They found the room and a resident taping a bandage to a woman’s forehead. The woman was black.
“Dr. Holmes?” Stone said.
The young man turned.
“Yes?”
Stone limped into the room. “You’ve got another patient, a woman, here.”
“Nope, this is it,” Holmes said. “An uncommonly slow night.”
“You’re sure?” Stone asked, puzzled.
The doctor nodded at the black woman. “The only customer we’ve had for two hours,” he replied. He watched Stone shift his weight and wince. “What’s wrong with you?”
“I just banged my knee; no problem.”
“Let’s have a look.”
“Yeah,” said Dino, “let’s have a look.”
Stone pulled up his trouser leg.
Dino whistled. “Oh, that looks great, Stone.”
“Tell me about it,” the doctor said.
Stone gave him an abbreviated history.
The doctor went to a refrigerator, came back with a flat ice pack, and fastened it to Stone’s knee with an Ace bandage. Then he retrieved a small box of pills from a shelf. “Keep the ice on until you can’t stand it anymore, and take one of these pills now and every four hours after that. See your doctor in the morning.”
“What are the pills?” Stone asked.
“A nonsteroid, antiinflammatory agent. If you haven’t completely undone your surgery, the knee will feel better in the morning.”
Stone thanked him, and they left.
“What now?” Dino asked as they turned onto Lexington Avenue.
Stone was about to answer when they saw the flashing lights. At Seventy-fifth and Lexington there was a god-awful mess, lit by half a dozen flashing lights. “Pull over, Dino,” he said.
Dino pulled over. Stone got out and approached a uniformed officer. He pointed at a mass of twisted metal. “Was that smoking ruin once an ambulance?” he asked the cop.
“Yeah, and what used to be a fire truck hit it broadside.” He pointed at the truck, which was only moderately bent.
“What about the occupants?”
“On their way to Bellevue,” the cop said. “Seven from the fire truck, two or three from the ambulance.”
“Anybody left alive?”
“I just got here; you’ll have to check Bellevue.”
Stone thanked him and got back into the car.
“Is that the same ambulance?” Dino asked.
“It’s the same service.” Stone stuck a flashing light on the dashboard. “Stand on it, Fittipaldi.”
Fangio stood on it.
* * *
The emergency room at Bellevue was usually a zoo, but this was incredible. People were lying on carts everywhere, overflowing into the hallways, screaming, crying, while harried medical personnel moved among them, expediting the more serious cases.
“What the hell happened?” Dino asked a sweating nurse.
“Subway fire in the Twenty-third Street Station,” she replied, “not to mention half a dozen firemen and a couple of ambulance drivers. We caught it all.”
“There’s nobody at the desk,” Stone said. “How can we find out if somebody’s been admitted?”
“Your guess is as good as mine,” she said, wheeling a cart containing a screaming woman down the hallway. “Paperwork’s out the window.”
“Come on,” Stone said, “let’s start looking.”
Fifteen minutes later, they hadn’t found her. Dino was looking unwell.
“I gotta get outta here, Stone,” he said, mopping his brow. “I’m not cut out for this blood-and-guts stuff.”
“Wait a minute,” Stone said, pointing across the room at a man on a stretcher. “A white coat.”
They made their way across the room to the stretcher. The man’s eyes were closed, but he was conscious; he was holding a bloody handful of gauze to an ear.
“Are you an ambulance driver?” Stone asked. “The one the fire truck hit?”
The man nodded, then grimaced at the pain the motion brought.
“What happened to your patient?” Stone asked.
“I don’t know,” the man whimpered. “My partner’s dead; I don’t know what happened to her.”
Stone straightened up. “Then she’s got to be here,” he said.
“But she’s not,” Dino replied. “We’ve looked at every
human being, alive or dead, in this place. She is definitely not here.”
They looked again, anyway, even though Dino wasn’t very happy about it. Dino was right. Sasha Nijinsky wasn’t there.
“Downstairs,” Stone said.
“Do we have to?”
“You sit this one out.”
Stone walked down to the basement and checked with the Bellevue morgue. There had been two admissions that evening, both of them from the subway fire, both men. Stone looked at them to be sure.
He trudged back up the stairs and went to the main admissions desk. “Have you admitted an emergency patient, a woman, named Nijinsky?” he asked. “Probably a private room.”
“We don’t have a private room available tonight,” the nurse said. “In fact, we don’t have a bed. If she came into the emergency room, she’s on a gurney in a hallway somewhere.”
Stone walked the halls on the way back to the ER, where he found Dino in conversation with a pretty nurse. “Say good night, Dino,” Stone said.
“Good night, Dino,” Dino replied, doing a perfect Dick Martin.
The nurse laughed.
“She’s not here,” Stone said.
“So, now what?”
“The city morgue,” Stone said.
Compared with Bellevue, the city morgue, just up the street, was an island of serenity.
“Female Caucasian, name of Nijinsky,” Dino told the night man. “You got one of those?”
The man consulted a logbook. “Nope.”
“You got a Caucasian Jane Doe?”
“I got three of them,” the man replied. He pointed. “They’re still on tables.”
Stone walked into the large autopsy room, the sound of his heels echoing off the tile walls. “Let’s look,” he said.
The first was at least seventy and very dirty.
“Bag lady,” the attendant said.
The second was no older than fifteen, wearing a black leather microskirt.
“Times Square hooker, picked up the wrong trick.”
“Let’s see the third,” Stone said.
The third fit Sasha Nijinsky’s general description, down to the hair color, but she had taken a shotgun in the chest.
“Domestic violence,” the attendant said smugly.
Stone couldn’t tell if the man was for it or against it. “It’s not she,” he said.
“Don’t talk like that,” Dino whispered. “It’s not her.”
“It is not she,” Stone said again. He produced a card and wrote his home number on the back, then handed it to the attendant. “This is extremely important,” he said. “If you get a Nijinsky in here, or a white Jane Doe in her thirties, call me. And please pass that on to whoever relieves you. If someone overlooks her, heads will ricochet off these walls for days to come.”
“I got ya,” the man said, and he stapled Stone’s card to his logbook. “They won’t miss it here.”
In the car, Dino, who was usually the most cheerful of souls, sighed deeply. “I got a feeling,” he said.
“Oh, God, don’t get a feeling,” Stone whimpered. “Don’t get Italian on me.”
“I got a very serious feeling that this one is going to be a fucking nightmare,” Dino said.
“Thanks, Dino. I needed that.”
“And, Stone,” Dino added, “never say, ’It’s not she’ to some guy at the morgue. He’ll think you’re a jerk.”
Chapter
W
hen Stone and Dino got to the precinct, the two detectives who had been at the Nijinsky apartment were sitting at their desks, cataloging evidence.
“So?” one of them asked. “Is she alive, or what?”
“Or what,” Dino said.
“So she croaked, then, or what?”
“Or what.”
Stone tugged at his partner’s sleeve. “Let’s see Leary.”
Lieutenant Leary, the squad’s commanding officer, was in his tiny, glassed-in cubicle, reading Sasha Nijinsky’s diary. He looked up and waved the two detectives in. “Well, it took a fuckin’ celebrity swan dive to get you back on the street, didn’t it, Barrington?”
“I saw it happen,” Stone said. “From the street.” He took Leary through everything that had happened at the apartment.
“So, where’s Nijinsky now?” he asked.
“It’s like this, I think,” Stone said. “The ambulance was taking her to Lenox Hill when it got broadsided by a fire truck. Another ambulance was called and took the driver and his partner to Bellevue. The driver’s alive, but doesn’t know what happened to Nijinsky. The partner’s dead.”
“So, to ask my question again, where’s Nijinsky?”
“We don’t know. She wasn’t at Bellevue. We looked at everybody there.”
“Not in the Bellevue emergency room,” Leary said.
“No. Not anywhere at Bellevue. We checked it out thoroughly. Not at the city morgue either. They’ll call me if she shows up.”
Leary looked bemused. “What the fuck is goin’ on here?”
“Probably homicide—attempted homicide, if she’s still alive.”
“Because of the guy you chased down the stairs?”
“Yes.”
“Maybe he was the pizza deliveryman, got there in time to see her take the dive, then ran.”
“Maybe. It feels like a homicide.”
“And maybe a kidnapping, too. If the lady fell twelve stories and then her ambulance got whopped by a fire truck, she ain’t walking around out there somewhere, right?”
Dino piped up. “If she’s dead, is it a corpsenapping? And is that a crime?”
Leary tapped the diary with a stubby finger. “You read this?”
“Only the last page,” Stone said.
“The last page was one of her better days. This was a very unhappy lady.”
“She was about to become the only female news anchor on a major network. I would have thought she had it all.”
“Anybody would think so. But she sounds scared to me. Maybe afraid she couldn’t cut it.”
“Maybe. It’s a natural enough reaction.”
“The diary makes her sound like a suicide.”
“Maybe,” Stone said. “I don’t think so.”
“Okay, here’s what happened, maybe,” Leary said. “You get this big pileup on Lex, and
two
ambulances respond. You know how competitive they are. One goes to Bellevue with the driver and the other guy, and the other ambulance goes to some other hospital.”
“That’s what I figured,” Dino said.
“Run it down,” Leary replied. He handed the diary to Stone. “Read that and tell me she didn’t try to knock herself off.”
Stone and Dino spent the rest of the night calling every hospital in Manhattan and reading Sasha Nijinsky’s diary.
When the day shift came on, Lieutenant Leary called a meeting and brought the new group up to date.
“Okay, now you know everything we know,” he said to the four assembled teams. “The press knows about the dive, because this guy Scoop What’s-his-name?—”
“Berman,” Stone said.
“—Berman shows up and gets his tape. They don’t seem to know that the lady hasn’t been seen since, and I want to keep it that way as long as possible. This is Barrington and Bacchetti’s case, reporting directly to me. Barrington, Bacchetti, go sleep. I don’t want you back here before noon. The rest of you, check on every private clinic, every doctor’s office in the five boroughs, if you have to. Check Jersey and Westchester, too. On Long Island, just check the fancy private clinics. I want this woman found this morning, dead or alive. When you find her, Stone and Bacchetti get the interview, unless it’s deathbed stuff. Nobody, but nobody says a word to the press except me, for the moment. I don’t have to tell you what this celebrity shit is like. The mayor’ll be on the phone
as soon as he wakes up, and he’ll want to know. I’ll ask him to buy us a few hours to find the woman.”
As the detectives shuffled out, Leary called Stone and Dino back. “Barrington, I’m assuming you’re up to this. You’re still on limited duty, officially.”
“I’m up to it, Lieutenant.”
“I mean it about the sleep,” Leary said. “You grab four or five hours. This one ain’t likely to be over today, and I want you in shape to fuckin’ handle it.”
“Yessir,” they replied in unison.
Stone limped up the steps of the Turtle Bay brownstone, retrieved the
Times
from the stoop, and let himself in. He was met by the combined scent of decay and fresh wood shavings. No messages on the answering machine in the downstairs hallway. Too tired and sore to take the stairs, he took the elevator to the third floor. It creaked a lot, but it made it.
His bedroom looked ridiculous. An ordinary double bed stood against a wall, with only a television set, an exercise machine, an old chest of drawers, and a chair to help fill the enormous room. He switched on the television and started to undress.
“Television journalist Sasha Nijinsky last night fell from the terrace of her twelfth-floor East Side penthouse. An off-duty police detective who was at the scene gave chase to someone who had apparently been in Ms. Nijinsky’s apartment, but was, himself, injured and lost the possible perpetrator. Astonishingly, Ms. Nijinsky may have survived the fall. She was taken to a Manhattan hospital, and we have had no further word on her condition. We’ll keep you posted as news comes in.”
“You’re guessing about the Manhattan hospital, sport,” Stone said to the newscaster. “That was my guess, too.”
He stripped off his clothes and stretched out on the bed,
switching the channel to
The Morning Show.
“Sasha Nijinsky has done just about everything in broadcast journalism, and she’s done it fast,” a pleasant young man was saying. They cut to a montage of shots from Nijinsky’s career, and he continued, voice-over.
“Daughter of the Russian novelist Georgi Nijinsky, who was expelled from the Soviet Union more than twenty-five years ago, Sasha was six years old when she came to this country with her parents. She already spoke fluent English.” There were shots of a bearded man descending from an airplane, a surprised-looking little girl in his arms.
“Sasha distinguished herself as an actress at Yale, but not as a student. Then, on graduation, instead of pursuing a career in the theater, as expected, she took a job as a reporter on a New Haven station. Four years later, she came to New York and earned a reputation as an ace reporter on the Continental Network affiliate. She spent another three years here, on
The Morning Show
, where she honed her interviewing skills, then she was sent to Moscow as the network’s correspondent in the Soviet Union for a year, before being expelled in the midst of spy charges that she has always maintained were fabricated.”