by Neal Baer
“Less and less,” Rosa said. She described them—a man chasing her and almost catching her—but Claire was drifting. She couldn’t help but think she was a kind of soul sister to Rosa; that in many ways she and this undereducated but nevertheless poised young woman were living parallel lives.
Why can’t I be at peace? Why am I not feeling free to live my life? What is it that’s holding me back?
“Doctor Waters?” Rosa asked. “Are you okay?”
Claire tried to regain her composure. In the past, she’d try to cover. But she’d come to realize that with her patients, honesty was the best policy.
“Sorry, Rosa, I guess I went off into la-la land,” she said, rising from the chair and holding out her hand. “Come on, I’ll walk you out to the lobby.”
He parked the car at the curb in a delivery zone on the street, making sure to put the plastic card on the dashboard to prevent it from being ticketed and towed. That card, the equipment he’d placed inside between the two front seats, and the make and model of the nondescript sedan itself would guarantee this car he’d searched for and bought for just this purpose would remain where it was until he came back.
He then walked quickly—but without attracting attention—around the corner, to a spot across the street from the monolithic building. He looked like any of the other millions of suit-clad businesspeople walking through the chaos of Manhattan. Though he knew he was different from everyone else and prided himself on it, today he was satisfied to just blend in. Anonymity was what he needed now. He knew he’d arrived on time. His wait would only be a few more minutes.
Claire and Rosa walked through the main lobby, mostly in silence. The serious look on Rosa’s face made Claire feel like she’d insulted her patient by drifting off during their session. She stopped and turned to the young woman.
“Rosa, what I did upstairs is inexcusable,” she said. “I shouldn’t have allowed my mind to wander. I promise it won’t happen again.”
This seemed to make Rosa even more uncomfortable. “Doctor, I don’t want to step into someone else’s business. But please don’t say you’re sorry. You’ve done so much to help me. . . .” She trailed off.
“You’re amazing, Rosa,” she said. “Thanks for asking, but I’ll be okay.”
“I’ll see you on Thursday?” Rosa asked tentatively, as if she expected Claire to say no.
“Of course,” Claire replied. “Call me if you need anything.”
Rosa walked through the doors out to the street, as Claire turned and hurried for the elevator. She always spent a little extra time in her sessions with Rosa. She had a half hour until her next appointment, and had hoped to check on her inpatients in that short window of time.
She bolted into an open elevator car and checked herself in the mirror. Dammit. I forgot my stethoscope.
She punched the button for the third floor. When the doors opened, she ran to her office, unlocked the door, grabbed her stethoscope, slipped on the flats she always wore on rounds (since slipping in heels on a patient’s bodily fluids one day), and was about to run back out when a flash of lightning drew her attention to the spring storm brewing outside. Something on the street caught her eye.
She hurried over to the window, which had an expansive view of Second Avenue.
A man in a dark suit was leading Rosa down the street.
In handcuffs.
“No!” Claire exclaimed, rushing out the door.
She ran down two flights of stairs, burst through the metal door into the lobby, and sprinted to the hospital entrance and out into the street. She looked in the direction she’d seen the suited man leading Rosa.
But all she saw was the already thick traffic on Second Avenue coming to a dead stop and the sea of black umbrellas opening almost all at once as the downpour began.
Rosa and the man with her were gone.
CHAPTER 3
“I don’t understand,” Claire barked into the phone on the desk in her office. “How could there be no record of her?”
An hour after she’d watched the man in the suit lead Rosa Sanchez away in handcuffs, Claire was no closer to finding out where her patient was or why she’d been arrested.
If she’d been arrested.
Claire kept looking out the window onto Second Avenue, where both the rain and the traffic had subsided, as she waited for the police officer on the other end of the line to answer her question, hoping she was finally talking to the right person.
This hadn’t been her first call. After canceling her remaining patients for the day, she’d started trying to track down Rosa’s whereabouts. The events of the previous year had given Claire an unexpected but fast and thorough education on the inner workings of the New York City Police Department. It had also given her entrée with the cops; there were few who didn’t know her name and how she’d helped them apprehend a killer.
When a rookie cop at the local precinct had told her Rosa hadn’t been brought there, she tried the detective squad in the Bronx that had arrested Rosa for the bad check. To no avail. The detective had suggested she try the NYPD’s central booking facility in Lower Manhattan.
She did, and was now on the phone with a friendly enough but no doubt bored police sergeant whose name she couldn’t remember.
“Probably hasn’t been booked yet,” he said. “Until your Rosa Sanchez is in the system and being transported here, we don’t know she exists. Make sense, Doc?”
Claire took a breath. Whatever had happened to Rosa, she knew, wasn’t this guy’s fault.
“Yes,” Claire answered, “it makes sense. Sorry to give you a hard time.”
The sergeant chuckled. “Lady, you wanna see a hard time, spend a few hours in this hellhole. This was a piece of cake. See ya.”
The line went dead. At least the guy had a sense of humor. But as she hung up the nondescript institutional phone on her nondescript institutional desk, that was little comfort.
She rose from her chair and went to the window, staring, searching, as if Rosa would suddenly, magically appear among the hordes of people walking the street. It was wishful thinking and she knew it.
Did I miss something? Was her humility an act that I either didn’t see or didn’t want to? Did she commit another crime she didn’t tell me about?
As quickly as she was flooded with questions, Claire dismissed them. She knew she’d always been an excellent judge of character. Her ability to read people upon meeting them had served her well throughout her life. Rosa, Claire decided, was exactly who Claire thought she was: a hardworking young woman who got swallowed up and victimized by circumstances out of her control.
Just as the city outside had swallowed her up an hour earlier.
Claire vowed she’d do whatever it took to find Rosa.
She went back to her desk, on which Rosa’s file still sat. She opened it and rummaged through, looking for something, anything she hadn’t thought of. She was only a few pages in when her cell rang. She eyed the phone’s display, which read Cecil Ward: Rosa’s probation officer. Her mind formed a picture of him, a lanky black man in his forties with a “been there before” demeanor, and she answered the call.
“Cecil,” she said. “Thanks for getting back to me so fast.”
“You said it was urgent, and you never once left a message like that,” said Cecil. “What’s wrong? Our girl didn’t show up or something?”
“She showed up all right, but as soon as she left some suit took her away in cuffs.”
“Seriously?” Cecil exclaimed, sounding as stumped as she was.
“I thought you might know who it was or at least why.”
“Hell, that woman’s a Swiss watch,” Cecil said. “I don’t have one violation on her and any warrant to pick her up would’ve come straight to my desk.”
“Is there anyone you can call?” Claire pressed.
Cecil, a twenty-two-year veteran of the Probation Department, knew as well as Claire that Rosa wasn’t one of his most likely clients to take a powd
er. He liked Rosa, felt almost as bad for her as Claire did. And he trusted Claire. Rosa was the third “probie” they’d shared; he knew Claire wouldn’t sound the alarm needlessly.
“Wait a minute, let’s start at the beginning,” Cecil said. “Did you actually see this happen?”
“Yes,” Claire answered, “from the window of my office.”
“Your office on the third floor of the hospital.”
“They were across Second Avenue.”
“So there’s no way you saw the guy’s face.”
Claire struggled to remember. But she’d seen nothing but the man’s back. “All I saw was the dark suit and the handcuffs.”
“Any chance it was a fed? Immigration catching up with her or something?”
“You know damn well that Rosa was born in the Bronx, Cecil,” she said, rising from her chair and moving toward the window again.
“Sorry, Doc,” Cecil said. “Sometimes Immigration arrests first and asks questions later. I’ll call the detectives who arrested her in the Bronx and the Queens SVU guy who handled her rape case for starters; how’s that?”
“Vito over at SVU was my next call,” Claire said, treading lightly. “I already tried the other two. But I’m afraid this is some bullshit complaint her ex-husband made and I don’t want her getting into any trouble over this.”
Now it was Cecil’s turn to be concerned. “Sounds like she’s already in trouble,” he said. “You’re not pulling my chain, are you?”
“Why would I do that?” Claire asked, struggling to hear him over the blaring siren of a fire department ambulance passing on the street below.
“You know, like Rosa didn’t really show today and you ‘think you saw’ some guy take her away in handcuffs because you don’t want me to send her back to Rikers for violating her parole.”
“Cecil, if I were lying to protect her, why would I have even called you?” Claire said, her voice rising. “Rosa hasn’t missed a session in the two months she’s been out of jail. She always gets here early.”
“Relax, Doc, you don’t have to sell me. I’ll check around on the down-low and let you know what I find out. That is, if I can find anything.”
“Thanks, Cecil.” She hung up, not wanting to wait however many hours—or even days—it might take Cecil to call her back.
She looked down at Rosa’s open file on her desk. Everything she needed to know about her patient’s life was right in front of her. With purpose, she picked up the folder, crossed the room, sat down, and began reading where she’d left off.
It was just before noon when Claire hurried down the immaculate hallway and around a corner to Doctor Fairborn’s office. Almost as soon as she knocked, Fairborn was standing in front of her, knowing from the look on Claire’s face something was terribly wrong.
“What happened?” she asked, ushering Claire into her spacious office, comfortably furnished in earth tones and tasteful but nondis-tracting prints and paintings. She was about to sit in her usual spot, a high-backed chair across from the sofa, when Claire started telling her about Rosa and what she’d done to track down her vanished patient.
“I called her cell phone half a dozen times,” Claire said, “and when she didn’t pick up, I left messages. I’ve already called her probation officer. He’s looking into it.”
Fairborn listened, but knew something was missing, something Claire wasn’t telling her. She prodded: “You think something happened to her.”
Claire nodded, though she didn’t want to say it out loud. “I don’t know why, but yes, I do,” she admitted.
“Well,” Fairborn said, “there could be a reasonable explanation for this.” Claire looked up sharply, as if the notion of anything about this being reasonable was nonsense. But Fairborn pressed on. “I know Rosa’s been conscientious, but even the most forthcoming patients don’t tell us everything,” she said.
“Rosa’s been seeing me twice a week for a month,” Claire replied, taking the edge off her voice. “If she were trying to hide something, I’d know it by now.”
Fairborn gestured Claire to the sofa, but Claire stood where she was, way too wired to sit. So Fairborn tried another tack. “Still, we all have secrets, and some of us are much better at keeping them than others,” she said. “It’s possible, as good as you are—and you’re the best I have here—that Rosa did something she was too ashamed to tell you about, and she got arrested for it.”
“Then what should I do?” Claire asked.
Fairborn knew what Claire wanted: her blessing to search for Rosa. It was the last thing Fairborn was about to give her.
“It sounds like you’ve done everything you can for right now,” she said to Claire in that calming, soothing voice on which Claire had come to depend. “So now it’s time to just wait and see.”
Claire had been staring at a watercolor on a far wall of a cityscape with rain coming down. When she looked at Fairborn, her mentor’s eyes were locked with hers, as if trying to burn a message into her brain. Gentle though it was, she’d been given a direct order by her supervisor; the general telling the private to stand down. Claire knew better than to argue her case.
“Okay,” Claire replied, heading for the door. “I understand.”
“Please let me know if you hear anything,” Fairborn said as Claire walked out, barely finishing the sentence before the door closed.
In the hallway, Claire stopped and leaned against the wall, questioning. She had tremendous respect for her mentor—the woman had been like a second mother to her over the last year. But Claire couldn’t shake the feeling that Rosa was in more than just legal trouble. The thought gave her the jitters, and she knew that sensation well. To her it had always come, even as a child, after being told no.
Right then, she decided she wasn’t willing to rely on or wait for the police or anyone else to learn Rosa’s fate.
She knew it was up to her. She’d find Rosa herself.
The graffiti-ridden, run-down, four-story tenement in the Soundview section of the Bronx was a throwback, a dinosaur living out its final days before extinction in the form of gentrification spread to even the toughest neighborhoods. Claire opened the building’s battered front door and was welcomed by an overpowering stench of stale urine invading her nostrils, forcing her to breathe through her mouth so she wouldn’t gag.
She climbed the decayed wooden stairs as a number 6 train rumbled over the Westchester Avenue elevated subway, known as “the el,” half a block away, fighting for attention with the din of cars battling rush hour on the Bronx River Parkway. Claire wondered how anyone could live in such a place and think straight or get a night’s sleep. She hoped the cacophony masked the groaning and creaking of every step she took.
She reached the second-floor landing, found the apartment, and knocked on the beat-up plywood door. She heard footsteps and a female voice.
“Who is it?”
“I’m looking for Franco Sanchez,” Claire said.
The door opened as far as the security chain would allow. A young woman with dark complexion and hair made no effort to hide the lavender bra and matching panties she wore as she peered through the slit. Claire figured her to be no more than twenty.
“You a cop?” asked the woman, presumably Franco’s girlfriend.
“I need to talk to him,” Claire stated, deciding not to answer the question. “About his wife.”
The young woman closed the door. For a second, Claire thought she’d walked away. But then Claire heard the chain slide across its latch and the door opened again. The young woman stood there, blocking the entrance. She didn’t want to let Claire in but she couldn’t think of a good reason to refuse.
“Franco, cops are here about Rosa,” she shouted, then disappeared through an inner door that presumably led to a bedroom.
“Thank you,” Claire called after her, looking around. The place was a dump. A railroad flat with windows that faced another building, too close to allow any good natural light into the apartment. What pass
ed for a living room was nothing more than a battered wood floor on top of which sat dinged-up furniture that looked like it had been picked up on the street. She could hear conversations and clanking dishes from the coffee shop below as if it were in the next room.
Two more trains rumbled past outside, a minor earthquake that shook the building. Claire wondered why Franco would have left the comfortable apartment he and Rosa had shared with their kids for this hellhole.
As the din from the passing trains subsided, Claire heard an angry Spanish exchange behind the door through which the girlfriend had gone. All at once, the shouting ended, the door opened, and Franco Sanchez scowled at the sight of Claire.
“She’s not a cop,” he shouted behind him before slamming the door.
Then he focused his ire on Claire. “Why’d you lie to my girlfriend?” he demanded, pulling on a soiled T-shirt over his solid body. He had green-and-red sleeve tattoos of the Virgin Mary and Harleys on both arms. His kneecaps stared at her through large holes in the disintegrating pajama bottoms he wore.
“I didn’t lie to her,” Claire said with defiance. “She asked and I didn’t answer.”
Their first meeting had been just as adversarial. Claire had to interview Franco as part of the custody process for his and Rosa’s two children. She’d quickly pegged Franco as a man with a serious anger disorder, a diagnosis her lengthy interviews with their two children confirmed. Franco wanted the kids to live with him; Rosa, of course, wanted them to live with her. Rosa won out, based on Claire’s recommendation to a family court judge, forcing Franco to pay child support to his soon-to-be ex-mother-in-law and pissing him off to no end.
“The hell you want?” Franco asked.
“Tell me where Rosa is,” Claire demanded, matching Franco’s anger. That made Franco grin.
“Aw, what happened, mama? She take off on you?” he taunted, enjoying himself.
Claire wasn’t about to tell him anything, so Franco assumed he was right. “Toldja you shouldn’ta bet the farm on her,” he leered, getting in her face. “And you came here to tell me this why?”