Judgment

65

She hit Duncan’s mobile number. It rang and rang. She listened to the rings, her heart thumping away, her jaw clenched. Please not him. Not him. Three rings, four, five... Your call has been forwarded to an automatic voice message system.

She didn’t leave a message. She hit Jake’s number. He picked it up after two rings. “Hey, Mom.”

“Jake, where’s your dad?”

“He’s upstairs.”

“You’re sure?”

“He’s here. Was that you who just called?”

“Yeah.”

“Oh, he left his phone downstairs as usual. Want me to get him?”

“No, that’s fine. I wanted to make sure he’s okay. Thank God.”

“Why?”

“I’ll — I’m at the airport, on my way home. I’ll see you soon, honey.”

So she knew who it was, who it had to be: Philip Hersh. What had the doctor said? This patient is critically ill.

Who else could it be?

She called his mobile phone number, and it went right to voice mail.

The 10:00 P.M. American Airlines flight out of Reagan National Airport arrived in Boston at 11:30 P.M. Just about everything in the airport, every concession, was closed. Whole sections were dark.

She told the cab to take her to Boston Medical Center. She got there a little before midnight. She had court in the morning and needed her sleep, but there was no choice. She had to see Hersh.

She told the nurse on duty that she was looking for a patient who’d been admitted to the ER within the last few hours, no ID on him.

“And you are—?”

“Juliana Brody.”

“Are you a family member?”

She hesitated a second or two. “No. I’m a friend. Dr. Kapoor called me a few hours ago from the ER because my number was in the victim’s pocket.”

“Ah, yes.” She directed Juliana to the neuro ICU. There, she identified herself the same way, and a nurse came around from the counter, a stocky redhead of around forty, holding a metal clipboard. “The patient I think we’re talking about was around fifty? Balding? He had no wallet or ID on him, just your number in his back pocket.”

“Can I see him, please?”

“I’d first like to get some information.”

“Take me to him and we can talk on the way.”

“Okay,” the nurse said with a shrug. She pressed a disc on the wall and buzzed them both into the ICU.

“How is he doing?” Juliana said.

“He’s out of surgery, in recovery.”

“Surgery.”

“I’ll let the doctor fill you in.” They arrived at a glass-walled room, a glass box.

The man on the bed looked nothing like Hersh. His eyes were purplish and grotesquely swollen shut. His nose was broken and bloodied, crooked and out of place. There were black sutures on his cheek. He had tubes coming out of his nose and mouth, and more tubes coming out of his head and his arms. His head was covered in white bandages. Each arm was in a splint. Only when she saw the fat gold wedding band on his left hand, the knuckles bloody, did she know it was Philip Hersh.

“Oh, my God,” she said.

He had been beaten nearly to death.

But he was alive.

It was oddly quiet, for everything that was going on, the monitors and the IV stands and the tubes and the wires. She heard only the soft whooshing of the ventilator, in time with Hersh’s breaths, and a low beeping.

“You’re a friend?” the nurse asked.

Juliana nodded.

“What’s his name?”

“Philip Hersh.” She spelled it for her.

“Do you know where he lives?”

“I can give you his office address. I don’t know his home address.”

“What about next of kin? Do you know anyone who might—?”

“I don’t. I don’t really know him that well.”

“I’ll page the doctor,” the woman said, and left.

Tears streamed down her cheeks. She looked at Hersh’s brutalized, misshapen face, listened to the whooshing. She wondered what exactly had happened.

She wondered if he’d been tortured.

She thought about his voice message, replayed it in her head.

I have a file for you... I don’t trust your e-mail, frankly... Happy to drop it off wherever you are. Happy to bring it to your office. Maybe I’ll do that. Or you can stop by my office and pick it up, if that’s on the way. But I think you need to see this. Okay?

Did he have this file with him, and had it been grabbed when he was beaten?

Or had he left it at his office?

She noticed a large clear plastic bag in the corner with the words PATIENT BELONGINGS printed on it. The mud-spattered leg of a pair of jeans spilled out. His stuff.

She picked up the bag, pulled out the jeans.

She felt the jingle of keys in his pants pocket. She checked the other pockets. No wallet. No cell phone. Nothing besides clothes in the bag. No file, no pieces of paper, folded or crumpled or anything. If he had a file with him, it was certainly gone.

She had a thought and reached into the jeans pocket and grabbed the ring of keys.

There was a knock on the open door. She looked up. A young man in a white doctor’s coat, wearing a tie. Had he just seen her take the keys?

“I’m Dr. Robiano,” he said. “I take it you are a friend of the patient’s.”

“Yes. Juliana Brody. Are you a surgeon?” she asked.

“I’m the neurocritical care fellow,” the doctor said, nodding. He was surprisingly alert for the middle of the night. His eyes shone. He had short brown hair and an appealing, very white smile. He also looked like he was about fifteen years old, though in reality he was probably in his midthirties. He reminded her of an adolescent who’d put on his dad’s white medical coat and tie.

He took a sip from a can of Coke Zero. “Look, I’m going to be very direct with you. I don’t have very much good news. His injuries are such that he could die.”

Juliana’s eyes flooded with tears. She nodded.

“We have him in a medically induced coma now, but he arrived with a Glasgow coma score of one-one-one.”

“I don’t know what that means.” A plastic bag of blood hung from one stand, fluids from another. A tube came from under the sheet filled with what looked like pinkish urine.

He didn’t bother to explain. “He sustained a really serious injury, but for now he’s stable.”

“So what happened to him?”

“He had injuries consistent with an attack. This is a nonmedical observation, but to me it looks like someone went after him with a tire iron.” He finished his Coke and tossed the can into the trash.

“Jesus.”

“I’m guessing some good Samaritan called 911. Anyway, there was a lot of facial trauma. His jaw is broken. We put a tube down his throat to protect his airway, then put him on a breathing machine and gave him some medication so he’s protected and he’s not in any pain.”

“Okay.”

“Unfortunately, we found a large amount of bleeding in his brain, an intracranial hemorrhage that required surgery.”

“Oh, dear God.”

“A subdural bleed — under the dura.”

“Was the surgery — successful?”

“We evacuated the hematoma, yes. We stopped the bleeding.”

“Is there — is there going to be brain damage?”

He looked at her for a couple of seconds. “You don’t ever know what the damage is going to be. Just putting all my cards on the table, he has a high risk of death or permanent disability. You just never know. Or he could recover and go back to a normal life.”

She nodded hopefully.

“If he does recover, though, there’s a good chance he’ll never be the same person again.”

“My God.”

“This is a marathon we’re looking at now. It’s impossible for us to predict today what the outcome is going to be, and he’s going to be in the coma, on the ventilator, for easily another twenty-four hours.”

“Then what?”

“Then we wean him out of the coma, and he’s extubated. This is a significant and serious injury. I should tell you — I don’t know what Mr. Hersh was like, physically, before this. But he gave as good as he got.”

“What do you mean?”

“You see what we call ‘fight bites’ on his hands? That laceration in the knuckles, from punching someone in the mouth. We found a tooth embedded in one of his knuckles. Whoever went after him probably has some serious dental work in his future. You can tell from his hands he didn’t go down gently.”

She nodded. “When can I — speak to him?”

“When? I don’t know if you’ll ever be able to speak to him.”