by Robert Pobi
Why hadn’t anyone told her about this?
“Can you print this up?” she asked Dr. Winslow. “And please forward it to me—there might be something hidden in the metadata. You’re not obliged to do so—I would need a court order to make you hand it over—but you would save us some time. It’s your call.”
Dr. Winslow waved it away. “Not a problem.” He tapped in a command and walked out of his room, coming back in thirty seconds with a crisp full-color invitation printed on glossy paper. Then he handed the iPad to Hemingway. “Please forward it to yourself.”
“Who sent the invitation?” Phelps asked.
Hemingway held up the tablet, touched her fingers to the screen, and magnified the text.
The e-mail had come from Marjorie Fenton.
||| EIGHTY-ONE
HEMINGWAY CALLED CNN and the news teams descended on the clinic with a well-coiffed vengeance; all that was missing was the Reverend Samuel Parris, a bullhorn, and a gallows. Papandreou and Lincoln were across the street, Papandreou working on a hot dog while Lincoln cautiously sucked a Rocket Pop in a stooped over pose so he wouldn’t drip red, white, and blue all over his shirt. When Hemingway pulled up in the Suburban, Papandreou chucked the last of the dog down and Lincoln tossed his Popsicle in the trash.
Hemingway plowed her way through the gauntlet of camera flashes, halogen lighting, and rhetorical questions. She yanked the door open and stepped into the skating-rink cold of the clinic. There wasn’t a patient in sight.
Director Fenton was behind the receptionist’s desk with her two security men, a troop of blue-suited lawyers behind her—they looked like Custer’s boys just before the shit went down.
“Detectives,” Fenton said as she checked her watch, “as of four minutes ago, the Park Avenue Clinic initiated bankruptcy proceedings. We have willfully placed a significant portion of our capital in escrow to go toward possible restitutions.” The statement was practiced and vague.
“Mrs. Fenton, may we speak with you in private?”
Fenton’s eyes twitched in their sockets and her mouth went flat, and for a second it looked like her operating system had crashed. Then her mouth opened very slowly and she said, “Yes, of course.”
They followed her to the subterranean boardroom and Hemingway noticed that the artwork was gone; empty nails stuck out of the walls at every turn. Papandreou and Lincoln waited in the hallway with Fenton’s legal counsel while Hemingway and Phelps talked to the woman. Fenton dropped into a chair and Hemingway perched herself on the edge of the table. Phelps leaned against the door, arms crossed, the Iron Giant at rest. Or waiting for an attack command.
“Mrs. Fenton, since I left here last time we have learned that Dr. Brayton has killed himself and you held an anniversary celebration last year for the patients.”
Fenton just stared at her.
Hemingway’s knuckles tightened on the edge of the desk and Fenton looked down at them, as if realizing for the first time that they were alone.
“If we had known about Brayton, we wouldn’t have wasted valuable resources looking for him. And if you had told us about the opera, and that almost all of your patients had been there together, we might have been able to warn them. Two more children might be alive.” And with that, Hemingway handed Fenton a photograph of the cryptid child from the bathtub.
The director looked at it for a second, then quickly turned away. Her jaw moved in its mounts and for a second it looked like she might gag.
“That’s William Atchison. He was at the opera that night.” She stabbed another photograph into Fenton’s hand, this one of the Simmons boy on the ferry. “And that’s another patient of Dr. Brayton’s—Zachary Simmons. He was at the opera as well.” She followed these with the color copy of the invitation that Dr. Winslow had printed up for her. “You should have told me about this the first time I sat down with you.” She wanted to knock this woman around.
At that Fenton held up a folder. Hemingway opened it. It was a clipping from the Style section of the Times, dated May 13 of last year. It was a photo taken in front of the Met, Dr. Brayton exiting a limousine. In front of him was a family, a little brown-haired boy in their midst. There was another to his left, and two more in the background. At first Hemingway thought you’d have to be blind to miss the similarity between the children but quickly realized that was what these women had ordered—what they had expected: handsome little men to be.
Fenton began to speak, and all the bite, all the swagger, had left her voice. She sounded tired. “I knew right there. At the opera. It was obvious that they were his. All of them. They were in different sections of the hall, so none of the parents caught on. But I didn’t get to where I am by believing in coincidences. I called my lawyers that night. I had his samples destroyed and I fired him the next morning. He signed his life away to me; I could have put him in jail for the rest of his life. I honestly didn’t know where he had gone—I wanted nothing more to do with the man. This clinic wasn’t built on deceit and I find it very sad that this is its undoing. We have helped a lot of people build beautiful families over the years.” Hemingway thought for the first time that Fenton sounded sincere. “I didn’t know Brayton had killed himself but I can’t say that I’m upset by it.”
“Can you prove that Brayton is father of these children?”
Fenton nodded. It was a defeated gesture. “I have cheek swabs locked away.”
“Whoever is killing these children has known about their connection to one another for a while. Who had access to your files—legally, ethically, physically? How are the files protected? We need to find this guy and we need to do it now. He’s going through these children like some kind of a bad dream.”
“From a legal standpoint, only those directly involved with a particular patient are supposed to access their files: it’s not like a library where browsing and choosing is permitted.
“Actual access to a patient’s record is restricted almost exclusively to physicians, health care providers, nurses, and medical assistants. A receptionist would potentially have access to, and occasionally handle, records, but would be technically prohibited from opening them. It’s not in the job description. From there it gets worse.”
Had she said worse?
“The number of people we employ in the billing department, the medical coders, and the records department is very robust. It’s part of what makes—made—us efficient. These employees have access to a massive amount of information. When they come across any personal information while billing or filing they are supposed to read what was done, code it, bill it, and forget it. Half of the time they don’t even read the patient’s name, only their patient ID number.
“Our paper charts are kept in both the vault as well as a personal fireproof safe in each doctor’s office. They are not left lying around. Our record and chart rooms are locked at all non-practice times but when the office is open, they are unlocked and available to our employees. Our medical records department physically stores all of our records. The runners who work there have total access to all of the patient records but they’re not supposed to look inside them.
“Then things get a little more complicated. At the beginning of last year we transferred all of our patient files to electronic medical records—it’s a new federal law. Access to electronic medical records is limited to authorized employees who need a password. Doctors and nurses are notorious for logging in and leaving their panels open because logging in and out all day long is annoying.
“There are complex security systems within the EMR networks but the measures are not infallible. There are apps that work from laptops, iPhones, iPads and other mobile devices. If a doctor were logged in and not physically with that device, it would be like leaving the file room open for anyone.”
Hemingway thought of the text she had received from Tyler Rochester’s phone; whoever was killing these children was comfortable around technology.
Fenton continued: “Anyone working in coding, billing, med
ical records, or medical transcription would have all the legal rights in the world to be looking into files. It’s the cornerstone of their job. But there’s a difference between legal and ethical. People check files all the time without any ethical reason whatsoever. Just not my people.
“Federal law mandates that patients’ records be made available to them. If Jane Doe demands a copy of her medical record, she gets it. We return files to patients all the time. Once they are printed and released, who knows who has access to them?” She shrugged.
Fenton had just spread suspicion to most of the people in the country.
Her voice box started back up. “But none of this shifts blame away from Dr. Brayton. We wouldn’t be here if he hadn’t been such a narcissist. I think what he did was unforgivable.”
Hemingway looked down at the photo of William Atchison. “So does the guy who’s killing these boys.”
||| EIGHTY-TWO
HEMINGWAY’S UNCLE had called; her parents would be at the Helmsley in a few hours and her brother was coming in from Los Angeles sometime during the night. Dwight—in his customary role as family mediator—wanted to know if she had a minute to drop by, if only to make an appearance.
She told him that she’d make it as soon as she could.
Papandreou and Lincoln still looked like tired, disheveled extras from a road movie. Phelps, on the other hand, was his same immutable self—hair combed, not so much as a yawn in the past twenty-four hours. Hemingway and Phelps had both managed to steal a shower; a change of clothes and freshly brushed teeth helped, at least until the heat needled back into everything.
“Okay.” Hemingway held up her hand, indicating that it was time to focus on the pile of dead children and the collateral murders of five adults. “We need to figure out what’s next on the flowchart.”
Papandreou finished off a slurp on his drink and shook his head, the cream mustache making him look like that guy from Hall and Oates. “He ain’t giving us time to breathe. The more people he kills, the more people we have to interview. My brain’s gonna explode and I haven’t had ten minutes to put any of this together.”
Hemingway stared at him for a moment. “You don’t get to stomp your feet and say not fair. I’m really sorry that you’re tired and that you still can’t see shit, but then I wonder how the hell you became a detective in the first place. Did you get anywhere with your interviews?”
Once the photograph of the opera became part of their armament, Brayton’s patients seemed more approachable, less defensive, as if the police were now in on some grand little secret that entitled them to civility. There was something fundamentally wrong with a few of these people; this was The Stepford Wives in wealthy Technicolor. They were so isolated, so used to things being done as—and when—they saw fit, the thought of an interloper penetrating their cloistered little terrarium was frightening.
Tyler Rochester’s and Bobby Grant’s deaths had made little impact on many of the parents they had tried to warn; that had been someone else’s child, not theirs. Theirs was special. She had never seen this level of worship to the cult of children. It was beyond jaw-dropping, it was downright disturbing.
“These people breathe a different oxygen than I do.” Lincoln pushed a stack of yellow interview jackets across the table.
“Find anything we can use? Any video, photographs or news footage? Tweets? Blogs? Cell phone pictures? Smoke signals? Suicide notes? Anything at all?”
“We have the surveillance video of Heidi Morrison’s death from the MTA.”
“And?”
“And nothing. She’s standing on the platform with her mother at the Hunter College station. Lots of kids milling about and just as the train pulls in she jumps out onto the track and gets grated by fifty tons of steel.” He reached for his laptop, pried the top open, cued up a video, and let it play out.
A section of platform at the Hunter College station came to life. There was no sound.
The platform was molecularly packed, it was clearly rush hour; men in suits, corporate-looking women and schoolchildren made up the bulk of passengers.
“That’s her,” Lincoln said, indicating a smudge amid a sea of smudges that translated to the top of the girl’s head. She was bouncing up and down—dancing. “And that’s her mom.” He indicated a woman to the smudge’s left. Lincoln fast-forwarded through time.
Hemingway’s focus stayed locked on the girl, now dancing in a manic pogo as the film played at thirty times normal speed.
The pulsing crowd slowed as Lincoln cued it up. The girl, still dancing, slowed down as well.
Interchangeable schoolboys ran through the frame, like fighter pilots dodging flak. An old lady eased her way from screen left to screen right, trying to get close to the tracks. A cop walked by. An old man with an umbrella came into the frame and leaned against a beam. Someone dropped a cup of coffee. Hemingway kept her focus on the girl.
For some reason the crowd moved to the left, like a flock of birds in flight, then back right as the lights of the approaching train became visible at screen left. People moved by her. Kids ran behind and around her. The old lady tried to strong-arm her way to the front of the queue.
All of a sudden the girl lurched forward, off the platform.
And the train rolled through.
“Rewind that.”
Lincoln shrugged. “It won’t do any good. Me and Nick watched it fifty freakin’ times. She just flies off the platform like she’s magnetic. No one pushed her. No one touched her.”
“Just rewind it.”
She watched it a few times and Lincoln was right: there was nothing to see. One minute the child was there, bopping up and down, the next she was under the train.
Lincoln reached over and tapped the files. “In every single instance we couldn’t find a reason to be suspicious.”
“Except?”
“Except those numbers don’t make any kind of sense in the real world. A one hundred percent accidental mortality rate for eight ten-year-old wealthy American girls in one summer doesn’t add up.”
Hemingway stared at her notes. All they really had were names and times of death and—
Hemingway reached over for the photograph of the party that Dr. Winslow had given her. She stared at it for a second, then reached for her notebook. “Here we go. May twelfth last year. Six o’clock at the Metropolitan Opera House at Lincoln Center. Evening dress. Cocktails followed by dinner and music. RSVP by April 29th.”
She wrote May 12 down at the top of the page, above the dates column. The party was held on May the twelfth.”
“And?” Lincoln said, irritated.
“And those girls started dying exactly two weeks to the day later.” She underlined the dates, one at a time. “It started with the party. It had to. It’s someone who was there.”
||| EIGHTY-THREE
IT WAS here somewhere.
But where—exactly—was here?
A room full of boxes—everything from protocols to autopsy reports, to the medical examiner’s notes and crime-scene photographs, the FBI’s CODIS returns and stacks of interview folders and known associates of everyone concerned.
Hemingway knew that it would come at them out of the blue. A criminal record. A text or an e-mail or a changed name. A parking ticket. A size ten or ten and a half leather-soled shoe that lit up in the lab. Someone with a faulty fuse box, an axe to grind, a debt to collect. Someone who listened to their Rice Krispies. Or God.
The news battalion camped across the street had fewer answers than the police did. They had thrown around so many bizarre scenarios that even the late-night shortwave conspiracy nuts thought they had lost their minds. The talking heads were calling it everything from payback for Area 51 experiments to biblical justice against mad science, and no one seemed to think his chatter was the least bit unethical. The newspeople had become a pack of braying animals, and Hemingway wondered who would start the grassroots riot that was surely coming—it would start when someone finally stood up
and made the ghost of the great Joseph N. Welch proud. An equivalent of, “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore!” might just do it.
Christ, she was tired. And amazed at the crap swirling around in her head. She needed to go home to get some sleep. Maybe talk to Daniel. And her folks. It was time for a little of the damage control Uncle Dwight had mentioned.
But first there was the case.
Out there, somewhere, was a very smart man with a saw who enjoyed doing terrible things to little boys.
In absolute terms, that was the effect, not the cause.
The cause was something much older—some deep childhood trauma that had melted the insulation off the wire. Bad home. Bad parents. No home. No parents. Evil done and evil now revisited. Somehow, doing those terrible things made him feel—better wasn’t exactly the word; less anxious was probably closer to the truth. And there was a fantasy at play that she didn’t know, couldn’t understand. Some specific pathology that internally justified these monstrous acts. Some basic belief that she couldn’t see but desperately needed to.
These boys were being destroyed by him.
Wrong—that was passive voice.
He destroyed them.
Active. And accurate.
There was planning behind it all. He had murdered eight girls on a clock that the Swiss could nail their train schedule to. And no one had noticed any of it happening. From a certain perspective, the whole thing tasted of black magic.
Had he been at the opera that night? Or was it some random nut who had glommed on to some insane fantasy that involved cutting up these boys? It wasn’t aliens or Jesus and it wouldn’t turn out to be anyone who believed in those things; there was too much critical thinking in this for it to be someone who believed that the Force existed or Jonah had actually lived in the belly of a whale. There was too much creativity at work for it to be someone of such limited vision.
Lincoln and Papandreou were at the computer lab picking up the lists of family, friends, business associates, practitioners, employees, tradespeople, neighbors, and anyone else remotely acquainted with the victims and their parents. They would also have the same lists from fifty-one of the fifty-nine former patients of Drs. Brayton and Selmer who had been interviewed in the past day and a half. The computers would cross-reference the lists, narrowing their search. Then they would weed out the natural happenstance of six degrees of Kevin Bacon and find the real common link—some little piece of connecting tissue that would set the whole thing on fire.
