We are walking toward the huge physiotherapy rehab room when Blumenthal gets a message on his cell phone. He reports that another police search group think they may have located the “possible MP Kovac.” He says, “The victim is in a basement storage room.”
Why did he use the word victim?
Now I’m nervous as shit. This isn’t a game. This is real.
We run for the elevator. Blumenthal tells us we’re headed for Mechanical Storage and Lab. It’s an area of the hospital I know nothing about. As we run, Blumenthal gets another text. They report that MP Kovac is seriously injured.
During the brief elevator ride, Blumenthal speaks directly to me. “My team says that this storage room is pretty grim. Have you ever been down there?”
“No,” I tell him. “I think it’s probably just where they keep old equipment like out-of-date x-ray machines, filing cabinets, that sort of stuff.”
The elevator arrives in the basement. We exit and quickly survey the area. The basement is vast. Its ceiling is low, and the very tall Detective Blumenthal has to tip his head forward to avoid lighting fixtures. Long corridors crisscross one another. Two NYPD officers quickly escort us to an open door.
Grim? They said the room was grim?
The harsh lighting, the putrid odors. The room sure is grim. But that’s only the beginning.
CHAPTER 13
OUR EYES BURN. OUR throats gag. The storage room is filled with three or four more cops and two men I recognize from GUH Security. We enter a miserable scene: small puddles of filthy, stinky liquid on the floor, dripping, oozing pipes running along the ceiling. The smell is an overpowering mixture of bathroom antiseptic and human or animal feces. Handkerchiefs go to faces, and a tough-looking NYPD officer vomits almost immediately. It is totally out of keeping with the high standards of you-can-eat-off-the-floor cleanliness practiced by GUH.
Two huge MRI machines are pushed up against big old-fashioned x-ray units, twenty-foot-long chunks of steel with worn leather and dirty plastic. Someone more creative than me might see this mash-up as a fascinating art installation, the absurd landscape of a foul medical junkyard, or props from a horror movie.
The sickening odor in the air is accompanied by a nerve-racking soundtrack: squeaking, squawking, screeching sounds. A million birds gone crazy? Then suddenly an answer from many feet away … a woman’s voice …
“Rats! They’ve got cages and cages of goddamn rats!” she screams.
We move toward her voice.
“A lot of rats, maybe hundreds of them,” the same woman’s voice shouts.
Once we know that the squealing and smell are coming from rats—not pigs or birds or even cute little white mice—it all seems even more disgusting, more frightening.
The lights flicker. We see a mountain of desk chairs and examination tables. We turn the mountain’s corner and see yet another pile, a traffic jam of cabinets. We make another turn, and there it is: ten cages packed with rats. Rats scampering over one another. Rats packed tightly together. White, black, brown rats. Some as large as raccoons. Some as small as mice. Fat rats nibble on dead rats.
One of the GUH Security people explains. “This is some sort of goddamn private place for raising lab rats. I’ve got an idea who’s doing it. They grab a few rats brought into the med school for research, and the assholes mate them and raise them down here. Dr. Katz is going to have a shit fit when he finds out.”
My instincts tell me the security guy might know more about this illegal rat farm if we only let him keep on talking. But then suddenly a loud yell erupts from deeper in the pile of abandoned equipment.
“Over here. Detective B, over here.”
The group seems to follow in some sort of order of seniority, Blumenthal at the lead.
The hell with it. I’m on this case, too. I’m the one who knows how to deliver babies.
I push my way to the front of the pack. We make our way, stumbling through a jungle of broken desk chairs, cartons of old glass syringes, office clipboards. The smell. Jesus Christ, the smell.
Another yells, “Hurry up, for Chrissake. Will you just hurry up?”
Blumenthal and I look quickly at each other. We keep moving. We are like a crazy lunatic parade wending its way through the disgusting basement room. We should ignore the smells, the screeching, the filthy floors.
My instincts kick in again. I have a miserable feeling that the nightmare is just beginning.
CHAPTER 14
KATRA KOVAC IS SPREAD unconscious on the narrow bed of another discarded MRI machine. She is a dead or near-dead body in a deserted tunnel. She is almost naked. Only a bloodstained hospital gown is scrunched up around her neck.
“Jesus Christ!” says one of the police officers. He took the words out of everyone’s mouths.
Some of the group turns away. Tracy Anne checks Katra’s neck for a pulse. She’s got one.
I look at the blood-covered belly of the motionless woman. Blood is still seeping in small rivulets down over her sides, puddling on the floor.
Alarms ring. Sirens sound. Somewhere in the distance we can hear loud, fast clattering feet. Nurses and doctors appear in the basement. The goddamn rats won’t shut up; it’s as if they know something terrible has happened. We’re in a hospital, but no one has brought a medical emergency kit. One police officer rips off his shirt to staunch the blood. Orderlies and two doctors rush in with padding and surgical staplers. Hands covered in plastic gloves reach in and slip an IV needle into Katra’s arm. An oxygen tube is now dangling from her nose.
“Don’t transfer her to a gurney,” a voice yells. It is unmistakably Sarkar’s voice.
“Move her on the bed of the machine. Move the bed with her,” I yell.
Now I suddenly think that Sarkar, Tracy Anne, and I are most likely the only ones present who can tell exactly what has happened: Katra Kovac, nine months pregnant, has been slit open. Her baby has been taken.
The procedure—it’s a disgusting lie to confuse this butchery with the term C-section—has left the mother barely clinging to life. And the baby? Who in hell knows what has become of the baby, this baby who was literally ripped from its mother’s womb.
Two GUH maintenance men and two residents begin to attack the ancient MRI machine with screwdrivers and electric saws, to detach the bed from its base, while Dr. Sarkar is literally on top of the machine’s bed with Katra, straddling her knees and pushing down on her stomach. If this was not all so horrible, it would look almost ridiculous—a grown man on top of a woman in a blood-drenched hospital gown, surrounded by a highly agitated crowd.
Then a gurney appears. Someone has—perhaps wisely—vetoed my suggestion that Katra not be moved.
“Lucy, you hold her neck,” Sarkar says as he climbs off the MRI bed. ER staff slide Katra onto what is called a sponge gurney, a stretcher thick with a great deal of absorption material. It’s used a lot at accident scenes. Right now it’s ready to suck up Katra’s blood. It’s been a few million hours, but Katra is now quickly being wheeled toward the elevator. Sarkar hurries along beside the gurney, his hands red and slimy with blood.
I am shaking.
I remember what my mother always told herself when a procedure wasn’t going smoothly. “We must rise to the occasion, Lucy. We must rise to the occasion.”