The Prisoner (30 page)

16:47

“I’m sorry, but I can’t help you.”

“Can’t or won’t?”

Dr. Kyle Hulman breathed on his glasses and rubbed the lenses with a square of crimson chamois before balancing them back on the tip of his nose. He peered uncertainly around the room, as if disappointed by the result.

“Look Mr. … er, Masek. Your search relates to events dating back, what, twenty-six years? Those records are long gone. Destroyed.”

“I hope you’re mistaken, Dr. Hulman. By law, birth and death records must be retained permanently.” Nikola drew his knees together and shifted on the hard padding of the chair facing the doctor’s desk—a chair admirably designed to distress visitors.

“That’s correct, and those records exist at the local health authorities that serve as the registrars of vital statistics. They keep a registry of births and deaths. But if I understand the nature of your inquiry, that’s not what you’re after. You want the medical record of a maternal health patient, and there the law is clear. The attending doctor must keep the records five years past the last date on which service was given.”

Nikola nodded. “Or until the infant’s twenty-first birthday, whichever is later.”

“Yes, but—”

“It means, since the subject of this inquiry has just turned twenty-six, you must have checked over the record I’m after only five years ago.” In fact, Dr. Hulman had done much more than that. On Nikola’s instructions, the department of criminal investigation at the DHS had served notice of his visit at exactly eleven-thirty. By then, Dennis had set up a system to monitor all traffic from Dr. Hulman’s office—even that of his personal cell phone, for good measure. Within five minutes the good doctor had contacted the hospital records department to check if there was anything left on someone named Araceli Goldberg. Later, using his private phone, he’d dialed another number. A woman had answered, “Petals; how can I help you?” After ascertaining that the number belonged to a downtown flower business, Dr. Hulman had muttered an excuse and hung up. Nothing out of the ordinary; everybody makes mistakes. But Dennis was thorough. He ran through the telephone company database to discover that the florist’s number had changed hands several times. Twenty-six years ago it belonged to an association of radical lawyers.

“I deal with hundreds, thousands of records every year.”

“Maybe, but those would be hospital records. I’m inquiring about a document you must have drafted.”

Dr. Hulman was middle-aged, in the limbo between fifty and sixty, neither young nor old, hair not dark but not white either: ordinary. Yet there was something shifty about him, an air of mendacity that Nikola found invigorating. His skin was white and spongy, almost translucent from a lifetime away from the sun—and similar to those who had spent time in the tanks, even years after their release.

“Do you recall destroying these particular records?”

“How could I? Hospital staff deals with record destruction by shredding, pulping, or burning. You’ll have to ask … Let me check.” Dr. Hulman stabbed his finger at a computer screen, scrolling down a departmental structure tree. “Here it is: Ms. Rosemary Wilder in the archives department. And, no, I don’t recall anything about the document you’re looking for.”

After learning that Laurel was adopted, it had been relatively easy to follow the thread to her real mother. Laurel’s
father was still a mystery, and Nikola hoped the good Dr. Hulman would be able to shed a glimmer of light on the subject. On his way, he’d checked Bellevue Hospital’s personnel records dating from a few years back to spot a familiar name. He’d known Walter Romero from his time in the DHS. That Romero was now in charge of security at a hospital didn’t speak highly of the man’s intelligence, but Nikola paid him a short social visit before meeting Dr. Hulman. Romero’s gossip had been priceless.

“You were Araceli Goldberg’s attending physician.”

“Yes. As I’ve already explained, I was a young man then. She was a trauma casualty. When I was called in, the woman was dying, probably comatose. I delivered her child, probably by cesarean section, and that was the extent of my involvement. She wasn’t my patient.”

“She was when you delivered the girl.”

“A girl? If you say so. Still, the record of my intervention was attached to her file.” He checked his watch, although there was a large digital clock on the opposite wall. “How time flies! Now, if you’ll excuse me, I must do a round of the wards.”

Another lie. Dr. Hulman had chosen paper pushing over poking at abused flesh a decade earlier. “Did Araceli name the father? Did she ask you to notify anyone? Did you take notes?” Romero had remarked that Dr. Hulman had the annoying habit of taking copious notes at meetings or when attending patient reviews on small notebooks he always carried with him, to the chagrin of his secretary, who had to transcribe his spidery longhand. whatever doubt he had about Hulman keeping notes of Araceli’s delivery evaporated. As soon as Nikola mentioned notes, Dr. Hulman had darted a nervous glance to a tall safe supporting a pot with an artificial plant.

“I’ve told you, I don’t remember. For crying out loud! It’s over twenty-five years ago. What do you think I am? A computer?”

I must be getting old
. He’d planned to grow calmer with the years, but his emotions only ran hotter with the extra mileage. In the past, Nikola would stoically endure uncooperative subjects and coax them into surrendering whatever
information they may have had. Of late, his capacity had shrunk to a point where he bored of the game with surprising alacrity. He stifled a yawn and ran a tired glance over the impersonal office, the safe, the false plant, and the pristine medical textbooks that lined the shelves and were probably never consulted.

When Nikola was a child, his father would take him to an old bookshop in Chicago. There he would leave the boy to roam through dusty bookshelves while he disappeared to do “research” with Mrs. Gibbs, the owner, on the upper floor. About two hours later, Nikola’s father would descend a spiral staircase, at times freshly showered. Nikola suspected his father’s “research” might have something to do with water, but he’d never asked.

During his waiting periods, the attendant, Vito—a small old man with a florid face—would suggest a book or an illustrated tale. Vito would complain about the waning habit of reading. Customers, eager to flaunt their cultural prowess, would fill their bookcases with yards of books with correctly colored spines to match the decor. A new fashion, Vito had confided in whispers redolent of cheap booze, was to sell only the book spines pasted to a board. Lighter and more manageable. Nikola sighed and snapped back from his reverie, still wondering if the medical tracts on the gleaming wood shelves had any pages attached to their covers. “No, Dr. Hulman. I think you are a liar, and a bungling one at that.”

“How dare you?” Hulman reached under his desk, his face set.

Nikola didn’t move or try to stop his call for help or react when he felt the door opening at his back. He stared into Dr. Hulman’s slowly widening eyes, intent on the sudden flash of fear scuttling across his irises.

The door closed.

A huge black mass clouded Nikola’s peripheral vision as Sergeant Cox, clad in regulation body armor, approached the desk. At his back, another officer would be blocking the door.

“Where were we? Ah, yes: a liar, and a damn poor one.”

The thud wasn’t too loud, perhaps hushed by the Kevlar padding under the ceramic articulations covering Cox’s fist,
but blood gushed from Dr. Hulman’s mouth and shattered nose as his head slammed back against the leather executive chair. For a moment, he didn’t move. Then his reading glasses, miraculously dangling from one of his ears, surrendered to gravity and dropped to the floor. Blood traced rivulets to collect under his chin and bloom like poppies on his shirt and lab coat. Then he snorted or sneezed, and a spray of red droplets dewed the desktop, peppering the documents in an open folder with curious marks, as if a child had been let loose with a red marker.

Slowly, Dr. Hulman reached to his mouth with a trembling hand to retrieve a tooth, and he looked at it with the same suspicious intent one has when peering at an unidentified lump found in a meat pie. He then pursed his lips into an almost perfect bloody O and, without transition, started to cry—deep sobs racking his chest.

“Please, Sergeant, there was no need for such violence,” Nikola said in a conversational tone. “So messy. … Restrain yourself. Let us conduct this conversation in a civilized manner.” Nikola pushed his chair back, noting with distaste a tiny drop of blood marring his trousers. He sighed and nodded.

Cox grabbed Dr. Hulman’s hand and slammed it on the desk.

“What a wonderful sight—friends holding hands.” Nikola tried a wolfish grin. “I will pose a few questions and you will answer them truthfully. If you don’t, this officer will break one finger, and then another, then another. Of course, fingers don’t last as long as conversations, but you also have toes, and countless other bones. How many bones?”

Dr. Hulman made a croaking sound and opened his mouth, reddish bubbles foaming over it; the sound grew into a scream punctuated by a sickening snap when Cox folded the doctor’s middle finger against the back of his hand as if turning the page of a book.

“Sergeant! Don’t be so hasty; give the man time. You must excuse him, Doctor, he’s young and eager. How many bones?”

“Two hun—two hundred six,” Hulman moaned.

“Wonderful. Excellent. And more than half that number are in your hands and feet. Amazing, isn’t it? Let’s start
again. I suggest you open that safe while you still have some operational fingers and give me the notebook where you wrote about the father. The father of the girl you delivered to Araceli Goldberg.”

22:38

Laurel glanced from her book to Russo’s reclining figure and tried to make out, for the umpteenth time, some familiar line along his nose, jaw, ears, or mouth. After almost twenty-four hours at Tyler’s farm, she’d committed every detail of Russo’s anatomy to memory. He had wasted to an extent that his own mother might have had trouble recognizing him, but still Laurel searched his face for something familiar, with the same intensity that she rooted within herself for a flicker of feeling for the stranger named Eliot Russo. Before the operation, during the long months of preparation and training, she’d been consumed with loathing for the man who had left her real mother at the mercy of the riot police. She’d longed for the moment when she could confront him. Later, his pathetic condition had filled her with pity; no one, regardless of the crime committed, deserved such punishment. Now she felt nothing. Over the bed, where Russo battled to heal bruised synapses and rid his organs of toxins, an array of dated equipment monitored his vitals. Still no change after the more than fifty-two hours since he was raised from the tank. He was alive—at least, a spiky trace on an oscilloscope certified there was electrical activity in his emaciated body—but barely. Fear returned, as it had at ever shorter intervals, and fluttered in her chest like a bird caught in a net struggling for freedom. Springing Russo from the tank had been nightmarish but nothing compared to their future if he didn’t recover coherent
consciousness. Which was a long shot, according to Dr. Floyd Carpenter.

Russo’s blood was new, thanks to the supply stolen by Antonio Salinas, Harper Tyler’s farm foreman and, Laurel suspected, comrade-in-arms. Throughout the first twelve hours after they arrived in the safe house at Tyler’s farm, Floyd had used over fifty bags of blood products and scores of packed red-blood-cell units in a series of transfusions to replace Russo’s blood. Among the items on Floyd’s shopping list that she’d beamed from the sewers was a hemodialysis machine, a special three-way valve, and supplies of bicarbonate for rinsing the machine. But regardless of the intensive blood replacement, Floyd worried that some readings remained alarmingly irregular. He had not been forthcoming, but it was obvious that extended hibernation without maintenance could cause long-term side effects. To reverse it, according to Floyd, would entail lengthy therapy.

They decided to take eight-hour shifts supervising Russo, keeping the steady drip from the IV lines flowing, noting the volume of his waste every hour, and ensuring his vitals remained within the limits prescribed by Floyd. She preferred the hollow hours between dusk and dawn and had volunteered for the night shift, seeking a little peace and quiet away from Lukas Hurley’s frightened face. Everybody had carefully avoided any mention of Bastien, as if silence could somehow deny the harrowing reality of his death.

Laurel jolted after hearing a floorboard close to the door creak. She held her breath and released it slowly when Floyd’s figure, clothed in jeans and a loose plaid shirt from the supply provided by Tyler, materialized. A far cry from the debonair figure he’d cast when he welcomed them from the sewers, but a sight better than the refuse-encrusted man he’d been at the subway station. Laurel could still feel the cauterizing fear she felt before the fat fields. “Damn, you scared me,” she muttered.