was developed for military use—probably ten times more potent than whatever they used before it. The bad guys applied it to the door handle of the house where the Skripals lived and were likely targeting the father, who’d been former KGB—a double agent. Both of them, father and daughter, touched the handle—just touched it—and they almost died.”
“But Novichok had an indeterminate shelf life,” Vickee said. “It can remain dangerous for years, once it’s deployed. So this latest poison was developed for the one-time hit—not contagious, no lingering effects, no chance of killing people aside from the target. That’s why the Russians have been calling it the Kiss of Death.”
“Russian military nerve agents?” I said, protesting again. “That’s ridiculous. Francie is a defense attorney for the indigent. Her being the target of the Kiss of Death makes no sense at all.”
“Do you know Quint Akers?” Vickee asked me.
“Sure. Francie’s supervisor.”
“We talked to him late today—but we didn’t tell him the diagnosis. He says Francie was in England a few weeks ago, and we know that places her not terribly far from where the Skripals were targeted.”
“I can’t believe you’re talking about this stuff,” I said. “I was supposed to be at that conference, too. It wasn’t about espionage and spies and secret agents. That’s absurd. It was an international symposium on violent crime.”
“Scully thinks the English visit is a long shot, too,” Vickee said, “but this newest nerve agent can work instantaneously when you touch it—or it can be absorbed more slowly into the bloodstream, depending on the method of delivery.”
“Francie may have been collateral damage, right?” I asked. “That makes more sense than her being a target.”
“It is what it is,” Vickee said. “The medical experts are certain they have identified a nerve agent, and in all likelihood it was a direct hit on Francie. We’re doing a clean sweep of Francie’s apartment tonight, in case whatever toxin it is happens to be in something that’s there—maybe even something she brought home from England—a gift or a souvenir that she just opened yesterday.”
“Did those Skirpers—?”
“Skripals,” Mike said.
“Whoever they are. Did they live?” I asked. “Did they survive direct contact with the nerve agent used against them?”
“Yes, but it’s slow going. They were both in comas for weeks,” Vickee said, nodding at me.
“Tell Coop the truth,” Mike said. “Not everyone recovers. Some who survive these chemical weapons have permanent nerve damage, chronic weakness in the arms and legs, severe depression, an inability to concentrate enough to read or to write. These are deadly, dark drugs.”
All this, and Francie was pregnant, too. Vickee hadn’t mentioned that and I didn’t dare ask.
“I told the commissioner that Francie wrote you a note to hand off at your party,” Vickee said. “That it mentioned something about a new job. Did you know anything about it?”
“That came as a total surprise. We never had the chance to talk,” I said. “I’ll make sure to give Mercer the note to get to you, for vouchering.”
“The conference—did she have a chance to tell you about that?” Vickee asked.
“It occurred right after I’d been released from the kidnappers. No, we never discussed that either. My fault, because I just didn’t focus on things that didn’t seem life-or-death at the time.”
Now I could kick myself for being so self-involved during my recovery.
“You have no idea what changes Francie was planning on making in her life?”
“I never thought she’d leave her job any more than I’d leave mine,” I said. “She lived for her work.”
“Like Coop said, does the commissioner think this poisoning was intentional?” Mike asked. “Isn’t there a chance Francie Fain wasn’t the intended victim?”
“There’s a chance she wasn’t, but like I said, this latest version of nerve agents isn’t contagious,” Vickee said. “Do you want to help?”
“Course I do,” Mike said.
“Scully had to call the head of the FBI,” Vickee said. “It’s the feds who are going through Francie’s apartment with our team. They’re better prepared on the chem weapons response. But we need someone to look at the video surveillance tapes for the hours before and after she collapsed on Baxter Street. It wasn’t an issue when we thought she was simply ill, but it’s critically important now.”
“I’m the man,” Mike said.
“Great. I told the commissioner you were the perfect candidate to do this because you were there just after she fell down, and you rode in the ambulance with her,” Vickee said. “We figured if we let Major Case guys do it, there’d be too many of them we’d have to tell about the nerve agent. But you—”
Mike poked her in the rib. “But me, I’m discreet, right?”
“You’d damn well better be the soul of discretion,” Mercer said, tipping his glass and pointing it at Mike.
“Who’d want Francie dead?” I said, looking for comfort in my drink.
“Maybe a perp she represented?” Mercer said.
“The ones she got off are grateful,” I said, “and the others are safely behind bars upstate, courtesy of my colleagues.”
“Did she have a guy?” Mike asked.
I waited for Vickee to answer, to see what she knew about Francie’s pregnancy—which would mean Keith Scully knew about it as well.
“We don’t know exactly,” Vickee said.
“You do know there’s a rumor Francie was pregnant?” I said, unable to hold back any longer.
“I guess that news is out there already,” she said, nibbling on a breadstick. “My boss wasn’t sure that her friends knew, so I wasn’t going to mention it.”
“I’m not certain that anyone else does,” I said. “Sorry, Vick. I didn’t mean to make you spill the beans. I just didn’t want the fetal DNA to be overlooked, if it becomes an issue. It could provide a valuable lead.”
“Scully’s on it,” Vickee said. “Francie’s in real danger of losing the baby, and he knows what has to be done if she does.”
There was not a ray of hope in this story, no matter how I looked at it.
“How do you not go public with this?” I asked. “If Francie wasn’t the intended victim, there could be so many more people at risk. The perp—or perps—might try again until they get it right.”
“Scully and the mayor are going back and forth on that,” Vickee said. “It’s been forty-eight hours since Francie went down, and no other cases have been reported. Scully thinks he’s only got another twenty-four before he has to make a statement. The mayor disagrees with him, of course. I get the feeling he hopes this is a one-off that will save him a huge po
litical headache if there are no other victims.”
“What a coward,” I said. “But that’s nothing new for him.”
“So there’s only one thing we haven’t talked about yet,” Mike said, “and that is what the commissioner did with the patient.”
Vickee’s back stiffened again. She didn’t speak.
“We know she’s not at New York/Cornell Hospital,” I said.
“If you can trust us to tell us this much, and to ask me to screen the videos,” Mike said, “you might let us know about the disappearing act the commissioner pulled.”
“Don’t put me in that position, Mike. Francie’s getting all the medical attention she possibly needs,” Vickee said. “And she’s safer this way, too.”
“Safer from me?” Mike asked, leaning back and putting his hands on his chest, in mock surprise. “I’m not the baby daddy, Vick. I’m not a suspect here. Let us in, will you?”
Vickee stood up and stared her husband down. “Mercer, I’m out of here, okay? I’m as concerned about Francie Fain as the three of you,” she said, pointing her finger at Mike and then me, “but that’s as far as we go tonight.”
Mercer got up to join her.
“If you two think you can top the best scientists in this country researching this new drug and its antidotes 24/7, trying to reverse the symptoms and all that,” Vickee said to the two of us, “I assure you I’ll advise the commissioner that you should just jump in and go to the head of the class.”
I’d never seen my friend this angry.
“And in case you think you deserve some kind of award for having very special balls, Mike, ’cause they’re what you’re usually trying to show off,” Vickee said, “let me just remind you they’re no match for the brains of the five or six Nobel laureates who have been up all night working to keep Francie Fain alive.”
TWENTY-SEVEN
“I’ve been to every hospital in Manhattan over the years, and most in the outer boroughs,” I said to Mike as we settled in at home in the den. “I should be able to figure out who’s got the best resources to care for Francie.”
Rape victims were treated in most emergency rooms, and we worked closely with forensic nurse examiners and docs who prepared evidence collection kits during those exams—now a critical feature in most trials.
My colleagues and I had stood beside gurneys in ERs to interview witnesses when an arrest time was critical, we had visited patients in ICUs just to make a silent bond when a case was assigned, and we often sat with survivors who were hospitalized with other injuries as we worked on their cases.
“You want to start on the southern tip of the island?” Mike asked. “Or top down?”
“Bottom up,” I said. “I’ve never seen Vickee snap like that.”
“She’s sitting on a powder keg,” Mike said, “and we weren’t much help.”
“How about a drink?” I said, reclining on the sofa in a pair of leggings and one of Mike’s shirts. I started to name the hospitals, drawing an imaginary map in the air. “Presbyterian Downtown, Beth Israel, Bellevue, NYU Langone.”
“Not so much research at those,” Mike said. “No Nobelists, I don’t think.”
“Cornell, St. Luke’s-Roosevelt, Lenox Hill, Mount Sinai,” I said, and by the time I had ticked off Metropolitan, Harlem, and Presbyterian Columbia in Washington Heights, Mike was cooling me down with a healthy dose of Dewar’s on the rocks.
He fixed a drink for himself and sat down in an armchair across the room.
“You skipped a few.”
“Specialty hospitals,” I said, dismissing them in one breath. “Places she isn’t likely to be. Ear, Nose, and Throat is mostly plastic surgery, which Francie doesn’t need; Memorial Sloan Kettering is a great cancer facility, which is fortunately not her issue; Hospital for Special Surgery is orthopedic, and nothing was broken. Did I ever tell you when HSS was founded, it was called the Hospital for the Ruptured and Crippled?”
“You got that story from your old man, right?” Mike asked.
“Yes, like everything else I know about this subject,” I said. “Then there’s Joint Diseases on East Seventeenth,” I said.
“Never been there,” Mike said. “No homicides, I guess.”
“That one was originally called the Jewish Hospital for Deformities.”
“Dr. Benjamin Cooper knows way too much about medicine.”
I sat up straight. “Why didn’t I think of that?”
“What?” Mike asked.
I grabbed my iPhone from the side table and dialed the international number for my parents, who were at their home in the Caribbean for the fall and winter.
“I’ll ask my father,” I said. “He’ll figure this out.”
It was an hour later on the tiny island of St. Barth’s than our ten thirty P.M., but my father was a night owl, just like me.
“Dad?” I said when he answered the phone.
“Alexandra,” he boomed back, enthusiastically. “Is everything okay?”
I had just spoken with him and my mother at length on Monday, assuring them that everything had gone well on my first day back at work.
“All good with Mike and with me, but we’re puzzling out a problem in a case, and I thought maybe you could help.”
“Just what a man wants to hear,” he said, “that I might know as much as Siri.”
“I like the sound of your voice much better,” I said, “and I know how much you love me, so I expect you’ll try harder than she would.”
“I’ll give it a whirl,” my father said. “What’s the question?”
“Let me put you on speaker so Mike can hear, too. We need help identifying a major medical research center in Manhattan,” I said. “At least, Mike and I think it’s in Manhattan.”
“Oh, darling,” he said. “I think you’ve given me an impossible task. Almost every major medical center in the city has a serious research arm attached.”
“Some must be more outstanding than others,” I said. “C’mon, Dad. What do you know about Nobel laureates?”
He laughed at me. “Do I need to remind you, Alexandra? I wasn’t exactly a sore loser, but I never won one.”
“I know you don’t have a Nobel Prize, Dad, but you were given a Lasker Award, and that’s pretty swell company.”
The Alfred and Mary Lasker Award was given annually to living persons who made major contributions to medical science. My father and his partner had received the award for their work on heart disease more than twenty-five years earlier.
He ignored my compliment and asked me a question in return. “What does this have to do with sexual assault?”
“Nothing,” I said. “Nothing at all. But someone I care about with a very rare diagnosis has been moved from New York/Cornell Hospital—shrouded in secrecy—to some kind of research facility, where there are something like five or six Nobel Prize laureates working on her.”
“You should have started with that fact, Alexandra. It’s a rather unique identifier,” my father said. “A facility with twenty-two Lasker Award winners and twenty-five Nobel Prize winners, six of them current faculty.”
“And it’s medical, Dr. Cooper?” Mike asked.
“Entirely,” he said. “It’s the first institute for research in America, founded in 1901, exclusively dedicated to the scientific study of medicine.”
“Where is it, Dad?”
“Right under your nose, Alexandra. Behind wrought iron gates, guarded by a security team to keep it private, on York Avenue, between Sixty-Third Street and Sixty-Eighth Street. The best-kept secret in the city.”
I looked at Mike and shook my head. A five-block stretch of the Upper East Side that was a total mystery to me.
“The Rockefeller Institute,” my father said, “complete with a sequestered twenty-bed hospital held in reserve for some of the most extreme medical cas
es in modern history. You’ll find your six Nobelists in there—and probably your patient, too.”
TWENTY-EIGHT
“I’ve seen a sign on the gates,” Mike said. “Isn’t it called Rockefeller University now?”
“Yes, but it was created as an institute and only changed its title to university in 1965,” my father said. “There are no college students at this university, Mike. It’s a pure research service, with a PhD program but no undergraduates.”
“And it abuts New York/Cornell Hospital,” Mike said, putting his hands together, reminding me that Francie had been on the north side of Sixty-Eighth Street just twenty-four hours earlier.
“That’s true. But there’s no relationship between them,” my father said. “It’s just a coincidence of location.”
“Do you know anyone on staff there, Dad?”
“Afraid not, darling. If you can think of any other way for me to be helpful, I’m more than happy to try.”
“Thanks, Dad. We’ll keep you posted,” I said. “Love you. Good night.”
I sank back onto the sofa and picked up my drink. “You’re right, Mike. There’s very little he doesn’t know about medicine, but I’m not sure what this information gets us.”
“Aren’t you curious about what goes on behind those wrought iron gates, and why that Rockefeller Hospital would be a better place to treat Francie than where she was?”
“Yes, I’m curious,” I said. “And if I stay up all night, I’ll never get the connection between her and some military weapon of mass destruction. It’s not that it matters where she is, but that she’s alive and someone is trying to save her life. I’d just like to lay eyes on her for five minutes, and whisper encouragement in her ear.”
Mike was using my iPad, apparently Googling something.
“Here’s the website for Rock U,” he said.
“What’ll that do for me?”
“The head of security in every hospital in this city is usually a retired boss from the NYPD. Probably not a Nobel laureate, but a pretty sure way for me to get in,” Mike said. “I’m looking up faculty and staff.”
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