The Brain Vault (Stephanie Chalice Thrillers Book 3) (4 page)

From inside the car I searched the vicinity again. Nothing. The catnap had helped a great deal. I was feeling semi-human—well enough to once again resume activity as my headstrong self. I left the security of the patrol car to take matters back into my own hands.

The moment I stepped from the car, my ears filled with the sound of giggling children. It took less than a minute to locate the source of their laughter. It was that group of school kids I had seen before, about twenty kids and four adults. The kids were preteen, and seemed to be having a great time. The hairs stood up on the back of my neck when I saw those two boys, the boys who had stared at me with concern. They were doing their best to hide behind the others. Something was up with those two.

I targeted the adult that seemed to be leading the group and made straight for her. I must have looked bizarre, a detective, with her shield tucked into the waistband of a pair green hospital scrubs. No matter, I approached.

“Detective Stephanie Chalice, how are you?”

The puzzled expression had been anticipated. “Paula Thompson.” She extended her hand. “You say you’re with the police? Is something wrong?”

I flashed my shield to set her mind at ease. “Everything’s fine. It’s just that we’ve been searching the park for evidence and I thought if you didn’t mind I’d ask—” Those two boys still looked pretty nervous. It almost looked like they broke out in a cold sweat. “You didn’t by any chance visit the Strawberry Fields Memorial this morning, did you?”

Paula smiled. “Loved John Lennon—made it our first stop.”

“Would it be okay if I spoke to those two?” I pointed to the two guilty looking boys.

“Corey and Zack, are you sure?”

“If it’s okay with you—they look like they want to cooperate with the police.”

I could see that Paula needed a moment to think about it. I backed off so that she’d be comfortable with her own decision. “Wait here, please.”

The other adults swarmed around her, no doubt concerned for the children’s well being. She seemed to handle them in stride and it only took her a moment to round up the two boys. She did the introductions and we walked a short distance from the others before I spoke. They were just kids and I didn’t want to frighten them. It didn’t take long. I just smiled at Corey and pointed to his bloated backpack. “Corey,” I asked. “What do you have in there?”  

I
t was midday before I began to feel like myself again.
I still had a headache and wasn’t going to push myself too hard, but I wasn’t going to waste the day, lying on the couch and watching Oprah. Gus took the skull down to the crime lab to get the process started and to fill out the laborious paperwork associated with the proper cataloging of evidence. As I had mentioned, the skull was bright white, Colgate white, fresh as driven snow white, not the creamy, pale yellow color associated with a bone that had gone through normal biological decomposition. My sixth sense was screaming at me, telling me that this was the skull that belonged to Kevin Lee. I couldn’t wait to hear the crime lab’s results.

Lenox Hill Hospital is a white stone building that occupies an entire city block between Park Avenue and Lexington Avenue—the cross streets are 76
^th
and 77
^th
streets. I don’t know if I’ve adequately conveyed the size and scope of how big the hospital really is. I’d seen the inside on more occasions than I’d like to admit; the place was just huge. Imagine Macy’s Herald Square filled with hospital beds instead of off-price merchandise. Get the picture?

On my way over to the hospital I thought about the man we’d found unconscious, sprawled out across the Strawberry Fields Memorial mosaic. The man had almost certainly been tortured, his body covered with scars. God only knew what this poor soul had been through and for how long.

A lovely silver haired retiree was manning (for lack of a better word) the reception desk. Her hair had been over-processed, giving it that bluish color we’ve come to be familiar with. In any case, it went well with her polyester charmeuse blouse. I flashed my badge. “Good morning. A man was admitted through the ER late last night. He’s probably listed as John Doe. Can you tell me where I might find him?” She smiled pleasantly, but didn’t respond. I gave her a moment. “Can you check your list, please?” I knew that Doe had been in ICU last night, but as I said, the place was enormous and I didn’t want to waste any time. Hospital beds, and ICU in particular beds, were a precious commodity. Administrators were constantly juggling them for efficiency’s sake.

“For what?”

“For the man I brought in last night.”

“What’s the patient’s name?”

“Look under John Doe.”

She smiled again and began pecking at the computer’s keyboard. “John Doe, oh we have several. Which one are you looking for?” It was a sad reality. New York was full of unidentifiable people: the homeless and the mentally insane. Most of us have no idea how many there really are. They wander the streets, sleeping in the parks when the weather’s good and in the subways when it’s cold. Most eventually succumb to sickness and end up in the city’s hospitals.

“The one that was admitted last night.”

She gave me a puzzled look. Apparently we had gone way beyond her technical limitations. I stepped around the counter to look for myself.

“You’re not supposed to be here,” she said.

“It’s all right, dear,” I whispered. “I’m with the police.”

“You are?”

“Yes, remember I showed you my badge.”

“Oh yes, that’s right. Please forgive me I don’t sleep well anymore. My mind tends to wander.”

The poor thing, unfortunately her mind was too old to be out by itself. Doe, my Doe anyway, was still in ICU on the seventh floor. “Found him, thanks.” Was it really going to be that kind of day, the kind that infuriates and exasperates? I had an ache in my head that was hoping not.

As the elevator doors closed, an image came to me. The connection I’d thought of in the park was surfacing again, this time in much greater detail. In the few seconds that it took to reach the seventh floor, my mind filled with thoughts. It was as if my brain had just been the recipient of a huge data dump. I saw newspaper bylines, chronicling a headless body found in Central Park, an unsolved homicide. Thoughts were emerging at a furious rate—details about the investigation and the victim, a commercial photographer living on West End Avenue. I was pulling at the furthest recesses of my brain as the doors opened onto the seventh floor, grasping for every last detail. Every atom of my being was telling me that I was right about the connection, despite yet to have reviewed a solitary shred of evidence.

I was having trouble focusing on John Doe as I approached ICU, which was on the east side of the building. A few more flashes of the tin and I had made it there, standing over the unconscious John Doe. I had hoped that he would have looked better, but he didn’t. Things have a way of looking dirty and insidious in the dark. Sometimes our minds see things that aren’t really there and they look better in the morning, bathed in cleansing daylight. This time, however, such was not the case.

“And you are?”

A physician was standing behind me. On first impression, he looked to be of Oriental descent, but there was something about his facial features that looked Occidental, and he was tall, probably six feet, taller than most Orientals. He had a wide mustache. My detective’s eyes picked up on the edge of a surgical scar, just peeking out from behind the top of his mustache. It was commonplace for men to disguise a cleft lip scar with a mustache. The actor Stacy Keach, television’s Mike Hammer, was one of the more famous examples.

My shield was still out. I made sure the doctor made note of it. “Detective Stephanie Chalice.” By the by, my name’s pronounced
Cha-lee-see
. Have you been reading it as
Chal-lis
? That wouldn’t be uncommon. Most seem to gravitate that way, making reference to the cup of Christ. Don’t fault yourselves, I should have told you sooner.

“Dr. John Maiguay,” the physician said. “Are you the detective that brought this man in last night?”

“Yes, well my partner did.”
I was unconscious at the time
. “That was about one in the morning. Did you operate on him?”

“No, I’m just the attending physician.” He handed me one of his business cards with his office and beeper numbers on it. I’d enter his information in my Palm Treo as soon as we were finished.

Maiguay had a chart under his arm. I was waiting for him to review it, but he didn’t. He was able to recall Doe’s information from memory. “He was operated on to repair a jagged gash on his ankle that nicked the anterior tibial artery.”

“He's lost a lot of blood?”

“Quite a bit—they used three pints in the OR. It was very lucky you found him when you did. Any additional blood loss would probably have proven fatal.” I glanced over at Doe, lying unconscious with scars over his face and body. “I don’t think the word lucky quite applies in this case.”

“He was also concussed. His hair is long, but—” Maiguay moved Doe’s hair aside. When he did, I once again got a strong whiff of cigarette smoke. There was a hefty welt on the back of his head. I was sporting a similar contusion, but you couldn’t see it under my long, jet-black hair. “See that? There was a modest degree of internal hemorrhaging, nothing fatal, just another factor contributing to his overall depleted condition.”

“Will he regain consciousness?”

“Hard to say, he’s in a very weakened condition. He’s malnourished and dehydrated—his blood chemistry is abysmal. I don’t know that he’ll ever emerge from his coma. The shock from rapid blood loss and his depleted health may be too large a hurdle for him to overcome.”

“In your medical opinion, what’s he been through?”

“I’m not a forensics expert, Detective, I can only point out the obvious.” Maiguay approached Doe and was about to pull back his blanket. “Are you sure this is something you want to see?”

I nodded. I had seen far worse, the dead, those that I gotten to too late. New York City had far more than its fair share of the criminally violent. “Please tell me what you can.”

Maiguay pointed to the abrasions running around Doe’s wrists. “He’s been bound. I think that you in the trade refer to these as ligature marks. There are several cuts here, many recent, barely healed.” He then made reference to the scars on his legs and stomach. “There are more of these on his backside. If you like, I can ask for a consult from someone in dermatology, so they can determine the age of these marks and how they were caused.”

“Thank you, that would help.” I’d have the department send down someone to make sure the dermatologist wasn’t missing anything. If Doe couldn’t speak for himself, perhaps the marks on his body could tell us something about the ordeal he had been through and the crimes that had been committed against him. We had brilliant forensic minds on staff, capable of extracting a world of information from even the smallest clues. “We’ll send someone over for fingerprints and photographs—with any luck we’ll get a quick ID. We can only hope he regains consciousness and is able to identify whoever did this to him.”

“I’ll pray for him, Detective, because this man will never be able to identify his captor.”

“And why is that?”

Maiguay pulled back one of Doe’s eyelids. His eye was an opaque white in appearance, similar to that of a hardboiled egg. “My guess is that this is the result of caustic material introduced into the eye.”

I felt sullen and nauseous. I placed my hand on Doe’s bedrail to support myself. I didn’t know if Maiguay picked up on the way I was feeling. In any case, he didn’t articulate any concern for my wellbeing.

Who was capable of inflicting such pain on a fellow human being? “Is that all of it?”

“To a layman like me, yes. Unfortunately, Detective, not all scars are visible to the eye.”

M
y visit to the hospital left me feeling a little out of sorts.
Viewing man’s inhumanity to man as it had manifested itself in the form of John Doe was just a little too much for me to stomach. My heart filled with dread thinking about the torture the poor man must have endured. How long had he been held captive, and why was it necessary for one human to be so cruel to another? In my line of work, I came across some pretty awful stuff, but this, this was about as bad as it gets. I’m accustomed to getting the call when the body is already cool, but this poor creature—I imagined it was like being caught on an endless loop, circling hell for eternity with no hope of rescue. I was aching for insight. We were at the very beginning of our investigation with so much yet to be determined. Doe’s captor was still an enigma to me. I could only hope the clues flowed quickly, because I wanted this one badly.

My thoughts felt muddled. I needed a quick, strong distraction to clear the channels for lucid deliberation. I had been plagued by the store of information that had flooded into my head in the hospital’s elevator, pictures of a decapitated body found in Central Park. My plan was to take a quick break and then go right for the research files. Now some choose to lose themselves in a bottle of whiskey, others find the path to distraction with narcotics. I do it a little differently. When I need to escape reality, I visit my mother—to each his own.

Ma, as her loved ones call her, lives close by. She had struggled for a few years, living alone after my dad passed away, not taking much of an interest in life, but now she’s got my brother Ricky to fill her days. My big brother is precious.

Now normally, precious would be an odd word choice to describe a fully-grown man, but such was not the case. Ricky is an adult in body, but not so mentally. A tragic event in his youth had interrupted his intellectual development. Don’t get me wrong; he’s not to be pitied. Ricky’s tall, winsome, and innocent. I don’t know about you, but I don’t run across a lot of men with a combination of attributes like that. Okay, he may never win the Nobel Peace Prize, but he’s as good a man as God has ever put on this earth. Ma and I love him to death.