This time it was a five-year-old kid.
Tracchio finally gave me a green light, and I called the squad together.
They gathered like a flock of large birds around the squad room: Jacobi and Conklin, Chi and Rodriguez, Lemke, Samuels, McNeil, all the other good cops I’d worked with for years, and depended on now.
I willed the anxiety out of my voice, but I felt it deep in my gut. I told them that a child had died at Municipal Hospital under suspicious circumstances. That we had to preserve the evidence while there was still time, and find the cruelest kind of killer without much to go on.
I could see the concern in their faces, and still they had faith in me.
I asked, “Any questions?”
“No, ma’am.”
“We’re on it, Lieutenant.”
The squad gave me the courage of my desperate convictions.
Chapter 115
WITHIN FORTY-FIVE MINUTES of my call to Tracchio, I had warrants in hand and a caravan of inspectors and cops, some on loan from Robbery, Anticrime, and Narcotics, behind me with lights flashing and sirens screaming. We were all heading north in a broken line to Municipal Hospital.
We left the cars on Pine, and once inside the hospital, we dispersed according to plan.
Jacobi and I took an elevator to the executive floor. I badged Carl Whiteley’s secretary; then we pushed past her, Jacobi in the lead, throwing open the doors to a wood-paneled conference room where a board meeting was in progress.
Whiteley was at the head of the table, looking as though he were trapped inside a very bad dream. His skin was sallow and gray. He was roughly shaven and glassy-eyed.
The other suits at the table had the same stark look of post-traumatic shock on their faces.
“There’s been a report of a suspicious death on the orthopedic floor. These warrants authorize us to search the hospital,” I said, slapping the paperwork down on the large blond table.
“For God’s sake,” said Whiteley, half-standing, knocking over his china coffee cup. He sponged up the spill with his pocket square. “Whatever you want, all right, Lieutenant? It’s not my problem anymore.”
“If that’s the case, who’s in charge here?” I asked.
Whiteley looked up. “Apparently, it’s you.”
Chapter 116
JACOBI AND I TOOK a noisy, very rickety service elevator down to the basement, which turned out to be a labyrinth of unadorned concrete walls filling the city block under the hospital.
We followed the signs to the morgue, drifting behind an orderly who was wheeling a gurney in that direction, the wheels rattling and grinding ahead of us.
We stood back as the orderly and gurney preceded us into the chilly room.
A stringy, middle-aged man with a basketball-size pot belly under his scrubs looked up when we entered the room. He put his clipboard down on a nearby corpse and walked toward us.
We exchanged introductions.
Dr. Raymond Paul was the chief pathologist, and he’d been expecting us.
“James Sweet’s room had already been cleaned out and we had him down here by the time we got your call,” he told me.
My sigh bloomed out in front of me, a frosty plume of disappointment. I had hoped against hope that the crime scene, if that’s what it was, hadn’t been destroyed.
We trailed Dr. Paul to the cooler, where he checked a list, then opened a stainless-steel drawer. The slab slid out with a smooth, rolling whirr. I drew back the sheet and saw for myself what Noddie Wilkins had described on the phone.
The boy’s naked body was so small and vulnerable. The cast on his arm made him seem even more pitiful in death.