City Under the Moon (2 page)

“I understand, ma’am, but we all have our jobs, and I can’t let you leave until I personally get these details—“

“Excuse me,” Tildascow interrupted. Kenzie was set to boil, and then she’d be totally uncooperative. Tildascow had no choice but to immediately sack the cop. “FBI Special Agent Brianna Tildascow. Officer…?”

“Dougherty,” sighed the cop.

“If you don’t mind, I’ll take it from here.”

“Have a good day, ma’am,” he muttered on his way off.

“I’m sorry for this,” Tildascow said to Kenzie. “We’re all frantic because Ms. Cooke is a VIP of sorts. Look at the clothes I’m wearing…“ Kenzie’s face soured further. Tildascow picked up the read and swerved to follow. “I didn’t even have a chance to change from undercover work. I mean, look at this.”

Kenzie’s eyebrows rose, and Tildascow knew she’d scored a point. “Are you supposed to be a prostitute?”

Tildascow paused, and then decided against self-defense.
Yeah, I’m gonna have to have that conversation with myself.

She walked Kenzie back toward the picture window, distancing her from the frustrating conversation with the cop. “You see, law enforcement officers have this method of interrogation where they’ll ask a suspect to tell their story over and over again.”

“But I’m not a suspect—“

“No, of course not. It’s just that they have their ways of rooting out the truth, and they think this works.” She hit
they
hard—suggesting to Kenzie that
she
wasn’t one of
them
. “They’ll look for inconsistencies each time you tell the story, to see if it holds up. Sometimes they’ll repeat it back with little mistakes, just to see if you correct them.”

“Well it’s exhausting. I’ve given police statements hundreds of times, and it’s never been like this.”

“I understand,” she said, “and I’m really sorry. But they’re trying extra hard here. And so are we. Mrs. Cooke’s child has been abducted.” She noticed that Kenzie was wearing the medal of St. Benedict on a necklace, so she tossed in, “May God watch over him.”

“It’s a terrible sin.”

Ding!
“With God’s help, we’re trying to find the man who took him.”

“I don’t think it was a man,” Kenzie replied. “Her wounds were the result of an animal attack.”

“An
animal?
” Tildascow feigned surprise.

“No question. Probably a large dog. She had a bite mark on her torso, just below her rib cage.” With a conspiratorial whisper, she added: “I hate to say it, but I think it’s possible that the animal…” She shook her head, unable to speak the words.

Yeah, there was a good chance that the kid was currently working his way into something’s lower intestines. Tildascow had considered that, but she liked her read on those blood patterns—the kid had been taken with care. And there would’ve been some evidence if an animal had eaten the kid, even if it took him somewhere else for a quiet snack: a shoe, a sock, maybe a drumstick.

After a moment of silence, Tildascow whispered, “God forbid.”

“God forbid,” Kenzie agreed, waving her medal in the sign of the cross.

And then a colossal
crash
shot through the ward.

It had come from an open room further down the hall. A woman’s shriek followed, and then a wet, heavy
thunk
.

Officer Dougherty was the first to head toward the commotion. Kenzie followed, her white coat billowing like a superhero’s cape.

A heart monitor launched from the doorway crashed through the plasterboard on the opposite wall. It must have hit the power line, because it ignited a fire and took out the breakers.

The overhead lights went out. Alarms blared. Confusion and fear spread through the crowd.

And then someone leaned out from that doorway.

He was large, hunched over, and moving deliberately, a shadowy wraith in the dim, flickering light. His eyes sparkled orange as they reflected the flames.

The emergency lights kicked in, dropping a sickly blue tint on the hallway. The man in the doorway was gone.

Dr. Kenzie continued toward his room. Tildascow caught her by the arm. “Stay here!”

“There’s a patient in there!“

And then a
howl
echoed through the hallway.

Everyone froze, listening intently, as it diminished in slow, melancholy waves and finally drowned beneath the alarm.

Kenzie backed away.

Tildascow drew her Springfield M1911A, the FBI’s standard .45. Fuck the wimpy Glock they dumped on female agents at Quantico.

Officer Dougherty approached the doorway, motioning for her to cover him. She nodded and crept in his tracks.

Behind them, the plainclothes detectives had emerged from Cooke’s room. One of them yelled, “Everyone get into a room and close the door!”

Tildascow threw her back to the wall next to the doorway and dropped to one knee. Dougherty took the door, weapon ready.

He fired with no hesitation.

At the same moment, something large and pink whizzed past Tildascow’s head, hammering Dougherty backward into the electrical fire.

Keeping clear of the doorway’s line of sight, Tildascow pulled Dougherty free of the jagged machinery. Shards of glass and metal had embedded in his back, but he’d escaped serious burning.

The pink projectile fell off and rolled across the floor, and then Tildascow realized it was a body—a mangled, decapitated torso in nurse’s scrubs. Blood sputtered from the severed throat.

What. The. Hell?

The door slammed shut with enough force to dislodge the metal frame. A bellowing roar emanated from behind it.

Was it a fucking
bear?

Through the thickening haze, Tildascow realized another commotion was brewing at the far end of the hall. Most of the hospital workers and patients had already fled, but something was happening in Holly Cooke’s room. One of the detectives rushed back inside.

But Tildascow had to focus on the room in front of her. She threw her back next to the doorframe. The handle turned. The latch clicked.

Now wild screams from Cooke’s room, followed by gunfire. Crashes and clangs throughout the dark hallway. Blinding smoke.

Glass shattering behind this door. The window?

She threw the door open and took the turn.

The room was clear. And devastated. The window had been shattered. One remaining fluorescent flickered off shards of glass clinging to the pretzeled frame. The other light fixtures dangled wires and plastic, and the heavy bed frame had been twisted silly. Blood everywhere. Syringes, swabs and tongue depressors floated in the red pond on the floor.

And yet, it was oddly still.

Tildascow raced to the window, shuddering as her bare feet splashed in the muck. The night air pricked her face as she scanned First Avenue four stories below. Traffic had stopped; motorists were out of their cars.

But the
whatever-the-fuck
was gone.

More screams from the hallway—there was still another crisis.

On her way out, she saw the nurse’s severed head sitting lopsided in the sink. The poor woman’s blank eyes were still popped in shock.

The hallway was a chaotic jumble of gore. Near Cooke’s room, a—

a dog?

—had Kenzie pinned down, with its massive paws on her shoulders. As it bit into her chest, Tildascow fired five shots from her 1911.

The beast jerked from the impacts, taking all five before rolling off. Maintaining momentum, it sprang up to—

to its hind legs?

—and turned to Tildascow.

The smoke was thick, but this thing was only twenty feet away, looking right at her, and she still couldn’t figure out what the fuck it was.

It roared, and she answered with three more shots: good, upper-body hits, knocking the thing back down to its knees. But it was still plenty vital.

Clip empty, she dropped her spent mag, stocked her spare, slid the rack—

But the animal had had enough. It pounced at the picture window and smashed through the reinforced glass.

She raced after it, stepping over bodies and limbs to reach the window. Leaning out over First Avenue, she searched now for a second animal.

Gone. The gathering crowd was still reacting in its wake.

She retreated from the window, and the magnitude of the carnage inside hit her. A doctor had been broken backward over the nurses’ desk, a nurse impaled on the metal guts of an overturned gurney. One of the plainclothes cops sat slumped with his ground-meat face in his lap.

In the middle of it all, Dr. Kenzie lay on her back, gaping at the ceiling like a dying fish. “She needs attention!” Tildascow yelled.

Officer Dougherty staggered to her side, dazed and bleeding himself. Kenzie looked like a goner, but at least she had the presence of mind to keep pressure on her chest wound.

Heads emerged. Screams followed. Two hospital cops arrived from the stairs. Their faces went pale as they surveyed the floor.

“Don’t touch
anything
,” she yelled. “Nobody touch anything!”

She looked into Holly Cooke’s room, searching for a bandage—gauze—
something
to dress Kenzie’s wounds.

One of the plainclothes detectives who’d been questioning Cooke was face-down in a bed of his own guts. The other was slumped in the corner.

The only sign of Holly Cooke was the imprint she’d left on the bedsheets.

Four

Bellevue Hospital Center

December 30

9:23 p.m.

Tildascow spent the better part of the next four hours giving statements to various law enforcement officers. But no matter how many times she recounted the events, the police were never going to be able to make sense of it.
She
couldn’t make sense of it. Scenario after scenario played through her mind, and the only conclusion she’d come to…

Well… There had to be
another
conclusion.

The NYPD had cordoned off the intensive care ward and moved witnesses to a nearby cardiology department for interviews. She’d stuck around and jumped through hoops to hear some of the other witnesses’ statements, but it was time to get back on the move.

Ostensibly looking for the rest room, she slipped through the throng of UN, CDC, hospital, state, city, and federal investigators on her way out of cardiology. Passing one door, she caught a glimpse of Dougherty gesticulating wildly with bandaged hands.

As she took the turn toward the restroom and elevator cluster, she altered her persona from witness to investigator, resetting her ponytail, throwing her shoulders back and moving with purpose, and kept going until she reached the IC Ward, where CDC Epidemic Intelligence Service Officers—the “Disease Detectives”—had taken over for the shell-shocked NYPD officers.

From the smashed window at the elevators to the scorch marks from the fire, the carnage stretched thirty feet. At least half a dozen mangled bodies lay scattered in the hall, and left far too much blood to distinguish individual patterns. The closest corpse was the plainclothes detective with the mangled face. As Tildascow passed, an EIS forensic scientist swabbed its shredded flesh and peered at the sample for some kind of clue.

Hey, honey—I think we know the cause of death.

She scanned the crowd, looking for the hospital official—he’d be the thunderstruck guy thinking
“What is all of this going to mean?”
When she found him, a short man in a K-mart suit, the only word he said was “Christian”—no indication whether that was his first name, his last name, or his brand of God. When she asked to see the surveillance tapes, he nodded emptily and escorted her back toward the elevator.

As they passed the second floor, he cleared his throat and muttered, “We have a no-animal policy.”

She failed to cover her giggle with a half-assed cough.

The little guy sulked, like she was laughing at the end of his career.

They arrived at the first floor and she followed Shorty to the security office, a nondescript alcove barely worthy of a broom closet. A couple of NYPD plainclothes were waiting outside, their badges hanging from their necks. Their emasculated frowns meant the feds already had the room. She flashed her own badge and left them with a sympathetic nod.

The “command center” was a suffocating room with loud fluorescent lights and no windows. It stunk of stale coffee and lunchmeat belches.

Four agents were huddled in front of the monitors. They’d boxed out a hospital HR guy, who was trapped between a coat rack and a water cooler.

“Special Agent Tildascow?” asked one agent. “It’s an honor to meet you. I’m Anderson. Matt Anderson. I’m a fan.”

Respect was nice. His brown suit was not. “Nice to meet you, Anderson.“

“You want to see it from surveillance?”

“Please.”

The hospital still used industrial three-quarter inch video tapes for surveillance, resulting in low-rez images that suffered even further on their tiny black and white monitors. A hospital cop at the controls reversed the jog wheel and the image rolled back, undoing all of the gore the animal created.

The tape began with a view of Doctor Kenzie shouldering her way between the uniformed cops to reach a chart on the wall next to a patient’s room.

“That’s 424, Holly Cooke’s room,” Anderson said.

“Do we have another angle on this?” asked Tildascow. This camera’s giraffe’s-eye view only covered the lower quarter of 424’s door; the dark window in the walkway corridor dominated most of the frame. And the whole thing blurred here and there as the camera tried to focus on an exit sign. “And any sound?”

Anderson shook his head.

On the tape, a nurse approaches Kenzie from the observation walkway. The woman seems unsteady on her feet, maybe feverish. They speak for a moment before Kenzie directs her down the hall.

“Who is that?” Tildascow asked.

“Another nurse, a Nancy Laurio,” Anderson said, reading his notes. A confirming nod came from the HR guy. “This is the last we see of her. Looks like she’s sick or something. Kenzie sends her to lay down.”

“Back it up,” Tildascow requested.