Death Angel

THIRTY-ONE

“How do you lose a patient?” Mike asked. “A psych patient, no less, who threatened to kill himself and off his old lady, too?”

“If you calm down, Detective, I’ll remind you.”

The storm that struck the New York metropolitan area on Monday, October 29th, was the largest Atlantic hurricane on record, with a diameter spanning more than 1,100 miles.

“Water had flooded the streets in lower Manhattan that night, and flooded the hospital’s basement as well. Our generator was gone, and we had a pretty desperate mission to make our patients safe. You’re thinking of psych patients, Mr. Chapman, but we also do heart surgery here and deliver babies; we have people on dialysis and ER admissions with brain trauma and life-threatening injuries.”

“I didn’t mean to imply-”

“By the next day, all of our thirty-two elevators had shut down. We lost our ventilators, so we put portable oxygen equipment next to the patients who needed it We ran out of food and we had no drinking water, Detective. But if you stood still for a minute, you could hear a sound like Niagara Falls roaring through the elevator banks as the river water submerged all of our generators. Any of this sound familiar?”

Hoexter had silenced both of us.

“I began to urge that we evacuate, like the NYU and Coney Island hospitals had done before us. And you know what? I received resistance to that idea, even while sleep-deprived nurses were carrying newborns down ten flights, and two of my best docs were helping a triple-bypass patient navigate an unlighted staircase, dragging his oxygen tank behind him.”

“I’m sorry I sounded so critical,” Mike said.

“The NYPD was great. So was the National Guard.” The silver-haired doctor seemed overcome by emotion. “I sat at my desk with a couple of flashlights but no phones, trying to figure out who should be saved first, while ambulances-ambulances by the dozens, organized by FEMA-lined up in front of my hospital and squared the block, two or three times over.”

Those images had been shown on the national news over and over again that evening and in the days to follow. It was an unforgettable scene. Emergency truck after emergency truck, from every hospital and service and department anywhere within an hour’s drive had responded, red lights flashing in the rainy night as they waited to take on patients while the storm surge continued to wipe out all the power in the city’s southern grid.

“I had no idea where these individuals were going,” Hoexter said, reliving the desperation of that moment as he retold the story. “All we knew is that they couldn’t survive here. ICU, the nursery, the coronary care unit-those patients went first. Where we were sending them, God only knew.

“I’m told that when each stretcher arrived at the front of the line, a dispatcher-someone on our staff-had triaged the patient, and the corresponding ambulance made its own determination about which facility-Mount Sinai, Roosevelt, Lenox Hill, Cornell, Columbia Pres-about which one could take that particular person and treat his or her needs.”

“And off they went into the night,” I said.

“Most of them left Bellevue without medical records to accompany them. All of them left with uncharged cell phones because we’d been without power for so long. Neither they nor we had the ability to notify next of kin. And when they walked-or were wheeled-out the door, none of them had the slightest idea where they were going. Nor did we.”

“So you lost patients, literally.”

“Seven of them, Ms. Cooper,” Hoexter said, dropping his head into his hands, elbows on his desk.

“All psych?”

“Yes. All civil commitments. The NYPD got all the criminally insane prisoners out. But Wicks was among the last patients evacuated. He had no urgent medical needs, like the others in his unit,” Hoexter said, checking the notes on the computer. “He’s quite intelligent and really hated being confined. Somehow, in all the confusion of that dreadful night, Eddie Wicks simply put on a rain jacket, followed the others out of the building, and walked away from his keepers.”

Hoexter tapped a button on his keyboard and printed out a photograph of Eddie Wicks. He passed it across the table for both of us to see. I looked at it, then handed the paper to Mike.

I didn’t know the significance of Wicks’s disappearance. Clearly, it shouldn’t have presented the threat to society that the escape of Raymond Tanner did. Wicks was a danger to himself, and possibly to his mother. And maybe Mike’s concern about the figure in the window of the Dakota was legitimate. Maybe Eddie Wicks had returned to his favorite hiding place.

“How about his mother?” Mike asked. “Why does she still think he’s here in Bellevue?”

Hoexter scrolled down through the file. “I don’t know what she thinks.”

“She’s next of kin. Why didn’t she get notified?”

“She may be next of kin,” the doctor said, “but Mr. Wicks is fifty-nine years old. He didn’t want any relatives notified about anything. The head of his team says a lot of his anger is directed at his mother. Bernice Wicks, is that her name?”

“Yeah.”

“We had no obligation to tell her anything.”

“Suppose he’s still on the warpath?” Mike asked. “Part of the reason he’s in this snake pit is because he threatened to kill her.”

Hoexter put his reading glasses on and returned to the patient file on the computer screen. “That problem wasn’t even referenced any longer by mid-August. I doubt he’s a menace to his mother. It was all about suicidal ideation. All about Wicks’s desire to hurt himself.”

“So where’d he go, Doc?”

Hoexter leaned back and put his hands behind his head. “I haven’t a clue.”

“Where was he likely to go, given his condition back in October?” Mike sounded exasperated.

“We try to treat the human mind, Detective. We have no ability to read it.”

“You just told us you don’t think he’ll hurt his mother.”

Hoexter brought his arms down and looked Mike in the eye. “Eddie Wicks was diagnosed with this bipolar disorder when he was fifteen years old. It’s a highly treatable condition, and it appears that Wicks accepted that treatment for long periods of time. He was in some pretty damn fancy facilities, as I skim his history.”

“How does it manifest itself?” I asked. “The bipolarity?”

“The mania occurs when the patient’s elevated mood exists with three or more classic symptoms for most of the day, for a week at least.”

“What symptoms?”

“Feelings of euphoria, becoming restless and hyperactive, confusion and poor judgment.”

“Alcohol abuse?”

“Frequently. And I see Wicks has a history of that.”

“Increased sexual drive?” I asked.

“In a much younger man, certainly. In Wicks, it doesn’t appear to be a serious part of the history.”

“And the depressive episodes?”

“Characterized by negative feelings-intense sadness and hopelessness, withdrawing from others, feeling angry and unable to think clearly.”

“Does Wicks exhibit any psychosis?” I asked.

Hoexter went back to the computer screen. “Yes. He was frequently delusional. Persecutory delusions.”

“I guess it won’t help that the police will be looking for him,” Mike said.

Hoexter scrolled up again. “Looks like he’s had these delusions since his late teens.”

I thought of the way Lavinia Dalton’s household staff-and their loved ones-had been subjected to interrogation and media scrutiny after Baby Lucy’s kidnapping. A bipolar kid who’d witnessed his father’s death must have been particularly vulnerable to feelings of persecution. Perhaps he’d been haunted by them his entire life.

“And never been cured?” Mike asked.

“We can’t cure this disorder, Mr. Chapman. We can manage it with medicines and therapeutic intervention. That’s the best we can do.”

“And now Eddie Wicks is off his meds.”

“Yes. He was being treated with lithium and with valproate, to which he was responding pretty well. But unless he’s sought treatment somewhere more to his liking, he’s off his meds, and that’s a very difficult place for him to be.”

“So what’s at risk here, Doc?” Mike said. “I want to talk to this guy. He may know something I need for a murder investigation. Now that he’s been out of here for eight months, he may even be a witness to events in the case. I don’t want to start a conflagration, but I’d like to find Eddie Wicks.”

Hoexter took a minute to reflect. “It’s clear that he’s afraid of the police, Mr. Chapman. He might find your manner a bit-”

“Overbearing?” I said, with a frisky tone in my voice.

“Better that you say it than I, Ms. Cooper. Wicks will probably respond more openly to questioning by you than by the detective. I doubt he’d find you-well, quite as intimidating.”

Mike stood up, ready to go. “Then he’d better hold tight to his balls, Doc, ’cause Coop can break them faster than eggs in a frying pan.”

“I don’t cook, Dr. Hoexter,” I said with a grin, “but I do enjoy breaking-”

“Where’s a guy like Wicks gonna go?” Mike asked.

“He complained to his physician that he could no longer afford the rent on his apartment, and he had no family he was interested in staying with. I’m afraid this would all have fed into his feelings of hopelessness, his withdrawal from others. Wicks might have experienced a few manic days-some euphoria, actually-when we managed to hand him the tools for his own escape from Bellevue.”

“We’ve got to check with the city’s Department of Homeless Services,” I said to Mike. “They relocated thousands of people after the storm.”

“It was a perfect opportunity for many to create new lives for themselves,” Hoexter said. “Folks were washed out of their homes without a chance to bring identification with them. Eddie Wicks had the smarts and ability to sell himself as a storm victim and start life over. You’re right to look at that option, or anyplace in which he had a comfort level.”

“He’d go back to someplace familiar?” Mike asked.

“Especially when manic.”

The ninth floor of the Dakota, his childhood sanctuary. The vast backyard of his youth, in Central Park.

“And if depression gets the better of him?” Mike said.

“The biggest risk there is what brought him here in the first place.”

“Suicide.”

“Twenty-five to fifty percent of patients with bipolar disorder attempt suicide at least once, Detective. Six to twenty percent of them succeed,” Hoexter said. “Seeing as how he has a family member who killed himself and having tried to do so previously, I’m almost surprised Wicks hasn’t made his way to the morgue yet.”

“Sobering words,” I said. “Are there warning signs? Things to look for?”

Hoexter’s fingers were templed now. “Constant talk about taking his life, which is a big part of his record here. Deep feelings of shame and guilt, which he’s expressed, apparently, through most of his life. He blames himself for his father’s suicide-or at least, since he was at home, for not preventing it. He blames himself for his mother’s menial labor, and that he couldn’t rescue her from that life. That sort of thing.”

“Understood.”

“Risk-taking behavior. I’d say heading off into the dark and stormy night last fall, away from his team and his lifeline, with no destination-that’s a major risk. And things like putting his affairs in order, such as they are. Like giving away any possessions he might have.”

“I don’t imagine there are many of those,” Mike said.

“Belvedere Castle and the Obelisk,” I whispered to myself, more as an aside than a statement. “The black angel.”

“What about them?” Mike asked.

“Maybe Eddie Wicks is somewhere in Central Park, or he’s the figure you saw in the ninth-floor window, the day the body came out of the Lake?”

“How did he get his hands on pieces of the Dalton silver collection?” Mike seemed as puzzled as I was.

“Don’t answer my question with a question, Detective. Somebody stole those two pieces of silver,” I said. “Who’s to say it wasn’t Eddie Wicks?”