Desperate Measures

29

The car rolled to a stop at the ER entrance to the huge hospital. Stone and Dino jumped out and ran down the hall to a nurse’s station.

Dino flashed his badge at a nurse. “Where is Faith Barnacle?”

The nurse consulted a list. “We’ve got no Faith Barnacle, but there’s a Jane Doe in exam room two, Commissioner,” she said, jerking a thumb down the hallway.

They ran another fifty feet and nearly collided with a nurse coming from behind the curtain, bearing a pan filled with blood-stained gauze and other horrible things.

“Get back,” she ordered the two men. “There’re two very busy doctors working in there, and you don’t want to screw with them. Siddown!” She jerked her chin in the direction of a row of chairs, and they meekly followed her orders.

“Hey, how is she?” Dino shouted at the nurse’s back as she walked away.

“Stick around!” she shouted without turning.

The better part of an hour passed before a young physician in bloody scrubs came out of the curtained room and was replaced by another.

“Doctor!” Dino shouted.

The man walked wearily over to where they were getting to their feet. “What?”

“How is she?”

“Awful,” he said. “I’ve rarely seen such a mess. I had to bring a fresh doctor down here just to suture her wounds.”

“Is she going to make it?”

“She’s taken about as much abuse as a human being can stand and still live, but she’s stable. She’s got some broken ribs and a thousand cuts, but she’s been conscious off and on, and that’s a good sign.”

“How were all these cuts inflicted?” Stone asked.

“Not with a knife or razor,” the doctor said. “As I hear it, she fell from three or four stories into a dumpster filled with chunks of old drywall and glass. There must have been enough air in there to offer some kind of cushion. Oh, and her hands were tied to what remained of a chair. That’s all I can tell you.”

Dino thanked him and got on his phone. “Listen, you’ve got to figure out which window she fell from,” he said. “We’ve gotta get an arrest out of this.” He listened for a couple of minutes. “Keep me posted,” he said and hung up.

“They found the room, twelve stories up. It looks like, while tied to the chair, she made a head-on run at the window and crashed through it. Two cops were sitting in their patrol car on the corner and heard the noise when she hit the dumpster. One of them found her and called it in. He thought she was dead.”

Stone collapsed into his chair. “Christ, she’s got guts, you have to give her that.”

“She must have had some idea of what was coming,” Dino said. “I hope I’d have done the same thing in the circumstances.”

Another doctor came out of the exam room, and Dino braced him. “Can we see her?”

“She’s out like a light on morphine,” he said. “She may be talking tomorrow, but I’m not promising you anything.”

“But she’ll live?” Stone asked.

“She’s a tough one,” the doctor said. “The ribs will be painful, but she doesn’t have any internal organ damage, and that’s remarkable. She’ll be recovering for quite a while.”

Stone and Dino made a move toward the exam room.

“Forget it,” the doctor said. “There’s a doctor and a nurse at work in there suturing, and believe me, you don’t want to see her in her current state. She was naked when she went into the dumpster, except she had a hood over her head, so the cuts to her face are less bad. Go home and call here tomorrow before you come over. She needs rest, not questions.”

They thanked the man and reluctantly left the hospital. By the time Stone got home, Joan was at her desk. He told her what had happened.

“That poor girl,” Joan said, brushing away a tear.

“Where are Jimbo and Sylvia?”

“At home. They’re both crushed, but there was nothing more they could do. I’ll call them.”

“Tell them to put a guard on her room at Bellevue,” Stone said. “When word gets out that she’s alive, somebody could come after her.”

“Will do,” Joan said, picking up her phone.

“Send a whole lot of flowers and a cell phone to her room, with a note from me saying that when she feels like talking to call me, but not to rush it.”

“All right.”

Stone went back upstairs to try to get a couple more hours of sleep. Dino called as he was getting into bed.

“I got a look at the room,” he said. “It’s in one of two buildings built into the hotel. Apparently, when it was built, the property owners wouldn’t sell, so the hotel was built around them. Down a hallway was a door leading to an attic, and through there you could get to the hotel.”

“There are those three night guys there,” Stone said, “night clerk, elevator operator, and janitor.”

“They’re at the precinct being separately sweated as we speak,” Dino said. “So far, nobody knows nothing.”

“Okay, I’m going to sleep. I told Strategic Services to put a guard on her room.”

“Already done,” Dino replied.

“And I sent her some flowers and a cell phone so she can call when she feels like it.”

“Good idea. Let me know if you hear from her.”

“Okay, now I’m going back to bed.”

“Lucky sonofabitch, I wish I could do that.”

“Don’t call me before noon, unless something breaks.”

“Sure.” Dino hung up.

Stone pulled the blinds and lay on the bed in the dark, wondering what he could have done different that would have avoided this. Finally, he decided that there was nothing he could have done, unless Faith cooperated, and she was clearly not the cooperative sort.

He fell asleep finally and dreamed of falling twelve stories into a dumpster.

He was awakened by the phone at the stroke of noon. “Yes?”

“We’re not getting a whole lot out of the three,” Dino said, “but everybody’s money is on the janitor.”

“It’s got to be all three of them,” Stone said. “He couldn’t have done it unless the other three were in on it — or, at the very least, covering for him.”

“I won’t argue with that,” Dino said. “Now, I’m going to lock myself in my office and take a nap on the sofa.” He hung up.